Loading...Yesterday I began to talk about the Martyrdom of Perpetua, one of the most interesting and moving texts to come down to us from early Christianity. It is an account of a 23-year old Roman matron who is willing to die a gruesome death for her Christian faith. Among other things, the text shows that her faith is far more important to her than her family. In particular, she is shown in conflict especially with her father (no husband is mentioned, which has led to considerable speculation: Divorced? Widowed? Unwed mother? Something else?). And even though it is with regret, she is willing to leave behind her own infant child by being martyred.
Family figures prominently in the two excerpts here. In the first her father begs her to avoid martyrdom, to no avail. In the second (chs. 7-8) we have an account of her dream and intervention on behalf of her dead brother Dinocrates. This is the part that I will be most interested in for the next post. Is it an early adumbration of the later doctrine of Purgatory?
Part of the intrigue in these early sections (before the description of the martyrdom itself) claim to be in Perpetua’s own hand – a kind of diary she kept in prison. One of the major issues in scholarship is whether
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I remember having heard or read you talk about Perpetua before – probably in your book Heaven & Hell. It’s a fascinating story. It makes me wonder whether dreams such as Pertetua’s were the source for the idea of Purgatory. Just a wild idea: mystics and philosophers through the ages have speculated that our earthly lives may be a sort of dream, or shadow reality akin to that experienced by the prisoners in Plato’s cave. If so, our daily waking reality would be a good candidate for Purgatory, in my estimation.
Hello Dr. Ehrman,
An evangelical friend of mine mentioned that Jesus’ miracles are credible because they are independently attested. How many are independently attested? I assume the resurrection is one, which in and of itself, doesn’t mean the story is accurate. (If you have addressed this on the blog, could you point me to the post?)
Thank you,
Dennis Kelly
Does your friend think that miracles in other religious traditoins (Islam, medieval Judaism, etc) are credible if they are multiply attested?
Orthodox Judaism teaches that miracles performed by charismatic religious figures are not necessarily from God.
I’ll chime in with my understanding of Bart’s perspective from reading his books.
Historians deal in facts from historical record. Any belief in the supernatural transcends the historical facts and therefore, historians don’t opine, in their role as historians, on the credibility of the belief.
On April 8, 1983, David Copperfield made the Statute of Liberty “disappear” before a live audience. The entire audience could “attest” that they saw the Statute of Liberty “disappear.” But it didn’t really “disappear.” They moved the stage to change the audiences’ direction of view and hid the Statute of Liberty behind a large building.
Bart, do I understand your perspective?
Yup. Except I always wondered about how David copperfield did that. I watched it on TV and thought it was pretty impressive!
Im afraid I’ve let my subscription run out. With American exchange against the Canadian $, even the cheapest plan is $40 Cad. The Silver was over $50. Oh well.
Send me an email if you’d can’t afford a subscription.
I can afford it, just not willing to pay that much any longer. Thanks for asking. The first part of my comment post was accidently done twice.
Im afraid I’ve let my subscription run out. With American exchange against the Canadian $, even the cheapest plan is $40 Cad. The Silver was over $50. Oh well. On the topic, i think Perpetua should have followed her father’s advice. In any case, many if not a majority of persecuted Christians ducked or capitulated to the authorities and lived to see another day and bring more Christians into the world. Hardliners never forgave them, like, the Novians and Donatists!
Having attended 12 years of parochial school back in the 50s and 60s, I’m pretty familiar with the concept of purgatory. My first grade classroom had a picture hanging in it, of a row of small individual fires with a person standing in each one, I think patrolled by several angels. We were told that it was purgatory, and each of us would be spending more time there when we died if we didn’t behave in class. (There were 72 Baby Boomers in that classroom, so she needed all the help she could get.) It was one of the early steps in my journey of religious fear, guilt, and (eventually) loathing. We were subjected to a lot of stories like Perpetua and Dinocrates. As a parent and grandparent, I now read of a seven-year old boy dying of facial cancer, in tremendous pain, shunned by neighbors, and wonder why anyone would worship a God who would then plop the kid’s soul in a place of additional torture. Lucky for him sister Perpetua has a special connection with God that she can use to pull him out!
You could also think of the victims of the holocaust, enduring horrible conditions, torture, and eventual murder. And death offers no respite. it just gets much, much, worse, and all because of Jesus. It takes a special kind of person to worship a god like that and I avoid them like the very plague.
Dinocrates died of facial cancer at age 7 which is highly unusual and makes me wonder what type of cancer… Maybe a rare pediatric melanoma, a rarer sarcoma of a facial bone or a retinoblastoma that started in the eye? In any case, an unusual death in a population at high hisk of death in that era, generally due to infectious disease.
Perpetua’s family must have had sufficient money in order to bribe the guards, and to have slaves. Even so, i would submit that death was so routine in that era, even among the wealthier, that it was far more likely for her to be widowed, and that perhaps people back then would not have dwelled on a new mom without a husband, especially if the reason was understood and a source of sadness?
Today in an era where medicine has reduced early deaths due to trauma and disease, we see an unwed young mother as evidence of what has been normalized in popular culture.
So Madonna’s song title “Papa Don’t Preach” would have meant something different to Perpetua. The idea of Madonna too (most Madonna fans probably do not know what the Madonna actually refers to).
