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New Testament Gospels

Why The Gospels Are Anonymous

Among the interesting questions I’ve received recently is the following. It’s on something other than How Jesus Became God! Rather than type out a completely new answer, I’ve resorted to the discussion I set out in my book Forged, cited here, as relevant, in full. QUESTION: I still can’t quite grasp why the Gospels were written anonymously. What is the prevailing theory? Why did the authors not attempt to pass themselves off as disciples by stating so at the beginning of their writings? RESPONSE: It is always interesting to ask why an author chose to remain anonymous, never more so than with the Gospels of the New Testament. In some instances an ancient author did not need to name himself because his readers knew perfectly well who he was and did not need to be told. That is almost certainly the case with the letters of 1, 2, and 3 John. These are private letters send from someone who calls himself “the elder” to a church in another location. It is safe to assume that [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:38:44-04:00April 12th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Early Judaism, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Fuller Account of Resurrection Discrepancies

Here is the bit that follows the part of my chapter 4 where I broke off yesterday, on the Gospels as sources for what happened at the resurrection event, starting with the same sentence I ended with yesterday. ****************************************************************************************************************** There are other discrepancies, but this is enough. I should stress that some of these differences can scarcely be reconciled unless you want to do a lot of imaginative interpretive gymnastics, of the kind fundamentalists love to do, when reading the texts. For example, what does one do with the fact that the women apparently meet different persons at the tomb? In Mark it is one man, in Luke it is two men, and in Matthew it is one angel. The way this discrepancy is sometimes reconciled,by readers who can’t believe there could be a genuine discrepancy in the text, is by saying that the women actually met two angels at the tomb. Matthew mentions only one of them, but never denies there was a second one; moreover, the angels were in human guise, so Luke [...]

BDEhrman2021-06-17T10:21:51-04:00April 2nd, 2013|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels|

Resurrection Narratives in the Gospels

Back to issues related to my book. In ch. 4 I talk about why the Gospels are problematic as "witnesses" to the resurrection (apart from the question of whether you can have *any* historical "evidence" for a miracle). This is the first part of my short discussion there, again, in rough draft ******************************************************************************************************************** We have already seen why the Gospels of the New Testament – our earliest available narratives of Jesus’ life – are so problematic for historians who want to know what really happened. They are written decades later, not by eyewitnesses, but by authors living in different countries from Jesus and speaking a different language. These authors are basing their accounts on written sources and, especially, oral traditions that had been in circulation year after year, decade after decade, until the authors themselves wrote them down. In this long process of oral transmission, stories about Jesus were changed, embellished, and made up. That in no small measure is why we find so many discrepancies and contradictions in our various Gospel accounts. Story tellers [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:40:41-04:00April 1st, 2013|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels|

Jesus as Divine in the Synoptics

In yesterday’s post I pointed out that if one asks about an early Christain text: “Does it portray Jesus as God,” then almost always if the answer is Yes (which it usually is), it has to be qualified: “Yes, in *some sense*. “ And the question is always, in *what* sense? The reason I stress this point is that for many years – until about six months ago – I was quite vehement, in person and in print, that the Synoptic Gospels did not portray Jesus as divine, but only the Gospel of John did. It’s true – I still think and, I suspect, always will think – that in the Gospel of John there is little doubt about the divinity of Jesus. As we have seen, the Gospel opens with the amazing poem: “ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came into being through him, and apart from him nothing came into being that came into being. In him was life, [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:44:39-04:00March 3rd, 2013|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels|

Early Christology: How I Have Changed My Mind

I’m ready now to get back to the issues involved with early Christology and the question of How Jesus Became God. In this post I’ll quickly review what I’ve covered up till now and indicate a major change in my thinking that has happened over the past six months. In these posts I have been arguing that there were two separate streams of early Christology (this too has been a major shift in my thinking, and is closely related to the one I will be discussing momentarily). The first Christologies were almost certainly based on the idea of “exaltation.” Christ, as a human being, came to be exalted to the right hand of God, where he was made to share in God’s status as a reward for his faithfulness. The earliest Christians – the earthly disciples themselves (or at least some of them: we have no way of knowing if they all “converted” to believe this about Jesus) --thought that this happened at Jesus’ resurrection, where God “made him” the Son of God (and thus [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:44:46-04:00March 3rd, 2013|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine|

