Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE) Archives - Page 2 of 5 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

The First Actual Account of the Resurrection (Hint: It’s Not in the New Testament)

On this Easter Sunday I thought it would be appropriate to repost a blog from several years ago on a Gospel not in the New Testament -- a Gospel that gives us an actual narrative of the resurrection. I often say that there is no story of Jesus' resurrection in the the New Testament -- and people think I'm nuts. Of *course* there is! No, there's not. In the New Testament, Jesus is buried on a late Friday afternoon. The action picks up, then, on the third day when the women arrive at the tomb, only to find it empty. The resurrection happened *between* these two events. It is never narrated. We have no account of Jesus being revived and coming out of the tomb. But we do from *outside* the New Testament, in a book that some early Christians considered canonical Scripture, the Gospel of Peter. This was an account that was lost for many, many centuries. It deals not just with Jesus' resurrection (though that is clearly the highlight), but with his trial [...]

BDEhrman2024-02-22T11:33:25-05:00April 9th, 2023|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

Dreaming of Purgatory

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 [...]

BDEhrman2023-03-26T13:25:55-04:00April 2nd, 2023|Afterlife, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Women in Early Christianity|

Is the Gospel of Mark in Papias Our Gospel of Mark?

Can we trust a source such as Papias on the question of whether our Gospel of Matthew was written by the disciple Matthew and that our Gospel of Mark was written by Mark, the companion of the disciple Peter? It is interesting that Papias tells a story that is recorded in our Matthew but tells it so completely differently that it appears he doesn’t know Matthew’s version. And so when he says Matthew wrote Matthew, is he referring to *our* Matthew, or to some other book? (Recall, the Gospel he refers to is a collection of Jesus’ sayings in Hebrew; the Gospel of Matthew that *we* have is a narrative, not a collection of sayings, and was written in Greek.) If he *is* referring to our Matthew, why doesn’t he see it as an authoritative account? Here's the conflicting story. It involves the death of Judas. And it’s quite a story! Here is my translation of it from my edition, The Apostolic Fathers (Loeb Classical Library, vol. 1; 2004). But Judas went about in this [...]

BDEhrman2023-02-26T12:40:53-05:00March 4th, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

Who Wrote the Gospels? Our Earliest (Apparent) Reference

I have begun to discuss the evidence provided by the early church father Papias that Mark was actually written by Mark. He appears to be the first source to say so. Does he? And if so, is he right? Here’s how I begin to discuss these matters in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (edited a bit here). ****************************** Papias is often taken as evidence that at least two of the Gospels, Matthew and Mark, were called by those names already several decades after they were in circulation. Papias was a Christian author who is normally thought to have been writing around 120 or 130 CE. His major work was a five-volume discussion of the teachings of Jesus, called Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord. [1] It is much to be regretted that we no longer have this book. We don’t know exactly why later scribes chose not to copy it, but it is commonly thought that the book was either uninspiring, naïve, or theologically questionable. Later church fathers who talk about Papias and [...]

BDEhrman2023-02-21T11:23:55-05:00March 2nd, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

Did Mark Write Mark? What the Apostolic Fathers Say

Did Mark write Mark? A couple of weeks ago I did an eight-lecture course on the Gospel of Mark for my separate (unrelated to the blog) venture, a series of courses on “How Historians Read the Bible” (the courses are available on my website: www.bartehrman.com). It was a blast. One of the things I loved about doing it was that I was able to read and reread scholarship on Mark and I learned some things I had long wondered about, and re-learned other things that I used to know. One of the things I had to think seriously about for the first time in some years was the question of why church fathers in the second century (but when?) began claiming that our second Gospel was written by John Mark, allegedly a secretary for the apostle Peter. That took me straight back to the question of the reliability of an early Christian writer named Papias (writing around 120 or 130 CE?). Papias gets used all the time as proof that Mark wrote Mark. Conservative Christian [...]

BDEhrman2023-03-01T16:20:35-05:00March 1st, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

The End of the World Means the End of Sex. Guest Post by Daniel Kohanski

Here now is the third post by Platinum blog member Daniel Kohanski, based on his recently published book A God of our Invention. This one should grab your attention! **************************** From its beginnings, Christianity has had theological difficulties with human sexuality. In this edited excerpt from my latest book, A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World, I lay out what I believe are some of the reasons for this. --------------------------------------------------------------- The first Christian commentator that we have record of, the Apostle Paul, was also the first to recommend that Christians avoid sexual activity and stay celibate. “To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain unmarried as I am” (1 Cor. 7:8). Still, he did accept that not all were capable of it. He advised the Corinthians that if a man “thinks that he is not behaving properly toward his fiancée, if his passions are strong, and so it has to be, let him marry as he wishes; it is no sin” (1 [...]

