Reader’s Questions Archives - Page 22 of 30 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Apologies, Questions, and Excuses

My sincere apologies to any- and every-one who has asked me a direct question that I have said I would devote a post or more to. The list of questions that I need to address is as long as my arm, and in many cases I suppose people forgot that they even asked! But if you asked and are waiting – apologies. I still have the questions and I will get to them, slowly. But I find that once I start answering a question, to cover the issues thoroughly ends up taking several posts and I get sent down some byways. But that’s OK, in my opinion; I tend to think that makes the blog a bit more interesting. Moreover, I constantly have things I want to talk about – for example, things I’ve been doing in my courses, such as the thread on the Gospel of the Ebionites this past week: I didn’t even *get* to the Gospel according to the Hebrews, the Gospel of the Nazareans, or the Gospel of the Egyptians; and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:42-04:00September 15th, 2013|Reader’s Questions, Teaching Christianity|

Why Luke is Thought To Have Written Luke

I made an off the cuff comment in a previous post that there was a certain logic that has led readers over the years to identify “Luke” as the author of the Third Gospel. Let me stress again that the book itself is written anonymously; the author never identifies himself in any way. Moreover, we do not have the identification of the author as Luke until some 100 years after he wrote, in a statement by Irenaeus in his book Against Heresies, where he names the four Gospels as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. So why Luke? Irenaeus doesn’t tell us, but there appears to be a kind of “exegetical logic” that led to this decision. The way it works is a bit complicated, but it goes like this: I mentioned in the previous post that the author of this Gospel also wrote the book of Acts. It too is anonymous. But in four passages in the book of Acts, when the author is describing some of the journeys and activities of the apostle Paul, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:25-04:00August 31st, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Reza Aslan’s View of Jesus

I am saddened and grieved to report that everyone on the blog who has responded to me about yesterday’s pop quiz has gotten one of the questions wrong. :-) More on that tomorrow. (But in the meantime: I’m giving brownie points for anyone who can indicate which question everyone is missing and why they’re getting it wrong!) But on rather more serious matters: back to Reza Aslan’s book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Let me state emphatically that I have not yet and am not now writing a review of the book. I’m not attacking its views or its scholarship, I’m not praising its brilliant insights and clear vision, and I’m not recommending that you read it or, instead, use it as a very handy doorstop. I HAVEN’T READ IT! And unlike some people I know (oh so well), I don’t believe in passing judgment on a book I haven’t read. My first post on the book was in response to a question of whether I consider to Aslan to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:25-04:00August 27th, 2013|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions, Religion in the News|

Reza Aslan on Jesus

QUESTION: Do you consider Reza Aslan to be a recognised scholar of early Christianity? Larry Hurtado described the thesis circulating in lay circles, that Jesus was a military revolutionary, as a "zombie" idea (from what I gather, a key conclusion of Aslan's 2013 book) which had been debunked over and over again by scholarship in the past century. RESPONSE: OK, I need to begin with a very serious disclaimer. I haven’t read Aslan’s book (Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth) yet. So what I say will not be based on careful observation of his views or the evidence that he cites to support them. My comments will not require any of that, as you’ll see. His publisher sent me a copy gratis, for which I’m very grateful. He sent it to me before he knew that it was going to be the #1 Bestseller in nonfiction on the New York Times Bestseller list – which it is still this week, I see in this morning’s paper – and when he was interested [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:24-04:00August 25th, 2013|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions, Religion in the News|

Conclusions Drawn from My Study of Didymus

Once I had solved the textual problems presented by the quotations of the New Testament in the writings of Didymus I could get to work on my project. It was painstaking. Very painstaking. One needs to be able to handle massive doses of boredom in order to do a project like this, many, many long hours looking at and dealing with mounds of textual minutia, day and week and month after day week and month. I don’t recommend it generally, unless you’re passionate for this kind of thing, as I was. The many volumes of Didymus’s newly discovered writings had been very carefully produced and indexed. I could look up every quotation or paraphrase of the Gospels in all his writings. For each one I made an index card (this was before any of us had computers). Hundreds of these cards, obviously. And once I had made up a card for every quotation or paraphrase, then the real fun began. FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a member. If you don't [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:24-04:00August 22nd, 2013|Fourth-Century Christianity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Problems with the Textual Evidence from Didymus

