Since the launch of The Bible and Interpretation in 2000, Bruce Chilton has been a leading contributor to the site. In recognition of his outstanding scholarship and his invaluable contributions over the past 25 years, we are pleased to honor him with a curated list of his articles.
Bruce Chilton is the Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Religion at Bard College and the Rector Emeritus of the Church of St. John the Evangelist. He has held academic positions in Europe at the Universities of Cambridge, Sheffield, and Münster, and in the United States at Yale University—where he was the inaugural Lillian Claus Professor of New Testament—and at Bard College. An internationally recognized expert on the New Testament and early Judaism, Professor Chilton has authored fifty books and more than one hundred scholarly articles. His work has focused particularly on understanding Jesus within the context of Judaism and on the critical study of the Targumim, the Aramaic paraphrases of the Bible.
By Bruce Chilton
Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Religion
Bard College
August 2025
Rabbi Jesus, November 2000
James, Jesus' Brother, November 2001
Another look at the James Ossuary, April 2003
The Missing Jesus: Rabbinic Judaism and the New Testament, May 2003
Scholars, Journalists and the Ossuary, November 2003
Mel Gibson’s Passion Play, March 2004
Pilate, the Politics of Rome, and Evangelical Politics, February 2005
The Mamzer Jesus and His Birth, October 2005
Plus ça change… “The Jesus Seminar” and “The Jesus Project”, January 2009
In My View: from “The Historical Jesus” to understanding Jesus, historically, April 2010
Gnostic Breakthrough, May 2010
In My View: Arizona and the Vanishing Bible, June 2010
Why, only now, a pope named Francis?, October 2013
Giving the Jewish Jesus his Religion Back, November 2013
The O. J. Verdicts and the Ossuary of James, April 2014
The Attorney General’s Saint Paul, June 2018
The Logic of Jesus’ Resurrection, October 2019
Herod, His Progeny, and the Cutting Edge of Power, July 2021
Autobiography
The Editors, after skillfully collecting my work for The Bible and Interpretation, asked for a biography that was a little more informative than the usual boilerplate that appears with publications. I have enjoyed putting together a more reflective account of my background and trajectory.
Baseball and sailing were my favorite pastimes as I grew up. Long Island offered plenty of opportunity for both. School interfered with them, but I liked school well enough, until the day I could not stand it. In the end administrators, not wishing to see that year’s Salutatorian quit altogether, agreed that I could spend most of my days in the library until graduation. There I completed a reading of Carl Jung, whose approach to the study of religion had fascinated me.
Among colleges at the time, only the program of Bard College appealed to me, with its emphasis on independent and activity-based learning. While completing the degree there, the conviction deepened in me that I had a vocation to the priesthood. The moment of decision crystallized when I was involved in a production of the medieval “Play of Daniel”; I discovered that translating the Latin text was more rewarding for me than performing it. That brought me to the General Theological Seminary in New York City. There, during a time when the number of students plummeted (owing to the elimination of a deferment from the draft), I found myself engaged with a brilliant range of professors. The better I did at languages (Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Latin for the Bible; German, French, and Latin again for scholarship), the better I could engage with them.
Although I did not know it at the time, the pivotal moment in my trajectory came when I graduated from Seminary in 1974. Several of my professors urged me to continue into doctoral study. I had resisted. My reasons for resisting were sound: I had always thought of the priesthood in terms of pastoral ministry, I had pretty much run out of patience with taking courses, and despite the scholarships I had benefitted from, I was in debt. The financial hurdle was overcome by the Episcopal Church Foundation, which granted me a generous fellowship. The other hurdles were overcome by St. John’s College in Cambridge, which gave me further financial support, wonderful lodgings, and an active part in the Chaplaincy. Since then, I have always been pastorally active, even during those periods when academic work has alone paid the bills.
