New Testament Manuscripts Archives - Page 15 of 19 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

More on Greek Numerals

A member of the blog, Douglas Harder, was inspired by yesterday's post on how to make numbers in Greek, to come up with a full description and chart of how it works. He sent it to me and gave me his approval to post it. I think it is very clear and interesting. So here is what he has come up with. (In my next couple of posts I'll talk about how knowing this information matters for understanding some early Christian texts, including a curious passage in the letter of Barnabas and, then, the 666 -- the number of the Beast -- in the book of Revelation.) ************************************************************************ Greek numerals Like the Romans, the Greeks used letters to represent numbers. An older pre-Hellenistic Greek alphabet had 27 characters, not 24, and this allowed them to create three groups of nine letters where the first nine represented the values 1 through 9, the next nine represented 10, 20, 30 up to 90, and the last nine represented 100, 200, 300 and up to 900. These [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:22-04:00February 11th, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

GUEST POST! Dr. Brent Nongbri on How We Date Manuscripts

One of the people we are lucky to have as a member of the blog is Dr. Brent Nongbri, who did his Ph.D. at Yale in 2008 and who is now a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at Macquarie University (see here). Among other things, Brent is one of the most knowledgeable and productive scholars working in the field of paleography – the discipline that deals with the dating of ancient manuscripts. He has been following this discussion of a possible first-century copy of the Gospel of Mark, and to my great appreciation has agreed to do a GUEST POST for us all, on an area many of us are very interested in. How would we know the first-century manuscript if we saw one??? Here is his succinct and lucid summary of how scholars date ancient manuscripts, from a leading authority, in his own words. Many thanks, Brent! Brent Nongbri - How We Date Manuscripts Brent Nongbri’s most popular books are Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept and God's Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:04-04:00February 2nd, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts|

Another (Final!) Insight into that Mummy Mask and Papyrus

OK, I am at the tail end of this thread on mummy masks and the alleged discovery of a first-century fragment of Mark’s Gospel. But I did want to provide access to an interesting article and penetrating set of questions on the issue published a week ago on CNN by my friend Candida Moss and her partner-in-all-things-editorial Joel Baden (they crank out a lot of articles on issues in biblical studies, especially as items appear in the news). Candida is a Professor of New Testament at Notre Dame and Joel is a Professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale. I’ve re-posted this article with permission. It comes from: http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/21/living/gospel-mummy-mask/ ********************************************************* (CNN)Media outlets have been abuzz this week with the news that the oldest fragment of a New Testament gospel -- and thus the earliest witness of Jesus' life and ministry -- had been discovered hidden inside an Egyptian mummy mask and was going to be published. The announcement of the papyrus' discovery and impending publication was made by Craig Evans, professor of New Testament at Acadia [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:04-04:00January 30th, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts, Religion in the News|

Why I’d Be Thrilled If A First-Century Manuscript Appeared

In several posts I have been emphasizing – possibly over-emphasizing – that if a first-century fragment of the Gospel of Mark does ever get published, and if it is in *fact*from the first century (which, I should stress, will be almost *impossible* to demonstrate conclusively), that it is very hard indeed to imagine that it will be any kind of game-changer, that it will tell us something different from what we already think. The reason I have been emphasizing this is because the evangelical Christian scholars who are making the headlines with their declarations about the discovery will almost certainly, once it is published, if it ever gets published, claim that it is evidence for their view that we can know what the original text says. See! We have a FIRST-CENTURY MANUSCRIPT!!! So, consider these posts of mine as a kind of prophylaxis against future claims. I don’t want to hear later that I’m just offering sour grapes when I say the same thing (that it is telling us nothing new) later, after the manuscript [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:04-04:00January 29th, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts, Religion in the News|

Why Are Evangelical Scholars So Interested in Finding a First-Century Manuscript?

I have thought of a couple of scenarios that would make the discovery of a first -entury papyrus copy – even a small fragment of Mark – VERY interesting, for all of us, not just for evangelical Christian scholars intent on destroying antiquities in order to get their hands on it. (Well, I’ve thought of these scenarios as others have suggested them….) I’ll give the scenarios at the end of this post. But first, assuming, as it is *relatively*, but not absolutely probable that we should, that the fragment in question is simply of a few verses in the middle of Mark’s Gospel that do not vary significantly from what we already have, I’m still obsessing with the question of why evangelical scholars would be so bound and determined to get their hands on it. I’ll deal with that question first. It may not be obvious why it is a puzzle. Here is why. As a rule (a rule to which I do not know a single exception), evangelical scholars of the New Testament who [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:04-04:00January 27th, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts|

How Accurate Are our Earliest NT Manuscripts?

