BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 104 of 206

About BDEhrman

Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he has served as the director of graduate studies and chair of the Department of Religious Studies.

One of My Favorite Letters in the New Testament: The Book of James

Sometimes the questions I get from readers are short and to the point, but require long answers over a number of posts. Here’s one of the recent ones: QUESTION: Could you write a blog on the book of James and why it is considered a forgery? RESPONSE: I think this question deserves an entire thread of responses. I haven’t talked much about the letter of James on the blog (at least so far as I can remember and tell!). So why not? It’s a short “book” – just five brief chapters. You can read it in fifteen minutes. Go ahead! What I say about it will then make better sense. The best known feature of the letter is that it *seems* to be opposing the writings and teachings of Paul. But does it? Martin Luther, father of the Reformation, thought so. He included the book only as an appendix to the New Testament. I talk about the letter, and the reasons I don’t think it was actually written by James, the brother of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:38-04:00July 12th, 2019|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Reader’s Questions|

Sad News From Larry Hurtado

Many readers on the blog will know of Larry Hurtado, a prominent New Testament scholar who has been influential as one of the most regular and reliable bloggers on issues of relevance to the study of early Christianity. Larry has announced that he is very ill and will no longer be able to participate in either scholarship or the promotion of early Christians studies to a broader reading audience. This is very sad, especially for us who know him. (I will give his announcement about his illness and the prospects at the end of this post.) I have known Larry for over thirty years. He started out as a New Testament textual critic, with his first book a published version of his dissertation: Hurtado, Larry W. (1981). Text-Critical Methodology and the Pre-Caesarean Text: Codex W in the Gospel of Mark. Studies and Documents. 43. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. It's not something you will want to try to reading, unless you're an expert on Greek and the Greek manuscript tradition of the NT. Trust me. But I used [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:38-04:00July 10th, 2019|History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum|

The Legality, Morality, and Scandal of Acquiring Ancient Manuscripts: Guest Post by Jennifer Knust

Here is the final part of Jennifer’s Knust’s quest to trace the history of an intriguing Christian manuscript she came across, suspecting it had come to Duke ultimately as a result of Nazi looting decades earlier. Now she details how she tried to track it down. The entire episode leads her, then to reflect on the Green Family Collection, a group of manuscripts and antiquities purchased by the owners of the Hobby Lobby and the basis of the “Museum of the Bible” in Washington D.C. Any visitor to the museum might assume that acquiring such treasures would be relatively simple and involve no issues of legality, morality, and scandal. On the contrary…. Jennifer Knust’s most popular books are To Cast the First Stone and Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity. ************************************************* Part III: Manuscripts are Commodities The Antiquariat was (and is) a bookstore. Günther Koch was a bookseller. Indeed, in a counter-claim filed against the Rosenthals in the 1950s, he described himself as uniquely qualified for the position he undertook during and after the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:38-04:00July 9th, 2019|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts|

Christian Manuscripts and Nazi Loot: Guest Post by Jennifer Knust

This now is the second of Jennifer Knust’s three posts on her current project, tracing the history of a Christian manuscript she came upon from the rare book collection at Duke University. Her research led her to booksellers in London, Munich, and Amsterdamn, and implicates the Aryanization policies of the Nazis. Who knew New Testament scholarship could be so interesting? Find below what she has to say. Jennifer Knust’s most popular books are To Cast the First Stone and Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity. ************************************* Part II: Nazi Loot? My own project began when Aaron Ebert, a doctoral student at Duke University, noticed that the manuscript he was studying was one of three purchased by Duke from the London bookseller Raphael King in the 1950s. Very little information about Mr. King is available, so Aaron reached out to the Ludwig Rosenthal Antiquariaat, a venerable antiquarian bookstore now located in the Netherlands that once owned another of Duke’s manuscripts also sold by King, Greek MS 018. According to an important volume on Byzantine [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:38-04:00July 8th, 2019|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts|

Tracking Down Stolen Manuscripts: Guest Post by Jennifer Knust

I have asked my friend and colleague Jennifer Knust (Professor of early Christianity at Duke) to write some guest posts for us on the blog. Jenny is the author of Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity, and she has also recently published the definitive study of the famous passage of the “Woman Taken in Adultery” (containing the line “Let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her” – a passage not originally in the New Testament), a long, sophisticated, and learned book (co-authored with Tommy Wasserman), called To Cast the First Stone; and I had suggested she write about that for us. Maybe she will later. But for now she has decided to post about some very exciting current research she’s doing, as we speak: tracking down the history of a Christian manuscript that was plundered by the Nazis. Intriguing stuff. This will take several posts. ***************************************************** Jennifer Wright Knust Duke University “In this kind of world no blueprint instructs us how to house what we [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:38-04:00July 7th, 2019|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts|

