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Discussions and comments about Bart’s latest book.

Major Issues in the Earliest Christian Centuries (In my Book After the New Testament)

What were the key issues, controversies, developments, and concerns of the Christian communities of the first three centuries?   These are the topics considered in my book After the New Testament:  A Reader in Early Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed, 2015). In the previous post I explained that the book is a collection of most of the most important writings from the second and third centuries -- the period right after the books of the New Testament were themselves written.  Here I talk about the various themes that I used to organize my collection, themes that I judged to be the most significant for anyone trying to understand Christianity in earliest times.  This will take two posts. ****************************** By way of introduction to this collection of ancient Christian writings, I should say a word about the nature of the rubrics I'll be using and the logic of their sequencing.  This need not entail a lengthy discussion: each chapter begins with a sketch of the important historical aspects of the topic, and each individual [...]

My Most Helpful Book? After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity

What happened in early Christianity just *after* the period of the New Testament?  It's an unknown period for most people, but of vital importance for anyone interested in the Christian religion.  For the next three posts I'll explain by discussing my book devoted to the topic, After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed, 2015) In some ways, I think After the New Testament is the most *useful* book I've ever done.  It is an anthology of important ancient Christian texts in readable English translations, each with introductions that explain what they are about and why they matter.  Some of these are texts you may have heard of.  Some, I bet not!  But they are all important and intriguing. In these posts I will explain my book by excerpting the General Introduction, which introduces readers to the fascinating world of Christian Origins and shows it's importance and the problems its study poses for scholars. ****************************** General Introduction (Part 1) Over the past century and a half, archaeological [...]

What If Another Christianity Had Won?

If only one form of early Christianity won the contest for domination, what were the results -- what the gains and losses from that "triumph"?  And what would have happened to world history if things had gone in another direction?  This is my third and final post on my book Lost Christianities, taken from its Introduction (Oxford Press, 2003).   ******************************* The Stakes of the Conflict Before launching into the investigation, I should perhaps say a word about what is, or at least what was, at stake.  Throughout the course of our study I will be asking the question: what if it had been otherwise?  What if some other form of Christianity had become dominant, instead of the one that did?[1] In anticipation of these discussions, I can point out that if some other form of Christianity had won the early struggles for dominance, the familiar doctrines of Christianity may never have become the “standard” belief of millions of people around the world – including the belief that there is only one God, [...]

More Lost Christianities

In my previous post I discussed the wide variety of early Christianities and their ranging views.  Here I consider some aspects of the Scriptures known and used by these various groups.  Again, this comes from the Introduction to my book Lost Christianities (Oxford Press, 2003). ****************************** The Lost Scriptures The Gospels that came to be included in the New Testament were all written anonymously: only at a later time were they called by the names of their reputed authors, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  But at about the time these names were being associated with the Gospels, other Gospel books were becoming available, sacred texts that were read and revered by different Christian groups throughout the world: a Gospel, for example, claiming to be written by Jesus’ closest disciple, Simon Peter; another by his apostle Philip; a Gospel allegedly written by Jesus’ female disciple Mary Magdalen; another by his own twin brother, Didymus Judas Thomas.[1] Someone decided that four of these early Gospels, and no others, should be accepted as part of the canon [...]

Lost Christianities

How diverse was early Christianity?  I had been transfixed by this question for a long time when I decided to write a trade book, Lost Christianities.  It was a blast to write and in some ways launched my career of writing for general audiences.  My earlier book Jesus, Apocalyptic Prophet was definitely directed to that crowd, but it was with Lost Christianities that I started kicking broader communication to a wider readership into gear. Here's I'll excerpt by explanation of the book in its Introduction (from Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. Oxford University Press, 2003).  This will take three posts. ********************* It may be difficult to imagine a religious phenomenon more diverse than modern-day Christianity.  There are Roman Catholic missionaries in developing countries, who devote themselves to voluntary poverty for the sake of others, and evangelical televangelists with twelve-step programs to assure financial success and prosperity.  There are New England Presbyterians and Appalachian snake handlers.  There are Greek orthodox priests committed to the liturgical service of God, replete with set [...]

More Lost Scriptures

How did we get our books of the New Testament, and what do we know about the ones that were "left out"?  Here I continue my Introduction to my book Lost Scriptures, as started in my previous post. ****************************** When was this New Testament finally collected and authorized?  The first instance we have of any Christian author urging that our current twenty-seven books, and only these twenty-seven, should be accepted as Scripture occurred in the year 367 CE, in a letter written by the powerful bishop of Alexandria Egypt, Athanasius.  Even then the matter was not finally resolved, however, as different churches, even within the orthodox form of Christianity, had different ideas -- for example, about whether the Apocalypse of John could be accepted as Scripture (it finally was, of course), or whether the Apocalypse of Peter should be (it was not); whether the epistle of Hebrews should be included (it was) or the epistle of Barnabas (it was not); and so on.  In other words, the debates lasted over three hundred years. [...]

