Canonical Gospels Archives - Page 19 of 32 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

New Testament Gospels

Bart Ehrman Resurrection of Jesus: A Blast from the Past

On this Easter Sunday, I thought I should say something about the resurrection of Jesus. It turns out I've said a lot over the years on the blog (I just checked!). Here's a post from about five years ago, giving not my personal views but those of another well-respected New Testament scholar who, like me (we are a rare breed), is not personally a believer. Bart Ehrman Resurrection of Jesus: What Are My Thoughts? One of the first books that I have re-read in thinking about how it is the man Jesus came to be thought of as God is Gerd Lüdemann’s, The Resurrection of Christ: A Historical Inquiry (2004). Lüdemann is an important and interesting scholar. He was a professor of New Testament at Göttingen in Germany, and for a number of years split his time between there and Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville. He is a major figure in scholarship and is noteworthy for not being a Christian. He does not believe Jesus was literally, physically, raised from the dead, and he thinks [...]

BDEhrman2024-02-22T11:11:37-05:00April 16th, 2017|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Paul and His Letters|

My Meditation Practice and Women at the Empty Tomb: Readers Mailbag April 9, 2017

I will be dealing with two questions in this week’s mailbag, one about me personally – do I meditate? – and one about the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection: in all our narratives it is specifically women who are said to have found the empty tomb and so to be the first witnesses to the resurrection. Given ancient views that denigrate women, is it likely that anyone would make up such a story? If someone made up the tomb-discovery story, wouldn’t they have claimed that that *men* found the tomb empty? And doesn’t that suggest the story really happened as narrated? QUESTION: Do you meditate? If so, which techniques do you use? Do you find it helpful? RESPONSE: Yes indeed, I do meditate. Every New Years I make it a resolution to meditate each and every day. This year I’m doing pretty well *except* when I’m traveling (which, unfortunately, is a lot this semester); that’s probably when I need most to meditate and I just have real trouble scheduling it in. Not good. [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:27:36-04:00April 9th, 2017|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Is Mark’s Gospel Unsophisticated?

I’ll be be dealing with just one question in this week’s Readers’ Mailbag, since the response will require some explaining. I has to do with the literary artistry of the Gospel of Mark – is it a fairly unsophisticated account of Jesus’ life and death? The question itself will require a bit of set-up and explanation. In an earlier post I argued that Mark’s Gospel almost certainly ended in chapter sixteen at verse 8. Jesus has been crucified, dead, and buried. On the third day some women go to his tomb to anoint his body more appropriately for burial, but when they arrive the tomb is already opened, Jesus’ body is not in it, but a young man is, who asks them if they are looking for Jesus of Nazareth. He then tells them that he has been raised and that they, the women, are to go tell the disciples that Jesus will meet them in Galilee. The women, though, flee the tomb and don’t say anything to anyone because they were afraid. In my [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:30:13-04:00April 2nd, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Does Jesus Claim to Be God in Mark? And My Former Converts. Mailbag March 19, 2017

Two questions in this week’s Mailbag, one about whether Jesus was claiming to be God in the Gospel of Mark, and the other about my personal life: whether today, as an agnostic, I ever meet people I once converted when I was a gung-ho conservative evangelical Christian. If you have a question you would like me to address, ask away! QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman, the other day I was discussing with an Evangelical pastor that the sayings of Jesus in which he claimed to be God were only found in the Gospel of John. He had me read Mark 2:5-7. This is the verse where Jesus heals a paralytic and says to him “Son, your sins are forgiven”. The religious leaders say “Who can forgive sins but God alone”. The pastor said that this shows that even in the earliest Gospel Mark, Jesus claimed to be God. I wasn’t sure how to respond but told him that there was still a big difference in the comparison. Do you have any thoughts or comments in which [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:31:17-04:00March 19th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

The First Textual Variant in the Gospel of Mark

I have been talking about some of the textual variants in Mark, and wanted to address the very first one that can be found in our textual witnesses, one that occurs in the first verse of the Gospel. I have decided to do so by showing how a relatively hard-core argument is made by textual scholars. To do that I have copied in my discussion of the passage in my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. This was not a Barnes & Noble book, but was written for academics. But I think it’s useful to get a sense for that kind of discourse on occasion (OK: rare occasion) on the blog. So here it is. As you’ll see, it presupposes some knowledge of adoptionistic Christologies, the topic of yesterday’s post. (I have eliminated part of the discussion that gets particularly technical, involving the surviving manuscripts that evidence the textual variant) (And apologies for the odd spacing...) ***************************************************************** The vast majority of manuscripts introduce the Gospel of Mark with the words: “The beginning of the Gospel [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:34:16-04:00February 27th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Jesus’ Teaching in Aramaic and the Books of the Canon: Mailbag February 24, 2017