Heightened Opposition to Jews in Early Christianity
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Heightened Opposition to Jews in Early Christianity

Book Discussions, Jews and Christians in Antiquity

Heightened Opposition to Jews in Early Christianity

I have been outlining some of the issues that I may talk about in a book on the rise of anti-Judaism in early Christianity, if I write it. In previous posts I have detailed some of the uglier Christian attacks on Jews and Judaism, almost all of them tied to Christian ways of reading the Old Testament that different from traditional, Jewish readings. Some Christians claimed that Jews misread what God had told them in the Scripture, and that this is what led them to reject their messiah, and since they had rejected their messiah, God had rejected them. Christians, not Jews, were the people of God. Jews were condemned. It’s not a happy history, and it gets worse. In my book I will not move into the later consequences of the Middle Ages down to modernity – restrictions on what Jews could do for a living, on where they could live, on how they could engage with others in their communities; eventually the pogroms and expulsions; and so on. I will be focusing only [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:38-04:00July 5th, 2019|Book Discussions, Jews and Christians in Antiquity|

When Christians Went on the Attack Against Jews

I return now, for a couple of posts, to my thoughts on the rise of anti-Judaism in the early Christian tradition, and my thesis that it was largely driven by a different way of reading the Bible, that the Christians insisted the Jewish scriptures were looking forward to Jesus as a suffering messiah who would die for sins, and in doing so fulfilled all sorts of prophecies, and most Jews thought this entire view was nonsense, if not blasphemous. Here is where my thoughts move on from what I said in the last post on the matter. Should you need to refresh your memory, it is here: https://ehrmanblog.org/why-christians-needed-an-old-testament-pagan-attacks-on-the-faith/ An important point to stress is that Christians recognized that if their own interpretations of the Jewish Bible were correct, the Jews’ own interpretations were necessarily invalid. As I argued in Triumph of Christianity, the distinctive feature of early Christianity vis-à-vis all the other religions of the Roman world – including Judaism – was that Christians argued their views provided the way of salvation and the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:21-04:00July 3rd, 2019|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Jews and Christians in Antiquity|

Is the Qur’an More Reliable than the New Testament?

I often get asked questions about the Qur’an, and I almost always do not answer them, most because I can’t answer them. I’m not an expert on the Qur’an, and tend to talk only about things I have done serious and sustained research on. Otherwise I’m just spreading stuff I’ve heard, and I’m no more authoritative on that than anyone else. So what’s the point of my talking about it? But one question that I get frequently, especially from Muslim readers, is about the manuscript tradition of the Qur’an in relation to the New Testament. Even though I’m not an expert on the manuscript tradition of the Qur’an (oh boy am I not an expert), I know enough to answer with some authority this particular question. The question is whether it simply isn’t true that the Qur’an is more reliable than the New Testament. What the questioner almost always means by that is that the ancient manuscripts of the Qur’an tend to be amazingly similar to one another. Virtually identical up and down the line. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:21-04:00July 2nd, 2019|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Why Was the World Created in 4004 BC?
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Why Was the World Created in 4004 BC?

Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reflections and Ruminations, Religion in the News

Why Was the World Created in 4004 BC?

Why was the world created? We appear to be living in an age where science no longer matters. As you may know, the English word "science" comes from the Latin term "scientia," which means "knowledge.: People who reject "science," well, what is it they're rejecting? We live in dangerous times. Apart from the more obvious examples of this rejection that you can find in the newspaper every day (involving a human-induced apocalypse of biblical proportions), there are still, of course, a large number of "creationists" out there, who not only deny evolution (as a student now then will always tell me, with passion in his voice, "Hey, it's ONLY a theory!!") but who also subscribe to a young earth theory. The earth has just been around for about 6000 years. Really. When I was a fundamentalist I knew people who seriously claimed not only that dinosaurs and humans were walking around the earth together, but that fossils that appear to date to millions of years earlier were put into the geological record by Satan, who [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:20-04:00July 1st, 2019|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reflections and Ruminations, Religion in the News|

Would You Be Willing To Donate a Membership?

