Did you know that Jesus wasn’t the first Jewish king to ride in triumph into Jerusalem on a donkey? Jesus knew it — and that’s why he did what he did! Check out this quick Palm Sunday video (be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel), and share it with your friends. Welcome to Holy Week 2020 on TheFaithExplained.com!
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Here’s a catechesis I delivered on baptism with Father Ryan Alemao at the Jordan River, while on The Faith Explained Holy Land Pilgrimage. Together we unpack the biblical background and theological meaning of Jesus’ baptism — and our own.
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Ever wonder exactly why Jesus chose to ride into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday on a donkey? It was no accident. In this video, filmed on location at the Church of All Nations in Jerusalem, Cale explains how Jesus fulfills Old Testament prophecies as a new and greater Solomon, the “Son of David”, not only as Israel’s King, but also as Messiah.
(My latest for Catholic Answers Magazine.)
These days I take a lot of heat for my name.
When I introduce myself as “Cale”, I quickly have to add, “not spelled like the vegetable.” This often leads to a bit of repartee, in which I explain that my father was a big fan of the famed race-car driver Cale Yarborough. Eating Kale wasn’t really a thing when I was born, but now that it is, perhaps I should change my name to “Arugula.”
This sometimes gets me thinking about some of the more unique names in the Gospels, like that of St. Bartholomew, whose feast we celebrate on August 24th. Often it is alleged—in both scholarly and popular circles—that the Gospels are late, legendary documents written many decades after Jesus died, or that they are not based on eyewitness testimony, and, as such, are not to be trusted.
Recent studies on names in Jewish antiquity, however, give us new reasons to challenge such assumptions.
Building upon the work of the Israeli historian Tal Ilan, Richard Bauckham has compiled lists of the most popular Jewish names at the time of Jesus. In his magnificent tome, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, the famed Cambridge New Testament scholar shows that there were clear regional preferences for certain names, even within the same ethno-religious group. In Egypt, for example, the most popular Jewish names would have been different from those in Roman-occupied Palestine, where Jesus lived, even though the regions were adjacent to one another.
Greg Monette, in his book The Wrong Jesus, takes Bauckham’s list of the most popular Jewish names in Roman Palestine and applies it to the list of Jesus’ apostles in Matthew (with their respective rank in parentheses):
The names of the twelve apostles are these: first, Simon (1), who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother; James (11) the son of Zebedee, and John (5) his brother; Philip (61) and Bartholomew (50); Thomas and Matthew (9) the tax collector; James (11) the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus (39); Simon (1) the Cananaean, and Judas (4) Iscariot, who betrayed him” (Matt. 10:2-4).
Andrew is a Greek name, and therefore unranked, although he may have had another, more common Semitic name. Thomas’ name is Aramaic for “twin” and is likely his nickname, and therefore also was not ranked.
This explains why there are always “qualifiers” applied to figures in the Gospels who have extremely common names. “Simon”, as the list above shows, was the most popular Palestinian Jewish male name in Jesus’ day—hence the need to differentiate “Simon, who is called Peter (the name bestowed on him by Jesus, meaning “Rock”)” from “Simon the Cananaean”. Bartholomew owned only the fiftieth most popular name, and Philip had the sixty-first, so there was no danger, really, of confusing them with anyone else in the apostolic band. Hence, they could be identified by only one name.
Other common qualifiers included one’s father’s name, known as a patronymic, such as “Simon Bar-Jonah” (Matt. 16:17). The Aramaic “Bar,” of course, means “son of”. Place of origin was another differentiator; hence “Jesus of Nazareth.” By the way, in case you were wondering, “Jesus,” which is the same name as “Joshua” (or “Yehoshua” in Hebrew, meaning “God saves”), was the sixth most popular name at the time.
Why does all of this matter? Because it shows once again that the Gospels cohere with the way things really were at the time, making their historical accuracy much more likely.
If the Gospels, as critics allege, were really written many decades after the events in question and made up out of whole cloth, what would be the likelihood they would have picked the right names for their “characters”? This idea is akin to someone today penning a fictional story set a century ago in another country—one might have a hard time coming up with historically accurate names for that place, at that time. Of course, Google could help with this, but imagine trying to do that almost 2,000 years ago on your own! It would be technically possible, but highly unlikely.
The fact that the Gospels do display accurate first century Palestinian Jewish names is a mark of authenticity, making it extremely likely that they were indeed written very close in time to the historical events they narrate, and that they reflect eyewitness testimony.
