BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 152 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.

Do I Have a Grudge Against Dr. Bruce Metzger?

QUESTION: A more personal question: did you have a grudge against Dr. Bruce Metzger? I have always seen conservative textual critics and scholars pit you against Dr. Metzger's views. RESPONSE: When I first read this question I was very surprised indeed. A grudge against Bruce Metzger??? Metzger, as many readers of this blog know, was my teacher and mentor, and I never had anything but the most profound and utmost respect for him, from the moment I first had the privilege of meeting him until the time of his death – and still today. Dr. Bruce Metzger - The Greatest New Testament Scholar in North America I don’t think there’s anyone in the known universe who would disagree that Bruce Metzger was the greatest NT textual scholar ever to come out of North America. I first heard about him when I was an undergraduate at Wheaton College. I was taking Greek there and began to be interested in pursuing the study of Greek manuscripts. I knew that Metzger had been one of the five editors [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:39-04:00September 20th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Live Stream the Debate Tonight

One of the readers of the blog has submitted this: Found this claim: Livestreaming is happening for the Friday night debate, “Did the Historical Jesus Claim to be Divine?” Instructions: To view the event you must have an account with livestream.com. If you do have an account, just sign in to your account to view. If you do not have an account you will have to go through the process of creating an account with Livestream.com. Just copy and paste the URL below and follow the instructions. https://livestream.com/accounts/12497542/events/4350731 Moreover, another asked me why in the world I'm interested in doing debates with this, against people I so thoroughly disagree with in front of audiences that are antagonistic toward me and my views. So here's the deal. First, with respect to such debates in general. I accept about five speaking (or debating) gigs each semester. I charge a healthy fee for these gigs -- minimum $5000 (depending on where it is, how much travel, and so on; west coast is $6000; international is more like $8000; [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:39-04:00September 19th, 2015|Bart's Debates|

Magic and Manuscripts

In my post yesterday I mentioned something about the importance of our surviving manuscripts for understanding practices of magic in the early Christian tradition. Several people have asked me about it, so I thought I would follow it up. There’s been a lot written about magic over the years. When talking about antiquity, “magic” is not what we think of today: we think of illusion artists who do tricks in order to make think something has happened which in fact has not. In antiquity, magic was understood to be a real thing, not a clever illusion. It involved the manipulation of the physical world through suprahuman means. The big question was then (and still is for scholars studying the phenomenon) how to differentiate between magic and miracle. The (very) short answer is that miracles were performed by those who were thought (by the observer) to be on the side of the good (or God or the gods) and magic was performed by those who were (thought by the observer to be) on the side of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:38-04:00September 17th, 2015|History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

Debate in Dallas on Friday

For anyone in the Dallas area: On Friday (two days! Sept. 18) I will be having a public debate with Justin Bass, a Christian apologist and pastor with a PhD from Dallas Theological, on the question "Did the Historical Jesus Claim To Be Divine?" Dr. Bass thinks the answer is YES. I think the answer is NO. It should be an interesting back and forth. If you want to hear the arguments, come and see it. Free admission. And my arguments will be worth every dime you pay to hear them. (It will be at Collin College at 6:30 pm) Here's all the information you need: https://www.facebook.com/events/1666142046937367/

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:38-04:00September 17th, 2015|Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

Why Intentional Changes of the Text Might Matter

In doing the research that led up to my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, I came to see that the variations of our manuscripts were important not only because they could tell us what the original writers said in the books that later became the New Testament, but also because they could tell us about what was influencing the anonymous and otherwise unknown scribes who produced the copies of these books in later times. As I pointed out in a previous post, scholars have long thought – with good reason – that most of the intentional changes of the text (that is, the alterations that scribes made on purpose – at least apparently on purpose – as opposed to simple scribal mistakes) were made sometime in the first two hundred years of copying. If these changes were indeed made intentionally, then the scribes who made them must have had a reason for wanting to make them. They were consciously changing their texts in places. They weren’t doing that in millions of places, but in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:38-04:00September 16th, 2015|Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

Why Bother With Anything Except the “Original” Text??

