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New Testament Gospels

Was (the author of ) Matthew Really a Jew?
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Was (the author of ) Matthew Really a Jew?

Canonical Gospels, Public Forum

Was (the author of ) Matthew Really a Jew?

My previous posts were dealing with the themes and historical context of the Gospel of Matthew, along with a list of suggested readings for those who want to go deeper. I would like to go deeper myself by returning at greater length to one of the most puzzling features of Matthew, its relationship to Judaism. To begin with, I suggested in my post "Who, When, and Why" that the author himself was Jewish. I want to explore that at some greater depth here. The first thing to say is that not all New Testament scholars have thought so. Au contraire. One of the premier scholars of the NT and the historical Jesus is John Meier. Before he began his massive multi-volume study of the historical Jesus, called A Marginal Jew, he was principally known as an expert on the Gospel of Matthew. Meier’s view was that Matthew was not actually Jewish. One of his pieces of evidence is very interesting and has always struck me as rather amusing. It is this. In Matthew 21 we [...]

BDEhrman2025-01-21T11:22:02-05:00January 21st, 2025|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

The Gospel of Matthew: Who, When, and Why?

In my previous post we took the first step in understanding the Gospel of Matthew, grasping its major themes and emphases. It is also important to situate the book in its own historical context. For that we need to know something about the author, the approximate time he was writing it, and why he appears to have taken on the task. In short: Who, When, and Why? We start with the “who.” Our oldest full manuscripts of the Gospel call it “According to Matthew.” These manuscripts date from around 375 CE, and so were created about three hundred years after the book was in circulation. We wish we had earlier manuscripts to help us gauge when it was first called this. This designation (“according to Matthew”) is obviously not the original title. When I write a book, I don’t title it “According to Bart.” I give it a title. Whoever wrote this book either gave it a title that is lost (that seems unlikely), or simply published it anonymously (which happened a good deal in [...]

BDEhrman2025-01-21T11:40:26-05:00January 18th, 2025|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

The Gospel of Matthew in a Nutshell

Are you familiar with the Gospel of Matthew? If not, read on! If so, try to summarize its distinctive portrayal of Jesus in one sentence. (of say, 50 words or so max). If you really can’t, then again, read on! If you give it a try, check to see that you have both described it accurately and shown how it is distinctive among the other Gospels. Here’s a sentence that I might try if I were given the assignment: Matthew portrays Jesus as the miracle-working messiah who fulfilled the predictions of Scripture, taught the correct understanding of the Law of Moses, insisted his followers keep it by living lives of love, came to be rejected by his own people, but died for others before being raised from the dead. Hey, that’s exactly 50 words! Now let me expound a bit by discussing the most important aspects of Matthew’s Gospel. Matthew is often considered the “most Jewish” of the Gospels because of its repeated emphasis that Jesus is the Jewish messiah, sent from [...]

BDEhrman2025-01-17T09:43:52-05:00January 16th, 2025|Canonical Gospels|

Being Consistently Critical (In the Good Sense)

In my previous post I discussed the difference between approaching the Bible theologically and using it historically. It is often hard to explain to people to that doing "critical" scholarship does not mean being a pain in the neck by criticizing everything. It means using "critical judgment" in order to to establish what is true. That's another way of simply saying that you don't accept everything you hear or read, but evaluate it to see if it's right or not. My sense is that most people exercise critical judgment about something things and not other things -- for example, these days in particular, when they believe flippin' everything they hear from one news source but reject everything they hear from another. (From whatever side of the social/political spectrum). But I'm not here to talk politics (thank god): I'm interested for now in history. How do we know that a written account or oral report of something that happened in the past actually happened? Or happened in the way it was related? We [...]

BDEhrman2024-12-25T10:43:23-05:00December 28th, 2024|Canonical Gospels, Reflections and Ruminations|

Oral Traditions and the Dates of Our Gospels

As many of you know, this past year I published the 8th edition of my textbook The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the New Testament (Oxford University Press, 2024), but this time, rather than doing it myself, I asked my colleague Hugo Mendez to join me in editing / updating it, and truth be told, since hey, I believe in telling the truth, he did the vast bulk of the work on this one. Most of the changes came in his rewriting sections that needed to be brought up to snuff with current scholarship, including the one dealing with the sources of Synoptics, since a lot of scholars (though not the majority, so far as I can tell) are inclined to think the Q source never existed (including Hugo!) and the entire chapter on the Gospel of John, on which Hugo is a major expert and the paradigm of how to understand it has changed significantly over the past five years or so. In ANY event, one of the features I've always liked [...]

