BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 156 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.

The Discovery of Lost Documents

PLEASE NOTE: I am incommunicado for a few days on a gulet in the Aegean Sea on the west coast of Turkey. I have asked Steven, our blog support, to add some posts for me in my absence; I prepared these in advance knowing I would be out of reach. Here is one of them. I’m afraid I will not be able to respond to comments on the next few posts until I return to some form of civilization that supports Internet and all things electronic. So sorry! **************************************************** I’ve been discussing lost books from early Christianity that I very much wish would be discovered. Like everyone else interested in this field, I would of course love to have *all* the now-lost books to be turned up. Unfortunately, we probably don’t even know what the majority of the lost books even were, and have no concrete reason for thinking that they ever existed. Here is a related question that a member of the blog asked a couple of weeks ago: QUESTION: What do you think are the odds that a really startling discovery like [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:30-04:00June 10th, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Papias and the Eyewitnesses

I have been discussing the writings of Papias, his lost five-volume Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord. Scholars of the New Testament have long ascribed huge significance to this work, in no small part because Papias claims to have ties to eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus. In my view this championing of Papias is misguided. I say something about that in my new book on Jesus Before the Gospels (or whatever we end up calling it); I will probably be going into a more sustained analysis in my scholarly book that I’m working on next on memory and the historical Jesus. The excitement over Papias as a link to our eyewitnesses is based largely on the following passage that is quoted from his writing by Eusebius in his early-fourth-century Church History. This was written about 200 years after Papias, but Eusebius had read Papias’s book and so could quote from it. In his discussion of the book Eusebius mentions the references to Papias in the writings of Irenaeus, from around 180 CE, just [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:30-04:00June 9th, 2015|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers|

Lecture: Jesus and the Historian

On Tuesday, February 25, 2014 I gave a lecture at Dickinson College (Carlisle Pennsylvania) on "Jesus and the Historian," in the Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium. In the lecture I deal with the historical problems posed by the surviving Gospels for evaluating the evidence for the life and teachings of Jesus. Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition (The quality is not as good as one might hope, but it's the best we can do given the original source)

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:12-04:00June 7th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Video Media|

Wine in the Kingdom

Writing my last post on Papias made me think of something that is rather humorous even if it is only very tangentially related. If you recall, Papias claimed that Jesus taught the following about the future utopian kingdom on earth: The days are coming when vines will come forth, each with ten thousand boughs; and on a single bough will be ten thousand branches. And indeed, on a single branch will be ten thousand shoots and on every shoot ten thousand clusters; and in every cluster will be ten thousand grapes, and every grape, when pressed, will yield twenty-five measures of wine. When I was writing up that post, I was reminded of the story in the Gospel of John in which Jesus turns the water into wine. Jesus appears to have enjoyed wine in great abundance. The story in John is particularly interesting, and what is humorous to me is how I’ve heard it interpreted by well-meaning conservative Christians who were certain that Jesus would not ever encourage people to partake of alcoholic beverages. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:30-04:00June 6th, 2015|Canonical Gospels|

A Fantastic Saying of Jesus in Papias

I have mentioned one of the intriguing traditions found in the now-lost Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord by the early second century proto-orthodox church father Papias (his account of the death of Judas). Here is another one. In this one Papias is relating what he has heard that Jesus taught. As you’ll see, it is not a teaching that is found in the New Testament Gospels, or in fact in any other Gospel source we have. What is most striking, in some ways, is that Papias claims that he has a clear line of tradition going straight back to Jesus to confirm the reliability of the saying: he learned this from “elders” (that is, senior Christians) who heard from John the son of Zebedee, one of Jesus’ closest disciples, that this is something Jesus used to say. So this is not an “eyewitness” account (or, rather, not an “earwitness” account) – it is an account that we get from Papias who got it from others who got it from John who got it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:30-04:00June 5th, 2015|Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers|

