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Here I continue with another reminiscence of my interactions and relationship with my mentor, the great textual scholar Bruce Metzger. This one has always struck me as a bit humorous.
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In almost (but not absolutely) all PhD programs in this country, the doctoral candidate has do an “oral defense” of the dissertation. If s/he successfully defends, the PhD is then granted. Here at UNC, the defense is conducted in front of the five-person dissertation committee, all of them experts on one or another aspect of the work. Everyone on the committee has carefully read the dissertation, and the defense is designed to see if, well, the thesis is defensible.
In other words, faculty members do not hold back but probe deeply into the work to see if there are any flaws in it. If a student fails the defense, s/he has to revise the dissertation and try again. Even if it is considered passable, revisions of some sort are often considered necessary.
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If anyone deserved a break…
It’s no clear how it goes from here.
Maybe those questions were a way to conceal not your opinion on any reasonable question but bring the conversation back to possible dumb data or enumeration.
Or the futility of banalize two years of work into a chit-chat (in that case would be a strong opinion on your subsequent non-academic work) denouncing the futility to push a broader effort on public work or even maybe on this blog.
Please explain.
He was just trying to take it easy on me.
Oh, people working with literature aren’t making most of it.
Mr. Ehrman, although these Bruce Metzger stories you have been sharing with us lately are truly fun and fascinating, I have a totally unrelated question – kind of a spin-off one from your last sentence!
You say that you had a big party that night. I guess at that time you firmly believed in free will. Now that you’re not, would you react in a similar fashion? Or, to put it simply, if we don’t have free will, is there any meaning in being proud about anything? I only ask you because I had been deeming pride as a huge value/motivator in my whole life, and, ever since I stopped believing in free will, it has been quite difficult for me to find personal meaning in achievements of various sorts.
Even if you don’t actually have free will, it certainly *seems* that you do. So feel free to feel proud of your accomplishments….
I’m sorry, Mr. Ehrman, but I thought we were in the business of finding the truth, not comforting illusions! Your suggestion is tantamount to someone saying “even if the Bible is forged and erroneous, it *seems* as if it’s god-inspired, so feel free to believe in its inerrancy”!
I don’t think that’s the same thing. One is an internal subjectivity and the other is a cognition. Not teh same! The problem of consciousness itself, of course, is a matter of subjectivity by definition. What you happen to think is not.
I don’t think free will and consciousness are the same thing, if that’s what you’re implying in the second part of your answer, Mr. Ehrman (sorry if I misunderstood and you’re not implying such a thing). I do get that the inner sense of free will and the understanding of a book are two distinctly separate things; and I don’t think I claimed the opposite.
What I argued against was your suggested approach to the *understanding* of these two: if you encourage someone to process his thoughts on the basis that he has free will (even though he has no such a thing), only because it *feels* like he does, how’s that different from encouraging someone to process a certain book with a certain mindset (even though that mindset is marred with fallacy), because it *feels* like that’s the correct mindset to process it?
(I’m sorry to probe you with this stuff, sorry if I’m being pesky! I’ll stop the spamming! It’s just that this particular subject is pretty important for me to understand it fully, and I really appreciate it that you share your views on it.)
No, I’m not equating free will and consciousness. And yes, I’m saying that if it *seems* like you have free will then in highly practical terms, you may as well act like you do.
“What a life”. A few questions about your attitude toward this. I’m sure you had a very strong interest in everything you were teaching and studying and writing. But to what degree did that intense interest sustain and motivate you vs reaching your goal of a PhD? No doubt both were very important. But it strikes me as almost impossible to do unless your interest in the material was the main motivation on a day-to-day basis.
At the time did you often feel that these ever so rigorous requirements were irrational, inhuman, or, in the context of living a full human life, not worth it?
It seems like intense apprenticeships like this are common if not standard in many professions and in the military. Among other things they must be intended to transform the person in some deep ways. What kind of personal transformations did these rigorous requirements work on you? For the most part were they transformations that were also personal goals of yours or were they more like side effects of reaching your goals?
Yes, I was intensely passionate about the topic. And the “busy-ness” of those days went a great way toward making me efficient, disciplined, and focused.
Your PhD is from Princeton Theological Seminary, right? And that’s not affiliated with Princeton University, right? Is it unusual for professors teaching religious studies in major research universities, like UNC, to have PhDs from seminaries vs other major research universities?