John’s Logos and Jewish Wisdom

In yesterday’s post I began to discuss the Prologue of the Gospel of John, which contains a poem that celebrates Christ as the Word of God that became human. This Word of God was with God in the beginning of all things, and was himself God; through him the universe was created and in him is life. This word took on flesh to dwell with humans, and that human – the divine word made flesh – was Jesus. Some readers over the years have wondered if this celebration of the Logos of God that becomes flesh owes more to Greek philosophy than to biblical Judaism. It’s a good question, and hard to answer. One thing that can be said is that this Logos idea does find very close parallels with other biblical texts – in particular with texts that speak of the Wisdom (Greek: Sophia) of God. Sophia and Logos are related ideas; both have to do in some respect with “reason.” Sophia is reason that is internal to a person; Logos is that reason [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:47:30-04:00February 23rd, 2013|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

The Christ-Poem in John

Arguably the best known and most influential passage dealing with Christology in the New Testament is the Prologue of the Gospel of John, 1:1-18. It is also probably the most studied and discussed passage – even more than the Christ poem in Philippians 2:6-11. The first eighteen verses of John are typically called the “Prologue” because they are clearly set apart from the rest of the Gospel as a kind of celebration of the main character of the book; these verses are written in a different writing style from the rest of the Gospel (lofty poetry), they contain key concepts not found in the rest of the Gospel (Christ as “the Word” made flesh), and yet they introduce well some of the most important views of the Gospel (the high view of Christ generally). And so it is widely thought that the author of the Fourth Gospel appended these verses as a Prologue, possibly after the rest of the book was written. It is widely thought, in fact, that the Gospel went through multiple editions, [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:47:39-04:00February 22nd, 2013|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine|

An Important and Relevant Textual Variant in Luke 2

I’d like to address the issue of early Christology from a slightly different angle in this post. So far I have talked about how an “exaltation” Christology, in which Jesus, the man, is made the Son of God at some point of his existence can be found in various parts of the New Testament (Rom 1:3-4; speeches in Acts), and how different early Christians located that exaltation to different moments in Jesus’ existence (resurrection, baptism, birth, pre-existence). As it turns out, this view of Christology relates to an important textual variant in the Gospel of Luke. So, by way of background for anyone new to this kind of discussion. We don’t have the original copy of Luke’s Gospel (or of any other NT book) (or, actually, of any book at all from the ancient world!). What we have are copies made from copies made from copies that were made from copies. We have thousands of copies of the NT from the centuries before the invention of printing. And these thousands of copies have hundreds of [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:48:36-04:00February 13th, 2013|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, New Testament Manuscripts|

Pushing Back the Exaltation

It has taken me a while to get to this stage with respect to my discussion of exaltation Christologies. At first I thought that the point I’m going to make in this current post would be my very first post – and then I realized I needed to provide background, and then background for the background, and then background for the background for the background and so on. So it’s been a number of posts. And to make sense of this one, you really need to read the others. Sorry ‘bout that, but these things ain’t easy….. My contention is a fairly non-controversial one among critical scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity. When the disciples came to believe in the resurrection, they thought that God had exalted Jesus to a unique, divine status. This is the oldest Christology there was. It is attested in such places as the pre-Pauline fragment in Rom. 1:3-4 and in several places, pre-Lukan, incorporated in the speeches of Acts. FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:48:45-04:00February 13th, 2013|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters|

Exaltation Christology: Some Background

Yesterday I posted the first in what will be a series of reflections on the earliest Christian Christologies (understandings of Christ), a in this post I would like to provide some necessary background information that will allow that post to make even better sense. In that post I began to outline what I take to be the earliest Christology of all. Jesus and his followers, I maintained, saw him(self) as a man and nothing more than a man (who was a great teacher, a prophet, and the future messiah of the coming kingdom – but human through and through, nothing else). But once these followers came to believe that he had been raised from the dead, they altered their view to begin to think that God had exalted him to heaven and made him his specially anointed one, his Son, who would indeed be the future messiah and who would bring in that Kingdom himself when he returned from heaven as the Son of Man. And so, why do I think that this Christological view [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:49:18-04:00February 7th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine|

