BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 108 of 203

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.

How Would an Early Christian “Know” Which Books Peter Wrote?

So if there were lots of books in circulation that claimed to be written by the apostle Peter, why did some of them (1 and 2 Peter) come to be accepted both as his and as canonical scripture, and others come to be deemed forgeries and excluded from the canon? The first point to stress is that Christians in the second, third, and fourth centuries had no real way of knowing which, if any, of these books Peter wrote. They were living many decades or even centuries after the books had first been put in circulation. The books were passed around from one church to the other before *anyone* on record claimed that they really were or really were not written by Peter. And how would they know? They almost certainly didn’t have any “insider information.” Where would their information have come from? Simply from other people who said so, one way or the other. And 99.9% of these people accepting, or rejecting, this book or another were not specialists trained in sophisticated modes of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:11-04:00December 18th, 2018|Catholic Epistles, Christian Apocrypha|

The Books of Peter

I return now to the thread I had been working on before devoting the last few posts to the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke. If you recall, some time ago I indicated that I had become a bit obsessed with a rather interesting if largely unasked question, of why the Apocalypse of Peter did not make it into the New Testament but the book of 2 Peter did. When I started on that thread, I thought it would take three or four posts, but as I got into it I realized that more and more background information was needed – and it turned into a rather longish thread, not only about what the Apocalypse of Peter is about (the first Christian account we have of a guided tour of heaven and hell, given to the apostle Peter himself, where he sees the glories of heaven for the saints and, in far more graphic detail, the torments of hell for the sinners) – but also about how we got the New Testament at all, that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:11-04:00December 17th, 2018|Catholic Epistles, Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity|

Jesus’ Birth in Matthew and Luke: A Study in Contrasts

In two previous posts I’ve detailed what happens in Luke’s version of Jesus’ birth and then in Matthew’s. I will assume those two previous posts in the comments that I want to make in this one. The problem people have with reading these two accounts, usually, is the problem they have reading the Gospels (and the Bible as a whole) generally. Or at least this has been my experience. It’s the problem of assuming that one account is basically saying the same thing as some other account. People do that with the Bible all the time. With the New Testament, people tend to read Matthew as if he’s saying the same thing as Mark; John as if it’s the same thing as Luke; Paul’s letters as if, at heart, they’re the same thing as James; Revelation as if it’s the same thing as John. And on and on and on. One of the most important tasks I have as an undergraduate teacher of the New Testament is to get students to see that each of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:11-04:00December 16th, 2018|Canonical Gospels|

Jesus’ Birth as “The Fulfillment of the Prophecies”

Here I continue my reflections on the birth narratives in the New Testament, with a post on an important aspect of Matthew's account, central to its claims. One of the most distinctive aspects of Matthew’s infancy narrative is his insistence that everything that happened was a “fulfillment” of Scripture. Why was Jesus’ mother a virgin? To fulfill what the prophet said (he quotes Isaiah 7:14: “A virgin shall conceive and bear a son”) Why was he born in Bethlehem? To fulfill what the prophet said (he quotes Micah 5:2: “And you, Bethlehem…from you shall come a ruler” Why did Joseph and the family escape to Egypt? To fulfill what the prophet said (he quotes Hosea 11:1: “Out of Egypt I have called my son”) Why did Herod have the boys two years and under killed? To fulfill what the prophet said (he quotes Jeremiah 31.15 “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation”) Why did Joseph and family relocate to Nazareth? To fulfill what the prophet said (he quotes … well what does [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:11-04:00December 14th, 2018|Canonical Gospels|

The Birth of Jesus in Matthew

Here I continue my seasonal reflections about the Christmas accounts in the New Testament. Yesterday’s blog was about the account of Jesus’ birth in Luke; today I talk about Matthew. Even a casual reading shows that these are two very different accounts. Matthew has nothing about the birth of John the Baptist, the Annunciation, the census, the trip to Bethlehem, the shepherds, the presentation in the Temple. Matthew’s version, as a result, is much shorter. Most of his stories are found only in his account. And some of the differences from Luke appear to involve downright discrepancies, as I will try to show in another post. For now: Matthew’s version. Matthew begins with a genealogy of Jesus. Luke also has a genealogy, but it is given after Jesus is baptized in ch. 3, instead of where you would expect it, at his birth in ch. 1. I’ll explain my view of that in a later post. After the genealogy of Matthew in which Jesus is traced to David, the greatest king of Israel, and to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:11-04:00December 12th, 2018|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

