Christian Apocrypha Archives - Page 10 of 12 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

More on Jesus’ Wife!

So here’s a topic I haven’t addressed for nearly a year and a half! The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife. New developments happened about six weeks ago. I meant to post on them, other things got in the way, I put it off, so now I’m way behind the times. But in case you haven’t kept up with the story from other venues, I thought I should say something about it. It’s all extremely interesting. I won’t review everything I’ve said about the fragment already, but will give just a three-sentence summation of where the discussion stood last time I talked about it on the blog. In 2012 Karen King, a superb scholar of early Christianity at the Harvard Divinity School (and a colleague and friend), announced that she had been given by an anonymous collector the little fragment scrap of a Gospel written in Coptic. It was smaller than a credit card and contained eight partial lines of text that cited some words of Jesus, including a reference to “my wife.” Prof. King planned to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:15-04:00May 25th, 2014|Christian Apocrypha, Public Forum|

Jesus Kissing Mary Magdalene

QUESTION: I know that the “Gospel of Philip does not have much if any real historical veracity to it about Jesus’ life, but does the references about Jesus and Mary Magdalene being lovers and the holes in the papyrus ‘kissing’ verse (verses 32 and 55 in your “Lost Scriptures” book), help support the view that this most likely Gnostic Christian sect truly believed and taught that Jesus and Mary M were married? RESPONSE: Yes, this is one of those questions I get asked about on occasion. I have a reasonably full discussion of the relevant issues in my book Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene. In the book I put the discussion in the context of – yes, you guessed it -- Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, the one source many people turn to for the Gospel of Philip. (!) Here’s what I say there: ************************************************************** Some of the historical claims about the non-canonical Gospels in the Da Vinci Code have struck scholars as outrageous, or at least outrageously funny. The book claims, for example, that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:13-04:00February 5th, 2014|Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions, Sex and Sexuality in the Bible, Women in Early Christianity|

Video: Illuminated Manuscripts and Legends about Jesus

I was asked to speak at the Getty Museum, in the Harold M. Williams Auditorium in Los Angeles, California on Thursday, September 22, 2011 during the exhibition "In the Beginning Was the Word: Medieval Gospel Illumination." Illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages are significant for the literary texts they preserve. But they are also important, historically and culturally, for their illustrations of the life of Jesus and other figures associated with him. These artistic representations tell tales of their own, and the visual stories are not always found in the corresponding texts. A careful examination of these images shows clearly and convincingly that medieval artists were familiar not only with the stories of the canonical Gospels but also with many noncanonical apocryphal tales of Jesus. The apocryphal stories, in some instances, were understood to be "Gospel truth" on par with accounts found in Scripture. In any event, here is the lecture that I gave: Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition: Details on the "In the Beginning Was the Word: Medieval Gospel Illumination" 2011 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:13-04:00February 4th, 2014|Christian Apocrypha, Public Forum, Video Media|

Ramtha Again: The Question-Answer Session

Here is the second part of my talk at the Ramtha School of Enlightenment. It is a question-answer session that I had with the attendees, and for my money, it was the best, most interesting part of the evening. Since we had abundant time -- well over an hour -- I was able to give the questions full, drawn out answers, virtually mini-lectures in themselves, on an enormous range of issues that came up. The questions dealt with intriguing topics on the whole. Many of my answers are not what the questioner wanted to hear. And it is interesting to see what the crowd reaction to my answers was (usually very positive -- effusive at times; but it is clear that I am the odd-person-out in this group as, well, you would surely expect!). At some points I get very personal and talk not just about my scholarship but about my beliefs and understandings of the world. In any event, I hope you enjoy listening to this as much as I enjoyed participating in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:43-04:00January 22nd, 2014|Christian Apocrypha, Public Forum, Video Media|

Trying Again: More on Ramtha

SORRY 'BOUT THIS. MY ORIGINAL POST FOR MEMBERS ONLY ON "MORE ON RAMTHA" WAS NOT SHOWING UP (FOR SOME WEIRD REASON) AS A POST YOU COULD ACCESS. SO HERE IT IS A SECOND TIME. I’m a little surprised (OK, really surprised) that when I posted the video of my lecture on the Gospel of Judas Iscariot two days ago it didn’t generate more (a lot more) discussion on the blog. Not because of the lecture, but because of where I gave it, the Ramtha School of Enlightenment. I expected that to spark a lively response. It didn’t. And the most common response that I did receive (on the blog or privately) was some surprise that I would lend my name to such an institution to give them greater credibility. So I should say something about that. To start: a number of people asked me if I would have given the talk if had known that it was not the American School of Gnosticism but was, what it was, the Ramtha School of Enlightenment. I think [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:56-04:00January 19th, 2014|Christian Apocrypha, Reflections and Ruminations, Video Media|

Jesus Writes A Letter!

