Canonical Gospels Archives - Page 25 of 36 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Did Luke’s Gospel Originally Have the Virgin Birth?

I have been discussing the intriguing textual variant found in Luke 3:23, where Jesus is said to be baptized. When he comes out of the water the heavens open up, the Spirit descends upon him in the form of a dove, and voice then comes from heaven. But what does the voice say? In most manuscripts the voice says exactly what it does in Mark’s Gospel: “You are my beloved Son; in you I am well pleased.” But in a few ancient witnesses it says something slightly but significantly different: “You are my Son, today I have begotten you” (or: “given you birth”). I am arguing that the latter may in fact be the original text of Luke, but that it was changed by scribes who were alert to the problems it posed. But if that’s what the voice said, then doesn’t that indicate that it was at that moment (Note: “Today”!) that Jesus became the Son of God? You may be able to figure out one objection to thinking that this is what Luke [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:11-04:00October 21st, 2015|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts|

Scribes Who Changed the Voice at Jesus Baptism?

I have been discussing views in the early church that asserted (or were claimed to assert) that Christ was not a divine being by nature, but was only “adopted” to be the Son of God, for example at his resurrection or, more commonly, at his baptism. Some such views were allegedly held by the Jewish-Christian Ebionites and by the Roman-gentile Theodotians. Whether these Christians actually held to such views is a bit difficult to say, since we don’t have any writings from their hands. But it is clear that they were *thought* to hold these views, and for my study of the changes made in the texts of the Bible by Christian scribes, that is all that matters. Scribes sometimes changed the text in light of “aberrant” views thought to be held by others. (Whether these others actually held such views or not.) We have seen instances in previous posts of changes made in order to oppose “docetic” Christologies, which had just the opposite problem (in the eyes of the proto-orthodox): these held that Christ [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:57-04:00October 19th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts|

Luke’s Last Supper and Orthodox Corruptions of Scripture

I can now wrap up my discussion of the textual problem of Luke 22:19-20 and the intriguing question of what Jesus said at his Last Supper (according to Luke). I have argued so far that the longer (more familiar) form of the text, found in most surviving manuscripts, is actually a change made by scribes, not what Luke originally wrote (this is where Jesus indicates that the bread is his body given for others and that the cup is the new covenant in his blood shed for others). I set *up* that discussion by referring to one of the debates over the nature of Christ in precisely the time period when the change was made: the second century, when Christians were debating whether Jesus was so completely divine that he was not actually human. Various Christians that scholars call “docetists” said the answer was no. The label for these Christians comes from the Greek word doceo, “to seem,” or “to appear,” because these people said that Christ “appeared” to be human and “seemed” really to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:56-04:00October 12th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

The Striking Conclusion: Jesus’ Last Supper in Luke

This sub-thread about the Last Supper and the death of Jesus in the book of Luke (and Acts), part of a longer thread on The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, has (itself) taken a rather remarkably circuitous route. Let me remind you how we started this little side-trip. First the biggest picture. I am describing my book – originally written over twenty years ago now (my God, how does this happen???) – about how scribes in the second and third Christian centuries changed their texts in order to make them more obviously “orthodox” and less susceptible to use by Christians who held Christological views deemed “heretical.” The current sub-thread has all been on one textual variant, a passage in Luke 22:19-20, the account of Jesus at his last supper. If you recall, there are two forms of the text, one much longer than the other. We are asking whether Luke originally wrote the longer version of the text (so that scribes shortened it by taking out a verse and a half) or if he wrote the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:56-04:00October 11th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

Luke’s Understanding of Jesus’ Death

I have been dealing with the question of Jesus’ death in the Gospel of Luke and have been arguing that Luke does not appear to have understood Jesus’ death to be an atonement for sins. He has eliminated the several indications from his source, the Gospel of Mark, that Jesus’ death was an atonement, and he never indicates in either his Gospel or the book of Acts that Jesus died “for” you or “for” others or “for” anyone. Then why did Jesus die? It is clear that Luke thought that Jesus had to die. For Luke it was all part of God’s plan. But why? What is the theological meaning of Jesus’ death for Luke, if it was not a sacrifice that brought about a right standing before God (which is what the term “atonement” means)? You get the clearest view of Luke’s understanding of Jesus’ death from... The Rest of this Post is for Members ONLY! If you don't belong yet, JOIN!! It costs less than a dime per post, and every one of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:56-04:00October 9th, 2015|Canonical Gospels|

