It is impossible to understand, let alone appreciate, many aspects of modern culture ("high" culture -- art, music, poetry, fiction, etc.) without a relatively deep knowledge of the Christian tradition going back to the New Testament itself.  I repeatedly tell my students this -- becoming religiously literate in the western tradition is not simply for those who are religious, or are committed the Christian faith in particular, or are even just curious about ancient religion.  It is important for making sense of  many of the cultural glories of the modern world. As a New Years Resolution this year my wife Sarah decided to memorize a poem every week.  She's an English professor who has no trouble knowing the best of the best.  Her first week it was W. B. Yeats, "The Second Coming," a familiar poem to literary buffs but not universally, and one with deep resonances that take a lot of pondering, even if one knows some of the key phrases ("the centre cannot hold," "anarchy is loosed on the world," etc.). [...]

Now that I have retired from UNC (but not from anything else!) I've had several people ask me about my personal work habits.   In reply to the most recent query from a blog member,  I remembered I wrote a post about them some years ago.  Looking back (and looking now), I don't necessarily recommend my approach.  More than a bit excessive, and I've eased up a good deal!  But, if you like getting a lot done.... Here's what I said then, in the first year of Covid.... ****************************** Blog members sometimes ask me about my work habits:  I seem to get a lot of writing done in addition to the day job as a university professor and doing the blog and what not.  How’s that happen exactly?  I should say that it’s not happenin’ too well right now: start of classes – teaching 240 students remotely! – and lots of other things--I ain’t getting twit done on my research…. But normally I do try to pack it in.  And how?  My usual answer [...]

As many of you know, my book Love Thy Stranger: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West (Simon & Schuster) is coming out next month: March 24.  The issues I address in the book are obviously central to what we do here on the blog, and I'm unusually excited about this one.  It is now available for pre-order, and later in the post I'll explain why it might be worth ordering-pre. But first I'd like to say something in general about it. The only reason an author writes a book of non-fiction (OK, or SHOULD write a book!) is because it deals with something that is both significant and of interest to readers.  I've tried to write books for a general audience that cover issues important  and even intriguing to people interested in the Bible, the historical Jesus, the history of early Christianity, and the Christian religion in general.  This book is a different because I think it is IMPORTANT.  To lots of things.  To be sure, for anyone who [...]

On January 26 I announced on the blog a lecture cruise I was planning to take to the Greek Islands.  I have decided I will not be doing this trip. Many apologies to any of you who expressed interest in coming.

I have often talked about scribes of the New Testament sometimes being careless, occasionally making rather amazing mistakes.  Most of the time, of course, scribes were careful and accurate, but every now and then they would make a mess up by, say, leaving out a word or three, or an entire line, or copying the same word twice, etc.  And sometimes they added things they thought ought to be in the text but were not. Only in a few places does that involve MAJOR additions, the two largest and most significant by far are the last twelve verses of Mark (16:9-20, where Jesus appears to his disciples after the resurrection) and the story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53-8:11). Most of the changes scribes made were accidental (slips), others were almost certainly intentional (whoever added the long ending of Mark didn’t do so by a slip of the pen).  In making mistakes, these early Christian scribes were almost certainly never ill-intentioned:  they were human and made mistakes (accidental changes) [...]

One of the most frequent questions I get asked about (who woulda thought?) is  whether the source called "Q" really existed and why I think so. I'll explain what that means in a second, but first: if you are interested in hearing two of the world's experts talk about it (taking opposite sides!), do we ever have an event for you!  It is not connected with the blog, but it would be a shame not to let blog members know about it in case they (you!) want to attend.  Here's a link for more information and registration: Did Q Exist? So, for those who don't know, "Q" is the hypothetical document allegedly used independently by both Matthew and Luke for a good many passages in their Gospels, mainly sayings of Jesus (the Lord's Prayer, the Beatitudes, a number of parables, one-liners, etc.). The deal is this:  it is almost universally agreed that both Matthew and Luke used Mark for many of their narratives (they have verbatim agreements all over the place, and there [...]

