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Does It Mean What It Says? More Problems with the King James

In my previous post I pointed out that the King James Version sometimes uses words and phrases that no longer make sense to most speakers/readers of the English language today. That obviously makes it use complicated. Why would you want to use a study Bible that doesn’t communicate in common English – or in this case, in English that no longer makes sense? I can understand – and heartily support – those who want to read the King James for its sheer beauty and historical significance. But if you want to study what the Bible actually means, it’s not the best place to go. In fact, it’s a rather awful place. An even bigger problem comes from the fact that sometimes the King James uses a word or phrase that does in fact make perfectly good sense in modern English. But the word means something very different now from what it meant in 1611, since the language (and hence the meanings of words) has changed over the past four hundred years. Here are a few [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:59-04:00January 23rd, 2017|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Problems with the Language of the King James Version

In my Introduction to the New Testament class this semester, I talked on the first day about which Bible translations I would allow students to use for the class. The basic answer: most any modern translation would be fine (though I myself prefer the New Revised Standard Version), but I would not allow paraphrases (which are not actually translations from the original Hebrew and Greek, but are simplifications of previously existing English translations and as a result can be highly interpretive and misleading) or the King James Version. When I tell them I do not allow the King James, I let them know that I think the King James is one of the great classics of English literature. As a piece of writing, it is arguably the most significant work every produced in English. But it is decidedly not a good study Bible. That is for several reasons: one is that the manuscripts of the New Testament it is based on (going back to the Textus Receptus – i.e. the original edition by Erasmus) were [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:59-04:00January 22nd, 2017|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

How Do We Know What “Most Scholars” Think?

I have received a particularly interesting question that has led to a bit of back and forth between me and a person on the blog. This person pointed out that in my writings I often indicate that a view that I have (e.g., that the Gospel of John was not written by John the son of Zebedee; that the book of Ephesians was not really written by Paul even though the author claims to be Paul; or that the Gospels are all 40-65 years after the death of Jesus, etc.) is held by the majority of scholars. But fundamentalist and conservative evangelical scholars say just the opposite, that their views (e.g., that John the son of Zebedee did write the Gospel of John, or that the Gospels date to before the destruction of the Jerusalem in the year 70) are the views of the majority of scholars. So who is right? And how can a person know? In my initial response to this person, I told him that what I always try to say (maybe [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:58-04:00January 20th, 2017|Bart's Critics, History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Leading up to the King James Translation

The King James Version (KJV) is right hailed as one of the great classics – arguably *the* great classic – of English literature. But most people have no idea where it came from and how it came into existence. And so I am going to take a side-path (OK, a tangent) in my thread to devote a few posts to the KJV, also known as the Authorized Version (AV). To start with, contrary to what a lot of people think, the KJV, which appeared in 1611 under, yup, King James of England, was not the first translation of the Bible into English. Not even close. The first English translation was by John Wycliff (or his followers), done long before, in 1382. Wycliff, however, did not translate the Bible from the original languages, Hebrew and Greek, but from the Latin Vulgate. That makes sense, since the Catholic church had always used the Latin version (ultimately going back to the fifth-century church father Jerome). And almost no one in the 14th century even knew Greek and Hebrew, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:58-04:00January 19th, 2017|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Where Did the King James Bible Come From?

What were the King James Bible translators actually translating? You may not have known it from the previous two posts – but that is what I have been getting at, when talking about the first published edition of the Greek New Testament by Erasmus, and the subsequent editions. The King James is deservedly considered of the greatest classics ever produced in the English language. There can be no doubt about its enormous influence on English literature and the English language itself. But as a study Bible, it is problematic – in part because of the Greek text (for the NT) that underlies it. Here is how I explain all that, going back to my discussion yesterday about Erasmus. ***************************************************** The larger point I am trying to make, however, is that all of these subsequent editions of the Greek New Testament – those of Stephanus included – ultimately go back to Erasmus’s editio princeps, which was based on some rather late, and not necessarily reliable, Greek manuscripts – the ones he happened to find in Basle [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:58-04:00January 18th, 2017|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

The First Greek New Testament

In this thread on Bible translation, I have been talking about what it is translators of the New Testament actually translate. In order to answer the question, I have had to explain how we started to get printed editions of the Greek New Testament, including the first to come off the printing press, the Complutensian Polyglot (discussed in yesterday’s post). Today I take the discussion a step further, to talk about the first published (not the first printed!) Greek New Testament. Again, the discussion is taken from my book Misquoting Jesus. ************************************************************** The First Published Edition of the Greek New Testament Even though the Complutensian Polyglot was the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament, it was not the first published version. As I pointed out, even though the work was printed by 1514, it did not actually see the light of published day until 1522. Between those two dates a famous and enterprising Dutch scholar, the humanist intellectual Desiderius Erasmus, both produced and published an edition of the Greek New Testament, receiving the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:58-04:00January 17th, 2017|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