The Birth of Jesus in Luke

As I indicated yesterday, I'm doing a series of posts leading up to Christmas, dealing with the accounts of Jesus' birth in the New Testament. Here's a discussion of the one most familiar to people, found in the Gospel of Luke. ********************************************************************************** As I’ve indicated, it is only Matthew and Luke that tell the tales of the infancy narrative, and the annual “Christmas Pageant” that so many of us grew up seeing is in fact a conflation of the two accounts, making one mega-account out of two that are so different up and down the line. And so, the Annunciation to Mary is in Luke, the dream of Joseph in Matthew; the shepherds are in Luke, the wise men in Matthew; the trip to Bethlehem is in Luke, the Flight to Egypt is in Matthew, and so forth and so on. You can compare them yourself, up and down the line, and see the differences. In this post I want to focus on Luke’s account. Then I will look at Matthew’s. And then I will [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:11-04:00December 10th, 2018|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

What Can We Know about Jesus’ Birth?

Browsing through holiday-season blogs from previous eras, I came across my first small thread on Christmas from exactly six years ago. I had forgotten about this. Some of the material has shown up occasionally in the intervening years, but maybe it's a good time to repost a bit of it. Here is the first: an account of what we can, and cannot, know about Jesus' birth. Bethlehem? Virgin? Date? Or even... year? ************************************************************************** I have decided to provide a series of posts related to the stories of Christmas in the New Testament. This first post more or less states some of the basic information that most readers know, but that it’s worth while stressing as a kind of ground clearing exercise. To begin with, we are extremely limited in our sources when it comes to knowing anything at all about the birth of Jesus. In fact, at the end of the day, I think we can’t really know much at all. Just to cut to the chase, I think that it is most probable that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:11-04:00December 9th, 2018|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

Another Chance: Donating Free Memberships

In years past, when I’ve solicited donations to provide free year-long blog memberships to people in need, who really would love to be on the blog but simply cannot afford it because of personal circumstances, I’ve been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support. For one reason or another that has not happened as much this year. There have been a number of you who have donated, and for that I’m deeply, deeply grateful. But the numbers are serious down – so much so that I asked my assistant Steven Ray if the post went out as normal or if there was some kind of glich. No glich. It’s just one of those years. But I want to mention it again, a second time, just in case anyone was primed for a nudge. I’ll be announcing the possibility of free memberships to those who need them in three days, and do not want to have a situation where there are dozens of needy and eager potential blog members that I/we cannot accommodate. So if you can [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:11-04:00December 8th, 2018|Public Forum|

Did Jesus Write Anything in the New Testament?

I have mentioned two apocryphal letters forged in the name of Jesus himself, one written to a King Abgar and the other, well, dictated to the cherubim in heaven from the cross. Several readers have asked me about New Testament examples, one in the famous story of the woman taken in adultery in John 8, and the other the seven letters allegedly dictated by Christ in Revelation 2-3. As to the first, yes, as many of you already know, even though there is an account of Jesus writing on the ground in John 8 (he is writing, by the way, not doodling; the Greek is fairly clear on the point) (we are not told *what* he is writing; there are about 97 theories about that, each one the favorite of one person or another….), this account was not originally in John. It is a scribal addition to the story. (BTW: one recent NT scholar, Chris Keith, has written an entire book arguing that the passage was inserted by scribes precisely to show that Jesus was [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:11-04:00December 7th, 2018|Historical Jesus, New Testament Manuscripts|

An Intriguingly Legendary Account of Jesus’ Death

Here is some more of the intriguing (later) Gospel, allegedly written by none other than Joseph of Arimathea, the figure who, in the New Testament Gospels, buried Jesus. It is entirely apocryphal of course, based on some information from the Gospels, later legends, and an extremely vivid imagination! The point of these posts has been to talk about whether Jesus ever wrote anything. Here he does, kind of. While hanging on the cross. You don’t find stories like *this* every day! This is my own translation, taken from the book The Other Gospels, co-edited/translated with my colleague Zlatko Plese. *********************************************************** Jesus Put on Trial (1) At three o’clock on the next day, the fourth day of the week, they brought him into the courtyard of Caiaphas. Annas and Caiaphas said to him, “Tell us, why did you carry off our law? And why have you preached against the promises of Moses and the prophets?” But Jesus made no answer. Again a second time, when the multitude was also present, they said to him, “Why do [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:10-04:00December 5th, 2018|Christian Apocrypha|

