Christian Apocrypha Archives - Page 8 of 12 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Did Jesus’ Death Matter? The Intriguing View of the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter

From remembering the birth of Jesus (Christmas!), we turn for a moment to remembering his death. I recently received this question, in response to my statement that some Christians did not think the death of Jesus mattered for salvation, and others maintained that he never actually died. QUESTION: Can you give some reference to where I can explore this idea of the Crucifixion being unimportant or not happening at all? RESPONSE: I will take two posts to answer this question, since they involve two different sets of “Gnostic” belief, which, in brief, was a distinctive and “declared-heretical” understanding of the Christian faith that stressed that the ultimate divine realm was not closely connected with this material world (the highest God was not the Creator), a world that was to be escaped, not one that would be redeemed. One document that embraces the view that the death of Jesus had no bearing on salvation is the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter, which provides an alternative understanding of what happened at Jesus’ death – as witnessed by [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:45-04:00December 26th, 2017|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Doctrine, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Heresy and Orthodoxy, Public Forum|

A Very Strange Saying: From the Gospel of Peter?
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A Very Strange Saying: From the Gospel of Peter?

Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Public Forum

A Very Strange Saying: From the Gospel of Peter?

As I pointed out yesterday, the "Gospel of Peter" that we have today, discovered in 1886, is unfortunately, only a portion – the only surviving portion – of what was once a complete Gospel. But was it a complete Gospel? Or was it only a passion Gospel (like the later Gospel of Nicodemus) that gave an account only of the trial, death, and resurrection of Jesus? That has long been debated. I discussed one intriguing view of the matter some years ago on the blog, as follows: In recent years a German scholar named Dieter Luhrmann has argued that other portions of the Gospel of Peter have shown up, in very small fragments of papyrus discovered in Egypt. It is a controversial claim. The most interesting possibility, for me, is a papyrus fragment that Luhrmann published called Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 4009 (it is the 4009th papyrus published from the huge find of papyri in the trash heap of ancient Oxyrhynchus Egypt). To understand why this *might* be a fragment of the Gospel of Peter requires a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:31-04:00December 5th, 2017|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Public Forum|

The Exasperatingly Fragmentary Gospel of Peter: Readers’ Mailbag December 4, 2017

My Readers’ Mailbag is stuffed, and I need to clear out a few questions to make room for others that come in. So I may be answering more than normal over the next couple of weeks. Here is one that I find intriguing: QUESTION If you could choose any currently-fragmentary or otherwise lacunose document from antiquity and magically receive a reconstructed version to read, what would it be? RESPONSE Wow. There are lots to choose from. I would probably come up with different answers on different days of the week, but the first thing that springs to mind is the Gospel of Peter, one of the most interesting of the ancient non-canonical Gospels. We have only a fragment of the book, which begins smack dab in the middle of an episode and ends, literally, in the middle of a sentence. To show why that’s so tantalizing, let me first say a bit about what the Gospel is (at least that part of it we still have!). The Gospel comes from one of the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:31-04:00December 4th, 2017|Christian Apocrypha, Reader’s Questions|

Jesus’ (Young?) Mother and (Half?) Brothers? The Proto-Gospel of James

A few days ago lot of readers made comments on the question (thanks to the Roy Moore newsflashes) of whether Mary was a young girl when she got married; and now I have mentioned Jesus' mother and brothers in Mark's Gospels. So let me say a few more things about them. The earliest non-canonical source that talks about Jesus' mother (indicating she was a teenager -- not something found in the NT) and his brothers (were they really is brothers?) is in the non-canonical Proto-Gospel of James, from some time in the second century. I thought it might be useful for me to re-post a discussion of the matter from a number of years ago, here: ************************************************************** The Proto-Gospel of James 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 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:15-04:00November 20th, 2017|Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reflections and Ruminations|

Another Translation Project: The Apocryphal Gospels

In my last reposted-post I mentioned that some years after the Apostolic Fathers (after, apparently, I had forgotten all the pain involved), I took on another (very large) translation project, of wider interest to the world at large -- the ancient Gospels that did not make it into the New Testament. Here is how I have described that one, just to finish out the thought. ******************************************************** After having done the Apostolic Fathers in two volumes for the Loeb, I had decided never to do another translation project again. Too hard! But then, forgetting my decision, I thought it would be useful to have a Greek/Latin – English version of the early Christian non-canonical Gospels. And at the urging of the editor at Harvard, submitted a proposal also for the Loeb Classical Library. But the editorial board decided that they did not want to start publishing new editions of Christian texts in the series, since that would detract from its typical focus on Greek and Roman classics. And so I was now interested in a project [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:58-04:00November 1st, 2017|Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha, Public Forum|

My Favorite Anecdote about Jesus and the Afterlife: Teeth Will Be Provided!