QUESTIONS I have received the following three, interrelated, questions from an inquiring mind that wants to know, all of them involving the potential accuracy of the manuscript tradition of the NT based on what we can deduce from the early papyri. My responses will follow. In your last debate with Dr. Wallace, he seemed to argue, in part, for the relative integrity of the early NT manuscript tradition. He referred to p75 as being representative of other early NT MSS in that, while obviously the product of non-professionals, it yielded variants that were easy to correct, in the nature of "onion instead of union". Is this a fair characterization on his part of these early texts? What portion of these variants would indeed fall into the category of "easy to correct"? Citing Dr. Metzger, Dr. Wallace also claimed that Alexandria was one place where uncontrolled early scribal practices was not the norm. You countered with the letters of Clement of Alexandria as evidence against this conclusion. Could you please elaborate on this point & mention [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:04-04:00January 26th, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Would a First-Century Fragment of Mark Matter?

As you know, there is a good deal of discussion going on about the destruction of mummy masks in order to uncover New Testament papyri. One point that I am not seeing discussed strikes me as the most important of all, and I want to address that here. But before doing so, I want to ask two questions, that maybe someone on the Blog can answer for me. The first is actuallyseveral questions: exactly how many masks are we talking about here? How many have been destroyed? And how many have been singled out for destruction? Don’t we as a reading public have the right to know? And second: am I right that the only way to know if a New Testament papyrus was used as part of the “paper mache” in the mask, that first the mask has to be destroyed? That is to say, this one mask – or these many masks? – is/are being destroyed not because it / they are known to house NT papyri, but in the hopes that they [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:04-04:00January 24th, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts, Religion in the News|

An Expert Talks About Mummy Masks and Papyri

One of the things that I find disconcerting about all the discussion about whether it is legitimate to destroy mummy masks in order to get NT papyri is that the only people who seem to know anything about what has been found (this alleged first century copy of the Gospel of Mark) are not experts in the specific fields in which expertise is required, both to dismantle masks and to date papyri. As it turns out, they're all friends of mine. Craig Evans is a New Testament scholar, but he is not a textual critic, let alone a papyrologist (expert in papyri) or palaeographer (expert in dating manuscripts). Dan Wallace, who first announced the discovery in a debate against me over two years ago, is in the same boat; he's done lots of good for the academy by going around the world to photograph/digitize manuscripts, but he is not trained in either papyrology or palaeography and is expert in neither. My oldest friend in the field, a good friend for some thirty years now, Michael [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:04-04:00January 24th, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts, Religion in the News|

Defending the Destruction of Mummy Masks

In yesterday’s post on New Manuscripts and the Destruction of Antiquities, I cited an article by Mary-Ann Russo that explained the situation about the mummy masks that were being destroyed in order to acquire papyrus fragments of the New Testament. The scholar mainly cited in that article as being involved in that process was Craig Evans, a friend of mine with whom I have had several public debates. Craig feels that he has been somewhat misrepresented in this article, and sent me a clarification. I have asked and received his permission, and this is what he says: (NOTE: after this paragraph is a lengthier explanation and justification of what they are doing when destroying mummy masks): THE REST OF THIS POST IS FOR MEMBERS ONLY. If you don't belong yet, YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE MISSING!! Last summer I gave a presentation on the number, age, and reliability of New Testament manuscripts. In this lecture I described the effort under way in recent years to recover manuscript fragments, including biblical manuscripts, from ancient cartonnage, including [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:04-04:00January 21st, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts, Religion in the News|

New Manuscripts and the Destruction of Antiquities

As many of you know, in 2012 I had a public debate in Chapel Hill with Dan Wallace, professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary, on the question of whether we have the original New Testament or not. During the debate he dropped a bombshell, on me and all of us. He mysteriously claimed that now we have a first-century copy of the Gospel of Mark. This would be a copy well over a century older than any other that exists, and would give us a copy that is very close in date to the original. He dropped the bombshell purely as a debating strategy, not in order to provide real information – when pressed he wouldn’t say anything about the copy, except that it is not anything like a complete copy, but a fragment with probably a few verses, at best, on it. But he refused to answer, and continues to refuse to answer, all the relevant questions: How extensive is the fragment? How does he know it is from the first century? [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:04-04:00January 20th, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts, Religion in the News|

Do Textual Variants Really Matter for Anything?

