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Lecture Cancellations and Non-Cancellations (so far)

I hope all of you are well and staying away from viruses.  As it turns out, just now I’m reading On the Beach, a fantastic 1957 novel set in 1963 about what happens “after the war,” when the northern hemisphere has destroyed itself with a massive nuclear exchange, and the people of Melbourne are waiting as the radiation cloud is slowly heading their way over the course of months, with nothing to stop it.  (I’m reading novels like this, and watching comparable films, as I’m thinking about my next book Expecting Armageddon.)    Suddenly this morning I realized (duh!) how timely it is, mutatis mutandis.  Maybe I’ll blog on such things. But for now!  Our new companion Corona has disrupted many of our lives and is certain to disrupt virtually all of them.  Please accept my hopeful thoughts that the disruptions you experience are merely inconvenient and not debilitating, either physically, financially, socially, or emotionally. Some of my immediate trips and lectures have been cancelled (well, postponed for a year or so!), and I wanted [...]

2020-03-11T09:28:42-04:00March 11th, 2020|Public Forum|

Did Jesus Sweat Blood? “Intrinsic” Evidence for Textual Variants

In yesterday’s post I mentioned some of the kinds of “external” evidence that textual scholars look at when trying to establish the “original” text of a document (that is, the wording of the text as the author originally wrote it) when different manuscripts have different wordings for this or that passage.  In this post I’ll talk about one kind of “internal” evidence that is used to assist in making this kind of decision.  With internal evidence, instead of looking at what the *attestation* of a passage is in the surviving witnesses (i.e., manuscripts of various kinds) you look at the passage itself, to see what about it can suggest which of the different ways of wording it is probably the "original" and which are the changes made by scribes. There are two kinds of internal evidence that are usually called (1) intrinsic probabilities and (2) transcriptional probabilities.   For now, I’ll focus on the first. Intrinsic probabilities involve determining which of two (or more) forms of the text found in the manuscripts is the one that [...]

How Manuscripts Matter for Knowing What an Author Wrote

In this thread I am addressing the question several readers have asked me about: if I think that the Christ poem of Philippians 2:6-10 is not something Paul himself wrote (as I have argued; see for example https://ehrmanblog.org/how-ancient-is-the-idea-of-christs-incarnation/), but has been quoted by him from some other text, why not just think a scribe inserted it into Philippians?  That is, maybe it wasn't in the letter in the first place; why not thing a scribe stuck it in after the letter was placed in circulation? It's an extremely important issue.  If the passage (or any other passage) was not originally in the letter, then we don't know if it represents what Paul himself thought; moreover, we can't know when the ideas of the inserted passage originally appeared -- an important issue when trying to figure out how quickly Christians developed their theological views.  Did Christians think of Jesus as a pre-existent divine being already in the 50s CE?  Or was it not until 100 CE or so?  Etc. I have differentiated between "textual variants" and [...]

2020-04-02T14:23:07-04:00March 9th, 2020|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Intimate Relationships: Nonbelievers and Believers

Over the past couple of months I’ve received maybe seven or eight emails from readers – some on the blog and others not – about marriage (two in the past 24 hours).  Not about what the New Testament says about marriage, but about what these emailers should do with *their* marriage.     Each of these was married to someone who was a faithful, committed, religiously conservative Christian of one kind or another (evangelical, Catholic, Mormon), but the emailer had, a while back, moved away from their earlier faith commitments, and now considered themselves agnostic or atheist or both, and weren’t sure how to handle it the marriage situation. In some cases the question was: should I tell my spouse?  In others it was: how can this work?  In others it was: how can I convince them that their views are full of problems and help them see the truth? I am not a marriage counsellor, as some of you may have noticed.  But I do have a lot of experience with questions like this, and have [...]

What Did Ancient People Think (a) God Was?

