“It will certainly be to many a discovery that Jesus was known in the first century as the Wisdom of God.”           —Rendel Harris, 1916 (The Origin of the Prologue to St. John’s Gospel, p. vi) In the last post we looked at the Acts of Pilate (AcPil)—being the first half of the rather obscure Gospel of Nicodemus, a Jewish Christian work probably of the mid-second century CE. The work betrays a most unusual theology where “Jesus” is partly physical, partly spiritual, and somehow able to pass from one person to another. This ambiguous theology is the author’s focus. For example, the setting is scrupulously laid out whereby Joseph of Arimathea is locked into a sealed room (even without windows), and … Continue reading →