Loading...I have been asked to comment on whether we can get back to the “original” text of Paul’s letter to the Philippians, and I have begun to discuss the problems not just of getting *back* to the original, but also of knowing even what the original *was*. In my previous post I pointed out the problems posed by the fact that Philippians appears to be two letters later spliced together into one. And so the first problem is this: is the “original” copy the spliced together copy that Paul himself did not create? Or is the “original” the product that Paul himself produced – the two letters that are not transmitted to us in manuscript form any longer, to which, therefore, we have no access (except through the version edited by someone else)?
But there are more problems. Here I’ll detail them, in sequence as they occur to me.
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Hi Dr Ehrman!
Does UNC offer religious studies in a summer school type exchange?
Thank you!
There are certainly exchange students thorughout the year, but I’m not sure what all the optoins are. You should look it up online!
Do we know if scribes wrote in a form of shorthand and then transcribed it into a standard orthography? Of did the originator have to speak at dictation speed? I was once a journalist. Shorthand speed (English) was acceptable at 90 words a minute. Experts could do far better. I know modern shorthand is a recent invention but it seems logical to me that in any situation in which you are ‘taking dictation’ shortcuts in a first draft would be used, even if a full ‘shorthand’ was not.
Apparently Cicero’s secretary Tiro invented a short hand that came to be used. But I doubt if Paul’s secretaries would have known it. It’s not clear if he slowed down or if they just got very fast…..
Is the doctrine of original sin biblical or is it one of Augustine’s bright ideas?
It developed out of biblical passages (Genesis 3, Romans 5), but did not come to full expression until Augustine; his views made it more precise and nuanced, and these became standard.
Bart,
Do we have any sense of the ancient Roman prison logistics? Would it be fair to say that if Paul was imprisoned, he might not have had access to writing materials and that a scribe may have had to take dictation from outside of the prison walls? Also, even if Paul was truly a sort of tent-maker for a period of time, that still might not be a guarantee that he could actually manipulate a pen correctly (with a potentially injured right hand) after falling off a horse and deflecting stonings so many times! This all might help explain why we do not seem to have as many letters from Paul as we might expect to have if Paul was truly able to write legibly.
We know some things, and very recent research is giving us a lot more informaiton. But visitors were allowed, and they could bring the prisoners what they needed. Including food, which wasn’t normally provided apparently. I don’t think there’s any evidence that Paul had injured his hand, but Galatians 6:11 does suggest he was not a skilled writer.
On a recent youtube episode, you addressed the idea of forgiveness, drawing a distinction between the Greek words used in each context in reasoning that a key difference was promoting forgiveness for wrongs that were not intended. What do you think of Musonius Rufus, 10 Will the Philosopher Prosecute Anyone for Personal Injury? He discusses “being reviled or struck or spit upon. Of these the hardest to bear are blows”, things done where the “spirit of the man” doing them “is monstrous”. Rufus reasons that one should “not be disturbed by any of these things.” The “sensible” person doesn’t go to the law when injured but “easily and silently bear what has happened” as “noble-minded.” He then says he knows of others hoe experienced “violence and bodily harm” who “very meekly bore their wrong” and “quite right” to do so. This is done to “be a source of good hope to [the perpetrator]” and “is characteristic of a benevolent and civilized way of life”. He criticizes schemes “to bite back the biter and to return evil for evil”. This sounds to me like a teaching of forgiveness for malicious (intentional) wrongs. Thanks!
Well, kind of. As a Stoic, Rufus was opposed to being upset or engaging in revenge because it would mean that someone else can actually do you harm. But no one can hurt the real you. they may hurt your body, or they may try to hurt your spirit, but your body is not ultimately what matters and no one and nothing can touch your spirit. So you simply don’t worry or think about the wrongs that someone else has done to you. If everyone lived this way, the world would be a better place. (That’s different from the idea that if someone harms you and feels regret nad remorese and then asks for your forgiveness you forego your anger; for Rufus if you feel anger the problem is your feeling, not what someone else has done. And you need to be concerned only about yourself.)