The Oldest Printed Versions of the Greek New Testament

I have started to explain what it is translators of the New Testament actually translate. They do not translate just one manuscript or another; they translate what they take to be the “original” text as it has been reconstructed by textual specialists (some of whom are the translators themselves). These reconstructions can be found in printed editions of the Greek New Testament. To make sense of what the translators actually have in front of them when they are translating, I need to give a brief history of the printing of the Greek New Testament. To that end I will provide in two or three posts the directly relevant material given in my book Misquoting Jesus. I’ve always thought this is unusually interesting information connected to “how we got our Bible.” I start at the beginning, with the invention of printing. ********************************************************* The text of the New Testament was copied in a fairly standardized form throughout the centuries of the Middle Ages, both in the East (the “Byzantine” text) and the West (the Latin [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:58-04:00January 16th, 2017|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

My Problem(s) With Fundamentalism: A Blast from the Past

What are fundamentalists, and why don't I like them? Here is a post I published almost exactly four years ago now. My views have not changed! ********************************************************************** QUESTION: You note that fundamentalism is dangerous and harmful. How do you define fundamentalism and why do you think it’s dangerous? RESPONSE: There are of course actual definitions of “fundamentalism” that you can find in scholarship on religion, but I sense that you’re asking more for a rough-and-ready description. Years ago I started defining fundamentalism as “No fun, too much damn, and not enough mental. When I was a fundamentalist myself (yet to be described) I understood it in a positive way. Originally, in Christian circles, it referred to believers who held on to the “fundamentals” of the faith, which for us included such things as the inspiration of Scripture, the full deity of Christ, the Trinity, the virgin birth, the physical resurrection, and, well, probably a collection of other doctrines. Fundamentalism, for us, was to be differentiated from liberalism, which had sacrificed these basic fundamental doctrines to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:58-04:00January 14th, 2017|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Biblical Scholars Don’t Typically Call Themselves Biblical Historians
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Biblical Scholars Don’t Typically Call Themselves Biblical Historians

Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations

Biblical Scholars Don’t Typically Call Themselves Biblical Historians

Biblical Scholars--are they Biblical Historians....and will I create a book from my blog posts? Two interesting questions on this week's Readers Mailbag. If you have a question, just ask away! Biblical Scholars - How are They Seen? QUESTION: I just had a debate with a Mythicist who had no idea that any biblical scholar could be a historian. I have to admit, I was just as ignorant of this fact until a little less than two years ago. How mainstream is it that biblical scholars are also known as historians? Maybe people think of biblical scholar–historian as two entirely separate entities. RESPONSE It’s a good question! I would say that most biblical scholars in fact are not historians. But some are. It depends on what their interests and expertise are. In most PhD programs in biblical studies – for example, those provided in seminaries and divinity schools – the training is focused principally on the texts of the Bible and their meaning. The emphasis, in those circles, is on “exegesis,” that is, the interpretation [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:58-04:00January 13th, 2017|Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

What Text Are the Translators Translating?

What is it that Bible translators translate when they are translating? Let me focus on the New Testament, my main area of expertise. When a translator wants to make an English version of, say, Mark (what I say about Mark will be true of all the books of the NT), what does she actually translate into English? Obviously she cannot take Mark’s original manuscript and translate it, since we don’t have it. Or the first copy of the original, or a copy of the copy of the original. We have hundreds of copies of Mark. Does she just choose one that seems good and translate that? No, as it turns out, that’s not how it works at all. She translates a critical edition of the Greek text of Mark as it has been reconstructed by textual scholars. This will take a good bit of explaining. From near the time in the fifteenth century when printing with moveable type was invented there have been scholars interested in producing printed versions of the Greek New Testament (and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:58-04:00January 11th, 2017|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

What Do Translators Translate?

What do translators of the Bible actually translate? This has been the question in the back of my mind for the thread that has been going on over the past couple of weeks. The question has two components. (1) Which books do they translate and call “the Bible”? And (2) when they decide on those books, where do they find what they need in order to translate it? Do they translate certain manuscripts? Which ones? How do they decide? And when the manuscripts have differences among themselves, which ones do they follow? And on what grounds? These are among the enormous number of fundamental questions that translators have to deal with even before they translate the first word of the Bible. But let me be clear and emphatic: they are all questions with which every decent modern translator is intimately familiar, and these scholars always know all the ins and outs of all the issues. I want to stress this point because about once every other week I get a question on email in which [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:58-04:00January 10th, 2017|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

What About the Apocrypha?

What about the Apocrypha? I have been talking about how we got the books of the Bible – both Old Testament and New Testament – and how other books came to be left out. But what are the books of the Apocrypha, where did they come from, and why do some communities of faith (but not others) accept them as authoritative? When someone refers to “The” Apocrypha they are speaking of the “Old Testament Apocrypha,” a set collection of books written by Jewish authors (not Christian). There are also Christian apocryphal books (e.g., other Gospels – such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Mary – and other epistles, Acts, and apocalypsese that did not make it into the NT). But these are not called “The” Apocrypha. That term instead refers to the books written, as a rule, between the end of the OT and the beginning of the NT that are included in some Christian Bibles as canonical or semi-canonical. Here is some basic information about the Apocrypha, lifted [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:58-04:00January 9th, 2017|Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

Did the Council of Nicaea Take Away Reincarnation and Give us the Bible?

