History of Biblical Scholarship Archives - The Bart Ehrman Blog

How Theologians and Historians Approach the Same Bible Differently. Guest Post by Daniel Kohanski

I am very pleased to announce that a scholar of religion who is also a log-term blog member, Dan Kohanski, has just published an intriguing book of direct relevance to what we do here on the blog (A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World). When I got the book I realized it would be great to have Dan do a couple of guest posts on the blog to share some of the views he develops in it. He agreed, and here is the first of three of his posts. Feel free to comment and ask questions! ****************************** (This essay is adapted from my just-published book, A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World, Apocryphile Press, 2023; https://apocryphilepress.com/book/a-god-of-our-invention-how-religion-shaped-the-western-world/ . Support your local independent bookstore and order using the “Buy paperback from Bookshop” link on that webpage.) There are several ways one can approach the Bible (including ignoring it), but I want to look here at two most of the most common ways: that of the theologian, and that of [...]

BDEhrman2023-02-01T12:07:07-05:00February 11th, 2023|Book Discussions, History of Biblical Scholarship|

Do All Modern Translators of the New Testament Translate the Same Greek Text?
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Do All Modern Translators of the New Testament Translate the Same Greek Text?

History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts

Do All Modern Translators of the New Testament Translate the Same Greek Text?

If someone translates the New Testament today into English, French, Arabic, or Swahili -- what exactly are they translating? They must have access to some kind of Greek text. But what? Are there lots to choose from out there? Are they wildly different from one another? I pointed out in my previous post that the King James and just about all other versions before the end of the 19th century were based on a printed Greek text that is now widely seen as flawed. So what do folks use today? Or if someone is just wanting to *read* the Greek -- what options are there? Is there some kind of "official" version? Blog readers occasionally ask me these questions and luckily there is a fairly standard answer known to almost no one but scholars. When scholars translate the New Testament into any modern language, they almost always (apart from fundamentalists who prefer the Greek used for the King James) use the same Greek text. It is a printed edition of the Greek New Testament published [...]

BDEhrman2023-01-16T19:05:26-05:00January 17th, 2023|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts|

Famous Passages that Are Not Original: How Do Modern Translators Deal with Them?

In my previous post I indicated that the King James Version includes verses in some places that are almost certainly not “original” – that is, passages that were not written by the original authors but were added by later scribes. I chose three of the most outstanding and famous examples: the explicit reference to the Trinity in 1 John 5:7-8; the story of the woman taken in adultery in John 7:53-8:11; and Jesus’ resurrection appearance in the longer ending of Mark’s Gospel, Mark 16:9-20. What about more recent translations? how are these three passages presented there? I won't discuss all the translations here, of course (the 29 million of them) but the one that I and most other historical scholars I know, prefer, the New Revised Standard Version, recently updated in the NRSVue (= updated edition. Catchy, huh?). Since virtually all scholars (including the translators of this edition) agree these three passages were not original to the New Testament, are they printed there? As it turns out, the three passages are handled differently. The first, [...]

BDEhrman2023-01-02T11:38:50-05:00January 12th, 2023|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts|

Problems with the King James Version: What Were the Translators Translating?

I’ve mentioned several problems with the King James Version in previous posts. Arguably the most significant set of problems has to do with the text that the translators were translating. The brief reality is that in the early 17th century, Greek editions of the New Testament were based on very few and highly inferior manuscripts. Only after the King James was translated did scholars begin to become aware of the existence of older, and far better, manuscripts. The manuscripts of the New Testament (and of all books from antiquity) were copied -- prior to the invention of printing -- almost always by scribes who did their best to make faithful reproductions of the copies they were copying, and many of them did a remarkably good job. Others did a not-so-good job. Since mistakes can get replicated over time, and introduced over time, in general it is a good idea to consult the *earliest* manuscripts for determining what an author of a book wrote. The later manuscripts tend to be worse (that’s not an *absolute* rule, [...]

BDEhrman2023-01-02T11:33:24-05:00January 11th, 2023|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts|

Can We Trust the Bible? The First Published (as opposed to Printed) Greek New Testament
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Can We Trust the Bible? The First Published (as opposed to Printed) Greek New Testament

History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum

Can We Trust the Bible? The First Published (as opposed to Printed) Greek New Testament

In this thread on Bible translation, I have been talking about what it is translators of the New Testament actually translate. In order to answer the question, I have had to explain how we started to get printed editions of the Greek New Testament, including the first to come off the printing press, the Complutensian Polyglot (discussed in yesterday’s post). Today I take the discussion a step further, to talk about the first published (not the first printed!) Greek New Testament. Again, the discussion is taken from my book Misquoting Jesus. ****************************** The First Published Edition of the Greek New Testament 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 Testament, receiving the [...]

