History of Christianity (100-300CE) Archives - Page 9 of 14 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

My Response To Mark Goodacre on the Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library

A couple of days ago we enjoyed a guest post on the blog by Mark Goodacre, Professor of New Testament at Duke University. In this post Mark provided five reasons for doubting if the story of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library – as that story has been recounted by scholars for many years – is in fact accurate. Mark’s post was a summary of a longer, more detailed, and scholarly article that he has published on the subject. I asked Mark’s permission to respond to his five points, and he gladly agreed; I in turn have agreed to let him respond to my responses. Rather than asking you to reread his post, I have reproduced each of his five reasons here, and then dealt with them one at a time. Mark will later post a response to each of my responses. Let me say that I really don’t have a horse in this race, and my sense is that Mark doesn’t either. We would both love to be able to keep telling the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:36:26-04:00June 22nd, 2015|History of Biblical Scholarship, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Mark Goodacre: Questioning the Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library

A few days ago I posted about the Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library, giving the remarkable story that scholars -- for as long as I myself have been a scholar -- have been telling about how it happened. I also mentioned that my New Testament colleague at Duke, Mark Goodacre – who is on this blog and who has an important blog of his own, as well as the most important website on the New Testament on the entire Internet – has written an article calling this story into question. I asked Mark if he would be willing to summarize his objections to the story as it is typically recited, and he has done so in the following post. In my next post I will respond to his objections, and then Mark will respond to my response. Isn’t scholarship great? Here’s Mark’s post on the matter: - Mark Goodacre is the author of several books, including The Case Against Q, and Thomas and the Gospels. ************************************************************************** Five Reasons to Question the Story [...]

BDEhrman2021-01-29T02:33:30-05:00June 20th, 2015|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum|

The Contents of the Nag Hammadi Library

In my last post I gave the story typically recited by NT scholars for the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library. As I pointed out, some scholars have doubted the story, most recently Mark Goodacre. He has agreed to do a guest post on the blog in which he shows why this story – which has been told by probably every NT scholar to every Introduction to NT class for undergraduates for the past thirty years! – is problematic and, well, possibly not true. That post will come by way of tomorrow’s blog. For today’s post, first, I want to say something about the contents of the Nag Hammadi library. This, at least, is not in dispute. Here is what I say 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 [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:36:33-04:00June 18th, 2015|Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

The Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library

In this thread on the discovery of ancient Christian texts, I have mentioned the serendipitous discovery of both the Nag Hammadi Library in Egypt and the Dead Sea Scrolls in what is now Israel. It might be useful for me to say something about both of these discoveries. In this post and the next I will talk about the Nag Hammadi Library. I have taken this discussion from my New Testament textbook. But let me reproduce the discussion with a warning. Caveat lector! My friend Mark Goodacre, NT scholar at Duke and inveterate destroyer of New Testament scholarly myths, has called this account (which is the standard account found among NT scholars) into question. Mark is on the blog. Maybe he will be inspired to respond! In any event, here is the tale of the discovery from my undergraduate textbook: ************************************************ It is an intriguing story, this chance discovery of a cache of ancient Christian documents in 1945, in a remote part of Upper Egypt, a story of serendipity, ineptitude, secrecy, ignorance, scholarly brilliance, murder, [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:36:41-04:00June 17th, 2015|Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Tischendorf and the Discovery of Codex Sinaiticus

PLEASE NOTE: I am incommunicado for a few days on a gulet in the Aegean Sea on the west coast of Turkey. I have asked Steven, our blog support, to add some posts for me in my absence; I prepared these in advance knowing I would be out of reach. Here is one of them. I’m afraid I will not be able to respond to comments on the next few posts until I return to some form of civilization that supports Internet and all things electronic. So sorry! **************************************************** In my previous post on the discovery of biblical manuscripts, I mentioned the most intrepid of manuscript-hunters of modern times, Tischendorf. His story is very interesting. Here is what I say about him and his most famous discovery in my book Misquoting Jesus. The one nineteenth-century scholar who was most assiduous in discovering biblical manuscripts and publishing their texts had the interesting name Lobegott Friedrich Constantin von Tischendorf (1815-74). He was called “Lobegott” (German for “Praise God”) because before he was born, his mother had seen [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-05T13:05:09-04:00June 12th, 2015|Book Discussions, Fourth-Century Christianity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

How Are Manuscripts Discovered

PLEASE NOTE: I am incommunicado for a few days on a gulet in the Aegean Sea on the west coast of Turkey. I have asked Steven, our blog support, to add some posts for me in my absence; I prepared these in advance knowing I would be out of reach. Here is one of them. I’m afraid I will not be able to respond to comments on the next few posts until I return to some form of civilization that supports Internet and all things electronic. So sorry! **************************************************** In this thread I have been discussing documents from early Christianity that I would very much like to have discovered. In my last post I mentioned the fact that documents that *do* tend to be discovered are either texts that we already have copies of (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 [...]

