BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 164 of 204

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.

Why Do I Devote Myself to Studying the Bible?

QUESTION: The one thing that I do not understand about you is that you have stated you have lost your faith. That being said, how do you continue to work in your field? Have you ever wanted to redirect your academic career to study other subjects? RESPONSE: I get this question a lot. On one level I understand it: if I don’t believe in the Bible, why would I dedicate my life to studying it, researching about it, writing about it, and teaching about it? From the perspective of someone who has strong feelings about the Bible – for example, as a believer who holds that the Bible is the word of God or as an atheist who thinks the Bible is the root of all kinds of evil – it may seem like a mystery that someone in my boat would be interested in spending such an enormous amount of time and effort in studying it. Or from the perspective of someone who is completely apathetic about the Bible: why would you bother? But [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:30-04:00December 13th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Best of Times and the Worst of Times

Like many of us at this time of year, I am looking at my life and thinking how incredibly thankful I am for all the good things I have: a beautiful, brilliant, humane, and loving wife; a fantastic, interesting, and caring son and daughter; the two best grandchildren the world has ever seen; a teaching position I absolutely love and thrive on; chances to do what I really want to do with my so-called free time – reading and writing; good health; good friends who, like me, love good food, good drink, and good conversation about important things; and, well, lots of other things. When I first became an agnostic, I had a problem with thankfulness. I felt very thankful (though, frankly, times were hard: divorce, money issues, familial and life uncertainties) . But it seemed weird to feel thankful. I had always thought of thankfulness to be something you have *toward* somebody. When you say thank you, you say thank you precisely to someone. But who was I to thank for the good things [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:30-04:00December 12th, 2014|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Is the Discovered Gospel the Gospel of Peter?

With this post I conclude my discussion to the Gospel of Peter – although, of course, I’m always happy to engage with any questions you have about it (or anything else). What we have seen so far is that the Gospel was known in antiquity, even though it came to be judged heretical. Our principal source of information about it is in a discussion of the church historian Eusebius, who mentions a Gospel of Peter known to a Syrian bishop Serapion, who eventually judged it inauthentic because it (allegedly) proclaimed a “docetic” understanding of Christ (that he was not really a human being who really suffered). A Gospel fragment was discovered in 1886 that scholars almost immediately claimed to be a portion of the Gospel of Peter mentioned by Eusebius (and Serapion before him). But is it that? Here are the issues, laid out in brief order. Again, this is lifted from my discussion in my (and Zlatko Plese’s) book The Other Gospels. *************************************************** The author of this account [the discovered fragment] writes in the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:30-04:00December 10th, 2014|Christian Apocrypha|

The Discovery of the Gospel of Peter

This is the second of my three posts on the Gospel of Peter. In yesterday’s post I talked about what we knew about the Gospel before its (partial) discovery in 1886, from what Eusebius, the fourth century church historian, told us, in his story about Serapion of Antioch. In this post I discuss the modern discovery. Again, this is taken from my book The Other Gospels, co-authored and edited with my colleague Zlatko Plese. ************************************************************ What we now call the Gospel of Peter was found in one of the most remarkable archaeological discoveries of Christian texts in the nineteenth century. In the winter season of 1886-87 a French archaeological team headed by M. Grébant was digging in Akhmîm in Upper Egypt, in a portion of a cemetery that contained graves ranging from the eighth to the twelfth centuries CE. They uncovered the grave of a person they took to be a Christian monk, who had been buried with a book. Among other things, the book contained a fragmentary copy of a Gospel written in the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:30-04:00December 9th, 2014|Christian Apocrypha|

Why Not the Gospel of Peter?

In my discussion of why the four Gospels were given their names, I hypothesized that it was because an edition of the four was produced in Rome in the mid second-century, and that this edition named the Gospels as “according to Matthew” “according to Mark” “according to Luke” and “according to John.” The trickiest name to account for is Mark’s. Here I suggested that the editor of this Gospel edition wanted the readers to understand that this Gospel presented the views of Peter; but he did not call the Gospel of the Gospel according to Peter because such a Gospel was already known to exist. This naturally led several of my readers to pose an important question. Here is how one reader worded it: QUESTION: If this hypothetical edition of the four gospels in Rome did not attribute 'Mark's gospel to Peter because the gospel of Peter was already known at that time, why did this edition of four gospels also not include the gospel of Peter? RESPONSE: Ah, that was a part I forgot [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:30-04:00December 9th, 2014|Christian Apocrypha, Fourth-Century Christianity, Reader’s Questions|

Do You Need A Free Membership?

