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Did Paul Write Colossians? According to Most Scholars No – Paul did Not Write Colossians
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Did Paul Write Colossians? According to Most Scholars No – Paul did Not Write Colossians

Forgery in Antiquity, History of Biblical Scholarship, Paul and His Letters

Did Paul Write Colossians? According to Most Scholars No – Paul did Not Write Colossians

Did Paul write Colossians? Asking and answering questions like this every now and then is useful on the blog to shift gears away from explaining at a more popular level what scholars have come to think - to showing how scholars make their arguments to one *another*. I don't want to do this a lot, but it seems that it can be helpful at times, just so blog readers can get a bit of a sense. Right now I'm in them middle of a thread on whether the author of Luke was really "Luke the gentile physician," one of Paul's traveling companions. The only reason for thinking such a person even existed (a gentile doctor named Luke) is that he is mentioned by Paul in Colossians. In my previous post I explained why the majority of critical scholars don't think Paul actually wrote Colossians (so that the historical Paul does *not* mention this person). The post was written for a general audience, and a number of people raised questions about it. So here is how [...]

BDEhrman2022-05-10T13:35:59-04:00January 11th, 2020|Forgery in Antiquity, History of Biblical Scholarship, Paul and His Letters|

Final Tribute To Larry Hurtado

I am sorry to report that my colleague Larry Hurtado, a well-known scholar of the New Testament, author of several influential books, and prominent blogger, has died. Back in July I indicated on the blog that he had become very ill. At the time we thought he had only a few weeks to live. But he soldiered on, and passed away last Monday, November 25. There is a very nice tribute to him by one of his former students at: https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2019/november/died-larry-hurtado-new-testament-early-christian-worship.html I decided to repost here what I said in July, both as a tribute to him and to suggest several of his books that you might be interested in reading. Larry was about ten years ahead of me in the field, and had very similar interests to mine, from textual criticism (studying ancient Greek manuscripts) to Christology (understanding how Jesus came to be worshiped as God). A couple of his books are highly technical (as I indicate below); others are completely accessible to the non-academic. You may want to check them out. [...]

BDEhrman2019-12-03T09:18:26-05:00December 3rd, 2019|History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Is the Bible Inerrant? Guest Post by Mike Licona

This now is the second of three posts by Mike Licona, Associate Professor of Theology at Houston Baptist University. Mike has a PhD in New Testament studies and is a committed evangelical apologist, who has written a recent book, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels (Oxford University Press, 2016). He does indeed admit there are differences in the Gospels, which some people would claim are actually contradictions; but he continues to believe the Bible is "inerrant." What does he mean then? In this clear and lucid post, he explains his views. NOTE: Mike's first post generated lots of comments, and it was a bit overwhelming. He will be willing to answer questions/comments over the next four days, but not afterward. That in itself is amazingly generous. Please don't ask tons of questions in one comment -- that (I can say from experience) is hard to deal with! Moreover, he and I both know that many people on the blog have a different perspective from his. But please be respectful and courteous, even in your [...]

BDEhrman2021-02-13T01:05:29-05:00December 2nd, 2019|Canonical Gospels, History of Biblical Scholarship|

How Many Books in the New Testament Were Forged?

In response to the lecture on ancient practices of pseudepigraphy (writing in the name of a famous person when, alas, you are actually someone else), I received this important question, getting to the very basics – the heart and soul of the issue for students of early Christianity. QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman, I know you have published and spoken on the topic, but would you mind sharing which NT books are pseudepigraphical? RESPONSE Yes indeed, one of the reasons I’m so interested in this topic is that the use of pseudepigraphy, what today we would call “forgery,” was so much more widespread in antiquity than today, probably because there were far fewer people who were literate in the first place and so far fewer experts who could uncover a forgery; and those who could, of course, didn’t have our modern methods of analysis and technologies of data retrieval. It was very common in the Christian world as well. Before answering the question directly at the end of this post, let me just say something about how [...]

BDEhrman2022-06-19T21:31:25-04:00September 20th, 2019|Forgery in Antiquity, History of Biblical Scholarship, Reader’s Questions|

My Lecture in Quebec: Did Ancient Authors Try To Deceive Their Readers?

I have decided to go ahead and post the address I gave last week to an academic conference in Quebec on "Pseudepigraphy" in the ancient world. If you're not familiar with the term (why would you be??) it refers to a book written by an author who falsely claims to be someone else (like if I wrote a book and claimed to be Stephen King) (which maybe I should do....). Most scholars seem to think this was an acceptable practice in the ancient world. I don't. My lecture was meant to show why. This will take about four posts. Here's the beginning of the lecture (it came as the keynote at the end of two days of meetings/papers). In the post itself I have translated the foreign language terms I use. *************************************************************************************** Over the past three days we have enjoyed a wide range of papers on numerous important texts, specific instantiations of ancient pseudepigraphy. In this final address I will not be discussing a specific text but rather the broader phenomenon of pseudepigraphy itself, with [...]