BDEhrman2024-10-14T16:07:25-04:00October 23rd, 2024|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels|

The First Ancient Christian List of the Books (allegedly) of the New Testament

The first church father to name Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as the four Gospels in the New Testament is Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons in Gaul (i.e., the ancient forerunner of Lyon, France), in his five-volume work, "Against Heresies" in 180 CE. He spent significant time in Rome itself before his appointment in Gaul, and he considered the Roman church to be the center of Christendom at his time, but there are no Roman authors before him who say anything about it. The important teacher / philosopher Justin (who acquired the epithet "Martyr"), from whom we have three surviving writings about Jesus, Scripture, and the truth of Christianity, quotes the Gospels but never indicates who wrote them. There is another (apparent) witness to the fourfold Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John from Irenaeus’s time, and also appears to be connected with Rome -- and as it turns out, it is the first list of canonical NT books that we have from antiquity. This comes to us in the fragmentary Latin text [...]

BDEhrman2024-10-11T17:16:47-04:00October 5th, 2024|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

Paul and the Anachronistic Origins of Early Christianity – Part 2 by Dr. Robyn Faith Walsh

Here is the second post by Robyn Faith Walsh, challenging what the majority of scholars think and teach about the relationship of Paul and the Gospels, and the implications for early Christianity. Again, this is related to her book, which you can find here: The Origins of Early Christian Literature. ****************************** Paul makes sense as a “source” for the gospel writers for several reasons. The first relates to literary practices and social context: given what we know about the processes of ancient authors, it is likely that the gospel writers would have sought out any available material about the Christ movement as they created their works. And the only available writings that we know existed before the gospels are Paul’s letters; that some of these letters even survive to the degree that we have them suggests they were circulated and/or known in some measure. Yet, as discussed in Part 1, it is exceptionally rare to find studies that link Paul directly with the gospels, even if this makes good chronological sense. Paul [...]

Diane2024-09-16T12:35:38-04:00September 22nd, 2024|Canonical Gospels, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Paul and the Anachronistic Origins of Early Christianity – Part 1 by Dr. Robyn Faith Walsh

I am happy to publish two guest posts by Robyn Faith Walsh, Assistant Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Miami, based on her book The Origins of Christian History. She stakes out some controversial claims here about the Gospels, contrary to what you often hear. What do you think? ****************************** Studies on the so-called origins and development of the Jesus Movement largely focus on the figure of Jesus, his teachings, and biography. This is evident in courses and textbooks that begin with the narratives of the canonical gospels. It is also evident in scholarship that seeks out evidence for the historical Jesus, Jesus’ earliest followers, and/or early Christian “oral traditions” (such as Q). In each case, Jesus is presumed to be the starting point for Christian history. Such approaches, whether consciously or not, mirror the strategic aim of the New Testament canon—namely, to establish Jesus as the religion’s founder via a compilation of late first century biographies (bioi). These approaches persist despite knowing that the gospels are not [...]

Diane2024-09-16T12:35:17-04:00September 21st, 2024|Canonical Gospels, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

How Scholarship Changed My Life

I continue now with the backstory of why I wrote my book Misquoting Jesus; up to this point I’ve explained how I became an evangelical Christian and, after high school, made a beeline for Moody Bible Institute and became interested in understanding how we got the New Testament – not in the original writings, which we no longer have, but only in later copies which have lots of mistakes in them. I continue now from there, with another excerpt the Introduction of my book Misquoting Jesus (Harper, 2005) ****************************** At the end of my three years at Moody (it was a three-year diploma) I had done well in my courses and was more serious than ever about becoming a Christian scholar. My idea at the time was that there were plenty of highly educated scholars among the evangelical Christians, but there were not many evangelicals among the (secular) highly educated scholars. And so I wanted to become an evangelical “voice,” as it were, in secular circles, by getting degrees that would allow me to teach [...]

BDEhrman2024-08-15T10:29:56-04:00August 10th, 2024|Bart’s Biography, Canonical Gospels|

Toe-to-Toe with Evangelical New Testament Scholar Peter Williams: Can We Trust the Gospels?

I recently reposted a debate I did with Peter Williams about the signficance of textual variants for the New Testament. It reminded me of another debate we did some five years ago, on an even more pressing question, whether the Gospels can be seen as completely trustworthy. This one was televised. I thought it was particularly interesting because Peter is not a simply a Christian apologist who uses other peoples' scholarship to promote his religious beliefs; he himself is a bona fide scholar with a PhD from Cambridge, and one of the leading experts on the ancient Syriac version of the New Testament. Peter has been a friend for a long time, and is also a committed evangelical Christian who does not believe there are mistakes in the Gospels. I *so* disagree with that. Our debate was on the Christian Radio program "Unbelievable" under their new series "The Big Conversation" Season 2-Episode 3, hosted by Justin Brierley. It was a long and interesting debate. Peter has written Can We Trust the Gospels? and C S [...]

