History of Christianity (100-300CE) Archives - Page 4 of 15 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Modern Christians Who Follow Marcion (Unawares)

Before I move on from Marcion to talk about "Gnostic" understandings of Christ -- all in this long thread on where the Trinity came from -- I'd like to return to an issue I mentioned briefly in my first post on Marcion, that in many ways his views are alive and well among us. As I have said on the blog before, 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 he was, 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 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:04-04:00March 25th, 2021|Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

The Value of Amulets for Reconstructing the New Testament Text: Guest Post by Brice Jones

Now here is a topic I bet you've never heard of before. The value of what? Amulets? For what? Really? Yup, really. Sometimes the most interesting issues are ones you haven't heard of before. And hey, now you'll be able to talk about it. This is a guest post from Brice Jones, a textual specialist on this topic, who has written the definitive book about it. I've asked him to tell us about it in layperson's terms. This will take him a couple of posts. Here is a brief bio on him so you have a sense of who he is, followed by post number one, in which, among other things, he tells you what this is all about. - Brice Jones is the author of New Testament Texts on Greek Amulets from Late Antiquity and Matthean and Lukan Special Material. ************************************ Brice C. Jones is an ancient historian specializing in the study of Early Christianity and papyrology. He received his Ph.D. in Religion from Concordia University (Montreal) and his M.A. in New Testament from Yale University. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:04-04:00March 18th, 2021|History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

When Did Jesus Become Divine?

In this thread on the Trinity I am developing at some length the first major issue: how did someone besides God come to be considered God among people who thought God and this other God were different yet continued to claim they were monotheists? (Later I'll talk about the Spirit, as many have asked; but there frankly is not nearly as much to say there, as we'll see). What I've spelled out so far is not hugely controversial among critical scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity. When the disciples came to believe in the resurrection, they thought that God had exalted Jesus to a unique, divine status. This is the oldest Christology there was. It is attested in such places as the pre-Pauline fragment in Rom. 1:3-4 and in several places, pre-Lukan, incorporated in the speeches of Acts. And then what happened? The Rest of this post tries to show how Christ came to be exalted more and more until his followers claimed he had been God from the beginning. Want to see [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:17-04:00February 3rd, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Women Apostles in Early Christianity

In my previous post, I discussed the Gospel of Mary and its portrayal as Mary Magdalene as the one to whom Jesus had revealed the secrets of salvation (as part of a gnostic myth) - -much to the consternation of the male disciples, especially Peter and his brother Andrew. Hey, how could he consider a *woman* more important than us men??? It’s an attitude that appears to have run through the family. It is striking that there was a much wider tradition in early Christianity that said that Mary Magdalene was the *first* apostle, the one who made the other apostles. Now THAT is a view you don’t hear every day. To explain it I first have to say something about women apostles more broadly in early Christianity, another topic most people don’t think or know much about. Here is how I explain it in my book Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene. ****************************** The term “apostle” comes from a Greek word that means something like “one who has been sent.” It can refer to anyone [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:51:23-04:00November 15th, 2020|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Paul and His Letters, Women in Early Christianity|

How Were the Gnostic Gospels Discovered?

This now is the fourth of FIVE FAVORITES with which I'm beginning the new launch of our blog site, one from our fourth year of operation 2015. I am trying to pick different kinds of posts and even though I am not saying these are my all-time favorites of all, they certainly are posts (from five from sequential years) that for one reason or another I very much like. I need to give a more extensive introduction to this one. It is actually one of a series of posts connected with the discovery of the "Nag Hammadi Library" -- known more popularly as "the Gnostic Gospels." These "heretical" books were discovered by accident in 1945, not by archaeologists looking for ancient books but by Egyptian fellahin in a wilderness area near the village of Nag Hammadi Egypt. Scholars have long told the story of their discovery -- I have done so roughly 4000 times; but my friend and colleague in NT studies at Duke, Mark Goodacre, has argued that the story itself is an unsubstantiated [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:51:03-04:00October 26th, 2020|Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reader’s Questions|

What Is Gnosticism?

I have been talking about how I came to learn about the Gnostic Gospel of Judas, the most significant Christian document discovered in modern times (since the 1940s). Now I want to explain what the Gospel is. I have just called it a "Gnostic" Gospel, and so to begin I need to say something about what Christian Gnosticism was. It is a fascinating topic, but widely misunderstood. The reading-public-at-large was *somewhat* introduced to it in the 1950s with the publication of the Gospel of Thomas (which scholars today are reluctant to label "Gnostic," as it turns out); but it became much more widely known in the 1970s when Elaine Pagels published her blockbuster, The Gnostic Gospels. She too has changed her views on lots of things (including the Gospel of Thomas), but her book is still a terrific read. I assign it to my undergrads. I talk about Gnosticism in a number of my books. The following is some of the basic information from my textbook on the New Testament. In the next post I'll [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:50:05-04:00August 2nd, 2020|Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Did Early Christian Heretics Promote Outrageous Sex Rituals?

