Paul and His Letters Archives - Page 12 of 20 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Did Paul Really Write 2 Thessalonians?

I am out of the country must now, giving lectures for a tour of Greece and Turkey focused on “The Footsteps of Paul.” For the past three days we’ve been in Thessaloniki, a terrific place; tomorrow we’re off to Samos, an island near the coast of Turkey, from which we’ll make expeditions to Ephesus and Patmos (not connected with Paul, but how can we pass it up?), etc. Suffering for the cause. In my talk to the group today, I was explaining why scholars have such difficulties knowing what Paul actually said and did. For one thing, the accounts in Acts (which give a kind of biography of Paul) may be roughly accurate in their broad picture, but there are reasons for thinking the details are problematic. That’s important because Acts is our only ancient source that claims Paul was from Tarsus, was a Roman citizen, and had three major missionary journeys. And some of the things it says about Paul are highly significant, if true – for example, that he never, personally, stopped keeping [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:02-04:00June 7th, 2019|Paul and His Letters|

Homosexuality and the New Testament. Guest Post by Jeff Siker.

Yesterday Jeff Siker, PhD in NT and editor of two books that discuss biblical/Christian views of homosexuality, started his summary and assessment of what the Bible has to say about same-sex relations, in light of the recent vote of the United Methodists not to welcome “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” in their churches. In that post he dealt with the salient passages in the Old Testament; today he moves to the controversial texts of the New Testament and ends with some insightful reflections on the relevance of the Bible for same-sex relations in the modern context. Jeff Siker is the author of Jesus, Sin, and Perfection in Early Christianity, Liquid Scripture: The Bible in the Digital World and Homosexuality and Religion: An Encyclopedia. ****************************************************** Romans 1:26-27 “For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:03-04:00March 4th, 2019|Paul and His Letters, Reflections and Ruminations, Religion in the News, Sex and Sexuality in the Bible|

Jews and Gentiles in Paul’s Churches

Another one of the new boxes in my textbook on the New Testament ********************************************************* Another Glimpse into the Past Box 21.2. Jews and Gentiles in Paul’s Churches The earliest Christians, immediately after Jesus’ resurrection, were obviously Jews: eleven of the apostles (minus Judas Iscariot) and a handful of women, including Mary Magdalene. Once these followers came to believe, they converted others they came into contact with – all of them, at first, Jews. But the Jewish Christian church was never a huge success. Later sources occasionally mention smallish Jewish groups of Christians, but apart from the church in Jerusalem, these never played a huge role in the ongoing life of the church in the early centuries. Jewish Christianity was almost always on the margins. It was probably heading to the margins by ... To see the rest of this post you'll need to belong to the blog. It takes little effort and not much money to join. And you'll be so loaded up with important knowledge you won't know what to do with yourself. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:42:44-04:00November 2nd, 2018|Paul and His Letters|

Did Paul Believe that the Fleshly Body Would be Resurrected

Browsing through posts I made (exactly) six years ago, I came across this one (which deals with a subject I'll be addressing in my new book) about Paul's view of the future resurrection. What I thought I thought about that issue *before* I started doing the hardcore research for my book on the afterlife is very similar to how I still think now. I hope that doesn't just mean I'm stubborn! Here is the perceptive question and my response: ****************************** QUESTION: What is a BODILY resurrection without the flesh? Don't the early Christians (and Paul) think the flesh (the corpse) didn’t matter anymore and could be left behind, rotting and decomposing? Isn’t it all about the spirit finally getting this new, better, perfect, divine ‘body’? Addendum: The Greek for ‘spiritual’ (like in spiritual body) is pneumatikos, right? According to Strong’s that means: pertaining to wind or breath, windy, exposed to the wind, blowing. Now those wouldn’t be obvious words to describe something physical or made out of matter, would it? They seems to rather define [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:42:43-04:00October 14th, 2018|Afterlife, Paul and His Letters|

Is There Sarcasm in the New Testament?