I indicated in my previous posts that there are serious methodological problems with using patristic evidence in NT textual criticism. That was no less true for the church father I chose for my dissertation, Didymus the Blind, than for any other. But there are always ways to deal with problems, and that proved to be the case here as well. For one thing, I noted in my earlier post that scribes of the Middle Ages often changed the texts of the church fathers that they were copying in order to make their quotations of scripture coincide with the form of text known in their own (the scribes’) day. With the OT commentaries of Didymus that was not so much a problem, because the manuscripts discovered in Egypt of his writings dated from the sixth century, not much later, and they may well have been copies of the originals, or of early copies of the originals. And there is evidence that the quotations were not much changed: these quotations agree quite strikingly with the readings found [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:24-04:00August 21st, 2013|Fourth-Century Christianity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Didymus the Blind and Patristic Evidence

As I have indicated, my PhD dissertation was written in the field of textual criticism, with a focus on the patristic evidence; my topic was the quotations of the Gospels found in the writings of Didymus the Blind, a famous teacher/theologian who was active in Alexandria Egypt in the middle and at the end of the fourth century. Possibly by explaining what the dissertation was I can help show why patristic evidence can be so valuable for understanding the history of the transmission of the text of the NT. I have already shown how Patristic citations can help us determine if a variant reading (that is, a way of wording the text that differs from the way it is worded in other witnesses) may well be original (thus my posts on Luke 3:22). That is obviously one of the most important goals – many would argue that it is THE important goal, or even the ONLY important goal, though I think this is too extreme – of textual criticism, namely, to know what the author [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:24-04:00August 19th, 2013|Fourth-Century Christianity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Problems with Patristic Evidence

Sorry not to have posted for a couple of days. I am out of the country and did not have the wifi connection that I was told I’d have. I confess, it was nice being incommunicado! But I’m back, for the duration I should think. And to return to the topic of original conversation on this thread – before getting sidelined with all that discussion of Luke 3:22 -- the importance, but problems, with patristic evidence (that is, citations of the New Testament in the writings of the church fathers) for the tasks of textual criticism. Of the three kinds of evidence available for establishing the text of the NT and for determining how it was altered over the years, the Patristic evidence has received the least attention. Most attention has been paid, as you would expect, to the Greek manuscripts; after them, to the versions – although some versions have been notoriously neglected, in no small measure because they involve languages few people know (Armenian, Goergian, Gothic, Old Church Slavonic, etc.) and because their [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:24-04:00August 18th, 2013|History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reader’s Questions|

A Final Post (!) on Luke 3:22

I would like to thank all the readers who have indulged me on this rather heavy thread of posts on the text of Luke 3:22. I certainly do not mean to provide a steady diet of hard-hitting scholarship on the blog, and I know that for some of you, this thread has been rather boring and uninteresting. But I do think that every now and then, maybe a couple of times a year, it is good to peel back the layers and go at it at a deeper level of scholarship, if nothing else to show the world at large how this kind of thing gets done at a more serious level. My book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, from which these posts have come, is all at this level. If you’ve enjoyed the posts (I know a couple of people have!) you may want to check out the book. If you’ve found them rather tedious, then you should be pleased to know that I will go back to less in-depth posts starting with my [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:10-04:00August 14th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Luke 3:22 — More on What Luke Would Have Written

In yesterday’s post I started to discuss the “intrinsic probabilities” that can help us establish the text of Luke 3:22. This kind of probability looks to determine what an author himself (as opposed to a scribe copying his text) would have been likely to write. That is determined by considering his writing style, vocabulary, theological views, narrative interests and so on, and determining which of the available readings fits with these established patterns of usage better than the other(s). What I’’ll be arguing in this post, again, taken from The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, is that the reading found only in Codex Bezae coincides more closely with the view of Jesus’ baptism that can be found elsewhere in the two-volume work of Luke-Acts. The first paragraph below is the one that ended yesterday’s post, to provide some context for the following observations. ***************************************************************************************************************** More fruitful is an assessment of the other references to Jesus’ baptism throughout Luke’s work, “backward glances,” as it were, that provide clues concerning what happened at that point of the narrative. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:10-04:00August 13th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Luke 3:22 — What Luke Himself Would Have Written

