Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE) Archives - Page 4 of 8 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

The Gospel of Judas: The Most Recently Discovered Sethian Gnostic Gospel

For anyone interested in Gnosticism, the most recent full Gnostic Gospel to appear, the Gospel of Judas, is a real treasure. In my previous post I described the broad contours of Gnostic views and the more specific Sethian understanding of the divine realm, the world, humans, an salvation. Different Sethians, of course, would have different views of things (think of all the Catholics, Episcopalians, or Baptists you know or know of!). The Gospel of Judas presents a particularly intriguing form of the Sethian myth. I have said some things about the Gospel of Judas on the blog, but it's been a few years, so it's worth talking about again. You can find a translation, done by my colleague Zlatko Pleŝe, in the volume we co-edited and translated: The Other Gospels: Accounts of Jesus from Outside the New Testament. We also give the following Introduction to the text; I will give the rest of the Introduction and a bibliography, and a bit of the translation itself, in the next post. ****************************** The Gospel of Judas is the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:05:01-04:00October 29th, 2023|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Heresy and Orthodoxy|

Interesting Questions About the Books From Nag Hammadi
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Interesting Questions About the Books From Nag Hammadi

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

Interesting Questions About the Books From Nag Hammadi

There are a lot of unsettled questions about the "Gnostic Gospels," that is, the books of the Nag Hammadi Library. After my recent posts I received some interesting questions that *can* be settled, and here I deal with two of them: one that’s a zinger and the other that has been asked by several readers. First the zinger. The reader noted that I indicated that the books of the library were manufactured in the fourth century; we know this because the leather bindings on the books had their spines strengthened with scrap papyrus (and is therefore called cartonnage) and some of these papyri were dated receipts. And so the reader’s question: QUESTION: Just out of curiosity – what form of dating did the compilers of the books use, that would correspond to our “341 CE” and so on? I’m assuming they weren’t using Roman dates. But were the Romans themselves, in that era, still using dates “ab urbe condita”? RESPONSE: This is a great question, and I have to admit, I had [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:05:01-04:00October 24th, 2023|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

The (Lost) Greater Questions of Mary (Rated R) (X?)

In my last post I mentioned Gospels that we know about because they are mentioned, or even quoted, by church fathers, but that no longer survive. A second, 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). 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 by Epiphanius of Salamis, a Christian heresy-hunter who was prone to exaggeration and fabrication, who was incautious at best in his attacks against heretical sects in his book the Panarion (= “Medicine Chest”; in it Epiphanius supplies the “antidotes” for the “snake-bites of heresy”). The most notorious of the groups that Epiphanius attacks were known by a variety of names, including the “Phibionites.” According to Epiphanius -- our sole source of knowledge about the group -- these gnostic believers engaged in nocturnal sex rituals [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:03:37-04:00July 2nd, 2023|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

The Lost Gospel of Basilides

I sometimes get asked about "lost Gospels" -- Gospels that we know at one time did exist (because they are mentioned and sometimes even discussed by ancient authors) but that, alas, exist no more. I dealt with this question on the blog many moons ago, and I regret to say that in the interim, the books I'd love to show up have not. And I don't expect them to. But then again, life is full of surprises. One of the very early ones I'd *love* to get my hands on is the Gospel of Basilides. Basilides is one of the early Gnostic figures mentioned by the late-second century heresy-hunter Irenaeus. Regrettably, we do not have any writings from Basilides or any of his followers, and so all we know about these people and their writings is what authors like Irenaeus tell us. That is somewhat like asking Mike Pence for a fair assessment of Bernie Sanders. You have to take the description with a pound of salt. We don’t know if Basilides actually had a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:03:37-04:00July 1st, 2023|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Heresy and Orthodoxy|

More on Secret Mark as a Forgery (by Morton Smith?)

Here now is the second of my two posts on reasons for suspecting that Morton Smith himself may have been the one who forged the “letter of Clement” that discusses the “Secret Gospel of Mark” (see my post from yesterday). Again taken from my article, “Hedrick’s Consensus on the Secret Gospel of Mark,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 11 (2003) pp. 155-64. ****************************** (2) Several things that are hard to explain about the “discovery.” For those who want to show the letter is authentic (i.e. really written by Clement of Alexandria), these are the issues to address. I leave off several other matters that some have raised, such as why the letter is never mentioned by Clement or any other heresiologist who opposed the Carpocratians otherwise: (a) Why does this letter contradict in content what Clement says elsewhere? For one thing the attitude toward true gnosis in this letter is completely at odds with what is found elsewhere in Clement, as Eric Osborne trenchantly noted. Never for Clement is true knowledge a matter [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:56-04:00May 31st, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Biblical Scholarship|

Did Morton Smith Forge the Secret Gospel of Mark?
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Did Morton Smith Forge the Secret Gospel of Mark?

Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum

Did Morton Smith Forge the Secret Gospel of Mark?

Last month (April 2023) I published a thread of blog posts on the intriguing and controversial Secret Gospel of Mark, allegedly discovered by Columbia University scholar Morton Smith in the library of the Greek orthodox monastery Mar Saba twelve miles southeast of Jerusalem. He did not actually discover the Gospel itself, but (allegedly) discovered a letter that described and quoted it, allegedly written by the church father Clement of Alexandria (200 CE or so), allegedly copied by a scribe of the eighteenth century in the back blank pages of a seventeenth-century book otherwise (actually) containing the letters of Ignatius of Antioch (110 CE or so), in which Clement allegedly discusses a potentially scandalous edition of Mark’s Gospel allegedly used by a nefarious Gnostic group called the Carpocratians. Confused yet? Read the posts, starting with this one from April 12: https://ehrmanblog.org/do-scholars-ever-forge-gospels In my posts I did not give any evidence to show that this “alleged” discovery might not have been a discovery but a forgery, possibly by Smith himself, even though from the outset some (many?) [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:56-04:00May 30th, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum|

A Scandalous Discovery of a Scandalous Gospel?

Later scholars have sometimes claimed Morton Smith forged the Secret Gospel of Mark; he claimed he *discovered* it. Which is it? Here I continue with my account of how he said it all happened. In my previous post I indicated that in 1958 Smith was catagaloguing the books of the library of the monastery of Mar Saba near Jerusalem, when he found a book that had a text written into its final (blank) pages. It was allegedly a letter of Clement of Alexandria, a famous theologian and ethicist who lived and wrote around 200 CE. Smith immediately recognized that it was a letter we did not have before. And here is how I discuss what he did next, in my book Lost Christianities (Oxford University Press, 2003). ****************************** On the spot, Smith decided to photograph the three pages that contained the handwritten copy of Clement’s letter, but chose to hold off translating the entire text until later, reasoning that if some such treasure had turned up, there might be more where that came from; given [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:06-04:00April 25th, 2023|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Could the Mysterious “Secret Gospel of Mark” Be Authentic?

In my previous posts I discussed how Morton Smith claimed he discovered a copy of an ancient letter of Clement of Alexandria (ca. 200 CE), written in the back of a 17th century book, by a scribe of the 18th century, in which Clement described a mysterious “Secret Gospel” – an intriguing and possibly scandalous longer version of the Gospel of Mark. In yesterday’s post I indicated how Smith went about trying to authenticate the discovery. Here I pick up at that point, again, as recounted in my book Lost Christianities. ****************************** A key question was whether the copyist who put the alleged letter of Clement of Alexandria that Smith mound into the bak of a book was copying an actualy letter of Clement of Alexandria. There is no difficulty believing that a scribe of the eighteenth century might have had a fragmentary copy of an ancient letter at his disposal – possibly a loose sheet in the ancient library, known for its famous ancient texts – and that rather than simply discard it, he [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:07-04:00April 23rd, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Biblical Scholarship|

How Do You Prove an Ancient Manuscript is Ancient? The Secret Gospel of Mark

In my previous posts I explained how American scholar of early Christianity, Morton Smith, claimed to have discovered the Secret Gospel of Mark in 1958. Now I’ll discuss how, once he discovered it (assuming he did – some scholars think he actually forged it…), how he went about trying to find out if it was actually an ancient Gospel. Again, from my book Lost Christianities: Authenticating and Interpreting the Letter Morton Smith devoted much of his research for the next fifteen years studying this find. Roughly speaking, the work involved establishing the authenticity of the letter and determining the meaning of the passages quoted from the Secret Gospel. In 1973, Smith published the results of his labors in two books, one a popular account for general audiences, full of interesting anecdotes and still worth reading, The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the the Secret Gospel According to Mark, the other an erudite report on his investigations for scholars in the field, an amazing book of scholarship but inaccessible for the most part to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:06-04:00April 22nd, 2023|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Biblical Scholarship|

The Discovery of a Lifetime: A Secret Gospel of Mark?

