Reader’s Questions Archives - Page 7 of 29 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

The Brother of Jesus and the Book of James

Finally I get to explaining reasons why the brother of Jesus, in my judgment, almost certainly did not write the book of James. The explanation will come in two parts, or possibly three. In this one I build on my last post, by arguing that it seems completely implausible that James *could* have written the letter. (For those of you inclined to think he used a "secretary" to do it for him -- I've posted on this a bunch in the past, to show why that didn't happen; just search for "secretary" on the blog). In my next post or two I'll give additional reasons, for those of you not completely enthralled with questions of who could read and write in antiquity. Both discussions are edited versions of what I say in my book Forgery and Counterforgery. *********************************************************** There are solid reasons for thinking that whoever wrote this letter, it was not James, the brother of Jesus. The first, as already mentioned, is that James of Nazareth could almost certainly not write. Whoever produced this [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:39-04:00July 24th, 2019|Catholic Epistles, Reader’s Questions|

Did James Write James?

In two previous posts I gave an overview of the letter of James, one of the real gems hidden away in the New Testament (it takes 15 minutes to read it, max. Try it! Great little book.) Now I want to devote several posts to address the question I was originally asked about it. Was it really written by James, the brother of Jesus, as traditionally claimed? I deal with that question at some length in my book Forgery and Counterforgery. I think the discussion is accessible to the non-expert. Here is how I begin (some of this has been edited to make it slightly more user-friendly). It ends up being an important issue: do we have a writing from Jesus’ own brother? Now *that* would be interesting! But, alas, I think not. *************************************************** The letter of James begins simply enough: “James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes in the dispersion, greetings” (1:1). A number of persons are named James in the New Testament, including the father [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:39-04:00July 21st, 2019|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Reader’s Questions|

One of My Favorite Letters in the New Testament: The Book of James

Sometimes the questions I get from readers are short and to the point, but require long answers over a number of posts. Here’s one of the recent ones: QUESTION: Could you write a blog on the book of James and why it is considered a forgery? RESPONSE: I think this question deserves an entire thread of responses. I haven’t talked much about the letter of James on the blog (at least so far as I can remember and tell!). So why not? It’s a short “book” – just five brief chapters. You can read it in fifteen minutes. Go ahead! What I say about it will then make better sense. The best known feature of the letter is that it *seems* to be opposing the writings and teachings of Paul. But does it? Martin Luther, father of the Reformation, thought so. He included the book only as an appendix to the New Testament. I talk about the letter, and the reasons I don’t think it was actually written by James, the brother of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:38-04:00July 12th, 2019|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Reader’s Questions|

Is the Qur’an More Reliable than the New Testament?

I often get asked questions about the Qur’an, and I almost always do not answer them, most because I can’t answer them. I’m not an expert on the Qur’an, and tend to talk only about things I have done serious and sustained research on. Otherwise I’m just spreading stuff I’ve heard, and I’m no more authoritative on that than anyone else. So what’s the point of my talking about it? But one question that I get frequently, especially from Muslim readers, is about the manuscript tradition of the Qur’an in relation to the New Testament. Even though I’m not an expert on the manuscript tradition of the Qur’an (oh boy am I not an expert), I know enough to answer with some authority this particular question. The question is whether it simply isn’t true that the Qur’an is more reliable than the New Testament. What the questioner almost always means by that is that the ancient manuscripts of the Qur’an tend to be amazingly similar to one another. Virtually identical up and down the line. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:21-04:00July 2nd, 2019|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Is There a Way to Know if a Manuscript is the “Original”?

In response to the recent flurry of posts on the question of a “first-century Mark,” I have received a very interesting question: suppose there *were* a first-century Mark that was discovered (hey, it’s possible! And we’re holding our breaths – what an amazing find it would be).. Would there be a way of showing it was the actual original Mark, the one the author himself wrote with his own hand? I was asked this question on the blog seven years ago, and responded to it by saying I had never thought about it before. (!) Below is the original question and my initial reflections. My views haven’t matured much during the past seven years (and they ain't the only thing), so I give my initial response. If someone can improve on it, let me know. First here is this week’s way of asking the question: QUESTION: Suppose someone did claim to have found the original…. I get that you can show something isn’t original, such as by dating it to two hundred years later. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:20-04:00June 28th, 2019|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Is There a “Best” Bible Translation Out There? A Blast from the Past

