History of Christianity (100-300CE) Archives - Page 13 of 15 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Was the Author of Matthew Matthew?

In my previous post I showed that the claim that Matthew, the tax-collector, was the author of the Gospel of Matthew (as we continue to call it) cannot be traced earlier than about 180 CE. It is not found in Justin, who lived in Rome in 150 CE and who quotes the Gospel – along with Mark and Luke – without indicating who wrote them. And the evidence of Papias (120-140 CE) is more than just ambiguous: he actually does not appear to be referring to *our* Gospel of Matthew when he says that the disciple Matthew collected the sayings of Jesus in the Hebrew language. In this post I want to give two reasons for thinking that the Gospel was not in fact written by Jesus’ disciple Matthew (and at every point it needs to be remembered that the Gospel does not *claim* to be written by Matthew; quite the contrary, not only is it anonymous: it speaks of Matthew as one of the characters in the story in the third person). FIRST point. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:39-04:00June 25th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reader’s Questions|

When Was Matthew Called Matthew?

For years I agreed with those scholars who claim that we have very early “evidence” that the Gospel of Matthew was actually written by Matthew, the tax-collector who was a disciple of Jesus. I no longer think so. Let me give some of the relevant information. The anonymity of this author – as is true for the other three NT Gospels as well, was respected by Christians for decades. When the Gospels of the New Testament are alluded to and quoted by authors of the early second century, they are never entitled, never named. Even Justin Martyr, writing around 150-60 CE, quotes verses from the Gospels, but does not indicate what the Gospels were named. For Justin, these books are simply known, collectively, as the “Memoirs of the Apostles.” It was about a century after the Gospels had been originally put in circulation that this book was called Matthew, and the others were called Mark, Luke, and John. This comes, for the first time, in the writings of the church father and heresy-hunter Irenaeus, around [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:39-04:00June 24th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reader’s Questions|

Mark as Peter’s Scribe

QUESTION: Why are scholars almost certain that Peter did not give the general details of Jesus' life and ministry to his companion Mark, who faithfully recorded the details in Greek, in the style found in his gospel? I know you've said that someone such as Peter, aside from not knowing Greek, almost certainly wouldn't have had the ability to build the relatively sophisticated structure of Mark's gospel, but why couldn't Mark have "put form" on Peter's prosaic verbal account ? RESPONSE: This is a very good question, and as it turns out it is a bit complicated. The first thing to say is that one has to look for *evidence* if one wants to think, for example, that Mark is recording the traditions given to the author by Peter. The idea that he does so ultimately goes back to Papias. To begin answering the question, in this post I thought I’d talk about Papias and the tradition of the Gospels. And rather than write it all out from scratch, I’ve decided simply to reproduce [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:25-04:00June 1st, 2013|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reader’s Questions|

More on Jews, Christians, and the Battle for Scripture

In yesterday’s post I indicated that my next trade book, to be written in a couple of years, would deal with the question of Jews and Christians, centered on the question of why Christians kept the Old Testament and how doing so led to controversies with Jews. The following is how I set up the issue that I will be addressing. The second-century Christian theologian Marcion maintained that the Old Testament was the Scripture of the Jews. Christians, however, were not Jews; they were followers of Jesus. Moreover, the loving God of Jesus was not the wrathful God of the Jews. For Marcion, Jews and Christians had nothing in common except in a negative sense: the Jews represented everything the Christians rejected, including the inferior, legalistic God who chose the Jewish people and gave them their Scriptures. Christians have their own beneficent and salvation-bringing God, and their own Scriptures. For Marcion, the Old Testament is not part of the Christian Bible. FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click here for [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:25-04:00May 27th, 2013|Book Discussions, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reader’s Questions|

The Next Trade Book: Jews and Christians

QUESTION: I was wondering if someday you will write a book on the rise of anti-Judaism in early Christian circles ? If you were to write such a book, what would the title and the subtitle be ? RESPONSE: As it turns out, that is indeed to be the topic of my next trade book, which I plan to write in a couple of years. As I have said on this blog before, I try to alternate the kinds of books I write: trade books for a general audience, textbooks for college students, and scholarly books for the six people in the world who really care. Now that I am putting the finishing touches on my trade book How Jesus Became God, I am getting ready to work on my next scholarly book. This will be a heavy-hitting scholarly commentary on the early Christian Greek Gospel fragments from the early second century, including most notably the Gospel of Peter, Papyrus Egerton 2, the Jewish Christian Gospels (Gospel according to the Hebrews; Gospel of the Nazareans; [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:25-04:00May 26th, 2013|Book Discussions, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reader’s Questions|