In this Readers’ Mailbag I’ll deal with two questions that involve modern myths about the Council of Nicaea in the year 325. Is it true that this is when the church fathers decided which books would be in the New Testament? And that these authorities also removed all references to reincarnation from the Bible? If you have a question you would like me to address in a future Mailbag, go ahead and ask! QUESTION: I've noticed many people have the misconception that the NT canon was decided at the Council of Nicaea. Where are people getting this misconception, and can it be quashed? QUESTION: I have often heard that original scrolls make reference to reincarnation but that such references were removed at the Council of Nicaea to strengthen the Church's position that the imperative for living a Godly life this time around necessitated immediate adherence. Is there any truth to this claim? RESPONSES: First, on the canon of the New Testament, let me say categorically that the Council of Nicaea did not debate [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:58-04:00January 8th, 2017|Constantine, Fourth-Century Christianity, 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|

How We Got the Hebrew Bible

Here at last I can summarize what modern scholars say about the formation of the canon of the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament). It’s a fascinating topic, of relevance, of course, to Jews, Christians, and anyone else who thinks the history of our civilization matters! This summary is taken from my book The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction (If the terms I use here don’t make sense: read the preceding two posts!) ************************************************************* Contemporary Views of the Formation of the Canon Today scholars tend to present a somewhat fuzzier picture of when and why the canon came to be formed, although there do seem to be some fixed points. It is widely held that the five books of the Torah were accepted by nearly all Jews as a set canon by the fifth century b.c.e., in the early postexilic period. One piece of evidence comes from the Bible itself, in a post-exilic book, Ezra. The scribe Ezra himself is described as being “skilled in the Torah of Moses that the LORD the God of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:40-04:00January 3rd, 2017|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

What is the Hebrew Bible?

In response to my previous two posts about how the Hebrew Bible came to be copied over the years, several readers have asked me a related (though also very different) question about how the books of the Hebrew Bible were chosen – why do we have these books and not some others? Who decided what the canon of the Hebrew Bible would be? When did they decide? And what were their criteria? These are important questions, and even though not quite as directly related to the thread I’m making my way through, I think they are worth a couple of posts. Before giving the standard scholarly view of such things, I will need to explain in the simplest terms I can what the layout, structure, and divisions of the Hebrew Bible are, and define and explain a number of terms. That will occupy us in the present post. I have once more taken this information from the discussion in my book The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction. ************************************************************** BOX 1.1 THE [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:40-04:00January 1st, 2017|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

Looking Back on the Blog 2016

The end is near! Or at least the end of 2016. For some of us this has been a nightmare year that we are glad to see behind us. For others it has been a year of unusual success, prosperity, and happiness, a utopian cornucopia. Whichever camp you are in (most of us are somewhere in between), I hope you can look forward with some hope to what lies ahead. This will be an end-of-the-year post, summarizing what we have accomplished on the blog over the past twelve months and thinking a bit about what lies ahead. It has been a very good year for the blog. I can start by giving some of the important numbers. My objective, all along, has been to provide 5-6 posts a week, each and every week. To my knowledge, I haven’t missed yet. This past year I made 281 posts, an average of just over 5.4 per week. So I have kept the pace up. Since starting the blog in April 2012, I have made 1394 posts. Each [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:40-04:00December 31st, 2016|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Copying of the Hebrew Bible

Here I continue on with my comments on the manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, and the question of whether they were changed over the years. Again, this is taken from my discussion in The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction. *********************************************************************** The Masoretic Text The text of the Hebrew Bible that is read today and that is at the basis of all modern translations is called the Masoretic Text. It is called this because the Jewish scholars who devised the rules for copying scripture are known as the Masoretes. The term “masorete” comes from the Hebrew word masorah, which means “tradition.” The Masoretes were the scholars who worked out ways to preserve the traditions of the Hebrew Bible. They were active between 500-1000 CE. To understand what the Masoretes accomplished, you need to remember that ancient written Hebrew was a language that used only consonants, not vowels. Any language that is written only in consonants is open, obviously, to serious problems of interpretation. Imagine if you were to write English that way. Apart from context, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:40-04:00December 29th, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible

Just now I started to write a post dealing with what it is exactly that translators (such as those of the New Revised Standard Version) translated when they translated their texts. I realized that to explain that I have to say something about the surviving Hebrew manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible – something I have not talked a *great* deal about on the blog in the past, and about the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament – about which I have said a good deal more. My comments on the Hebrew Bible will require a couple of posts. As you’ll see, I start at the most basic level and go from there, never getting at all complicated or technical. This has been taken from my textbook The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction ********************************************************** The Text of the Hebrew Bible We have seen that the earliest writings of the Hebrew Bible were probably produced during the eighth century BCE. This is the date of the oldest prophets such as Amos and Isaiah of Jerusalem. When [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:40-04:00December 28th, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

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