Catholic Epistles Archives - Page 4 of 4 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Could Peter Have “Written” 1 and 2 Peter Some Other Way?

Here is the last of my three posts digging down deeper into the question of whether Peter would have, or could have, written the books we now call 1 and 2 Peter, composed in highly literate Greek by someone skilled in Greek composition. ****************************** It should come as no surprise that Peter could not write Greek (or Aramaic, for that matter). As it turns out, there is New Testament evidence about Peter’s education level. According to Acts 4:13, both Peter and his companion John, also a fisherman, were agrammatoi , a Greek word that literally means “unlettered,” that is, “illiterate.” And so, is it possible that Peter wrote 1 and 2 Peter? We have seen good reasons for him not writing 2 Peter, and some reason for thinking he didn’t write 1 Peter. But it is highly probable that in fact he could not write at all. I should point out that the book of 1 Peter is written by a highly educated, Greek-speaking Christian who is intimately familiar with the Jewish Scriptures in their [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:10-04:00November 30th, 2018|Acts of the Apostles, Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

Seriously. How Many People in Antiquity Could Write?

I have received some push-back from readers who object to my view that Simon Peter, Jesus’ disciple, a fisherman from rural Galilee whose native language was Aramaic, living among lower-class people who spoke Aramaic, almost certainly could not have written a highly stylized and sophisticated Greek treatise such as we find in the book of 1 Peter. My sense is that I will never convince anyone who thinks that it is simply “common sense” that of course he could learn to write Greek if he wanted to and did so at the end of his life. But I’m bound and determined to try! (It used to be “common sense” that the sun revolved around the earth, after all…. Just because it’s something we’ve always heard and thought doesn’t make it true!) I’ve dealt with literacy issues on the blog before, but I think I need to give a fuller explanation of my views. The fullest is in my book Forgery and Counterforgery, but I”ve decided not to go there, since it is not really written [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:42:57-04:00November 27th, 2018|Catholic Epistles, Reflections and Ruminations|

Who Wrote 1 Peter?

This post is to close out my discussion of 1 Peter, from the New Testament. Who actually wrote it? Spoiler alert: we don’t know, but it probably wasn’t Peter. On several occasions on the blog I’ve talked about the issue, most recently at length in a repost earlier this year: https://ehrmanblog.org/did-peter-use-a-secretary-for-his-writings-a-blast-from-the-past/ That’s where I give the fuller story. For now I give just the simple side of things, as I lay it out in my undergraduate textbook on the New Testament. Following this post I will start talking about how and why the books assigned to Peter did or did not make it into the New Testament. If you recall, the whole reason I got into this thread in the first place (which I foolishly thought would take 2-3 posts) is that I became intrigued by the question of why 2 Peter made it into the New Testament but the Apocalypse of Peter did not. As I will explain in the next post, I have far fewer questions about 1 Peter (which, like the other [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:42:57-04:00November 26th, 2018|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

The Situation Behind the (“Forged”) Book of 1 Peter

I am in the midst of talking about works attributed to Peter, the chief disciple, which have come down to us from the early church. I should be clear, I think each and every one of these writings was “forged.” I don’t think Peter himself wrote any of them – 1 Peter, 2 Peter, the Gospel of Peter, the Apocalypse of Peter, or any of the other Petrine works that we now have. Each was written by a different author, but each author claimed to be Peter, Jesus’ right hand man. The book most widely accepted in the early church as having actually come from Peter is the book we call 1 Peter, from the New Testament. Yesterday I started talking about what is in it. Today I follow up on that discussion by explaining its apparent historical context and the approach the pseudonymous author takes in dealing with the problems he (and his ostensible audience) are confronting. Again, this is taken from my textbook on the NT. ***************************************************** The Context of Persecution Those [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:42:57-04:00November 25th, 2018|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

The So-Called First Letter of Peter

I am nearly at the end of my discussion of “Petrine” works in early Christianity, the books that some early Christian or another had been written by Peter, the closest disciple to Jesus in the New Testament. There are other books connected with Peter that I have chosen not to talk about, at least at this point, including legendary accounts of his missionary activities, some of which are really interesting and were, at one point, highly influential. At this stage, though, I’m talking only about books that we know were thought to be legitimate parts of the New Testament in one circle or another: 2 Peter, the Apocalypse of Peter, and the Gospel of Peter. And it has occurred to me (just this morning!) that I haven’t said anything yet about the one book connected with Peter that almost *everyone* we know of (who said anything about the matter) thought was part of canonical Scripture: the book of 1 Peter. I will want to say a few things about this book before getting back to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:42:57-04:00November 23rd, 2018|Catholic Epistles|

