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

Introducing the Apocalypse of Peter

As I said in my last post, I have been putting a lot of time into reading the scholarship on the Apocalypse of Peter, an early-second-century text that describes the torments of the damned in some graphic detail, and that almost came to be accepted as part of the New Testament canon. I’m puzzling long and hard over why, in the end, it did not make it in. It’s not an easy question to answer, given our scant discussions of it the matter antiquity, and given the fact that, well, there are no obvious disqualifying features. But I’ll get to all that later. First it’s important to summarize what the text is, so we’re all on the same page. Here is how I introduce it in my textbook on the New Testament. ****************************************************** The last Christian apocalypse for us to consider claims to be a firsthand account of the tortures of hell and the ecstasies of heaven written in the name of Jesus’ disciple Peter. As we have seen, there are a large number of [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T00:50:26-04:00November 12th, 2018|Afterlife, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

A Very Perplexing Question

As many of you know I am on sabbatical this year at the National Humanities. This gives me a year off from teaching duties in order to focus on my research for my next book. I am not working on a trade book for a general audience, but a scholarly monograph meant for academics in the field of Early Christian studies. I’ve talked about the book before on the blog, but want to say a few more things about it now that I’ve been doing research on it. I have no idea what it will be called, but I know what I want it to be about. It is related to my trade book (which itself is virtually finished – I still need to put the final touches on it before sending it in to my editor), whose tentative title (the trade book) is “Heaven, Hell, and the Invention of the Afterlife” (again, who knows what it will finally be called; that has to be worked out between the publisher, my agent, and me). The [...]

BDEhrman2018-11-11T09:48:59-05:00November 11th, 2018|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Reflections and Ruminations|

Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library and Some Crucial Missing Parts!

I have been making two-posts-a-day, giving the new “boxes” that I've written for the seventh edition of my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. Today, as it turns out, the two boxes I was going to post are both about the Nag Hammadi Library (the so-called “Gnostic Gospels”). So I’ll simply include both of them in this one post. Happy reading! *********************************************************** Another Glimpse Into the Past 11.6 The Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library The chance discovery of a cache of ancient Christian documents in a remote part of Upper Egypt -- the Nag Hammadi library -- is a story of serendipity, ineptitude, secrecy, ignorance, scholarly brilliance, murder, and blood revenge. Even now, after scholars have spent years trying to piece it all together, details of the find remain sketchy. We do know that it occurred around ... To see the rest of this post you will need to belong to the blog. It doesn't cost much to join, you get tons for your money, and every nickle [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T00:54:02-04:00October 30th, 2018|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

What Was Discovered in the Nag Hammadi Library?

I have started a short series in response to a question about the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, discovered in 1945 among a cache of documents near Nag Hammadi Egypt. In my last post I gave the story typically recited by NT scholars for the discovery of this "Nag Hammadi Library." Some scholars have doubted the story, and we may never know the details. What is not in dispute is what was actually discovered. This is what I say about it in my undergraduate textbook on the matter. ************************************************************** What was this ancient collection of books? The short answer is that it is the most significant collection of lost Christian writings to turn up in modern times. It included several Gospels about Jesus that had never before been seen by any Western scholar, books known to have existed in antiquity but lost for nearly 1500 years. The cache contained twelve leather-bound volumes, with pages of a thirteenth volume removed from its own, now lost, binding and tucked inside the cover of one of the others. The [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T01:07:42-04:00August 20th, 2018|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

How the Gospel of Thomas Was Discovered

A few days ago I responded to a reader's comment by saying something about how I am reluctant these days to label the Gospel of Thomas a "Gnostic" Gospel. Several readers responded to my comment by asking what in the blazes I could possibly mean. So I thought I would respond. But then I realized that to make sense of anything I have to say about the matter will require me to start at the beginning -- since some readers won't know what the Gospel of Thomas is or how it was discovered or anything else. So, well, why not? Here we start at the beginning. This will become it's own little thread dealing with Gnosticism and the Gospel of Thomas. I have posted on this before, some years ago. But it continues to be interesting material. If you have been an avid reader of the blog for four years or so, you will remember the story of the discovery of the "Nag Hammadi Library." This is a cache of books found in 1945 near [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T01:07:52-04:00August 19th, 2018|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

Is 1 Clement Older than Some Books of the New Testament?

