Catholic Epistles Archives - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Other NT Writings

Proof That Historical Narratives (not just myths) Constantly Change in Oral Cultures

I have been discussing some of the many problems with assuming that oral traditions are passed along intact, without significant change, in oral cultures. In graduate school we all learned that they are and did, so that, for example, the fact that we might have a saying of Jesus or story about him in a source 50 years removed from his life isn’t really a problem. It would have been kept intact from the beginning without being changed. That’s how oral cultures work and always have worked. Nope. Not true. At least based on the hard-core research that actually examines the question. My previous two posts have marshaled some of the evidence. Here I continue on the theme, again in an excerpt from my 2017 book, Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne). *************************** Given these realities (that oral traditions are constantly changed when told and retold in oral cultures), as attested by numerous anthropological studies, why is it that people in literate cultures so often claim that people in past oral cultures had phenomenal memories and [...]

BDEhrman2024-02-09T12:03:03-05:00February 18th, 2024|Catholic Epistles, Historical Jesus|

Religion and the Wrecking Ball of Truth

In my last post I began to discuss the importance of "truth" to conservative evangelical Christianity, through a bit of autobiography. You don't need to have read that post for this one, so I begin here with the final paragraph that I left off with there. This is from my book Forged. ****************************** One of the ironies of modern religion is that the absolute commitment to truth in some forms of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity, and the concomitant view that truth is objective and can be verified by any impartial observer, has led many faithful souls to follow the truth wherever it leads, but where it leads is often away from evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity. That is to say, if you can, in theory, verify the “objective” truth of religion, and then it turns out that the religion being examined is verifiably wrong, where does that leave you? For many one-time evangelical Christians it leaves them in the wilderness outside the evangelical camp, but with an unrepentant view of truth. Objective truth, to paraphrase the [...]

BDEhrman2022-11-25T16:11:55-05:00November 22nd, 2022|Bart’s Biography, Catholic Epistles|

Can’t We Just Get Rid of Some of the Books of the Bible?

Here's an interesting question I received from a blog reader long ago! 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 and Revelation – and all the other books that were admitted when Church Fathers (wrongly) thought they were written by apostles of Jesus [...]

BDEhrman2022-10-28T14:39:53-04:00October 25th, 2022|Catholic Epistles, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reader’s Questions|

Did Ancient Writers Use Secretaries?

In my previous post I tried to show that the disciples of Jesus were almost certainly not literate. Yet we have books allegedly written by them. Is it possible that people like Peter, John, James, and Jude used a secretary to write their books for them? So that the apostles in the ultimate sense were the "author" but someone else composed the writing 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. Again, this is taken, in slightly edited form, from my book Forgery and Counterforgery, which goes into a great bit of detail about what we know about writing practices in the ancient world. ****************************** The notion that early Christian authors used secretaries .... is so widespread as to be virtually ubiquitous. There is no need here to cite references; one need only consult the commentaries, not only on the [...]

BDEhrman2022-08-22T15:11:33-04:00September 1st, 2022|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

How Many People Were Literate in Antiquity?

Over the past month I have received a number of questions on the blog about whether it was possible that some of the apostles used "secretaries" to write their books -- so that when 1 or 2 Peter, say, claims to be written by Peter, it actually was written by Peter in a sense. Peter told a secretary what to write and the secretary (e.g., Silvanus? 1 Peter 5:12) actually put pen to papyrus. But the thoughts and ideas were all Peter's. It's an important question, and I've dealt with it a good bit over the years. I actually did a short thread on it over six years ago now here on the blog. I've decided to return to the issue. This will take three posts. The first is on what levels of literacy back at the time of the New Testament: how many people cold read and how many write (which is not the same thing in antiquity!); and apart from who could write, who could compose a writing? Here is what I said about [...]

BDEhrman2022-09-02T10:35:38-04:00August 31st, 2022|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

You Don’t Think Peter Wrote 1 and 2 Peter?

In my previous post I indicated that I didn't think Peter wrote 1 and 2 Peter. One of my main reasons for thinking so is that I'm pretty sure Peter could not write. These books were composed in highly literate Greek by someone skilled in Greek composition. To be able to compose a book took years and years of training starting with childhood. Everyone we know like that was elitely trained and connected with a wealthy family, almost always in an urban area. Not, for example, a rural Aramaic-speaking daylaborer from a remote part of Galilee. But couldn't Peter have "written" these books some other way -- e.g., by having a secretary or scribe do it for him? I dealt with that question many years ago on the blog (based on much fuller discussions in my books Forged and Forgery and Counterforgery, if you want to see more of the evidence and logic) and still think the same thing. As it turns out, there is New Testament evidence about Peter’s education level. According to Acts [...]

