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Heresy and Orthodoxy

Why Did We Get a New Testament?

In my past couple of posts I’ve talked about how the canon of the Hebrew Bible was formed. That raises the obvious corollary of how the canon of the New Testament was formed. Who decided we should have the twenty-seven books we do? Why these books and not others? Why were any books chosen at all? When were these decisions made? And what criteria were used to make the decisions? To my surprise, I haven’t talked much about the process on the blog over the years. So here I will devote two posts to the issue. I have written at greater length about the matter in several of my books, especially Lost Christianities. Here is the most direct and to the point discussion that I provide in my textbook The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction. ********************************************************** THE CANON OF THE NEW TESTAMENT We are much better informed about the formation of the canon of the New Testament, in no small part because we have the writings of later church fathers who explicitly discuss the [...]

BDEhrman2021-02-23T01:57:32-05:00January 5th, 2017|Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers, Public Forum|

What Is Gnosticism? A Blast from the Past

From time to time I get asked about Gnosticism. What was it exactly? I deal with the issue in a number of my books, as you may know. Here is a summary statement that I published a couple of years ago on this date, based on my rewriting of the section on Gnosticism in my undergraduate textbook, The New Testamen: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. ***************************************************************** Major Views of Various Gnostic Groups Despite the many differences among the various Gnostic groups, most of them appear to have subscribed to the following views. (1) The divine realm is inhabited not only by one ultimate God but also by a range of other divine beings, widely known as aeons. These aeons are, in a sense, personifications of the ultimate God’s mental capacities and/or powers (some of them were called such things as Reason, Will, Grace, and Wisdom). (2) The physical world that we inhabit was not the creation of the ultimate God but of a lower, ignorant divine being, who is often identified [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:55:24-04:00November 7th, 2016|Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum|

Marcion as Alive and Well Among Us

As I’ve been thinking about Marcion over the past couple of days, it has occurred to me that in some ways he is still alive and well among us. I have known Christians over the years who in fact have views in many ways close to what Marcion taught. These people would, of course, deny they have anything like the touch of the heretic about them. But at the end of the day, their views are not so different. Maybe they are not as extreme as him, but they do seem to be dwelling on the fringes of his camp. First, I have known a lot of Christians who think that the Old Testament has a God of wrath and condemnation and the New Testament has a God of love and mercy. Students say this to me with some regularity. The God of the Old Testament gives difficult laws that no one can possibly follow (how, exactly, are you supposed to keep from “coveting” anything??). And then he condemns people for not keeping them. But [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:01:07-04:00October 19th, 2016|Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Arch-Heretic Marcion’s Theology

I am discussing the relationship between Jesus and the Law of the Jews, and to get to that question I am dealing with how Christians about a century after Jesus’ life understood this relationship. I began with Marcion and his followers, who thought that Jesus had nothing to do with the Law, since he represented a different God from the one who gave the Law. The Law was given by the Creator of this world who called Israel to be his people and then judged them, and all people, harshly, for not obeying his law, leading to universal condemnation. Jesus came from a different God, a previously unknown God, who was not the God of the Old Testament, but a higher spiritual being who intervened on behalf of people to save them from the wrath of the Creator. There are many, many things about Marcion’s system of belief that we would love to know that we simply do not. The main reason is that Marcion’s own writings have not been passed down to us from [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:01:14-04:00October 18th, 2016|Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum|

The “Arch-Heretic” Marcion, Jesus, and the Jewish Law

In this thread, I’ve started to talk about the relationship of Jesus to the Law of Moses. I’m going to get to the issue by means of a circuitous route, by talking about how that relationship was understood by followers of Jesus living a hundred years after his day. The reason for starting there is that we have a clearer idea what these followers thought than we do, say, of Jesus’ followers a decade after his death. Those earlier followers left us no writings and they are not directly discussed (in terms of their theological views) by extensive other sources (except the book of Acts). We do know about later Christians and their views, however, even if our sources of information for these are also partial and imperfect. There were strikingly distinct positions taken by Christians in the middle of the second century with respect to Jesus and the law. One extreme position was taken by the teacher-philosopher Marcion, who was eventually declared the arch-heretic of the church but who in his day pronounced a [...]