Anti-Judaism in the Gospel of Luke

In my previous post I argued that in the narrative of Luke’s Gospel, Jesus has to die for a rather specific reason. In Luke, more than in his predecessor Mark, Jesus is portrayed as a great prophet (like Samuel, like Elijah, etc.), and in Luke’s understanding, that is why Jesus had to die. The Jewish people, in his view, always reject their own prophets sent from God. Jesus was the last of the great prophets. He too had to be rejected and killed at the hands of the Jewish people. Some scholars have argued that because of this denigration of the Jewish people for always rejecting the prophets and Jesus, Luke is probably to be seen as an “anti-Jewish” Gospel. In my judgment there is a lot to be said for this view. The only Jews that the Gospel appears to approve of are the ones who recognize Jesus as a great prophet and son of God (his mother, Symeon and Anna, John the Baptist, his own disciples, etc.). The other Jewss seemed to be [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:56-04:00October 8th, 2015|Canonical Gospels|

Jesus’ Death as a Prophet in Luke

In my previous post I argued that the author of the Gospel of Luke had changed the view that he found in his source, the Gospel of Mark, so that Jesus death, in Luke, is no longer an atoning sacrifice for sins. I’ve always found this to be extraordinarily interesting. Both the source for Luke’s Gospel, and the hero of his book of Acts – the apostle Paul – portrayed Jesus’ death as an atonement. But Luke does not. I’ve had several readers ask me: if Jesus’ death was not an atonement for Luke, then why did he die? It’s a good question, but a complicated one. There are several approaches to take in answering it. Let me present two, which happen to coincide with one another at the end of the day. The first has to do with the narrative plot of Luke’s Gospel, and the second has to do with his theology (as found in both his Gospel and Acts). First, the plot. It is beyond any doubt that Luke understands that Jesus *had* [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:56-04:00October 7th, 2015|Canonical Gospels|

Luke’s View of Jesus’ Death

In my previous post I tried to argue that the longer version of the account of Jesus’ Last Supper in Luke could have been created by a scribe who wanted to make the passage sound more like what is familiar from Matthew, Mark, and John, and to stress the point made in those other accounts as well, that Jesus’ broken body and shed blood are what bring redemption. The passage as you recall reads like this: 17 And he took a cup and gave thanks, and he said: “Take this and divide it among yourselves; 18 for I say to you that from now on I will not drink from the fruit of the vine until the Kingdom of God comes.” 19 And taking bread he gave thanks and broke it and gave it to them saying, “This is my body that is given for you; do this in remembrance of me.” 20 Likewise after supper (he took) the cup, saying, “This cup is the new coverant in my blood that is shed for you. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:56-04:00October 1st, 2015|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts|

Why Would a Scribe Change Luke’s Account of the Last Supper?

In my previous post I started to discuss a textual variant that I covered in my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, a very important variant for understanding Luke’s account of Jesus’ last days, for grasping Luke’s view of the importance of Jesus’ death, and for seeing how scribes occasionally modified their texts for theological reasons. The passage has to do with what Jesus said and did at the Last Supper. Here is the form of the text as found in most of the manuscripts. (I have put verse numbers in the appropriate places) 17 And he took a cup and gave thanks, and he said: “Take this and divide it among yourselves; 18 for I say to you that from now on I will not drink from the fruit of the vine until the Kingdom of God comes.” 19 And taking bread he gave thanks and broke it and gave it to them saying, “This is my body that is given for you; do this in remembrance of me.” 20 Likewise after supper (he [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:55-04:00September 30th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

The Last Supper in Luke: An Important Textual Problem

The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture argues that there are textual variants still preserved among our manuscripts of the New Testament that were generated by scribes who were trying to oppose various kinds of “heretical” Christologies, including the one I discussed yesterday, which said (at least which its opponents said that it said) that Christ did not have a real flesh and blood body, and that as a result he did not really experience pain and death, but only appeared to do so. The proto-orthodox theologians who responded to this view insisted that Jesus really was human, and they argued that it was precisely the bodily, human nature of Christ that allowed him to bring salvation. By shedding his (real) blood and experiencing a (real) broken, crucified body, Christ brought about salvation for the world. The docetists (those who claimed that Christ only “seemed” to have a body that could bleed and die), in the opinion of their opponents, had gone way too far in asserting that Christ was a divine being. If he wasn’t human, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:55-04:00September 29th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

Did Scribes Add the Passage of the Bloody Sweat?

