Canonical Gospels Archives - Page 30 of 36 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

More on Mark

I started this thread by mentioning that when I teach my undergraduate class on the NT, I not only teach them about the four Gospels, but I teach them different *methods* for studying the Gospels – for example redaction criticism and “literary-historical” criticism. In my class I use the latter to explore the Gospel of Mark, and in order to illustrate here, on the blog, how it works (establishing the genre of a writing then seeing how that genre “worked” in the relevant historical period) I started showing how Mark can be interpreted as an ancient biography. But now that I’ve given several posts on that, I realize that I’m deep into the interpretation of Mark but haven’t actually pointed out the really important themes of the Gospel in its portrayal of Jesus. So that seems unsatisfying. I’ve decided to continue on to the end, and give the rest of my discussion of Mark from my textbook, to show what a fuller interpretation (which, of course, just scratches the surface) would reveal. This will take [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:15-04:00February 20th, 2014|Canonical Gospels|

More on the Beginning of Mark’s Gospel

In this post I resume what I began yesterday, an explanation of how the Gospel of Mark can be read as a biography of Jesus, with the “character” of the main subject shown in the stories told about him at the early part of the account. I’ve pointed out that Jesus is portrayed in a very Jewish light as the messiah, the Son of God (and I have said a few words about what that would mean to a Jewish audience). And then, in Jesus’ first actions, we learn more about who he is – specifically, what kind of Son of God. Again, the following is taken from my textbook on the New Testament. ************************************************************** Jesus the Authoritative Son of God The reader is immediately struck by the way in which Jesus is portrayed as supremely authoritative. At the outset of his ministry, he sees fishermen plying their trade; he calls to them and without further ado they leave their boats and family and hapless co-workers to follow him (1:16-20). Jesus is an authoritative leader; [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:14-04:00February 19th, 2014|Canonical Gospels|

The Beginning of Mark’s Gospel/Biography

OK, I won’t do this for all the Gospels, but I thought rather than trying to type up at length how the beginning of Mark’s Gospel portrays Jesus (on the assumption that since it’s an ancient biography, it will lay out the character of the subject at the very outset), I should simply reproduce what I already say about this in print elsewhere, in my Introduction to the New Testament. Here is the first part of that discussion. The second part I’ll give in my next post. **************************************************************** One of the first things that strikes the informed reader of Mark's Gospel is how thoroughly its traditions are rooted in a Jewish world view. The book begins, as do many other ancient biographies, by naming its subject: "The Beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ" (1:1). But readers living in the Greco-Roman world would not recognize "Christ" as a name; for most of them, it was not even a meaningful title. It came from the verb "to anoint," and typically referred to someone who has just [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:14-04:00February 18th, 2014|Canonical Gospels|

The Gospels as Biographies

In my last post I indicated that among the different ways to study the Gospels, one is what I call the “literary-historical” approach. This approach determines the literary genre of a writing, and then sees how that genre “worked” in its own historical context (as opposed to how a similar genre make work today). The Gospels of the NT are widely seen as examples of ancient biography. So it would help to know how biographies worked in Greek and Roman antiquity. There are numerous examples of biographies from the Greco-Roman world, many of them by some of the most famous authors of the Roman literary scene, such as Plutarch, Suetonius, and Tacitus. As I indicated in my previous post, and need to stress here, these biographies, understood in their own historical context, are different from the biographies we read today. Understanding the differences can be key to recognizing the way any particular ancient biography “worked,” including the Christian examples such as Mark (and the other Gospels). As I contrast ancient with modern biographies here, it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:14-04:00February 17th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture|

How To Study the Gospels

I’ve been speaking about the importance of the differences of the Gospels. So far I’ve argued that these show that each Gospel has to be read for the message that *it* is trying to convey; no one should assume that the message of one Gospel is the message of another, that the portraits of Jesus are the same among all the Gospels, that none of the differences matter for much of anything because they can all be reconciled. That is to miss out on a real opportunity of determining the message of each of these authors. I think that’s important. These are important books. Whether you’re a Christian or not, no one can much doubt that the New Testament is the most important book, historically and culturally, in the history of Western Civilization. Knowing what it’s authors have to say really matters. And if you wear blinders when trying to interpret these books, you’ll simply see what you’re programed to see. And that’s not good. In my last post I argued that one of the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:14-04:00February 15th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, Teaching Christianity|