Thanks to the incredible generosity of members of the blog, I am happy to announce that there are a limited number of free one-year memberships available. These have been donated for a single purpose: to allow those who cannot afford the annual membership fee to participate on the blog for a year. I will assign these memberships strictly on the honor system: if you truly cannot afford the membership fee, but very much want to have full access to the blog, then please contact me. Do NOT reply here, on the blog, as a comment. Send me a separate email, privately, at [email protected]. In your email, let me know your situation (why you would like to take advantage of this offer) and provide me with the following information: 1) Your first and last name. 2) Your preferred personal email. 3) Your preferred user name (no spaces). 4) Your preferred password (should be 8 or more characters, no spaces). The donors will remain anonymous, but here let me publicly extend my heartfelt thanks for such [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:58-04:00December 6th, 2014|Public Forum|

Gift Memberships on the Blog 2014

‘Tis the season! It’s hard to believe, but the holidays are upon us again. And 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, last year, thanks to a number of generous donors, we pulled this off in a big way. It happened in two stages. Two anonymous donors had provided 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 otherwise. 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 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:30-04:00December 6th, 2014|Public Forum|

Why Was the Gospel of Mark Attributed to Mark?

I come now – at *last*, you might say – to the final post in this thread dealing with how the Gospels of the New Testament came to be named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. I have covered a lot of territory in this thread, arguing that the Gospels were not known by these names until near the end of the second century; that they probably acquired their names because of an edition of the Gospels produced in Rome sometime after the time of Justin Martyr (mid second century), an edition that influenced both Irenaeus and the author of the Muratorian canon, and eventually all of Christendom. This edition named the first and last of the Gospels after two of Jesus’ disciples and the third Gospel after a companion of the apostle Paul. I have explained the reasons in the preceding posts. And now comes the most difficult and puzzling question: why was the second Gospel attributed to Mark? I regularly am asked this question, and usually the questioner expresses it with some surprise: why [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:30-04:00December 5th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Why Was the Gospel of Luke Attributed to Luke?

So far I have tried to explain why, in the proto-orthodox church of the second century, the Gospels of Matthew and John came to be attributed to two of the disciples of Jesus. My thesis is that an edition of the four Gospels appeared in Rome sometime in the second half of the century and that it differentiated the four Gospels by indicating which was “according to” whom. I now can address the question of how the other two Gospels were given their names, and why they were not assigned to disciples of Jesus but to companions of the apostles, Luke the companion of Paul and Mark the companion of Peter. Luke is the easier of the two to explain, and in some ways is the easiest of all four Gospels. That’s because the author provides hints of who he is – or at least hints of whom he wants his readers to *think* he is. The hints do not come in the Gospel of Luke itself. As I have already pointed out, the author [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:30-04:00December 4th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Why Was the Gospel of John Attributed to John?

Some of the same objections to Matthew having written the First Gospel apply to John the son of Zebedee having written the Fourth. Unlike Matthew, John did not copy any of our other Gospel sources, and so that’s not the problem that it is for Matthew (who surely, if he was an eyewitness, would not have taken his stories about Jesus from what he found in someone else’s written text). But there is an even higher probability, bordering on certainty, that John the son of Zebedee could not write. He was a fisherman from rural Galilee. Fishermen were not educated. They were very low class peasants. John would never have gone to school. Where he lived, there *were* no schools. He never would have learned to read. Let alone learned to write. Let alone learned to write in Greek. Let alone learned to write sophisticated, philosophically informed prose narratives in Greek. I think there is virtually no chance that the historical John of Zebedee wrote the Gospel. So why did our anonymous editor living a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:30-04:00December 2nd, 2014|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Why Was The Gospel of Matthew Attributed to Matthew?