Here is an unusually interesting question I have received: QUESTION: During the time that the New Testament was being written, especially during Paul’s time, did they have in society what we consider sarcasm? Sometimes certain sentences pop out to me as they could have meant them in a sarcastic tone. I know it is probably just me since I am a sarcastic person. RESPONSE: Now *that’s* an interesting question that I, literally, have never been asked before! But it’s something I’ve thought about a bit over the years, and I think the short answer to it is Yes. Let me start by giving a definition of sarcasm. You can find various definitions just on the Internet, but the basic idea is that sarcasm is a form of humor that used irony in order to mock another. It is difficult to identify sarcasm in ancient writings. In fact, as you’ve probably noticed, sometimes it’s hard to know if someone is being sarcastic when they are speaking directly to our face! The way we [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:57-04:00August 5th, 2018|Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Are Matthew and Paul at Odds on the Most Important Issue?

I have been talking about contradictions and their value for knowing about history -- about what actually happened in the past. There are lots of other kinds of ways that passages of the New Testament are at odds with one another. Sometimes, and more important for many people, they can have very different theological views, sometimes on absolutely key and important issues. That is a matter I addressed many years ago on the blog, in this post: ************************************************************************************** One of my major goals as a professor of New Testament is to get my students to understand that the NT is not a single entity with a solid and consistent message. There are numerous authors who were writing at different times, in different parts of the world, to different audiences, and with different – sometimes strikingly different – understandings about important issues. In fact, about key issues, such as who Jesus was and what his role was in salvation. One of the assignments that I used to give was to have students compare Matthew’s view of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:40-04:00July 10th, 2018|Canonical Gospels, Paul and His Letters|

Does the Book of Acts Portray the Teachings of Paul Accurately?

This is my second post on the portrayal of Paul in the book of Acts. In the one previous I tried to show, briefly, how the account of Paul’s activities in Luke’s narrative do not gel well with what he says in his own letters. Here I address the question that was originally raised: his teachings. Do the things Paul says in Acts coincide with what he himself indicates? I won’t give a detailed discuss, but just look at one key passage. Again, this is drawn from my book The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. ************************************************************** Paul’s Teaching. Almost all of Paul’s evangelistic sermons mentioned in Acts are addressed to Jewish audiences. This itself should strike us as odd given Paul’s repeated claim that his mission was to the Gentiles. In any event, the most famous exception is his speech to a group of philosophers on the Areopagus in Athens (chap. 17). In this speech, Paul explains that the Jewish God is in fact the God of all, pagan and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:24-04:00June 18th, 2018|Acts of the Apostles, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Does the Book of Acts Accurately Portray the Life and Teachings of Paul?

A fundamental question has recently come to me, which involves one of the central issues in the study of the life and teachings of Paul. As most members of the blog may know, there are thirteen books in the NT that claim to be written by Paul, six of which are widely thought not actually to be by him. But that means, on the positive side, that we almost certainly have seven letters actually written by Paul, so that if we want to know about him, we can turn to his own writings (unlike, for example, Jesus, from whom we have no writings). We also, however, have the book of Acts, the fifth book of the NT, which gives a narrative of the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman world, as the faith moved from being a sect within Judaism to becoming a world-wide religion for both Jews and Gentiles. The key figure in that transition, and the main character in the book of Acts, is Paul. But can we trust that wuat the book [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:24-04:00June 17th, 2018|Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Does Paul Condemn Slavery? The Case of Philemon and Onesimus.

I received an interesting question this week about Paul’s letter to Philemon. And hey, how often do you get a question about Philemon?!? This is the shortest of Paul’s letter (it’s a one-pager) where he is writing to his convert Philemon, a rich slave owner, asking him to receive back into his good graces his run-away slave Onesimus. So what was *that* all about? Here is the question and my response. QUESTION: A question on an atheist discussion group, “Why did Paul send Onesimus back?” got me thinking. From your writing about Greco Roman notions of dominance as status, it seems that the simple manumission of a slave was not a de facto improvement in status, because a man with no wealth, power, or influence was about as low on the ladder as one can be, save for a similarly situated woman. A trusted slave of a wealthy, powerful individual would have more status than a “free” Onesimus. Would it be unreasonable to suggest that Paul was hoping for an improved station in life [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:07-04:00May 11th, 2018|Paul and His Letters|