BDEhrman2017-11-29T21:40:09-05:00June 11th, 2015|Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Papias and the Eyewitnesses

I have been discussing the writings of Papias, his lost five-volume Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord. Scholars of the New Testament have long ascribed huge significance to this work, in no small part because Papias claims to have ties to eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus. In my view this championing of Papias is misguided. I say something about that in my new book on Jesus Before the Gospels (or whatever we end up calling it); I will probably be going into a more sustained analysis in my scholarly book that I’m working on next on memory and the historical Jesus. The excitement over Papias as a link to our eyewitnesses is based largely on the following passage that is quoted from his writing by Eusebius in his early-fourth-century Church History. This was written about 200 years after Papias, but Eusebius had read Papias’s book and so could quote from it. In his discussion of the book Eusebius mentions the references to Papias in the writings of Irenaeus, from around 180 CE, just [...]

BDEhrman2021-02-23T02:01:39-05:00June 9th, 2015|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers|

A Fantastic Saying of Jesus in Papias

I have mentioned one of the intriguing traditions found in the now-lost Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord by the early second century proto-orthodox church father Papias (his account of the death of Judas). Here is another one. In this one Papias is relating what he has heard that Jesus taught. As you’ll see, it is not a teaching that is found in the New Testament Gospels, or in fact in any other Gospel source we have. What is most striking, in some ways, is that Papias claims that he has a clear line of tradition going straight back to Jesus to confirm the reliability of the saying: he learned this from “elders” (that is, senior Christians) who heard from John the son of Zebedee, one of Jesus’ closest disciples, that this is something Jesus used to say. So this is not an “eyewitness” account (or, rather, not an “earwitness” account) – it is an account that we get from Papias who got it from others who got it from John who got it [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:37:12-04:00June 5th, 2015|Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers|

Other Accounts of the Death of Judas

As I indicated in the previous post, there are two versions of the death of Judas Iscariot in the New Testament. These versions have some striking similarities, but at the end of the day, I think they cannot really be reconciled with one another. After the New Testament period, there were legends about Judas’s death that continued to be invented and circulated. I discuss one of them in my college-level textbook on the New Testament, in a side-bar that I meant to be a kind of humorous human interest story. Here is what I say there: When trying to determine which stories in the Gospels are historically accurate, we need to look not only at the Gospels of the New Testament, but at all the surviving ancient narratives that discuss Jesus’ life. In many instances, however, the accounts are quite obviously legendary, written for the entertainment, edification, or even instruction of their readers. One occurs in a fourth- or fifth-century document known as the Gospel of Nicodemus (also called the Acts of Pilate). In one [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:37:21-04:00June 4th, 2015|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Doctrine, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

The Lost Writings of Papias

In this thread I have been discussing documents known from early Christianity that no longer exist and that I very much wish would be discovered. So far I have talked about the lost letters of Paul, the writings of Paul’s opponents, Q (the source used by Matthew and Luke for many of their sayings of Jesus), and the Signs Source (a collection of Jesus miraculous activities used by the Gospel of John). With this post I move outside the New Testament to indicate documents that certainly at one time existed that I wish we still had. One such document was a five-volume book produced by a church father named Papias. We don’t have this long book any longer. In fact we don’t have any of the writings from Papias. We know about him, and his writings, only because later church fathers refer to him. He is first mentioned in the writings of Irenaeus, the bishop of Gaul and himself the author of a long five-volume work that attacked heretics (especially Gnostics). Irenaeus’s book is known [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:37:35-04:00June 1st, 2015|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reflections and Ruminations|