Twice a year on the blog, around mid-year and Christmas, I open up a possibility to help out people who really want to be on the blog but cannot afford the membership fees. We are at that point! So here is the semi-annual appeal for you to pitch in, as you feel moved. We've been doing this for nearly six years. It all started off when two anonymous donors proposed that they provide some funds to pay for memberships for a few people who wanted to be on the blog but because of personal circumstances, could not afford the membership fees. I put out the offer on my Facebook page, asking if anyone was in that boat, and within twenty minutes I had thirty requests –all from people who were eager to join but simply did not have the means to do so. I had to shut down the offer nearly as soon as I made it. This made me suspect that there were a lot more people out there like that. And so [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:20-04:00June 30th, 2019|Public Forum|

Is There a Way to Know if a Manuscript is the “Original”?

In response to the recent flurry of posts on the question of a “first-century Mark,” I have received a very interesting question: suppose there *were* a first-century Mark that was discovered (hey, it’s possible! And we’re holding our breaths – what an amazing find it would be).. Would there be a way of showing it was the actual original Mark, the one the author himself wrote with his own hand? I was asked this question on the blog seven years ago, and responded to it by saying I had never thought about it before. (!) Below is the original question and my initial reflections. My views haven’t matured much during the past seven years (and they ain't the only thing), so I give my initial response. If someone can improve on it, let me know. First here is this week’s way of asking the question: QUESTION: Suppose someone did claim to have found the original…. I get that you can show something isn’t original, such as by dating it to two hundred years later. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:20-04:00June 28th, 2019|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Flat-out Lies or Willful Ignorance. How Do They Get Away With It?

Sometimes it’s enough to make my blood boil. Maybe someone can explain it to me. If you were to interview the 7,346,235,000 occupants of this planet, you would find *no* group of people who declare themselves MORE committed to “truth” than the evangelical Christians. Evangelical Christianity, historically, is about nothing other than the Truth. Jesus himself said “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no one comes to the Father except by me” (John 14:6); and “You shall know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free” (John 8:32). The Christian faith, for these people, is all about finding the Truth that leads to eternal life. So why do so many of their spokespersons simply tell lies? Or at least propagate willful ignorance? Those are the two choices: they either know what they’re saying is absolutely false or they don’t go to the bother of finding out, when the information is readily available to anyone who wants to take 38 seconds to look for it. I don’t get it. Well, OK, I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:20-04:00June 26th, 2019|Bart's Critics, Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Hobby Lobby, Biblical Manuscripts, and Academic Scandal

Yesterday I posted the most recent developments in the scandalous “first-century Mark” affair. Readers of the blog who are not familiar with or invested much in the study of ancient manuscripts may have shrugged their shoulders and not seen what the big deal was. I completely get that. But anyone involved in New Testament textual criticism, the history of the Bible, and the ethics of modern biblical scholarship would have seen that this is a very, very big deal. A blockbuster development. For years now conservative evangelical scholars have been declaring that they have solid proof to support their views about the New Testament, against crazy liberal types (like me): we NOW have, they claimed, reliable *first* century evidence that the Gospels were both written earlier than the skeptics claim *and* that it was being reliably copied. Their evidence? A portion of the Gospel of Mark that had been dated by one of the world’s experts to the first century itself. Amazing! And where was this manuscript of Mark? No one would say. How much [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:20-04:00June 25th, 2019|New Testament Manuscripts, Religion in the News|

Finally! Now We Know. The “First-Century Copy” of Mark

I have posted on and off over the past six or seven years about an allegedly first-century copy of the Gospel of Mark that some scholars claimed we had now in our possession. This would be by far the earliest manuscript we have of any part of the New Testament, a matter of real importance and interest. But it turns out NOT to be that, and it has involved a real academic farce. Those of you who have followed this charade know most of the important facts, but for those of you who don’t, and just to remind those of you who do, let me set them out, before explaining the new development: In 2012 I was holding a public debate on whether we can know what the authors of the New Testament “originally” wrote, given the fact that we don’t have their original writings but only later copies of them, all of them different in many, many small ways and sometimes in more important ways. Virtually all of these copies are many centuries removed [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:20-04:00June 24th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Why Christians Needed an Old Testament: Pagan Attacks on the Faith

In my discussion why Christians claimed the Jewish Bible for themselves (and argued it no longer belonged to Jews), I’ve been focusing strictly on the relationship of Jews and Christians, for obvious reasons. But as it turns out, there is more to it than that. Here is an issue that is hardly ever talked about in the scholarship on the rise of anti-Judaism in early Christianity, let alone among lay people wondering about why mainstream Christianity became opposed to Jews and the religion they practiced in antiquity (leading to the anti-Judaism and then the antisemitism of later times.) This issue involves Christians’ relations not with Jews, but with pagans, and the rejection of the new Christian faith by the world at large. As is well known, apart from Jews and Christians, everyone in the Roman empire was pagan – that is, everyone followed one or more of the polytheistic religions of that world. I do not need to detail the various kinds of pagan religion found throughout the Roman Empire. But a couple of important [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:20-04:00June 23rd, 2019|Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Jews and Christians in Antiquity|