In my post a few days ago I mentioned the widespread rumor in the ancient Roman world of the first couple of centuries CE that Christians were flagrantly immoral, engaging in wild sex and infanticide and homicide in their weekly meetings. A couple of readers have asked if that might have been true for *some* of the Christian groups of “heretics,” and that Roman outsiders who knew of their activities assumed all Christians engaged in them. Great question! I’ve thought about this one for over thirty years. What I concluded about twenty-nine years ago is what I still think now: these kinds of charges were commonly leveled in the Roman world against whomever you didn’t like and suspected and there is very little any evidence that they were ever true. Almost always they are just slanders. It is worth noting that very similar charges were leveled by pagans against Christians, pagans against Jews, pagans against each other, Christians against pagans, Christians against … Christians! I’ve talked about this in some of my publications, most fully [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:50:04-04:00July 14th, 2020|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

The Outrageous Immorality of Early Christians (!) (?)

The question I addressed yesterday: could the obvious benefits of the Christian community – a community of love, fellowship, and mutual support – have drawn converts into it, who very much wanted that kind of thing? The surprising answer, I think, is no, at least in the early centuries when Christianity was trying to establish a foothold in the world. There’s another reason for thinking what I do, and it’s not one you would expect. There were reports about the early Christian communities among outsiders. But it was not that they were a loving and caring group of unusually upright and morally committed people. On the contrary, the Christians were known to be flagrantly immoral, engaged in heinous, licentious, and murderous behavior. Hard to believe, but that is the charge we repeatedly find. Here is what I say about it in my book The Triumph of Christianity. Brace yourself. ************************************************************* In the early centuries Christians were accused of almost unfathomable outrageous behavior. Both Justin around 150 CE in Rome and Tertullian some fifty years [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:49:48-04:00July 12th, 2020|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Christianity (100-300CE), Spread of Christianity|

Did the Benefits of the Christian Community Win Converts? Readers’ Mailbag.

Here's an important question I have received, along with an answer a lot of people think is counter-intuitive. It has to do with why Christianity proved so attractive in the ancient world as they were desperately trying to attract converts. QUESTION: Please help me understand – didn’t first-century Christians offer more than stories of Jesus and a god to pray to? Didn’t they also offer the care and support of a community? Weren’t they actually supporting and providing for each other’s needs? And if so, wouldn’t this make their religion attractive to others in need? RESPONSE: As it turns out, my view of the matter is that the answer to the first three questions is a resounding YES; but the answer to the final question – that is, the one that this reader is most interested in and (I would guess) thinks depends entirely on the preceding three – is MAYBE but the implication that this is why they grew and expanded is probably NO. History is like that sometimes. In my book [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:49:48-04:00July 10th, 2020|Book Discussions, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Spread of Christianity|

Want To Know About the Apostolic Fathers?

Last year we admitted a student into our PhD program last year to work with me, but since I've been on academic leave to write my next book, I haven't had the chance to teach her. That's obviously a problem, since I"m one of the reasons she's here! So we agreed that I would go ahead and do a one-on-one independent study with her this semester on an important topic, the Apostolic Fathers. We meet once a week for three hours to translate Greek texts, discuss the books in question (see below), and talk about scholarly monographs that she is assigned to read each week. It's a lot. But, well, welcome to the PhD! For many students college is a big leap form high school; a master's program is a big leap from undergraduate; and a PhD program is a QUANTUM leap. The "Apostolic Fathers" is a technical term for a group of 10 (or 11, depending on what you include) authors traditionally thought to have been writing immediately after the books of the NT [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:48:01-04:00January 22nd, 2020|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Teaching Christianity|

Was Christianity a Missionary Religion with No Missionaries?