In this thread I am discussing the discovery of the Secret Gospel of Mark in 1958. Or was it the forgery of the Secret Gospel of Mark? Entire books have been written on the topic. My first foray into the fields was in my book Lost Christianities (Oxford Press, 2003). Here is how I begin to talk about the matter there: ******************************* The Discovery We need to begin with the tale of the discovery, as recounted by Morton Smith himself in his sundry publications on the “Secret Gospel of Mark,” especially the two books published fifteen years after the discovery – one for a general audience, a beautifully written piece that reads like a detective novel, and one for scholars, a detailed linguistic and philological analysis of the text and its significance.[1] In 1941, as a twenty-six year old graduate student, Smith had gone to the Holy Land on a traveling fellowship from Harvard Divinity School. Unfortunately, the Mediterranean was closed by the war, and he was stuck in Jerusalem. While there he became acquainted [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:06-04:00April 13th, 2023|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Biblical Scholarship|

The First Actual Account of the Resurrection (Hint: It’s Not in the New Testament)

On this Easter Sunday I thought it would be appropriate to repost a blog from several years ago on a Gospel not in the New Testament -- a Gospel that gives us an actual narrative of the resurrection. I often say that there is no story of Jesus' resurrection in the the New Testament -- and people think I'm nuts. Of *course* there is! No, there's not. In the New Testament, Jesus is buried on a late Friday afternoon. The action picks up, then, on the third day when the women arrive at the tomb, only to find it empty. The resurrection happened *between* these two events. It is never narrated. We have no account of Jesus being revived and coming out of the tomb. But we do from *outside* the New Testament, in a book that some early Christians considered canonical Scripture, the Gospel of Peter. This was an account that was lost for many, many centuries. It deals not just with Jesus' resurrection (though that is clearly the highlight), but with his trial [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:06-04:00April 9th, 2023|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

Dreaming of Purgatory

Yesterday I began to talk about the Martyrdom of Perpetua, one of the most interesting and moving texts to come down to us from early Christianity. It is an account of a 23-year old Roman matron who is willing to die a gruesome death for her Christian faith. Among other things, the text shows that her faith is far more important to her than her family. In particular, she is shown in conflict especially with her father (no husband is mentioned, which has led to considerable speculation: Divorced? Widowed? Unwed mother? Something else?). And even though it is with regret, she is willing to leave behind her own infant child by being martyred. Family figures prominently in the two excerpts here. In the first her father begs her to avoid martyrdom, to no avail. In the second (chs. 7-8) we have an account of her dream and intervention on behalf of her dead brother Dinocrates. This is the part that I will be most interested in for the next post. Is it an early adumbration [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:01:53-04:00April 2nd, 2023|Afterlife, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Women in Early Christianity|

Is the Gospel of Mark in Papias Our Gospel of Mark?

Can we trust a source such as Papias on the question of whether our Gospel of Matthew was written by the disciple Matthew and that our Gospel of Mark was written by Mark, the companion of the disciple Peter? It is interesting that Papias tells a story that is recorded in our Matthew but tells it so completely differently that it appears he doesn’t know Matthew’s version. And so when he says Matthew wrote Matthew, is he referring to *our* Matthew, or to some other book? (Recall, the Gospel he refers to is a collection of Jesus’ sayings in Hebrew; the Gospel of Matthew that *we* have is a narrative, not a collection of sayings, and was written in Greek.) If he *is* referring to our Matthew, why doesn’t he see it as an authoritative account? Here's the conflicting story. It involves the death of Judas. And it’s quite a story! Here is my translation of it from my edition, The Apostolic Fathers (Loeb Classical Library, vol. 1; 2004). But Judas went about in this [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:01:35-04:00March 4th, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

Who Wrote the Gospels? Our Earliest (Apparent) Reference

I have begun to discuss the evidence provided by the early church father Papias that Mark was actually written by Mark. He appears to be the first source to say so. Does he? And if so, is he right? Here’s how I begin to discuss these matters in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (edited a bit here). ****************************** Papias is often taken as evidence that at least two of the Gospels, Matthew and Mark, were called by those names already several decades after they were in circulation. Papias was a Christian author who is normally thought to have been writing around 120 or 130 CE. His major work was a five-volume discussion of the teachings of Jesus, called Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord. [1] It is much to be regretted that we no longer have this book. We don’t know exactly why later scribes chose not to copy it, but it is commonly thought that the book was either uninspiring, naïve, or theologically questionable. Later church fathers who talk about Papias and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:01:35-04:00March 2nd, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

Did Mark Write Mark? What the Apostolic Fathers Say

Did Mark write Mark? A couple of weeks ago I did an eight-lecture course on the Gospel of Mark for my separate (unrelated to the blog) venture, a series of courses on “How Historians Read the Bible” (the courses are available on my website: www.bartehrman.com). It was a blast. One of the things I loved about doing it was that I was able to read and reread scholarship on Mark and I learned some things I had long wondered about, and re-learned other things that I used to know. One of the things I had to think seriously about for the first time in some years was the question of why church fathers in the second century (but when?) began claiming that our second Gospel was written by John Mark, allegedly a secretary for the apostle Peter. That took me straight back to the question of the reliability of an early Christian writer named Papias (writing around 120 or 130 CE?). Papias gets used all the time as proof that Mark wrote Mark. Conservative Christian [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:01:35-04:00March 1st, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