QUESTION: I only recently bought Eusebius’ “Ecclesiastical History” and have flipped through it. I was shocked to see in Book 1, Chapter 13, a supposed letter from Jesus to King Agbarus! I knew I had to everything Eusebius wrote with a grain of salt, but after this, it made me realise that a grain won’t be enough. No one actually takes this letter seriously, do they? And if not, how much confidence can we place in his other testimonies of letters and documents that we no longer have access to beyond his book? RESPONSE: Yes indeed, this is the famous correspondence between Jesus and King Abgar of Edessa in Syria (well, famous among scholars of early Christianity at least). I have translated it anew for my book The Other Gospels. Here is what I say there about the letters (the one from Abgar to Jesus, then his response); at the end of the post I give my new translations of the two letters. ****************************************************************************************************** Jesus’ Correspondence with Abgar The apocryphal correspondence between Jesus and Abgar [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:56-04:00January 18th, 2014|Christian Apocrypha, Reader’s Questions|

Video: The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot Part 1

This past November I flew to Yelm, Washington, outside of Seattle, to deliver a lecture on the Gospel of Judas Iscariot at the Ramtha School of Enlightenment. When I had been invited to give the talk the year before, I frankly had never heard of the Ramtha School of Enlightenment. In fact, when I was invited, I was told that the school was called The Gnostic School of America -- and so I naturally thought that it was some kind of college made up of west-coast-modern-day-Gnostics who saw themselves standing in line with the ancient Gnostics. Such people do exist! But that is not what this school is. The School of Enlightenment was founded by a woman named JZ Knight, and it is named, obviously, after Ramtha. In case you don't remember who that was, let me tell you. Ramtha was a philosopher-warrior who lived 35,000 years ago, who, with his 2.5 million soldier army, conquered most of the known world at the time, including the island of Atlantis. JZ channels him. (In one of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:43-04:00January 16th, 2014|Christian Apocrypha, Public Forum, Video Media|

Infancy Gospel of Thomas: The Technical vs. the Interesting

A couple of days ago, in my post on my talks at the Smithsonian, I indicated that my first lecture included a discussion of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and that in that kind of setting I have to choose carefully what I talk about. What I said in the post was: There are all sorts of things about this book that scholars are interested in that I won’t be going into, principally because they are things that non-scholars, frankly, are *not* all that interested in, and it’s impossible, in my view, to *make* them interested in them because, well, the issues are detailed and scholarly and not at all sexy…. A couple of readers indicated that they’d like to know what sorts of things those might be. So the following is what I say about this Gospel in my Introduction to the text in the scholarly version, Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations that I wrote, edited, and translated with my colleague Zlatko Plese. Some of you will be interested in this kind of detail; [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:27-04:00December 9th, 2013|Christian Apocrypha|

Taking Jesus the Wunderkind Seriously

I had a great time giving my lectures at the Smithsonian yesterday. Terrific crowd, very attentive, highly intelligent, great questions. And a completely exhausting day. Four lectures back to back is tough. So I came back to my room and did football, pizza, and beer all night, which was just what the doctor ordered. (I am a Dr., after all) The first lecture, as I indicated in my previous post, was on the Infancy Gospels, or at least on two of them, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Proto-Gospel of James (Protevangelium Jacobi). I have already summarized some of the stories of the Infancy Gospel, and have pointed out the obvious, that on a casual reading Jesus certainly seems to be a bit of a brat. Or at least a miracle-working son of God who as an immature boy does not seem to have his powers under control and behaves with a real mischievous streak. But I also indicated that there are scholars who call that understanding of the text into question. I’m not [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:27-04:00December 8th, 2013|Christian Apocrypha|

Jesus: L’enfant terrible?