Introducing the Book of 2 Peter

To make sense of the difficulty I’ve been having in figuring out what they Apocalypse of Peter did not make it into the NT, but the book of 2 Peter did, I need to say a bit about the latter – and probably about *other* Petrine books that did or did not make It (which also claim to be written by Peter even though the author was someone else). Here is a brief introduction to the book of 2 Peter, taken from my textbook on the New Testament. ******************************************************************* 2 PETER For a variety of reasons, there is less debate about the authorship of 2 Peter than any other pseudepigraphon in the New Testament. The vast majority of critical scholars agree that whoever wrote the book, it was not Jesus’ disciple Simon Peter. As was the case with 1 Peter, this author is a relatively sophisticated and literate Greek-speaking Christian, not an Aramaic-speaking Jewish peasant. At the same time, the writing style of the book is so radically different from that of 1 Peter that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:42:56-04:00November 13th, 2018|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

Did Peter Use a Secretary for his Writings? A Blast from the Past

Looking through some posts of blogs-past I came across this interesting one from six years ago now! I think it's an intriguing question, and the answer is not what most people would probably think. QUESTION: What do you make of the author's reference to a Silvanus in 1 Peter 5:12? Could it be that this really is Peter saying he used a secretary to write this letter? I know you said there is little to no evidence that people used secretaries, but what do you make of this reference to a Silvanus? RESPONSE: Yes, this is a question that I deal with in my book Forged, and that I deal with at yet greater length in the book coming out in the fall, Forgery and Counterforgery. Several points are important to make about the question, but first a bit of background. FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click here for membership options. If you don't belong yet, JOIN!! Background. Scholars have long noted that the book of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:57-04:00July 26th, 2018|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Reader’s Questions|

Can (or Should) We Change the Canon of Scripture? A Blast from the Past

Digging around in posts from five years ago now, I came across this one --as interesting to me now as it was then! Hope you think so too. It's a response to a penetrating question. QUESTION: Given the criteria used to determine what would go on to constitute the New Testament canon, how is it that Hebrews and the book of Revelation remain part of the canon? I understand that Christians came to believe that they were authored by the apostles which is why they made it into the canon, but we now know that they weren't authored by Paul or John..so why are they still in the NT? RESPONSE: Interesting idea! I sometimes get asked what I would exclude from the canon if given the choice, and I almost always say 1 Timothy (because of what it says about women in 2:11-15, and how the passage has been used for such horrible purposes over the years). But, well, it ain’t gonna happen. I don’t get a vote. And that’s the problem with Hebrews [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:27-04:00June 9th, 2017|Catholic Epistles, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

My Work Habits the Letter allegedly by Jesus’ Own Brother: Mailbag 2/12/2017

I will be addressing two quite disparate questions in this week’s Readers’ Mailbag: one about my work habits and one about the New Testament epistle of James: how do we know that the author expected his readers to think (or know) that he was actually the brother of Jesus himself? If you have questions you’d like me to address in a future Mailbag, send them along! QUESTION: I notice you seem to get quite a bit done in a day (more than most people I know,) and that you have been doing that from a fairly young age (at one point you even experimented with decreasing your sleeping hours, If memory serves). The biggest hindrance to productivity for me is procrastination (like right now for example). How do you deal with it? You must feel it too sometimes. Did you always have an easier time concentrating than other folks? Did you learn it early in life (maybe by watching your parents)? If so, what techniques do you employ to deal with it? RESPONSE: [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:15-04:00February 12th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Does James Contradict Paul?