The End of the World Means the End of Sex. Guest Post by Daniel Kohanski
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The End of the World Means the End of Sex. Guest Post by Daniel Kohanski

Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Sex and Sexuality in the Bible

The End of the World Means the End of Sex. Guest Post by Daniel Kohanski

Here now is the third post by Platinum blog member Daniel Kohanski, based on his recently published book A God of our Invention. This one should grab your attention! **************************** From its beginnings, Christianity has had theological difficulties with human sexuality. In this edited excerpt from my latest book, A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World, I lay out what I believe are some of the reasons for this. --------------------------------------------------------------- The first Christian commentator that we have record of, the Apostle Paul, was also the first to recommend that Christians avoid sexual activity and stay celibate. “To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am” (1 Cor. 7:8). Still, he did accept that not all were capable of it. He advised the Corinthians that if a man “thinks that he is not behaving properly toward his fiancée, if his passions are strong, and so it has to be, let him marry as he wishes; it is no sin” (1 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:01:35-04:00February 28th, 2023|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Sex and Sexuality in the Bible|

Is Christianity a Cult of the Dead? Guest Post by Kyle Smith, PhD

Now here's an intriguing topic I bet you've never thought about. Can you (should we?) consider early Christianity -- and in fact Christianity as a whole, as a "cult of the dead"? Kyle Smith is an associate professor and director of the History of Religions program in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto (See: Kyle Smith | Department of Historical Studies (utoronto.ca). I have known Kyle for many years, since he was a PhD student in early Chrsitianity at Duke. Since then he has become a well-known scholar of Christianity in late antiquity, who already now at a relatively young age (compared to us geezers) has published six books. (Not sure if you know this, but many, many senior scholars publish only two or three for their entire careers.) Five of them are hard-hitting scholarship. His most recent one is for a general audience, Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity (University of California Press, 2022). I think it's unusually interesting. I thought it would be extremely interesting to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:01:20-04:00February 16th, 2023|Book Discussions, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Can We Know Anything About Judas Iscariot?

I get asked about Judas Iscariot far more than any of the other disciples, even the ones who are completely central to Jesus' life and ministry (Peter, James, and John). I guess that's because he is seen as, ultimately, more crucial to the story of Jesus. The betrayer. Without him, no arrest, trial, and crucifixion. Or at least, a completely different scenario for the death of the Son of God. This week, when scrounging around looking for something else, I came across this paper I delivered at a conference years ago. I thought it might be of interest to blog members. This will take three posts. (The paper was written for scholars, so I'll put any necessary explanatory notes in italics) ****************************** In recent years, more has been written and less known about Judas Iscariot than about any of Jesus’ followers, with the outstanding exception of his wife and lover, the founder of the Merovingian Dynasty. (That was a little joke about people who take Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code seriously about what he says about [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:01:19-04:00February 12th, 2023|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Historical Jesus|

Do Eyewitnesses Prove Miracles? Can They Be Faked? The Martyrdom of Polycarp

For over two hundred years scholars of antiquity have worked diligently to determine which ancient writings by pagans, Jews, and Christians were actually produced by their alleged authors and which are by authors merely claiming to be some other famous person, as well as which originally anonymous writings were wrongly ascribed to one famous author or another. If a book is wrongly ascribed, it’s not the author’s fault. If Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John did not write Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, that would not make these books “forgeries.” A “forgery” is when an author intentionally takes the identity of another (famous or important) person with the intent of deceiving her or his readers. There were lots of reasons for doing that in antiquity, and I discuss all such matters on a popular level in my book Forged (HarperOne, 2011), where by and large I focus on the writings of the New Testament (e.g., the six letters that claim to be written by Paul but appear not to have been; and also letters by Peter; [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:01:02-04:00January 31st, 2023|Book Discussions, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Forgery in Antiquity|

Can We Take the Martyrdom of Polycarp at Face Value?

I continue here my discussion of the Martyrdom of Polycarp as found in my book Forgery and Counterforgery. This will get in the weeds a bit, but hey, it can be good for your soul! I've always thought that it's useful for layfolk to see how scholars in one field or another argue among themselves, and this is an example of it. And we ain't talkin' quantum physics here. This should be pretty accessible if you're interested in some of the complexities. Here I explain why in the past scholars doubted whether the account was authentic or not; in posts to come I'll explain reasons that I ended up finding it more compelling to think that the book is in fact a forgery. ****************************** It has long been recognized that there are problems with taking the Martyrdom of Polycarp at face value as a straightforward historical record of what actually happened to the bishop of Smyrna. The numerous parallels to the Gospel records of Jesus’ death appear contrived in places, the account is chock-full of miraculous [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:01:02-04:00January 29th, 2023|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

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