It’s not clear that there was a Dinocrates. For the past 20-30 years many scholars have argued that Perpetua’s diary is a forgery…
Completely off topic: could you go over the reasons why Luke would not know Matthew?
I searched and found this:
https://ehrmanblog.org/did-matthew-copy-luke-or-luke-matthew/
The argument convinces that Luke did not have full copies of both Mark and Matthew sitting on his desk.
But isn’t it possible, for instance, that Luke had heard several passages from Matthew?
It’s certainly possible that Luke had heard stories that are in Matthew, yes. But saying that “Luke did not know Matthew” is simply shorthand for saying, in longer hand, “Luke did not use the written text of Matthew as a literary source for the accounts in his Gospel.” The strongest piece of evidence is that in Luke has Matthews sequence principally in markan material (they both kept the sequence) but whenecer there is double tradition it is normally found in a different sequence in Luke than in matthew. That’s implausible if Matthew was a source, as opposed to another work utilizing a shared source.
Maybe my question is: how strong is the evidence for the existence of Q as a book?
Or how helpful is the Q theory in solving the difficulty you point out.
If Matthew and Luke both used Q and respected the sequence of episodes in Q we would see the episodes in the same order in Matthew and Luke, which as you point out we do not.
Should we perhaps imagine Q not as a book, but as a set of short episodes (without order)?
I think it’s very strong. It’s been challenged in recent years by Mark Goodacre and his students. But I doon’t find them convincing. Q would have been a document of some sort, circulating in Greek, mainly filled with sayings of Jesus, and possibly an episode or two of his life.
The reference to the ‘Emperor Geta’ is interesting. It dates that part of the story to 211 AD, between February and December. But Geta is an obscure emperor and not a sole emperor either. He shared the throne with his brother Caracalla (the Emperor who, the following year, 212, extended Roman citizenship to every free-born person within the Empire) for about 9 months. Caracalla then had Geta murdered on the basis that Rome wasn’t big enough for the ‘both of them’. Geta’s memory was then damned – his name was even removed from his father, Septimius Severus’ famous triumphal arch in the Roman Forum. But his inclusion in this story suggests that he wasn’t quite as forgotten as his fratricidal brother would have hoped.
Hi Bart,
Sorry, my question/comment has nothing to do with this post.
Could you recommend a good parallel gospel reference with 4 columns, one column for each gospel, as an aid to a “horizontal reading” of the gospels?
Thanks
Jerry
Yup: Kurt Aland, Synopsis of the Four Gospels. (Get that title, not the one in Latin, since he has other parallels using the Greek instead of the English!)
Does Aland’s book also have annotations?
Nope.
Google has created a powerful AI chatbot called “Bard”. When I asked Bard the question “What is Bart Ehrman’s opinion of the Acts Seminar Report?”, it responded in a way that I suspect will surprise you. What follows is a part of Bard’s response:
—
Ehrman has been critical of the Acts Seminar Report. He has argued that the report is based on a flawed methodology and that it reaches conclusions that are not supported by the evidence. He has also argued that the report is biased against Christianity and that it is trying to undermine the authority of the Bible.
In his book, Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman writes: “One of the biggest problems with the report is that it is based on a very narrow definition of history… History is not just about what actually happened. It is also about how people understand what happened… The Acts Seminar Report fails to take into account the fact that Acts is a historical novel. The scholars who produced the report treat Acts as if it were a modern history book. They try to find evidence to support their conclusions, but they often ignore evidence that contradicts their conclusions.”
—
You never said that, did you?
Actually, I’m not sure I’ve ever *heard* of the Acts Seminar Report….
That is so strange!
In Perpetua’s vision, is Dinocrates in what we would call “Purgatory” or merely the pagan Roman version of the underworld? A kind of dank, miserable place where *all* souls — save for a few exceptional heroes — end up? So what she has done is release him from Hades and into, well, not quite the Christian heaven, but perhaps some kind of pleasant Elysian Field?
Perpetua is a really unique text for what it suggests about the ways early Christian belief/practice diverged in certain ways from the dogmas of the later theologians like Augustine.
Well, it’s not Hades as portrayed in, say, Homer, since he is being tormented. She would have been raised pagan, of course, so her view of the afterlife is surely colored by typical pagan views, but these varied.
She’s NOT imagining “purgatory” in the Xn sense, though, of course, since, as I said,, that did not come to be conceptualized until many centuries later.
2 Questions
1) on the way home you were on Fresh Air with Terri Gross
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/03/1167715957/armageddon-shows-how-literal-readings-of-the-bibles-end-times-affect-modern-time
Did you share this already with your audience?
2) I rented Tar and was wondering was there a post about your movie night watching Tar so people can get reactions from that night
Steve Campbell, author of Historical Accuracy
P.S.
3) Is Revelation an angry rant of the Justice that didn’t happen under the Son of Man?
1. Not yet! 2. Noep: since it wsa a fund raiser we didn’t post it; but we’ve thought about doig so as an addiitonal fundraiser. 3. I don’t think so: he’s expecting it to happen soon in his own day.
Great timing on your choice of topic. I’m literally reading Dante’s Purgatorio. Absolutely loving the rich symbolism and meaning he has all throughout it.
Does the Eastern Orthodox tradition also have a purgatory teaching? Or is it only found in Roman Catholic tradition?
I don’t believe purgatory is part of the Orthodox tradition.
Interesting