BDEhrman2022-07-25T17:38:09-04:00August 9th, 2022|Acts of the Apostles, Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

A More Serious (Specific) Problem with the NRSV Translation

In my last post I mentioned John 3:22 as a verse that is mistranslated in the NRSV, leading to problems; but the problems of interpretation are not that enormous there – the translators simply removed an internal inconsistency by the way they mistranslated the verse. This second problem, the subject of this post, is more severe. A mistranslation has completely altered the meaning of a passage; it is the result of a very good motive – to make the translation gender-inclusive. But motive has led to a very bad result in this case. The policy of the NRSV was to render gender neutral statements in a gender neutral way. If a passage refers to humans in general, then it does not make sense to translate it as referring only to “men” (or only to “women” for that matter). And so instead of “man” the translators chose to use “person” or “human” or – if the mortality of people is the issue – “mortals” or … whatever; instead of “men” they used “people,” “humans,” etc. That’s [...]

BDEhrman2021-09-25T11:55:06-04:00October 3rd, 2021|Catholic Epistles, History of Biblical Scholarship|

Was Christ So Divine That He Was Not Human? The “Antichrists” of 1 John

Just as there were “adoptionist” Christians in the second century, who maintained that Christ was not really a divine being, but a human being who had been “adopted” to be divine by God (so: not pre-existent; not born of a virgin; not “equal” with God; etc.), so too, on the other end of the spectrum, there were others who claimed that he was so *entirely* God that he was not actually human. Here is how I talk about early representatives of that view in my book How Jesus Became God. **************************** We have seen that those holding adoptionist views of Christ claimed to represent the earliest views of Jesus’ own apostles. Of course, every group representing every view of early Christianity claimed that its views were the original teachings of Jesus and his earthly followers – but in the case of the adoptionists, they may well have been right. The view we will consider now is in some ways the polar opposite: it maintained that rather than being completely human, and so not – by [...]

BDEhrman2021-03-08T15:03:26-05:00March 16th, 2021|Catholic Epistles, Early Christian Doctrine|

How the Trinity Got Into the New Testament: Part 2

I continue now with the story of how the doctrine of the Trinity as stated in 1 John 5:7 (the only passage in the entire Bible that states that there are three divine figures and “these three are one”) was actually not originally part of 1 John – or the Bible at all. It was a later addition. But how did it come into the King James Bible then? Read on! This is how I explained it in my book Misquoting Jesus. (If you haven’t read the previous post, it provides some background) (it also does even if you did read it). ************************** 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 [...]

BDEhrman2020-12-29T00:40:59-05:00January 9th, 2021|Catholic Epistles, Early Christian Doctrine, New Testament Manuscripts|

Did Some One Forge the Writings of “John”? Guest Post by Hugo Mendez

Here my colleague Hugo Mendez wraps up his discussion of the writings of "John" -- the Gospel of John, 1 John, 2 John, and 3 John -- and he does so with a BANG. I hope you can see both the quality and significance of these conclusions. This is very serious and persuasive scholarship put at a level that even non-scholars can understand, with huge implications for understanding four of the important writings of the New Testament but also for rethinking questions of authorship of the early Christian writings and the history of our earliest Christian communities. It's easy for scholars to see these implications (mainly because the conclusions he reaches are contrary to what most critical scholars actually teach their students all the time), which is why Hugo has stirred up a bit of a hornets' nest. I hope it's possible for you to both appreciate and enjoy the argument as well. There is only one point on which he and I probably disagree, and it has to do with the authorship of the [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-19T11:28:58-04:00May 19th, 2020|Canonical Gospels, Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

Problems with Thinking the “Letters of John” in the NT are Forgeries? Guest Post: Hugo Mendez

This thread of posts we have been having by Hugo Mendez on the writings of "John" in the New Testament has been unusually stimulating and in the world of scholarship, controversial. If you haven't followed the thread, just look at the four that have already been posted starting two weeks ago. If he were to argue that 1 Timothy was not really written by Paul, but someone claiming to be Paul (i.e., that it was a "forgery"), not a single New Testament scholar in the country would raise an eyebrow. But to claim the letters of John are forgeries? Yikes -- now *that* is something you don't hear every day. But can the claim be sustained? Here Hugo answers some of the objections others might raise. What do you think? Convinced? NOTE: most posts on the blog are for members only. This one is open to anyone who wants to see it. Wanna see this kind of post five times each and every week, going back eight years? Join [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-18T15:13:23-04:00May 18th, 2020|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