BDEhrman2020-11-28T21:32:46-05:00September 17th, 2019|Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity, History of Biblical Scholarship|

Sad News From Larry Hurtado

Many readers on the blog will know of Larry Hurtado, a prominent New Testament scholar who has been influential as one of the most regular and reliable bloggers on issues of relevance to the study of early Christianity. Larry has announced that he is very ill and will no longer be able to participate in either scholarship or the promotion of early Christians studies to a broader reading audience. This is very sad, especially for us who know him. (I will give his announcement about his illness and the prospects at the end of this post.) I have known Larry for over thirty years. He started out as a New Testament textual critic, with his first book a published version of his dissertation: Hurtado, Larry W. (1981). Text-Critical Methodology and the Pre-Caesarean Text: Codex W in the Gospel of Mark. Studies and Documents. 43. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. It's not something you will want to try to reading, unless you're an expert on Greek and the Greek manuscript tradition of the NT. Trust me. But I used [...]

BDEhrman2019-07-10T05:01:47-04:00July 10th, 2019|History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum|

The Legality, Morality, and Scandal of Acquiring Ancient Manuscripts: Guest Post by Jennifer Knust

Here is the final part of Jennifer’s Knust’s quest to trace the history of an intriguing Christian manuscript she came across, suspecting it had come to Duke ultimately as a result of Nazi looting decades earlier. Now she details how she tried to track it down. The entire episode leads her, then to reflect on the Green Family Collection, a group of manuscripts and antiquities purchased by the owners of the Hobby Lobby and the basis of the “Museum of the Bible” in Washington D.C. Any visitor to the museum might assume that acquiring such treasures would be relatively simple and involve no issues of legality, morality, and scandal. On the contrary…. Jennifer Knust’s most popular books are To Cast the First Stone and Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity. ************************************************* Part III: Manuscripts are Commodities The Antiquariat was (and is) a bookstore. Günther Koch was a bookseller. Indeed, in a counter-claim filed against the Rosenthals in the 1950s, he described himself as uniquely qualified for the position he undertook during and after the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-06T12:34:11-04:00July 9th, 2019|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts|

Christian Manuscripts and Nazi Loot: Guest Post by Jennifer Knust

This now is the second of Jennifer Knust’s three posts on her current project, tracing the history of a Christian manuscript she came upon from the rare book collection at Duke University. Her research led her to booksellers in London, Munich, and Amsterdamn, and implicates the Aryanization policies of the Nazis. Who knew New Testament scholarship could be so interesting? Find below what she has to say. Jennifer Knust’s most popular books are To Cast the First Stone and Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity. ************************************* Part II: Nazi Loot? My own project began when Aaron Ebert, a doctoral student at Duke University, noticed that the manuscript he was studying was one of three purchased by Duke from the London bookseller Raphael King in the 1950s. Very little information about Mr. King is available, so Aaron reached out to the Ludwig Rosenthal Antiquariaat, a venerable antiquarian bookstore now located in the Netherlands that once owned another of Duke’s manuscripts also sold by King, Greek MS 018. According to an important volume on Byzantine [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-06T12:35:41-04:00July 8th, 2019|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts|

Tracking Down Stolen Manuscripts: Guest Post by Jennifer Knust

I have asked my friend and colleague Jennifer Knust (Professor of early Christianity at Duke) to write some guest posts for us on the blog. Jenny is the author of Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity, and she has also recently published the definitive study of the famous passage of the “Woman Taken in Adultery” (containing the line “Let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her” – a passage not originally in the New Testament), a long, sophisticated, and learned book (co-authored with Tommy Wasserman), called To Cast the First Stone; and I had suggested she write about that for us. Maybe she will later. But for now she has decided to post about some very exciting current research she’s doing, as we speak: tracking down the history of a Christian manuscript that was plundered by the Nazis. Intriguing stuff. This will take several posts. ***************************************************** Jennifer Wright Knust Duke University “In this kind of world no blueprint instructs us how to house what we [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-06T12:36:14-04:00July 7th, 2019|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts|

The Writings of Papias: Guest Post by Stephen Carlson

I occasionally get questions about one of the most interesting but least known Christian authors of the early 2nd century, a man named Papias (writing in 120 CE? 140 CE). Many readers consider him particularly important because he claims to have known and interviewed the companions of disciples of Jesus’ own apostles (it’s a bit confusing: but Jesus had his apostles; after his death they themselves had disciples; Papias knew people who knew these disciples of the apostles); moreover, Papias is the first author to mention a Gospel of Matthew and a Gospel of Mark. Pretty important. Unfortunately, we don’t have his writings – only a few quotations of them, here and there, among the writings of later church fathers. But these quotations are highly fascinating. There has never been a definitive, full-length study of Papias until now. (Well, until the near future.) My friend and former student and Stephen Carlson has been working for years on the Papias fragments. Stephen did his PhD in New Testament at Duke and is now a Senior Research [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-25T16:40:52-04:00April 4th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Biblical Scholarship|

