History of Christianity (100-300CE) Archives - Page 6 of 15 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Why Women Came to be Silenced

Given what I’ve said before about women in the ancient world, in early Christianity, and in the churches of Paul, I can now explain why women who had originally played a significant role in the early Christian movement came to be silenced, especially in the churches of Paul (as seen, for example, in the Pastoral epistles). Here is how I discuss the matter in my college-level textbook on the New Testament. ***************************************************** Our theoretical discussion of the ideology of gender in the Roman world, that is, of the way that people mentally and socially constructed sexual difference, gives us a backdrop for reconsidering the progressive oppression of women in the Pauline churches. Women may have been disproportionately represented in the earliest Christian communities. This at least was a constant claim made by the opponents of Christianity in the second century, who saw the inordinate number of women believers as a fault; remarkably, the defenders of the faith never denied it. The large number of women followers is not surprising given the circumstance that the earliest [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:20-04:00March 6th, 2018|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Paul and His Letters, Women in Early Christianity|

Is the Didache One Document or Three?

I have been discussing the interesting and important early Christian document called the Didache. Yesterday I gave a translation of its first part, the “two ways” or the “two paths” section. After that the topic and tone of the book changes, as it starts to talk about how Christian baptism and eucharist should be celebrated. It ends on a completely different note, with a one-chapter description of the coming apocalypse. Scholars have asked whether the book as we now have it was actually created by someone who took several disparate texts and cut and pasted them together. Here is what I say about the matter in my edition of the Apostolic Fathers in the Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press, 2003). ****************************************************** The Didache obviously addresses several discrete topics: the two paths, the “church order” (which may comprise two distinct units, one on liturgical practices and the other on the treatment of itinerant “apostles and prophets”), and the apocalyptic discourse. Moreover, there is no necessary connection between them, except that provided perhaps by an editor, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:32-04:00December 23rd, 2017|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers|

The Ethical Teachings of the Didache

We have been talking about the Didache on the blog, and it occurred to me that it might be useful to post part of its text, so readers can see what we’re talking about. The book has several discrete parts: it begins with a discussion of the “two ways” – one that leads to life and one to death. This is a set of ethical instructions for Christians. As you’ll see, the author appears to have taken materials from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew and various other passages chiefly from Matthew and Luke; but he cites other ethical injunctions (some of them unusual) from other, unknown sources. After the “two ways” comes a set of instructions about church life and ritual – for example, how to baptize and what prayers to say at the eucharist meal. At the end comes a one-chapter “apocalyptic discourse” describing what will happen at the end of time. Here is the opening discussion of the two ways; it is my own translation, which, in a later version, appeared [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:32-04:00December 21st, 2017|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers, Public Forum|

Could Q Have Been Lost? Readers’ Mailbag December 3, 2017

I have received a lot of questions about Q this week. If you’re wondering about why blog members are interested in a figure from Star Trek, you may want to review this week’s posts. Here is a question that I find particularly intriguing. QUESTION: It is hard to believe that Q, if it existed, circulated enough to be used by both but then dropped off the face of the Earth without so much as a mention by an early church father, while references to so many other documents survived (with some being found). RESPONSE: Ah, this is an interesting observation and involves a set of questions that I’m very interested in but have never published (much of) anything about. How much of the early Christian literature was lost? Could early Christians simply have allowed important writings to disappear (even if independent once knew them)? To the historian’s eternal chagrin, the answer appears to be yes. My guess is that most early Christians simply didn’t see a need to preserve their writings for posterity [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:31-04:00December 3rd, 2017|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum|

Jesus’ (Young?) Mother and (Half?) Brothers? The Proto-Gospel of James

A few days ago lot of readers made comments on the question (thanks to the Roy Moore newsflashes) of whether Mary was a young girl when she got married; and now I have mentioned Jesus' mother and brothers in Mark's Gospels. So let me say a few more things about them. The earliest non-canonical source that talks about Jesus' mother (indicating she was a teenager -- not something found in the NT) and his brothers (were they really is brothers?) is in the non-canonical Proto-Gospel of James, from some time in the second century. I thought it might be useful for me to re-post a discussion of the matter from a number of years ago, here: ************************************************************** The Proto-Gospel of James was very popular in Eastern, Greek-speaking Christianity throughout the Ages, down to modern times; and a version of it was produced – with serious additions and changes – in Latin, that was even more influential in Western Christianity (a book now known as the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew). In some times and places, these books [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:15-04:00November 20th, 2017|Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reflections and Ruminations|