I was thinking (I'm always thinking) about Jesus and the afterlife, and suddenly my favorite rather humorous anecdote occurred, which involves a real moment in (relatively) modern scholarship. I tried to find where I had written about it in one of my books: I was sure I *had* done so, but I couldn't find anyplace where I had. If I haven't, I may include it in the next one. But I did find that I made a post of it on the blog four years ago. Here it is! **************************************************************** I think it’s time for a break from the hard-hitting discussions for something a bit different and humorous. And so I have an anecdote to tell about a passage that I quoted in one of my earlier posts from Matthew, where Jesus says: “Truly I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith. I tell you, many will come from east and west and will eat with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the heirs of the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:39-04:00September 15th, 2017|Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Too Much Money and the Afterlife

In a previous post I talked about the very funny satirical dialogue of the second-century pagan Lucian of Samosata, “Voyage to the Underworld” in which an unbelievably wealthy tyrant became incredibly miserable after death, because he realized that all his power, influence, and massive wealth had been stripped from him, and would be, for all eternity, whereas a poor cobbler who had lived a miserably impoverished existence was rather pleased that he no longer would starve and freeze nearly to death ever again. The point of the dialogue is pretty obvious. If you are deeply attached to the material things of this life, you are courting your own disaster. That’s not what you should be living for. At about the same time as Lucian was writing an anonymous Christian author produced a book known as the Acts of Thomas. This is the first legendary account we have of the apostle Thomas, famous for (allegedly) being the first missionary to take the gospel to India. Unlike the work of Lucian, the account is not meant to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:39-04:00September 11th, 2017|Christian Apocrypha, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, Public Forum|

Fun with the Jewish Christian Gospels: A Blast from the Past

I was looking through the blog archives today, and ran across this interesting one from four years ago. In additional to being rather informative about Gospels outside the New Testament, it shows how even in antiquity Christians had to figure out how to reconcile minor discrepancies among the canonical Gospels. Enjoy! ********************************************************************* Yesterday in my graduate seminar we spent three hours analyzing the three so-called “Jewish-Christian Gospels.” These are very tricky texts to deal with. We don’t have any manuscripts of them – even small fragments. They come to us, instead, in the quotations of church fathers such as Origen, Didymus the Blind, Jerome, and Epiphanius. These (orthodox) church fathers sometimes quoted or referred to one or the other of the Gospels in order to relate what it said; and sometimes it was in order to attack what it said. There are all sorts of questions raised about these no-longer surviving Gospels in these quotations. A good part of the problem is that some of these fathers – especially Jerome, on whom we depend for [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:23-04:00September 8th, 2017|Christian Apocrypha, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reflections and Ruminations|

Looking at Hell

I have been talking about different views of what the afterlife entails. In the broadest terms, some ancient people believed that everyone at death had the same fate: they lived on, not in their body but in their soul, in some kind of netherworld where nothing much ever happened. It was a dreadfully banal and boring existence, that went on forever, the same for everyone. Some ancient authors who had that view described visits to the underworld by the living, where they encounter the souls of the dead, who tell them how awful it is – not just for sinners but for everyone. The point of these otherworldly journeys is crystal clear: you should avoid death for as long as you can, since once it happens, you have a hopelessly insipid future ahead of you, which will stretch for all eternity. Stay alive as long as you can! This is one of the main points of the otherworldly of Odysseus, in Homer’s Odyssey. And it stands very much at odds with the view set forth [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:23-04:00September 5th, 2017|Afterlife, Christian Apocrypha, Public Forum|

Recent Manuscript Discoveries: A Blast from the Past

As we are nearing the five-year anniversary of the Blog, I have been looking back over some past postings, and this one caught my eye, from 3/30/13 (*four* years ago....). It's still of interest. Two things to say about it: "The Gospel of Jesus' Wife" is now recognized by everyone to be a modern forgery (it has been proved) (see, e.g., https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/the-unbelievable-tale-of-jesus-wife/485573/); and the fragment of Mark's Gospel allegedly from the first century has STILL not been published! Here is my original post on the two: ************************************************************************ As I am taking a break from my Christological posts for a couple of days, I’ve received several inquiries about other things, including the newsworthy manuscript discoveries announced this past year: what has happened to them? Specifically, what about that Gospel of Jesus’ Wife that was named, announced, and published by Karen King back in September, and what about the first-century manuscript of the Gospel of Mark that Dan Wallace announced but would tell us nothing about in the debate that he had with me in Chapel [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:35-04:00March 31st, 2017|Christian Apocrypha, New Testament Manuscripts|