BDEhrman2023-02-22T12:04:30-05:00February 28th, 2023|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Sex and Sexuality in the Bible|

Is Christianity a Cult of the Dead? Guest Post by Kyle Smith, PhD

Now here's an intriguing topic I bet you've never thought about. Can you (should we?) consider early Christianity -- and in fact Christianity as a whole, as a "cult of the dead"? Kyle Smith is an associate professor and director of the History of Religions program in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto (See: Kyle Smith | Department of Historical Studies (utoronto.ca). I have known Kyle for many years, since he was a PhD student in early Chrsitianity at Duke. Since then he has become a well-known scholar of Christianity in late antiquity, who already now at a relatively young age (compared to us geezers) has published six books. (Not sure if you know this, but many, many senior scholars publish only two or three for their entire careers.) Five of them are hard-hitting scholarship. His most recent one is for a general audience, Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity (University of California Press, 2022). I think it's unusually interesting. I thought it would be extremely interesting to [...]

BDEhrman2023-02-06T19:32:26-05:00February 16th, 2023|Book Discussions, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Can We Know Anything About Judas Iscariot?

I get asked about Judas Iscariot far more than any of the other disciples, even the ones who are completely central to Jesus' life and ministry (Peter, James, and John). I guess that's because he is seen as, ultimately, more crucial to the story of Jesus. The betrayer. Without him, no arrest, trial, and crucifixion. Or at least, a completely different scenario for the death of the Son of God. This week, when scrounging around looking for something else, I came across this paper I delivered at a conference years ago. I thought it might be of interest to blog members. This will take three posts. (The paper was written for scholars, so I'll put any necessary explanatory notes in italics) ****************************** In recent years, more has been written and less known about Judas Iscariot than about any of Jesus’ followers, with the outstanding exception of his wife and lover, the founder of the Merovingian Dynasty. (That was a little joke about people who take Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code seriously about what he says about [...]

BDEhrman2023-02-01T12:38:30-05:00February 12th, 2023|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Historical Jesus|

Do Eyewitnesses Prove Miracles? Can They Be Faked? The Martyrdom of Polycarp

For over two hundred years scholars of antiquity have worked diligently to determine which ancient writings by pagans, Jews, and Christians were actually produced by their alleged authors and which are by authors merely claiming to be some other famous person, as well as which originally anonymous writings were wrongly ascribed to one famous author or another. If a book is wrongly ascribed, it’s not the author’s fault. If Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John did not write Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, that would not make these books “forgeries.” A “forgery” is when an author intentionally takes the identity of another (famous or important) person with the intent of deceiving her or his readers. There were lots of reasons for doing that in antiquity, and I discuss all such matters on a popular level in my book Forged (HarperOne, 2011), where by and large I focus on the writings of the New Testament (e.g., the six letters that claim to be written by Paul but appear not to have been; and also letters by Peter; [...]

BDEhrman2023-01-23T11:17:01-05:00January 31st, 2023|Book Discussions, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Forgery in Antiquity|

Can We Take the Martyrdom of Polycarp at Face Value?

I continue here my discussion of the Martyrdom of Polycarp as found in my book Forgery and Counterforgery. This will get in the weeds a bit, but hey, it can be good for your soul! I've always thought that it's useful for layfolk to see how scholars in one field or another argue among themselves, and this is an example of it. And we ain't talkin' quantum physics here. This should be pretty accessible if you're interested in some of the complexities. Here I explain why in the past scholars doubted whether the account was authentic or not; in posts to come I'll explain reasons that I ended up finding it more compelling to think that the book is in fact a forgery. ****************************** It has long been recognized that there are problems with taking the Martyrdom of Polycarp at face value as a straightforward historical record of what actually happened to the bishop of Smyrna. The numerous parallels to the Gospel records of Jesus’ death appear contrived in places, the account is chock-full of miraculous [...]

BDEhrman2023-01-22T14:32:20-05:00January 29th, 2023|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

The First Christian Martyr Text?