One might argue, “Perhaps the names and accounts were still fabricated—but by contemporaries, not someone coming along several decades later.” One major problem with that objection is that and could have set the record straight as the Gospels began to circulate. In this scenario, they might have gotten the names right, but the events of Jesus’ career couldn’t have been fudged, with so many eyewitnesses who could have easily refuted such reports, were they not factual.
Before we go, I want to talk about Bartholomew in particular (it is his feast day, after all). Who was he, really?
This has proved to be a somewhat difficult question to answer. He’s a bit of a man of mystery, so he isn’t necessarily the most popular of Jesus’ disciples today. His first post-New Testament mention isn’t until the fourth-century Ecclesiastical History by Eusebius, which states that he, at some point, may have been evangelizing in India. Various accounts of his martyrdom have also been proffered.
To further complicate things, we’re not absolutely sure what his real name was. Many scholars have historically claimed that Bartholomew was the same person as Nathanael, who famously scoffed at the idea that the Messiah could hail from Nazareth (John 1:43-51). One reason that scholars believed this is that Nathanael, who is never mentioned in the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), appears in John’s Gospel, while Bartholomew, present in the Synoptics, is never mentioned in John. In the lists of the apostles in the Synoptics, Bartholomew’s name follows Philip’s, implying a connection between them—and it is Philip, in John’s Gospel, who introduces his friend Nathanael to Jesus.
But Bauckham cautions us about being too dogmatic about this. As we saw earlier, name differentiators were often used when a person’s given name was very common. Bartholomew’s name means “Bar-Tolmei”, or “son of Tolmei,” and the name Tolmei/Bartholomew was only the fiftieth most common name. So, Bauckham reasons, if one was going to use such a unique name as a replacement, that would indicate he had a common given name. But that would seem to rule out Nathanael as a name, since it was already an uncommon name in Israel. In fact, tied with Bartholomew for fiftieth place. In other words, there shouldn’t have been a need for Nathanael to call himself Bartholomew at all to differentiate himself from anyone else among Jesus’ apostles.
Perhaps ol’ “Bart” and “Nate” aren’t the same person after all—or maybe they are! We may not have absolute certainty about that issue this side of heaven, but we can take heart in the fact that the Jewish names in the Gospels are marks of authenticity for these books. And we can still celebrate the feast of St. Bartholomew with a great meal, perhaps even serving up some kale—or maybe arugula, instead.
Dr. Larry Hurtado, writing on his personal blog:
“The leukemia (AML) for which I was treated here last summer has reactivated, after some 9 months of remission. The further treatment options are quite limited, and may only be palliative care of various sorts. In any case, I am now fully occupied with exploring various arrangements for the situation and aftermath of my death on my wife and others. So, I shall have no time for blogging or my scholarly work. Signing off unless further notice. I hope that the archives on the site will continue to prove useful to interested readers.”
This is very sad news indeed. Dr. Hurtado is truly a giant among New Testament scholars. His publications on Christian origins are remarkable — of special note are his works explaining how worship of Jesus as divine was not a late development, but indeed reaches back to the dawn of Christianity. He also has some great material on early artifacts of the Faith; specifically, the early Christian manuscripts. Please pray for Dr. Hurtado and his family at this most difficult time.
(My latest for Catholic Answers Magazine.) James Carroll, an ex-priest writing for The Atlantic, recently argued for an abolition of the Catholic priesthood, mostly due to the abuse scandal. He is certainly right that the priesthood in general has its problems, as continuing revelations of abuse and cover-up have shown.
But I want to focus on another assertion Carroll makes: namely, that in the nascent Church, “There was no priesthood yet,” at least not by the time the great Jewish historian Josephus wrote about the early Christians, about sixty years after the first Easter. In other words, Carroll doesn’t see the priesthood as intrinsic to the New Covenant established by Christ.
This view is at loggerheads with that of the Catholic Church—that the priesthood of the New Covenant was established by Jesus himself and is foundational to the Church’s identity as the new Israel. Let’s take a look at one individual mentioned in Scripture who, despite being shrouded in mystery, leaves us an important clue in this regard.
St. Luke, writing in the Acts of the Apostles, introduces us to St. Matthias, who replaced Judas as the twelfth apostle (Acts 1:15-26). In so doing, Luke provides us with some unexpectedly rich apologetic material concerning the New Covenant priesthood, despite the relative obscurity of Matthias himself. He is never mentioned again in the New Testament, although later apocryphal accounts speak of his preaching to the Ethiopians. Both the early Church historian Eusebius and St. Epiphanius believed that Matthias had been one of the original “seventy” disciples of Jesus (cf. Luke 10:1).
