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Loading...I know that by now I’m supposed to be citing Craig Evans’s best arguments that Jesus was probably given a decent burial on the day of his crucifixion by Joseph of Arimathea, rather than being left hanging on the cross for a few days in accordance with standard Roman practice. But I’ve realized that before I get to the first of these arguments, I have to say something about how historians need to use their ancient sources. The short answer to that question is that they need to use them … gingerly. And consistently gingerly.
This perspective will not come as a surprise to anyone who has read this blog for a long while and seen how I think we need, consistently, to use the books of the New Testament itself as sources for what actually happened in the past – whether we are considering the Gospels for knowing about what Jesus really said and did, or considering the book of Acts for knowing about the life and teachings of Paul, or considering the letters allegedly, but not really, written by Peter, James, and Jude for knowing the teachings of the historical Peter, James, and Jude – and so on.
But I do need to stress the point to make sense of what I want to say about Josephus, whom I introduced in my previous post.
Let me make the point by telling an anecdote. This has happened to me a dozen times, but I’ll recount simply one instance. A couple of years ago…
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Josephus is obviously very much biased in favor of the Romans against the Jewish rebels of his time and he criticizes the rebels for their shameful treatment of corpses sometimes. So do you think he made up the idea that the Romans might have allowed crucifixion victims to be buried?
I’m about to get to that!
Patience is not always a virtue.
Indeed, when you discussed Philo’s accounts of Pilate’s escapades in Jerusalem, I was already thinking about possible motivations for Philo to portray each incident the way he did. I, for one, assume that my sources are prone to fabrication when it suits their message. I probably need to apply this principle to modern sources as much as I do to ancient 😛
Ha! Yes indeed!
Years of religious brainwashing absolutely blinds one to common sense and reality. Only the brave of heart can shed the myth. It isn’t easy sometimes. That and people who get caught up in Jesus/Bible cults simply loose their power of clear thinking. Christopher Hitchens said that teaching religious dogma to children was child abuse. In the modern era in which we live, I have to agree.
I don’t know what it is about the human psyche that is so resistant to facing facts. Fear, I guess. They have learned to fear their own minds and their own judgment so rely on hocus pocus.
Bart, I have said this before, but thank you for your common sense and work in this area. What your readers/students should understand is that they don’t have to agree with everything you say but can learn to think for themselves- think and question. It is all food for thought and can be used a source of enlightenment.
Amen! I watch the news by channel surfing from CNN to MSNBC to Fox News and what a difference there is between sources. So, if we cannot get current history straight today, little wonder we have such trouble with 2,000-year-old history.
When it comes to the sayings in the NT (particularly those of Jesus), what do you think of the Jesus Seminar? I know they are big proponents of discovering the “authentic” sayings and then constructing a basic context in which to determine other aspects of Jesus’s life based on those sayings as opposed to creating a context and then seeing which sayings align with that perspective (I believe this is the view Dale Allison takes). What are your thoughts?
I don’t disagree with the general idea of the Seminar — debating which traditions actually go back to Jesus and which not, on the basis of established criteria, and then making a decision. I vigorously disagree with the view of Jesus that has emerged from the seminar as a non-apocalyptic preacher of wisdom.
Why do conservative Christian scholars criticise the Jesus Seminar?
Mainly becaus they thnk the vast majority of the saying of Jesus in the Gospels were not actually spoken by him.
I’ve only perused Josephus, but I know there is pretty good archaeological evidence for some things that he wrote (it would be kinda hard to ignore Masada). But, if we read him critically, how accurate does he seem in relation to other sources, say Roman archives and such?
On a related note, Herodotus seems to get credentials from some writers, but even I know that some of it is imagination (how would he know what was said in conversations in Persia if he wasn’t there?). I’ve been fortunate to have Dr. Vandiver, another Great Courses instructor, clear up some of Herodotus via email. You, too, do a good job of answering questions here, for which I am grateful.
-Robert Shearer
He’s a good historian. But there are obvious distortions — as becomes clear when you compare what he says about the same event in different ones of his writings.
Taking into consideration your entry on having “original” manuscripts, how close in time do we get to the time of Josephus with our earliest manuscripts of his histories?