How Jesus Became God: More Questions

In yesterday’s post I began to explain some of the problems that I had started to have with my original way of imagining this book, How Jesus Became God (I give the original prospectus in the three posts preceding that one). The problem I mentioned yesterday was a big one: I came to think that the proposal did not take into account fully enough the variety of Christological expressions that one finds at the same time in early Christianity, but seemed to assume that there was some kind of straight line, linear progression from a low Christology to a high one. To some extent I still think that there was a progression. It is clear, at any rate, that the Christology embraced at the Council of Nicea was MUCH “higher” than the one found in the Gospel of Mark. You’d have to be blind not to see the difference. But something has to account for the fact that in our earliest source – Paul – we appear to get some kind of high Christology already, [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:49:36-04:00February 5th, 2013|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture|

How to Date Documents, including Barnabas

QUESTION: In a comment on my recent post on the letter of Barnabas, where I indicated that “it is almost certainly to be dated to the 130s CE (for reasons I could explain if anyone really wants to know….)” – one reader asked: I, for one, would be quite interested in the how these various works are dated. Seems like it would be of utmost importance seeing as the date of composition all but decides the question of authorship. Even if it only provides a general sense of why a particular date is hung on a manuscript or composition, I think it would be helpful. RESPONSE: Yes, as it turns out, it is very difficult to date ancient writings; but scholars who have worked on such matters (for nearly 300 years now, in some instances) have marshaled pretty good evidence in case after case, although in many instances there continue to be substantial debates. There are several ways to establish parameters, which are fairly commonsensical. If a writing is quoted by an author whose [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:06:04-04:00January 2nd, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Christian Apocrypha, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reader’s Questions|

Luke’s First Edition

In my previous post, ostensibly on the genealogy of Luke, I pointed out that there are good reasons for thinking that the Gospel originally was published – in a kind of “first edition” – without what are now the first two chapters, so that the very beginning was what is now 3:1 (this is many centuries, of course, before anyone started using chapters and verses.) If that’s the case, Luke was originally a Gospel like Mark’s that did not have a birth and infancy narratives. These were added later, in a second edition (either by the same author or by someone else). If that’s the case then the Gospel began with John the Baptist and his baptism of Jesus, followed by the genealogy which makes better sense here, at the beginning, than it does in the third chapter once the first two are added. But is there any hard evidence that a first edition began without the first two chapters? One of the reasons it is so hard to say is because we simply don’t [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:06:49-04:00December 23rd, 2012|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

Luke’s Genealogy

In my previous posts I have already said a number of things about the genealogy in Luke – possibly most of the important things: it differs from Matthew’s in numerous ways, many of them irreconcilable; even though it too is a genealogy of Joseph, rather than Jesus, it traces Joseph’s line through a (completely) different set of ancestors back to Nathan, son of David, rather than to Solomon Son of David; it is not, however a genealogy of Mary, but is explicitly said to be Joseph’s; it is not clear why a genealogy of Joseph is given, since the whole point of a genealogy is bloodlines, and Jesus is not in the bloodline; Unlike Matthew it begins with Joseph and works backward from there (that is not a discrepancy, of course, just a different way of doing it); And unlike Matthew it does not stop with Abraham but goes all the way back to Adam – as in Adam and Eve. And it goes in fact a step further, indicating that Adam was “the son [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:06:58-04:00December 22nd, 2012|Canonical Gospels|

The Women in Matthew’s Genealogy

Another bit drawn mainly from my undergraduate textbook, but of relevance to my current thread on the birth narratives of Jesus. There is one other interesting and frequently-noted feature of Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus (actually, not of Jesus, but of Joseph). That is the fact that it makes explicit reference to women among Jesus’ ancestors. That is highly unusual. Women scarcely ever appear in most ancient Israelite and Jewish genealogies;, which invariably trace a person’s lineage from father to son (or vice versa) all the way back through the family line; see, as I pointed out earlier 1 Chronicles 1-9. Where are the women? For ancient genealogists, as a rule, they were not important enough to mention. But Matthew not only ends his genealogy by mentioning Mary, Jesus’ mother, but he also includes reference to four other women: Tamar (v. 3), Rahab (v. 5), Ruth (v. 5), and the “wife of Uriah” that is, Bathsheba (v. 6). Stories about all four of these women are found in the Jewish Scriptures (Tamar: Genesis 38; Rahab: Joshua2, [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-30T11:54:29-04:00December 21st, 2012|Canonical Gospels, Women in Early Christianity|

