Paul and His Letters Archives - Page 13 of 20 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Are There Cut-and-Paste Jobs in the New Testament? The Case of 2 Corinthians

How much of the early Christian writings consist of scissors-and-paste jobs, where later editors cut up earlier writings and stitched them together into one continuous work, so that what we have now are not the originals but only the final edited version? Are there books like that, for example, in the New Testament? In a recent post I mentioned how the early Christian writing called the Didache is that kind of thing, with three documents artificially combined into the 16-chapter book we now have. That prompted the following question from a blog member. QUESTION: It seems like there was a lot of “cutting and pasting” in early Christianity. It reminds me of how I cobbled together different parts of the World Book when I turned in my first high school papers. Do we know whether or not this kind of editing was a common practice during the first three centuries? RESPONSE: Yes, it does appear that we have other examples of that kind of thing in the surviving early Christian writings – including at least [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:45-04:00December 30th, 2017|Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Paul’s Exalted Self-Image: The Fulfillment of Ancient Prophecy

I am off today to Boston for a week of various professional activities. Tomorrow morning I will be filming a documentary with an independent film maker on some aspect of the New Testament. After that I’ll be having lunch with about a dozen members of the blog, and then dinner with three or four. Following that, on Friday, I will be giving a talk at the Biblical Archaeology Society FEST (a gathering of interested lay folk to hear lectures by scholars for a couple of days). And then it’s off to my annual professional meeting, with thousands of other biblical scholars from the U.S. and around the world, the Society of Biblical Literature meeting. My talk at the Biblical Archaeology Society will be about Paul and his understanding of his mission. About a year ago I realized something I had never thought of before. Paul actually understood himself, personally, to have been predicted by the prophets of the Old Testament as the fulfillment of God’s plan. Wow. Here is how I have thought about and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:15-04:00November 15th, 2017|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

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|

Did Paul Think Jesus’ Body Remained in the Grave? Mailbag July 14, 2017

I will address two very different questions in this edition of the Readers’ Mailbag. If you have a question you would like me to address, ask away, and I’ll add it to the list. QUESTION: I just finished reading scholar Gregory Riley’s Resurrection Reconsidered. He presents the position that people in the Greco-Roman world had a very different perception about spirits (ghosts) than we do today. Riley states that people living in the first century Roman Empire believed that dead people frequently came back to visit the living, appearing in “bodies” that looked exactly like their former fleshly bodies, and having the same capabilities of their former fleshly bodies: capable of eating food, drinking wine, and even engaging in sex…even sex with the living! The ONLY difference between a spirit body and a fleshly body was that USUALLY a spirit body was impalpable (could not be touched). Riley believes that Paul would have been shocked to hear about an empty tomb as he would have believed that Jesus’ fleshly body would OF COURSE [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:04-04:00July 14th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Can (or Should) We Change the Canon of Scripture? A Blast from the Past

Digging around in posts from five years ago now, I came across this one --as interesting to me now as it was then! Hope you think so too. It's a response to a penetrating question. QUESTION: Given the criteria used to determine what would go on to constitute the New Testament canon, how is it that Hebrews and the book of Revelation remain part of the canon? I understand that Christians came to believe that they were authored by the apostles which is why they made it into the canon, but we now know that they weren't authored by Paul or John..so why are they still in the NT? RESPONSE: Interesting idea! I sometimes get asked what I would exclude from the canon if given the choice, and I almost always say 1 Timothy (because of what it says about women in 2:11-15, and how the passage has been used for such horrible purposes over the years). But, well, it ain’t gonna happen. I don’t get a vote. And that’s the problem with Hebrews [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:27-04:00June 9th, 2017|Catholic Epistles, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Bart Ehrman Resurrection of Jesus: A Blast from the Past