This will be my final post on the book of 1 Clement. Now that I’ve summarized what the book is about and said something about its author, I can turn to the original question I was asked, about its date. The time of its writing is an important question, for a reason you might not suspect. It is almost always said – I myself regularly say this, as a kind of simple “short hand,” knowing that it’s probably not literally true, that the books of the New Testament are the “earliest” Christian writings we have. In fact, if, as is often thought, Revelation was written around 95 CE, and 2 Peter around 120, then a couple of other Christian books may have ante-dated them, including 1 Clement and the Didache, two of the apostolic fathers. So too, the letters of Ignatius of Antioch were almost certainly written around 110 CE. So, the big question here is: when did this anonymous author from Rome write the book of 1 Clement? This is how I discuss the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T01:08:38-04:00August 13th, 2018|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Reader’s Questions|

Did a “Pope” Write the First-Century Book of 1 Clement?

I return her to the book of 1 Clement, probably unknown to many people on the blog, but an important work written at about the time of some of some of the writings of the New Testament – or so I’ll b arguing in the post after this. First I need to say something about the author. Why is it attributed to someone named Clement? Could this really have been written by a first-century pope (i.e., the Bishop of the church in Rome)? Again, I am taking this information from the Introduction to the letter, which I give in a new English translation (with the Greek text on the facing page) in the first volume of my Apostolic Fathers in the Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press). ************************************************************** The Author of the Book Even though the letter claims to be written by the “church ... residing in Rome,” it has from early times been attributed to Clement, a leader of the Roman church near the end of the first century. In his celebrated church history, [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T01:08:48-04:00August 12th, 2018|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

The Letter of First Clement: An Overview

I received a request recently about one of the “Apostolic Fathers.” This term does not refer to just any of the post-canonical writers of early Christianity, but to a specific group of ten (or eleven, depending on how you count) authors who were later considered “authoritative” in some sense by proto-orthodox thinkers, but were believed to have been writing after the NT period. They include letters by Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp of Smyrna, and texts called 1 and 2 Clement, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the Didache, the Shepherd of Hermas, the letter to Diognetus, and the fragments of Papias and Quadratus. This is one of the most understudied corpora of early Christianity, and I’ve been intensely interested in the texts for well over twenty years. About fifteen years ago I produced a new translation of them for the Loeb Classical Library (2 vols., Harvard University Press, 2004), including versions of the Greek (and a bit of Latin) texts, my translation, introductions, and a few notes. Many lay folk have never [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T01:08:56-04:00August 10th, 2018|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Reader’s Questions|

The Different Terms for Literary Deception

In the Seminar on Ancient Forgery at Rice University a few days ago, I made a presentation in which I urged (all of us) scholars to decide on which terms we use to describe different kinds of literary phenomena associated in one way or another with literary deceit. My view is that since there are different phenomena (even if these can overlap), we ought to have distinct terms to refer to them – otherwise it just gets confusing. It can be confusing to have so many different terms as well, but if we don’t differentiate the phenomena from one another, it makes matters only worse. And so if we have not only distinct phenomena but also distinct terms for referring to each of them, that should provide clarity to what it is we’re doing (at least in theory). It certainly does not help to call an act of plagiarism also a falsification, if by falsification we mean something other than plagiarism. The following are the terms that I have proposed we use for the various [...]

BDEhrman2021-01-10T00:35:00-05:00April 24th, 2018|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Forgery in Antiquity|

Different Kinds of Literary Deceit

In my presentation to the seminar on forgery at Rice University a few days ago, I dealt with a problem facing scholars who study literary deceit in antiquity. On the most basic level, no one – even experts – seems to agree even on which terms to use to describe this or that kind of ancient deceptive practice. It would be worth devoting a couple of blog posts to the issue. As it turns out, it was also subject of a lecture I gave at a conference at York University in Toronto a few years ago. Here is how I began the lecture. ************************************************************* All of us who labor in the fields of early Christian apocrypha know they are white for harvest. But even as significant advances are made in producing critical editions, new translations, and significant studies, there are still some preliminaries that require our attention. One of them involves devising and agreeing upon a sensible taxonomy of literary deceit, a set of discrete terms to refer to the wide range of [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-11T17:05:19-04:00April 23rd, 2018|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Forgery in Antiquity|