The God Christ and the Jews

I should probably at some point provide a sketch of how my book How Jesus Became God will be structured and organized (I don’t *think* I’ve done that yet; I need to look). In any event, in the second to last chapter I show how by the fourth century there was a broad consensus that Jesus was God in a very concrete sense: he was co-eternal with God the Father (there never was a time before which he did not exist) and was “of the same substance” with the Father, and therefore was actually equal with the Father. In the final chapter, I go into the ramifications of this view for various polemical relationships Christians were in: with pagans (whose emperor used to be a competitor-divine-man with Jesus), with one another (as more Christological controversies erupted), and with Jews. Here’s a part of my section on what the effect of the claim that Jesus was God had on the relations of Christians and Jews. ****************************************************************************** To discuss the rise of Christian anti-Judaism in antiquity would [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:11-04:00April 27th, 2013|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers|

Growth Rate of Early Christianity

Time to answer a readers' question, as a change of pace, unrelated to anything else I've been posting on: QUESTION: The question on my mind is almost certainly NOT knowable, but I will ask it anyway. 1 – can anyone estimate how many Christians (all variations included) were abroad on Planet Earth at any given time in the 100s or 200s? 2 – when Constantine chose to back Christianity and make it the “official” religion — in the early piece of the 300s — how many actual Christians were there? Or, to make it easier: Taking the whole “Roman” empire as 100%, what pct of the peeps were Christians? 3 – A few generations later (380?) — Theodosius I said that the Roman Empire officially believed what the Bishop of Rome believed. How many (or what percentage of the people) were Christians in 379? I don’t expect precise answers. Any pointers you could provide to where answers might be found (or guesstimates, even) by researchers/experts/theologians/atheists or even hockey players would be appreciated. RESPONSE: This is [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:10-04:00April 23rd, 2013|Constantine, Fourth-Century Christianity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reader’s Questions, Spread of Christianity|

A Third Forgery in the Name of Peter

As I mentioned in the two previous posts, in my talk at Unity Village the other night, I introduced my discussion of whether there could be forgeries in the New Testament by introducing three forgeries from *outside* the New Testament; the first was the Gospel of Peter with its giant Jesus and walking-talking cross at the resurrection and the second was the letter of Peter to James in which he attacks “the man who is my enemy,” a transparent reference to the apostle Paul. The third is the one I’ll mention here: another book allegedly, but not really, written by Peter, this time an apocalypse, the Apocalypse of Peter. As it turns out we have three “apocalypses” allegedly written by Peter. The one I dealt with in my talk is the most famous of the three, one discovered in 1886, in the same book in which the Gospel of Peter is found. It is a 66-page book that contains four texts. In some ways the Apocalypse of Peter is the most interesting. It is the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:56-04:00April 8th, 2013|Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reflections and Ruminations|

Another Forgery in the Name of Peter

In my talk the other night at Unity Village, called “Are there Forgeries in the New Testament?” (or maybe I called it something even more provocative, like “Is the New Testament Forged?”), I started out, as I indicated in my previous post, by discussing several forgeries that are found *outside* the New Testament, as a way of introducing the audience to what I meant by the term “forgery” (which I use in a strict and technical sense to refer to books whose authors claim to be someone famous, knowing full well they are someone else; this kind of false authorial claim, of course, has little or no bearing on whether anything else found in the writing could or should be considered “true”) and as a way of “easing them into” the idea that there could be forgeries within the New Testament as well. And so I chose three later forgeries, all done in the name of Jesus’ disciple Simon Peter. In my previous post I mentioned the Gospel of Peter, as the first of the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:56-04:00April 7th, 2013|Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity, Fourth-Century Christianity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reflections and Ruminations|

Forgery and the Gospel of Peter

So in my talk on forgery last night, I introduced the question of whether there could be forgeries inside the New Testament by talking about forgeries that definitely exist *outside* the New Testament; and to do that I began by speaking of three books that Peter, the disciple of Jesus, allegedly wrote. My definition of forgery is a fairly technical one. When I speak about forgery I’m not talking about books whose contents have been made up or fabricated, and I’m not talking about books whose contents have been falsified and modified over the years. I’m talking purely about authorial claims. A forgery is a book whose author claims to be a (famous) person when in fact he is someone else – and he knows full well he is someone else. If some writes a book claiming to be Paul, but in fact he is not Paul, that’s a forgery. The phenomenon was widely known, widely practiced, and widely condemned in antiquity, as I’ve talked about on this blog before. To read this blog post [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:56-04:00April 6th, 2013|Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