The Protestant Obsession with Origins

It was especially in the nineteenth century that scholars of religion, theology, and biblical studies became deeply obsessed with the question of “origins.” In many ways, the roots for this interest – in these fields in particular – lay in the Protestant Reformation, and it is no accident that the major research on the question was done in predominantly Protestant countries (especially Germany; somewhat in England and, even less, in America) and by Protestant professors in these fields, scholars who had themselves received theological training before themselves giving instruction in universities. Roughly speaking, it was possible to think about “origins” in two very different ways, one we might label “Catholic” and the other “Protestant.” In the Catholic way of thinking, the “origins” of something was the starting point, from which important developments began to transpire, as religion, theology, and even “the truth” evolved into higher forms over the centuries. This evolutionary model, of course, owed a good deal to other intellectual currents of the day, for example in the understanding of languages: they become more [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T00:05:57-04:00March 13th, 2019|History of Biblical Scholarship, Reflections and Ruminations|

A Return to the Historical Jesus

One of the most interesting developments within New Testament studies happened in the 1950s. To set the development in context, I need to remind you that the long “quest” of the historical Jesus – trying to determined what Jesus said and did historically – was evidently put to rest by the work of Wrede and Schweitzer fifty years earlier, and not a whole lot was being done in that field, as scholars *either* thought that our sources were basically reliable and so should be simply be accepted for what they said, *or* realized that our sources were so highly problematic that we couldn’t actually say much about what had happened in Jesus’ life historically. And so scholars turned their attention to other things, first in examining the oral traditions about Jesus through form criticism, and then starting in the 50’s focusing on the distinctive *portrayals* of Jesus in the Gospels using redaction criticism. (I’m simplifying things here, of course, since there were lots of scholars doing lots of different things at the time). In the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T00:07:04-04:00February 27th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship|

The Gospel Writers as Editors Rather than Authors

Three weeks ago I started to give a response to a question about the Messianic Secret. At first I thought I could handle the question in a post or two. As seems to happen a lot on the blog, once I explained all the background that led up to the development of the idea, and then explained it, and then talked about its aftermath – Voila! We had an entire thread. All to the good, I suppose. I have now gotten to the point of talking about how in the 1950s, New Testament scholars moved away from focusing on the oral traditions behind the Gospels (the concerns of the “form criticism”) to looking at the theological and literary investments of the Gospels themselves (“redaction criticism”). Scholars now had a renewed interest in seeing what these particular authors – the anonymous writers of the Gospels – wanted to emphasize, individually and distinctively, about Jesus. It came to be realized afresh that each writer had his own emphasis, his own story, his own perspective – that Matthew’s [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T00:07:13-04:00February 26th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, History of Biblical Scholarship|

A New Way of Looking at the Gospels

In this long and complicated answer to the "messianic secret" in Mark I have explained how 19th century scholars were interested in "source criticism" -- the attempt to figure out what the sources of the Gospels were, and in particular, how to explain the "synoptic problem," that is, the problem of explaining how Matthew, Mark, and Luke have so many similarities, in terms of the stories they tell, often in the same sequence, and even at numerous points in precisely the same words. The goal in this source analysis was to figure out which Gospel was closest to the time of Jesus and therefore most reliable. The answer: Mark. But after some decades Wrede showed that even Mark was not a simple historical account of Jesus' life, but was driven by literary/theological purposes, causing the author to alter the traditions about Jesus' words and deeds he had inherited. That killed for a time the Quest of the Historical Jesus. Scholars turned to a different interest: what can we say about the traditions of Jesus *before* [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T00:07:23-04:00February 25th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship|

If the Quest for the Historical Jesus Failed… What Then?

In response to a question about the Messianic Secret in Mark, I have now shown how scholars (most signficiantly William Wrede) came to realize that not even the Gospel of Mark was a straightforward historical account of what actually happened in the life of Jesus. Some five years ago on the blog I talked about what happened next, in the scholarship on the New Testament. It's a crucial element of the history of biblical scholarship. Here is what I said. ***************************************************************************************************** Once it came to be realized that Mark’s Gospel – the earliest of our surviving accounts of Jesus – was driven not purely by historical interests in order to record biographical information with historical accuracy, but was (like the other Gospels) written in order to convey theological ideas in literary guise, the movement to use Mark to write a “Life of Jesus” more or less collapsed on itself, for a time and among most New Testament scholars. What arose from the ashes of this “Quest of the Historical Jesus” could not have been foreseen [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T00:07:31-04:00February 22nd, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship, Memory Studies|