In my previous post I talked about a textual problem in the early Christian writing, "The Martyrdom of Polycarp." To my surprise, I've never talked about this intriguing text on the blog before. It's time I did! This is one of the books of the corpus I've been calling "The Apostolic Fathers," a collection of ten or eleven "proto-orthodox" authors (meaning that they attest forerunners of the views that eventually became "orthodox" -- that is, widely approved as "true"). It is our first Christian narrative fully devoted to describing a martyrdom (the martyrdom of Stephen is described in the NT in Acts 8, but it one episode in a long narrative; other martyrdoms are mentioned in Acts and Revelation, etc., but are not narrated). This became a kind of genre within early Christian literature--accounts, many of them claiming to be by eyewitnesses, of martyrdoms. Here is how I discuss the Martyrdom of Polycarp in my Loeb edition of the Apostolic Fathers (in the Introduction to my translation of the text). This will take two posts. [...]

BDEhrman2023-01-22T09:44:01-05:00January 24th, 2023|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

A Spectacular Martyrdom and an Intriguing Textual Change

Outside the New Testament there are some truly terrific early Christian writings, including accounts of early martyrs. And sometimes we know know what the authors of these texts actually wrote, because our surviving manuscripts have differences. Sometimes rather bizarre differences. There are lots and lots of textual variants in the various writings of the apostolic fathers. As with the New Testament (where there are thousands more manuscripts and hundreds of thousands more variants), most of the variant readings do not matter for much. But some of them are of real importance. Yesterday I mentioned one in Ignatius. Today I discuss one in the Martyrdom of Polycarp, possibly our earliest surviving Christian martyrology – that is, the first account, outside the New Testament, of a Christian being martyred for his faith. It is a fascinating account – required reading for anyone interested in early Christianity! In the narrative, the old man Polycarp, Christian bishop of Smyrna, is tracked down and arrested by the local officials, who take him to the arena for public judgment. When he [...]

BDEhrman2023-01-22T09:44:07-05:00January 23rd, 2023|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

The New Testament Ain’t the Only Text with Important Scribal Changes!

Readers of the blog will know that I've talked a lot about scribal changes in the writings of the New Testament, making it difficult to know what the author originally wrote. Which in turn makes it difficult to know what a translator should translate. Which words?? The ones in this manuscript, or in that manuscript, or some other manuscript?? Sometimes people say to me "Well, if you say that about the New Testament you'd have to say that about all ancient texts!" They say this as a rhetorical statement (even scholars have said this to me! Even New Testament scholars!!) -- as if THAT would be the most ridiculous thing you can imagine. You can't possibly think there are problems like that with Plato, or Euripides, or Cicero! What's wrong with you? Yeah, there ain't anything wrong with me -- at least in this respect. Of COURSE we have the same problems with all these authors. Often far worse than with the New Testament. The reason (some) NT scholars (including some NT manuscript scholars!!) don't know it is because [...]

BDEhrman2023-01-16T22:08:51-05:00January 22nd, 2023|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

What’s So Hard about Translating Ancient Texts?

Publishing a translation of an ancient text ain't at all like writing a book about the text. When the editor at Harvard Press asked me if I would be interested in doing a new edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loebs, she wasn’t offering me the opportunity then and there. She was suggesting that I write up a prospectus that she could take to the board of the Loebs, in which I described the need for a new edition and explained how I would go about making one. After I thought about it for a while, and got advice from my friends, I decided to go for it. I had never (ever!) planned doing a serious translation project for publication. I had lots of other things I wanted to write – scholarly monographs, textbooks, and so on. But I thought it made sense to do it, both personally and professionally. So I wrote up the prospectus and the editorial board agreed it was a task that needed to be done – and so they [...]

BDEhrman2023-01-10T10:26:05-05:00January 19th, 2023|Book Discussions, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

What About Translations of Other Ancient Christian Writings?

I've been talking about translations of the Bible -- especially the King James Version -- and I'd like now to move to a broader issue. EVERY text from the ancient world needs to be translated in order to be made accessible to a modern audience. Hey, we're not back in the 19th century when going to university meant learning Greek and Latin! And texts even then also came from even other languages (Hebrew, Coptic, Syriac, etc.). If you're a graduate student in antiquity, you have to learn to read these texts in their original languages; you simply can't get the nuances of a text -- especially a fairly sophisticated one dealing with, say, philosophy or religion -- in translation. And translators have to make decisions about how to translate a text. It's not a mechanical process. Whether you like it or not -- most people when they learn of this don't much like it, and even more people have never learned of it -- translation is also an act of interpretation. You have to know [...]

BDEhrman2023-01-16T18:52:55-05:00January 18th, 2023|Book Discussions, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Public Forum|

What about Forgeries IN the New Testament? Is it Possible?