BDEhrman2022-07-03T16:10:16-04:00October 16th, 2016|Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum|

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 [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:09:06-04:00November 13th, 2015|Christian Apocrypha, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Other Christians Who Denied that Christ was Divine by Nature

In my previous post I discussed on group of early Christian “adoptionists” – that is, followers of Christ who maintained that he was not really a divine being (by nature) but was a human who had been “adopted” by God (at his baptism) to be his Son. To be sure, from that point on he was in some sense divine; but he was not born of a virgin and he did not pre-exist his appearance in the world. The group I mentioned yesterday was the Jewish-Christian Ebionites. There was another group known (or thought) to have a similar Christological view that was not in the least Jewish, but was from start to finish gentile. This is a gropu that emerged in second century Rome called the Theodotians, named this because the founder of their sect was named Theodotus. He was a cobbler by trade. But he obviously didn’t work making shoes 24/7; he must have had time for some serious theological reflection as well. Here is what I say about Theodotus and his followers in [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:15:01-04:00October 16th, 2015|Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Was Christ God? The View of Jewish-Christian Ebionites

We know of several groups and individuals from the first three centuries of Christianity who were known, or at least thought, to support an “adoptionistic” Christology, one that said that Christ was not by nature a divine being but was, instead, a fully and completely human being, one who had been “adopted” by God to be his son (and therefore divine for *that* reason). He was the Son of God, then, by adoption or election, not by nature. He did not pre-exist his birth, and his birth was normal – his parents had sexual relations and he was the offspring. But later God made him his own son. When I say that some persons were known or thought to hold some such view, I mean that in many instances it is difficult (impossible, actually) to show that they really did hold such views. All we have, in virtually every case (not quite) are what their proto-orthodox opponents said about them. In other words, we have to take their enemies’ word for it. That is not [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:15:08-04:00October 15th, 2015|Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Adoptionistic Christologies

For some posts now I have been talking about “docetic” Christologies in the early church – views of Christ that said he was so much divine that he was not really a human – and about how these influenced proto-orthodox scribes who changed their texts of scripture in order to show that, by contrast, Christ really was a flesh and blood human being. I would now like to shift to the other end of the theological spectrum to discuss Christological views that insisted on the contrary that Christ was fully human, so much so that he was not actually, by nature, divine. Sometimes these Christologies are called “adoptionistic,” because in them Christ is portrayed not as a divine being who pre-existed before being born of a virgin, but as fully and completely and utterly human, a very righteous man who was born like everyone else and who was by nature like everyone else, but because of his special devotion to God was “adopted” by God to be his son and, as the one who had [...]

BDEhrman2021-02-23T01:58:49-05:00October 14th, 2015|Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, Historical Jesus, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers|

Are Their Any Completely Anti-Heretical Manuscripts?

READER COMMENT/QUESTION: The whole thread on the “The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture” is really really great! Thanks!! QUESTION: are the shorter version in Luke 22:19-20 and the “bloody sweat” in Luke 22:44 documented by the same manuscripts? Or do these variants appear in different manuscripts? In other words: do we have an “entirely docetic” manuscript of Luke? (incidentally, I see that both variants are in chapter 22 very close to each other). Thank you very much!!! RESPONSE: Ah, this is a great question. The answer to the first question is no. The manuscripts that contain the shorter reading in Luke 22:19-20 (that is, the form of the text in which Jesus does NOT say that the bread represents his body “given for you” and that the cup is “the new covenant in my blood poured out for you”) are not the same ones that contain the shorter reading in Luke 22:43-44 (the “bloody sweat”; in this case the manuscripts with the shorter reading do NOT have the account of Jesus’ sweating great drops of [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:15:29-04:00October 13th, 2015|Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