BDEhrman2024-06-08T16:17:45-04:00June 19th, 2024|Bart's Debates, Canonical Gospels|

How Can We Even IMAGINE an “Original” Text of the Gospels?

QUESTION: When it comes to the gospels, how do we define the ‘original text’? Do we define it as the original manuscript that was first penned by the author, or do we define it as the gospels in their most settled canonical form? RESPONSE: As it turns out, this is a complicated and endlessly fascinating question that, so far as I have been able to work out over the past twenty years of thinking about it, has no clear and obvious answer! By way of very simple background for readers not completely on top of the textual situation we are confronting when it comes to the Gospels (or any of the other books of the New Testament) (or of any ancient Christian writings at all) (or, in fact, of any writings of any kind at all that come down to us from antiquity) we do not have the “originals” (however we define that term: see below!). What we have are copies made from copies, which were themselves made from copies. Most [...]

BDEhrman2024-05-06T23:37:47-04:00May 9th, 2024|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Making the Gospels Say What You WANT Them To Say

Here is the second post on the Very Reverend Robert Barron’s curious critiques of my book How Jesus Became God. I will not be doing a point-by-point assessment of everything he says; I frankly found none of his criticisms very convincing, largely because, as I indicated in the previous post, he does not appear to have read my book very carefully, but at best skimmed it to find what he was expecting to find. But I thought I would deal at least with his opening counter-argument, over whether Jesus saw himself or proclaimed himself to be God. Here is what he says. Ehrman’s major argument for the thesis that Jesus did not consider himself divine is that explicit statements of Jesus’ divine identity can be found only in the later fourth Gospel of John, whereas the three Synoptic Gospels, earlier and thus presumably more historically reliable, do not feature such statements from Jesus himself or the Gospel writers. This is so much nonsense. It is indeed the case that the most direct affirmations [...]

BDEhrman2024-03-24T10:03:08-04:00March 30th, 2024|Bart's Critics, Canonical Gospels|

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 [...]

BDEhrman2024-03-27T11:43:13-04:00March 28th, 2024|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels|

How Much Fact, How Much Fiction? The Life of Peter

History or Legend? Fact or Fiction? A bit of both? It’s hard to know how to understand stories about the apostle Peter found both inside and outside the New Testament. I began with some examples yesterday, involving his allegedly raising people from the dead. OK, probably fiction, but still – presented as fact! I pick up there with this post, taken from my book Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene (Oxford University, 2006). *************************** The resuscitation of dead bodies may not seem all that remarkable to readers of the New Testament. To be sure, we don’t see this kind of thing happen every day, but they do seem to happen in the Bible. Other miraculous events, though, while no less “impossible” in a literal sense, may strike us as a bit more peculiar and subject to doubt. Consider the episode of Peter and the smoked tuna fish. Peter is back in Rome, trying to convince the crowds that his God is all powerful and deserves to be worshiped. They ask him for a [...]

BDEhrman2024-02-26T14:25:18-05:00February 28th, 2024|Canonical Gospels, Christian Apocrypha|

The Disciple Peter in History and Legend
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The Disciple Peter in History and Legend

Canonical Gospels, Christian Apocrypha

The Disciple Peter in History and Legend

Probably my best-named book is Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene. This is a book I wrote so I could use the title. (A) In fact a publisher wanted to give me a contract for the book, but I turned it down because they wanted me to do other apostles too. NO! I said. It’s gotta be these three. It’s perfect! They disagreed. Some people just don’t have a sense of humor. So I went with a different publisher. (!) The short thread I just did on Mary Magdalene gave me an occasion to look back at the book. I recall writing it with some fondness, in part because it is such a great topic: three of the most important figures in the early years of Christianity: Jesus' closest disciple, his most important convert/missionary, and the one who is said to have found his empty tomb. All three have great stories told about them in the New Testament, and from there the stories get, if anything, even more interesting. Highly legendary, but just as highly intriguing. [...]

BDEhrman2024-02-26T14:26:04-05:00February 27th, 2024|Canonical Gospels, Christian Apocrypha|

When Did Mary Magdalene Become a Prostitute?