There are two interesting questions in this week’s Readers’ Mailbag: one about Jesus’ teaching in Aramaic and the other about which books did not make it into the New Testament. If you have a question yourself, ask it as a comment and I will add it to the burgeoning list! QUESTION: Even though Christ taught in Aramaic, was there absolutely nothing written down in Aramaic? Is there much of a language translation problem going from Aramaic to Greek? (Again, it’s mind boggling to consider how many opportunities for error to creep in by accident or design) RESPONSE: Yes, I’m afraid that’s right: we don’t have any writings from any early Christians in the language that Jesus spoke, Aramaic. That makes things rather complicated when it comes to deciding what Jesus really said – that is, if we want to have an idea of his exact words. Let me make two points about that. First, there are some passages in the Gospels where the author will preserve an Aramaic word or phrase on Jesus’ [...]

BDEhrman2017-09-22T13:23:59-04:00February 24th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Heresy and Orthodoxy, Historical Jesus, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

An Interesting Scribal Change at the Beginning of Mark

Since I’ve started saying something about how scribes altered the Gospel of Mark over the years as they copied it (yesterday I mentioned eight changes made by scribes in just the five verses, Mark 14:27-31) I would like to pursue this theme a bit, and talk about some of the more interesting changes. In this post I’ll pick just one that occurs right at the beginning of the Gospel. It’s an interesting change because scribes appear to have made it in order to eliminate a possible contradiction that was originally found in the Gospel – already in verse 2! The first verse of Mark’s Gospel is often understood to be a kind of title for the entire account: “The Beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” To that opening statement, most manuscripts add the words “the Son of God.” I’ll talk about that textual variant in my next post, because it is complicated and interesting too – were those additional words originally found in v. 1 or not? And why would it matter? It turns [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:34:33-04:00February 22nd, 2017|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

How Do We Know When the Gospels Were Written: A Mailbag Blast from the Past

I occasionally get asked how we know when the Gospels were written. Why do scholars date them when they do? I answered that question here on the blog over four years ago now. Most of you weren't on the blog then. And if you were, and you're like me, you'll have no recollection at all about what was said four years ago! So here is the post I made back in May 2012. **************************************************************************** QUESTION: How are the dates that the Gospels were composed determined? I've read that Mark is usually dated to 70 or later because of the reference to the destruction of the temple. Is this the only factor that leads scholars to conclude that it was composed in 70 CE or later or are there other factors? I've heard that Luke and Matthew are likewise dated aroun 80-85 CE to give time for Mark to have been in circulation enough to be a source for them. Is this accurate? How is John usually dated to around 95 CE (or whatever the correct [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:34:57-04:00February 19th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

The Gospel Truth: Sometimes A Little Hazy

One of my all-time favorite interviewers is Terry Gross, the host and co-executive producer of Fresh Air on NPR. I have done her show six times over the years for various books I've written, and it has been a terrific experience each time. She is an amazing interviewer. She asks really perceptive questions and knows how to get to what is especially interesting about a guest's work. If you've listened to her show, you'll know that it always sounds like she is in the same radio studio with the person she is interviewing, talking to them face to face. That's not how it is. The person being interviewed is physically somewhere else, in a radio studio in their own location, and the interview is happening over headphones and cable hookups. It certainly never seems that way! But I've never met her face to face. Here is an interview I did with her on March 4th, 2009 about my book "Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don't Know About Them)." [...]

BDEhrman2017-09-22T13:27:06-04:00February 16th, 2017|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Video Media|

The Ending of Mark in the King James Bible

I have been talking about passages of the New Testament that can be found in the King James Bible but were not in the “original” text of the New Testament. I should stress, there are not thousands of these: among the hundreds of thousands of differences among our manuscripts, most are not significantly expanded texts that hugely affect a passage/book. But some areAmong those is the entire ending of the Gospel of Mark, as found in later manuscripts and the KJV. Here is what I say about it in my book Misquoting Jesus. The Last Twelve Verses of Mark The next example that I will consider may not be as familiar to the casual reader of the Bible, but it has been highly influential in the history of biblical interpretation and poses comparable problems for the scholar of the textual tradition of the New Testament. This example comes from the Gospel of Mark, and concerns its ending. In Mark’s account of Jesus’ passion, we are told that he is crucified and then buried by [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:40:06-04:00February 4th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