Here is one of the most frequently questions I have received over the years; I addressed it exactly seven years ago on the blog, as I have just discovered while rummaging through the archives. And since it continually comes up, I thought it would be a good time to address it again. Here's what I said then (and what I still think now!). ******************************************************************************** QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman, most of your readers doe not know the ancient languages thatthe Bible was written in and therefore must rely on translations. Clearly no one translation is conclusive, but for clarity of reading and reliable research, can you recommend some translations to us? Conversely, do you have any that readers should avoid, because of clear bias or a little too loose? RESPONSE: When I published Misquoting Jesus (2005) I received a lot of emails from a lot of people asking a lot of questions. But the one question I got asked more than any other was this one (in various forms): which translation of the Bible do I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:02-04:00June 5th, 2019|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Were Miracle Stories Originally in the Gospels?

Looking through old posts on the blog, I came across this very interesting and important question from seven years ago. It's a question I continue to get on occasion, so I thought we all might profit by thinking about it again. (And now, older and wiser, I would answer almost exactly the same way!) QUESTION: I have looked up the content of all the papyri I'm aware of (off of links on wikipedia, so who knows if they're accurate). It is my understanding that although p52, p90, and p104 are dated around 125-150 AD, they contain fragments of John 18 and Matt 21 only, and that it's not until 200 AD that manuscripts emerge which actually contain accounts of supernatural actions by Jesus. So, it's possible that accounts of miracles existed in copies that got destroyed, but is it fair to say that the earliest available copies of accounts of Jesus's supernatural actions date from around 200 AD? In other words, assuming people on average had kids by age 20 back then, and thus 20 years counts [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:01-04:00May 22nd, 2019|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

When Did Jesus Become Sinless?

I recently received a question from a blog member about when it was in the Christian tradition that Jesus came to be thought of as “perfect,” without sin. I feel no great need to answer the question myself because my friend and occasional guest blog poster Jeffrey Siker, long-time professor of New Testament at Loyola Marymount University, has written an entire book on the topic. And so I asked him to prepare some blogposts, and here’s the first one. For what it’s worth, he and I both liked very much the title he wanted for the book, Jesus the Perfect Sinner; but, as often happens, the publisher went with something less scintillating: Jesus, Sin, and Perfection in Early Christianity. But the cover of the book is to die for. - Jeffrey Siker is also the author of Liquid Scripture: The Bible in the Digital World and Homosexuality and Religion: An Encyclopedia. ********************************************** Jesus and Sinlessness How and when did Jesus come to be viewed as sinless in earliest Christianity? Surprisingly, this question [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:00-04:00May 14th, 2019|Early Christian Doctrine, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Early Christian Liars

Yesterday I started explaining in some depth how forgers in early Christianity – that is, authors who falsely claimed to be, say, Peter or Paul or James (as in the case of the authors of 2 Peter, 1 Timothy, the Proto-Gospel of James, etc.) – could justify their lies. I need to stress, the idea that they were lying is not just a modern one. The ancients talk about forgery a good deal; they never approve of it and they explicitly called it lying. Yet people did it, producing forgeries far more often than happens today. How did they live with themselves – especially those Christians who insisted that nothing was more important than “truth”? I pointed out yesterday that there were very broadly speaking two views of lying in early Christainity: 1) that it was sometimes acceptable; 2) it was never acceptable in any circumstance whatsoever. It’s not hard to see where forgers lined up on the spectrum. Here I continue the discussion, repeating the final paragraph of yesterday’s post for context. This is [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:40-04:00May 7th, 2019|Forgery in Antiquity, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Could Christian Forgers Justifying Lying?

Yesterday, in response to a question, I started to discuss the age-old problem of literary forgery (authors lying about their true identity), and specifically the question of why Christians would engage in it. In my two books on the topic I spend considerable time trying to demonstrate that forgery was indeed understood – in antiquity – to involve lying, and that the authors who claimed (falsely) to be Plato or Galen or Peter or Paul knew they were lying. But why would they do that? Especially the Christians? Here is a fuller answer that I give at the end of my book: Forged: Writing in the Name of God. It follows a discussion of a number of modern (mainly 19th century) forgeries of Gospels, including the ones that claim that, for example, Jesus went to India as a young man to learn the ways of the Brahmins…. ************************************************************** Christian Forgeries, Lies, and Deceptions This issue of modern hoaxes brings me back to a question that I have repeatedly asked in my study of forgeries: [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:39-04:00May 6th, 2019|Forgery in Antiquity, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Did Ancient Christian Forgers Commit Forgery?