Misquoting Jesus Interview on WPSU

On March 15, 2007, I had an interview with Patty Satalia for a Pennsylvania State University on Demand Program called "Pennsylvania Inside Out," on my book "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why" . In the interview I discuss how the modern Bible was shaped by mistakes and intentional alterations that were made by early scribes who copied the texts. I also explain how realizing this led me to shift my way of thinking about the Bible. We also get into the question -- then very pressing still -- about Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. It seems so long ago now that everyone was talking about it! Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition:

BDEhrman2017-12-09T08:25:00-05:00May 2nd, 2015|History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Video Media|

York Symposium on Early Christian Apocrypha

I thought some of you might be interested to know about a symposium focusing on early Christian apocrypha that will be taking place in the fall. The schedule for the event has just been sent. If any of you is near there, you should think about going! It looks terrific. It is being organized principally by Tony Burke, along with Brent Landau; they are two very active scholars in the field of apocrypha studies. Here’s what the lineup looks like. *************************************************************** Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictions: Writing Ancient and Modern Christian Apocrypha The 2015 York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium will take place September 24-26 at Vanier College, York University. The specific objectives for the 2015 Symposium are: 1. to examine the possible motivations behind the production of Christian Apocrypha from antiquity until the present day, 2. to integrate medieval and modern apocrypha (composed in the 19th to 21st centuries) into the wider study of apocryphal literature, and 3. to reflect on what the reactions to the recently-publishedGospel of Jesus’ Wife can tell us about [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-09T08:25:27-05:00May 1st, 2015|Christian Apocrypha, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum|

BBC Clip on “The Lost Gospels”

On Tuesday the 21st, September 2010, BBC FOUR aired "The Lost Gospels." I was one of the talking heads. The presenter was an interesting fellow, an Anglican priest Pete Owen Jones. The show included several on-location discourses. They flew me to Egypt for the taping. Some of it was done near the village of Nag Hammadi, at the spot where the so-called "Nag Hammadi Library" was discovered in 1945. The fourteen books found in a jar in this wilderness area contain 52 tractates, the famous "Gnostic Gospels." The most famous of these was and is the Gospel of Thomas. The clip here includes a shot in a busy market in Cairo, where we are sipping coffee and thinking deep thoughts together. In the clip I talk about the Gospel of Thomas, and I would like to make one point before you watch it. For over a decade now a lot of scholars of Gnosticism have argued that this Gospel is not actually a Gnostic Gospel. None of the complicated Gnostic mythology that [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:48:24-04:00April 19th, 2015|Christian Apocrypha, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Video Media|

Creative Uses of Numbers in Scripture

Here I resume my interrupted thread on the use of letters as numbers in ancient languages. As I had indicated earlier, Greek and Hebrew did not use a different system for their alphabets and their numerals, but the letters of the alphabet played double duty, so that each letter had a numerical value. One pay-off of that system was that every word had a numerical value, discovered simply by adding up the letters. In Greek, for example, the six letters in the name Jesus, Ιησους , add up to 888. Or another example: in Hebrew, the three letters in the name “David” (ancient Hebrew did not have vowels, only consonants), D-V-D were worth 4-6-4, so that the name added up to 14. That may have been significant for the genealogy of Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 1:1-17), since, as Matthew presents it, Jesus, the “son of David” had a genealogical tree that can be organized around the number 14: between the father of the Jews, Abraham, and the greatest king of the Jews, David, was 14 generations [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T14:00:26-04:00February 17th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

The Virgin Birth and Jesus’ Brothers

I am now ready to end this thread of posts dealing with the stories of Jesus’ virgin birth – told differently in Matthew and Luke, not at all in John, and seemingly argued against in the Gospel of Mark. Earlier I should have given some terminology so that we could all be on the sam page. There are different terms that are often confused: Immaculate Conception. This doctrine is *not* about Jesus’ mother conceiving as a virgin; it is about Mary’s *own* mother and how she conceived Mary. Mary, in Roman Catholic thinking, did not have a sin nature. Otherwise she would have passed it along to Jesus. But how could Mary not have one, if she were born and raised like every other human? The answer came in the medieval notion of the immaculate conception: Mary herself was conceived (by her mother Anna) miraculously: God did a miracle so that even though Mary was conceived through the sex act, she was not given a sin nature. Virginal conception. This is actually the view of [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-09T11:12:36-05:00January 3rd, 2015|Historical Jesus, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Why Was the Gospel of Mark Attributed to Mark?