BDEhrman2023-01-10T10:56:50-05:00January 10th, 2023|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Can We Trust the Bible? The First Printed Greek New Testament

I have started to explain what it is translators of the New Testament actually translate. They do not translate just one manuscript or another; they translate what they take to be the “original” text as it has been reconstructed by textual specialists (some of whom are the translators themselves). These reconstructions can be found in printed editions of the Greek New Testament. To make sense of what the translators actually have in front of them when they are translating, I need to give a brief history of the printing of the Greek New Testament. To that end I will provide in two or three posts the directly relevant material given in my book Misquoting Jesus. I’ve always thought this is unusually interesting information connected to “how we got our Bible.” I start at the beginning, with the invention of printing. ****************************** The text of the New Testament was copied in a fairly standardized form throughout the centuries of the Middle Ages, both in the East (the “Byzantine” text) and the West (the Latin Vulgate). It [...]

BDEhrman2023-01-08T07:08:04-05:00January 8th, 2023|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts|

Is the King James Bible Actually the William Tyndale Version?

Many, possibly most, people don’t realize that the King James Bible was not the first translation of the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament into English. There were seven major translations published earlier, and all of them to a greater or lesser extent (almost always greater) were dependent on the one(s) that came before them. The first, greatest, and most influential was the translation by William Tyndale. It was also the riskiest. It cost Tyndale his life. In 1408 a law had been passed in England making it illegal to translate or to read the Bible in English without official ecclesiastical approval; this was in response to the translation activities connected with (pre-Reformer) John Wycliffe and his followers, whose English rendering was not from the original Hebrew and Greek, but from the Latin vulgate. By the time of Tyndale in the early 16th century, it was possible to learn Greek at Oxford, and just possible to pick up Hebrew, and he did so. Tyndale was refused permission to publish a translation in England, [...]

BDEhrman2023-01-06T13:48:51-05:00January 1st, 2023|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts|

Studying the New Testament in Graduate School

My favorite professor in graduate school once told me he thought that PhDs in New Testament were over-trained for what they had to do. I had finished my degree at the time and was heading off to an on-campus interview at Notre Dame, which was looking for a faculty member who was an expert in Pauline studies. They had a number of other biblical scholars there, but wanted to fill a gap in their curriculum and wanted someone with a specialization in Paul. I didn’t consider myself a Pauline scholar in particular – at the time my research was in analyzing and classifying the Greek manuscript tradition of the New Testament, and even though I had fairly extensive training in Pauline studies, it wasn’t at all my expertise. My professor was telling me to relax: I was more than enough qualified. Looking back, I think he had a point – not about me as a Pauline scholar (in the end they offered me the position, but I turned it down for the offer from UNC) [...]

BDEhrman2022-08-22T11:42:43-04:00August 30th, 2022|Christianity in the Classroom, History of Biblical Scholarship, Teaching Christianity|

Doing Critical Scholarship as a Committed Christian: Anniversary Guest Post by Jeffrey Siker

As part of our ten -year anniversary on the blog, we requested special anniversary posts from scholars who had, over the years, made guest contributions; our instructions were that they could post on any topic of their choice for the event. We had a gratifying number of scholar-colleagues-friends of mine graciously respond. I'll be posting one of them a week, and then at the end figure out a way to combine them into one big kind of anniversary blog post e-book for distribution. Here is the first in line, written by one of my closest friends Jeff Siker, Professor Emeritus at Loyola Marymount University, an expert in New Testament studies publishing in international venues since our graduate student days oh so many decades ago. Jeff is an ordained Presbyterian minister who, like me, has trouble understanding why so many people seem to think that critical scholarship is necessarily inimical to being a Christian. On the contrary, as he says, he has one foot in the academy and the other in the church. Here are some [...]

BDEhrman2022-07-13T17:15:13-04:00July 23rd, 2022|History of Biblical Scholarship, Reflections and Ruminations|

An Eyewitness Account of Jesus’ Crucifixion!