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|

The Surprising Understanding of Gender in the Ancient World

Back in January I made three posts on the role of women in the churches of Paul (see the posts of January 16, 17, and 18). These raised various questions from readers about how and why women went from having a fairly *prominent* role in Paul’s own churches to having thoroughly *diminished* roles in the churches that arose after his day, as embodied for example in the Pastoral epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus (books that claim to be written by Paul but that he did not himself write; they were produced by a later author who, among other things, opposed the role of women in the church). I’d like to answer these questions by discussing a matter that most modern readers of the Bible (or of other ancient texts) simply are unaware of: how ancient people understood the relationship of the genders. We ourselves have a “common sense” of what the differences between male and female are, and we naturally assume that our common sense has been the common sense of everyone [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:20-04:00March 5th, 2018|Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, Paul and His Letters, Sex and Sexuality in the Bible, Women in Early Christianity|

Jesus and Paul: Similarities and Differences

In my previous post I raised the question of whether Jesus and Paul represent fundamentally the same religion or not. Here I continue the discussion by pointing out what seem to me to be the main similarities and differences between them, as I spelled it out in a post several years ago: ******************************************************************* I have been talking about the relationship of Jesus’ proclamation of the coming Kingdom of God to Paul’s preaching about the importance of the death and resurrection of Jesus. In the previous post I argued that the fundamental concerns, interests, perspectives, and theologies of these two were different. In this post I’d like to give, in summary fashion, what strikes me as very similar and very different about their two messages. Again, in my view it is way too much to say that Paul is the “Founder of Christianity”: that assumes that he is the one who personally came up with the idea of the importance of the death and resurrection of Jesus for salvation, whereas almost certainly this view had [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:00-04:00January 29th, 2018|Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters|

Are Paul and Jesus on the Same Page?

In response to my previous post on the importance of Paul, I have had several people ask me about the relationship between the teachings of Jesus and Paul: are they actually representing the same religion? I dealt with that question some years ago on the blog. Here is the first of two posts on the issue. ****************************** I have spent several posts explicating Paul’s understanding of his gospel, that by Christ’s death and resurrection a person is put into a restored relationship with God. He had several ways of explaining how it worked. But in all of these ways, it was Jesus’ death and resurrection that mattered. It was not keeping the Jewish law. It was not knowing or following Jesus’ teaching. It was not Jesus’ miracles. It was not … anything else. It was Jesus’ death and resurrection. I then summarized in my previous post, the teaching of Jesus himself, about the coming Son of Man and the need to prepare by keeping the Law of God, as revealed in the Torah, as summarized [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:59-04:00January 26th, 2018|Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters|

Is Paul Given Too Much Credit?

Is the apostle Paul given more credit than he deserves by modern scholars? Here is what has (recently) raised the question for me. As many readers of the blog know, the corpus of early Christian writings known as the “Apostolic Fathers” is a collection of ten (or eleven) proto-orthodox authors who were, for the most part, producing their writings just after the New Testament period. For anyone interested I have a two-volume edition / translation of these important texts, The Apostolic Fathers, in the Loeb Classical Library series (Harvard University Press, 2004) (it gives the original Greek on one side of the page and an English translation on the other) (the books are included, only in English, in my anthology After The New Testament). These are fascinating books – they include a number of letters (e.g. by Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp of Smyrna, and one later attributed to Clement of Rome – the last of which was actually written before some of the books of the New Testament), some treatises (e.g., the book of Barnabas), [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:59-04:00January 24th, 2018|Paul and His Letters|

Was Paul a Misogynist?

Now I can consider whether Paul himself actually wrote 1 Cor 14:34-35 -- a passage that tells women they are not allowed to speak in church -- or if it was, instead, inserted into his letter by someone else later. It's an important issue: if Paul did write the passage, and if he also wrote 1 Timothy (widely thought to be written by someone else *claiming* to be Paul) then by modern standards, at least, he would not be considered to have a, well, liberated view of women. I begin with a paragraph that ended my post two days ago, to set the context for the rest of what I have to say: *********************************************************************** Paul’s attitude toward women in the church may strike you as inconsistent, or at least as ambivalent. Women could participate in his churches as ministers, prophets, and even apostles, but they were to maintain their social status as women and not appear to be like men. This apparent ambivalence led to a very interesting historical result. When the dispute over the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:07:14-04:00January 18th, 2018|Paul and His Letters, Women in Early Christianity|