Mary Magdalene has become one of the most talked about figures from the life of Jesus, even though she hardly ever shows up in the Gospel accounts about him (during his public ministry, just in one verse, total!, Luke 8:2). (She shows up only at the crucifixion and, most important, the empty tomb). In my last post I began to explore the tradition -- not found in the New Testament -- that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. Here I pick up the thread where I left it off. I had mentioned a number of passages that people read *AS IF* they were talking about Mary Magdalene, even though her name does not occur in them. Here I'll show that none of these passages is about her. And then I'll explain why everyone today thinks she is a prostitute and where that idea came from. Spoiler alert: a sixth-century Pope! Once again, this comes from my book on Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene (Oxford University Press, 2006) ****************************** None of these New Testament stories, however, deals [...]

BDEhrman2024-02-19T18:41:34-05:00February 24th, 2024|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Women in Early Christianity|

Was Mary Magdalene a Prostitute?

It is "common knowledge" that Mary Magdalene is portrayed as a prostitute in the New Testament, but like so much "common knowledge" this view, while common, is not "knowledge." In fact it's not true. I get asked about this on occasion, and so I thought I should devote a couple of posts on it. I discuss most of what I think we can know in the final section of my book Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene (Oxford University Press, 2006) (A book I remember fondly, in part because I wrote it in a coffee shop in Wimbledon!). In that book I devote six chapters to each of these important Christian figures, in each case explaining what we can know about them historically and then what we can know about the later legends that sprang up about them. In my introductory comments to my discussion of Mary Magdalene, I explain why she is widely thought of as a prostitute (in the popular imagination, not by scholars), even though she is not called that in [...]

BDEhrman2024-02-19T18:37:31-05:00February 22nd, 2024|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Women in Early Christianity|

Changing the Past in Light of the Present
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Changing the Past in Light of the Present

Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus

Changing the Past in Light of the Present

Did people in oral cultures even care if stories were changed? We do! We have an interest not just in story but in establishing with some kind of accuracy what actually happened in the past, whether it is about the Civil War, the assassination of JFK, or the last election. Did people in oral cultures have a way to know the past with historical accuracy? Did they care? Here I end this thread on what we know about how oral cultures passed along their traditions – not just their myths and customs but also the past events that affected their communities, in what Jan Vansina calls “testimonies” about the past, as shared by word of mouth in non-literate cultures. Were they concerned to repeat the past "accurately"? Again this comes from my 2017 book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne). ****************************** Traditions that are passed along by word of mouth in oral cultures experience massive changes not simply because people have bad memories. That may be true as well, but even more important, as Vansina [...]

BDEhrman2024-02-19T18:20:56-05:00February 20th, 2024|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

When is “The Same” Memory/Tradition/Story Not Actually “The Same”?

Do we mean the same thing by “the same” that people in oral cultures do? Here I pick up on my discussion of oral cultures; in the previous post I talked about how Milman Parry began to study one such culture, and his discoveries were starting. Professional memorizers/reciters would claim that various performances of the “same” tradition/account/story/song was in fact the “same” as earlier performances. But, well, apparently not. At least by our standards. Again, this is excerpted from my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2017). ****************************** How different could “the same” song be in different versions? Social anthropologist Jack Goody has noted that when Milman Parry first met a singer named Avdo, he took down by dictation a lengthy song that he performed called “The Wedding of Smailagić.” It was 12,323 lines in length. Some years later Albert Lord met up with Avdo again, and took down a performance of “the same” song. This time it was 8,488 lines.[1] Parry himself observed this phenomenon. He at one time had Avdo sing [...]

BDEhrman2024-02-21T11:24:26-05:00February 17th, 2024|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

How Do We Know About Oral Cultures? By Starting Where You’d Never Suspect!

How do oral cultures “work”? How do they pass along their traditions? How accurately? And why did scholars first get interested in the question. Not at ALL in the way that you might think! Here’s how I discuss the matter in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2017). The Beginning of Studies of Orality: Singers in Yugoslavia The twentieth-century study of oral cultures can be traced back to the groundbreaking work of Milman Parry (1902-35), a scholar of classics and epic poetry at Harvard, and his student Albert Lord (1912-91). As a classicist, Parry was especially interested in the Homeric Question, which is actually a set of questions about Homer, the alleged author of the great classics the Iliad and the Odyssey. Was there a Homer? Were these books actually written by him? Were the two books even written by the same person? Even more, is each book itself a single literary composition? Is each of them instead a collection of earlier stories that have been patched together? Is it possible [...]

BDEhrman2024-02-09T12:25:13-05:00February 15th, 2024|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

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