I’ve been talking about some of the early Christian forgeries, books that Christian authors published claiming to be apostles when they were … someone else. Could we have such things actually in the New Testament? That is the topic I discuss in my book Forged (HarperOne: 2011). I give extensive arguments and evidence throughout the book, but here is the opening gambit. ****************************** There are thirteen letters in the New Testament that claim to be written by Paul, including two to the Thessalonians. In the Second Letter to the Thessalonians we find a most intriguing verse, where the author tells his readers that they are not to be led astray by a letter “as if by us” which indicates that the “day of the Lord” is almost here (2 Thess 2:2). The author, in other words, knows of a letter in circulation claiming to be by Paul, which is not really by Paul. This other letter allegedly teaches an idea that Paul himself opposes. Who would create such a forged letter? Obviously someone who wanted [...]

BDEhrman2022-11-27T17:27:06-05:00December 13th, 2022|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Forgery in Antiquity|

Forgeries in the Names of the Apostles: Some of the Most Interesting

As I pointed out in my previous posts, taken from the Preface of my book Forged (HarperOne, 2011), we still have numerous forged documents that emanated from the early church, numerous Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypses (these are the four literary genres of the New Testament) all of them claiming to be written by apostles. Many of these non-canonical books are fascinating and still worth reading.[1] I’ve talked about a number of them on the blog before, but here it may be worthwhile to give a quick summary of some of them. Among the Gospels, for example, there is an account allegedly written by Peter, which gives a detailed narration of the resurrection. This is striking because – most readers have never noticed this – the New Testament Gospels do not narrate the resurrection. They do say that Jesus was buried, and they indicate that on the third day his tomb was empty; but they do not narrate the account of him actually emerging from the tomb. There is such an account in the Gospel [...]

BDEhrman2022-11-27T17:16:57-05:00December 11th, 2022|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Forgery in Antiquity|

Can Christianity Be Seen as “Objective” Truth? Modern and Ancient Views.

In a previous post I pointed out that for over the past century modern evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity has been unusually focused on knowing the “objective” truths that can be “proved” about Christianity. In recent times, some have argued evangelical Christianity has become far more focused on social and cultural issues than theological doctrines (when someone says that this is not the evangelical Christianity your grandfather knew, they are apparently talking about me….). And I think that’s true. But even so, apologetics is still BIG in that tradition, and it is almost always based on objective evaluation of the truth. One could argue that this evangelical obsession with religious truth was matched by the commitment to truth in the earliest years of Christianity. Historically, this is one of the features of Christianity that made it distinctive among the religions of antiquity. Most people today don’t realize that ancient religions were almost never interested in “true beliefs.” Pagan religions – by which I mean the polytheistic religions of the vast majority of people in the ancient [...]

BDEhrman2022-11-27T16:59:42-05:00December 8th, 2022|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Greco-Roman Religions and Culture|

The Canon of the New Testament: Why It Matters

With this post I conclude my thread on how we got the canon of the New Testament. In the last post I began to talk about how having a canon affected the way people read the books of the New Testament. Even though there are important *differences* among the various books, when they are all put between the same two covers, people read them as if they were all saying the same thing. Here I pick up right before I left off…. ****************************** There are, for example, four Gospels, each presenting a different understanding of Jesus’ words and deeds. The thirteen letters assigned to Paul contain inconsistencies and incoherencies (especially between the ones he actually wrote and those produced in his name later by others). The alleged writings of James, Peter, John, and Jude also present distinctive messages, sometimes at odds with the others. But when all twenty-seven books were canonized into a single book, the statements of one writing came to be read in light of another, forcing readers (almost always unsuspectingly) to think [...]

BDEhrman2022-09-09T23:46:07-04:00August 27th, 2022|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

When Did We Get the Final Canon of the New Testament?

I am nearing the end of this thread on the formation of the canon of the New Testament. Rather than going into all the ins and outs of the process, I have been laying out the topics that I hope to address in a book on the matter down the road. I say down the road because it is not the very next book I plan to write, but the one *after* the one I now plan to write. I like to think ahead. Here I talk about when the decisions were finalized (were they?) and what the major significance of “closing” the canon was. A Final Consensus? Many (most?) people imagine that the canon, in the end, was decided by a vote at one of the major church councils, such as the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE (as propounded by that inestimable authority, Dan Brown, in The Da Vinci Code). But the question of the canon was not even Blog members get five posts like this every week. Memberships start at $2.99 [...]

BDEhrman2022-08-18T11:40:15-04:00August 24th, 2022|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

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