Are the Gospel and Epistles of John Forgeries?? Guest Post by Hugo Mendez

Whoa! Forgeries? That seems a bit extreme! Right? Forgeries??? Hugo Mendez continues his discussion, and I have to say, it's pretty convincing. He and I may disagree on a couple of things about the Gospel of John -- I haven't decided yet :-) -- but on the epistles I'm gettin' there and am open to persuasion on the entire case. What do you think? The hardest part for most of us is preventing the knee that is jerking from controlling our brain that is judging. So read what he has to say, ponder it, and see what you think -- no matter how out of control the knee is. And if you see flaws in what he's saying, free to tell him (and me, and everyone else!) why. Here's his fourth post. ***************************************************** The Johannine Texts as Literary Forgeries The primary reason why scholars believe a “Johannine community” once existed is that we possess not only a Johannine Gospel (John) but also three Johannine Epistles/Letters (1, 2, and 3 John). Those letters seem to actually [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-13T15:34:06-04:00May 12th, 2020|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

Was There One Author Behind the Four Johannine Writings? A Community? Guest Post by Hugo Mendez

We continue now with the third of Hugo Mendez's guest posts on the "community" allegedly behind the Gospel of John, 1, 2, and 3 John. Here he shows why most critical scholars do NOT think (as most other interested human beings on the planet do!) that all four were written by the same person (let alone Jesus' disciple, John the Son of Zebedee), and why they have argued that instead they all come from like-minded authors from the same community. But when he gets to the end he indicates why there is a flaw in this reasoning. This post is an excellent example of solid scholarship with an unexpected ZINGER at the end! Hugo will be happy to respond to your comments, and he has certainly set up the next post. (If you have time, go ahead and read the three letters; they are very short and it's a fast read. But they have an importance far beyond what you might expect from their size) Why Scholars Haven’t Given Up on the Johannine Community (Yet) [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-11T09:54:58-04:00May 11th, 2020|Canonical Gospels, Catholic Epistles, History of Biblical Scholarship|

WAS there a Community behind the Gospel and Letters of John? Guest Post by Hugo Mendez

Here we begin a series of posts written by my colleague at UNC, Hugo Mendez. Hugo has had an intriguing and impressive career. He did an MA in Religion at University of Georgia, but then his PhD was in Linguistics, also at Georgia. He went from there onto a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Yale and “retooled” to become a New Testament scholar through some, well, incredibly intense study. He came to UNC as a postdoctoral fellow in 2016 for two years, after which we were fortunate to hire him as an assistant professor on tenure track. Hugo’s skills are remarkably wide-ranging. He knows far more ancient languages than I do (on his CV he lists: Indo-European: Ancient Greek, Latin, Classical Armenian, Gothic, Old Church Slavic, Sanskrit (Classical, Vedic). Aramaic (Biblical Aramaic, Classical Syriac), Classical Hebrew, and Akkadian. Really. OK then. If you’re interested in checking out his C.V. (hey, is this guy qualified? J ), it is here: https://religion.unc.edu/files/2020/05/CV_2020_Mendez_abbr.pdf Hugo has just started his publishing career, and is doing so with a bang. One of [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-05T13:04:17-04:00May 5th, 2020|Canonical Gospels, Catholic Epistles, History of Biblical Scholarship|

The Johannine Letters in Sum

This will be the final post in my thread on the Gospel and Letters of John. Here I will reflect further on what we can about the epistles and the context out of which they emerged. If you want to read more, check out my chapter in The New Testament: A Historical Introduction.... In that chapter I explain how views similar to those found in these Johannine writings eventually contributed to what we now call Gnosticism. (That, of course, is a whole *other* story.) As always, at the end of the chapter in my book, I give suggestions for further reading. ******************************************************** At this stage you may have recognized one of the difficulties of this kind of contextual analysis [i.e. that I explained in the previous chapter] It is very hard for the historian to know for a fact that the Johannine secessionists actually taught that it was unimportant to love one another and to keep God’s commandments. The problem is that the only source we have for the secessionists’ views is the author of [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-01T07:51:58-04:00May 1st, 2020|Catholic Epistles|

What Are The Epistles of John?