An Ancient Accusation of Textual Tampering

I will get back to my discussion of Christology soon (tomorrow?) but wanted to take a break and talk about something else that came up in my reading today. I’m working diligently on finishing the research for my next book How Jesus Became God. My goal is to finish all the research in about three weeks. Unfortunately, I can’t be devoting my entire attention to the research just now because I have other things hanging fire. I’m putting the final touches on The Other Gospels manuscript, which I hope to have finished this week; and next week I will be in Washington D.C. recording a 24-lecture course for the Teaching Company on “The Greatest Controversies in Early Christianity.” That will take the entire week, and when I won’t be giving a lecture (six a day), I’ll be too exhausted and brain dead to think about much anything else. But after that I have a few weeks to work, with only weekends away for giving lectures in various spots. And I hope to start writing about [...]

BDEhrman2026-03-31T11:05:36-04:00February 20th, 2013|Book Discussions, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

Gospel of the Savior

I’ve decided today to take a brief break from my discussions of early Christology to post on something else (tomorrow I’m back to Christology, if all goes according to plan). As I think I have mentioned, my colleague Zlatko Plese and I are in the process of publishing an English-only version of our book The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations. That is, we are not including the Greek, Latin, and Coptic texts, but only the English translations. I have adjusted the Introductions for a lay-audience. We are adding a couple of texts that we did not include in the quadri-lingual edition, most notably “The Gospel of the Savior.” This text is not well known outside the ranks of scholars of the early Christian apocrypha, and so I thought I would mention it here. The following, in fact, is a draft of my Introduction (which will include bibliography as well): ***************************************************************************** The Gospel of the Savior is one of the most recent Gospels to become available to public view, having been first announced in the mid [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:23-04:00February 11th, 2013|Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Paul’s “Gospel” and Marcion

Question: (Here is a question that has been raised about one of my posts. The question begins with a quotation from what I said, in contrast to something else I said, which seems to contradict it. Far be it from me every to eschew contradictions! :) But in this case, I have been misunderstood, probably because of the poor way I phrased it. A couple of people have asked me about the same thing, so here’s the gist of their questions, in the form of one iteration). “The apostle Paul – well-connected and well-traveled and familiar with lots of churches – shows no knowledge that such a thing as Gospels exist.” I should have asked you about this earlier. I was surprised when, back in a post on Marcion, you said the other “gospel” Paul talked about was “a version of our Gospel of Luke.” Would you explain? RESPONSE: OK, so how can I have it both ways? How can I say that Paul did not know about any Gospels AND say that Marcion used [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:54-04:00January 6th, 2013|Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

The Mayan Calendar, Y2K, and the Letter of Barnabas

You may have noticed that the world didn’t end two weeks ago, despite widespread anticipation. Sometimes things just don’t go as planned. It’s a strange phenomenon this expectation that the world is soon going to end; and if Christian fundamentalists and Mayan enthusiasts can’t get it right, who can? When I was a fundamentalist back in the mid 70s, I – and all my friends – were sure that the end was going to come, with the reappearance of Jesus, before the end of the 1980s. We had sure-fire biblical proof of it. I’ll give you the logic in some other post, down the line. For now all I want to say is that we were not alone in our views. Every generation of Christians from the beginning of the Christian religion until now has known fervent believers who maintained that there’s was the final generation on earth, that the end would come in their own day. As I have frequently noted, all of these die-hard prognosticators have had two things in common: every one [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:54-04:00January 3rd, 2013|Christian Apocrypha, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reflections and Ruminations, Religion in the News|

How to Date Documents, including Barnabas

QUESTION: In a comment on my recent post on the letter of Barnabas, where I indicated that “it is almost certainly to be dated to the 130s CE (for reasons I could explain if anyone really wants to know….)” – one reader asked: I, for one, would be quite interested in the how these various works are dated. Seems like it would be of utmost importance seeing as the date of composition all but decides the question of authorship. Even if it only provides a general sense of why a particular date is hung on a manuscript or composition, I think it would be helpful. RESPONSE: Yes, as it turns out, it is very difficult to date ancient writings; but scholars who have worked on such matters (for nearly 300 years now, in some instances) have marshaled pretty good evidence in case after case, although in many instances there continue to be substantial debates. There are several ways to establish parameters, which are fairly commonsensical. If a writing is quoted by an author whose [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:54-04:00January 2nd, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Christian Apocrypha, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reader’s Questions|