Eternal Life and Damnation

In my summaries of the Apocalypse of Peter and the Apocalypse of Paul, as a couple of readers noticed, there was a striking difference in emphasis. Both of these early Christian texts (the first from the second century, the other from the fourth or possibly the fifth?) narrate guided tours of the realms of the blessed and of the damned, and both seem more interested in describing the torments of the lost than the ecstasies of the saved. The former focuses on moral sins that lead to eternal punishment: seductresses, adulterers, murderers, children who are disobedient to parents, slaves who are disobedient to masters, women who had sex before marriage; and sundry other things. To be sure, some of the sins are “religious” – blasphemy, socerery, and so on. But in this case, “torment is for everyone forever according to his deeds.” The Apocalypse of Paul, on the other hand, is far more concerned about sins within the church, sins of ecclesiastical and doctrinal error: ascetics who break their vows; church people not commited completely [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:34-04:00March 27th, 2017|Afterlife, Christian Apocrypha, Public Forum|

Another Gory Account of the Afterlife: The Apocalypse of Paul

Yesterday I discussed the first surviving Christian account of a tour of heaven and hell, an apocalypse allegedly, but not really, written by Jesus’ disciple Peter. Here is one other, this time allegedly, but not really, written by the Apostle Paul. I have taken this description from my book Forgery and Counterforgery (which I have revised a bit to get rid of some of the scholarly jargon). ***************************************************** Far more influential on the history of Christian thought than the Apocalypse of Peter, though clearly dependent on it for many of its traditions, the Apocalypse of Paul was originally composed in Greek but came to be translated into a number of languages: Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Slavonic, and Ethiopic. The text as we have it is dated at the outset: “In the consulate of Theodosius Augustus the Younger and of Cynegius, a certain respected man was living in Tarsus….” Commonly this is taken to indicate that the book was composed, in its final form, around 388 CE, but scholars today think that it may derive from the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:34-04:00March 22nd, 2017|Afterlife, Christian Apocrypha, Public Forum|

Touring Hell: The Apocalypse of Peter

I am about ready now (I think!) to dig more deeply into a thread on the Invention of the Afterlife – the tentative title of the book that I *hope* will be my next one. I’ve been putting off starting the thread in earnest because, in fact, I don’t feel particularly ready for it. I’m just at the preliminary stage of my reading and have many dozens of books I need to work through before I can even think about sketching out how I want to broach the subject in my book (I have about a hundred unread books on various aspects of the matter sitting on my shelf now, as we speak, and I’m collecting more virtually every day). But I think that I will be doing this book differently from others I’ve done – at least with respect to the blog. I’m thinking about using the blog as a way to think out loud about some of the topics I’m covering in my reading. I’m not sure that everything I read about will [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:34-04:00March 21st, 2017|Afterlife, Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity, Public Forum|

A Different Interpretation of the Mischievous Boy, Jesus

I have decided that I can't simply post yesterday's blast from the past about the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and leave it at that, since the way we today tend to read the account (where Jesus seems, to our eyes, to be a Super-Brat) may not be the way it was read in antiquity (believe it or not!). So here is the post that I wrote to explain that, when I first dealt with the matter three years ago. **************************************************************************** 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 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:23-04:00December 10th, 2016|Christian Apocrypha, Public Forum|

Jesus the Superboy: A Blast From the Past

As is my wont, this time of year, I've been thinking about the stories of Jesus' birth and early life for a few days now. And just this instant I was looking at some old posts on the blog, from years ago -- and this one turned up from 2013. A matter of ongoing interest: if Jesus was the miracle working Son of God as an adult, what was he like as a kid? We have stories about that from the early church. Here's the post, occasioned by some lectures I was giving: ***************************************************************************** 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, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:23-04:00December 9th, 2016|Christian Apocrypha, Public Forum|