Yup, the seminary. A separate institution from the university (the university started *out* as the seminary, back in the day). I’t s pretty rare for a PhD from a seminary to teach in a secular research university. I was crazily lucky to get the job.
Hey,
I have a question regarding Matthew 27:9 and Mark 1:2-3. In both texts, the authors quote portions of the O.T. and seem to attribute these quotes to the wrong authors. I was reading a Christian resource, and that author defends Matthew and Mark suggesting that it was a common practice in the ancient world to conflate quotations and attribute them to the more popular author, in these cases, the more major prophet. However, he unsurprisingly didn’t cite any evidence. Do you know of any evidence for this claim? Or is it unfounded?
I”ve heard that too but I haven’t seen any evidence that I recall — other than authors misciting their sources (!) — including, say, church fathers quoting Matthew and saying it is Luke….
I wonder, do Biblical literalists have to believe that all Cretans are liars, evil brutes, and lazy gluttons? Did you believe that when you were a literalist?
We took it as a caricature. The problem is whemn a Cretan says it: is he then telling the truth that all Cretans are liars? If so, then they aren’t. But that means they are.
I know that among dissertation defenses in Physics it’s not uncommon to face apparently off-the-wall questions. The point here is not necessarily to come up with a “correct” answer, but rather to demonstrate how the candidate can reason their way through a novel problem (especially while under pressure).
[A (in)famous example of such a question is “How many piano tuners are there in New York City?” Again, the point is not to produce a specific “exact” answer, but to show how skillfully one can reason: e.g. “Well, there are eight million people in the city, and let’s assume one in X own a piano…. so, if a tuner could stay in business by servicing Y pianos… [etc].” And so on, until arrive at a reasonable “order of magnitude” number.)
But a real question here. You describe Prof Metzger addressing you as “Mr Ehrman”.
Do you recall the first time someone addressed you (for real) as “Dr Ehrman”?
I can only imagine that it might have been quite a thrill.
(I have a vision of some sort of semi-formal ceremony where your DokterVater addresses you as such to kind of seal the deal.)
Who first called me Dr. Ehrman? That night, my friends at the party!
Who first called me Dr. Ehrman? That night, my friends at the party!
I’m going to have to deduct for failure to say Sampson.
Hi Dr Ehrman!
Have you ever watched the movie The Last Supper? (About liberal grad students who are so left that they go right and start killing conservatives)
Thank you!
Nope! Sounds … unusual…
Tiresias?
Yup, good one. Though I think he meant historical figures.
What about blind Bartimaeus, in Mark 10:46f? Explain the significance of his name and why Luke omitted it, and why Matthew turned him into two people, with references to church fathers who cited these texts. (Ha, just want you to feel like old times again!) Actually, are these the sort of random questions that might get thrown at a PhD candidate?
Ah, good one. But I think he meant historical persons. And not, that’s not the kind of question you’d get at a place like Princeton Seminary. It’s be more like “Explain how Bultmann and Kasemann differed in their interpretation of Romans 4:1-2.
Hilarious, I had similar experiences through my four and one-half hours of oral boards in 1990 … I was overly prepared and a few of the experts I thought were going to “rake me over hot coals”, instead asked me my opinion about current difficult cases they were faced with that week … I too had a very big party a week later, when I found out I passed my boards!
I’m new to this. My question does not relate specifically to this topic, but it’s the first opportunity I’ve found to ask a question:
In Matthew 16:13 Jesus asks, “Whom do men say that I the Son of Man am?”
Surely Jesus is using the term in reference to himself?
He definitely is.
He definitely is.
Good Morning Dr. Ehrman.
Enjoyed reading the reflections on your relationship with Dr. Bruce M. Metzger.
I have only one book in my Canon section of my library from Dr Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance. Original Publication Date 1987. Reprint in paperback in 1997.
I assumed , probably very wrongly, that people who dedicate their lives to the study of the text of the New Testament mainly come at it from a point of view of personal faith.
Can you share your thoughts of where Dr Bruce Metzer was spiritually?
Atheism? Agnostic? Deism? Theism? Christian? Anglican?
Thanks for your very quick responses as noted above on your blog.
Starting to read your books now.
Randy Cates, New MA Theology Student.
He was a devout Christian and ordained Presbyterian minister, and a professor at a theological seminary training ministers. But the book is thoroughly scholarly and historical, with a tehological reflection or two only at the very end. Most of it is rigorously historical information for the purposes of establishing history.