In this post I would like to tie a couple of strings together that have been more or less hanging. In a couple of earlier posts I asserted my view that we were probably as “close to the originals” of the New Testament writings as we are ever likely to get, that barring some spectacular new discoveries (such as the original themselves!) or some fantastic changes in method, we simply are not going to be able to know whether we are right or wrong in the textual decisions we have made about which among the many thousands of textual variants (most of which are completely insignificant and meaningless, but some of which are very important indeed) are probably original and which are later scribal alterations. It’s not that I think we must now have the original text. I don’t think we be sure. But I also don’t think we will come to know how close we are to the original any better in the future than we do now -- unless something drastically changes. And [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:38-04:00September 15th, 2015|History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

My Focus on Christology in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture

In the last couple of posts I have talked about the basic thesis that lay behind my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. After doing my dissertation I became interested in seeing how theological disputes in early Christianity may have affected the scribes who were copying the texts that later came to be collected into the canon of the New Testament. Rarely had a study of this sort been pursued before, and never thoroughly and rigorously. Here let me provide a bit more background. First, for reasons I have stated earlier in this very-long thread, there is a broad consensus among textual scholars that the vast majority of textual variants found in all of our manuscripts down to the invention of printing (and beyond!) were probably generated in the first 200 years of copying. This has to do with the phenomenon that I have earlier called “the tenacity of the tradition.” If you recall, this is the phenomenon that later scribes appear not to introduced new readings into the tradition (at least not very often [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:38-04:00September 14th, 2015|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

The Unusual Thesis of The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture

As I started to point out in my previous post, the overarching idea behind my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture was that scribes copying their sacred texts in the early centuries of Christianity were not immune from the theological controversies raging in their day, but that they were, in some sense, participants in those disputes. In pursuing that idea, I had to bring together two fields of academic inquiry that were almost always kept distinct from each other – the study of the manuscripts of the New Testament and the investigation into the development of early Christian theology. The vast majority of scholars who worked on manuscripts were not informed about the social and doctrinal history of early Christianity (except in rather broad and basic terms) and the vast majority of scholars who worked on the theological controversies of the early church were almost completely ignorant of the manuscript tradition of the New Testament. I wanted to bring the two together. Let me again say that I was not the first to come up [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:38-04:00September 12th, 2015|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts|

Back to the Question: The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture

This is by far the most unusual thread I have had in the three and a half years of doing the blog. It started with a question that I began to address on June 30. It is now September 11. I have had a few brief interludes dealing with other things, but almost all the posts in the intervening weeks (months!) have been background that I needed to lay out to answer the question. And in fact the background has been only to answer one part of the question. Here was the original question: READER’S QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman, I do not know if others would find this interesting, but I would love to know how you developed the idea for The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. How did you go about researching it? How long did it take? Is it a once in a lifetime work? RESPONSE: OK, so to understand my response it is important to bear in mind what I have been discussing all this time. Here I will summarize. Roughly speaking [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:38-04:00September 11th, 2015|Book Discussions, Heresy and Orthodoxy, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Back to the Forgery of the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife

Some three years ago now I discussed in several posts the newly "discovered" text called "The Gospel of Jesus' Wife" (just search for "wife" and you'll find the posts). A new development has occurred that makes it almost certain that this text is a modern forgery, done sometime in the last 20 years. The evidence has been uncovered by Andrew Bernhard, author of Other Early Christian Gospels, and who was one of the first to establish other grounds for seeing the text as something quite fishy, and who has posted several times on the matter on Mark Goodacre's blog (as Mark informed me a couple of nights ago at a reading group). I asked Andrew to come up with an explanation of the new evidence of foul-play (either by the person who gave the document to Harvard Professor Karen King or by the person who gave it to that other person). I am very grateful to him for having done so. Here is what he says: *********************************************************************************************** Confirmation that the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:38-04:00September 10th, 2015|Historical Jesus, Religion in the News|

Christ’s Self-Ignorance

As chance would have it, I was asked virtually the same question within about fifteen minutes of one another, a couple of days ago. Here is the question, in both its iterations: QUESTION ONE: I have a question with regard to your statement that you are not “trying to argue that Jesus is not God.” If the message of the book is that the concept of the “divinity of Jesus” was not clearly stated by Jesus and, instead, slowly evolved after His death, then doesn’t this imply that this concept of the “divinity of Jesus” is a human invention and, therefore, Jesus is not really God? ANOTHER QUESTION ONE: I confess I don’t see how something can be theologically “true” and yet not be historically true. If Jesus did not claim to be God and his immediate disciples did not believe he was God in what sense can he be God now? If they don’t discipline their speculations with recourse to history how can theologians claim to be making truth statements of any kind? [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:38-04:00September 8th, 2015|Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

On “Knowing” the Original Words of the NT

I have been discussing the question of whether we can know that we have reconstructed the original text of the New Testament at every point – or even every important point. To me the answer is self-evidently, No, of course not. Many of my conservative evangelical critics think that I’m being overly skeptical, that since we have thousands of manuscripts of the NT, we can surely know better what the authors of the NT said than any other authors from the ancient world. My view is that this might be true, but that simply shows that we can’t know what *most* authors of the ancient world actually said, word for word. Why does that matter? I’ll explain in a second, for the bulk of this post. But first let me put the matter in very simple form (I keep trying to explain this in a way that’s satisfying to myself.). Suppose Matthew’s Gospel was circulated for the very first time in Antioch of Syria around the year 85 CE. We’ll call that first circulated copy [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:38-04:00September 7th, 2015|Bart's Critics, New Testament Manuscripts|

How Jesus Became God on Humanist Hour

OK, here is something different to break up all the discussion of textual criticism. On May 14th, 2014, I was interviewed by Bo Bennett on the hour long program called The Humanist Hour. This is a one-hour talk show produced by the American Humanist Association (see : http://americanhumanist.org/ ). In the interview we discuss my personal background as a believer, some fundamentals of the Bible from a historical perspective, and some comments related to my book, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. + + + + + + + + + + + + + Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition:

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:14-04:00September 6th, 2015|Book Discussions, Public Forum, Video Media|

Irrelevant Arguments and the So-called Tenacity of the Tradition

A couple of posts ago I promised to deal with an argument sometimes used by those who believe we can know with good certainty what the original text of the New Testament books said. This is the argument called the “tenacity of the tradition.” If you recall, the argument is prefaced on the very interesting phenomenon that whenever papyri manuscripts are discovered – say from the third or fourth Christian century – they almost *never* contain new variant readings that we did not already know about from later manuscripts, of say the seventh to fifteenth centuries. Instead, the readings of these early manuscripts re-appear in later manuscripts. The conclusion that is sometimes drawn, then, is that that tradition is “tenacious.” That is to say, later manuscripts did not invent their variant readings, but in almost every instance replicated variant readings that they got from earlier manuscripts. And one corollary that is sometimes drawn, then, is variant readings do not disappear but continue to be replicated in later witnesses. If that is the case, then the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:38-04:00September 5th, 2015|History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

What Is the “Original” Text?

In my debates with other scholars about whether we can know (for certain) (or at they sometimes put it, with 99% certainty) what the original words of the New Testament were, I always argue that we cannot “know,” and they argue we can. Let me explain one reason that I find their position highly problematic by dealing with a broader issue. What exactly *is* the original text of a document? If we can’t agree on that very basic and fundamental question, then we can’t very well agree on the possibility of getting back to the original. I’ve dealt with this problem on the blog before, but let me approach if from a different angle this time. I have just finished my recent book on how memory studies can help us think about the oral traditions of Jesus that were in circulation in the years and decades before the Gospels were produced. The book will be called Jesus Before the Gospels, and should be published sometime in the spring. So in 20 years, looking back on [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:37-04:00September 2nd, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts|