Here is an intriguing question I received recently about the use of literary “forgery” in antiquity. A “forgery,” in the technical sense I’m using it, refers to a very specific phenomenon: it is not simply making up a false story or perpetrating some other kind of falsehood. It refers, specifically, to a book whose author falsely claims to be a (famous) person. If I wrote a novel and claimed I was Stephen King, that would be a forgery. Sometimes these books are called “pseudonymous” (which means “going under a false name”). That sounds less offensive, but it means the same thing (literally: “the name is a lie”). There were lots of forgeries in antiquity – many of which were uncovered back them, a number that have been exposed in modern times. My books Forged and Forgery and Counterforgery discuss the phenomenon more broadly but with a special focus on Christian texts of the first four centuries (the first book is for a general audience, the second is a scholarly analysis). Here is the question I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:39-04:00May 5th, 2019|Book Discussions, Forgery in Antiquity, Reader’s Questions|

Why Are the Gospels Anonymous?

Looking through some old posts, I ran across this one (that I'd forgotten about) that answers a question I get at least a couple of times a year. Why didn't the authors of the Gospels name themselves? (They have long been called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, of course, but you'll notice that the authors themselves never indicate who they are; the first record we have of anyone actually quoting these books *and* calling them Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is in Irenaeus, Against the Heresies, written about 185 CE -- that is, about a century after the Gospels themselves were written and placed in circulation. Anyway, here is the post, giving a reader's question and my attempt at an answer. *************************************************************************************** Among the interesting questions I’ve received recently is the following. It’s on something other than How Jesus Became God! Rather than type out a completely new answer, I’ve resorted to the discussion I set out in my book Forged, cited here, as relevant, in full. QUESTION: I still can’t quite grasp [...]

admin2025-07-16T17:31:12-04:00April 19th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

Did Jesus Pray “Father Forgive Them” from the Cross?

I recently received an important question about a highly significant textual variant in Luke 23:34, the one and only place in the NT where Jesus prays for those responsible for his death “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing.” The verse is not found in the other Gospels, and interestingly, it is also not found in some of the important manuscripts even of Luke. And so the question: is it a verse that some scribes inserted into Luke? Or is it a verse that other scribes decided to take out? It’s one or the other! When I received the question I was sure I had dealt with it on the blog before. But I’ve checked. Nope. Never have. But I was even more sure I had written about it somewhere. It took me a long time to track it down, but I’ve uncovered it in an article that I wrote called “The Text of the Gospels at the End of the Second Century,” now found in a collection of my more scholarly essays [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:21-04:00March 24th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Do Any Ancient Jewish Sources Mention Jesus? Weekly Mailbag

I recently received a succinct but very important question about whether Jesus is ever mentioned by any Jewish sources of the first century. The premise behind the question is that if Jesus was the miracle-working son of God who was healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead – wouldn’t everyone be talking about him, all the time? It turns out, the answer is – we don’t know! We have hardly any Jewish writings from his time and place. At the end of the first century we do have the copious and massively important historical writings of Flavius Josephus, and there is one passage in particular where he does indeed refer to Jesus. The passage is typically called the “Testimonium Flavianum” (that is, “Flavius [Josephus’s] Testimony to Jesus”). But did Josephus actually write this passage? Or has it been inserted into his work by a later scribe? Or did a later Christian scribe “touch it up” a bit? Here is the simple but crucial question I have received. QUESTION: How much of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:04-04:00March 10th, 2019|Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Homosexuality in the Bible (and the Christian Church)

Here is a pressing question I was asked about a month ago, involving homosexuality and the Christian church. Since the question was asked, as you know (if you follow the news!), the Methodist Church has made its decision. I decided to ask a real expert to deal with the question, my friend Jeff Siker, PhD in New Testament who has just retired from a 30+ year career teaching biblical studies at Loyola Marymount, and who has edited two books that address Christian views of homosexuality, the one he mentions below in his answer (1994) and a more recent reference work, Encyclopedia of Homosexuality and Religion (2006). When it comes to this topic, he’s heard it all and is massively informed. These two posts, of course, represent simply a condensation of the relevant information and his views about them. Jeff has served as a guest poster twice on the blog before, and both times graciously answered questions and responded to comments. I’m not sure if he will be able to do so (I asked him just [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:03-04:00March 3rd, 2019|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reader’s Questions, Religion in the News, Sex and Sexuality in the Bible|