Thanks,
-robert
I don’t know the exact information offhand (I’m out of the country and away from my books), but there are very few manuscripts of Josephus and that they date from the Middle Ages.
The Canadian poet, Irving Layton, remarked at our university that most Christians had a hard time coming to accept the human Christ. He went on to mention that Jesus would have all the bodily functions and in his list included that he would have broken wind. This created a storm of controversy but our Catholic chaplain agreed. However, too many could not accept that Christ was truly human and seem to favour a monophysite kind of Jesus that he was really only divine with a human shell. I can understand this feeling of seeing Jesus as only divine for he is the believed coeternal divine entity who redeemed us. No human could do this. This dual nature is a complexity hard to understand like the enigma of the Trinity..
I quite agree. Incongruity all over the place.
It’s a very confusing doctrine!
It can be really difficult to critically examine something when you have a strong attachment to a particular belief. Can a conservative, devout Muslim apply historical criticism to the Qur’an?
I don’t believe it’s ever happened yet, no. Just as no Xn fundamentalist accepts historical criticism for the NT.
Dear Professor Ehrman, although I’m very much interested in the history of Christianity (especially the first few centuries), i have recently felt more and more the need to know the sources upon which historians actually rely on. In other words: i don’t just want to know what happened, i also want to know how it is possible to know. What the sources are, where they are found, what it takes to read/understand them. To your knowledge as an expert in the field, has anybody ever attempted the task of writing a history of how historians have managed to put together the big Jigsaw puzzle that Christianity is? Has anybody ever collected and catalogued all the primary sources upin which our understanding is based on for the reconstruction of the history of Christianity?
Oh yes, there are lots of books that do this. If you look up “Patrologies” you’ll find numerous scholarly works that describe all the ancient Christian writings, when they were written, who their authors were, where they lived, what their sources of information were, how reliable the manuscripts of their works are, what their major themes are, etc. etc. You’ll find that information in any of the collectoins of early writings as well; I do that for the Apostolic Fathers in my edition of them and for the non-Canonical Gospels of the early centuries in my edition of that (which I published wth my colleague Zlatko Plese).
Dear Dr Ehrman, I just purchased your book Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. When it comes to being consistent with critical thinking, it seems to be even more of a challenge when I read how many copies of copies we have of old manuscripts and the destruction of originals. I would like to know what churches or scribes of churches would have destroyed these originals? Was this done to deceive? Or was this done to make the reading more understandable.
Thanks, RD
Thanks. No, I don’t think anyone intentionally destroyed originals. With the books of the New Testament it’s the same as with every ancient book. The originals were worn out or simply disappeared. It’s true of all the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Seneca, Cicero, and … well, as it turns out, of every single ancient author! So there was nothing unusual or nefarious of it happening with the NT; it’s just what always happened.
After watching your video about the Gospel of Judas, YT kept trying to get me to watch a 3.5 hour interview of Ammon Hillman by Danny Jones from 7 months ago, which I did. I then posted some questions on the r/AmmonHillman subreddit, and I watched his first video on YT.
He made some interesting statements that I assume are true about why Greek was superior to Hebrew and other languages, and he also made the claim that the Old Testament was first written in Greek. Other than his claims about language, he makes a lot of bold claims about how his only goal is to more accurately translate texts that others ignore or get wrong. However, he is visibly titillated talking about ancient drug use, goddess worship, pedophilia, and Satan. He also clearly believes most of what he claims is in the texts.
What is your assessment of Ammon Hillman’s work?
Hello Professor Ehrman,
Have you read either of these two books: Finding God Beyond Religion, by Tom Stella, or The Postsecular Sacred, by David Tacey, or any books with a similar message? The basic message of these books is that many people go through 3 stages: 1) believing in the God they learned about during their formative years 2) not believing in that God– and possibly becoming an atheist, and then 3) believing in God again, but not the same God that they believed in when they were younger. I would be interested in reading any thoughts you are willing to share about this topic.
Dr. Ehrman,
RE: What we would *like* to do is to show what really happened in the past simply by pointing to a source and saying “See, it says so!”