It’s been too many years, so I don’t remember the exact question, but in my PhD orals in physical anthropology one of my committee members asked something like “Who do you consider the three greatest hominids of all time?’ I was stunned. Perhaps he did it to “loosen” me up, but I must admit I didn’t appreciate it nor did it raise my respect for him. It was an utter waste of time.
Did you start with “the guy who invented the wheel”?
Dr. Ehrman: How many languages was Dr. Metzger fluent in? How good was he , really?
I don’t think I ever heard him speak in otehr languages, but I’m sure he could (French and German?). He could read a ton of them (Spanish, German, Russian) and lots of ancient ones, including Greek, Latin, Syriac, Aramaic, Coptic, Hebrew, Armenian, and who knows what….
I am sure you were relieved, but in the aftermath (and after the hangover passed), did you go through a phase of irritation that your orals were a charade?
And many. many years later, having sat on the other side probably countless times, what do you think about it now?
Oh, I ended up with some very hard questions. But I never thought of it as a charade. I thought it was surprising and very funny, and was grateful that he was taking it easy on me.
We do, indeed, have free will. You have to get a bit deep into Quantum Physics to understand.
The latest book I’ve read that clearly (??, nothing in Quantum Theory can truly be called clear) explains my statement is:
The Grand Biocentric Design, How Life Creates Reality
Lanza, Robert; Pavsic, Matej. The Grand Biocentric Design (p. vii). BenBella Books, Inc.
It’s a deep book, but basically, it explains how everything is a probability wave. EVERYTHING. It’s consciousness in the now that instantiates reality. The past is only a probability, the future is only a probability. Only the now is real.
So why do we perceive continuity of solid objects, one instant to the next? It’s because consciousness determines it, from one instant to the next. Anything is possible. Consciousness determines reality. What you chose determines reality.
3 Bruce Metzger stories: You may remember our first assignment in our first PhD seminar at Princeton was from Dr. Metzger, to read the latin Muratorian Canon, for which there was no translation available. So I simply told him, “Dr. Metzger, I’ve never studied Latin,” expecting to get another assignment. Instead he directed me to the University Bookstore where I could get a Latin dictionary and Wheelock’s grammar. “But, Dr. Metzger, I don’t know *any* Latin.” “Yes, yes, the name is Wheelock.” So I had a week to learn Latin, plus read this mutilated document. Welcome to doctoral studies.
Later he was gracious enough to tutor me in Latin, usually a job shoved off on a grumpy graduate assistant. At our first meeting, he says, “Now get yourself a copy of the New Testament and Psalms in Latin. That way, when you do your morning devotions, you can study your Latin at the same time.” Seriously? Morning devotions? My response: “Sure, Dr. Metzger, I’ll do that.” If Bruce Metzger thinks seminarians are doing morning devotions, he wasn’t going to hear differently from me.
Ha!! I remember the interchange, but I remember it differently! I remember him telling you that they taught Latin at the evening school at Princeton High School and that you should consider it taking it. I also remember him giving you an exam that consisted of translating the Johannine prologue (!!)
Funny, I don’t remember that discussion at the seminar the way you do at all. Memory does funny things with stories. Maybe someone should write a book about that.
Ha! Maybe so. When I did Jesus Before the Gospels I spent two years reading NOTHING about the NT, jsut studies of memory by psychologists, anthropologiest, and sociologists. FAntastic. And I came away not only realizing that NT scholars who talk about oral cultures and memory actually appear to know very little about either one (not to name names, but, well, Bauckham), but also the psychologists have the best job on the planet. If you have any wit, humor, and intelligence and want to design an experiment involving memory, the world is at your feet.
Last story: at my oral exams (in front of the whole NT faculty), there was a brief discussion of my dissertation proposal, which was on sexual ethics in 1 Corinthians. Dr. Metzger’s question: “You remember in the Mithras liturgy, where the hero is stung on the testicles by the giant scorpion — What are you going to do with that?” Me: “Uh — I don’t know, Dr. Metzger.” Dr. Metzger: “Oh, okay.” All the other faculty smiling. He apparently did this all the time at public orals, bringing up items that even to seasoned scholars were terribly obscure, but to him seemed as relevant as anything else — but always gracious when neither the candidate nor the other faculty knew what he was talking about.
Yes indeed, I remember that one!!!