History of Biblical Scholarship Archives - Page 2 of 8 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Is Critical Biblical Scholarship Valid? What the New Testament Itself Indicates!

In my previous post I argued that critical scholars who insist that the Gospels are not historically accurate accounts of what happened in the life of Jesus – even though they do contain some historically accurate information, which needs to be carefully and cautiously ferreted out of their narratives – are not trashing the Gospels. They are trashing unfounded fundamentalist assumptions about the Gospels. In this post I’d like to argue that this view -- that the Gospels are not sacrosanct-historically-accurate-to-the-very-detail accounts of what really happened in the life of Jesus -- is not merely a modern notion that emerged during the Enlightenment. It is that, to be sure; but it’s not merely that. In fact, I would argue that this is the earliest attested view of the Gospels from earliest Christianity. Let’s assume for this argument a view that most scholars hold and that I could demonstrate if I wanted to spend a lot of time doing so (for example here and here), that Mark was the first of our Gospels and that Matthew [...]

BDEhrman2023-08-09T07:15:25-04:00August 10th, 2023|Canonical Gospels, History of Biblical Scholarship|

More on Secret Mark as a Forgery (by Morton Smith?)

Here now is the second of my two posts on reasons for suspecting that Morton Smith himself may have been the one who forged the “letter of Clement” that discusses the “Secret Gospel of Mark” (see my post from yesterday). Again taken from my article, “Hedrick’s Consensus on the Secret Gospel of Mark,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 11 (2003) pp. 155-64. ****************************** (2) Several things that are hard to explain about the “discovery.” For those who want to show the letter is authentic (i.e. really written by Clement of Alexandria), these are the issues to address. I leave off several other matters that some have raised, such as why the letter is never mentioned by Clement or any other heresiologist who opposed the Carpocratians otherwise: (a) Why does this letter contradict in content what Clement says elsewhere? For one thing the attitude toward true gnosis in this letter is completely at odds with what is found elsewhere in Clement, as Eric Osborne trenchantly noted. Never for Clement is true knowledge a matter [...]

BDEhrman2023-05-30T12:30:07-04:00May 31st, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Biblical Scholarship|

Did Morton Smith Forge the Secret Gospel of Mark?
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Did Morton Smith Forge the Secret Gospel of Mark?

Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum

Did Morton Smith Forge the Secret Gospel of Mark?

Last month (April 2023) I published a thread of blog posts on the intriguing and controversial Secret Gospel of Mark, allegedly discovered by Columbia University scholar Morton Smith in the library of the Greek orthodox monastery Mar Saba twelve miles southeast of Jerusalem. He did not actually discover the Gospel itself, but (allegedly) discovered a letter that described and quoted it, allegedly written by the church father Clement of Alexandria (200 CE or so), allegedly copied by a scribe of the eighteenth century in the back blank pages of a seventeenth-century book otherwise (actually) containing the letters of Ignatius of Antioch (110 CE or so), in which Clement allegedly discusses a potentially scandalous edition of Mark’s Gospel allegedly used by a nefarious Gnostic group called the Carpocratians. Confused yet? Read the posts, starting with this one from April 12: https://ehrmanblog.org/do-scholars-ever-forge-gospels In my posts I did not give any evidence to show that this “alleged” discovery might not have been a discovery but a forgery, possibly by Smith himself, even though from the outset some (many?) [...]

BDEhrman2023-06-05T09:00:28-04:00May 30th, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum|

More Problems with Thinking Jesus’ Followers Memorized the Stories about Him

In my previous post I began to explain the problems with the idea that Jesus' followers, like all good students of Rabbis in the Jewish tradition, were trained to memorize what he said and did, so that the Gospels provide us with reliable accounts of his life. This idea was most forcefully promoted by Swedish scholar Birger Gerhardsson and was popular for a while in scholarly circles. But it is widely seen today as problematic. Here is how I continue to explain some of the issues in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** An even bigger problem is that we have clear and certain evidence that Jesus’ followers were not passing along his teachings, or accounts of his deeds, as they were memorized verbatim. This is one of the complaints that other scholars generally lodge against Gerhardsson – he does not engage in a detailed examination of traditions that are preserved in the Gospels in order to see if his theory works. What is the evidence that Jesus’ teachings were preserved word-for-word [...]

BDEhrman2023-05-08T12:55:33-04:00May 24th, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship|

Didn’t the Disciples Memorize Jesus’ Teachings and Accounts of His Life?
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Didn’t the Disciples Memorize Jesus’ Teachings and Accounts of His Life?

Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship, Memory Studies, Public Forum

Didn’t the Disciples Memorize Jesus’ Teachings and Accounts of His Life?

I've been talking about how scholars began to realize in the early 20th century that the stories of Jesus in the Gospels were based on oral traditions that the Gospel writers inherited decades earlier. But is that really a problem? Here's how I discuss the issue in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** Many people, when they first consider the reality that the traditions in our Gospels must have circulated orally for decades before being written down, come up with a commonsensical response. Surely the sayings of Jesus, and the accounts of his life, were actually memorized by his followers, so that they would be preserved accurately. Aren’t oral cultures known for being able to preserve their traditions spotlessly? After all, since they didn’t have written records to keep their memories alive, people in such cultures must have worked with special diligence to remember what they learned and to pass their stories along seamlessly from one person and one generation to the next. Right? Unfortunately, decades of intense research have shown that this [...]

BDEhrman2023-05-23T07:35:59-04:00May 23rd, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship, Memory Studies, Public Forum|

Stories of Jesus Passed on By Word of Mouth. When Scholars First Took Oral Traditions Seriously.

I'm discussing how scholars came to realize that Mark our earliest Gospel is not simply a nuts-and-bolts, unembellished, accurate report of what Jesus said and did. This kind of scholarship reached a kind of climax about a century ago with a group of scholars called "form critics." To make sense of what they said and why they said it, I need to start where I left off yesterday -- and so I'll repeat the end of yesterday's post to get us a running start on today's, taken from my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne 2016). ****************************** Where did the stories found in the Gospels themselves come from? The "form critics" (a term I'll explain below) maintained that they did not come from authors who were themselves followers of Jesus or who acquired their information directly from eyewitnesses. The stories instead came from oral traditions in circulation in the years prior to the Gospels. The authors of the Gospels – all of them, not just Mark – wrote down stories that had been passed along by word [...]

BDEhrman2023-05-15T15:50:57-04:00May 21st, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship|

Does Mark Present the Bare-Bones Facts about Jesus’ Life?

In my previous post I showed how scholars in the 19th century came to think that our shortest and evidently-least-embelished Gospel Mark gave the accurate account of Jesus ' life, so that any reconstruction of what Jesus really said and did simply could simply assume that Mark provides the essential information. But is that right? It eventually came to be seen as wrong. Here's how I discuss the matter in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** The problem with Mark is that it is so terse that there are huge gaps in the narrative. It is hard to determine what is driving Jesus’ action and what his ultimate objective is. To solve that problem 19th-century scholars writing about Jesus filled in the gaps either with inventive narratives they spun out of their own imagination or with psychological analyses about what must have been motivating Jesus at one point of his life or another.[1] All of these efforts were rooted in the sense that Mark is the earliest and most historical account without any [...]

BDEhrman2023-05-15T15:50:26-04:00May 20th, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship|

How Can We Get Behind “False Memories” of Jesus to the Historical Facts?

I'm discussing how in both the ancient and modern worlds people have constructed "false memories" of who Jesus really was. In this post I give a brief explanation of how scholars became increasingly aware of the problem and, for a time, thought they had found a solution: Mark's Gospel is the unembellished version and so we need to stick mainly with that! How'd they come up with *that* one? And is it true? This is taken from my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** Throughout the history of scholarship, especially since the nineteenth century, scholars have realized that Christians in the early years after Jesus’ death were not only altering traditions about Jesus’ life and teaching that they inherited, they were also inventing them. We do not need to wait for non-canonical Gospels such as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, or the Gospel of Nicodemus for “distorted” memories of Jesus to surface among authors and their readers. (Recall: by “distorted memory” I simply mean any recollection of the past that [...]

BDEhrman2023-05-08T12:22:00-04:00May 18th, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship|

Did Early Christians “Invent” Memories of Jesus?

I've been talking about how we remember things -- or misremember things, or make up memories of things -- as a way of getting to the question of how, in our heads, we think about what Jesus said and did. This is all part of my larger project that came incarnated (inletterated?) in my book Jesus Before the Gospels. As I point out early in the book, we remember most things just fine, but we also often get things either partially or completely wrong. Memories can be frail, faulty, and false. And not just our individual memories, but also the “memories” we have as a society. In previous posts I illustrated the point by talking about social memories of Abraham Lincoln and Christopher Columbus. But what about faulty memories of Jesus (see my last post if it doesn't make sense to talk about "remembering" someone we never knew!). To get to this question, in my book, I talk about some of the modern representations of Jesus by current-day scholars and popular authors – for example, Jesus [...]