A number of people have asked me how anyone could imagine a human being or becoming God in the ancient world, based on my claims that for Paul and other early Christian writers Jesus was a divine human.  But if he was human, how could he be God?   To answer that I have to stress a point I made repeatedly in my book How Jesus Became God.   Anyone who wants to say that “Jesus is God” according to an early Christian text, has to explain “in what *sense*” is he God? Now is a good time for me to lay out how again how ancient people understood the divine realm. It was very different from the way most people today do – at least the people I run across. People today think of God as completely Other than us humans. We are mortal and limited in every respect; he is immortal and unlimited. He is all-powerful, all-knowing, and everywhere-present. We are by comparison weak, ignorant, and in one place at a time. He is infinite [...]

How Can You Tell If the Text Has Been CHANGED?

There are some passages in the New Testament that have been either added or omitted  by scribes in the process of copying them.  This is not some kind of “opinion.”  It is a fact.   In know full well that there are always readers who have said: “Scribes would never do that!  This was the Word of God for them!”   The logic in this objection is that anyone who held the Bible to be a holy book would not change it.   Hey, think about the Jewish scribes in the Middle Ages with the Torah, or the Muslim scribes from as far back as we can go with the Qur’an!  Scribes don’t change the texts they are copying if they think they are straight from God! It’s an intriguing argument – I hear it on occasion -- but I’m afraid it is based on complete ignorance.  In reality, it is an undeniable fact that scribes sometimes omitted or added to the texts of the NT, whether we are talking about a a word, a phrase, a sentence, [...]

2020-04-02T14:23:49-04:00March 4th, 2020|New Testament Manuscripts|

Maybe the Passage wasn’t “Original”!!

How do we know if a passage in the New Testament was “originally” in the New Testament?   Scholars are widely agreed, for example (there is not a whole lot of serious debate about the matter) that the appearances of Jesus after his resurrection at the end of  Mark’s Gospel (the last twelve verses of Mark 16) were not originally there.  The Gospel ends with the announcement that he has been raised and will meet his disciples in Galilee (so that, contrary to what a lot of people say – there definitely *is* a resurrection in Mark); but no one sees him.   That makes Mark very different from the other Gospels. So too the famous story of the woman taken in adultery in John 7:53-8:11 – arguably the most famous story from the life of Jesus in the entire New Testament, but almost certainly not originally there.  It was added later. So how ‘bout *other* passages?  How can we know? I’m addressing this question because ... At the end of this post I explain why it [...]

2020-04-02T14:23:55-04:00March 3rd, 2020|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters|

Paul’s Incredibly High Christology

I have been trying to explain the unusually important statement about Christ in Paul's "Christ Poem" in Phil. 2:6-10.   It's an extremely high Christology.   Christ is a divine being before coming into the world; and at his exaltation he was made *equal* with God.   Wow.  Just 20 years earlier Jesus was a virtually unknown peasant with a few followers in a remote part of rural Galilee.   Now he's equal to the Lord God Almighty??   How did *that* happen??? That, of course, is the topic of my book How Jesus Became God.  I try to explain how it happened.  In the book I talk about other passages in Paul that have similarly remarkable things to say about Christ.  Here is how i discuss it there.  (I do refer back to some of my earlier discussions in the book here -- e.g., about how some Jews thought of another power being on God's level; I can post some of those too if anyone is interested.) *********************************************************************** Other Passages in Paul The incarnational Christology that lies behind the [...]

2020-04-02T14:24:16-04:00March 2nd, 2020|Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters|

Authors and the Fiasco of Book Tours

With the advent of social media, author book tours have more or less gone the way of the stegosaurus.  Some authors do them, but mainly only the celebrities, Hilary or David Sedaris.  And you might be surprised to know that most authors think their demise is a very good thing.  A book tour sounds exotic – at least it always did to me:  “An Eleven-City National Book Tour!!!”  How good can it get?  Well, actually, it can get a lot better… Let me preface this by saying that right now is an absolutely awful time to be publishing a book, the worst time in recorded history (well, OK, in my recorded history).   The only way to sell a book seriously is to get serious media attention.  That means TV, radio, and front covers.   But at this stage of human evolution, if your name is not Donald, Bernie, or Corona, it just ain’t gonna happen.   The media can’t squeeze it all in, and books are at the bottom of the heap.  Even if your book is [...]

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