Newsweek Article on Christmas: Part 1

In my last post I made an off-the-cuff comment about an article about Christmas that I wrote for Newsweek four years ago (2012). Someone asked for more information, and I see now that I never posted the article on the blog. So I’ll post it here in two parts. Here is the first half: ******************************************************************* This past September, Harvard University professor Karen King unveiled a newly discovered Gospel fragment that she entitled “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.” This wisp of a papyrus has stirred up a hornet’s nest and raised anew questions about what we can know about the historical Jesus of Nazareth, and about whether there are other Gospels outside the New Testament that can contribute valuable information. Few questions could be more timely, here in the season that celebrates Jesus’ birth. The fragment is just a scrap – the size of a credit card – written in Coptic, the language of ancient Egypt. It contains only eight broken lines of writing, but in one of these Jesus speaks of “my wife.” [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:22-04:00November 28th, 2016|Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

Lost Gospels: The Greater Questions of Mary. A Blast From the Past

Here is a blast from the past -- almost exactly four years ago now -- about one of my all time favorite "lost" Gospels. If it ever existed. One very imaginative church father certainly thought it did. It was a Gospel featuring Mary Magdalene and a rather wild encounter she had with Jesus. Here is what I said in the post of November 2012. ************************************************************************* I have been discussing some of the Gospels that we know about because they are mentioned, or even quoted, by church fathers, but that no longer survive. Another, particularly intriguing, Gospel like this – one that I desperately wish we had, for reasons that will soon become clear -- is known as “The Greater Questions of Mary” (i.e., of Mary Magdalene). My following comments on it are more or less lifted from my Introduction in the recent Apocryphal Gospels volume. One of the “great questions” for scholars is whether such a book ever really did exist. It is mentioned only once in ancient literature, in a highly charged polemical context [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:06-04:00November 15th, 2016|Christian Apocrypha, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Women in Early Christianity|

Bart Ehrman discusses the Apocalypticist

This is a very strange video! One of the strangest I've ever been in. To begin with, the title doesn't make any sense (I'm not sure who called it this). The word "apocalypticist" means "a person who holds to an apocalyptic world view." So who or what is "The apocalypticist"? I've never heard someone being given that title ("THE" apocalypticist; as if there were just one??). Maybe it means Jesus the Apocalypticist? Maybe, but that's not really what the clip is mainly about. It's about the ancient world view of apocalypticism. It starts with a movie with Richard Harris, moves to an interview with me about what the term "apocalypse" means, goes (briefly) to the question of whether Jesus was an apocalypticist; and ends with Harold Camping, this fellow who claimed the end of the world was coming on May 21, 2011. It's a very odd clip. But here it is! (NOTE: This particular post is open to everyone. Most posts on this blog are for MEMBERS ONLY. Think about joining. You get tons of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:41-04:00July 27th, 2016|Christian Apocrypha, Jesus and Film, Religion in the News, Revelation of John, Video Media|

Readers’ Mailbag November 13, 2015

It is time for the weekly Readers’ Mailbag. I am keeping a list of questions readers have asked, and I add to it all the time. If you have a question you are eager to hear me answer in a couple of paragraphs or so, simply ask! One convenient way to do so is simply to make a comment/question on this post. Here are three questions for today. QUESTION: The Wikipedia entry on the gospel of the Nasorenes mentions your work on the similarities between it and the Gospel of Matthew, could you briefly tell me what this is about? RESPONSE: There are three Gospels that are frequently called the “Jewish-Christian Gospels,” because they were – according to the writings of the church fathers – used by Christians who self-identified as being, also, Jewish (e.g., by keeping the Jewish law and, possibly, insisting that to be a follower of Jesus a male had to be circumcised and males and females needed to keep the Sabbath, observe kosher food laws, and so on). We do [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:13-04:00November 13th, 2015|Christian Apocrypha, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

A Fantastic Saying of Jesus in Papias

I have mentioned one of the intriguing traditions found in the now-lost Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord by the early second century proto-orthodox church father Papias (his account of the death of Judas). Here is another one. In this one Papias is relating what he has heard that Jesus taught. As you’ll see, it is not a teaching that is found in the New Testament Gospels, or in fact in any other Gospel source we have. What is most striking, in some ways, is that Papias claims that he has a clear line of tradition going straight back to Jesus to confirm the reliability of the saying: he learned this from “elders” (that is, senior Christians) who heard from John the son of Zebedee, one of Jesus’ closest disciples, that this is something Jesus used to say. So this is not an “eyewitness” account (or, rather, not an “earwitness” account) – it is an account that we get from Papias who got it from others who got it from John who got it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:30-04:00June 5th, 2015|Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers|

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