Here is another modern Gospel forgery that has over the years won over readers who have thought it was authentic. It's intriguing stuff: an eyewitness account of Jesus' death! Again, this is taken from my book Forged: Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (HarperOne, 2010). ****************************** An equally interesting modern apocryphon, The Crucifixion of Jesus, by an Eye-Witness, deals not with the beginning of Jesus’ adult life, before his ministry, but with its ending and aftermath. [1] The account comes in the form of a letter written, in Latin, seven years after Jesus’ crucifixion, from a leader of the mysterious Jewish sect of the Essenes in Jerusalem to another Essene leader who lived in Alexandria, Egypt. All elements of the supernatural are completely stripped away from the account’s description of Jesus’ life and death. Jesus is shown to have led a completely human life and to have died a completely human death. But not on the cross. Jesus survived his own crucifixion and lived for another six months. The account [...]

BDEhrman2022-03-13T19:27:56-04:00March 16th, 2022|Christian Apocrypha, History of Biblical Scholarship|

Young Jesus with the Brahmins in India!

In my last post I talked about a humorous Gospel forgery by a modern scholar. There are a number of other forgeries of Gospels done in (relatively) modern times -- especially in the nineteenth century -- which were not particularly risible but were far more successful. I still get asked about them today, especially by people who don't know what to think about them or, even more, people who assure me they are true. I talk about them in the last chapter of my book Forged (HarperOne, 2011). Here's one of the most successful, as I discuss there. ****************************** One of the most widely disseminated modern forgeries is called The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ.[1] From this account we learn that Jesus went to India during his formative teen years, the “lost years” before his public ministry, and there learned the secrets of the East. The book made a big splash when it appeared in English in 1926; but as it turns out, it had already been exposed as a fraud more than thirty years [...]

BDEhrman2022-03-06T13:06:32-05:00March 13th, 2022|Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity, History of Biblical Scholarship|

A Humorous Modern Gospel Forgery

In a previous post I gave the introduction to my book about ancient forgery, Forged, written for a general audience. Posting it reminded me of a modern forgery that was done by a bona fide scholar -- of a Gospel text! I heard the story numerous times because the fraud was exposed by my own teacher, Bruce Metzger. I think the first time I wrote about the story was in my book Lost Christianities (Oxford University Press, 2003). Here is what I said there: ****************************** Some forgeries have been perpetrated in modern times, of direct relevance to our current study of early Christian apocrypha. One might think that in our day and age, no one would be so deceitful as to try and pawn off any first hand accounts of Jesus as authentic. But in fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. Strange Gospels appear regularly, if you know where to look for them.[1] Often these record incidents in the “lost years” of Jesus – e.g., accounts of Jesus as a child or a young [...]

BDEhrman2022-02-28T13:14:37-05:00March 10th, 2022|Forgery in Antiquity, History of Biblical Scholarship|

Who Knew? Our Oldest Commentary on the Book of Revelation

One of the great things about being a research scholar is that if you’re diligent and paying attention, you learn new stuff all the time. For someone with an inquiring mind, it’s like striking gold with some fair regularity. And if you dig deep enough, you find things that very few people know about – often even scholars within your own field. I first read the book of Revelation when I was seventeen; I had a college course on it two years later; and have studied it ever since. But it was not until a couple of years ago that I came to know something about the very oldest commentary we have on the book. Old not in the sense that it was written in, say, the 18th century, but old in the sense that it was written in the THIRD century. That’s old. The commentary was written by a little-known church leader, Victorinus, who was bishop of Pettau (modern Ptuj in Slovenia). We don’t know a lot about him. He wrote a number of [...]

BDEhrman2021-09-30T09:41:57-04:00October 12th, 2021|History of Biblical Scholarship, Revelation of John|

Another Problem with the NRSV: Knowing What To Translate

SORRY Y'ALL. AS roughly 82,000 people have pointed out to me: This post was already posted four days ago. It was a glich in the system. The system is ... my brain. UGH. So if you read Oct. 6, don't bother today!.... Translators of the Bible have a terrifically complicated and difficult (and usually thankless) task. I always knew that, of course, with my head – ever since taking Greek back in college. But I did not relate to the problems emotionally until I started publishing translations of my own. It’s HARD. My first translation project was a two-volume edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library (published by Harvard University Press). It was at that point that I realized that what translators do is not at all what the rest of us do who can teach the ancient languages and read Greek and assign Greek translation exercises to classes of graduate students. When you are with a class of students, you can sit around the table, discuss the various options about how [...]