Luke’s Last Supper and Orthodox Corruptions of Scripture

I can now wrap up my discussion of the textual problem of Luke 22:19-20 and the intriguing question of what Jesus said at his Last Supper (according to Luke). I have argued so far that the longer (more familiar) form of the text, found in most surviving manuscripts, is actually a change made by scribes, not what Luke originally wrote (this is where Jesus indicates that the bread is his body given for others and that the cup is the new covenant in his blood shed for others). I set *up* that discussion by referring to one of the debates over the nature of Christ in precisely the time period when the change was made: the second century, when Christians were debating whether Jesus was so completely divine that he was not actually human. Various Christians that scholars call “docetists” said the answer was no. The label for these Christians comes from the Greek word doceo, “to seem,” or “to appear,” because these people said that Christ “appeared” to be human and “seemed” really to [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:15:44-04:00October 12th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

Early Christian Docetism

I can now, at long last, start talking about the kinds of textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament that I covered in my 1993 book, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (I did a second edition, updating the discussion with a new Afterword in 2011). From the surviving documents of the period, there appear to have been five major competing Christologies (= understandings of who Christ was) throughout the Christian church, and I will devote a post or two to each of the first four. Docetism, the subject of this post, understood Christ to be a fully divine being and therefore not human; Adoptionism understood him to be a fully human being and not actually divine; Separationism understood him to be two distinct beings, one human (the man Jesus) and the other divine (the divine Christ); Modalism understood him to be God the Father become flesh. The fifth view is the one the “won out,” the Proto-orthodox view that Christ was both human and divine, at one and the same time, that [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:18:07-04:00September 28th, 2015|Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

How Can You Know A Scribe’s Intentions?

My next step in this thread about my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture will be to discuss the various Christological views known from the second century (Docetic Christologies, adoptionic Christologies, separationist Christologies; and Modalistic Christologies), and then I will try to show how textual changes made by scribes in the period reflect opposition to this, that or the other Christology, in support of the “Proto-orthodox” Christology that came to dominate the early Christian tradition. Before doing that, I need to clear out one final piece of underbrush. The argument of my book was that Christological changes of the text were “intentional” not simply accidental. But that raises a very large question that I have not addressed on the blog, even though I have discussed intentional changes a number of times. It is this: how can we determine the “intention” of a scribe? This is part of a much larger question that literary scholars have dealt with for many decades now, going back at least to the middle of the twentieth century, to what is [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:18:19-04:00September 25th, 2015|Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, New Testament Manuscripts|

How Consistent are Orthodox Corruptions of Scripture?

The goal of my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture was to show all the places that I could find of where early Christian scribes modified their texts of the New Testament in order to make them more amenable to their own (the scribes’ own) polemical purposes, particularly with respect to the Christological debates they were involved with. I will describe these second and third century debates in subsequent posts. (Recall: there are very good reasons for thinking that the vast majority of “intentional” changes in the text of the NT were made already by around the year 300 CE – so it is debates in this earlier period that really matter for understanding textual changes.) In my previous post I indicated how I went about finding the data: I carefully combed through our most exhaustive textual apparatuses verse by verse, throughout the entire New Testament, examining every textual variant that is noted in them – many thousands indeed! – and looking to see which ones were closely, relatively closely, or distantly tied to Christological [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:18:28-04:00September 23rd, 2015|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, New Testament Manuscripts|

How Do You Research Orthodox Corruptions?

When I finished my dissertation on a technical area within textual criticism – it was an analysis of the quotations of the Gospels in the writings of the fourth-century church father Didymus the Blind, in an attempt to demonstrate what the manuscripts at his disposal in Alexandria Egypt must have been like – I very much wanted to continue to work in the field of textual criticism, but I wanted to do some research that had some broader applicability and wider interest to scholars who were not purely technicians in this one rather arcane subdiscipline within New Testament studies. I had always been especially interested in the detective work involved in solving textual problems in the New Testament. Where there are important passages that have important variants among the various manuscripts, how do you decide which variants are “original”? I’ve always loved that kind of problem, maybe because I’ve always been such an inveterate debater, and arguing for a plausible solution to a textual conundrum involves, virtually every time, mounting a convincing argument in the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-29T15:57:40-04:00September 21st, 2015|Book Discussions, Heresy and Orthodoxy, New Testament Manuscripts|