Differences in the Gospels and Redaction Criticism

In my previous two posts I stressed that knowing that there are differences, even discrepancies, among the Gospels does not need to be considered in a purely negative light. There are very serious positive pay-offs. These differences/discrepancies open up possibilities for interpretation, because they (in theory) prevent a person from importing a meaning into a text that is difficult to sustain from the words of the text itself. When John says that Jesus died on the day before the Passover meal was eaten, but Mark says that Jesus died on the day *after* the meal was eaten (both are quite explicit), then the interpreter’s energy really should not be taken up with showing that they both are saying the same thing. They are saying different things, and not recognizing this means failing to recognize what each Gospel is trying to say. In this particular case, John almost certainly is the one who changed the historical datum (although, OK, this is debated). It allows John to portray Jesus as the “lamb of God” who is killed, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:14-04:00February 14th, 2014|Canonical Gospels|

Similarities and Differences: The Synoptic Problem

In yesterday’s post I mentioned my New Testament class, and that one of the main lessons I’m trying to convey in it is that each of the Gospels has to be read for what *it* has to say. This requires the reader to bracket information that is conveyed in some other Gospel (or that they’ve heard before elsewhere), to see what the meaning of this particular text is. That shouldn’t be such a hard idea to grasp. If I write a book about Jesus, I don’t expect or want my readers to read my book in light of what some other author said (say, Reza Aslan or Bill O’Reilly), interpreting my views in light of the other person’s views, as if my views, as I state them, are not enough or sufficient. And yet people regularly read the Gospels as if Mark must mean the same thing that John does, or that this passage in Matthew makes best sense in light of that other passage in Luke, and so on. We don’t do that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:14-04:00February 12th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Teaching Christianity|

Discrepancies in the Resurrection Narratives

I’ve been having a great time with my undergraduate course this semester, “Introduction to the New Testament.” It has 240 students in it. I lecture twice a week, for 50 minutes at a shot; then for their third class period each student has to meet in a recitation group of 20 students, each one led in discussion by one of my graduate teachings assistants (four TA’s altogether; each one has three recitations). I meet with TA’s for an hour each week to talk about what we want to have happen in the recitations that Friday. The students taking the class, as I’ve pointed out before, have to do a two-page “position paper” each time in preparation for recitation. So far I think *most* (not all!) students are enjoying the course. A lot of them are finding it challenging – not so much because of its inherent difficulty as because of the perspectives being put forth in the readings and the lectures. We have spent a *lot* of time on the differences among the Gospels, and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:14-04:00February 11th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, Teaching Christianity|

The Later De-apocalypticizing of Jesus

Yesterday I started mounting the case that rather than being a zealot interested in a military overthrow of the Romans to reclaim the land for God, Jesus was an apocalypticist who believed that God himself would intervene in history to destroy the forces of evil (presumably including the Romans; and certainly including the Jews who were not “on the right side”) to set up his kingdom. It is worth re-emphasizing that all over the map in our early sources Jesus speaks about the Kingdom of God. He does not speak about the Kingdom of Israel, or about the use of military force (I’ll get to the scattered exceptions eventually), or about “retaking the land.” This is a key point because Aslan thinks that for Jesus it was all about getting rid of the Romans and taking the land back; but Jesus doesn’t talk about that in our earliest sources – even the ones that Aslan cites (as I showed in earlier posts: unlike zealots, Jesus told his followers that they *should* pay taxes to Rome!). [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:43-04:00December 29th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

A Third View of Jesus’ Body at the Resurrection

This will be my final post on the early Christian understandings of the nature of Jesus’ resurrected body. I have tried to show that Paul believed that Jesus’ actual body came out of the tomb, but as a spiritual, immortal body – completely transformed; other Christians, including groups of Gnostics, maintained that Jesus’ spirit lived on even though his body decomposed and ceased to exist (like all other bodies) In this final post I deal with another extreme in the opposite direction, one found already in the New Testament, possibly in order to oppose the idea that Jesus was raised only in spirit but not in body. Again, this is an extract from my forthcoming book How Jesus Became God. ************************************************************************************ The Raising of the Mortal Body We don’t know how early such full-blown Gnostic views came to expression in the Christian movement; they were certainly in place by the middle of the second century, and possibly earlier. But there were tendencies toward such views already in the New Testament period. If my reconstruction of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:27-04:00December 1st, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

New Hermeneia Manuscript
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New Hermeneia Manuscript

Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Religion in the News

New Hermeneia Manuscript

Yesterday I provided background for my post of today by talking about the five hermeneia manuscripts of the Gospel of John that were discussed by Bruce Metzger in a publication in 1988. The reason that is now timely is that a new manuscript has just recently been identified with the same phenomenon. This time it is a Coptic manuscript that survives only in a fragment, of John chapter 3. The person who has identified it is Brice Jones, a PhD candidate in New Testament at Concordia University in Montreal. Brice is developing an expertise in textual criticism and the study of manuscripts, and this is a terrific discovery. Below is the notice that he sent around a few weeks ago reporting his find (in his own words, of course). FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click here for membership options. If you don't belong yet, JOIN NOW!!! Yesterday I provided background for my post of today by talking about the five heremeneia manuscripts of the Gospel of John that were [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:14-04:00November 6th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Religion in the News|

Writers Who Contradict Themselves

In response to the question of why the authors of the New Testament sometimes contradict themselves, I’ve so far discussed two phenomena: (1) sometimes (as with Paul) an author changes his mind about something over time, and (2) sometimes an author (as with John) incorporates a number of earlier sources in his or her writing when these sources are sometimes at odds with one another, thereby creating discrepancies, or “literary seams” as I called them in my previous post. Now I deal with a third and final thing (there may be more explanations, but these are the ones I’ve thought most about). In my view, authors – not just NT authors, but authors in general (and whatever we can say about the writers of the NT, at least we can say they were authors!) – often simply are careless and don’t notice mistakes. This is not only true of authors, it’s true of readers. Very often, when I point out internal discrepancies, for example, in the Gospel of John or in the Book of Acts, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:13-04:00November 1st, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

Discrepancies Inside the Fourth Gospel

OK, back to contradictions. This thread (such as it is – so far there’s been no thread) began with a reader’s question of how there could be contradictions in the work of a single author? Was he just inattentive? Didn’t he care? Was he sloppy? In the previous post I pointed out that with someone like Paul, it was possible that he changed his mind about some things over the decade covered by his letters. But how about internal contradictions within a book? There are lots of these two? How can they be explained? In some instances they can be explained by the fact that an author has taken a variety of different sources and incorporated them into his writing. On occasion, these sources have discrepancies (sometimes very slight) between them, and the author for some reason or another did not choose to smooth them out. Or he didn’t notice them! (More on that in my next post.) A terrific set of examples comes from the Gospel of John. Most people reading John don’t see [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:13-04:00October 31st, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

Why Are There Contradictions in the New Testament?

QUESTION: If I had collected a lot of stories about a person and put them together into a “biography” I would at least make sure that all the stories were at least somewhat consistent. I don’t understand why the writers of the gospels didn’t make sure their final product made sense – they certainly didn’t seem to have any problems changing things to suit them in many cases. Did they just write down everything they heard without any regard to whether one story or dialog totally contradicted another in the same story? Did they not even care? RESPONSE: This is a great question, and I wish there were a simple (let alone great) answer to it. Let me make a few observations more or less off the cuff, without presuming to make anything like an authoritative pronouncement on the matter…. First, the question refers to internal discrepancies *within* a single author, not to discrepancies between authors. One of the most interesting features of the canonical Gospels’ accounts of Jesus is, of course, that they are [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:59-04:00October 27th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Catholic Epistles, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Jesus’ Brothers?!? And the Proto-Gospel of James

One more post on the Proto-Gospel of James. As it turns out, this Gospel was very popular in Eastern, Greek-speaking Christianity throughout the Ages, down to modern times; and a version of it was produced – with serious additions and changes – in Latin, that was even more influential in Western Christianity (a book now known as the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew). In some times and places, these books were the main source of “information” that people had for knowing about Jesus’ birth and family – more so than the NT Gospels. The idea that Joseph was an old man and Mary was a young girl? Comes from the Proto-Gospel (not the NT!). The view that Jesus was born in a cave? Proto-Gospel. The notion that at the nativity there was an ox and a donkey? Pseudo-Matthew. And there were lots of other stories familiar to Christians in the Middle Ages not so familiar to people today, all from these books – for example, a spectacular account (in Pseudo-Matthew) of Jesus as an infant, en [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:59-04:00October 23rd, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

My Jesus Class and … Destroying Christianity?