On this Easter Sunday, I thought I should say something about the resurrection of Jesus. It turns out I've said a lot over the years on the blog (I just checked!). Here's a post from about five years ago, giving not my personal views but those of another well-respected New Testament scholar who, like me (we are a rare breed), is not personally a believer. Bart Ehrman Resurrection of Jesus: What Are My Thoughts? One of the first books that I have re-read in thinking about how it is the man Jesus came to be thought of as God is Gerd Lüdemann’s, The Resurrection of Christ: A Historical Inquiry (2004). Lüdemann is an important and interesting scholar. He was a professor of New Testament at Göttingen in Germany, and for a number of years split his time between there and Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville. He is a major figure in scholarship and is noteworthy for not being a Christian. He does not believe Jesus was literally, physically, raised from the dead, and he thinks [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:51-04:00April 16th, 2017|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Paul and His Letters|

Was Cephas Peter? The Rest of the Argument

I have received a number of emails asking me about the Cephas and Peter article I started giving a couple of posts ago, and most of the questions, as it turns out, are answered in the *second* half of the article, which I had originally planned not to provide here on the blog. So now I’ve decided, well—why not? And so here is the rest of the article for anyone who is interested. For those not interested in all the convoluted ins and outs of the argument, you may want to see the end, the summary and conclusions, as the pay-off of the argument is rather significant. As with the rest of the article, I have not included any of the footnotes, where I give some of the logic and evidence for my sundry points. As it turns out, I’m not sure I buy the argument anymore. I’ll explain why in simple terms in a later post. ******************************************************* The evidence of Paul has not been exhausted by this consideration of Gal 2:7-9. There [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:38-04:00December 15th, 2016|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Cephas and Peter in the Writings of Paul (Who Knew Them)

In my previous post I gave the evidence that in the early church there were writers who maintained that Cephas and Peter were *not* the same person, despite what is explicitly said in John 1:42. As some readers have noted to me, that differentiation *may* have been driven by a very clear and certain reason: in Galatians 2 Paul confronts “Cephas” and blasts him for not understanding the Gospel. Could there have been a major rift between the two most important apostles of early Christianity? Surely they were more unified than *that*! Well, if Cephas was not the same person as Peter, it is a much, much smaller problem. So maybe that is what was driving early Christians to claim there were in fact two figures, the apostle Peter and the other person Cephas. That post came from a scholarly article I wrote on the topic many years ago. I’ve decided not to give the entire article here – it gets increasingly technical and rather, uh, boring to general readers. But I will give here, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:38-04:00December 14th, 2016|Paul and His Letters, 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|

Does Paul Know that Judas Betrayed Jesus?

QUESTION: In your list of the things Paul tells us about the historical Jesus (he was born of a woman, he was a Jew, he had brothers, he had twelve disciples, etc.) one thing you seem to have left out was the fact that he was “betrayed” on the night he had the last supper. 1 Corinthians 11:23 says “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread,24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you…” Why haven’t you included the betrayal as part of the tradition about Jesus that Paul knows? RESPONSE: Ah, good question. Many years ago when I was first teaching I did include that datum as rather important. I don’t do so any longer any more for one particular (and, in my books, very good) reason: I think the word “betrayed” is a mistranslation of the Greek of the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:05-04:00November 12th, 2016|Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Carrier and James the Brother of Jesus

I hope I am not beating a dead horse by going at some length into this discussion of James, the brother of Jesus, in response to the Mythicists, who have a very real stake indeed in saying that he wasn’t really Jesus’ brother, since that would mean Jesus existed. I’m pursuing the matter in part because it is such a key issue and as well to show that it would be possible to argue to all eternity with Mythicists on point after point after point. Some of them are truly inexhaustible. If I wanted to spend my entire life and career doing nothing but answering Mythicists rejoinders to my replies to their responses to my comments on their claims – it could occupy my next twenty years! I am giving a taste of what it involves here. The short story: The historical man Jesus from Nazareth had a brother named James. Paul actually knew him. That is pretty darn good evidence that Jesus existed. If he did not exist he would not have had a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:05-04:00November 5th, 2016|Bart's Critics, Bart's Debates, Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