Other Accounts of the Death of Judas

As I indicated in the previous post, there are two versions of the death of Judas Iscariot in the New Testament. These versions have some striking similarities, but at the end of the day, I think they cannot really be reconciled with one another. After the New Testament period, there were legends about Judas’s death that continued to be invented and circulated. I discuss one of them in my college-level textbook on the New Testament, in a side-bar that I meant to be a kind of humorous human interest story. Here is what I say there: When trying to determine which stories in the Gospels are historically accurate, we need to look not only at the Gospels of the New Testament, but at all the surviving ancient narratives that discuss Jesus’ life. In many instances, however, the accounts are quite obviously legendary, written for the entertainment, edification, or even instruction of their readers. One occurs in a fourth- or fifth-century document known as the Gospel of Nicodemus (also called the Acts of Pilate). In one [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:29-04:00June 4th, 2015|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Doctrine, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

My Trip to Turkey

I am en route to Istanbul now with a layover, at this moment, as we speak, in London’s Heathrow airport. I’ll be in Turkey for nearly three weeks. This is a trip sponsored by my home institution, the General Alumni Association of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As is true of most universities, UNC has a vibrant travel program for alumni. Trips can be on the expensive side, but they are usually fantastic. As the guest lecturer, I get a free trip out of it. There are four people connected with the blog on the trip (maybe more: but there are four that I know of so far). (It may seem strange, but one does not have to be an alum of the university to go on an alumni trip!) It is intentionally a small group, just twenty-five of us. Turkey is one of the great places on earth, with a massive and varied cultural history. My lectures concern only one small part of the Turkish legacy. As it turns out, this [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:29-04:00June 3rd, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Death of Judas in the NT

In this and the next couple of posts I will be talking about what we know was in Papias’s five-volume book, now lost, Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord. As I previously indicated, the only reason we have any clue about the matter is that later church fathers quoted a few passages from the book. Would they had quoted more! But what they give us is very tantalizing. The first passage I want to discuss involves the death of Judas Iscariot. To make sense of what Papias has to say, I need to provide some context. Many people don’t realize that Judas’s death, after he betrayed Jesus, is not mentioned in three of our Gospels: Mark, Luke, and John. It is mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew, however, and just as important, in the book of Acts, written by the same author who produced the Gospel of Luke (so, well, let’s call him Luke). What is striking is that the descriptions of Judas’s death in these two accounts are at odds with one, even [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:29-04:00June 2nd, 2015|Acts of the Apostles, Canonical Gospels|

The Lost Writings of Papias

In this thread I have been discussing documents known from early Christianity that no longer exist and that I very much wish would be discovered. So far I have talked about the lost letters of Paul, the writings of Paul’s opponents, Q (the source used by Matthew and Luke for many of their sayings of Jesus), and the Signs Source (a collection of Jesus miraculous activities used by the Gospel of John). With this post I move outside the New Testament to indicate documents that certainly at one time existed that I wish we still had. One such document was a five-volume book produced by a church father named Papias. We don’t have this long book any longer. In fact we don’t have any of the writings from Papias. We know about him, and his writings, only because later church fathers refer to him. He is first mentioned in the writings of Irenaeus, the bishop of Gaul and himself the author of a long five-volume work that attacked heretics (especially Gnostics). Irenaeus’s book is known [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:29-04:00June 1st, 2015|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reflections and Ruminations|

Losing Religion in America

As many of you know, there was a major poll done recently by the Pew Research Center involving religion in America. The results were published about three weeks ago, and the findings were striking indeed. Among the most intriguing were that the percentage of people identifying themselves as Christian in the U.S. has declined by nearly 8% in just seven years. That corresponds to those who consider themselves not “religiously affiliated” in any way, which, for the purposes of this poll, meant they were atheist, agnostic, or basically no religion at all. This category is up nearly 7%. Here are the findings in the salient paragraph, drawn from the full account at http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/ The major new survey of more than 35,000 Americans by the Pew Research Center finds that the percentage of adults (ages 18 and older) who describe themselves as Christians has dropped by nearly eight percentage points in just seven years, from 78.4% in an equally massive Pew Research survey in 2007 to 70.6% in 2014. Over the same period, the percentage of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:29-04:00May 30th, 2015|Reflections and Ruminations, Religion in the News|