In my previous post I began to look at the “internal” evidence that the voice at Jesus’ baptism in Luke’s Gospel said the words that are found among Greek manuscripts *only* in Codex Bezae of the early fifth century: “You are my son, today I have begotten you,” as opposed to the words found in all the other Greek manuscripts (the voice as recorded also in Mark): “You are my son, in you I am well-pleased.” If you’ll recall, there are two kinds of internal evidence that scholars consider: “transcriptional probabilities” (which reading would a scribe more likely have preferred and therefore created by changing the text) and “intrinsic probabilities (which reading would the author have been more likely to have written originally). The last post was on transcriptional probabilities showing that the reading in Codex Bezae is probably the older form of the text. Now in this blog and the next one (or two) I will discuss the “intrinsic probabilities,” which point in the same direction. All of these arguments are meant to work [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:10-04:00August 12th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reader’s Questions|

More Arguments over Luke 3:22

Yesterday I posted some comments that were designed to show why knowing the Patristic evidence is so valuable in establishing what the oldest form of the text of the NT was. My illustration was from Luke 3:22, where the voice from heaven says different things, depending on which witnesses you read. The fifth century manuscript Codex Bezae is the *only* Greek manuscript that has the reading “You are my son, Today I have begotten you.” The Greek manuscripts that were produced before Bezae, and all those produced afterwards, have a different reading, the one you will find in most Bible translations, “You are my beloved son, in you I am well pleased.” The point of my post was not to give conclusive evidence that the reading found in virtually all the manuscripts is the *wrong* one; it was to show that Patristic evidence is valuable because it shows that in the second and third Christian centuries, it was the *other* reading (the one that eventually came to be found in Codex Bezae) that was most [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:09-04:00August 11th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reader’s Questions|

Church Fathers and the Voice at Jesus’ Baptism

In my previous post I argued that the quotations of the New Testament in the writings of the later church fathers can help both to establish the earliest form of the text and to determine when and where the text came to be changed in the process of its transmission. I indicated that I might give an example of how that works, and that’s what this post is all about. I have taken a couple of paragraphs from my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture to illustrate the point. The passage I am discussing here is a very important one. It has to do with what the voice said from heaven at Jesus’ baptism, as recorded in the Gospel of Luke. In virtually all the Greek manuscripts of Luke – hundreds of them – the voice says “You are my beloved Son, in you I am well pleased.” But in one – count them, one – manuscript of the early fifth century the voice instead says “You are my beloved Son, Today I have begotten [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:09-04:00August 10th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reader’s Questions|

Patristic Evidence: Why Time and Place Matter

In my previous post I indicated that there are three major kinds of evidence for reconstructing the text of the New Testament: the surviving Greek manuscripts (obviously our best source of evidence), the early versions (ancient translations into such languages as Latin, Coptic, and Syriac), and the quotations of the church fathers. Moreover, I indicated that one advantage of the citations of the church fathers is that this kind of evidence can be dated and located far more easily than can the Greek manuscript evidence. But now in looking back over the post, I realize that I never indicated why that might matter. As with all things dealing with textual criticism (which I use strictly in the technical sense: textual criticism is NOT simply the scholarly study of texts – e.g. as literary critics engage in – it is the *reconstruction* of texts, that is, the attempt to get back to the text as written by an author given manuscripts that have differences in them; textual criticism is used for every literary text of the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:09-04:00August 9th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, History of Biblical Scholarship, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reader’s Questions|

Church Fathers Who Quote the New Testament

QUESTION: I am curious about the early patristic evidence for the various Gospels and other New Testament writings. As I understand these are helpful in establishing the dates for many of these works. Related to this is, when early Church Fathers quote passages from NT writings, are they usually verbatim or do they often differ from the canon that was eventually established? Perhaps my question is a bit broad, but feel free to narrow or expand as time allows. RESPONSE: This is a good set of questions, and I may make two or three posts on it, depending on how it goes. As it turns out, it is an issue I’ve long been interested in. In fact, when I started doing serious research in the textual criticism of the New Testament – back when I was in the last year of my Master’s Program – this was the one topic I was most interested in: the Patristic evidence for the text of the NT. (Patristic = Writings of the Church Fathers.) I told my [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:09-04:00August 6th, 2013|History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Early Doubts about the Pastorals