I come now – at *last*, you might say – to the final post in this thread dealing with how the Gospels of the New Testament came to be named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. I have covered a lot of territory in this thread, arguing that the Gospels were not known by these names until near the end of the second century; that they probably acquired their names because of an edition of the Gospels produced in Rome sometime after the time of Justin Martyr (mid second century), an edition that influenced both Irenaeus and the author of the Muratorian canon, and eventually all of Christendom. This edition named the first and last of the Gospels after two of Jesus’ disciples and the third Gospel after a companion of the apostle Paul. I have explained the reasons in the preceding posts. And now comes the most difficult and puzzling question: why was the second Gospel attributed to Mark? I regularly am asked this question, and usually the questioner expresses it with some surprise: why [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T14:17:16-04:00December 5th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Why Was the Gospel of Luke Attributed to Luke?

So far I have tried to explain why, in the proto-orthodox church of the second century, the Gospels of Matthew and John came to be attributed to two of the disciples of Jesus. My thesis is that an edition of the four Gospels appeared in Rome sometime in the second half of the century and that it differentiated the four Gospels by indicating which was “according to” whom. I now can address the question of how the other two Gospels were given their names, and why they were not assigned to disciples of Jesus but to companions of the apostles, Luke the companion of Paul and Mark the companion of Peter. Luke is the easier of the two to explain, and in some ways is the easiest of all four Gospels. That’s because the author provides hints of who he is – or at least hints of whom he wants his readers to *think* he is. The hints do not come in the Gospel of Luke itself. As I have already pointed out, the author [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T14:17:26-04:00December 4th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Why Was the Gospel of John Attributed to John?

Some of the same objections to Matthew having written the First Gospel apply to John the son of Zebedee having written the Fourth. Unlike Matthew, John did not copy any of our other Gospel sources, and so that’s not the problem that it is for Matthew (who surely, if he was an eyewitness, would not have taken his stories about Jesus from what he found in someone else’s written text). But there is an even higher probability, bordering on certainty, that John the son of Zebedee could not write. He was a fisherman from rural Galilee. Fishermen were not educated. They were very low class peasants. John would never have gone to school. Where he lived, there *were* no schools. He never would have learned to read. Let alone learned to write. Let alone learned to write in Greek. Let alone learned to write sophisticated, philosophically informed prose narratives in Greek. I think there is virtually no chance that the historical John of Zebedee wrote the Gospel. So why did our anonymous editor living a [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T14:17:35-04:00December 2nd, 2014|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Why Was The Gospel of Matthew Attributed to Matthew?

I have now gotten to a point where I can discuss why the four Gospels were specifically given the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Recall the most important points of my preceding posts on the blog so far: the Gospels were all written anonymously and they circulated anonymously, for years and decades; we have no certain evidence that they – these particular Gospels -- were called by their familiar names until around 180 CE, in sources connected with Rome (Irenaeus and the Muratorian Fragment); my hypothesis is that an edition of these four Gospels was published in Rome sometime between Justin in 150-60 CE (he quotes the Gospels but does not name them) and Irenaeus in 180-85 CE. That edition gave these Gospels their now-familiar names. If all that is correct, then there is no reason to think that people widely associated them with their familiar names before that. The reason this became a widespread tradition is that it was started by a single editor – possibly based, of course, on things being [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T14:17:44-04:00December 1st, 2014|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Do Textual Variants Really Matter for Anything?

QUESTION: I got the impression (I can’t remember where or if you said this… or if Bruce Metzger said it) that no significant Christian doctrine is threatened by text critical issues… and so, if that is the case, who cares if, in Mark 4: 18, Jesus spoke of the “illusion” of wealth or the “love” of wealth. I mean, who cares other than textual critics and Bible translators? RESPONSE: This is a very good question, and one that I get a lot. I’ve given an answer to it before on the blog, but since it periodically reappears, I thought that maybe I should give it another shot. The first thing to emphasize is a point that I repeatedly make and that many people seem never to notice that I make (especially my fundamentalist friends who very much object to my views about textual criticism): of the many hundreds of thousands of textual variants that we have among our manuscripts, most of them are completely unimportant and insignificant and don’t matter for twit. Why should [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T14:17:54-04:00November 29th, 2014|History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

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