Arguments that We Have the Original Text

When I have public debates with scholars over whether we can know the original text of the New Testament or not, I stake out the claim that we cannot, and they stake out the claim that we probably can. Part of my argument is always the one I started to outline in the previous post. If we take something like the Gospel of Mark, our first complete manuscript of Mark is 300 years after Mark was first produced and put in circulation. So how can we know if that manuscript is extremely close to the original? We don’t have an original to compare it to in order to find out. And we don’t have earlier manuscripts to compare it to in order to find out, except for one remarkable, but highly fragmentary manuscript about a century and half earlier (dating from around 200 CE), which does contain differences from the complete one. So given this fact, how does my opponent typically argue his case? Normally he cites two important data. There is no disputing either [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:37-04:00September 1st, 2015|Bart's Critics, New Testament Manuscripts|

Contradictions and Silly Claims by Textual Critics

A couple of posts ago I mentioned a comment that I used to make (and still would be happy to make) that rankled some of my colleagues and has led some of my conservative evangelical critics to claim that I’m contradicting myself and can’t figure out what to think. Or, rather, they claim that I present one view to scholars and a different view to popular readers in order to sensationalize the truth in order to sell books, presumably so I can make millions and retire in a Swiss villa in the Alps. The comment, as you recall, ran something like this: “Barring spectacular new discoveries (such as the originals!) or radical developments of new methods, we will never get any closer to the original writings of the New Testament than we already are.” I explained in my previous post why I used to make some such statements (and why I continue to stand by them). In short, despite all the discoveries over the past 135 years, and all the revolutions in method, the basic [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:37-04:00August 31st, 2015|Bart's Critics, New Testament Manuscripts|

Textual Criticism Syllabus

This semester I am teaching my PhD seminar in precisely the topic I've been discussing for the past number of weeks, New Testament textual criticism. Here, for your reading pleasure, is the syllabus for the class. Reli 809: New Testament Textual Criticism Instructor: Bart D. Ehrman University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Fall 2015 Course Description This class focuses on one of the foundational disciplines of biblical studies. New Testament textual criticism has experienced a significant resurgence over the past twenty years or so, as scholars have begun, again, to recognize its importance for exegesis, theology, and the history of Christianity, and have realized, contrary to general perception, how much of real significance is yet to be done in the field. Your work for this seminar will assume sundry forms. A substantial portion of it will be devoted to the study of a significant textual problem, on which you will write a term paper. The basic task, of course, is to establish the earliest form of the text. But [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:37-04:00August 29th, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts, Teaching Christianity|

Ruffling the Feathers of My Fellow Textual Critics

I seem to get under the skin of a lot of my fellow textual critics. Or at least a lot of them find my views somewhere between troubling and irritating. That became most clear when I published my book Misquoting Jesus. From what I can gather, the most common complaints about the book were about its perceived “tone.” Some scholars thought that I made the situation of our manuscripts to be worse than it really is. I, on the other hand, am not so sure about that. What has probably struck me the most in the years since the book was published (it’s been ten years now! Very hard to believe….) is that critics almost never say that anything I claimed in the book is actually wrong. In fact, so far as I know, everything I said in the book is completely right. How many books are attacked for not saying anything wrong? Here are the main points that I stress in the book. We do not have the originals for any of the books [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:37-04:00August 28th, 2015|Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

How God Could Become a Human

I have finished my posts on the passage of the so-called “bloody sweat” in Luke 22:43-44. I devoted some considerable time to this text (for a second time on the blog) because I wanted to use it to set up a discussion in response to a question that a reader asked (that I started answering a very long time ago. June 30 in fact….) about what motivated me to write my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. Now, after setting the stage for about two months, I’m able to answer the question. About time, you might think…. But first, in response to my recent posts, I received this interesting query from a reader, not about the textual tradition of the New Testament but about early Christian understandings of Christ. Here’s the question. QUESTION: Have any Christians suggested that Jesus was fully God (from all eternity); but *because* he was God, and was *omnipotent*, he could choose to incarnate as a human and – for a planned period of time – *forget* that he was [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:22-04:00August 26th, 2015|Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

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