My first-year seminar on “Jesus in Scholarship and Film” is going extremely well. Last week I gave the students an exercise comparable to one I mentioned earlier on the infancy narratives of the Gospels; this one was on the passion narratives. They were to read each of the Gospels accounts of Jesus’ trial, death, and resurrection carefully, several times (Matthew 27-28; Mark 15-16; Luke 23-24; John 18-20). Then they were to choose two of the four, and compare them very carefully, noting all the similarities, all the differences, and any apparent discrepancies that they thought in fact could not be reconciled. As a side note: probably three or four times a week I get an angry note from someone who has read one of my books or heard me give a lecture or listened/watched one of my Great Courses courses, who is upset because I am “trying to destroy Christianity.” I’m always completely baffled by this comment. (I got it yesterday from a retired Episcopalian priest; I would think an Episcopalian cleric would be the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:59-04:00October 16th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Reflections and Ruminations|

Follow That Star!!
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Follow That Star!!

Canonical Gospels, Reflections and Ruminations

Follow That Star!!

In a post a couple of days ago I mentioned that if the wise men were following the star to Bethlehem, they would be walking in circles. When asked about it by several people I explained that since the earth is not "fixed" -- it rotates and is in orbit around the sun -- stars are never in the same place in the sky, so "following" one would take you all over the place. Here's a hilarious illustration of what would happen if the wisemen followed a celestial body to find Jesus. I have borrowed this (no permission required, only acknowledgment) from here: http://what-if.xkcd.com/25/ Acknowledgement is here: http://xkcd.com/license.html ***************************************************************************************************************** Three Wise Men The story of the three wise men got me wondering: What if you did walk towards a star at a fixed speed? What path would you trace on the Earth? Does it converge to a fixed cycle? —N. Murdoch If the wise men leave Jerusalem and walk toward the star Sirius, day and night, even when it’s below the horizon, this is the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:58-04:00October 5th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Reflections and Ruminations|

Killing Jesus is Killing Me….

I received my copy of Killing Jesus in the mail today and started to glance at it. I know I said I would read it, but I’m just not sure I can bring myself to do it. The opening “Note to Readers” makes one’s heart sink. We are told that this will be a “fact-based book.” Oh, that’s good, the reader thinks: it won’t be biased but will be objective, based only on facts. Until you begin to read the opening page of ch. 1 “Heavily armed solders from the capital city of Jerusalem are marching to this small town, intent on finding and killing the baby boy. They are a mixed-race group of foreign mercenaries from Greece, Gaul, and Syria….” Oh dear. So, for our FOX historian of antiquity writing this account – the Gospel according to Bill – who is giving us only “facts,” it turns out that the “slaughter of the innocents” in Bethlehem, taken from Matthew’s infancy narrative, is a factual, historical account. We not only know it happened, we know [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:43-04:00October 3rd, 2013|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Religion in the News|

Jesus Position Papers

Several readers have asked me about the weekly papers that I assign for my undergraduate seminar on “Jesus in Scholarship and Film.” I call these “position” papers because the students are required to stake out a position on a controversial topic. There are no (absolutely) right or wrong answers. The point of the papers is to get the students to think about a topic before we have a discussion about it in class, so that when we do talk about it, we’re not simply pooling our ignorance.. For that reason I don’t actually grade the papers, at least in any regular way. Instead. if the student has clearly thought about the question, answered it clearly, and shown that they have invested some time reflecting on it, I give the paper an S (= Satisfactory); if they have not, I mark it a U (= unsatisfactory). All the papers are to be two pages, double-spaced. Here are the instructions for this term’s papers. (The students write other papers as well: they are writing a book review [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:43-04:00October 1st, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions, Teaching Christianity|

Jesus at the Movies: Infancy Narratives

I’m having a terrific time with my undergraduate course this semester, a first-year seminar that I call “Jesus in Scholarship and Film.” Last month I posted my syllabus for the class on the blog. This past week was the first time we’ve done any film in the class, and it was very interesting. For the class I had the students do a writing assignment, in which they compared the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke in detail (Mark and John, of course, don’t *have* anything about Jesus’ birth). They were to find both similarities and differences, and then they were to decide if any of the differences were irreconcilable. This was to set up what they were going to see in the film clips that I was set to show. The similarities are pretty interesting if you come up with a full list: Jesus is born in Bethlehem; his mother Mary is a virgin; after his birth he is visited by a group of men (shepherds in Luke; wise men in Matthew) who have been [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:43-04:00September 27th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Jesus and Film, Public Forum|

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