Why Was Barnabas Attributed to Barnabas: Part 2

In my last post but one, in starting to talk about why the anonymous Letter to Barnabas was attributed by early Christians to Barnabas, best known as a one of the closest companions of Paul, I talked mainly about the mid-second century philosopher/theologian-eventually-branded-arch-heretic Marcion. You may have wondered why. In this post I’ll tell you why. VERY brief review. Recall, the letter of Barnabas is stridently anti-Jewish, claiming that the Jews never were the people of God because they had broken the covenant as soon as God had given it to them on Mount Sinai (by worshipping the Golden Calf); they misunderstood the law, taking it literally, when it was meant figuratively. Even though Jews never realized it, the OT was not a Jewish book but a Christian book, that not only anticipated Christ but proclaimed the Christian message. END of review…. The first explicit reference to this anonymous letter is in the writings of Clement of Alexandria, writing around 200 who quotes it and claims it was written by Barnabas, who, he indicates, was [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:54-04:00January 1st, 2013|Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reader’s Questions|

Why Was The Letter of Barnabas Attributed to Barnabas?

QUESTION: So why was the Letter of Barnabas thought to have been written by Barnabas? BACKGROUND: This question was asked in reference to my discussion of “Gematria” in the Letter of Barnabas. For fuller background, if you’re interested, you should refer to this post: “Another Instance of Gematria (For Members)” (the search function on the blog is very good, btw; it is in the upper right hand corner of your screen). In that post I note that the “Letter of Barnabas” was not actually written by Barnabas. In fact, it could not have been, since it is almost certainly to be dated to the 130s CE (for reasons I could explain if anyone really wants to know….). Barnabas, the companion of Paul, must have died no later than the 70s CE, more likely the 60s – some seventy years before this letter was written. So Barnabas couldn’t have written it. FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click here for membership options. If you don't belong yet, THE YEAR IS [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:53-04:00December 30th, 2012|Christian Apocrypha, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reader’s Questions|

Luke’s First Edition

In my previous post, ostensibly on the genealogy of Luke, I pointed out that there are good reasons for thinking that the Gospel originally was published – in a kind of “first edition” – without what are now the first two chapters, so that the very beginning was what is now 3:1 (this is many centuries, of course, before anyone started using chapters and verses.) If that’s the case, Luke was originally a Gospel like Mark’s that did not have a birth and infancy narratives. These were added later, in a second edition (either by the same author or by someone else). If that’s the case then the Gospel began with John the Baptist and his baptism of Jesus, followed by the genealogy which makes better sense here, at the beginning, than it does in the third chapter once the first two are added. But is there any hard evidence that a first edition began without the first two chapters? One of the reasons it is so hard to say is because we simply don’t [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:53-04:00December 23rd, 2012|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

Another Instance of Gematria

From my last post on the gematria at work (possibly) in Matthew’s genealogy, I can’t resist adding a note about the Jewish use of gematria – or its Greek equivalent – in another early Christian writing, the epistle of Barnabas. First: two bits of background. FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click here for membership options. If you don't belong yet, NOW'S YOUR CHANCE!!! The epistle of Barnabas was seen as part of the New Testament by a number of early Christian writers. It almost made it in. It is attributed (not by the author himself, but by later readers) to Paul’s traveling companion – mentioned in Acts – Barnabas. But the book itself is anonymous, and it was certainly not written by Barnabas, who was long dead by the time it was produced. Scholars generally date the book to around the year 130 or so (Barnabas would have died at least 70 years earlier). The book represents an attempt to show its Christian readers that the Jews who [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:53-04:00December 20th, 2012|Canonical Gospels, Christian Apocrypha, Early Judaism, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

The Christmas Story: Some Basic Background

Now that I have posted a couple of my earlier published reflections on Christmas, I can make some comments in a series of posts, going into a bit more detail. This first post more or less states some of the basic information that most readers know, but that it’s worth while stressing as a kind of ground clearing exercise. To begin with, we are extremely limited in our sources when it comes to knowing anything at all about the birth of Jesus. In fact, at the end of the day, I think we can’t really know much at all. Just to cut to the chase, I think that it is most probable that he was born in Nazareth in the northern part of what we today think of as Israel (back then, in Galilee), where he was certainly raised from the time he was a child. His parents were Jewish by birth, religion, culture. I’d assume their names were really Joseph and Mary. We don’t know anything about them other than the fact that Joseph [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:38-04:00December 6th, 2012|Canonical Gospels, Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

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