Early Christians were bound and determined to convert others to their faith, as I indicated in my previous post. Or at least that’s what their literature suggests; I very much doubt if *everyone* was! But they certainly did convert people – within four hundred years a tiny handful of the disciples of Jesus’ uneducated and unimpressive disciples had become the official religion of the entire western world. The interest in making converts made this religion unlike anything else in the Roman empire (or outside of it). Now *that’s* interesting, and different from what we could expect. But what is also odd to modern eyes is that even though Christianity was evangelistic, there were almost no evangelists. That is to say, hardly anyone – so far as we know – went on a mission to other places to convert people, with one notable exception. So how did the Christians manage to convert millions of people? That’s the subject of this post, again taken from my book Triumph of Christianity. ******************************************** Christians then, starting at least with [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:44-04:00January 4th, 2020|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reader’s Questions, Spread of Christianity|

Why Do Christians Try to Convert People?
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Why Do Christians Try to Convert People?

Book Discussions, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Jews and Christians in Antiquity, Reader’s Questions

Why Do Christians Try to Convert People?

Why Do Christians Try to Convert People? I begin this New Year by addressing a really interesting question I received recently from a reader. It’s a question that has rarely occurred to most people. Today, we tend to think that religions are by their very nature interested in converting others to their views, that they are just inherently evangelistic, missionary, and proselytizing. If your religion is “the right one,” wouldn’t you want everyone to agree with you, so they too could be right, instead of wrong? Wouldn’t their salvation depend on it? That indeed has long been the view of both Christianity and (later) Islam and … well surely all religions, right? Uh, as it turns out, the answer is No. In the world that Christianity came into, for example, in the Roman empire, there simply weren’t such things as missionary/evangelistic religions. Huh? Then why was Christianity? Here’s the question I received. Why Do Christians Try to Convert People? QUESTION: Where/how/why did the new religion ‘about Jesus’ becomes – unlike most contemporary religions up to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:44-04:00January 2nd, 2020|Book Discussions, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Jews and Christians in Antiquity, Reader’s Questions|

How Did We Get The 27 Books of the New Testament?

27 Books of the New Testament. This is now a continuation of my projected longer blog post that will serve as an introduction to the New Testament (possibly around 5000 – 6000 words or so). In the first section, I discussed the layout and structure of the New Testament. In the second I gave brief descriptions of each of the twenty-seven books. This one is spread out over two posts and deals with the question of how we actually got it. How was it collected together into a “book” and how was it transmitted to us over the centuries. How Did We Get The 27 Books of the New Testament? The New Testament did not drop from the sky one day a few years after the death of Jesus. It was written over a number of years by a number of authors with a number of different purposes, interests, and perspectives. But how did we actually get it? That is, who decided on these particular 27 Books of the New Testament (early Christian writings) rather [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:06-04:00November 18th, 2019|Early Christian Doctrine, Fourth-Century Christianity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

The Gospel of Thomas and the Other Gospels

Here's a post from seven years ago that is still very important and intriguing to anyone interested in the NT and early Christianity. It's mainly about the most influential and historically important Gospel from outside the New Testament. I've inserted a couple of explanations [in brackets] to update the post. ******************************************************************* One of the benefits of teaching at a research university with a graduate program is that – at least where I am – there are periodic reading groups with other faculty members and graduate students. I go to a couple of these a month, including one that I organize. As it turns out, last week I went to two. The first was mine, the (other ) CIA, in which we typically read someone’s work-in-progress. That week’s presentation was a paper by my former student and soon-to-be faculty member in early Christianity at Duke Divinity School, Maria Doerfler, an exceptionally bright and erudite human being [who now is teaching at Yale], who gave a paper on a virtually unknown letter by the famous fourth-century bishop [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:06-04:00November 13th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Christian Apocrypha, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

How Did We Get These 27 Books in the New Testament?

I often receive questions about how we got the canon of the New Testament. We have twenty-seven books in it. Who decided? On what grounds? And when? Here is a recent question on the matter. QUESTION I have always wondered about the men (only men!) who decided “this one’s in . . . that one’s out!” back in 325 (was it 325?) at Trullan, Rome, Trent and where else? Nicea? RESPONSE: The first thing to emphasize is that the most common answer one hears – an answer that seems to have become common sense among people-interested-in-such-things-at-large -- is completely wrong. It appears that people have this answer because they read it someplace, or heard it from someone who had read it someplace, and that someplace was a place in particular: Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code! (If you don’t know, I wrote an entire book pointing out the historical mistakes in the book. [title: Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code]. That was a particularly fun book for me to write. Some [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:31-04:00October 4th, 2019|Fourth-Century Christianity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reader’s Questions|

Is It Ever Right to Lie? Or Was It? Even in Early Christianity? The Relevance for Forgery.