In my discussion of the role of women in the early church, I discussed the fact that women are ordered to be silent in 1 Timothy, one of the Pastoral epistles, but that this view should not be attributed to Paul himself because, despite the fact that 1 Timothy *claims* to have been written by Paul, it almost certainly was not -- that is, its author was lying about his identity. A lot (a *whole* lot) of modern-day scholars and lay readers object (strenuously) to the idea that the author was actually “lying,” but I go to great lengths in my two books on forgery (one written for a general audience, the other written for scholars) to show that in the ancient world, pseudepigraphic writing (that is, when an author claims to be a famous person, knowing perfectly well that he was someone else) was considered a form of literary deceit and was in fact denounced as a form of lying. Be that as it may, the reality is that the majority of NT scholars [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:09-04:00August 5th, 2013|Forgery in Antiquity, History of Biblical Scholarship, Paul and His Letters, Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reader’s Questions|

How Women Came to Be Silenced

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 of Christianity in the second century, who saw the inordinate number of women believers as a fault; remarkably enough, the defenders of the faith never denied it. Second, we should recall that the earliest Christian communities, including those established by Paul, were not set up as public institutions like the Jewish synagogues or the local trade associations, which met in public buildings and had high social visibility. Paul established *house* churches, gatherings of converts who met in private homes. The significance of this difference should not be overlooked. For in the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:09-04:00August 2nd, 2013|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions, Women in Early Christianity|

The Non-Pauline Oppression of Women

In my previous post I argued that the view of women in 1 Timothy 2:12-15 does not coincide with Paul’s own teachings, and that it therefore is probably not something that Paul wrote. (This is a standard view among scholars, that Paul did not write 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus; there are compelling reasons for this view, which I could go into if anyone really wants to know….) But doesn't Paul say something similar in his undisputed letters, in the harsh words of 1 Cor 14:34-35? Indeed, this passage is *so* similar to that of 1 Tim 2:11-15, and so unlike what Paul says elsewhere, that many scholars are convinced that these too are words that Paul himself never wrote, words that were later inserted into the letter of 1 Corinthians by a scribe who wanted to conform Paul's views to those of the Pastoral epistles. The parallels are obvious when the two passages are placed side by side. (AND if I knew *how* to place them side by side in Word Press, they [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:09-04:00July 31st, 2013|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions, Women in Early Christianity|

Paul, the Pastorals, and Women

Based on what I said in the previous post, Paul's attitude toward women in the church may seem inconsistent, or at least 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 role of women in the church later came to a head, both sides could appeal to the apostle's authority in support of their views. On one side were those who urged a complete equality between men and women in the churches. Some such believers told tales of Paul's own female companions, women like Thecla, who renounced marriage and sexual activities, led ascetic lives, and to taught male believers in church. On the other side were those who urged women to be in complete submission to men. Believers like this could combat the tales of Thecla and other women leaders by portraying Paul as an apostle who insisted on [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:09-04:00July 30th, 2013|Christian Apocrypha, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions, Women in Early Christianity|

Paul’s View of Women in the Church

In this thread I have been talking about the role of women in the early church, starting with the ministry of Jesus, then in the churches of Paul (the first churches we have any real record of). In this post I continue by reflecting on Paul’s actual *views* of women; this strikes me as a particularly important topic since Paul is frequently condemned as the first Christian misogynist (or at least one of the first bad ones). Is that justified? The following represents some of my reflections as found in my discussion in my textbook on the NT for university students. The apostle Paul did not know the man Jesus nor, probably, any of his women followers. Moreover, many of the things that Paul proclaimed in light of Jesus' death and resurrection varied from the original message heard by the disciples in Galilee. For one thing, Paul believed that the end had already commenced with the victory over the forces of evil that had been won at Jesus' cross and sealed at his resurrection. Not [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:09-04:00July 29th, 2013|Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions, Women in Early Christianity|

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