BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 9 of 180

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 Most Significant Study of Christian “Heresy” in Modern Times

In my last post I started discussing the terms “orthodoxy” and “heresy,” pointing out that their traditional/etymological meanings are not very helpful for historians. “Orthodoxy” literally means the “right belief” about God, Christ, the world and so on. That means it is a theological term about religious truth. But historians are not theologians who can tell you what is theologically true; they are scholars who try to establish what happened in the past. And so how can a historian, acting as a historian, say that one group of believers is right and that another is wrong? The problem with the two terms came to particular expression in a book written in 1934 by a German scholar named Walter Bauer. The book was auf Deutsch, but its English title is Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. For my money, this was the most important book on early Christianity written in the 20th century. It completely revolutionized how we are to understand the theological controversies that were wracking the Christian church in its early years. If you [...]

BDEhrman2023-11-06T14:11:47-05:00November 16th, 2023|Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

A Fundamental Issue: Heresy and Orthodoxy in Early Christianity

I have been talking about various forms of Gnosticism and that now has led me to move into a broader discussion about early Christian "heresy" in general. I've talked a lot about non-canonical books, and various forms of Christian belief and practice, and so on over the years, but to my surprise it's been a very long time since I addressed one of the most fundamental questions of early Christian history, the relationship of "orthodoxy" and "heresy" in early Christianity. The understanding of this relationship has long been much debated, and the debate begins with the terms themselves, which, as it turns out, are notoriously tricky. Part of the issue has to do with their literal or etymological meaning. In terms of etymology, the word “orthodoxy” comes from two Greek terms that mean something like “correct opinion” or “right belief.” The word “heresy” comes from a Greek word that means “choice.” And so someone subscribes to orthodoxy if they hold to the right belief, but they hold to a heresy if they have “chosen” to [...]

BDEhrman2023-11-11T09:18:33-05:00November 15th, 2023|Heresy and Orthodoxy|

What’s the Best Way to Read a Non-Fiction Book?
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What’s the Best Way to Read a Non-Fiction Book?

Reflections and Ruminations

What’s the Best Way to Read a Non-Fiction Book?

I sometimes get asked what the best way is to read a work of non-fiction. Well, who knows? All I can say is what I do. I've dealt with the question here on the blog a number of times. But since I'm nearing the tail end of research on my next book dealing with the ethics of Jesus in relation to the broader world at the time, and how his ethics revolutionized the ways people in the west thought about how we ought to behave, I'm reading a lot right now, and I thought I should address the question again. My practices, in fact, have not changed much over the course of my scholarly career. My approach depends entirely on what kind of book I'm reading (I'm referring to non-fiction books here, not novels) and why I'm reading it -- that is, what I want/need to get out of it. When I was in graduate school I had a friend who insisted that anyone should be able to read an entire book of scholarship [...]

BDEhrman2023-11-13T15:11:06-05:00November 14th, 2023|Reflections and Ruminations|

How Exactly Could the Virgin-Born Jesus Have a Twin Brother?

I have mentioned in passing that there were some early Christians who thought that one of Jesus’ brothers, Jude (or Judas: both are translations of the same Greek word), was actually a twin. Not just of anyone, but of Jesus himself. Some readers have expressed surprise in the most succinct way possible, by asking: “Huh??” I talk about the matter in a couple of my previous publications, especially when speaking about early Christian apocryphal texts that deal with the missionary exploits of the apostles after Jesus’ death. We have several of these, including an Acts of Thomas. Like the other apocryphal Acts (such as the more famous Acts of Thecla – an account of the adventures of the apostle Paul's most famous legendary convert, an upper-class woman named, obviously, Thecla), this one celebrates the virtue of celibacy and sexual renunciation, and it actually uses the idea that Jesus’ had an *identical* twin to advance its views. I’ll explain how it does that in the next post. In this one I’ll deal directly [...]

BDEhrman2023-11-15T10:09:18-05:00November 12th, 2023|Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus|

Could the Gospel of Thomas Be Q? Could it Be Older Than the NT Gospels?

A number of blog members over the years have asked about Thomas’s relation to the Synoptic Gospels and the famous Q source -- that is, the lost source that both Matthew and Luke used for many of their sayings of Jesus not found in Mark (called Q from the German word Quelle, which means “source”). Here is what I say about those issues in my textbook: The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Oxford University Press). ****************************** Thomas and the Q Source. The Gospel of Thomas, with its list of the sayings of Jesus (but no narratives) reminds many scholars of the Q source. Some have maintained that Q was also composed entirely of the sayings of Jesus and that the community for whom it was written was not concerned about Jesus’ activities and experiences, including his death on the cross. If they are right, then something like Thomas’s community was already in existence prior to the writing of the New Testament Gospels. Many other scholars, on the other hand, have their [...]