Another Instance of Gematria

From my last post on the gematria at work (possibly) in Matthew’s genealogy, I can’t resist adding a note about the Jewish use of gematria – or its Greek equivalent – in another early Christian writing, the epistle of Barnabas. First: two bits of background. FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click here for membership options. If you don't belong yet, NOW'S YOUR CHANCE!!! The epistle of Barnabas was seen as part of the New Testament by a number of early Christian writers. It almost made it in. It is attributed (not by the author himself, but by later readers) to Paul’s traveling companion – mentioned in Acts – Barnabas. But the book itself is anonymous, and it was certainly not written by Barnabas, who was long dead by the time it was produced. Scholars generally date the book to around the year 130 or so (Barnabas would have died at least 70 years earlier). The book represents an attempt to show its Christian readers that the Jews who [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:07:15-04:00December 20th, 2012|Canonical Gospels, Christian Apocrypha, Early Judaism, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Matthew’s Genealogy: The Number “Fourteen”

Like my previous post, this one takes material over from my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. I pointed out in the previous post that Matthew presents a numerically significant genealogy of Jesus in order to show that something of major significance happen every fourteen generations: from Abraham, the father of the Jews, to David, the greatest king of the Jews: fourteen generations; from King David to the Babylonian Captivity, the greatest disaster for the Jews: fourteen generations; and from the Babylonian Captivity to the Messiah Jesus, the ultimate savior of the Jews: fourteen generations. It’s a terrific genealogy. But to get to this 14-14-14 schema, Matthew had to manipulate the names in a couple of places, for example, by leaving out some of the generations and by counting the final set of names as fourteen, even though there are only thirteen. And so, we might wonder whether the number fourteen, in particular, was for some reasons significant for Matthew. Why not 15, or 12? Over the years interpreters [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:07:23-04:00December 19th, 2012|Canonical Gospels|

Matthew’s Genealogy

As I have pointed out, the reader who first comes to the New Testament, and so begins at the beginning, with Matthew chapter 1, first finds him/herself confronted with a genealogy. This may not seem like an auspicious beginning, but the genealogy is highly significant for understanding Matthew’s Gospel, since this genealogy is mean to emphasize Jesus' "credentials" precisely as the messiah. And so v. 1 indicates that Jesus he was "the son of David, the son of Abraham." (“son of” in this context obviously means: “descendant from”). And why highlight his relationship to David and Abraham in particular, before giving the details in the genealogy? It is because Matthew's ancient reader would realize full well that Abraham was “the father of the Jews,” and David was the greatest king in the history of Israel, whose descendant was to resume his rule, enthroned in Jerusalem, reigning over a sovereign state of Israel as God's anointed. This son of David would be descended from the Jewish greats and would, in fact, be the messiah. Thus Matthew [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:08:28-04:00December 18th, 2012|Canonical Gospels|

Genealogies of Matthew and Luke

One of the differences between the stories of Matthew and Luke in their infancy narratives is in their genealogies of Jesus (which for Luke, oddly enough, does not actually occur in his infancy narrative!). I know that genealogies are among the least favorite reading for many students of the Bible, and one may be a bit dismayed in starting to read the New Testament, with the very opening of the very first book, Matthew, to find a genealogy! But I tell my students to suck it up: this one is only sixteen verses long. If they want a REAL genealogy, they should go to the book of 1 Chronicles in the Hebrew Bible: NINE chapters (count them, nine) of genealogies. When I was in college I took a correspondence course on the Bible and for the course we had to memorize verses as part of the assignment. I think the designers of the course had in mind verses like John 1:1; 1:14; 3:16; Romans 3:23 and so on. For my verses I chose some out [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:08:36-04:00December 17th, 2012|Canonical Gospels|

The Infancy Narratives Compared

In two previous posts I’ve detailed what happens in Luke’s version of Jesus’ birth and then in Matthew’s. I will assume those two previous posts in the comments that I want to make in this one. The problem people have with reading these two accounts, usually, is the problem they have reading the Gospels (and the Bible as a whole) generally. Or at least this has been my experience. It’s the problem of assuming that one account is basically saying the same thing as some other account. People do that with the Bible all the time. With the New Testament, people tend to read Matthew as if he’s saying the same thing as Mark; John as if it’s the same thing as Luke; Paul’s letters as if, at heart, they’re the same thing as James; Revelation as if it’s the same thing as John. And on and on and on. One of the most important tasks I have as an undergraduate teacher of the New Testament is to get students to see that each of [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:08:51-04:00December 13th, 2012|Canonical Gospels|

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