The Nature of John’s Signs Source

I have given one of the major pieces of evidence that there was a Signs Source that was used by the author of the Gospel of John, a written document that enumerated seven miraculous deeds of Jesus that were designed to show that he was a divine being, the Son of God. There is another piece of evidence. It is the concluding comment of chapter 20 of the Gospel, which I have already quoted a couple of times: “Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, but these are written so that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you might have life in his name.” (20:30-31) The reason this verse seems to suggest the existence of a signs source is that it doesn’t really make very much sense where it now occurs, at the end of the stories of Jesus’ resurrection (Note: as I’ve indicated before, scholars frequently think that chapter 21 of John was tacked on later, in a second edition; [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:29-04:00May 28th, 2015|Canonical Gospels|

Some Evidence for a Signs Source in John

I started this mini-thread by mentioning one of the now-lost documents of early Christianity that I would love to have discovered, the alleged “Signs Source” of the Gospel of John. Before giving the evidence that there may have been some such source, I went off on a tangent, in order to show that John has a different view of Jesus’ spectacular deeds from what you find in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In these earlier Gospels, Jesus does “miracles,” both because he feels compassion for those in need and in order to illustrate his teaching that the Kingdom of God was soon to appear. In John, however, he does “signs” to prove that he really is a divine being. So, what evidence is there that John’s accounts of Jesus’ signs derive from a previously existing, but no longer surviving, written source? The evidence does not make a slam-dunk case, and so the matter is debated among scholars. I’ve long thought, though, that there probably was some such source. First, some basic factual information. These are the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:29-04:00May 27th, 2015|Canonical Gospels|

Why Jesus Does Miracles

I seem to be taking a very circuitous route (as you may have noticed) to the question of why we might think that the author of the Gospel of John had access to a written source that gave him his information about the “signs” that Jesus did during his public ministry. To get to that point, I have been discussing how John’s view of Jesus’ spectacular deeds differed significantly from the view of the Synoptics. I have stressed that whereas in John Jesus does signs in order to prove that he is the Son of God so that people would come to believe in him, in the Synoptics Jesus refuses to do signs in order to prove his divine identity. But why then does he do miracles in the Synoptics? I suppose the common answer is probably right: he does miracles out of compassion for those who are suffering. But there is more to it than that. The miracles in the Synoptics do demonstrate that what Jesus says is true. But in these Gospels what [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:29-04:00May 26th, 2015|Canonical Gospels|

The Temptation Narrative Missing from John

In my previous post I started to discuss the hypothetical Signs Source that some scholars have claimed lay behind the accounts of Jesus’ miracles in the Gospel of John – one of the now lost documents of early Christianity (assuming it once existed) that I very much wish could be discovered. Before giving evidence that there was some such written source, I started in the last post by discussing the distinctive view of Jesus’ spectacular deeds in the Fourth Gospel, where they are called “signs” rather than “miracles.” In that post I argued that John has a completely different view of these deeds from that found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In these Synoptics Jesus refuses to do miracles in order to prove his identity. When he is asked to do so, he indicates that “no sign will be given to this generation” – apart from the sign of Jonah. Not so in John. Jesus does signs. They are designed to make people believe who he is (4:54). And the Gospel writer himself indicates that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:29-04:00May 25th, 2015|Canonical Gospels|

Signs in the Gospel of John

For many decades now there have been scholars who have been convinced that the Gospel of John is based, in large part, on written, but no-longer surviving, sources. It is much debated whether John relied on the Synoptic Gospels for any of its stories, or whether in fact its author had ever read (or even heard of) Matthew, Mark, and Luke. There are very few verbatim overlaps between John and the others, and outside of the Passion narrative there is not a lot of overlap in the stories told. Somewhat like the Synoptics John does have the healing of a Capernaum official’s son, the feeding of the 5000, and the walking on the water – all told in striking different ways. John’s four other miracles (which he doesn’t call miracles, but “signs”) are unique to his account (including the favorite miracle on college campuses everywhere, the turning of water into wine, and the favorite of most Hollyood screen writers, the raising of Lazarus). Moreover, the teachings of Jesus are highly distinctive in John. Almost nothing [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:29-04:00May 23rd, 2015|Canonical Gospels|