QUESTION: I got the impression (I can’t remember where or if you said this… or if Bruce Metzger said it) that no significant Christian doctrine is threatened by text critical issues… and so, if that is the case, who cares if, in Mark 4: 18, Jesus spoke of the “illusion” of wealth or the “love” of wealth. I mean, who cares other than textual critics and Bible translators? RESPONSE: This is a very good question, and one that I get a lot. I’ve given an answer to it before on the blog, but since it periodically reappears, I thought that maybe I should give it another shot. The first thing to emphasize is a point that I repeatedly make and that many people seem never to notice that I make (especially my fundamentalist friends who very much object to my views about textual criticism): of the many hundreds of thousands of textual variants that we have among our manuscripts, most of them are completely unimportant and insignificant and don’t matter for twit. Why should [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:29-04:00November 29th, 2014|History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Jesus Sweating Blood: Transcriptional Probabilities

I’ve been discussing the kinds of evidence that textual critics appeal to in order to make a decision concerning what an author originally wrote, when there are two or more different forms of the text – that is, where a verse or passage is worded in different ways in different manuscripts. And I have been using the passage found (only) in (some manuscripts of) Luke of Jesus’ bloody sweat as an example. Yesterday I discussed one kind of “internal” evidence. Remember: external evidence deals with figuring out which manuscripts have which reading: how many manuscripts (not so important), age of the manuscripts, geographical distribution of the manuscripts, and (something I didn’t discuss) quality of the manuscripts. And recall that internal evidence is of two kinds, the first of which is “intrinsic probabilities,” which seeks to establish which form of the text is more likely to have been written by the author himself. The second kind of internal evidence is a kind of flip side of the coin, and it’s called “transcriptional probabilities.” With arguments/evidence of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:56-04:00October 17th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts|

Jesus’ Sweating Blood and “intrinsic” evidence

In yesterday’s post I mentioned some of the kinds of “external” evidence that textual scholars look at when trying to establish the “original” text of a document (that is, the wording of the text as the author originally wrote it) when different manuscripts have different wordings for this or that passage. In this post I’ll talk about one kind of “internal” evidence that is used to assist in making this kind of decision. There are two kinds of internal evidence that are usually called (1) intrinsic probabilities and (2) transcriptional probabilities. For now, I’ll focus on the first. Intrinsic probabilities involve determining which of two (or more) forms of the text found in the manuscripts is the one that the author himself was more likely to have written. Suppose you have a verse worded in two different ways. If one of the ways uses the vocabulary and the writing style found elsewhere in the author, and presents ideas that he otherwise attests, whereas the other way includes words and grammatical constructions and ideas that are [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:56-04:00October 16th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts|

External Evidence in Textual Criticism

When I realized that I did not want to spend my life as a text-critical technician – collating and classifying Greek manuscripts – it became obvious to me the way to go. Textual critics at the time generally understood that there were two major tasks in the discipline: to establish the original text (that is, the text in the words written by the actual authors, as opposed to the changes of the text made by later scribes) and to write the history of its transmission (seeing how it had been modified over the years in different times and places). And I realized that through no tragic fault or brilliant plan of my own, I had been trained to do both things: the first requires substantial expertise in exegesis (the interpretation of texts), and the second requires a knowledge of early Christian history. These were the two areas I had focused on in my graduate training, in all those years when I wanted, instead, simply to be trained in reading manuscripts. I think it is widely [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:56-04:00October 15th, 2014|New Testament Manuscripts|