Did Jesus Write a Letter to Joseph of Arimathea

Did Jesus write a letter to Joseph of Arimathea? In yesterday’s post on the letter forged in Jesus’ name, allegedly to the king of Edessa Abgar, I mentioned another text in which Jesus is alleged to have written a letter. This one is even stranger. Far stranger. It is a letter he writes from the cross to the cherubim in heaven. It’s in a (much) later gospel called the Narrative of Joseph of Arimathea, an account of Jesus’ Passion allegedly written by the obscure figure in the NT Gospels who buried him. Among other things, it gives us “information” on the two robbers who were crucified with him. Here I explain what the text is and then give the opening scenes. Tomorrow I will give the rest of it (it’s a short gospel). All of this comes from the book I co-produced with my colleague Zlatko Plese, The Other Gospels, a book you might be interested in getting! It gives about 40 Gospel texts (many of them only in fragments) from early Christianity. The [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:10-04:00December 4th, 2018|Christian Apocrypha|

Do Any Forgeries Claim to be Written by Jesus?

I have received an interesting question about ancient forgeries. If we have lots of forgeries in the name of Peter -- and lots of others in the names of other apostles: Paul, James, Jude, Thomas, Philip, etc. etc. -- why don't we have any forgeries allegedly written by Jesus himself? As it turns out we do. The most famous was, at one time, well known indeed. Here is the question and my response. QUESTION: If Peter was named as an author of these works, why not name Jesus then of others(that we know of )? Was it understood within the community that, and why, he chose not to write his views down -- or was this too bold of a move even for a shameless forger? Or he was still deemed less accessible than his followers? RESPONSE: Yes indeed, there is a one-time famous correspondence between Jesus and a king who lived in Edessa in Syria named Abgar.. I have translated it anew for the book I published (on all earliest Christian Gospels) with [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:10-04:00December 3rd, 2018|Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity, Reader’s Questions|

Gift Memberships 2018!

It is already December (sigh....) and we are now blasting from one holiday to the next. For the occasion, I want to open up a holiday giving option that can help out people who really want to be on the blog but cannot afford the membership fees. As many of you know, for the past five of years, thanks to a number of generous donors, we pulled this off in a big way. It has happened in two stages. It 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. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:10-04:00December 2nd, 2018|Public Forum|

Could Peter Have “Written” 1 and 2 Peter Some Other Way?

Here is the last of my three posts digging down deeper into the question of whether Peter would have, or could have, written the books we now call 1 and 2 Peter, composed in highly literate Greek by someone skilled in Greek composition. ****************************** It should come as no surprise that Peter could not write Greek (or Aramaic, for that matter). As it turns out, there is New Testament evidence about Peter’s education level. According to Acts 4:13, both Peter and his companion John, also a fisherman, were agrammatoi , a Greek word that literally means “unlettered,” that is, “illiterate.” And so, is it possible that Peter wrote 1 and 2 Peter? We have seen good reasons for him not writing 2 Peter, and some reason for thinking he didn’t write 1 Peter. But it is highly probable that in fact he could not write at all. I should point out that the book of 1 Peter is written by a highly educated, Greek-speaking Christian who is intimately familiar with the Jewish Scriptures in their [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:10-04:00November 30th, 2018|Acts of the Apostles, Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

Were First-Century Jewish Boys Taught to Read and Write?

In this post I continue to dig down into whether a poor Aramaic-speaking fisherman in rural Galilee could compose a highly sophisticated Greek treatise such as 1 Peter. In my last post I dealt broadly with the question of how many people in antiquity could write. In this post I turn my attention to Peter’s own historical context, Roman Palestine. Is it true that boys were consistently taught literacy there and that it’s plausible that one of them could write rhetorically effective Greek compositions? I take the discussion, again, from my book Forged. ****************************** It is sometimes thought that Palestine was an exception, that in Palestine Jewish boys all learned to read so that they could study the Hebrew Scriptures, and that since they could read they could probably write. Moreover, it is often argued that in Palestine most adults were bilingual, or even trilingual, able to read Hebrew, speak the local language Aramaic, and communicate well in the language of the broader empire, Greek. Recent studies of literacy in Palestine , however, have shown [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:10-04:00November 28th, 2018|Early Judaism|

Seriously. How Many People in Antiquity Could Write?