BDEhrman2023-05-14T20:45:22-04:00May 17th, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum|

Could the Mysterious “Secret Gospel of Mark” Be Authentic?

In my previous posts I discussed how Morton Smith claimed he discovered a copy of an ancient letter of Clement of Alexandria (ca. 200 CE), written in the back of a 17th century book, by a scribe of the 18th century, in which Clement described a mysterious “Secret Gospel” – an intriguing and possibly scandalous longer version of the Gospel of Mark. In yesterday’s post I indicated how Smith went about trying to authenticate the discovery. Here I pick up at that point, again, as recounted in my book Lost Christianities. ****************************** A key question was whether the copyist who put the alleged letter of Clement of Alexandria that Smith mound into the bak of a book was copying an actualy letter of Clement of Alexandria. There is no difficulty believing that a scribe of the eighteenth century might have had a fragmentary copy of an ancient letter at his disposal – possibly a loose sheet in the ancient library, known for its famous ancient texts – and that rather than simply discard it, he [...]

BDEhrman2023-04-21T18:31:39-04:00April 23rd, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Biblical Scholarship|

How Do You Prove an Ancient Manuscript is Ancient? The Secret Gospel of Mark

In my previous posts I explained how American scholar of early Christianity, Morton Smith, claimed to have discovered the Secret Gospel of Mark in 1958. Now I’ll discuss how, once he discovered it (assuming he did – some scholars think he actually forged it…), how he went about trying to find out if it was actually an ancient Gospel. Again, from my book Lost Christianities: Authenticating and Interpreting the Letter Morton Smith devoted much of his research for the next fifteen years studying this find. Roughly speaking, the work involved establishing the authenticity of the letter and determining the meaning of the passages quoted from the Secret Gospel. In 1973, Smith published the results of his labors in two books, one a popular account for general audiences, full of interesting anecdotes and still worth reading, The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the the Secret Gospel According to Mark, the other an erudite report on his investigations for scholars in the field, an amazing book of scholarship but inaccessible for the most part to [...]

BDEhrman2023-04-21T18:32:31-04:00April 22nd, 2023|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Biblical Scholarship|

The Discovery of a Lifetime: A Secret Gospel of Mark?

In this thread I am discussing the discovery of the Secret Gospel of Mark in 1958. Or was it the forgery of the Secret Gospel of Mark? Entire books have been written on the topic. My first foray into the fields was in my book Lost Christianities (Oxford Press, 2003). Here is how I begin to talk about the matter there: ******************************* The Discovery We need to begin with the tale of the discovery, as recounted by Morton Smith himself in his sundry publications on the “Secret Gospel of Mark,” especially the two books published fifteen years after the discovery – one for a general audience, a beautifully written piece that reads like a detective novel, and one for scholars, a detailed linguistic and philological analysis of the text and its significance.[1] In 1941, as a twenty-six year old graduate student, Smith had gone to the Holy Land on a traveling fellowship from Harvard Divinity School. Unfortunately, the Mediterranean was closed by the war, and he was stuck in Jerusalem. While there he became acquainted [...]

BDEhrman2023-04-03T11:22:24-04:00April 13th, 2023|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Biblical Scholarship|

Do Scholars Ever Forge Gospels?

Do modern scholars ever produce “ancient” forgeries? In particular, have experts in the New Testament and early Christianity ever gone out on a limb and forged a Gospel, claiming to have discovered it, and tried then to convince others that it is ancient and authentic? Yup. I’ve discussed some examples in earlier posts on the blog – e.g., just last year: https://ehrmanblog.org/teeth-will-be-provided/ But I don’t believe I have ever devoted any attention to the most famous instance, a “discovery” of an ancient text by a renowned scholar, a text that some other scholars claim he himself forged. Others very much think it really is authentic. The debate focuses on a brilliant academic named Morton Smith, and his alleged (or real) discovery of “The Secret Gospel of Mark.” I devoted an entire discussion to Smith and the Secret Gospel twenty years ago in my book Lost Christianities; the book is about different kinds of early Christianity (Gnostics, Marcionites, Jewish Christians, etc.), and is particularly interested in the kinds of books they claimed provided “apostolic” support for [...]

BDEhrman2023-04-03T11:28:31-04:00April 12th, 2023|Forgery in Antiquity, History of Biblical Scholarship|

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|

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