BDEhrman2023-10-31T13:37:08-04:00November 11th, 2023|Public Forum|

What Is the Gospel of Thomas All About? And Did the Author Use the New Testament Gospels?

What is the Gospel of Thomas trying to teach? In my previous post I gave a basic overview of the book; here I go into some more depth (not a huge amount) about what it's all about, what it's trying to teach, and whether it depended on Matthew, Mark, and Luke for its sayings. ****************************** The Overarching Message of the Book. The meanings of many of Thomas's sayings are in no way obvious. If they were, they would not be called secret! Even though the book contains nothing like the Sethian or Valentian myths, some of the sayings do seem to reflect roughly analogous understandings of the world and the human’s place in it (see earlier posts on Gnosticism). Within the hearer is an element of the divine—a soul—that had a heavenly origin (it originated “in the place where the light came into being”). This world we live in is inferior at best, and is more appropriately thought of as a cesspool of suffering, “a corpse.” A person’s inner being (the “light” [...]

BDEhrman2023-11-08T17:45:09-05:00November 10th, 2023|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Heresy and Orthodoxy|

Send in your Questions! November Gold Q&A

Dear Goldies and Plats, It's time for the November Gold Q&A, where I answer your questions--or at least as try to. Send your questions to [email protected], and Diane will compile and send me the list. Get your question in by Saturday (11/11/) midnight (whenever midnight is in your time zone). (Sorry 'bout the late notice) The questions are always interesting, but remember that shorter, more general-interest questions are more likely to be answered. Lookin' forward to it!

BDEhrman2023-11-09T11:30:33-05:00November 9th, 2023|Public Forum|

The Most Famous Non-Canonical Gospel: The Gospel of Thomas

We've talked about Gnosticism and in the previous post I mentioned Gnostic groups connected with "Thomas," allegedly the (twin!) brother of Jesus. There are a number of writings written in the name of Thomas, the most famous of which is the Gospel of Thomas discovered at Nag Hammadi. I haven't talked at length about it on the blog for several years now, so it seems like a good time to return to it here. This will take three posts. The one today is a broad introduction to what the Gospel is and what it contains. I have taken this from my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. ****************************** The Gospel of Thomas is without question the most significant book discovered in the Nag Hammadi library. Unlike the Gospel of Peter, discovered sixty years earlier, this book is completely preserved. It has no narrative at all, no stories about anything that Jesus did, no references to his death and resurrection. The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of 114 sayings [...]

BDEhrman2023-10-31T13:32:10-04:00November 8th, 2023|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Public Forum|

Thomasine Gnostic Christians, and Sundry Others
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Thomasine Gnostic Christians, and Sundry Others

Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Heresy and Orthodoxy

Thomasine Gnostic Christians, and Sundry Others

In this thread of posts I have been reproducing my comments on Gnosticism from the 2nd edition of my anthology, After the New Testament. In addition to the Sethians and the Valentinians, scholars talk about the school of Thomas and about yet other Gnostic groups that are not easy to identify with any of the other three or to group together in any meaningful way. Gnosticism was a messy group of religions! Here is what I say in the Introductions to the Thomasines and the Other Gnostic groups in the book. ****************************** Thomasines A number of books from the early Christian tradition are connected with a figure known as Didymus Judas Thomas. The word “Didymus” means “twin” in Greek; so too the name “Thomas” means “twin” in Aramaic. And so this person is Judas, or Jude, the twin. But the twin of whom? In our earliest surviving Gospel, Jesus himself is said to have a brother who is named Jude (for example, Mark 6). And in later traditions, especially from Syria, this Jude was thought [...]

BDEhrman2023-11-08T17:38:53-05:00November 7th, 2023|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Heresy and Orthodoxy|

My New Course: November 11 — The Scribal Corruption of Scripture

Just a reminder, in case you haven't noticed or don't remember! I will be doing a new online course on Saturday, November 11: "The Scribal Corruption of Scripture: How the Bible was Changed and Why Readers May Never Know." The general topic will sound familiar to many of you -- it is the kind of thing I discuss in my book Misquoting Jesus and that I"ve dealt with on the blog at times. But this course will be different. Among other things, it will provide much fuller explanations about: How scribal changes affect major issues in understanding the New Tesament Why decisoins about the original text are so complicated. What motivated scribes to alter the texts in places. Whether we can be reasonably sure that we know what an author wrote (the answer here will surprise many of you, in a way that you won't expect to be surprised) How *exactly* do scholars make decisions about what the text said and why a scribe changed it. In addition, I'll be discussing a number of textual [...]