The Jewish Bible in the Gentile Churches

I continue here with my thoughts about how Christians came to claim the Jewish Bible for themselves, and to argue that it no longer belonged to Jews. I’ve already pointed out that the Jewish followers of Jesus (Many? Most? All?) (I suspect the answer is “Most”), within a short time after his death (months? a year?) began wonder why other Jews did not accept Jesus as the messiah. After all, they themselves “knew” he had been raised from the dead. It was a great miracle. It proved Jesus was God’s “anointed” one. Why wouldn’t others accept it? That was particularly perplexing and frustrating and eventually irritating and aggravating as they started finding indications in the Bible itself that this is what was supposed to happen to the messiah. It’s all there, in the prophecies of Scripture. Why don’t our fellow Jews – family members, friends, neighbors, fellow worshipers in the synagogue – why don’t they *see* it? Are they blind? Heard headed? Rebellious against God? Eventually it came to be thought among many of these [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:19-04:00June 21st, 2019|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Jews and Christians in Antiquity|

Feedback on the Blog?

I’m back from Greece and Turkey now, with two weeks with nothing to do but work like a wild-person day and night on my book project on Christian tours of heaven and hell in relation to their Greek and Roman predecessors. I’m madly into Virgil’s Aeneid just now. Great stuff. I’ll say more about it anon. But it seems like a good time for me to pause for a day and take assessment of developments on the blog and get your reactions. I do this a couple of times a year, as old-timers will know. My basic questions: How is the blog going, from your point of view? And is there anything we should change/do differently? Any feedback at all is welcome – just let me hear it. The goal, of course, is to keep the customers satisfied and to draw more in. I’d like to use the blog to disseminate scholarly knowledge of the New Testament and the early Christian movement more broadly, for three interrelated reasons. First, of course, is that I think [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:19-04:00June 19th, 2019|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Paul Did Not Write 2 Thessalonians: A Final Post

This will be my last post on the question of whether Paul wrote 2 Thessalonians. If you’ve been following all this, you know that my view is that he did not. My sense is that a lot of people have trouble accepting that view simply because it’s not what they’ve always heard and thought. It’s hard to change your mind about something that just seems sensible and right, even if you haven’t really given it much thought or attention. We’re *all* inclined to think what we’ve always thought. For most people, of course, the question doesn’t matter a twit. Who CARES? Well, some of us care. And if you’re one who does, then I’d suggest being open to changing your mind if the evidence takes you in a different direction. If you don’t want to change your mind, or are just on principle disinclined to do so, fair enough. We all have to decide that to think and also what even not to bother thinking about. (But then why are you reading these posts?!? J) [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:19-04:00June 18th, 2019|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters|

Does Paul Think the End is Coming Soon? Does 2 Thessalonians?

I now come to the crux of the matter, the argument that for me seems the most convincing that Paul probably did not write 2 Thessalonians. I already stated the argument in its simple form last week, here: https://ehrmanblog.org/did-paul-really-write-2-thessalonians/ Now I want to show how the argument gets grounded in a much deeper exploration of the text itself; in part this is to show that it’s not a particularly simple matter and in part it’s to illustrate, again, how scholars make argument like this to other scholars (as opposed to summarizing the results more broadly). That may not be your cup of tea – but if so, then be assured, another pot is brewing. Once more, this comes from the blog (five years ago), and can be found with footnotes (if you’re a real glutton for punishment) in my monograph Forgery and Counterforgery. I have translated most of the Greek here. For further guidance, among the technical terms I use, “realized eschatology” refers to the idea that believers are *already* enjoying the full benefits of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:19-04:00June 17th, 2019|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters|

2 Thessalonians as a Forgery? Does the Author “Write” Like Paul?

I have made the following post available to all readers, whether they belong to the blog or not. Rarely on the blog do I show how scholars make arguments to other experts in the field of biblical studies (as opposed to scholars who simply summarize the results for non-scholars); even more rarely do I make such posts available to anyone who wants to see. But here is an example -- just in case you're interested and would like to know. (You'll notice that once you get into the meat of the discussion, about half-way through, it's not the sort of thing that would occur to regular-ole readers of the Bible, even if they've been reading it their entire lives.) This is a "re-post" of a post I made some five years ago. If you were a member of the blog, you could read five posts a week, nearly always written at a popular level for non-scholars, but always based on scholarship "behind the scenes" (like this). So think about joining! ************************************************************* In my previous two [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:19-04:00June 16th, 2019|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters|

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