I just (now) flew into Washington D.C., to give four lectures tomorrow (count them, four) on “The Other Gospels” at the Smithsonian. Each lecture is about an hour, followed by 15 minutes of Q & A. It’ll be a grueling day. I do these Smithsonian things once or twice a year on average. They’re great – 160 adults who have paid good money and devoted an entire day to hearing lectures on a topic important to them. It’s a terrific audience, wide-ranging, highly intelligent, educated, and curious -- real a shift from teaching 19-year old college kids. I enjoy both kinds of audience very much – but (some) more things can be assumed in this setting and, well, the humor has to change. :-) I normally do these Smithsonian talks when a new book has come out, and so this is to be about the new edition of The Other Gospels that just appeared. I’ve decided that my lectures will be on four different Gospels/types of Gospels, and maybe I’ll blog a bit about them. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:27-04:00December 6th, 2013|Christian Apocrypha|

The Gospel of Peter in a Papyrus Fragment?
Gallery
The Gospel of Peter in a Papyrus Fragment?

Christian Apocrypha, Public Forum

The Gospel of Peter in a Papyrus Fragment?

Yesterday I gave a lecture at the Biblical Archeology Society FEST here in Baltimore. Even though I'm (obviously) not an archaeologist, a lot of my work is connected with archaeology, especially the discovery of ancient manuscripts. In 1886 archaeologists digging in Akhmim Egypt were working through a cemetery and uncovered a tomb, from about the 8th century, they thought, that had, along with a skeleton, a 66 page parchment book. The book was written in Greek, and had four texts in it (all incomplete), including, on the first ten pages, a copy of what was identified as the Gospel of Peter. If you’ve ever read the surviving Gospel of Peter, this is the text (or the translation of it!) that you have read. I can blog more about it at some point later. For now: this is an alternative account of the trial, death, and resurrection of Jesus, which is most famous for the resurrection scene, in which the narrator describes what actually happened when Jesus came out of the grave. It’s spectacular. Jesus is [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:26-04:00November 23rd, 2013|Christian Apocrypha, Public Forum|

My SBL Conference

There are two happy events affecting my life today. The first is that I just now have received an author’s copy of my new book, co-edited with my colleague, Zlatko Plese, The Other Gospels: Accounts of Jesus from Outside the New Testament (Oxford University Press). As I’ve earlier indicated, this book is an English-only edition of our Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations, which included the original Greek, Latin, and Coptic along with the English translations. For this new lay-reader edition, we have simplified the introductions, making them more accessible to the non-scholar, and gotten rid of the ancient languages. The other happy event is that I am off, now, to my annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature meeting. This is the professional meeting for all scholars and professors of Biblical literature. It is a highlight of my year. Papers are read by scholars on topics of everything you can imagine by scholars who are presenting the results of their research to other scholars. Papers are short – usually 20-25 minutes in length – [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:26-04:00November 22nd, 2013|Christian Apocrypha, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Upcoming Lectures at the Smithsonian

Now that the government is back in business, the Smithsonian Associates has resumed its work; they sponsor lectures and lecture series in Washington D.C., every week, all the time, and I usually do a day long series of lectures for them once or twice a year, based on a book I have coming out. I’m scheduled for the Spring 2014 in conjunction with my book How Jesus Became God. But I’ll also be doing one this December for the English-only version of the apocryphal Gospels that is to be published by then (edited from the original-language + English version that came out last year; this new one, like the old one, was written, edited, and translated with my colleague at UNC, Zlatko Plese). This first event is scheduled for Saturday Dec. 7; there will be four lectures, two in the morning and two in the afternoon. It’s a killer of a day (for me at least). But anyone in the area should consider attending. You can get further information at their website: http://smithsonianassociates.org/ticketing/index.aspx The following [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:59-04:00October 25th, 2013|Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus|

Jesus’ Brother and the Mythicists (Part 2)

In my previous post I pointed out that mythicists have a real problem on their hands when it comes to insisting that Jesus didn’t exist (well, they actually have a *boatload* of problems; but this is one of them): Paul actually knew, personally, Jesus’ own brother, James. It’s hard to say that Jesus never lived if he in fact had a brother…. It doesn’t solve the problem to say that this was in fact Jesus’ cousin, since, well, he would still then be the cousin of (the real) Jesus (!) (plus the word Paul uses is “brother” not “cousin”) and it doesn’t work to say that he is Jesus’ brother meaning he is a member of the Christian church (since Paul differentiates him from himself and Peter by calling him the “brother” – and both Peter and Paul were also members of the church!). Mythicists have tried other approaches, including the one I discussed yesterday, of trying to claim that there was a group of fervent missionaries in Jerusalem called “the brothers of the Lord,” [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:59-04:00October 24th, 2013|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Paul and His Letters, 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|