BDEhrman2023-11-05T12:03:35-05:00November 5th, 2023|Public Forum|

A Bizarre Scene in the Gospel of Philip: Jesus Kissing Mary

Did Jesus and Mary Magdalene have an affair? Now that I've mentioned the Gospel of Philip, I can't help but repost a blog from a few years ago, dealing with one of the most intriguing, not to say titillating, passages from this otherwise somewhat obscure Valentinian Gospel. My original post on the topic was in a thread that was discussing whether Jesus was celibate or not, and I argued that the modern idea that he and Mary were intimately involved is ... a modern idea (without any foundation other than wild imagination and wishful thinking ) A number of readers responded to my post by pointing out that the non-canonical Gospel of Philip sure does seem to *say* they were intimate! So, what do I have to say about that? I have a reasonably full discussion of the relevant issues in my book Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene. In the book I put the discussion in the context of – yes, you guessed it -- Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, the one source many people [...]

BDEhrman2023-10-29T17:13:17-04:00November 5th, 2023|Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus|

The Gospel of Philip: An Example of a Valentinian Gnostic Gospel

In my previous post discussing Valentinian Gnosticism I mentioned an intriguing Valentinian text, the Gospel of Philip. Now I'd like to explain what it is and give you a bit of the opening section in translation so you can get a taste of it yourself. I've taken all this from the second edition of my book After the New Testament; the introduction is mine but the translation comes from Marvin Meyer, referenced below **************************** INTRODUCTION Even though the Gospel of Philip, also discovered at Nag Hammadi, is easily recognized as Valentinian, the book is notoriously difficult to understand in its details. In part this is due to the form of its composition. It is not a narrative Gospel of the type found in the New Testament or a group of self-contained sayings like the Gospel of Thomas (see Chapter 8). It is instead a collection of mystical reflections that have evidently been excerpted from previously existing sermons, treatises, and theological meditations, brought together here under the name of Philip -- presumably Jesus' own disciple. Since [...]

BDEhrman2023-11-08T17:34:11-05:00November 4th, 2023|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Heresy and Orthodoxy|

A Different Kind of Gnostic: The Valentinians

In my last several posts I've been talking about Sethian Gnostics, beginning with a description of what they believe and then discussing one Sethian text, the Gospel of Judas. Sethians weren't the only kind of Gnostic floating around in the second and third century; there may have been lots of other groups (since we only have a limited number of texts, it's impossible to say how many, or what each of them actually believed). But one that we know about reasonably well are called the Valentinians. Here is what I say about them in the second edition of my book After the New Testament (Oxford University Press). ****************************** Valentinians Unlike the Sethian Gnostics, the Valentinians were named after an actual person, Valentinus, the founder and original leader of the group. We know about the Valentinians from the writings of proto-orthodox heresiologists beginning with Irenaeus and by some of the writings discovered among the Nag Hammadi Library that almost certainly derive from Valentinian authors, including one book that may actually have been written by Valentinus [...]

BDEhrman2023-11-04T13:17:12-04:00November 2nd, 2023|Heresy and Orthodoxy|

Check Out This Gnostic Myth from the Gospel of Judas!

A lot of people over the years have told me they are drawn to the Gnostic way of looking at things, but it’s pretty clear they’ve never actually read any Gnostic texts. Gnosticism is a lot easier to like in the abstract than in the on-the-ground (or out-of-this-world) reality. When scholars typically describe Gnosticism to general audiences (at least when I do), it usually sounds very weird, rather fascinating, and more-or-less sensible. When people actually read the Gnostic texts, some of them are like that too (weird/fascinating/sensible) – but lots of the texts seem anything but sensible. They are (or seem to be) completely incomprehensible. I thought I’d illustrate the point by giving one form of the Gnostic myth as found in a relatively small but rather dense portion of the Gospel of Judas. Some people find that if they have a basic explanation/sense of Gnostic thought (a weird, fascinating, but sensible one as I tried to several posts ago), it is often possible to get the gist of this kind of myth (although parts [...]

BDEhrman2023-10-24T18:51:18-04:00November 1st, 2023|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Heresy and Orthodoxy|

The Gospel of Judas: Here’s a Taste of It
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The Gospel of Judas: Here’s a Taste of It

Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)

The Gospel of Judas: Here’s a Taste of It

Here is the first bit of the Gospel of Judas from the translation of my colleague Zlatko Pleše in our book The Other Gospels. The first paragraph is the explanation of where we got the text from; then the translation of the opening scene. After this bit here, the Gospel gets very strange, at least to most modern readers. But as you can see, it is really interesting. At the end I give the bibliography for further reading that we cite in our book. This translation is based on the Coptic text of Rodolphe Kasser, and Gregor Wurst, eds. The Gospel of Judas: Critical Edition. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2007. New portions of the Gospel appeared in 2006, when the one-time owner of the manuscript declared bankruptcy and his remaining antiquities collection was turned over to a bank in Ohio; included in this collection were numerous small fragments of the Gospel of Judas. These have been photographed and they have begun to be studied; for our translation of the account here we have been able [...]