In my previous posts I’ve been puzzling over the textual problem of Luke 22:43-44, the so-called “bloody sweat” passage, where Jesus, before his arrest, is said to have been in such deep agony that he sweat drops “as if of blood,” so that an angel came down from heaven to minister to him. These verses are found in some manuscripts of Luke, but not others. So which text is “original”? The version of Luke with the verses or the version without them? In previous posts I have argued that the verses run contrary both to the structure of Luke’s passage and to the theology of Luke, who worked to *eliminate* any sense of Jesus actually suffering from his Gospel. In my last post I began to ask, not which of the two texts the author Luke himself would have written (scholars call that kind of question “intrinsic probabilities”: what is more intrinsically likely to go back to the author?) but which of the two texts scribes of the second century, when the passage came to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:21-04:00August 25th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

The Bloody Sweat and the Scribes Who Changed It

I have been talking about the famous passage in Luke 22:43-44, the account of the so-called “bloody sweat,” where we are told that prior to his arrest, Jesus went into deep agony and began to sweat great drops “as if of blood,” and to be so deeply disturbed that an angel had to come down from heaven to support him. These verses can be found in a lot of manuscripts, including those used by the translators of the King James Bible, which is why the passage became so familiar to English-Bible readers over the years; but they are absent from many or our earliest and best manuscripts, which is why some modern translations put the verses in a footnote or, more commonly (as in the NRSV), in double brackets, indicating that in the opinion of the translators, the verses were not original (the translators keep them – bracketed -- in the text because they knew they are familiar and judge that they are very ancient). In my previous posts I have given two reasons for [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:21-04:00August 24th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

Jesus’ Lack of Agony

Did Jesus feel deep agony in the face of death, in virtual despair up until the end? Or was he calm and collected, confident in both himself and God’s will? It depends which Gospel you read. And that is one of the reasons (not the only one, as we will see!) that the textual problem of Luke 22:43-44 – the passage that narrates the “bloody sweat” -- is so important. If the verses were originally in Luke, then Jesus in Luke, as in Mark, is in deep agony looking ahead to his crucifixion. If the verses were not originally in Luke, then there is no evidence of any agony in Luke’s entire account. Just the contrary. So were the verses originally in Luke or not? It’s a question that really matters. It is worth stressing what I showed yesterday, that in this passage, Luke has changed Mark (his written source for the account) in significant ways. Many of these changes achieve one overarching purpose: Luke has eliminated every reference and hint to Jesus’ agony. No [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:21-04:00August 21st, 2015|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts|

When I First Realized the Importance of Textual Criticism: The Bloody Sweat

I think I first came to see precisely why textual criticism could be so important my first semester in my PhD program, during a seminar I was taking that had almost nothing to do with the study of the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. It was an “exegesis” course (i.e. focused on interpretation) on the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke – studied, of course, in the Greek). My realization of the importance of text-critical issues was not even connected to my own research. It had to do with what a friend and colleague of mine had discovered. For that seminar we had to make a class-presentation of our study of a passage in the Synoptics. My fellow-first-year student Mark Plunkett (who later went on to teach at Ohio Northern University before deciding to scrap the academic thing and become a gynecologist) (really!) was devoting his term paper to the prayer of Jesus before his arrest as found in the Gospel of Luke. As many readers of this blog know, Luke had as one [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:21-04:00August 20th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts|

Mark 1:1 as an Intentional Alteration of the Text

In yesterday’s post I began to explore a textual variant in Mark 1:1 that could be explained either as an accidental slip of the pen or an intentional alteration of the text. We’re plowing into some heavy waters here – I know some members of the blog like me to go deeper into serious scholarship on occasion, and others would rather prefer that I not. But here I am, in the thick of it. All of the posts in this thread are a lead up to answer the question from weeks ago now, about what led me to write The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. I’ve found that I can’t really get to that without providing some substantial background on what it is the field of textual criticism actually does. So where we are just now, by way of review: there are thousands of textual witnesses to the NT (Greek manuscripts, manuscripts of the versions, writings of the church fathers who quote the text); these witnesses attests hundreds of thousands of variance among themselves; the vast [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:19-04:00August 4th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts|

A Variant in Mark 1:1 — Accidental or Intentional?