When Time Stood Still

Tomorrow in my graduate seminar on the early Christian apocrypha we finish translating the Proto-Gospel of James (aka: the Protevangelium Jacobi). We have done about five or six chapters a week for each of the past few weeks; next week we begin to translate the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, another really great text. In an earlier post I mentioned one of the most significant passages of the Proto-Gospel, where the midwife Salome doubts that a virgin had given birth (note: she does not doubt whether a virgin could have *conceived* [although no doubt she *would* have doubted it!]; what she doubts is that a woman could give *birth* and still have her hymen intact. That, obviously, would be impossible), and gives Mary a postpartum examination only to find that in fact she really is still a virgin (i.e., “intact”). Immediately before that amazing scene is another that I find at least as entrancing. In it, Joseph himself describes – in the first person – what happened when the Son of God came into the world. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:59-04:00October 21st, 2013|Christian Apocrypha, Reflections and Ruminations|

You Won’t Find This in the New Testament!

In my graduate course last week, we analyzed the Proto-Gospel of James (which scholars call the Protevangelium Jacobi -- a Latin phrase that means “Proto-Gospel of James,” but sounds much cooler….). It is called the “proto” Gospel because it records events that (allegedly) took place before the accounts of the NT Gospels. Its overarching focus is on Mary, the mother of Jesus; it is interested in explaining who she was. Why was *she* the one who was chosen to bear the Son of God? What made her so special? How did she come into the world? What made her more holy than any other woman? Etc. These questions drive the narrative, and make it our earliest surviving instance of the adoration of Mary. On the legends found here was built an entire superstructure of Marian tradition. Most of the book deals with the question of how Mary was conceived (miraculously, but not virginally), what her early years were like (highly sanctified; her youth up to twelve (lived in the temple, fed every day by an [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:43-04:00September 29th, 2013|Christian Apocrypha, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum|

Early Gospels: A Messier Scenario

In my last post I was trying to imagine what the situation was with the first and second century Gospels, and proposed a Scenario One in which there were set Gospels, some earlier than others, with later ones using earlier ones for some of their information, along with other information from other Gospels (and oral traditions) that no longer survive. I guess that’s how I tend to view the situation some of the time. But I wonder if in fact the reality was a lot messier than that (I call the first scenario messy because it is *not* the simpler view that a lot of people assume: that there were basically four Gospels from the first century and in the second century the Gospels either borrowed from those Gospels or made things up; that’s a pretty “clean” view of the situation. But I don’t think it’s plausible). Scenario Two: Much Messier without Fixed Boundaries I have begun to suspect that the real situation was even messier than the first option I sketched. What if, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:43-04:00September 25th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Christian Apocrypha, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Messy World of Second Century Gospels

This thread has taken several detours (never mind the mixed metaphor), and I want to end it where I had planned to take it all along. What’s been going on in my mind has been an issue that I raised in one of the posts, about how we are to conceptualize the situation of first and early second century when it comes to our Gospels. I’ll talk about it with reference to Papyrus Egerton 2, about which I’ve only said a few things – lots more there to talk about. (But I’ll be moving on after this.) Before doing so let me recap the situation: Scholars have traditionally thought of the four canonical Gospels as THE Gospels that were available, so that when a new Gospel like the Unknown Gospel in Papyrus Egerton 2 appeared the question always was: WHICH of the canonical Gospels was the author familiar with (and which did he use). I challenged that view in my earlier post. We shouldn’t think that there were basically FOUR, and everything else was dependent [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:43-04:00September 25th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Christian Apocrypha, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum|

An Unknown Gospel

And behold, a leper approached him and said, “Teacher Jesus, while I was traveling with some lepers and eating with them at the inn, I myself contracted leprosy. If, then, you are willing, I will be made clean.” Then the Lord said to him, “I am willing: be clean.” Immediately the leprosy left him. Jesus said to him, “Go, show yourself to the priests and make an offering for your cleansing as Moses commanded; and sin no more....” This may sound like the Bible, but it’s not. This is one of the stories found in a document known to scholars as Papyrus Egerton 2. This papyrus consists of four small pieces of papyrus manuscript, written on front and back (so it comes from a codex, not a scroll). It contains four different stories: (1) an exhortation by Jesus for his Jewish opponents to “search the Scriptures” (in terms similar to John 5:39-47 and 10:31-39); (2) a foiled attempt to stone and then arrest Jesus (cf. John 10:31f) and then his healing of the leper cited [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:42-04:00September 19th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Christian Apocrypha, Reflections and Ruminations|

Previous 1···91011 12 Next