I can now describe and explain the letters of 1, 2, and 3 John. 1 John has always been one of my favorite books of the New Testament, and only takes a few minutes to read; the final two are incredibly short, less than a page each. Think about reading them! The author never gives us his name. But because the books aer so similar in theme and writing style to the Fourth Gospel – whose author from antiquity was thought to be Jesus’ disciple John -- these letters were also assigned to him. Critical scholars today almost entirely think that the author was not the *same* person as the author of the Gospel, and was almost certainly not John the Son of Zebedee. he probably was, though, an author living in the same community, at a later time, with a similar point of view. Here is how I explain what these letters are by situating them in a historical context in light of what was happening in the author's community. Again, this is taken [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-29T08:25:45-04:00April 29th, 2020|Catholic Epistles|

Reading the New Testament Letters in CONTEXT

OK, we return now to some of the books in the New Testament attributed to "John." I have talked at some length about the Gospel of John and the community that appears to lie behind it. I now move to the three epistles of John, found among the "catholic" or "general" epistles near the end of the New Testament. (When I was at Princeton Seminary, one day I went into the men's room and over the three urinals, in sequence, someone had written, as graffiti, 1 John; 2 John; 3 John. I guess it was a seminary joke....). All of this is in preparation for a series of blog posts being written for us by my colleague Hugo Mendez, in which he will argue *against* the idea of a Johannine community. (!) Before talking directly about these three letters, I need to explain one of the most common ways scholars analyze epistolary literature in the NT (i.e. the books that started out as actual *letters* -- written by a Christian author to a community or [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-28T15:26:26-04:00April 28th, 2020|Catholic Epistles|

What Is the New Testament? A Broad Overview

With some very sage outside advice, I have decided to add a new feature to the blog. Once or twice a week (at least that’s the *plan*) I will create a kind of “general introduction” post, dealing with some broad and basic matter connected with the New Testament, the Historical Jesus, the apostle Paul, the role of women in the church, persecution and martyrdom, heresy and orthodoxy, the development of theology, the Christianization of the empire, etc. etc. Broad overviews, of the BIG matters, at the introductory level. The idea is to make, say, three or four related posts on each issue, and then, when they’re completed, edit them all together into one massive post (say 4000-5000) words, and have that post well indexed with lots of links to other posts on the blog. That way, we can maximize its wide availability throughout the internet. When someone googles “What Is The New Testament,” they will find this particular post; the post will link to other posts on the blog. People go to these other posts. [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:26:10-04:00November 5th, 2019|Acts of the Apostles, Canonical Gospels, Catholic Epistles, Paul and His Letters, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Did the Author of James Claim to be James in Particular?

This will be my last post on the epistle of James in the New Testament as “counter”-forgery, that is, as a forgery (a book written by someone falsely claiming to be a famous person) that is written against another book that is itself a forgery (written by someone claiming to be some *other* famous person). In this case, the author is claiming to be James, the actual brother of Jesus, and he is writing to counter views of Paul – but not views Paul himself endorsed (exactly), but later developments of Paul’s views by an author (or authors) who wrote books, after Paul’s death, while *claiming* to be Paul. All a bit confusing! But here I finish by explaining why I think this author of the epistle of James claimed to be James in particular. Why did he choose that name? Why not some other? We will never know for sure, of course, but here are my thoughts about it. (This again is taken from my book Forgery and Counterforgery; I’ve added a couple of [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-29T17:33:15-04:00August 6th, 2019|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

Is the Author of James Rejecting Paul Himself?

I have been talking about how the letter of James appears to refer to Paul's letters in order to contradict them (as has long been thought by scholars -- going back at least to Martin Luther). But as it turns out, I don't think it's actually that simple. I briefly mentioned this in an earlier post, but here is the fuller scoop. This again is taken from my book Forgery and Counterforgery. I should remind you what I mean by those terms, "forgery" and "counterforgery." The term "forgery" is a technical term for a book that claims to be written by a famous person who in fact did not write it. (So "forgery" does NOT mean, in this context, something like "a made-up story." It refers specifically to the claim by an author -- either explicit or implicit -- to be someone other than he is.) A "counter-forgery" is a kind of forgery -- it refers to a forgery written in order to contradict the views found precisely in someone else's forgery (whether or not [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-11T17:06:59-04:00August 5th, 2019|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters|