Loading...QUESTION:
When it comes to the gospels, how do we define the ‘original text’? Do we define it as the original manuscript that was first penned by the author, or do we define it as the gospels in their most settled canonical form?
RESPONSE:
As it turns out, this is a complicated and endlessly fascinating question that, so far as I have been able to work out over the past twenty years of thinking about it, has no clear and obvious answer!
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How available were writing materials? When people wrote something was the papyrus expensive and limited so that a person would not rewrite something or did they revise manuscripts like they do today? And why would people write something then if not a letter, were books common?
It depended on time and place, but papyrus was relatively inexpensive and accessible; most poor folk couldn’t write so it wasn’t much of an issue. Paul or his companions wuld have had to access papyrus in some way, though shorter letters such as regular ole folk often wrote were often written on wax tablets that could be read and then wiped clean to be written on again.
“Or do we include everything that appears to have come from his own hand, including the later addition?”
And what if chapter 21 was not written by the same hand?
It seems that John 21:23-24 was written AFTER the “disciple who is bearing witness” finally died, although there was the expectation that he “was not to die”; somebody (another hand) had to explain the unexpected death!
Supernatural extended lives for people living in Jesus’s times was something early christians believed in; Eusebius ( Hist. Eccl. IV.3.) reproduced this passage of a letter by Quadratus to emperor Adrian (117-138) :
“But the works of our Saviour were always present …those that were healed, and were raised from the dead… were alive for quite a while, so that some of them lived even to OUR DAY.”
ok you won’t answer re sejanus n pilate & whether the “trial” is a piece of bs, got it!…but after constantine, more specifically his mother built over a piece of jerusalem….is everything left to conjecture & reading tea leaves?…granted you with the language & history read the crystal ball best…but?
since alaric of the goths…plenty to follow & all “christians”…undid rome, can we assume all is bullshit? re christianity?
obviously oppenheimer quoted baghdad vita for some reason….do you believe all religion is bullshit?
marx engels lenin or lennon?
Sorry: I just can’t answer questions / comments every day, so it often takes a few days for me to get to things. I have now answerd it
I’m afraid I don’t understand your other questions, but as to the last one personally I prefer Lennon, though after the breakup I think Harrison was better than either of hte mighty duo as solos.
Hi is it possible that he beloved deciple was a fictional testifier to make the gospels legendary claims (compared to the synopics) more beliveble.
Yup. I actually think that he’s a fictional character, but not just to provide “evidence” that the account is correct but also to show what an “ideal disciple” is like (in contrast to, say, Peter)
Can we certenly know from a historical stand point that like AD 33 passover fell on a saturday or can this statement be a approximation?
No, that’s the problem. We don’t have a specific year that seems to match the Gospel accounts.
In New Zealqnd, and I assume in other similar democracies, speeches in parliament are recorded and transcribed. But the members of parliament get a draft of the transcription to which they can make corrections without changing the sense of what was said. Another example, perhaps, of the impossibility of dying who was ‘original’
Nice.
Hi Dr. Ehrman, I was wondering if you’ve written anything about whether Paul or other early church figures were influenced by (or to what extent they were influenced by) ancient Stoicism? I know there are books out there arguing that Paul was influenced by Stoicism and may have expressed some of his ideas in Stoic terminology, for example. Will you be addressing this in your forthcoming book on ethics?
I had considered it but I wno’t be doing too much with it, because of the focus I’ve decided to have and the space I want to consume. But I’ll be dealing with it some. My view is that many of Paul’s views are similar to what you get in stoic moral philosophy (he has no interest in logic and their metaphysics are lightyears apart) but more on the surface than in substance, precisely because of the radically different metaphysics lying behind them.
Your point about dictating to a scribe is very important. We are fairly certain that most Roman authors usually dictated their works rather than writing them with their own hands; in the case of Cicero, we know the name of his scribe, Tiro, and have some evidence that Tiro invented his own form of shorthand to make taking dictation easier.