Lost Scriptures

I was reluctant to write my first trade book (Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet: see previous post), and had to be dragged into writing my second.  I just wanted to devote myself to technical scholarship.  But, well, I yielded in the end, and I'm glad I did. My second trade book ended up being two books.  I had agreed to write about the "heretical forms" of Christianity and their Scriptures, but then my publisher, Oxford University Press, talked me into not only doing that study (Lost Christianities) but also an accompanying anthology of texts, Lost Scriptures.  Once again I was reluctant (!) but I lost out again, and again I'm glad.  It's been the better selling of the two books, to my great surprise. Here I'll explain what it contains, taken from the Introduction to it (OUP, 2003).  This will take two posts. ****************** General Introduction Even though millions of people world-wide read the New Testament -- whether from curiosity or religious devotion -- very few ask what this collection of books actually is [...]

2024-07-08T11:45:59-04:00July 11th, 2024|Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha|

My First Trade Book: Jesus, Apocalyptic Prophet

I have started a thread discussing the books I've written for broader audiences.  My first actual "trade book" was Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford University Press, 1999) (uh, that would be 25 years ago!).   Here is how I explain the book and it's raison d'etre in the Preface.   In case you wonder -- I still hold the same basic views of Jesus now that I did then, and still find the arguments I adduce convincing. ****************************** Preface When anyone has asked me why I’m writing a book about the historical Jesus, I’ve usually replied, “Well, it’s about time someone did.” Actually, at last count there were something like eight zillion books written about Jesus.  And those are just the ones written by scholars.  A good number of these, mainly the lesser known ones, are written by scholars for scholars to promote scholarship; others are written by scholars to popularize scholarly views.  The present book is one of the latter kind.  I really don’t have a lot to say to scholars who [...]

2024-07-08T11:50:00-04:00July 10th, 2024|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

How Can We Possibly Know a Scribe’s Intentions? My Most Important Theoretical Reflection

Can we know what a scribe intended to do when he changed the text? Is it actually possible to know what anyone INTENDS?  Isn't that technically impossible, unless we get into their minds somehow?  I had to deal with this issue in the Orthodox Corruption of Scripture and there I laid out the theoretical premises I have/had, to allow me to say that a scribe intended to change a text.  It's a view that most readers completely overlooked, including a bunch of my critics. *********************** Intentionality as a Functional Category The other theoretical claim that I made in Orthodox Corruption involved the broader concept of what it means to describe a scribal alteration of the text as “intentional.”   I have been deeply interested in the question of “intention” for many years, as a philosophical problem (there is considerable philosophical discourse on it, of course), an issue in literary interpretation (especially since Wimsatt and Beardsley’s famous “Intentional Fallacy”), and, naturally, as it relates to scribes. Most textual critics have unproblematically talked about scribal changes being either accidental [...]

2024-07-10T12:29:21-04:00July 9th, 2024|Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

Are Scribes of Texts Actually Authors?

In my overview of the responses to my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture in the Afterword I wrote of the 2nd edition, I began to address some major questions.  In the book I argued that scribes of the New Testament intentionally changed the text in places in order to make it more orthodox in its theology or to circumvent its use by "heretics" who had other views.  That raises a question:  are scribes who change the text to make it say something different actually *authors* instead of mere copyists?  Here's how I discuss the issue at the beginning of my Afterword. ************************ I see no need here to restate the original thesis of The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.  There is one issue connected with it, however, that has not been clear to some of its readers that does need to be addressed.  In the book I never claimed and certainly never meant to claim that the majority of all textual variants in the tradition were “intentional” (a term I will be discussing [...]

2024-07-12T08:16:36-04:00July 7th, 2024|Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, 2nd edition

I get asked a lot about my various books, and I often mention one of my books when no one has asked (you may have noticed).  It occurred to me that it might be useful for me to present some blog posts on what each book is about. Probably my best known academic book was The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (Oxford University Press, 1993).   Twenty years after it was published I was asked to do a second edition, in which I would explain where the thing had originally come from (in my head) and what had happened in the field since it's original publication. Here is the Afterword to the 2nd edition (slightly edited) where I try to explain why I wrote it and what I was trying to accomplish with it.  (It includes reflections on an alleged "original text" of the New Testament). *******************************   The following sketch is intended to reflect on what has been achieved in the field of New Testament textual criticism since I first published The Orthodox Corruption of [...]