Is it ever morally acceptable – even desirable – to tell a bald-faced lie? That was probably a topic covered in your Philosophy 101 course. At a historian, I’m interested in the question from an ancient perspective. What did people in antiquity think about it? In particular Christians. Did they think – based on the Ten Commandments, say, or the teachings of Jesus, that a person should never lie? Or were they quite lax on the matter? Or something in between? I was actually a bit surprised to learn the answer to the question. And as you might expect, the answer is complicated. My original interest in the issue had to do with forgery. A forger claims to be someone famous, knowing full well he is someone else. That’s a lie, that is, it is a falsehood told intentionally. How did forgers justify that? It turns out, there appear to be answers. This is how I dealt with the matter in my lecture on forgery given at the conference in Quebec a couple of weeks [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:30-04:00September 29th, 2019|Forgery in Antiquity, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reflections and Ruminations|

Were Ancient Readers Interested in Detecting Forgeries?

I continue now with my lecture this past week on whether ancient readers and writers considered pseudepigraphic writing – in which an author claimed to be someone else (always someone famous) – was seen as deceitful, a kind of literary lie, and is therefore appropriately, in an ancient context, appropriately considered by thos of us today, “forgery.” This is Part 2 of 4. ******************************************************** I do not need to give an extensive account of all the instances of ancient Echtheitskritik (= scholarly attempt to determine if a work is authentic) found throughout the surviving literature: full accounts are readily available in any of the lengthy monographs. To be sure, some recent scholars have claimed it was a rare discourse. But maybe abundance, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. I myself have always been struck by how extensive the discourse of authenticity is, going back in some sense to Herodotus and becoming a focus of interest for some authors, especially critics and biographers such as (the Roman medical writer of the second century) [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:30-04:00September 18th, 2019|Forgery in Antiquity, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Did Superior Health Care Lead to the Dominance of Christianity?

Interesting question from a recent member of the blog: QUESTION: In the August 5/12 New Yorker, a review of a new book, “The mosquito: A Human History of our Deadliest Predator.” In this review, this sentence: “In the third century, malaria epidemics helped drive people to a small, much persecuted faith that emphasized healing and care of the sick, propelling Christianity into a world-altering religion.” I realize that medical history is not your thing. If nonetheless you’d care to comment, any warrant for this assertion? RESPONSE: I don’t know that I’ve ever written about mosquitoes before, either on the blog or anywhere else, but I have dealt with issues connected with ancient health care, and in particular with the theory that superior health care was one of the factors that led Christianity to expand to become a dominant (*the* dominant religion) of the Roman world. It is an intriguing idea indeed, and was a popular theory for a very brief moment, about when this book reviewed in the New Yorker came out. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:12-04:00August 28th, 2019|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations, Spread of Christianity|

But WHY Doesn’t Torture Hurt?? Guest Post by Stephanie Cobb

This now is the final of Stephanie Cobb's posts on the painlessness of martyrdom, as explained more fully in her recent book. And now we get to the heart of the matter: if it doesn't hurt, uh, why is that??? Again, Stephanie has graciously agreed to answer your questions -- so ask away. - Stephanie Cobb has written Dying to Be Men and Divine Deliverance. If you were a member of the blog, you would get access to all the posts, five times a week, instead of just one occasionally. It's terrific value for your money, and every penny goes to charity. So join already.... ************************************************************************************ In my first two posts, I asked “Does martyrdom hurt?” and explored reasons why early Christian martyr texts might reasonably answer “yes!” but then detailed the ways in which these texts actually make the counterintuitive argument: “No! Martyrdom doesn’t hurt.” In this—my last—post on Divine Deliverance: Pain and Painlessness in Early Christian Martyr Texts, I want to explore a slightly different question: “Why doesn’t martyrdom hurt?” To read a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:40-04:00July 30th, 2019|Book Discussions, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

How Could Torture Not Hurt?? Guest Post by Stephanie Cobb

Here now is the second of three posts by Stephanie Cobb on her recent book about early Christian accounts of the martyrs. As you'll see, she makes some rather astonishing and counter-intuitive claims. But I think she's completely right. This is fascinating material.... - Stephanie Cobb's most popular books are Dying to Be Men and Divine Deliverance. ********************************************************* In the previous post, I detailed the reasons martyr texts ought to focus on the suffering and pain of early Christians experiencing torture and being executed for their faith. I also, though, noted that despite those reasons, the texts exhibit an interest in protecting the Christian body from the experience of pain. In this post, we’ll look at some of the ways Christian authors accomplish their goals of illustrating Christian insensitivity to pain. But first, a quick caveat: in my work, I focus on rhetoric and narrative—not history per se. That is, I am not arguing that torture does not hurt. In fact, I am certain that torture hurts and to deny that is a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:39-04:00July 23rd, 2019|Book Discussions, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

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