Rather than picturing ‘John’ sitting down and putting ‘pen to papyrus’, then, we might do better to picture ‘John’ sitting in front of a scribe and speaking, while the scribe took down what he said. In that case, obviously, a great deal depends on the scribe’s skill and accuracy. As for how closely the author would check what the scribe had written, or whether the author would make edits to it, or in some cases even whether the author himself was actually literate or not, I think we simply don’t have much evidence on those points.
Hi Dr. Ehrman. Unrelated question. In your book Armageddon, p. 131, you discuss Nero, the fire of Rome, and the claim by Tacitus that Nero shifted the blame for the fire to Christians and executed them in various ways.
One reviewer of your book claims that Nero did not persecute Christians, that the “Tacitus passage is almost certainly an interpolation.” Also, “Christians in Rome were almost certainly no more than 1/10 of 1 percent of the population in Nero’s time in 64 CE.” “They would not have been on his radar screen.” “They weren’t called ‘Christians’ and identified as a separate movement then.” “Tertullian and other Church fathers cite no such passage [of Tacitus], and it appears not to be referenced by any Christian before 400 CE. Sulpicius Severus, ca 400 CE, appears to be the first Christian to write about it, but his account is hugely suspect. It gets many things wrong, starting with claiming there was a massive number of Christians at that time, then that Nero outlawed Christianity along with starting the persecutions.”
Do you think there is any validity to this reviewer’s claims?
Not really. I’ve talked with Tacitus scholars about it and they certainly think it is authentic. Who is the reviewer? Is she/he a Roman historian? Christians of course were indeed identified as a “separate movement” at the time of Tacitus. Three years prior to the Annals (115 CE) Pliny the younger in his letter to Trajan describes his encounters with Chrsitians and how he dealt with them, and we have Trajan’s reply (Pliny Letters book 10, letters 96 and 97). That’s the problem with reviews: people can say whatever they like whether thy have any expertise or not. Is this person an expert?
I agree with you that the reviewer probably has no expertise for his pronouncements. But he’s not saying that Christians were not identified as a separate movement at the time of Tacitus and Pliny (115 CE), but rather at the time of Nero and the burning of Rome (64 CE).
Oh, OK. I wonder what grounds there are for that other than assumption? Tactitus appears to be basing his narrative on historical sources.
Hi, Bart,
1) Where does it come from in the OT that whatever you pray for, you’ll receive? Is it an apocalyptical idea?
Mark 11:24 NIV
[24] Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.
2) I have to commentaries to make and I hope you can respond to them:
a) John 12:16 NRSV
[16] His disciples did not understand these things at first; but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered that these things had been written of him and had been done to him.
= Since John doesn’t talk in 1st person seems like he hasn’t written it and here it shows what happened: they interpreted the life of Jesus in terms of OT scripture and thought of him as Messiah
b) John 12:27 is an exemple of a contradiction and different naratives:
[27] “Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.
Vs.
Luke 22:42
[42] “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.”
Thank you
1. I don’t think it can be found in the OT and am not sure it’s apocalyptic particularoly. I’m not sure where it comes from. Possibly Jesus’ personal sense of intiemacy with God as Father? 2a: yes this suggests that hte author is decidely not one of the apostles. the author never claims to be John, of course
The original texts for me are the ones that the author wrote, even if they reflect changes/additions he or she made subsequent to the that person’s first version, BUT but excluding all changes that were ordered by someone (e.g., a church authority) who had the power to force a parishioner to alter a document or be expelled.