Why Textual Criticism Seemed to Be on Death’s Door

In last week’s readers’ mailbag I started to answer a question that I never finished – in fact, I never got around to the question! Here it is again. QUESTION: Is there a story (post) about your move from textual criticism to other things? RESPONSE: In my two-part (non-)response to this question I first explained that my training in graduate school actually was not in textual criticism, but was mainly in the interpretation of the New Testament and the history of earliest Christianity. But my passion was textual criticism -- that is, analyzing the surviving manuscripts of the New Testament – and related textual witnesses [early translations of the NT into other languages; and especially the quotations of the NT in the writings of early church fathers] – in order to determine both what the authors originally wrote and figuring out how, why, and when the text came to be changed by scribes who were copying it. It was precisely because my training was actually in something different from my passion that I ended [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:45-04:00February 17th, 2019|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Pursuing My Passion for Textual Criticism

Yesterday I started answering the question of how I moved on from doing research principally on New Testament textual criticism to do other things, mainly involving different aspects of the literature and history of Christianity in the first three centuries CE. I pointed out there that my training/education was actually not in textual criticism, but mainly in the exegesis (and theology) of the New Testament, and on various aspects of the history of earliest Christianity (from the historical Jesus to the formation of the canon to early heresy and orthodoxy etc.). But even though that was my *training*, my principal interest all along had been textual criticism, figuring out what the original wording of the New Testament in Greek was (verse by verse by verse), and seeing both how and why the text had been changed by scribes over the years. This was an interest that was generated very early on in my academic career. In fact, before I had an academic career. Before I or anyone else could have imagined I’d have an academic [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:45-04:00February 11th, 2019|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

On Being Just a Textual Critic

I’ve decided to address a question about my own academic life in this week’s Readers’ Mailbag. It involves an issue that comes up a lot, but not in this form. QUESTION: Is there a story (post) about your move from textual criticism to other things? RESPONSE: I can’t remember if there is (though I’m sure someone will tell me!). But I would like to say something about it, since it is an issue that seems to come up a good deal, not usually from people who are genuinely interested in knowing about my academic life per se (as this questioner is), but from critics who aren’t at *all* interested, but who want to inform their readers that my books are not written by an expert but by someone who was only trained as a textual critic. Most recently this was brought to my attention in a comment by the Christian apologist, himself a professional philosopher, William Lane Craig, who told his readers that I had no expertise on the question of whether Jesus’ [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:45-04:00February 10th, 2019|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Mark’s Central Focus on Jesus’ Death

I began answer the question of “What Is the Messianic Secret?” – a term used to describe that distinctive feature of Mark’s Gospel, that Jesus repeatedly tries to hush up anyone who starts to know or realize he is – first by explaining what the traditional views of the messiah were in ancient Judaism (anything *but* a person who would be publically humiliated and tortured to death by his enemies – just the opposite: he was to be a figure of grandeur and power who destroyed the enemies) and then by laying out how Mark portrays Jesus as someone whom no one really understands. What’s behind that interesting feature of Mark’s Gospel? Why does he develop that idea? Mark himself, of course, understands Jesus quite well. Jesus is the messiah who has to suffer and die. I was about to simply to indicate that I’ve said this on the blog before a few years ago, but I’ve decided that to make my point more emphatically and make sense of my answer to the question about [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:45-04:00February 5th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

How No One Understands Jesus in Mark’s Gospel

In yesterday’s post I began to address the question: What is the Messianic Secret? This is a term that scholars have applied for over a century to the Gospel of Mark, where Jesus repeatedly tells anyone who suspects his identity not to reveal it. Why? To make sense of this “Secret” of Jesus, it is important for us to have a fuller understanding of Mark’s portrayal of Jesus. One of Mark’s major themes, quite apart from how one explains the apparent “secret” of Jesus’ messiahship, is that no one in Mark’s Gospel (remember, I’m speaking ONLY of Mark now; not the other Gospels) seems to understand who Jesus is. Here is how I explain that in my discussion of Mark in The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. ******************************************************************** One way to establish misunderstanding as a Markan theme is to read carefully through the first half of the Gospel and ask, Who realizes that Jesus is the Son of God? The answer may come as a bit of a surprise. Clearly [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:45-04:00February 4th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

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