Loading...I’m nearly finished reading the page proofs for the second edition of After the New Testament. Gods willing, I finish tomorrow – a good thing, because I’m heading out of town (well, I’m already out of town; so I’m heading out of town out of town) to do some hiking. I’ll be able to keep the blog up (let’s hear it for wi-fi!). But proof reading is outta the question! Anyway, yesterday I gave the first half of the Introduction to one of the new sections in the second edition of the book (that I call ANT), on Women in Early Christianity. You may want to reread that bit from yesterday if it’s not fresh in your mind. Here’s the final part of the Introduction. (Please note: I give a very small bibliography at the end. The reason it is so small: it is for college students in a beginning course. Many of you will probably want to suggest other readings. I too would like to suggest more – lots more! But my idea is not to overwhelm students and to give them some of the best stuff out there. No slight is meant to anyone whose book has been left off the list. There is a *lot* of good work available….)
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Whatever roles women played in his churches, Paul’s attitudes toward and views of women have been matters of great dispute over the years, in no small measure because of the ambiguities of the evidence. On one hand, Paul makes pronouncements that sound remarkably liberated for the patriarchal world he inhabited, especially Gal. 3:28, that “in Christ there is no male and female.” On the other hand, when it comes to social – as opposed to hypothetical or eschatological – realities Paul appears to bow to the pressures of his environment. In his letter to the Corinthians he is quite insistent that women wear head coverings in church, in no small measure in order to show that they are subservient to their husbands, their “heads” (a complicated passage: 1 Cor. 11: 2-15).
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Fascinating .. and eager to read more.
Prof Ehrman
In your opinion when should we date the pastoral epistles?
thanks
My guess is late first century. If you want an extended discussion of their pseudepigraphic character (i.e., why they are almost certainly forgeries), see my book Forgery and Counterforgery, pp. 192-217.
question how is old the story of hercules and so on with poseidon and all that ?
I’m afraid I have no idea!
seems as if every body forgot that story which is FAR OLDER THEN JESUS
” hercules is loved by zeus i would think, ZEUS LOVES HIS HERCULES ,
that would suck to go to war against hercules due to the fact his brother is aries and his uncles is HADES and POSEIDON
Hi Bart, I recently had a “deconstructing Evangelical” friend ask about Mark 7:24–30. I checked my copy of “The Five Gospels” and their very brief summary is this:
“It is highly probable that the words attributed to Jesus in this story were created along with the story. They are not independently attested elsewhere. If they do represent an aphorism that had an independent existence, Fellows of the Seminar doubt that they can be traced back to Jesus. Statements about the extent of his mission, such as Matt 15:24 (“‘ was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”), are all taken to be the retrospective theological assertions of the early Christian community. Jesus himself does not claim that he had been assigned a specific mission that he had to carry out.”
I find this almost useless, since it doesn’t even address the issues that people see. Most of Mark is not independently attested, so we have to have other criteria to say a Markan narrative is fictitious. If Jesus did say it, what do we do with the implicit chauvinism?
Yes, I’m afraid their “criteria” tend to be assertions of opinion — as in the last sentence. That’s how they decide that Jesus is not ana apocalypticist as well.