James the Brother of the Lord

In my previous post explaining why I think the Mythicist position – that there never was a man Jesus – is simply untenable, I pointed out that among the things Paul says, none is more specifically relevant than the fact that he indicates that he was personally acquainted with Jesus’ own brother James (along with Jesus’ disciples Peter and John). When Paul mentions knowing and spending time with James, it is decidedly not in order to prove that he knew him. The comments he makes are completely incidental, explaining to people who already know about James how it is that he, Paul, met with him on a couple of important occasions. One of these occasions was just three years after Paul converted – so in about 36 CE. At that time Paul paid a visit to Jerusalem to meet with Cephas and James, the leaders of the church there. Paul is reluctant to mention that he had gone there, since the entire point he is making is that he did not learn anything of relevance [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:05-04:00November 4th, 2016|Acts of the Apostles, Bart's Debates, Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Paul’s Acquaintances: Jesus’ Disciples and Brother

I have pointed out that the information provided us by Paul shows that he, at least, understood Jesus to have been a real flesh-and-blood human being (even while acknowledging that he was also a divine being). He really was born, was a Jew, had brothers, and so on. The reason all this matters is that many Mythicists claim that Paul thought no such thing, that for him Christ was a cosmic being, not a human being, and that he had been crucified in outer space by demonic powers. I don’t think a careful reading of Paul could lead to those conclusions. There are two things in particular that Paul says that make it virtually impossible for me to ascribe to a Mythicist view. The first (I’ll deal with the second in later posts) is the fact that Paul actually knew at least a couple of Jesus’ earthly disciples, Peter and John the son of Zebedee, and even more impressive, his brother James. There can be no doubt about that. Paul himself describes two meeting he [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:05-04:00November 2nd, 2016|Bart's Debates, Mythicism, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Paul and the Historical Jesus

In this thread I have been talking about what I discussed in my thirty-minute presentation at the Mythicist Milwaukee conference, in my debate with Robert Price. After pointing out a couple of problems with typical Mythicist arguments I devoted the bulk of my time to laying out the positive evidence for my view that whatever else you might want to say about him, Jesus of Nazareth certainly existed as a real human being. In my last post I stressed the value of the Gospels, and their written and oral sources of information. There were lots and lots of sources, from the early days of the Christian movement, some of them coming straight out of Aramaic-speaking Palestine. It is almost impossible to explain how you could have so many independent sources saying similar things about the man Jesus unless he really was a historical figure. But there is much more. Next in my talk I moved to the apostle Paul, obviously a key figure in the debate. There are thirteen letters written in Paul’s name in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:05-04:00November 1st, 2016|Bart's Debates, Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Jesus and Paul on Heaven and Hell

A couple of days ago I indicated on the blog that I am thinking about devoting my next book to the “Invention of the Afterlife” – that is, to the question of where the Christian doctrines of heaven and hell came come. I asked for comments (and I still welcome them) from people about what they would be interested in seeing in a book like that. Many, many thanks to everyone who has (so far!) responded to my request! As some of you know, I have already written a *bit* about the topic in an earlier book, Jesus Interrupted. I thought it might be useful to replay what I said there, just to show where my thinking is at this point (I haven’t developed my thoughts significantly from writing that book, published in 2009) (but I expect they will develop in a big way, once I start working more diligently on the question). Here is the first half of what I said there. The second half will come tomorrow. (For those of you who keep [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:46-04:00October 9th, 2016|Afterlife, Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Does James Contradict Paul?