Fun with the Jewish Christian Gospels: A Blast from the Past

I was looking through the blog archives today, and ran across this interesting one from four years ago. In additional to being rather informative about Gospels outside the New Testament, it shows how even in antiquity Christians had to figure out how to reconcile minor discrepancies among the canonical Gospels. Enjoy! ********************************************************************* Yesterday in my graduate seminar we spent three hours analyzing the three so-called “Jewish-Christian Gospels.” These are very tricky texts to deal with. We don’t have any manuscripts of them – even small fragments. They come to us, instead, in the quotations of church fathers such as Origen, Didymus the Blind, Jerome, and Epiphanius. These (orthodox) church fathers sometimes quoted or referred to one or the other of the Gospels in order to relate what it said; and sometimes it was in order to attack what it said. There are all sorts of questions raised about these no-longer surviving Gospels in these quotations. A good part of the problem is that some of these fathers – especially Jerome, on whom we depend for [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:23-04:00September 8th, 2017|Christian Apocrypha, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reflections and Ruminations|

How Women Came to Be Silenced in Early Christianity: A Blast From the Past

Time for a blast from the blog's past. Here is a question I get asked about a lot by my students: Why did women come to silenced, their voices muted, in the early Christian tradition -- especially if, as the evidence suggests, women were even more attracted to this new faith than men in the early years? When I dealt with that issue exactly four years ago on the blog, this is what I said (it came at the end of a thread on women in the early Christian church): ********************************************************************** I come now to the climax of this thread: how is it that women came to be silenced in the early Christian tradition? Of all my posts in this thread on women in early Christianity, I think this is the most important. Again, I give my reflections on it from my Introduction to the NT: The first thing to observe is that women may have been disproportionately represented in the earliest Christian communities. This at least was a constant claim made by the opponents [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:05-04:00August 4th, 2017|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions, Women in Early Christianity|

Why Was Marcion Declared a Heretic?

The question I will be dealing with this week relates to the issue of heresy and orthodoxy in early Christianity. If you have a question you would like me to address, let me know! QUESTION: As I am reading about Marcion being declared a heretic I wonder, who had the authority to do this? RESPONSE: It’s a very good question, and more significant than, on the surface, one might think. First some background. Marcion was a second-century philosopher/theologian/teacher who eventually came to be branded as one of the arch-heretics of early Christianity. Our only sources of information about him are the writings of his enemies – proto-orthodox church fathers (church writers who embraced the theological views that later came to be endorsed as “orthodox” – that is, teaching the “right beliefs”) who saw him, and his views, as dastardly and demonic false teachings meant to led the faithful astray. It is much debated how much we can trust what his enemies said if we want to determine what it is that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:45-04:00July 3rd, 2017|Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

How Did Judas Iscariot Die? Readers’ Mailbag June 18, 2017

Two questions in this week’s Readers’ mailbag. The first concerns the very strange tradition about how Judas Iscariot actually died, as found in the writings of the early church father Papias; the second is about modern evangelical Christian biblical scholars: how do they deal with the fact that our manuscripts contain so many textual variants? If you have a question, feel free to ask, and I’ll add it to the ever growing mailbag. QUESTION: Papias didn’t think very highly of Judas. I can’t remember exactly what he said, is his version closer to Matthew or Acts? Or a different tradition altogether? RESPONSE: First some background. Papias is one of the fascinating and virtually unknown figures from the early church. He is normally thought to have been writing around 120 or 130 CE. His major work was a five-volume discussion of the teachings of Jesus, called Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord. We very much regret that we no longer have this book – it would have been the first known explanation of/commentary [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:28-04:00June 18th, 2017|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

How We Got Our 27-Book New Testament: The Case of Didymus

As I pointed out in my previous post, when I was a graduate student I wanted to show that I was not interested only in New Testament textual criticism (using the surviving witnesses to establish what the authors of the New Testament originally wrote) but in a range of important historical and interpretive issues in early Christianity. I wanted to be broad ranging. And I wanted this already at the very beginning of my graduate work. My first semester in the PhD program I had a seminar on the “Canon of the New Testament” with Bruce Metzger. This was a class that focused on the questions surrounding how we ended up with the twenty-seven books in the New Testament. Who decided that it would be these twenty-seven books, and no others? What was motivating these people? What were the grounds for their decisions? And when did they make them? These are all, of course, fundamental questions, and Metzger himself wrote the authoritative book on the topic – which is still the authoritative book. In the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:52-04:00April 25th, 2017|Fourth-Century Christianity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum|