I have a number of questions that I want to address in my Readers’ Mailbag, but one particularly important one requires a rather long response, and so I dedicate this entire week’s mailbag to answering it. Here it is: QUESTION: Bart, what is your view with regard to Paul and James teaching on the doctrine of justification by faith – are they contradictory? RESPONSE: Ah, this is a perennial question among readers of the New Testament. I deal with it at some length in my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, in a chapter called “Does the Tradition Miscarry,” where I talk about whether Paul saw eye to eye with Jesus, with James, and with later traditions about Paul (e.g. in the Acts of Paul and Thecla). My answer about the letter of James may surprise some readers, who would expect me to find it completely at odds with Paul. Here is what I say in the book: ****************************************************** The most famous passage of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00September 4th, 2016|Catholic Epistles, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

How Did Ancient Writers Use Secretaries? A Blast from the Past

Here is the second of a series of three blasts from the past -- from four years ago when I was dealing with how secretaries were and, especially, were not used in the ancient world by authors when producing their work. Did authors (such as John for the book of Revelation, or Peter for either 1 or 2 Peter) use a secretary to write their books for them? To answer the question with something other than common sense (that is, common guessing), we need to know about secretarial practices in antiquity. As it turns out, we do know some things, as I'll explain in this post and the next. This is what I said four years ago now: ****************************** I have received some comments and emails about my claims about Silvanus as a secretary (or rather, NOT as a secretary) for the book of 1 Peter, and realized it would help if I could give some more detail about what we know about secretaries in the ancient world. The following is from an excursus in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:12-04:00August 5th, 2016|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Who Could Read and Write? A Blast from the Past.

It’s been fun for me to look over posts on the blog from years ago. Here is one of relevance to some of my recent comments on the book of Revelation, for two reasons. One involves literacy: who could read and write? Could John the son of Zebedee? The other involves “secredaries.” Since my Revelation posts, a couple of people have asked me if it’s possible that the author used a “secretary” for the book (that is: since John the son of Zebedee couldn’t write, maybe he instructed a literate companion to write it for him.) The issue of “secretaries” in early Chrsitianity was the subject of two posts that I made exactly at this time, four years ago. I’ll give both posts, since they strike me as of perennial significance (and interest!) Here is what I said back then (as you’ll see, in this case the issues involved whether Peter could have written 1 Peter) ***************************************************************** IN RESPONSE TO MY POSTS ON SECRETARIES AND THE BOOK OF 1 PETER, SEVERAL PEOPLE HAVE RAISED [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:12-04:00August 4th, 2016|Catholic Epistles, History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum|

Taming the Diversity of the New Testament

In my previous post I started to show why it is difficult to use the New Testament itself as evidence that Christianity started out as an original unity, only to come to be fragmented with the passage of time into the second and third Christian centuries. It is true that the NT is the earliest set of Christian writings that we have, and that most of the books can probably be dated to the first Christian century. We don’t have any other books (well, virtually any other books) this early (I don’t think the Gospel of Thomas can date to the first century; the one exception to the rule would probably be 1 Clement, which is usually dated to the mid 90s CE, and which is, indeed, a proto-orthodox writing). The two problems I’ve isolated with using the NT to demonstrate early Christian unity are that: 1) The reason we have these books and no others from the time is that these are the books that later orthodox church fathers deemed scripture and worked to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:46-04:00July 8th, 2015|Catholic Epistles, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Paul and His Letters|

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|

Persecutions for Calling Jesus God

QUESTION: If the pre-'resurrection' Jesus and, later on, his earliest (Jewish) followers had declared Jesus to actually BE God then wouldn't they have been kicked out of the synagogues from the start because of blasphemy? But since that did not happen (Jesus preached in synagogues and his disciples continued to go to synagogues after his 'resurrection' for a while) doesn't that indicate that the earliest Christian belief did NOT contain the claim that Jesus actually was God? RESPONSE: This is a very interesting question and it has made me think for a bit. As I look over all the material that we have, it appears to me that the early Christians *were* regularly kicked out of the synagogues for their claims about Jesus, but that Jesus himself never was. First let me give the evidence for all that, and then deal with an important and related second issue about what those claims were exactly (this is where I’m still feeling my way a bit). FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. If [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:24-04:00May 19th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Catholic Epistles, Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

My Translation of the NT?