I have received some push-back from readers who object to my view that Simon Peter, Jesus’ disciple, a fisherman from rural Galilee whose native language was Aramaic, living among lower-class people who spoke Aramaic, almost certainly could not have written a highly stylized and sophisticated Greek treatise such as we find in the book of 1 Peter. My sense is that I will never convince anyone who thinks that it is simply “common sense” that of course he could learn to write Greek if he wanted to and did so at the end of his life. But I’m bound and determined to try! (It used to be “common sense” that the sun revolved around the earth, after all…. Just because it’s something we’ve always heard and thought doesn’t make it true!) I’ve dealt with literacy issues on the blog before, but I think I need to give a fuller explanation of my views. The fullest is in my book Forgery and Counterforgery, but I”ve decided not to go there, since it is not really written [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:42:57-04:00November 27th, 2018|Catholic Epistles, Reflections and Ruminations|

Who Wrote 1 Peter?

This post is to close out my discussion of 1 Peter, from the New Testament. Who actually wrote it? Spoiler alert: we don’t know, but it probably wasn’t Peter. On several occasions on the blog I’ve talked about the issue, most recently at length in a repost earlier this year: https://ehrmanblog.org/did-peter-use-a-secretary-for-his-writings-a-blast-from-the-past/ That’s where I give the fuller story. For now I give just the simple side of things, as I lay it out in my undergraduate textbook on the New Testament. Following this post I will start talking about how and why the books assigned to Peter did or did not make it into the New Testament. If you recall, the whole reason I got into this thread in the first place (which I foolishly thought would take 2-3 posts) is that I became intrigued by the question of why 2 Peter made it into the New Testament but the Apocalypse of Peter did not. As I will explain in the next post, I have far fewer questions about 1 Peter (which, like the other [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:42:57-04:00November 26th, 2018|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

The Situation Behind the (“Forged”) Book of 1 Peter

I am in the midst of talking about works attributed to Peter, the chief disciple, which have come down to us from the early church. I should be clear, I think each and every one of these writings was “forged.” I don’t think Peter himself wrote any of them – 1 Peter, 2 Peter, the Gospel of Peter, the Apocalypse of Peter, or any of the other Petrine works that we now have. Each was written by a different author, but each author claimed to be Peter, Jesus’ right hand man. The book most widely accepted in the early church as having actually come from Peter is the book we call 1 Peter, from the New Testament. Yesterday I started talking about what is in it. Today I follow up on that discussion by explaining its apparent historical context and the approach the pseudonymous author takes in dealing with the problems he (and his ostensible audience) are confronting. Again, this is taken from my textbook on the NT. ***************************************************** The Context of Persecution Those [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:42:57-04:00November 25th, 2018|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

The So-Called First Letter of Peter

I am nearly at the end of my discussion of “Petrine” works in early Christianity, the books that some early Christian or another had been written by Peter, the closest disciple to Jesus in the New Testament. There are other books connected with Peter that I have chosen not to talk about, at least at this point, including legendary accounts of his missionary activities, some of which are really interesting and were, at one point, highly influential. At this stage, though, I’m talking only about books that we know were thought to be legitimate parts of the New Testament in one circle or another: 2 Peter, the Apocalypse of Peter, and the Gospel of Peter. And it has occurred to me (just this morning!) that I haven’t said anything yet about the one book connected with Peter that almost *everyone* we know of (who said anything about the matter) thought was part of canonical Scripture: the book of 1 Peter. I will want to say a few things about this book before getting back to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:42:57-04:00November 23rd, 2018|Catholic Epistles|

Thanksgiving Musings 2018

Some musings on this Thanksgiving, 2018. To be honest, like so many others, I find it much easier to be thankful when I have a lot to be thankful for. I suppose being a truly thankful person would entail being thankful even when most of life was very hard and difficult. I’ve had times like that in my life, and at least as I recall, even then I found things to be thankful for – a loving family and the possibility, at least, of a good future at least. But lots and lots of people don’t have even those. Maybe thankfulness isn’t for everyone. On the other hand, there are lots and lots of people (I know a number of them, and I know *about* far more) who have masses and masses of good things, unbelievably good things, who aren’t thankful at all. They are simply greedy. No matter how much they have, it is never enough. Instead of being grateful for their good fortune, they relentlessly reflect on how they want more and more, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:42:57-04:00November 22nd, 2018|Reflections and Ruminations|

Previous 1···107108109···203 Next