2024-07-12T08:13:50-04:00July 6th, 2024|Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

My First Book! A Dissertation on Textual Criticism of the New Testament

Last night someone asked me about my very first book.  My answer wasn't what they were hoping for; the book was not an insightful discussion of Jesus or the Gospels or how we got the Bible for a general audience.  It was my published dissertation, a work of scholarship on the Greek manuscript tradition of the NT written for the six people in the world who would care. But it's kind of an interesting story anyway, in part because it deals with the fundamental issue of how scholars try to decide what the authors of the NT originally wrote.  It went at the issue in a highly specific and detailed way, that one probably would not think of off the bat.  I talked about it on the blog many years ago, and will devote to it three posts again. ****************************** I have talked about Bruce Metzger, my mentor in graduate school, for both my Master's degree and my PhD,  a number of times on the blog. When I entered my PhD program at Princeton Theological [...]

2024-06-24T10:11:38-04:00June 26th, 2024|Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

The New Book I’m Writing About Altruism: Putting It In a Nutshell

As I've been writing my new book, tentatively called "The Invention of Altruism: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Conscience of the West," I've been thinking about how I might summarize the basic argument.  Here's what I've got to this point.  I'd be happy to hear your reactions. ****************************** Most people I know are moved by news of tragedy.  A terrible earthquake, a drought, a famine, a flood, displaced people, innocent victims of military aggression, -- we feel pity for those who pointlessly suffer and sense a desire, even an obligation, to help, for example by donating to disaster relief.   Almost never do we know the people in need; they are complete strangers, often in far-off lands, whom we will never meet and possibly wouldn’t like if we did.  Yet we – at least multitudes of us – want to help. This sense of moral obligation to strangers in need is unnatural.  It is not written into the human DNA nor did it exist in the ancient roots of our Western cultural [...]

A Really Scathing Review of My Book on Suffering

I’ve devoted my past couple of posts to a review of one of my books that the reviewer (really) didn’t like, and doing so reminded me of the most scathing review that, to my knowledge, I ever received, that at the time (sixteen years ago) I thought was outrageous, and now find rather humorous….   I’m a believer in letting the “other side” have its say, so I thought I’d post it here. The book under review was God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Explain our Most important Question – Why We Suffer.  (As is usual, I didn’t give the book its title; usually publishers do that).  It was reviewed in the Christian Century (Dec. 30, 2008) (View PDF (christiancentury.org), by Will Willimon, a well-known preacher and a former Bishop of the United Methodist Church and Professor at Duke Divinity School. No need for me to comment on it.  Read it for yourself: ****************************** Bart Ehrman has written another book that is probably destined to be a best seller. God’s Problem is a lively, though [...]

2024-03-24T10:03:18-04:00March 31st, 2024|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions|

Dealing With Reviews of My Books By People Who (Apparently) Haven’t Read Them

As I am inching closer to writing my next book, on how the ethics of Jesus transformed the moral conscience of the West, I have started thinking, possibly not unnaturally, about how some of my earlier books were critiqued in published reviews.  I really don't mind if someone understands what I write and has reasoned disagreements with it; and I'm happy to make vigorous counter-arguments in response.  But unless the reviewer misrepresents what I say, I'm generally not irritated. I do get irritated, though, by reviewers who go for the jugular without seriously understanding (or caring) what I actually say.  Or possibly knowing what I say?  I sometimes genuinely do wonder if the reviewer actually bothered to read the book. In that context, I suddenly remembered that ten years ago I did a couple of blog posts after a reader alerted me to a published review of my book How Jesus Became God, by the Very Reverend Robert Barren.  When I read the review I was a bit, well, outraged.  I wrote two posts on [...]

2024-03-27T11:43:13-04:00March 28th, 2024|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels|

Gospel Thrillers Part II by Andrew Jacobs

Gospel Thrillers!  Who woulda thought?  Many of us knew of books like this, but never realized they were a coherent (sub-)genre, and certainly never thought much about how to understand them. Here now is Andrew Jacobs second post on his new book Gospel Thrillers: Conspiracy, Fiction and the Vulnerable Bible, which you can get at your favorite book-buying spot, including here:  Gospel Thrillers: Conspiracy, Fiction, and the Vulnerable Bible: Jacobs, Andrew S.: 9781009384612: Amazon.com: Books   ****************************** II. Inside the Gospel Thrillers   In my first post I described what Gospel Thrillers are and their role in US culture: they magnify, probe, and contain popular fears and desires about the vulnerability of the Bible by imagining a conspiracy surrounding a newly discovered first-century gospel. In this second post, I describe in more detail some of the “bombshell” secrets these novels invent and the specific fantasies and anxieties about the Bible they illuminate.   Desert Fantasies Many of the books imagine new discoveries emerging from the Middle East. Some of these are supposedly part of the [...]