The Woman Taken in Adultery in the King James Version

Among the most popular stories about Jesus that you will find in the King James Version is one that, alas, was not originally in the Bible, but was added by scribes. This is the famous account of Jesus and the Woman Taken in Adultery. The story is so well known that even most modern translations will include it – but place it in brackets with a footnote indicating there are doubts about its originality or, in some translations, making an even stronger note that it probably does not belong in the New Testament. In fact, even though it is technically true that the passage “probably” does not belong in the New Testament, the reality is that it is not a debated point among textual scholars and translators. The passage was not part of the Gospel of John originally. Or any other Gospel. People know it so well principally because it appeared in the KJV Here is what I say about the passage in my book Misquoting Jesus. ****************************** The Woman Taken in Adultery The story [...]

BDEhrman2021-10-31T12:29:15-04:00February 1st, 2017|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Women in Early Christianity|

Is the New Testament Authentic? Readers’ Mailbag December 4, 2016

QUESTION Dr Ehrman, I found this attack against you: Bart likes to deceive his listener by claiming more variations and more copies give birth to less authenticity. Actually flip that and you’ll begin to “see the light”. The Bible manuscripts were transmitted not in a linear way, as in “Chinese whispers” but geometrically as in 1 produced by 5 others which in turn then produced, say 20, etc. I think you already dealt with this claim, but I am unable to find your post. RESPONSE I have to admit that I have a hard time responding to this objection because I don’t know what the person is talking about. Maybe someone else can enlighten me. For openers, I’m not sure what he means that I “like” to deceive my listeners – I think that must mean I do this a lot. And the “deception” appears to be that I think lots of variations in the manuscripts of the New Testament make something “less authentic.” But what does the person mean? Exactly what is less [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:47:48-04:00December 4th, 2016|Bart's Critics, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Response to my Newsweek Article on Christmas

Earlier this week I posted my Newsweek article on Christmas from four years ago, and several people have asked me what kind of reaction I received. I made two posts about that at the time. Here’s the first. I find this post rather humorous now, years later, since I was obviously being wildly defensive (halfway through the response) before denying I was defensive at all (at the end)! What funny people we can be…. ******************************************************** My Newsweek article this week has generated a lot of response. I have no idea what kind of comments they typically get for their stories, but so far, as of now, there have been 559 on mine; and most of them are negative – to no one’s surprise – written by people (conservative evangelicals and fundamenalists for the most part, from what I can tell) who think that the Gospels are perfectly accurate in what they have to say about Jesus – not just at his birth but for his entire life. A lot of these respondents think that anyone [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:48:19-04:00December 2nd, 2016|Bart's Critics, Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Newsweek Article on Christmas: Part 2

Yesterday I gave Part 1 of my Newsweek article on Christmas, published in 2012. Here is Part 2! *************************************************************** Most modern readers who are not already familiar with these stories [in the apocryphal Gospels such as the Proto-Gospel of James] tend to find them far-fetched. That’s almost always the case with miraculous accounts that we have never heard before – they sound implausible and “obviously” made up, as legends and fabrications. Rarely do we have the same reaction to familiar stories known from childhood that are also spectacularly miraculous, and that probably sound just as bizarre to outsiders who hear them for the first time. Are the stories about Jesus’ birth that are in the New Testament any less far-fetched? It depends whom you ask. This past November, Pope Benedict XVI published his third book on the life of Jesus, this one focusing on the New Testament accounts of his birth, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives. Before his ascent to the head of the Catholic Church, Joseph Ratzinger was best known as a leading [...]

BDEhrman2020-12-17T16:30:13-05:00November 29th, 2016|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Looking Ahead to Christmas: A Blast from the Past

With the passing of Thanksgiving, Christmas season has now officially arrived (whether that brings you joy, despair, or indifference!). Here is a post that I made exactly four years, prompted in part by my decision to publish an edition of “other” Gospels (that did not make it into the New Testament, including some that deal with the birth of Jesus. ****************************************************** Right now I have the “other” Gospels on my mind. It’s true, I often have them on my mind, since they have been a focus for a good deal of my research over the past few years, and will continue to be for some years to come. But just now, they are particularly on my mind even though the book I’m currently writing (How Jesus Became God) is about something else. They’re on my mind for three reasons. First, I’ve agreed with Oxford Press, to produce, along with my colleague Zlatko Plese, an English-only edition of The Apocryphal Gospels, which came out in a Greek/Latin/Coptic-English edition last year; this new edition will include only the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:51:57-04:00November 27th, 2016|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Gospel Evidence that Jesus Existed

Jesus existed. In yesterday’s post, I began to show how Jesus is the best attested Palestinian Jew of the first century if we look only at external evidence. Josephus is better attested because we have his own writings. I am also not including Paul because I’m talking only about Jews from Palestine; he was from the Diaspora. The Gospel Sources We have four narrative accounts of Jesus’ life and death, written by different people at different times and in different places, based on numerous sources that no longer survive. Jesus was not invented by Mark. He was also known to Matthew, Luke, and John, and to the sources which they used (Q, M, L, and the various sources of John). All of this was within the first century. Non-New Testament & Non-Gospel Sources - We Have Many! This is not to mention sources from outside the New Testament that know that Jesus was a historical figure – for example, 1 Clement and the documents that make up the Didache. Or -- need I say it? [...]