QUESTION: Do you have any plans to publish your own "best" version of the NT in English? From reading several of your books, it does seem as though you probably already have a translation sitting in a drawer somewhere. I have not been able to find scholarly reconstruction that was produced in the last three and a half decades. Most of the newer "translations" are theologically motivated and sound more like modern slang. Have any of your colleagues/ students produced a readable version you would recommend? (Thousands of footnotes do not make for a readable text!) I would very much like to see your translation/interpretation sitting on a bookshelf. RESPONSE: No, as it turns out, I have never written out a full translation of the New Testament. For several reasons. First, there are a number of excellent translations already available that have been done by some of the best NT scholars on the planet. My translation would be different, but not necessarily better. Of course, I would think that where mine differed it would be [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:08-04:00October 26th, 2012|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Catholic Epistles, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Peter as Literate? Part 2

THIS IS A CONTINUATION OF MY POST FROM YESTERDAY ON WHETHER PETER COULD HAVE WRITTEN 1 PETER, BASED ON THE QUESTION OF HIS POSSIBLE LITERACY. READ THE FIRST POST FIRST, OR THIS ONE WON'T MAKE AS MUCH SENSE! In pursuing this line of inquiry, we might ask what we can know about Peter as a person, prior to his becoming a disciple of Jesus. The answer is that we do not know much at all. The Gospels are consistent only in portraying him as a fisherman from the village of Capernaum in rural Galilee. We can assume that since he was a common laborer, he was not from the landed aristocracy; and since he was from rural Galilee, he would have spoken Aramaic. What can we say about his home “town” of Capernaum? The historical and social insignificance of the place can be seen by the fact that it is not mentioned in any source, including the Hebrew Bible, prior to the writings of the New Testament. In the Gospels it is portrayed as a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:23-04:00August 7th, 2012|Book Discussions, Catholic Epistles|

Peter as Literate?

IN RESPONSE TO MY POSTS ON SECRETARIES AND THE BOOK OF 1 PETER, SEVERAL PEOPLE HAVE RAISED THE QUESTION OF WHETHER PETER WAS HIMSELF LITERATE (ABLE TO READ, OR MORE SIGNIFICANTLY, TO WRITE). THIS IS THE FIRST PART OF WHAT I SAY IN MY BOOK FORGERY AND COUNTERFORGERY; THE SECOND PART WILL BE IN THE NEXT POST. ************************************************************************************************************************ In his now-classic study of ancient literacy, William Harris gave compelling reasons for thinking that at the best of times in antiquity only 10% or so of the population was able to read [Ancient Literacy; Harvard University Press, 1989]. By far the highest portion of readers was located in urban settings. Widespread literacy like that enjoyed throughout modern societies requires certain cultural and historical forces to enact policies of near universal, or at least extensive, education of the masses. Prior to the industrial revolution, such a thing was neither imagined nor desired. As Meir Bar Ilan notes: “literacy does not emerge in a vacuum but rather from social and historical circumstances.” Moreover, far fewer people in antiquity [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:23-04:00August 6th, 2012|Book Discussions, Catholic Epistles|

Silvanus as Peter’s Secretary?

QUESTION: What do you make of the author's reference to a Silvanus in 1 Peter 5:12? Could it be that this really is Peter saying he used a secretary to write this letter? I know you said there is little to no evidence that people used secretaries, but what do you make of this reference to a Silvanus? RESPONSE: Yes, this is a question that I deal with in my book Forged, and that I deal with at yet greater length in the book coming out in the fall, Forgery and Counterforgery. Several points are important to make about the question, but first a bit of background. FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click here for membership options. If you don't belong yet, JOIN!! Background. Scholars have long noted that the book of 1 Peter is written in elegant Greek, and that it seems highly unlikely that an Aramaic-speaking fisherman of the lower classes (which Peter must have been), who is called “unlettered” (literally, “illiterate”) in Acts 4:13, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:22-04:00July 28th, 2012|Catholic Epistles, Reader’s Questions|

Should We Change the Canon of Scripture?

QUESTION: Given the criteria used to determine what would go on to constitute the New Testament canon, how is it that Hebrews and the book of Revelation remain part of the canon? I understand that Christians came to believe that they were authored by the apostles which is why they made it into the canon, but we now know that they weren't authored by Paul or John..so why are they still in the NT? RESPONSE: Interesting idea! I sometimes get asked what I would exclude from the canon if given the choice, and I almost always say 1 Timothy (because of what it says about women in 2:11-15, and how the passage has been used for such horrible purposes over the years). But, well, it ain’t gonna happen. I don’t get a vote. And that’s the problem with Hebrews and Revelation – and all the other books that were admitted when Church Fathers (wrongly) thought they were written by apostles of Jesus (in this case Paul and John). No one is going to give any [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:17:37-04:00June 10th, 2012|Catholic Epistles, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Previous 1···34