Loading...Among other things, I am spending a chunk of each day just now reading the page proofs for the second edition of my anthology After the New Testament. “Page proofs” are the type-set pages as they are ready to appear in the printed book. This is the last chance an author has to catch mistakes, typos, and so on. The new edition of this book is fairly long– over 550 pages – and reading proofs is one of the very least interesting parts of the job. It’s a serious pain in the neck. The press also (typically – depending on the press) employs a proof-reader; but no one can catch everything, and there are certainly typographical errors that will not be caught. In the first edition of this particular book, in the opening lines of the Gospel of Peter, where “King Herod,” Jesus arch-enemy, is introduced, my text was printed as “Kind Herod.” Ai yai yai….
In any event, as I mentioned back in January, and then again in May, there are sixteen chapters in this new second edition. Each one deals with a different aspect of early Christianity (100 – 300 CE), for example, one on the pagan assaults on Christianity, one on the relationship between orthodoxy and heresy, one on the development of early Christian liturgy and worship, one on the rise of Christian anti-Judaism, and so on. Each section has a short introduction to the topic, written, of course, from a historical perspective; and then there follow a set of readings of primary texts (i.e., Christian texts of the second and third century) that I’ve chosen as particularly illustrative of the topic. Unlike some of the other books that are kind of like this, I do not give large numbers of small snippets of text to illustrate this or that point. I give either complete texts (all of the Gospel of Peter, e.g.) or large chunks of texts (when the full text is really too much – which is quite often the case.)
In this second edition I have…
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Paul seems pretty progressive toward women in his early letters but the later letters written in his name basically undid all that progress, including that rude insertion in 1 Corinthians 14.
question bart who’s was BARNABAS AND Asclepius
Barnabas was an early apostle. Asclepius was a god of healing. They were not related.
Ok thanks . Another question have you worked with John Paul Jackson B4 ?
Nope!
if he was a early apostle why did they call him zeus ?
The story explains it. I discuss the passage in my book How Jesus Became God, as it turns out.
Dr Ehrman: Is there any evidence that women were ever crucified or was this a punishment for men??
I don’t know of any evidence. It’s a good question! If anyone else on the blog knows, let *us* know!
Josephus, in the Antiquities 18:3:4 (Loeb No. 433, near the bottom of p. 57), mentions Ida’s crucifixion by Tiberius. But her execution in this way, for a “hellish plot” (interesting story in previous pages) is not treated as unusual.
Interesting! Thanks.
Remember my telling you before that Wikipedia had a reference to an early drawing (or something like that) of a presumably real crucifixion, with the victim being a (named) woman? I told you at the time what they said the source was. I haven’t looked at the Wikipedia article again…
John Granger Cook wrote an article for Novum Testamentum titled “Crucifixion as Spectacle in Roman Campania” in which he cites another article saying: “…it is rare to hear of crucified women in antiquity…” And then later says that in an ancient Roman work, the lex Puteolana, that “provision is made for the execution of women at ‘private expense'”. No explanation for that last statement (aside from the fact that the “women” were probably slaves) is given in the article I have. The lex Puteolana is, I believe, a book of rules and regulations for the city of Puteoli. So, I’d think if one city had provisions for executing women then others did as well.
Interesting! Thanks.
Of course, those of us who don’t think Christianity was a boon to civilization might prefer to believe women were rejecting it!
Paul doesn’t mention that women were the first to proclaim that Jesus had been raised, so I wonder how historically accurate that is.
I do too!
Your scholarship and productivity are truly amazing.
and of course the first thing I read is a typo on line 3: itinerant, please!
Got it! Thanks.
If what you posted is a cut and paste from the new chapter and if what you posted is identical to the page proof then in sentence 6 which starts out with:
“In all four of the canonical Gospel women…”
Gospel should be plural. Maybe you already caught that one though.
I’ve written a good bit for technical journals and I hate proofing as well. When I do it I have to turn off “reading comprehension” in my mind and focus solely on spelling and grammar.
Caught it already! Thanks!
I was looking at some of the women you name on wiki to read a little more about them and it says that when Priscilla and Aquila are named they are named together in all 6 occurrences and that Priscilla is named first in 4 of those occurrences which would of course be unusual in a male dominated society. One of the six and one of the 4 occurs in 2 Timothy though.
In any event, without me looking up every single woman that Paul mentions in his letters does he place other women at the front of lists of his followers or married couples? Maybe this is something you talk about in the anthology.
He doesn’t mention too many other husband-wife couples (I can’t think of others, off hand — maybe someone else on the post knows of some?), but this is the only couple he does this for, which is often interpreted as meaning that that Priscilla was the leading Christian voice in the couple.
Dr. Ehrman,
Please what is the charateria by which scholars use in differentiating Paul’s views from his writings in order to determine which and which are truely his and which is a forgery?
Could Paul simply be a person who simply can’t make up his mind on what he writes and therefore changes his mind when next he writes?
He could be. But there are other criteria that scholars use as well. You might want to look at my book Forged. Or if you want the heavy-duty response, see my book Forgery and Counterforgery.