I have a number of questions that I want to address in my Readers’ Mailbag, but one particularly important one requires a rather long response, and so I dedicate this entire week’s mailbag to answering it. Here it is: QUESTION: Bart, what is your view with regard to Paul and James teaching on the doctrine of justification by faith – are they contradictory? RESPONSE: Ah, this is a perennial question among readers of the New Testament. I deal with it at some length in my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, in a chapter called “Does the Tradition Miscarry,” where I talk about whether Paul saw eye to eye with Jesus, with James, and with later traditions about Paul (e.g. in the Acts of Paul and Thecla). My answer about the letter of James may surprise some readers, who would expect me to find it completely at odds with Paul. Here is what I say in the book: ****************************************************** The most famous passage of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00September 4th, 2016|Catholic Epistles, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

How Did Ancient Writers Use Secretaries? A Blast from the Past

Here is the second of a series of three blasts from the past -- from four years ago when I was dealing with how secretaries were and, especially, were not used in the ancient world by authors when producing their work. Did authors (such as John for the book of Revelation, or Peter for either 1 or 2 Peter) use a secretary to write their books for them? To answer the question with something other than common sense (that is, common guessing), we need to know about secretarial practices in antiquity. As it turns out, we do know some things, as I'll explain in this post and the next. This is what I said four years ago now: ****************************** I have received some comments and emails about my claims about Silvanus as a secretary (or rather, NOT as a secretary) for the book of 1 Peter, and realized it would help if I could give some more detail about what we know about secretaries in the ancient world. The following is from an excursus in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:12-04:00August 5th, 2016|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

The Name of Saul/Paul and the Sources of the Pentateuch: Weekly Mailbag June 26, 2016

Why did Saul change his name to Paul? And what were the sources lying being the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible? Good questions! I’ll deal with them here in the Weekly Reader’s Mailbag QUESTION: What is the meaning of “Paul” that Saul of Tarsus was moved to change to that name upon his conversion? RESPONSE: Ah, right – my students ask me this a lot in my New Testament class. When we all grew up in Sunday School we learned that when Saul of Tarsus converted, he changed his name to Paul, so that Saul was his Jewish name and Paul his Christian name. As it turns out, that’s not quite right. Paul himself never gives any indication that he had another name, Saul. But he is called Saul in the book of Acts. Until he converts. After that he is usually called Paul. But not always! See, e.g., Acts 11:30 and 13:2 (there are other instances). There the Christian Paul is called Saul. What gives with that? Did [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:42-04:00June 26th, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Paul’s Converted Vision of Himself

To make sense of how Paul’s conversion affected his actual life, not just his theology, it is important to recall what I said about how it did affect his theology. I repeat the key paragraph from yesterday’s post before drawing the further even more far-reaching conclusion. To be members of God’s covenantal people, it is not necessary for gentiles to become Jews. They do not need to be circumcised, observe the Sabbath, keep kosher, or any of the rest. They need to believe in the death and resurrection of the messiah Jesus. This was an earth-shattering realization for Paul. Prior to this, the followers of Jesus – the first Christians – were of course Jews who understood that he was the messiah who had died and been raised from the dead. But they knew this as the act of the Jewish God given to the Jewish people. Certainly gentiles could find this salvation as well. But first they had to be Jewish. Not for Paul. Jew or gentile, it didn’t matter. What mattered was faith [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:41-04:00June 20th, 2016|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

What Paul’s Conversion Meant

In my previous posts I talked about Paul’s life up to his conversion and the conversion experience itself. Now, for two posts, I want to talk about what the conversion actually *meant* to Paul, particularly in terms of how it affected both his thinking and his life (which, for Paul, were very closely related to one another). His thinking involved his theology and his subsequent life involved missionary work as the newly minted apostle of Jesus with a distinctive message. It is easiest to understand Paul’s subsequent missionary activities and evangelistic message by realizing how an appearance of the living Jesus would force him from “fact” to “implications.” (I’ve discussed some of this on the blog before, but indulge me for a bit: I’m trying to clarify in my own mind exactly how I’m imagining all this…) For him the “fact” was that Jesus was alive again (it was a “fact” for him because he had seen Jesus alive three years after he had died). And from that fact Paul started reasoning backwards. This backward [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:41-04:00June 19th, 2016|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

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