As an aside, the fact that Judas had to be replaced at all reinforces the fact that “the Twelve” were an integral part of what Jesus had intended to establish with the New Covenant. Jesus’ selection of twelve apostles clearly evoked the foundational twelve tribes of Israel, which was not lost on his fellow Jews and certainly not on his opponents in the Jewish religious hierarchy. The titulus nailed above our crucified Lord’s head on the cross (cf. Luke 23:38) emphasized the main charge against him: that he claimed to be the “King of the Jews,” the King of Israel.
Israel was originally ruled by judges, not kings, because the Jews recognized God as their true King (in fact, the book of Judges views the people’s desire for a human king as an abomination—see especially 8:22-9:57). It was God who had founded the nation and established its twelve tribes derived from the sons of Jacob, who was renamed “Israel.” Thus, to claim the authority to establish a new (or renewed) Israel, with a new Twelve, is a strong claim to divinity on Jesus’ part.
This new Israel featured a new temple—the Church, a community of “living stones” (1 Pet. 2:5); a new sacrifice—the Eucharist, which in fact is the New Covenant in Jesus’ blood (Luke 22:20); and a new priesthood, celebrating this new sacrifice on a new altar. “We have an altar from which those who serve the tent [the Old Covenant priests, at the Jerusalem Temple] have no right to eat” (Heb. 13:10).
Luke’s two-volume work, comprising his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, is a masterpiece on many historical and theological levels. One of the things Luke does so well is to set the story of Jesus and the Church in continuity with the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament), often in remarkably subtle ways. One of the best examples of this is how Luke presents his account of Matthias’s selection:
“So one of the men who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us—one of these men must become with us a witness to his resurrection.” And they put forward two, Joseph called Barsabbas, who was surnamed Justus, and Matthias. And they prayed and said, “Lord, you know the hearts of all men, show which one of these two you have chosen to take the place in this ministry and apostleship from which Judas turned aside, to go to his own place.” And they cast lots for them, and the lot fell on Matthias; and he was enrolled with the eleven apostles (Acts 1:21–26).
A casual reader might assume that the method by which the eleven picked Matthias was a mere game of chance, leaving room for the Holy Spirit to make his sovereign choice. But remember, Luke’s gospel and Acts are a two-volume set, and Luke knows his readers will remember the beginning of the first book and connect it to the opening scenes of his sequel.
In Luke 1, we read about the “annunciation” to Zechariah, the future father of John the Baptist. Why is it that Zechariah, a priest, found himself on duty in the temple the day Gabriel appeared to him? “Now while he was serving as priest before God when his division was on duty, according to the custom of the priesthood, it fell to him by lot to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense” (Luke 1:8–9, emphasis added).
In other words, casting lots was a means of delineating priestly duties in the Old Covenant, and Luke shows that method was used again in selecting Matthias in the New Covenant period. This is something that the first readers of Acts would likely have noticed. The implication is that the office of priesthood is essential to the function of an apostle of Jesus Christ. This dovetails nicely with what Luke’s close companion in ministry, the apostle Paul, notes when he speaks of “the grace given me by God to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God” (Rom. 15:15–16, emphasis added).
The New Covenant priesthood, contra James Carroll, was not something the Church “invented” later on; the early Christians saw the apostles (and their successors) from the beginning as sharing in a special way in the priesthood of Jesus Christ. There are many other reasons this is so, far more than we have space to discuss here. But this truth is confirmed in a unique way in Luke’s account of the selection of St. Matthias as an apostle.
Happy Feast of the Visitation! In this teaching, recorded live at on pilgrimage at the Church of the Visitation in Israel, Cale Clarke, Director of The Faith Explained Institute, explains the significance of the site. Learn how the Gospel writers show how Mary fits into salvation history using typology.
Interested in joining us on our 2019 Faith Explained Holy Land Pilgrimage? Drop us a line at TheFaithExplained.com/contact and we’ll send you the info!
Join us for our next Faith Explained pilgrimage! Message us here: TheFaithExplained.com/contact and we’ll keep you updated.
Here’s my December article for Catholic Answers Magazine. Merry Christmas!
“The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mark 1:1).
The Gospel of Mark doesn’t have an “infancy narrative” about the events surrounding Jesus’ conception and birth as do Matthew and Luke. Rather, Mark begins in a deceptively simple manner with these opening words, known as an incipit.
Almost 2,000 years after these words were originally inscribed on parchment, we tend to read this line and think nothing much of it—perhaps even yawn—because it’s something we’ve heard many times before. And yet with this simple sentence, Mark would have absolutely shocked the entire world, arresting the attention of pious Jews and pagan Romans alike.