BDEhrman2022-07-31T16:19:24-04:00October 28th, 2016|Bart's Debates, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

The Gospels and the Existence of Jesus

If you have only thirty minutes to build a case that Jesus of Nazareth really existed, how do you do it? That was the problem I was confronted with this past Friday at the Mythicist Milwaukee conference, in my debate with Robert Price. Rather than mount a lot of arguments and say very little about each one of them (what we used to call “the shotgun approach” when I was in high school), I thought it would be better just to make a few points and pack them up with evidence and reasoning. The first and most obvious point, to me, is this. Jesus is one of the two best attested Jews living in Palestine in the entire first century. There were hundreds of thousands of Jews in some way connected with Palestine at the time Only one is better attested than Jesus (with a proviso, which I’ll explain). That one is the Jewish historian Josephus. The reason he is better known than Jesus is because he has left us a large number of writings [...]

BDEhrman2021-11-03T10:29:20-04:00October 27th, 2016|Bart's Debates, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Public Forum|

Why Don’t People See Discrepancies in the Bible? Readers’ Mailbag October 15, 2016

QUESTION: I assume that Bart Ehrman today when he reads the books of the New Testament sees large discrepancies between them. My question is about the precocious sixteen-year-old Ehrman, Did he too see this variousness (which opens up the possibility of inconsistency)? Or did it all as he read it cohere, seem of a piece, convey one doctrinally comprehensive and orthodox and uniform message? And if it did, how does today’s Ehrman think young Ehrman managed to overlook all those obvious discrepancies? RESPONSE: The sixteen-year-old Bart Ehrman who revered the Bible was probably like almost every sixteen-year-old on the planet who reveres the Bible. We were (and people are still now) taught that the Bible was the inspired Word of God. We knew that it was God’s revelation to humans before we had ever read a word of it. Even before I was an evangelical Christian I simply assumed it had been given by God. If that’s what a person simply assumes before coming to the Bible, then when she or he reads the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:01:32-04:00October 15th, 2016|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Anti-Judaism in the Gospels: A Blast From the Past

Four years ago now I offered up the following response to a question about whether the Gospels of the New Testament are anti-Semitic. Here's the post! ****************************************************************** QUESTION: It is in my understanding that it is of common scholarly opinion that the Gospel writers (at least Matthew, Luke, and John) were rather anti-Semitic in nature. Correct? How would you respond to that claim? After reading “The Origin of Satan” by Elaine Pagels, it is a subject that deeply interests me, and I would love to hear your professional opinion on the matter. RESPONSE: This question actually ties into some of the things I’ve been thinking about with respect to the stories of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and so it seems appropriate to answer it now rather than in a separate blog. I won’t deal with the question on the very broadest level, but will consider one feature of the Gospels that shows that with the passing of time they become more and more anti-Jewish. I should say at the outset that I do not think [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:01:41-04:00October 14th, 2016|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

The Inerrancy of the Bible? And Those Who Doubt. Readers’ Mailbag October 2, 2016

How did I deal with inconsistencies and discrepancies as a young Christian? And why does the NT indicate that some of Jesus' own followers doubted the resurrection? Those are the two questions I deal with in this week's readers' mailbag. QUESTION: I assume that Bart Ehrman today when he reads the books of the New Testament sees large discrepancies between them. My question is about the precocious sixteen-year-old Ehrman, Did he too see this variety (which opens up the possibility of inconsistency)? Or did it all as he read it cohere, seem of a piece, convey one doctrinally comprehensive and orthodox and uniform message? And if it did, how does today’s Ehrman think young Ehrman managed to overlook all those obvious discrepancies? RESPONSE: Ah, right, my former life! When I was young and Christian – say, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two – I was already passionate about the Bible, but was absolutely convinced that it was, in every way, the Word of God. I never doubted it. And I never saw [...]

BDEhrman2022-12-28T17:59:54-05:00October 2nd, 2016|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

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