Jesus’ Teaching in Aramaic and the Books of the Canon: Mailbag February 24, 2017

There are two interesting questions in this week’s Readers’ Mailbag: one about Jesus’ teaching in Aramaic and the other about which books did not make it into the New Testament. If you have a question yourself, ask it as a comment and I will add it to the burgeoning list! QUESTION: Even though Christ taught in Aramaic, was there absolutely nothing written down in Aramaic? Is there much of a language translation problem going from Aramaic to Greek? (Again, it’s mind boggling to consider how many opportunities for error to creep in by accident or design) RESPONSE: Yes, I’m afraid that’s right: we don’t have any writings from any early Christians in the language that Jesus spoke, Aramaic. That makes things rather complicated when it comes to deciding what Jesus really said – that is, if we want to have an idea of his exact words. Let me make two points about that. First, there are some passages in the Gospels where the author will preserve an Aramaic word or phrase on Jesus’ [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:16-04:00February 24th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Heresy and Orthodoxy, Historical Jesus, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

How We Got the New Testament (and not some other books!)

Many people (most people?) don’t realize that the collection of the books into the New Testament did not take a year or two. It was *centuries* before there was any widespread agreement about which books to include and which to exclude (why include the Gospel of John but not the Gospel of Thomas? Why include the Apocalypse of John but not the Apocalypse of Peter?). Yesterday I started to explain how it all happened. In this post I finish the task, by explaining the grounds on which the decisions were made and something of the historical process involved. I’ve always thought this topic was unusually interesting – it was my first passion in my graduate school days (and the first topic I ever wrote a scholarly article on). Again, this discussion is taken from my Introduction to the Bible, published a couple of years ago. *************************************************************** The Criteria Used The “orthodox” church fathers who decided on the shape and content of the canon applied several criteria to determine whether a book should be included or [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:57-04:00January 6th, 2017|Fourth-Century Christianity, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum|

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 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:40-04:00January 5th, 2017|Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers, Public Forum|

Are Cephas and Peter Two Different People?

QUESTION: I remember your saying that you once – wrongly – entertained a theory about “Cephas” and “Peter” being two different people. I *don’t* remember your explaining why you’d thought that, and what convinced you the theory was wrong. I’d still like to know! RESPONSE: I get asked this question on occasion and I’ve decided to do something unusual (for the blog) to answer it. Years ago I wrote a controversial article on the topic for an academic journal. Here I thought it might be interesting simply to reproduce the article for readers of the blog, over several posts. Among other things, this will show – to anyone who is interested in such things – how a work of scholarship on the New Testament is different from a work presenting scholarship to a general (non scholarly) audience. Now that I read through this first of the article, thinking about how it would “play” to a general audience, I think that the problem is not that it is particularly difficult to understand, but simply that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:38-04:00December 12th, 2016|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Lost Gospels: The Greater Questions of Mary. A Blast From the Past

Here is a blast from the past -- almost exactly four years ago now -- about one of my all time favorite "lost" Gospels. If it ever existed. One very imaginative church father certainly thought it did. It was a Gospel featuring Mary Magdalene and a rather wild encounter she had with Jesus. Here is what I said in the post of November 2012. ************************************************************************* I have been discussing some of the Gospels that we know about because they are mentioned, or even quoted, by church fathers, but that no longer survive. Another, particularly intriguing, Gospel like this – one that I desperately wish we had, for reasons that will soon become clear -- is known as “The Greater Questions of Mary” (i.e., of Mary Magdalene). My following comments on it are more or less lifted from my Introduction in the recent Apocryphal Gospels volume. One of the “great questions” for scholars is whether such a book ever really did exist. It is mentioned only once in ancient literature, in a highly charged polemical context [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:06-04:00November 15th, 2016|Christian Apocrypha, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Women in Early Christianity|

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 [...]

BDEhrman2026-05-29T07:46:22-04:00November 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 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:03-04:00October 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 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:47-04:00October 18th, 2016|Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum|

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

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 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:47-04:00October 16th, 2016|Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum|

Where Did the Trinity Come From? Video Lecture.

Here is the third of my three talks that I gave last year at Coral Gables Congregational Church in (suprise) Coral Gables, Florida, on my book, "How Jesus Became God." This lecture deals with one of the most important questions in Christian thinking: where did the idea and doctrine of the Trinity come from? Good question! I try to answer it in this video. Enjoy! Please adjust gear icon for 1080p High-Definition. How Jesus Became God -UCC Part 3 of 3: If you don't belong to the blog yet, JOIN!! You get good stuff like this ALL THE TIME, for very little cost. And all proceeds go to fight hunger and homelessness. So join!

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:57-04:00September 2nd, 2016|Book Discussions, Constantine, Fourth-Century Christianity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Video Media|

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