With respect to a Jewish audience, it’s easy to see why: in calling Jesus the Christ, Mark signals that he the long-awaited Jewish Messiah. But it’s the term Son of God that would have raised many a Roman eyebrow (remember—Mark’s Gospel was written to the Church at Rome, where he served as the chronicler of Peter’s memoirs of the Lord). Why is that?
Mark has a big problem as he tries to convince Romans that they should commit their lives to Jesus—and the crux of the matter is the cross itself. Who was the most powerful person in the Roman Empire? Why, the emperor himself, obviously. The Roman Caesars were crowned in an elaborate ceremony in which they were draped in a royal purple robe, with great pomp, amidst shouts of “Hail, Caesar!” When a new emperor ascended to the throne, or when Rome scored a great military victory, it was published throughout the empire as “Good News.”
In contrast, the most powerless person in the empire was the victim of crucifixion. This was an ordeal so brutal, so violent, so humiliating, that it was almost never administered to Rome’s own citizens (for whom the comparatively humane act of beheading was the preferred method of execution, as in St. Paul’s case). The contrast between the mighty Caesar and the seemingly defeated Jesus couldn’t have been more stark. This is why one major commentator on Mark calls that Gospel an “apology for the cross.”
We could add to this the many public inscriptions that have been unearthed from Rome’s ruins. These served as a civic catechism of sorts, proclaiming what one was supposed to know and believe as a citizen. And one thing all Romans were expected to assent to was this: not only was the emperor extremely powerful, he was to be considered the divine “son of god.” Here are just a few examples from a much longer list compiled by Craig Evans:
- Julius Caesar (48-44 B.C.):
An inscription from Ephesus describes him as “the manifest god from Ares and Aphrodite, and universal savior of human life.” Also, from Carthaea: “The Carthaean people honor the god and emperor and savior of the inhabited world, Gaius Julius Caesar, son of Gaius Caesar” (there are many more such inscriptions from the period).
- Augustus (30 B.C.-A.D. 14):
“Emperor Caesar Augustus, son of god”; “Emperor Caesar (Augustus), god from god”; “Emperor Caesar Augustus, savior and benefactor.” An inscription from Priene celebrates Augustus’s birthday as “the birthday of the god.”
- Tiberius (A.D. 14-37, who reigned when Jesus was crucified):
“Emperor Tiberius Caesar Augustus, son of god”; and “Emperor Tiberius Caesar, new Augustus, son of god, Zeus the liberator”.
- Nero (the crazed emperor who reigned from A.D. 54-68—there are some real doozies here):
“Nero Caesar, the lord”; “Nero Claudius Caesar… the savior and benefactor of the inhabited world”; “The good god of the inhabited world, the beginning and existence of all good things”; “the son of the greatest of the gods”; and “Nero, the lord of the whole world”.
So, in light of this exalted view of their emperor, why should citizens of Rome choose to pledge their allegiance to Jesus and not Caesar? Readers or hearers of Mark would no doubt be asking this question as they experienced this Gospel. Well, its account of Jesus’ authoritative teaching about the Kingdom, backed up with powerful exorcisms and healings, would no doubt have made an impression.
But so too would the presence in Mark’s Passion narrative of someone whom we might easily overlook: the figure of the Roman centurion who sees Jesus die.
The centurion, whose ultimate superior is Caesar, the alleged “son of god,” may have been aware of how his fellows had humiliated Jesus in a mock “coronation” replete with purple robe and a crown of thorns, and shouts not of “Hail Caesar” but, “Hail, King of the Jews!” as they beat him mercilessly (Mark 15:16-20). Yet somehow, as he watches Jesus die on the throne of the cross, and witnesses the powerful release of Jesus’ spirit, which tears the temple curtain in two, the centurion is granted the grace to recognize that one far greater than Caesar is here: “Surely this man” — and not Caesar — “is the Son of God” (15:37-39).
This was the very statement—politically perilous and subversive—that Roman Christians had to make their own. A statement about who truly possessed a sovereign claim over the world. Many of them were to stare down the absolute claims and power of the state and pay for it with their lives, as Jesus did. Peter himself, the source behind Mark’s Gospel, would also meet the horrific cross.
As we prepare to celebrate the true “birthday of the God” this Christmas, let us reflect on the kingship Jesus claims over our lives. Having conquered the grave, a foe no earthly ruler, however exalted, has ever defeated, he is worthy of it.