We still see this all too often. For Muslims, their Qu’ran and Hadith remain undisputed sources, despite some recent attempts to analyze those sources and their history without bias. The Eastern Orthodox still mostly avoid critical research theory. Recently, another uptick in the ‘end of the world’ scenarios is leveraging Revelation. Attempts to argue against Revelation as a reliable source for predicting the future basically get dismissed simply as being heretical.
I know you endured many critics calling you many unsavory things over the years because of your research. I have found your research to be well-balanced and logic-based. We know of many early Christian researchers and critics from the first three centuries that also had to endure harsh criticism (especially after their death when they could not respond.) Of those early researchers of whose history survives, who do you admire the most for their efforts to seek the truth? Origen was a great scholar, but he seems to not dig into the historical side of things very well.
Great question Rezubler.
I too have encountered many virulent intractable hyper-fragile individuals who try to use Revelation as a way to, not only predict the future, but to claim that we are doomed to fail if we try to interfere in anything Zionists do. I have been told it is necessary for Israel to kill every Palestinian and that my life will become 10x worse unless Israel “turns Iran into glass”. I have also been told that it was prophesied that Israel would control America and that both Israel and America will be destroyed, and there is nothing we can do about any of this but watch.
Therefore, one can see how it would be a healthy endeavor to expose any facts that would weaken their claims about Revelation.
Bart.
In line with your example with the girl, I am really curious about the passage in Philippians 2:6-11. It reads as if Paul is quoting from some other source, saying Jesus and God are of the same nature/form of God. I have not been able to find such source, so do you know from what he is quoting?
2nd question off topic..
From the Gospel of Thomas… I am having a hard time trying to understand how the author came up with the name “Didymos Judas Thomas”. So far in my research, I have not been able to find any other known writing using the three names together. I did find both the “The Book of Thomas the Contender” and “Acts of Thomas” using the name “Judas Thomas” that are both dated to early 3rd century.
So is the Name in the gospel a significant part of why scholars want to date the gospel to the 3rd century. Also then, where is it thought the name Judas became associated with Thomas in the other two writings?
1. Yes, scholras have long recognized that Paul is quoting a previously existing composition in Phil 2:6-11, either his own or someone else’s; the evidence is very strong, based on stylistic, contextual, and thematic issues. But it is a source that no long exists, so regrettably no one knows exactly what it was.
2. The Gospel is normally dated to the early 2nd century. Didymus is the Greek word for “twin.” Thomas is the Armaic word for “twin.” The name of the person is Jude the Twin. I am away from my books (out of town) so can’t check to see if the three-name version occurs elsewhere (and can’t remember!); certainly he is elsehwere referred to with two of the ames.
Excellent points, though in the specific case of news, often we are more or less forced to rely on a measure of trust in the credibility of the source. If the New York Times claims that numerous administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that X, typically I have no independent way to verify that. I’ll default to regarding it as probably true because I know the paper has a strict internal editorial process, and that a reporter who fabricated such a claim (as happens very occasionally even at reputable publications) would be risking the permanent ruin of their career and reputation. The question is less whether one must, at some level, rely on the relative trustworthiness of certain sources—sometimes we have little other option—but whether that trust has some reasonable basis or instead reflects a kind of tribal mood affiliation.
Why I can no longer believe in the concept of God found in the Bible.
Since God and his Son are “all knowing” – don’t you think they would be aware that only 1/3 of the people on Earth would be going to Heaven, since approximately only 1/3 of the people on Earth identify as “Christian” Christian theology is very clear that only those who profess following Jesus will be allowed in Heaven.
I ran some numbers the other day:
There are roughly 8 billion human beings living on Earth today. 2/3 of those folks will be suffering for eternity when they die, according to Christian teachings because they are not “Christians” . Every day 170,790 people die on Earth. This means that approximately 112,721 will be consigned to EVERLASTING torture EVERY DAY for eternity. . Personally, I could not enjoy Heaven knowing that there are billions of people down through the ages, all suffering in Hell for eternity – no place for pardon or parole.
Dear Dr Ehrman:
It was beautiful how you gently let the student realize what she believed can’t be substantiated.
That’s why in a few of your older debates, the young students that attested your opponent won. If someone could ask them how they’ve changed since.
Thank you & have a great year!
I Thessalonians 5:21 might have helped the student