Back To the Discovery of Lost Early Christian Writings

I have decided to return to the thread that I unceremoniously cut off nearly two months ago. At the time – in the middle of the thread -- I decided to start discussing my book on memory and the historical Jesus, since I had just finished it and wanted to get some feedback (which was all terrifically helpful, thank you all very much!). I then got onto some personal reflections about Moody Bible Institute and related topics. But now I’m ready, all this time later, to pick up the thread. The thread was dealing with lost writings from early Christianity that I would absolutely love to have (re-)discovered. If I could choose, which books would be on my list? Here by way of review is what I have said so far: In the opening posts of the thread I mentioned three early Christian writings (the first two are collections of writings) that I would love to have discovered. First, I would love to have... THE REST OF THIS POST IS FOR MEMBERS ONLY. If you [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:29-04:00May 22nd, 2015|Reflections and Ruminations|

My Resentment at Moody Bible Institute

OK, I want/need to bring this current thread – or rather, this current tangle of threads – to a close. I started out talking about what, looking back, I thought favorably about my three years at Moody Bible Institute, and what I felt resentful about it. This got me on to other things, which I was happy to do, since ten days ago I was at the end of the semester and the end of a book project (which happened simultaneously) and I was burned out and brain dead, and I couldn’t get up the energy to write anything about serious scholarship on the blog. But I’m recovered now, and can get on to more important things than me and my life. Which, frankly, would be most everything!! But I do need to spend this final post on the original thread to explain in very brief order what I am resentful about when it comes to my education as a 17-21 year old at Moody. There are three things, all of which I could expand [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:28-04:00May 21st, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

Authors Who “Just Want to Sell Books”

Sometimes I hear someone criticize me, or another author, by saying “he just wants to sell books.” That has always struck me as a very strange thing to say. Of course I want to sell books. Why else would I write books? Would I want to write books so no one would read them? Has there ever been an author on the face of the planet who wanted to write a book that would not be read? What people actually *mean*by that comment, of course, is far more sinister, snide, and offensive. What they mean is: “he will say anything in a book in order to get people to buy it.” There may indeed be authors for whom this is true. I can’t speak for them, only for myself. And for myself, this is one charge that I really bristle at. Almost no one of course comes out and actually makes the charge directly. But it must be what they mean, since, as I just pointed out, no one actually faults someone for writing a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:28-04:00May 20th, 2015|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions|

How I Moved into Trade Publishing

I have been explaining that I started to write books for a broader audience not because that was some kind of goal in my life – just the opposite! – but because I came to think it would be a good thing to try to communicate scholarship on the New Testament to 19-20 year olds in a college-level textbook. A couple of readers have commented that when my former classmates from Moody have indicated that I wanted (and still want) to write books to become famous, they were not referring to my textbooks but to my trade books for a general (adult) audience. That’s exactly right – that is indeed what they were referring to. The reason I’ve been talking about my first textbook is that this was the beginning of my quest to reach out to a broader swath of people. Here in this post I’ll get to my trade books. After I wrote my first textbook (I’ve now written three, and compiled three anthologies of ancient texts, in good translations, with brief introductions, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:14-04:00May 19th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

On Writing for A College Audience

I have been dealing with some of the criticisms that classmates from my college days at Moody Bible Institute have leveled against me. The reason this thread started is that I had decided to say a few words about my Moody experience here on the blog. I didn’t really finish that, but word got out among my former peers (I’m on a listserv that some of them hang out on) and several people made remarks about it. I’m not sure they knew I was reading their comments. (!) One comment was that I was in danger of judgment on the Last Day. I’ve already said a couple of things about that. Another was that I write my books simply in order to become famous. This post will be the second one on that. The third, which I will also deal with in a couple of posts, is the claim that I have led so many people astray (harming them, the truth, and reality as we know it). First let me finish with the view – [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:13-04:00May 18th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

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