Still, I turned away from the prospect of a full-time pastoral ministry with a sense of loss. I nonetheless made that course correction under the impetus of a thought which was becoming a passion. General Seminary at the time permitted students of the Master of Divinity to submit a thesis. Mine was awarded a prize and, more importantly, gave me the opportunity to pioneer a method of exegesis. At the time redaction criticism was very much in fashion, designed to identify the preferred patterns and wording of the Evangelists. I applied the approach to Mark, but with a twist. Instead of looking particularly for what was characteristic of the Evangelist, I asked: what is uncharacteristic? That is, what came to Mark from his tradition? The thesis was limited to the first exorcism story in the Gospel, but my readers on the faculty and I realized that the tweaked method might be applied more broadly. I was working on that before the offers from Cambridge and from the Episcopal Church Foundation appeared in the mail.
God in Strength: Jesus’ Announcement of the Kingdom was my doctoral thesis at Cambridge, examined in 1976, published in 1979 (Plöchl), and still in print. It is not a page-turner. But it not only uncovers traditional language within the Gospels: it also demonstrates that the conventional opinion at the time of writing was wrong. It is simply incorrect to say, as was said then and is still said by some scholars today, that Jesus was unusual within Judaism in referring to God’s kingdom as an influential force in human experience. You will find that theology also in Aramaic, for example within the translations of the Hebrew Bible called Targumim. Then, however, the whole issue of the dating of those documents needed to be sorted out, because only very general estimates were available. My advisers, Ernst Bammel and C. F. D. Moule, pointed out that I would break the page limit for doctoral theses if I tried to date the Targumim in the same work, so I took their advice and applied for employment instead.
The University of Sheffield that year announced a position in New Testament with tenure. I am still humbled by having kept company with the short-listed candidates, all of us appearing in South Yorkshire on an unusually hot summer’s day in 1976. Joining the Department of Biblical Studies demanded that I extend my range across the canon, and meant I could enjoy engagement with colleagues in the field. During my time there I founded Journal for the Study of the New Testament with its monograph series and drafted the graduate program that permitted the Department to extend its work.
All the while, I turned my attention to dating the Targumim, starting with the Targum of Isaiah. I found widespread agreement with my finding that its development in stages could be established by using methods similar to those I had used in studying the Gospels. My approach became standard within the field, and the relationship of all the Targums with the New Testament is set out in a volume I recently edited with Alan Avery-Peck, Targums and Rabbinic Literature (Zondervan, 2024). While at Sheffield I also wrote A Galilean Rabbi and His Bible (SPCK, 1984), which showed that it was possible to explain the relationship between Targums and Gospels with a narrative approach more accessible to general readers. I still have friends from my days in South Yorkshire, which is also where I met my wife Odile, who at the time had a visiting position from her university in France.
Productive and enjoyable though my years in Sheffield were, they were shadowed by the policies of the government led by Margaret Thatcher. The impact on the humanities was grievous — there and elsewhere in the United Kingdom. In addition, I had become keenly aware that collegial engagement with scholars in the field of Judaism had become a necessity for me, and Sheffield could not offer that. A special leave enabled me to teach Aramaic and Syriac at the University of Münster at the invitation of Karl Heinrich Rengstorf: having Jewish colleagues there only whetted my appetite for more engagement. When Yale University invited me to apply for a position, I was happy to agree, and very much appreciated my new colleagues at the Divinity School. Yale also brought me my first appointment to an endowed position, and Odile gave birth to our first son, Samuel, in New Haven. My commentary on the Isaiah Targum was also published during that time (The Liturgical Press, 1987). What Yale did not bring me was the interdisciplinary range I sought. The structure of an institutional separation of Divinity from other parts of the University — in particular Judaic Studies — prevented me from offering courses jointly with Jewish colleagues. For that and other reasons, I was happy to accept an offer from Bard College to take an appointment there, also in an endowed position.