Paul and His Female Disciple Thecla

I’m in the middle of talking about whether Paul wrote the verses now found in 1 Cor. 14:34-35, or if they were later added to his letter by an editor/scribe. To make sense of what I have to say next about the issue I need to provide just a bit more background, specifically about a legendary figure well known in the early church, but not widely known about today outside the realm of early Christianity scholarship. This is a one-time-household-name: Thecla, supposedly a female disciple of Paul. Here is what I say about her and her significance in my Introduction to the New Testament: ******************************************************** Paul’s words (in his authentic letter) may have taken on a life of their own as they were used in new contexts, gaining a meaning that was independent of what they originally meant when he proclaimed them to his converts. Interestingly, the distortion of Paul’s message is explicitly recognized as a problem even within the pages of the New Testament (2 Pet 3:16). This may be what happened in a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:46-04:00January 17th, 2018|Christian Apocrypha, Paul and His Letters, Women in Early Christianity|

Paul’s Views of Women

In this week’s mailbag I take up a very interesting question about whether there are other passages in the New Testament that are found in all of our manuscripts but that appear not to have been originally written by the author. That is, they were (possibly) passages inserted by a later editor, before any of our surviving manuscripts were made, so that they are universally attested, but probably not original. That is what I argued for 2 Corinthians 6:14 (it’s a standard scholarly view). And that prompted the following question: QUESTION: I hadn’t noticed the oddness of the 2 Corinthians 6:14 passage before, but it does seem out of place. Kind of like the woman-caught-in-adultery story in John 8, where the narrative flows smoother without that insert. Are there any other major examples of significant insertions into the NT books? RESPONSE: It is important to note the difference between 2 Cor. 6:14 and the passage in John 8. The latter is missing in our oldest and best manuscripts; the former is found in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:46-04:00January 16th, 2018|Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions, Women in Early Christianity|

Were Cut and Paste Jobs Common in Antiquity? Guest Post by Brent Nongbri

I have been talking about 2 Corinthians and Philippians, both of which may well represent instances in which earlier letters were cut and pasted together. A number of readers of the blog have asked me if this kind of thing was ever/often done in the ancient world. As it turns out, one of the blog members is an established New Testament scholar, Brent Nongbri (PhD from Yale; visiting associate professor at Aarhus University), who is interested in this kind of question. (He's also the author of Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept and God's Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts.) Unsolicited, he sent me the following note: asking and then answering the question, with a link to a fuller study. These are his words: *********************************************************************************** “Do we know whether or not this kind of editing was a common practice during the first three centuries?” I had this very question a few years ago, specifically regarding 2 Corinthians. I’ve read a lot of ancient letters, and I had never really seen like [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:46-04:00January 9th, 2018|Paul and His Letters|

More Cutting and Pasting? Paul’s Letter to the Philippians

I have been discussing instances in the New Testament where letters appear to have been cut-and-pasted together. The key example is 2 Corinthians, but one could make the case (and many have!) that something similar is true of Philippians. Here is how I explain it in my book The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. **************************************************** The Unity of the Letter The first two chapters of Philippians sound very much like a friendship letter written by Paul to his converts. The occasion of the letter is reasonably evident (see especially 2:25–30). The Philippians had sent to Paul one of their stalwart members, a man named Epaphroditus, for some reason that is not disclosed (until chap. 4). While there ministering to Paul, Epaphroditus was taken ill; the Philippians had heard of his illness and grew concerned. Epaphroditus in turn learned of their concern and became distraught over the anxiety that he had caused. Fortunately, his health returned, and he was now set to make his journey back home to Philippi. Paul [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:46-04:00January 8th, 2018|Paul and His Letters|

My Long Favorite Pauline Letter: Philippians

There is one other book in the New Testament that may be a cut-and-paste job, and as it turns out, it is another one of Paul’s letters, Philippians. Philippians was for a long time my favorite Pauline letter, back in my late teens when I was first starting to read the Bible. It contains the first verse I ever memorized: “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain” (1:21); and it is the first book that, a couple of years later, I committed completely to memory, word for word. Little did I know, back then, that some scholars think it is in fact two different letters of Paul’s that have been spliced together. The evidence of there being two letters in Philippians is not as clear and compelling as in the case of 2 Corinthians, and I suspect, but do not know for a fact, that the *majority* of scholars hold to the “integrity” of the letter. In this case, the word integrity has nothing to do with “honesty.” It is the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:46-04:00January 5th, 2018|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

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