Textual Scholars as Technicians

I’ve been trying in the posts of this thread to explain why textual critics are often thought not to be expert in the wide range of topics that other New Testament scholars are well versed in. They are instead frequently seen as technicians who do the really hard, dirty work that no one else is either that interested in doing or knowledgeable about, even though some of it (not all) is thought to be necessary and important as a kind of preliminary exercise. But it’s to be done by others. I, on the other hand, was long intrigued with textual criticism, from my early college days. When I went to Princeton Seminary (already knowing Greek) and took a course with Metzger on palaeography (the study of ancient handwriting in the manuscripts nd related topics) I was thrilled. In that course we learned how to “collate” manuscripts. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Collating manuscripts, for most people, is no fun at all. It involves taking a manuscript – that is, a hand written [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:55-04:00October 13th, 2014|New Testament Manuscripts|

A Text-Critical Dissertation

The point of this short thread dealing with my graduate training is to explain why it is that lots – probably most – New Testament scholars do not consider textual critics to be competent in a wide range of fields normally associated with New Testament scholarship. I know that must seem very strange to outsiders, but it’s the case. Textual critics are often thought of as a rather strange group of technicians without broad competency in the areas that other New Testament scholars are interested in – for example, the Jewish environment or the Greco-Roman worlds from which the New Testament emerged, the historical Jesus, the interpretation of and historical problems associated with the Gospels, the life and letters of the apostle Paul, the theology of the different NT writers, and on and on. The reason for this is that to be competently trained in textual criticism is a long and hard process and it’s very difficult to do that *and* to learn all the other things that most other NT scholars are competent and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:55-04:00October 11th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts|

My Graduate Training (Textual Criticism??)

I saw my master’s thesis as the perfect assignment to get me grounded in the entire, complicated field of New Testament textual criticism. Ever since then I’ve been in favor of students writing master's theses, even if it is not required for a master’s program. For one thing, doing so gets you into the frame of mind that you need to be in when you get to the point of writing a dissertation at the PhD level – which for most students is the first time they write a book. The masters thesis is usually much shorter – say 100-120 pages. But the layout tends to be similar. Most theses I’ve been involved with, including my own, have entailed an introduction, three chapters, and a conclusion. So the student learns to think in terms of writing chapters, each of which has its own thesis and point; but all of them work together in order systematically to set forth the overarching thesis of the work. This is a hard transition for some students, who for their [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:55-04:00October 10th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Training as a Textual Critic

In some of my previous posts I’ve indicated that since I was known as a textual critic (one who worked with Greek manuscripts of the New Testament in order to determine both what the authors originally wrote and how the text came to be changed over the centuries) I was not widely seen as a candidate for writing a New Testament textbook for undergraduates. Several readers have expressed some perplexity over this. Aren’t textual critics, by their very nature, background, and training, proficient in the wider field of New Testament studies? The answer may surprise you: it may be that they should be, but many (at one time, most) are not. It’s a little hard to explain why, but I’ll try. As is my wont, I’ll start autobiographically. In my case, the great bulk of my graduate training actually had very little to do with textual criticism. When I came to Princeton Theological Seminary as a master’s student ) in 1978 (after I had finished my BA in English at Wheaton college), I was required [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:55-04:00October 9th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

Where Does One Deal with Textual Criticism?

There were other organizational dilemmas that I faced in doing my textbook. As I indicated, I decided to begin with chapters on the Greco-Roman world and the Jewish world of the New Testament, and – before getting to the Gospels themselves – a chapter on the controversies in early Christianity that led to the formation of the 27-book NT canon. But there was one other rather fundamental issue. If I was talking about the canon of the NT before getting into a discussion of the NT books – shouldn’t I also talk about the text of the NT, that is, the surviving manuscripts of the NT, before discussing individual books? Many readers on the blog will be familiar with the textual problems posed by the New Testament. In broad outline, the problems are no different from those posed by every book, or sets of books, from the ancient world, whether the Hebrew Bible, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the plays of Euripides, the writings of Plato on down to the plays and essays of Seneca to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:55-04:00October 7th, 2014|Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

Yale Shaffer Lectures 3 of 3 – Christ Against the Jews

Here is the third of my Shaffer Lectures delivered almost exactly ten years ago. This final one has to do with textual variants and apocryphal texts that show evidence of Christian anti-Judaism. I call this one: Christ Against the Jews. It is a topic that I continue to be interested in, and on which I plan to write a book for a general audience, at some time in the next few years (not about textual variants, but about the rise of Christian opposition to Jews and Judaism.) Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition. Quality is lacking since this is a VHS to 720p uprez:

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:25-04:00September 22nd, 2014|Christian Apocrypha, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Video Media|

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