BDEhrman2021-10-10T13:27:38-04:00October 10th, 2021|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts|

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|

Working as a Secretary for the New Revised Standard Version

Here I continue with some reminiscences of my work with my mentor Bruce Metzger. ****************************** When I was still a graduate student in the PhD program at Princeton Theological Seminary, Metzger invited me to serve as a secretary for the committee that was producing the new revision of the Revised Standard Version translation of the Bible. The RSV (on which the new translation was to be based) had come out in 1952, and it had caused a huge furor at the time. It was an “official” revision of the King James Bible, that was supposed to update the language (English has changed a lot since 1611), to take into consideration new manuscript discoveries (especially important for the New Testament, since the KJV was based on only a few medieval manuscripts that were not of very high quality; hundreds of better ones had since been discovered, and to incorporate the findings of modern Biblical scholarship). The RSV of 1952 was an “official” translation because it was authorized by the National Council of Churches in the U.S. [...]

BDEhrman2021-09-16T10:22:40-04:00September 16th, 2021|Bart’s Biography, History of Biblical Scholarship|

The Reconstruction of Q: Platinum Guest Post by Steve Sutter

Here is an interesting and informative post on the Q source, provided for us by Steve Sutter. I have been spacing out these Platinum posts, in part because the supply is limited (and the queue almost gone!). If you have one to submit: go for it! You can get your ideas out there, people can respond, you can respond back, and it's all good. *************************** The Earliest Gospel “Q” was Lost -- But Reconstructed By: Steve Sutter, M.S. Presque Isle, Maine The idea of a collection of sayings of Jesus lying behind the Gospels of Matthew and Luke is not a new idea. In 1908, Dr. Adolf von Harnack, a Lutheran theologian and Professor of Church History at the University of Berlin, authored a book entitled The Sayings of Jesus -- The Second Source of St. Matthew and St. Luke. It’s intriguing that in Harnack’s day, at least some historical investigators hypothesized that Jesus was “a genuine Buddhist, who had, however, come under the influence of ideas originating in ancient Babylon, Persia, Egypt, and [...]

BDEhrman2021-06-19T08:01:43-04:00June 19th, 2021|Canonical Gospels, History of Biblical Scholarship|

How Then Do Most Ancient Manuscripts Get Discovered?

I have been discussing documents from early Christianity that I would very much like to have see with my own eyes. In my last post I mentioned the fact that documents that *do* tend to be discovered are either copies of books we already have (the Gospel of John, the book of Revelation, etc.) or of books that we did not previously know existed (the Letter of Diognetus, or most of the writings in the Nag Hammadi library). Here is a related question from a reader of the blog. QUESTION: Are there researchers who systematically attempt to find these ancient documents or when documents come to light is it pretty much by chance? ANSWER: Well, not so much, not these days. For a simple reason: how does one go about trying to discover a manuscript? Do you fly to Egypt, hire a taxi to take you out to the desert, and start digging? There were basically two ways that past researchers tried to discover manuscripts. Sometimes they were spectacularly successful. But one of these ways [...]

BDEhrman2021-06-10T20:04:23-04:00June 15th, 2021|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts|

How Do We Know What Christians Thought about Jesus BEFORE the New Testament?

Yesterday I posted the first in what will be a series of reflections on the earliest Christian Christologies (understandings of Christ). I began to outline what I take to be the earliest Christology of all. Jesus and his followers, I maintained, saw him(self) as a man and nothing more than a man (who was a great teacher, a prophet, and the future messiah of the coming kingdom – but human through and through, nothing else). But once these followers came to believe that he had been raised from the dead, they altered their view to begin to think that God had exalted him to heaven and made him his specially anointed one, his Son, who would indeed be the future messiah and who would bring in that Kingdom himself when he returned from heaven as the Son of Man. And so, why do I think that this Christological view – that God made Jesus his Son at the resurrection, the one who reigns *now* (and so is already the “ruler” or the “anointed one” or [...]

BDEhrman2021-01-18T09:54:44-05:00January 28th, 2021|Bart’s Biography, History of Biblical Scholarship|

Was Jesus Born in Bethlehem? Matthew’s Version….

It is virtually certain that Jesus’ was raised in the small hamlet of Nazareth in Galilee, the northern part of Israel. All of our sources agree that he was from there, and it is very hard to imagine why a Christian story teller would have made that up (since there was no prestige about the place: no one had ever even heard of it!). But now the question is whether that was also his place of birth. The only two accounts we have of Jesus’ birth, Matthew and Luke, independently claim that even though he was raised in Nazareth, he was actually born in Bethlehem. So isn’t that the more likely scenario? Born in Bethlehem but raised in Nazareth? You might think so, given the fact that this is what is stated in our only two sources of information, and that they independently agree about the matter (based on their own sources, the no longer existing M – Matthew’s source or sources – and the no longer existing L – Luke’s source or sources). But [...]

BDEhrman2020-12-13T21:35:28-05:00December 23rd, 2020|Canonical Gospels, History of Biblical Scholarship|

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