Why Intentional Changes of the Text Might Matter

In doing the research that led up to my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, I came to see that the variations of our manuscripts were important not only because they could tell us what the original writers said in the books that later became the New Testament, but also because they could tell us about what was influencing the anonymous and otherwise unknown scribes who produced the copies of these books in later times. As I pointed out in a previous post, scholars have long thought – with good reason – that most of the intentional changes of the text (that is, the alterations that scribes made on purpose – at least apparently on purpose – as opposed to simple scribal mistakes) were made sometime in the first two hundred years of copying. If these changes were indeed made intentionally, then the scribes who made them must have had a reason for wanting to make them. They were consciously changing their texts in places. They weren’t doing that in millions of places, but in [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:19:09-04:00September 16th, 2015|Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

My Focus on Christology in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture

In the last couple of posts I have talked about the basic thesis that lay behind my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. After doing my dissertation I became interested in seeing how theological disputes in early Christianity may have affected the scribes who were copying the texts that later came to be collected into the canon of the New Testament. Rarely had a study of this sort been pursued before, and never thoroughly and rigorously. Here let me provide a bit more background. First, for reasons I have stated earlier in this very-long thread, there is a broad consensus among textual scholars that the vast majority of textual variants found in all of our manuscripts down to the invention of printing (and beyond!) were probably generated in the first 200 years of copying. This has to do with the phenomenon that I have earlier called “the tenacity of the tradition.” If you recall, this is the phenomenon that later scribes appear not to introduced new readings into the tradition (at least not very often [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:19:30-04:00September 13th, 2015|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

The Unusual Thesis of The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture

As I started to point out in my previous post, the overarching idea behind my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture was that scribes copying their sacred texts in the early centuries of Christianity were not immune from the theological controversies raging in their day, but that they were, in some sense, participants in those disputes. In pursuing that idea, I had to bring together two fields of academic inquiry that were almost always kept distinct from each other – the study of the manuscripts of the New Testament and the investigation into the development of early Christian theology. The vast majority of scholars who worked on manuscripts were not informed about the social and doctrinal history of early Christianity (except in rather broad and basic terms) and the vast majority of scholars who worked on the theological controversies of the early church were almost completely ignorant of the manuscript tradition of the New Testament. I wanted to bring the two together. Let me again say that I was not the first to come up [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:19:36-04:00September 12th, 2015|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts|

Back to the Question: The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture

This is by far the most unusual thread I have had in the three and a half years of doing the blog. It started with a question that I began to address on June 30. It is now September 11. I have had a few brief interludes dealing with other things, but almost all the posts in the intervening weeks (months!) have been background that I needed to lay out to answer the question. And in fact the background has been only to answer one part of the question. Here was the original question: READER’S QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman, I do not know if others would find this interesting, but I would love to know how you developed the idea for The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. How did you go about researching it? How long did it take? Is it a once in a lifetime work? RESPONSE: OK, so to understand my response it is important to bear in mind what I have been discussing all this time. Here I will summarize. Roughly speaking [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:19:49-04:00September 11th, 2015|Book Discussions, Heresy and Orthodoxy, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Did Scribes Add the Passage of the Bloody Sweat?

In my previous posts I’ve been puzzling over the textual problem of Luke 22:43-44, the so-called “bloody sweat” passage, where Jesus, before his arrest, is said to have been in such deep agony that he sweat drops “as if of blood,” so that an angel came down from heaven to minister to him. These verses are found in some manuscripts of Luke, but not others. So which text is “original”? The version of Luke with the verses or the version without them? In previous posts I have argued that the verses run contrary both to the structure of Luke’s passage and to the theology of Luke, who worked to *eliminate* any sense of Jesus actually suffering from his Gospel. In my last post I began to ask, not which of the two texts the author Luke himself would have written (scholars call that kind of question “intrinsic probabilities”: what is more intrinsically likely to go back to the author?) but which of the two texts scribes of the second century, when the passage came to [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:23:32-04:00August 25th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

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