I have been talking about different kinds of changes made in our surviving New Testament manuscripts, some of them accidental slips of the pen (that’s probably the vast majority of our textual variants) and others of them intentional alterations. One of the points that I’ve been trying to stress is that at the end of the day it is, technically speaking, impossible to know what a scribe’s “intentions” were (or if he had any, other than the intention of copying a text). None of the scribes is around to be interviewed, and so – as with a lot of history – there is a good bit of scholarly guess-work that has to be done. This guess work is not simply shooting in the dark, however. And it is dead easy for a highly trained expert to tell the difference between informed guesswork and just plain guesswork. But at the end of the day we are always talking about historical probabilities, not historical certainties, when it comes to figuring out why a scribed decided to change [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:03-04:00August 3rd, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, New Testament Manuscripts|

An Intentional Change in Mark 15:34

I have started giving some instances of what appear to be “intentional” changes made by scribes, as opposed to simple, accidental, slips of the pen. In my previous post I pointed to an example in Mark 1:2, in which scribes appear to have altered a text because it seems to embody an error. If I’m wrong that this is the direction of the change – that is, if the text that I’m arguing is the “corruption” is in fact the original text – then there is still almost certainly an intentional change still involved, but made for some other reason. But either way, the change does not appear to have been made simply by inattention to detail. Here I’ll give a second instance from Mark of what appears to be an intentional change. I stress that these alterations “appear” to be intentional since, technically speaking, we can never know what a scribe intended to do. I use the term I simply to mean an alteration to the text that a scribe appears to have made [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:03-04:00August 2nd, 2015|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts|

Illustration of a Textual Change: Did Mark Make a Mistake?

I have started discussing “intentional” changes of the text of the New Testament – that is alterations found in manuscripts of the New Testament that appear to have been made by scribes who *wanted* to change the text, presumably in order to make it say (more closely) what they wanted it to say. Let me illustrate my discussion by dealing with three of the most interesting textual variants in the Gospel of Mark, one of which is an easy problem to solve, one that is a bit more difficult, and one that has generated a lot of discussion over the years and no firm consensus. This will take a couple of posts. In a still later post I will talk about the criteria and arguments that scholars typically use in order to resolve these questions. I will be alluding to those criteria and arguments here in my explanations of why one form of the text appears to be what the author originally wrote, and the other form of the text appears to be the scribal [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:03-04:00July 31st, 2015|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts|

Lecture: Jesus and the Historian

On Tuesday, February 25, 2014 I gave a lecture at Dickinson College (Carlisle Pennsylvania) on "Jesus and the Historian," in the Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium. In the lecture I deal with the historical problems posed by the surviving Gospels for evaluating the evidence for the life and teachings of Jesus. Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition (The quality is not as good as one might hope, but it's the best we can do given the original source)

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:12-04:00June 7th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Video Media|

Wine in the Kingdom

Writing my last post on Papias made me think of something that is rather humorous even if it is only very tangentially related. If you recall, Papias claimed that Jesus taught the following about the future utopian kingdom on earth: The days are coming when vines will come forth, each with ten thousand boughs; and on a single bough will be ten thousand branches. And indeed, on a single branch will be ten thousand shoots and on every shoot ten thousand clusters; and in every cluster will be ten thousand grapes, and every grape, when pressed, will yield twenty-five measures of wine. When I was writing up that post, I was reminded of the story in the Gospel of John in which Jesus turns the water into wine. Jesus appears to have enjoyed wine in great abundance. The story in John is particularly interesting, and what is humorous to me is how I’ve heard it interpreted by well-meaning conservative Christians who were certain that Jesus would not ever encourage people to partake of alcoholic beverages. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:30-04:00June 6th, 2015|Canonical Gospels|

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