When I arrived at Bard I continued work on Aramaic, inputting the original text of the Isaiah Targum with variants for the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon. With David Pierce, a colleague in the Department of Religion, I also began to read into the anthropology of sacrifice, widening the circle of readers to include anthropologists and students of anthropology, as well. The result was an inflection in my work, as I compared Jesus’ views with those in Judaism in and around his time. The Temple of Jesus was the result (Penn State University Press, 1992). By that time, Jacob Neusner had been corresponding with me for a number of years, and I sent him a copy of the book. The morning after he received it, he called me, and proposed that we write a book together; Jewish-Christian Debates (Fortress, 1998) began a collaboration of more than two decades, and a transformative friendship. Professor Neusner joined the faculty at Bard, marking a key step in my program of widening the Department to include all global religions, rather than Christianity alone. Concurrently, as Chaplain of the College, I recruited pastoral staff so that Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, as well as Christianity, could be informatively practiced as well as studied. My son Henry was born during the period at Bard, and Odile became an irreplaceable figure in the French Department. Languages as a whole thrived, so that our students have been able to study not only modern tongues, but also ancient languages key to the great religions. I have taught advanced classes in Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Latin, and Coptic. Quite apart from work with immediate colleagues in a Department we have renamed “The Interdisciplinary Study of Religions,” I have co-taught courses with colleagues in Art History, Biology, Chemistry, Dance, Drama, and Music. With my counterpart Robert Tully I convened joint seminars with the United States Military Academy at West Point, producing volumes such as Intolerance: Political Animals and Their Prey (Hamilton, 2017).
Partly as a consequence of engagement with colleagues in other disciplines, I have grown more sensitive to human factors in the development and transmissions of traditions. My work on sacrifice showed how a ritual activity can convey differing significances, depending upon participants and setting. In particular, Jesus’ intention to portray the wine and bread of his meals as taking the place of the blood and flesh of offerings in the Temple catalyzed reactions of ritual appropriation throughout the New Testament and beyond the New Testament. In A Feast of Meanings (Brill, 1994), I described how different cycles of tradition, between Jesus and the Fourth Gospel, fed the conceptions of the New Testament. The work of teasing out how such cycles of tradition interacted so as to produce the Synoptic Gospels culminated in Synoptikon (Brill, 2023), a handbook for studying Matthew, Mark and Luke as concurrent crystalizations of teaching, rather than as set-pieces of literary borrowing.
Understanding a tradition means appreciating the people who stand at its wellspring, and narrative is the idiom in which one human being can come to know another. That realization stands behind several books I wrote for Doubleday: Rabbi Jesus (2000), Rabbi Paul (2004), and Mary Magdalene (2005). In each case, the inquiry involves inferring the human agents involved in the traditions that came to represent them. Analyzing the processes in play brought me back to the Targums, to co-author with Paul Flesher The Targums: A Critical Introduction (Baylor University Press and Brill, 2011). The Herodian dynasty was a compelling political factor in the development of earliest Christianity and Second Temple Judaism, and the historical resources for assessing their influence and motivations are the focus of The Herods (Fortress, 2021).
The specifically theological dimension of religious traditions, however, is what provides their claim on transcendent truth. While at Bard I founded Bulletin for Biblical Research on behalf of the Institute for Biblical Research, chiefly in order to foreground the crucial aspect of conviction in the shaping and transmission of tradition. Nowhere is this a more important factor than in the varied narratives of Jesus’ resurrection, in which I trace both coherence and divergence in Resurrection Logic (Baylor University Press, 2019). That investigation led me to an inquiry into the Aramaic wellsprings of traditions concerning Jesus and their distinctive meanings in Aramaic Jesus: Tradition, Identity, and Christianity’s Mother Tongue (Baylor University Press, 2025).
Today baseball is for me a spectator sport, apart from very occasional pick-up games; I enjoy sailing more regularly. In both cases, the feeling of the coordination of forces that come together despite being outside my control lies at the heart of the pleasure they give. New Testament scholarship is not unlike that: a matter of identifying the forces in play, and wondering at their capacity to develop meaning in their interactions.
Bruce Chilton
August 12, 2025
Congratulations Bruce. Well deserved.