2024-02-02T13:22:43-05:00February 8th, 2024|Book Discussions, Public Forum|

Gospel Thrillers Part I by Andrew Jacobs

Probably all (nearly all?) of us have read thrillers, and all of us (certainly!) have heard of Gospels.  And some of us have read "Gospel Thrillers."  But do you know what a Gospel Thriller is?  You've probably never heard the term because it was recently coined by scholar of late antiquity Andrew Jacobs, in his intriguing analysis of them (the first analysis ever done), accessible to lay people (hey, we're talkin' thrillers here) just now being published: Gospel Thrillers: Conspiracy, Fiction, and the Vulnerable Bible (Cambridge University Press).  Check it out!  Gospel Thrillers: Conspiracy, Fiction, and the Vulnerable Bible: Jacobs, Andrew S.: 9781009384612: Amazon.com: Books I've known Andrew since he was a graduate student at Duke many-a-year ago.   He is now a Senior Research Fellow at the Center of World Religions at Harvard.  He is one of the leading figures in the study of Christianity of Late Antiquity (currently the President of the main professional society, North American Patristics Society). The book is terrific, and so I've asked Andrew to write a few blog posts [...]

2024-02-07T15:28:55-05:00February 7th, 2024|Book Discussions, Public Forum|

Making the Bible Benevolent: Guest Post by Jill Hicks-Keeton

Is the Bible "Good News" for everyone, or, does it just seem good to those who want it to be? And how do readers make it good in places that on any honest reading are not (think violence and the treatment of women and slaves).  Jill Hicks-Keeton, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Sourthern California, has recently published an intriguing book that is highly controversial in some circles (those who do what she describes) and a breath of fresh air in another, an analysis of how evangelical Christians work to make the Bible not just acceptable but good through and through.  Her study is called The Good Book: How White Evangelicals Save the Bible To Save Themselves.  (Available here:  Good Book: How White Evangelicals Save the Bible to Save Themselves: Hicks-Keeton, Jill: 9781506485850: Amazon.com: Books) I've asked Jill to talk about the book in a couple of posts on the blog.  Here's the first, with a teaser for the second! ****************************** Millions of Americans report understanding the Bible as the Word of [...]

How’s the Christian World Doin’ These Days with the Ethics of Jesus?

Jesus had a distinctive ethical view, significantly different from the ethics propounded and followed by most people in his world.  And, well, by most people in ours.  Even some (many? most?) who claim to be Jesus' followers.  Or so it appears to me when I look at what Jesus actually teaches and observe what some (many?) modern Christians both do and say.    I've spent the past five posts summarizing what I plan to cover in my book The Origins of Altruism: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Conscience of the West.  If history holds the publisher will be giving it a different title, and at this point for me the title's not the main thing.  Writing it is! The foci are Jesus' teachings on love, charitable giving, and forgiveness, how these teachings contrasted with those commonly followed in the Roman world at the time, how they were modified and softened by his own followers after his death, and how they nonetheless came to play an oversized role in the understanding of "how should we [...]

2024-01-22T11:43:32-05:00January 24th, 2024|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

When Is Forgiveness not Forgiveness?

Does love really "mean never having to say I'm sorry"?  Is "unconditional forgiveness" possible?  Is it even Christian?  Is forgiveness itself always possible, conceivable, feasible, expected, required, helpful?  Actually, what is forgiveness? These are questions people often ask.  When they ask what Jesus thought about the matter they usually get it wrong.  And as it turns out, so did his own disciples.  So I'll be arguing in my book, tentatively titled The Origins of Altruism. Here's another extract from my sketch of the book as it looks at this point in the pre-writing stage.... ****************************** Part Four:  Interpersonal Forgiveness (ch. 6 on Greek and Roman World; ch. 7 on Jesus and his followers) Whereas “charity” is the manifestation of agapē principally to outsiders in need, “forgiveness” is its manifestation principally to those with whom one is in close contact. The importance of “forgoing anger” (a very broad and – as I’ll argue – somewhat problematic definition of forgiveness) was widely acknowledged in the Greek and Roman worlds.  But the conditions under which it was possible [...]

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