BDEhrman2023-10-31T12:53:12-04:00October 31st, 2023|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

Want to Sit in on My October Gold Q&A (Monday Oct 30)?

I will be recording my Gold Q&A tomorrow, October 30, at 8:00 pm Eastern Time. Wanna come? I'll be doing it on Zoom so any gold or platinum member who wants to listen in is welcome. I've gotten a lot of unusually intriguing questions this time, and will not be able to answer all of them, but will pick a bunch and will be happy to have you listen in. I won't be able to answer live questions, but I will get on five minutes early to say hey to those who want to come. Here's the link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84586175851?pwd=h9zaZs1tYF3zvFhJh64GOTy9FafBh7.1 Hope to see you there!

BDEhrman2023-10-29T11:13:15-04:00October 29th, 2023|Public Forum|

The Gospel of Judas: The Most Recently Discovered Sethian Gnostic Gospel

For anyone interested in Gnosticism, the most recent full Gnostic Gospel to appear, the Gospel of Judas, is a real treasure. In my previous post I described the broad contours of Gnostic views and the more specific Sethian understanding of the divine realm, the world, humans, an salvation. Different Sethians, of course, would have different views of things (think of all the Catholics, Episcopalians, or Baptists you know or know of!). The Gospel of Judas presents a particularly intriguing form of the Sethian myth. I have said some things about the Gospel of Judas on the blog, but it's been a few years, so it's worth talking about again. You can find a translation, done by my colleague Zlatko Pleŝe, in the volume we co-edited and translated: The Other Gospels: Accounts of Jesus from Outside the New Testament. We also give the following Introduction to the text; I will give the rest of the Introduction and a bibliography, and a bit of the translation itself, in the next post. ****************************** The Gospel of Judas is the [...]

BDEhrman2023-10-22T18:52:28-04:00October 29th, 2023|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Heresy and Orthodoxy|

Gnostic Views in General and the More Specific Views of One Known Group (The Sethians)

I can now describe as succinctly as possible the basic views that appear to have been widely shared among various of the Gnostic groups, before giving a bit more detailed information on one of our best known groups, the Sethians. All this is taken from my textbook The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Oxford University Press). ****************************** MAJOR VIEWS OF VARIOUS GNOSTIC GROUPS Despite the many differences among the various Gnostic groups, most of them appear to have subscribed to the following views: The divine realm is inhabited not only by one ultimate God, but also by a range of other divine beings, widely known as aeons. These aeons are, in a sense, personifications of the ultimate God’s mental capacities and/or powers (some of them were called such things as Reason, Will, Grace, and Wisdom). The physical world that we inhabit was not the creation of the ultimate God but of a lower, ignorant divine being who is often identified with the God of the Jewish Bible. Because [...]

BDEhrman2023-10-22T18:47:45-04:00October 28th, 2023|Christian Apocrypha, Heresy and Orthodoxy|

Some of the Difficulties in Understanding Gnosticism

Now that I've discussed the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library, I can move into the kinds of religion found among these books, popularly known as the "Gnostic Gospels." And that will involve laying out the views found among the various Christian groups of the second and third century (principally) that scholars call Gnostic. Gnosticism is a fascinating topic, but it is also widely misunderstood, in no small part because scholarship on Gnosticism over the past twenty or thirty years ago has shown that the widely held views of earlier generations of scholars were based more on assumption than on evidence. There have long been heated debates over even how to define Gnosticism. Until about a hundred years ago, just about the only sources scholars used for understanding Gnosticism were the writings of its most vocal opponents, the proto-orthodox church fathers of the second, third, and fourth centuries. The problem is, as we all know so well (think: American politics!) you can't really rely on what a group's enemies say if you want to know [...]

BDEhrman2023-10-17T11:33:26-04:00October 26th, 2023|Christian Apocrypha, Heresy and Orthodoxy|

Aren’t You Inconsistent in Your View of the Historicity of the Gospels?

Do contradictions in a story show that it didn't happen? When I first responded (a few days ago) to Mark Goodacre’s five points calling into question the traditional story of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library, I was intrigued to receive a number of comments suggesting I sure seemed to be inconsistent in how I dealt with historical accounts. To wit: Why would I say contradictions in the Nag Hammadi discovery story (that Mark pointed out) DON'T show that the basic account is false -- that is, didn't happen -- but I DO use contradictions to call the Gospel accounts of Jesus into question. Is this an agenda-driven inconsistency? All right -- fair question. First let me remind you that in my post a few days ago (about the Nag Hammadi discovery) I pointed out that just because a story changes over time does not mean that the gist of the story is false. If some tellings indicate that the jar was two feet tall and others that it was six, or [...]

BDEhrman2023-10-22T19:26:10-04:00October 25th, 2023|Canonical Gospels|

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