I have now gotten to a point where I can discuss why the four Gospels were specifically given the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Recall the most important points of my preceding posts on the blog so far: the Gospels were all written anonymously and they circulated anonymously, for years and decades; we have no certain evidence that they – these particular Gospels -- were called by their familiar names until around 180 CE, in sources connected with Rome (Irenaeus and the Muratorian Fragment); my hypothesis is that an edition of these four Gospels was published in Rome sometime between Justin in 150-60 CE (he quotes the Gospels but does not name them) and Irenaeus in 180-85 CE. That edition gave these Gospels their now-familiar names. If all that is correct, then there is no reason to think that people widely associated them with their familiar names before that. The reason this became a widespread tradition is that it was started by a single editor – possibly based, of course, on things being [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:30-04:00December 1st, 2014|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Do Textual Variants Really Matter for Anything?

QUESTION: I got the impression (I can’t remember where or if you said this… or if Bruce Metzger said it) that no significant Christian doctrine is threatened by text critical issues… and so, if that is the case, who cares if, in Mark 4: 18, Jesus spoke of the “illusion” of wealth or the “love” of wealth. I mean, who cares other than textual critics and Bible translators? RESPONSE: This is a very good question, and one that I get a lot. I’ve given an answer to it before on the blog, but since it periodically reappears, I thought that maybe I should give it another shot. The first thing to emphasize is a point that I repeatedly make and that many people seem never to notice that I make (especially my fundamentalist friends who very much object to my views about textual criticism): of the many hundreds of thousands of textual variants that we have among our manuscripts, most of them are completely unimportant and insignificant and don’t matter for twit. Why should [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:29-04:00November 29th, 2014|History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Why Are the Gospels Anonymous?

In my previous posts I have tried to establish that the four Gospels circulated anonymously for decades after they were written. To some modern readers that seems surprising. Why wouldn’t the authors name themselves? Surely they named themselves. Didn’t’ they? The clear answer is, no, they did not. But why? There have been a number of theories put forth over the years. Possibly the most popular one (at least it’s the one I’ve heard most often) is that the Gospel writers thought that what was most important was the message they wanted to convey about the life, teachings, deeds, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The authors did not want their own persons to “get in the way” of the message, and so they wrote their Gospels anonymously. In rough outline I suppose that might be true, but I would refine the idea a bit myself – as I will in a moment. Before doing so, I should respond to an objection to this view. Most of the *other* books of the New Testament identify their [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:39-04:00November 28th, 2014|Canonical Gospels|

Papias on Matthew and Mark

In my previous two posts I showed why Papias is not a reliable source when it comes to the authorship of Matthew and Mark. If you haven’t read those posts and are personally inclined to think that his testimony about Matthew and Mark are accurate, I suggest you read them (the posts) before reading this one. In this post I want to argue that what he actually says about Matthew and Mark are not true of our Matthew and Mark, and so either he is talking about *other* Gospels that he knows about (or has heard about) called Matthew and Mark, that do not correspond to our Matthew and Mark, or he simply is wrong. I’ll reverse the order in which his comments are given, and deal with Matthew first. In the quotation of the fourth century historian Eusebius, we read this: And this is what [Papias] says about Matthew: “And so Matthew composed the sayings in the Hebrew tongue, and each one interpreted [Or: translated] them to the best of his ability.” The problems [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:29-04:00November 26th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Believing Papias When It’s Convenient

In my previous post I stressed that, contrary to what you sometimes may have heard or possibly will hear, Papias is not a *direct* witness to what the apostles of Jesus were saying. That is an important point because of the most important “testimony” that Papias gives, a testimony that is often taken as very strong evidence that the second Gospel of the NT was written by Mark, the companion of Peter, and that the first Gospel was really and truly written by Matthew, the disciple of Jesus. If these claims were right, they would be highly significant. Matthew would have been written by someone who was there to see these things happen; and Mark’s account would be based on arguably the most important witness to Jesus’ life.. Here is what Papias says. Remember, when he indicates what “the elder” says, he is indicating what he has learned from a person who was allegedly “companion” of the elder; the elder was someone who allegedly knew the apostles. “And this is what the elder used to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:29-04:00November 25th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Papias as an Earwitness?