One of the best ways to follow the proto-orthodox line of reasoning for what to include in the canon of the new testament is to consider the earliest surviving canonical list, a fragmentary text, subject to considerable debate in recent years, that is commonly known as the Muratorian Canon. Here is what I say about it in my book Lost Christianities (Oxford University Press) ****************************** This “canon” is a list of books that its anonymous author considered to be part of the New Testament Scriptures.  It is named for the eighteenth-century scholar, L. A. Muratori,. who discovered the manuscript that contains it in a library in Milan.  Muratori published the manuscript in 1740, not so much to provide the world access to the documents it contained -- principally treatises of several fourth- and fifth-century church fathers -- but in order to show how sloppy copyists could be in the Middle Ages.  In a treatise of Ambrose, for example, the scribe inadvertently copied the (same) thirty lines twice!  What’s worse, the second copy of these [...]

There's no way to put a precise date on the canonical process, but it is worth nothing that the formation of the canon was a long, drawn-out process.  Here are some thoughts on some of the key issues of the late second century drawn again from my book Lost Christianities (Oxford University Press). ****************************** Justin Martyr of Rome was one of the most productive proto-orthodox authors of the second century (martyred around 165 CE).  Still preserved are two “apologies” that he wrote – intellectual defenses of the faith against its pagan detractors – and a piece called the “Dialogue with Trypho,” in which he tries to show the superiority of Christianity over Judaism, largely by appealing to a Christian interpretation of the Jewish Scriptures.  Others of his works were lost, though, including an attack on heresies of his day that was later used as a source by Irenaeus. Despite his frequent appeals to authoritative texts, Justin shows no inclination towards a fixed canon of New Testament Scripture in his surviving writings.  He does [...]

Here now is a translation (from the Coptic) of a section of the intriguing apocryphal Gospel, The History of Joseph the Carpenter, by my colleague Zlatko Plese, as found in our book The Other Gospels (Oxford Press, 2014). As you’ll see there are eleven chapters before this and yet more after it; for the whole thing – along with some forty other apocryphal Gospels! – check out our book. This is Jesus speaking to his disciples, in the first person. ****************************** Joseph’s Death Draws Near 12 (1) But then the death of Joseph, my father, drew near, as is appointed to all people. (2) When his body grew ill, his angel announced to him, ‘In this year you will die.’ (3) And as his soul was troubled, he went up to Jerusalem. He entered the temple of the Lord and repented in front of the altar.  He prayed in this way, saying …. (I’m omitting the prayer here) 14 (1) After these things he returned to Nazareth, the town where he resided, and [...]

Why did it take so long to decide on which books would be in the canon? I continue my reflections on the issues connected with fixing a canon of Scripture in early Christianity, drawing from excerpts of my book Lost Christianities (Oxford University Press, 2003). ****************************** It may seem odd that Christians of earlier times, while recognizing the need for authoritative texts to provide guidance for what to believe and how to live did not see the need to have a fixed number of apostolic writings, a closed canon.  But in fact there is no evidence of any concerted effort anywhere in proto-orthodox Christianity (or anywhere else, for that matter)  to fix a canon of Scripture in the early second century, when Christian texts were being circulated and ascribed authority.  And different proto-orthodox Christians had different attitudes toward sacred texts. Let me illustrate the point by considering views found in three proto-orthodox writings from around the second quarter of the second century.  It is difficult to date these writings with any precision, but [...]

I provided a very brief overview of key aspects of how we got the canon of the NT (these 27 books and only these 27) in my previous two posts.  Now I want to move into a deeper look found in my book Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford University Press, 2003).  This was the second trade-book (for general audiences) I wrote, and it is the one that launched my career writing books for non-experts. The book is about the various forms of Christianity in the first several centuries (Ebionites, Marcionites, various kinds of Gnostics, various kinds of Proto-orthodoxy, etc.) and the books they used as their authoritative sacred texts.  Toward the end of the book I have a chapter on how the orthodox canon emerged out of that mess. I will be excerpting parts of the book here.  This will take a few posts. ****************************** So far as we can tell, all the Christian groups of the period came to ascribe authority to some written texts; and [...]

In my post yesterday I discussed the factors that motivated Christians to come up with a canon of the New Testament.  Now I can talk about how they decided which books should belong and how the process played itself out as leaders debated the issues over time. ****************************** The Criteria Used The “orthodox” church fathers who decided on the shape and content of the canon applied several criteria to determine whether a book should be included or not. Four criteria were especially important. A book had to go back to the very beginning of the Christian movement or it could not be accepted. If a really good and important book that was fully informed and “true” were written, say, last year, that would not be good enough for it to be part of Scripture. The canon of Scripture contained books from the beginning of the Christian movement. Only books that were written by apostles could be accepted as part of the canon; this included the disciples of Jesus and their followers of the [...]