The Martyr Perpetua and Her Estranged Family

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 [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-01T12:18:00-04:00March 28th, 2018|Afterlife, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Women in Early Christianity|

The Martyrdom of Perpetua

A long time ago now I was pursuing a thread on the development of the Christian views of the afterlife but I got side tracked. And then I got side tracked from my side track. And then … well, it’s been a long time. The thread died. I need to bring it back to life. So I’m hoping now to begin on the afterlife of the thread on the afterlife. Over all these months I have continued to read, think, and sketch my thoughts on where the Christian ideas of the afterlife came from – especially the view so common today that when a person dies, their soul goes to heaven for an eternal reward or hell for eternal punishment. That is not the view of the Old Testament and it is not what the historical Jesus preached. So where did it come from? That is the ultimate issue I will be pursuing in my book. But there are other topics of interest as well, such as where did the idea of “purgatory” come from. [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T01:29:42-04:00March 27th, 2018|Afterlife, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

The Golden Rule

After all the background I gave yesterday, I can now give a succinct answer to the question that was raised by a reader. Here it is again. QUESTION: I was surprised to see that, in the Didache, the form of the Golden Rule is in the negative. I’ve read that the positive formulation in the Sermon on the Mount may be original to Jesus. If the Didache used Matthew as a source, how does one account for that reversion? RESPONSE: I think this question has a simple answer. It is that the Golden Rule, which is known to everyone today mainly by the way Jesus said it, was a common teaching but was almost expressed negatively rather than positively (as I’ll explain below). When the author of the Didache states the rule he does so in the form that he was most familiar with rather than in the form known to Matthew. It is important to recognize that when one speaks of Matthew as a “source” for the Didache it is not the same thing [...]

BDEhrman2020-11-25T19:04:08-05:00March 13th, 2018|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Once More: The Interesting Text Called the Didache

QUESTION: I was surprised to see that in the Didache the form of the Golden Rule is in the negative. I’ve read that the positive formulation in the Sermon on the Mount may be original to Jesus. If the Didache used Matthew as a source, how does one account for that reversion? RESPONSE I started writing up a simple answer to this question but then I realized that the answer doesn’t make much sense without some more extended background. Just a few months ago on the blog – this past December -- I talked about the intriguing early Christian writing known as the Didache. But everything I said then may not be fresh in everyone’s mind (I know it’s not fresh in *my* mind: I had forgotten I even posted about it!!). So let me explain again what the book is – not in the same terms as I did as before but by way of a general overview, as I lay it out in my undergraduate textbook on the New Testament. In my [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-09T16:13:20-04:00March 12th, 2018|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Reader’s Questions|

Did They Crucify the Wrong Guy? Jesus’ Identity Switch.

Yesterday I posted about the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter, which clearly differentiated between the man Jesus and the spiritual being, the Christ, who inhabited him temporarily – leaving him at his suffering and death since the divine cannot suffer and die. That understanding of Jesus Christ is not, strictly speaking, “docetic.” The term docetic comes from the Greek word DOKEO which means “to seem” or “to appear.” It refers to Christologies in which Jesus was not a real flesh-and-blood human but only “seemed” to be. In reality, what they saw, heard, and touched was a phantasm. That is not what is going on in the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter. Here there really is a man Jesus – flesh and blood like the rest of us. But he is indwelt by a divine being who leaves him at his death, abandoneding him to die alone on the cross. That is similar to a docetic view, but also strikingly different. I call it a “separationist” Christology because it separates Jesus from the Christ (who himself separates from [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T01:41:28-04:00December 27th, 2017|Early Christian Doctrine, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Heresy and Orthodoxy, Public Forum|

Did Jesus’ Death Matter? The Intriguing View of the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter

From remembering the birth of Jesus (Christmas!), we turn for a moment to remembering his death. I recently received this question, in response to my statement that some Christians did not think the death of Jesus mattered for salvation, and others maintained that he never actually died. QUESTION: Can you give some reference to where I can explore this idea of the Crucifixion being unimportant or not happening at all? RESPONSE: I will take two posts to answer this question, since they involve two different sets of “Gnostic” belief, which, in brief, was a distinctive and “declared-heretical” understanding of the Christian faith that stressed that the ultimate divine realm was not closely connected with this material world (the highest God was not the Creator), a world that was to be escaped, not one that would be redeemed. One document that embraces the view that the death of Jesus had no bearing on salvation is the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter, which provides an alternative understanding of what happened at Jesus’ death – as witnessed by [...]

BDEhrman2020-12-26T00:47:07-05:00December 26th, 2017|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Doctrine, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Heresy and Orthodoxy, Public Forum|

Is the Didache One Document or Three?

I have been discussing the interesting and important early Christian document called the Didache. Yesterday I gave a translation of its first part, the “two ways” or the “two paths” section. After that the topic and tone of the book changes, as it starts to talk about how Christian baptism and eucharist should be celebrated. It ends on a completely different note, with a one-chapter description of the coming apocalypse. Scholars have asked whether the book as we now have it was actually created by someone who took several disparate texts and cut and pasted them together. Here is what I say about the matter in my edition of the Apostolic Fathers in the Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press, 2003). ****************************************************** The Didache obviously addresses several discrete topics: the two paths, the “church order” (which may comprise two distinct units, one on liturgical practices and the other on the treatment of itinerant “apostles and prophets”), and the apocalyptic discourse. Moreover, there is no necessary connection between them, except that provided perhaps by an editor, [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T01:41:51-04:00December 23rd, 2017|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers|

The Ethical Teachings of the Didache

We have been talking about the Didache on the blog, and it occurred to me that it might be useful to post part of its text, so readers can see what we’re talking about. The book has several discrete parts: it begins with a discussion of the “two ways” – one that leads to life and one to death. This is a set of ethical instructions for Christians. As you’ll see, the author appears to have taken materials from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew and various other passages chiefly from Matthew and Luke; but he cites other ethical injunctions (some of them unusual) from other, unknown sources. After the “two ways” comes a set of instructions about church life and ritual – for example, how to baptize and what prayers to say at the eucharist meal. At the end comes a one-chapter “apocalyptic discourse” describing what will happen at the end of time. Here is the opening discussion of the two ways; it is my own translation, which, in a later version, appeared [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T01:42:12-04:00December 21st, 2017|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers, Public Forum|

A Very Strange Saying: From the Gospel of Peter?

As I pointed out yesterday, the "Gospel of Peter" that we have today, discovered in 1886, is unfortunately, only a portion – the only surviving portion – of what was once a complete Gospel. But was it a complete Gospel? Or was it only a passion Gospel (like the later Gospel of Nicodemus) that gave an account only of the trial, death, and resurrection of Jesus? That has long been debated. I discussed one intriguing view of the matter some years ago on the blog, as follows: In recent years a German scholar named Dieter Luhrmann has argued that other portions of the Gospel of Peter have shown up, in very small fragments of papyrus discovered in Egypt. It is a controversial claim. The most interesting possibility, for me, is a papyrus fragment that Luhrmann published called Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 4009 (it is the 4009th papyrus published from the huge find of papyri in the trash heap of ancient Oxyrhynchus Egypt). To understand why this *might* be a fragment of the Gospel of Peter requires a [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T01:43:03-04:00December 5th, 2017|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Public Forum|

The Loeb Apostolic Fathers: The Challenges (Again)

This will be the last of my three blasts from past discussions of my translation of the Apostolic Fathers; in it I explain the difficulties involved in producing a "facing page translation" edition of ancient texts ("facing page" means you have the original language text -- in this case Greek -- on one page and then across from it, on the other page, your English translation) ************************************************************************* To continue my thread about translating the Apostolic Fathers for the Loebs…. So, the editor at Harvard Press, Peg Fulton, asked me if I would be interested in taking on the task of 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 [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T01:53:25-04:00October 31st, 2017|Book Discussions, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers, Public Forum|

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