I have discussed Papias a number of times on the blog in the past, but have not given any substantial time to him in a about a year and a half. He is an important figure for historians of early Christianity, because, as I pointed out in my previous post, he was a proto-orthodox author from the first part of the second century. More than anything, conservative biblical scholars have latched on to Papias because in their opinion he provides direct evidence that the Gospel of Matthew really was written by Matthew, and the Gospel of Mark was really written by Mark. I’ll be dealing with the evidence from Papias on both matters in subsequent posts. What is even more remarkable is that some conservative scholars have actually argued that Papias gives us evidence about Luke and John, even though in none of the surviving fragments does Papias so much as *mention* Luke and John!! Scholars can be amazingly inventive sometimes….. Before discussng what Papias says about the two Gospel-writers that do get mentioned in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:29-04:00November 25th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Why Don’t You Believe Like Your Teacher, Dr. Metzger?

QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman just out of curiosity, why do people pit you against your teacher Dr. Bruce Metzger? Did Metzger also find the construction of the originals impossible due to the late manuscript attestation and the inability to know what the original looked like? Or did your teacher, Dr. Metzger, disagree and hold to biblical inerrancy? RESPONSE: It’s a very good question and it has a very straightforward answer. The people who do this are all, to my knowledge, conservative evangelical Christians who find it upsetting over two of the things that I say: (1) that I am now no longer a believer because I do not think the Christian faith can adequately explain how a good and powerful God can be in control of this world when there is so much senseless pain, misery, and suffering in it and, completely unrelatedly (2) that since we do not have lots of early manuscripts of the New Testament (let alone the originals) there are places where we cannot know for sure what the authors originally wrote. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:29-04:00November 24th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Papias and the Gospels: Some Background

In my previous post I argued that sometime in the second half of the second century, an edition of the four Gospels was compiled by an unknown editor/scribe, and place in circulation in Rome, in which the texts were identified, definitively and possibly for the first time, as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Now the question is: why did these names come to be chosen? This is a complicated question, and the answer is neither straightforward nor easy. But I can state its broad contours simply: for two of the authors, Matthew and Mark, there were much older traditions indicating that they had written Gospels, and the editor of the Roman edition of the four Gospels latched onto these traditions and assigned two of his Gospels to them; and for the other two Gospels, the unknown Roman editor used internal hints within Luke and John themselves to derive the names of their authors. First I’ll deal with Matthew and Mark, beginning with this post. The old traditions that Matthew the tax collector and Mark the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:29-04:00November 22nd, 2014|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

The Four Gospels in the Muratorian Fragment

I argued in my previous post that sometime between Justin, in Rome around 150-60, and Irenaeus in 185 the Gospels had begun to be known as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In my opinion this did not happen earlier (if some of you are wondering about the witness of Papias, I’ll say something about him in a few later posts). In terms of his personal and ecclesiastical life, Irenaeus is best known as the bishop of Lyons in Gaul (i.e., the ancient forerunner of Lyon, France). But he spent significant time in Rome itself before his appointment in Gaul, and he considered the Roman church to be the center of Christendom at his time. There is another witness to the fourfold Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John from Irenaeus’s time, and also from Rome. This comes to us in a fragmentary Latin text discovered in the 18th century and called the Muratorian Fragment. This document was discovered by an Italian scholar named Lodovico Antonio Muratori in the Ambrosiana Library (and so it is named [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:13-04:00November 20th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

The Gospels are Finally Named! Irenaeus of Lyons.

In the previous post we saw that the Gospels almost certainly circulated anonymously at first, just as they were composed anonymously. It is an interesting question why the authors all chose to remain anonymous instead of indicating who they were. I have a theory about that, and I may post on it eventually when I get through a bit more of this thread on why the Gospels ended up with the names they did. At this stage, what we can say with certainty is that the Gospels are quoted in the early and mid-second centuries by proto-orthodox Christian authors, who never identify them as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. That is especially significant when we come to Justin around 150-60 CE, who explicitly quotes these books as “Memoirs of the Apostles,” but does not tell us which apostles they are to be associated with. This is in Rome, the capital of the Empire, and the seat of what was probably the largest, and certainly the most influential, church at the time. Some thirty years after [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:13-04:00November 18th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

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