Bill Steigelmann
Thank you for the posts on original texts; for me it raises a question about how reliable the Q document is for the teachings of the historical Jesus. Some of the sayings that Matthew attributes to Jesus are very similar to what is in the book of Sirach. Of course, it is possible that Jesus was aware of these teachings and simply taught them. The same could be true for other deuterocanonical books (how much of the claimed teachings of Jesus matches what is in them). But it’s possible that the author(s) of Q simply got these teachings from Sirach and then put them into the mouth of Jesus. It’s kind of hard to believe that memories of what Jesus taught would happen to correspond so well with Sirach (and Enoch, etc.). So, my questions are (1) do you think that some of the Q sayings didn’t come from Jesus but from these other books? and (2) how reliable do you think the Q document is about the teachings of the historical Jesus? Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Sirach#Influence_in_Christian_doctrine
My sense is that there were a lot of ethical teachings that were widely held by Jewish teachers at the time, so that it would be the *lack* of any overlap that would be more suprising. But yes, Q sayings are not necessarily ones Jesus said. Like every other source, Q had to be examined critically. It probably has some authentic sayings and some non-authentic. We don’t know when it would have been written, but aloms certainly a couple of decases or more after Jesus by someone living in a different country who didn’t know him.
Dr. Ehrman, why do a wide array of scholars say that the Gospel of John originally ended at the conclusion of chapter 20, and that the author added chapter 21 in a later edition?
Are there a number of older manuscripts that exclude chapter 21?
No, all the Greek manuscripts have it. But there’s a wide range of reasons for thinking that the text — ch. 20 appears to end the narrative, ch. 21 does’t have a smooth transition to the stories that follow, they appear to be added on and not entirely concsistent, etc. Read the two chapters very carefully and you may see what I mean.
From a historical standpoint (what really happened) do the “originals” really matter? In that they are compendiums of oral testimonies (however modified over time) and stories concocted with an intent to persuade beliefs reduced to writing 35ish to 65 ish years after the events? In other words as historical evidence, should we not be as concerned with the gospels as snapshots in time (about prior events) whether or not we have originals?
The questoin is always, “matter for *what*?” For interpreting the gospels as texts? Absolutely. Knowing what the authors wrote. Yup. KNowing what the first readers read, yes. For accessing oral traditions, yup (there’s no other way to them). For knowing about the historical Jesus, yes, since they are our only sources. Are they completely accurate, of course not. They are evidence though, so they matter.
I’m going to suggest something along these lines. A hypothesis I find plausible. The idea is that parts of the birth narrative in Matthew 1-2 wasn’t in the “original”; that Matthew himself or somebody else added some passages later.
Nota bene – I don’t talk about ALL of the birth narrative (I know that some scholars have suggested that all of Matthew 1-2 is a later addition, but that most scholars including you don’t believe so, because the style of Matthew 1-2 matches Matthew’s style elsewhere in his gospel.) but only parts of it, namely Matt 1: 18-25, and possibly the references to the women in 1: 3,5,6,7. The remainder of the genealogical table and all of Chapter 2, I think is original.
So, it’s the virgin birth part I don’t think is original. The reason is that Matthew’s main message is that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, predicted by the scriptures. This Messiah should have been a descendant of David, born in Bethlehem just like David. Therefore, a genealogicial table showing Jesus’s descendance from the patriarchs via David was included.
Continued in the next post…
My view is that it’s possible that some verse may have been added here and there in the NT even if they are found in every surviving manuscxript, but it takes a very heavy burden of proof to show that it happened in any particular case, and I don’t know of a case in these instances, since the versess do in fact coincide very well with matthew’s agenda otherwise.
…continued fron the previous post
This genealogical table could perhaps be interpreted as a list of those who held the royal titles (according to God in some sense, not in reality), thus making Jesus the “legitimate” King of the Jews.
But if Jesus was not a descendant of David but the Son of God, this genealogical table becomes meaningless. Then Matthew would have no reason to include this genealogical table in his gospel. I know it’s argued that Jesus was believed to have been adopted by Joseph into the Davidian family, but I don’t buy this. Without a blood line from David, the belief that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah would be substantially weakened, and Matthew would have no reason to include the genealogical table if that was what he initially believed.
But perhaps Matthew later on heard about the virgin birth and wanted to include that in a later “edition” of his gospel. He then added the (short) virgin birth passages,, and perhaps the references to the women i the genealogical table, although the table lost much of its significance.
Or somebody else added all this later, knowing about Matthew’s style and his habit of quoting scripture.