Mark: The First Gospel in 19th Century Research

My custom/self-imposed policy is to re-post blog posts only when they are a few years old, in the expectation that most blog members will not have seen them and that some of those who have -- if they are at all like me -- won't actually remember them. In this case I need to post one from 2017. In a later post I am going to argue that when William Wrede published his book on the Messianic Secret, it disabused scholars of a long held assumption, that Mark, as the earliest Gospel, was a fairly disinterested straight-up report of what actually happened in the life of Jesus. To get to that, I have to explain why nineteenth century scholars thought Mark was the oldest, earliest, most original Gospel there was, and that Luke and Matthew both used it for many of their own stories about Jesus. (John is a different kettle of fish: not as closely related to any of the other three as they are to each other.) That view is called “Markan priority” (Mark [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T00:09:51-04:00February 8th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, History of Biblical Scholarship|

The Beginning of the Quest of the Historical Jesus

In 1901 William Wrede, a German Protestant biblical scholar, published his earth-shattering work, Das Messiasgeheimnis, “The Messianic Secret.” It overturned in a rather devastating way the entire scholarly consensus about the Gospel of Mark and, more important and relatedly, undercut the whole enterprise scholars had undertaken to use the Gospels to reconstruct the life of the historical Jesus. When five years later, Albert Schweitzer (later famous as a great humanitarian, medical doctor to Africa, who had abandoned his career as a biblical scholar and concert organist to engage in his mission; he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952) published his even-better known and justifiably classic study The Quest of the Historical Jesus, he gave it the rather uninspiring title Von Reimarus zu Wrede: “From Reimarus to Wrede.” This was a history of scholarship on the historical Jesus, written to explain the attempts scholars had made since the Enlightenment down to Schweitzer’s own day to describe what Jesus really said and did given the problem of our Gospel sources. Starting with Hermann Samuel Reimarus in [...]

BDEhrman2020-11-08T00:12:51-05:00February 7th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship|

The Digital Bible (by Jeff Siker)

I just finished the seventh edition of my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. I started working on it, for the first edition, in 1993 – so I’ve been at it for 25 years. Ouch. For this new revision, among other things, I’ve added an Excursus of particular relevance, on the “Digital Bible,” written, luckily for all involved, not by me, but by my scholar-friend Jeff Siker, who has published, just this past year, the definitive book on it. Here is what he says about it. (He is on the blog, so if anyone has any questions for him about it, or about anything else, ask away!) - Jeff Siker is also the author of Jesus, Sin, and Perfection in Early Christianity, Liquid Scripture: The Bible in the Digital World. **************************************************** The Digital Bible Jeffrey Siker The changing technology of writing and reading has always played a major role in the transmission and interpretation of the New Testament, from papyrus rolls to parchment codices to Gutenberg’s printing press, and, [...]

BDEhrman2021-02-07T00:37:40-05:00October 21st, 2018|History of Biblical Scholarship, Teaching Christianity|

Redaction Criticism of the Gospels

In a previous post I explained why scholars have long held to "Markan Priority," the view that Mark was the first Gospel written and that Matthew and Luke both used it for constructing their own narratives. One great pay-off for this conclusion (it really is significant) is that it is possible, given this result, to see how Matthew and Luke have each *modified* Mark in the stories they received from him. This approach is called "redaction criticism." A "redactor" is an editor. Redaction criticism looks at the editing decisions made by an editor of a source. Years ago I described the method and gave an illustration of how it worked on the blog, in part to show that finding the differences between the Gospels is not necessarily a *negative* thing, but can have very *positive* results for interpreting the message each one has. This is what I said then: ********************************************************************* I have stressed that knowing that there are differences, even discrepancies, among the Gospels does not need to be considered in a purely negative [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T01:46:03-04:00December 1st, 2017|Canonical Gospels, History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum|

Translating the Apostolic Fathers: A Blast from the Past

In my last post I answered a question about whether I would ever publish a translation of the New Testament. (Short answer: almost certainly not!). But I want to take a couple of posts to talk about the work of translation. There is a very big difference between being able to read an ancient text in its ancient language (Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Coptic, whatever) and producing a translation of it for publication. You might think that it’s all basically the same thing: if you can read it, you can publish a translation of it. But as it turns out, it’s not that simple. I didn’t realize this for years and years, until I started publishing translations of ancient texts. My first experience was about fifteen years ago now, when I was asked to do a new edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library. Here I’ll give some background on that project and the series it appeared in, and in the next post I’ll talk about the difficulties of producing a translation. FOR [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T01:53:44-04:00October 27th, 2017|Book Discussions, History of Biblical Scholarship, Proto-Orthodox Writers, Public Forum|

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