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Loading...Interested in a free lecture on who wrote the Gospels?
As you may know, I’ve started doing some online courses on the Bible (and related topics) as part of my new venture, Bart Ehrman Professional Services (= BEPS). This venture is not connected with the blog, but I do like to announce what is going on over there since a number of blog members have been interested.
If you want to see what it all involves – and to see which courses are already available – you can find them on my personal website, www.bartehrman.com.
The courses are for purchase, but I’ve decided to do a freebie for anyone interested. It will be a live event on Sunday June 12, 2:00 pm ET; a recording of it will also be made available.
The title of my talk: “Did Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John Actually Write Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John”? Here’s the link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81200470127?pwd=bU82SGFTT3lLdlhSbkEwdnNrcWFQdz09
If you’d like to officially register for the event (this is not necessary but if you do so, we will send you reminders of the event), you can sign up at www.bartehrman.com/authors.
No charge or suggested donation to the blog (though voluntary donations are *always* welcome, and go straight to our charities). Just show up. I’ll lecture for about 50 minutes then have a live Q&A.
These are the kinds of things I’ll be discussing:
- The New Testament Gospels are anonymous. Why did early Christians say they were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?
- What’s the best evidence that they really were written by these apostles?
- Do the Gospels themselves provide any hints that they were written by apostles?
- Were the apostles of Jesus educated well enough to write books, let alone books that are this sophisticated?
- How could Aramaic-speaking authors manage to write such high-level Greek? Were the Gospels originally written in Aramaic?
- Did the apostles use secretaries who could edit and translate their work?
- What are the best arguments against these books being written by these apostles?
- Did the early church fathers claim the apostles wrote these books in order to make them more authoritative?
- And if the Gospels were not written by early apostles, where did their actual authors get their information?
This lecture will serve as a kind of introduction to an eight-lecture course that I will be doing for BEPS in August, that for now I’m calling “The Greatest Stories Rarely Told: Historical Understandings of the Gospels.” I’ll be saying more about that anon!
For now, I hope you can come to the talk on the lecture of the Gospels. Again: Sunday, June 12, 2022; at 2:00 pm ET.
Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81200470127?pwd=bU82SGFTT3lLdlhSbkEwdnNrcWFQdz09
Unrelated, but how much do you think Paul influenced early Christian theology? If Paul had died or never converted, how much do you think it would have changed early Christian views on the Law, the second coming, Christology, ect. Obviously just thinking about short-term consequences, since long-term butterfly effect stuff is impossible to predict.
There’s no way to know for sure, of course; but if his idea that followers of Jesus did not need to be Jews had not taken off, it’s hard to imagine the religion having any kind of widespread success.
I hope you will touch on why anonymous writings came to be accepted into the canon while writings in the name of apostles (Thomas, Peter, etc.) were not.
I won’t in the webinar directly, but I will in my book on the canon!
I can’t attend the live event, but I would love to get the recording. Do I need to register to receive the recording? BTW, thanks for the blog, the events, your responses to questions…everything. I really don’t know how you manage to do all this, teach, and write books, too. But I’m eternally grateful!
It’ll be publicly available, no registration necessary.
Dr Ehrman, Sir. Why are these gospels anonymous? As part of a very small club-literate, sophisticated Greek writers, and all that went into scribing the work, making the gospels accessible, shouldn’t these men be known? At least regionally at one time? What would compel someone to write such an involved and time consuming gospel but not stand ready or willing to take credit for it (get paid)? Doesn’t the fact Christianity reached such an elite, academic class in a position to research suggest a greater adoption of Christianity than what’s suggested by Rodney Stark and others? In a nutshell, what is the profile of an anonymous gospel writer, and how that writer would share his work with the masses? Thank you so much for your work in this field and accessibly in helping others learn more about it. Looking forward to reading more of the blog, just joined, been a fan for years. Best to you. -JR
Stay tuned!
Any chance of finding this webinar anywhere i can watch it after it happened?
Good question! I thought it was on my website, but I don’t see it there (www.bartehrman.com) . I’ll find out!
Historically speaking, isn’t it extremely unlikely that the two writers, Matthew and Luke, would have ever known about the Virgin Birth, as the only ones who knew about it were Joseph and Mary and they could not reveal it to ANYONE, for fear of it looking like adultery and having Mary stoned to death? And as an historian, don’t you HAVE to take the position that the Virgin Birth most likely never happened, but was added on to make Jesus more acceptable to the Romans?
Ken W.
New Jersey
My view is that no one “knew” about it. It was a tradition floating around. TEchnically speaking, of coruse, Joseph couldn’t know but even more striking, Mary may not have either, one way or the other. Only a gynecologist could say for sure.
Since, as you say, no one “knew” about the Virgin Birth and its only “source” is some “tradition floating around”, don’t you, as an historian, have to go with the stand that the Virgin Birth was added to the two Gospels, after the writers were dead, maybe long after, as a way of making Jesus more of a Pagan God, to stop the persecutions and maybe attract more Romans to Christianity, as the Virgin Birth was a common Pagan construct dating back to Greek and Egyptian civilizations, for which there is an enormous amount of historical evidence?
Ken W.
New Jersey
Yes, that’s my view: it’s not a historical event. But no, I do not think the idea of a virgin birth is common in antiquity. In fact I don’t know of an instance in the Greco-Roman world outside of these Chrsitain texts. When in the Greek or Roman myths a God gets a woman pregnant she is usually not a virgin before their encounter and is certainly not a virgin afterward!