Hi Bart,
In reference to Maytree above, can you please provide me with the link to your YouTube video episode in which you discuss the Greek text to conclude that forgiveness in the New Testament was for wrongs that were not intended.
I really appreciate it.
That’s not my view.
Hi Maytree,
Can you please provide the link for this “recent youtube episode”. This idea that “forgiveness are for wrongs that were not intended” is an interesting one.
Thanks.
Why complicate the matter to this level of detail?
Surely the most sensible approach, is to assume that the letter that was sent, and received, is the original?
Would it not?
I’m trying to argue it’s simply not that … simple. In what *sense* is that the original?
Yes, of course we can speculate over the tens of versions that might have proceeded the letter, including the rough draft Paul made of his letter to the Galatians while he was having dinner one evening. The questions, what’s the point? Of course, there could be some academic interest, just as there is with seeing the early lyrics to a Beatles song written on the back of an envelope a year before they made the record,
Surely what we are primarily interested in here, though, is the letter that was sent and read by the recipients and, which was used as the basis for later copies or even cutting and pasting together with other letters.
Is that not the primary focus of textual critics and scholars when they talk about ‘getting back to the original’?
Some talk about it that way, yes. Others insist even more strongly than me that the “original” is a massively complicated concept. Within the field, among scholars, very view are comfortable using the term “original text” any more, including at the two major centers of textual criticism these days, at the University of Birmingham (England) and Muenster (Germany)
I have read that Paul and the vast majority of early Christian authors used enslaved or formally enslaved secretaries, scribes, readers, and letter carriers.
Is that your understanding as well?
No.
How is your view of the scribes that people like Paul used?
I think Paul must have simply had someone local who was literate take dictation for him.
Sorry for adding this question here. I entered it initially in a James McGrath post but was hoping for an answer from you.
1. Do you think that Jesus went back to Nazareth after being baptized or do you think he stayed with John and his group until John’s imprisonment?
Mark 1:14 (Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the good news of God)
says Jesus came to Galilee after John was arrested.
I was thinking Jesus must have came back to Galilee sooner so that he could select his closest followers and set up his ministry.
2. Also, I have read that some believe that Jesus and John were in a competition. It would seem if they were in a competition, Jesus would have left John before he was imprisoned. Your thoughts?
3. My thinking is that the Luke story of Jesus and John being related is not historical. Is that your thought?
1. The texts all indicate that after his baptism he did not go back to Galilee. I suppose that’s right. 2. Usually people say they were “in competition” meaning that loosely, that their followrs had competing claims about them. There’s little to suggest they themselves saw themselves at odds iwth each other. 3. Yup, I don’t see how it can be historical.
Hi bart
In Mark 13: 20 jesus is talking about the end times in a way that it cannot come immediately because people had to be saved, but i dont think jesus saw his death as a sacrafice for sins. Was this passage later made up because people belived that jesus died for their sins. Also in Mark 13: 20 he says that no one exept the father know the hour when the son of man will come. Was this also later added because jesus said Mark 9:1 or did he mean that it will come in his life time but he did not know the hour?
Mark 13:20 doesn’t say anything about people being saved by Jesus’ sacrifice for sins. Jesus too thought people could be “saved.” By that he meant “delivered from the wrath of God to come.” Mark 13:20 just indicates that the Son doesn’t know when the end will come; it doesn’t say anything in contradiction to Mark 9:1.
Hi bart
I was wondering that is it impossible to see Jesus before the second coming acording to the new testament/revolution.
Sorry, I’m not sure what you’re asking, or in relation to what passage.
Sorry, I’m not sure what you’re asking, or in relation to what passage.
Hi, Bart,
What do you respond to people who say as an argument for the ressurection that it is true because *it is women* who first got the news of the ressurected Jesus and it is impressive since they were not so trusted in that culture?
I’ve given a long answer to that both on the blog and in my book How Jesus Became God. The question is: who would make up that WOMEN were the first to see Jesus resurrected? Well, women might. And Mark might. His whole point is that the men disciples never did “get it” and that it is outsiders, not insiders, who will inherit the kingdom.
It makes sense that Paul is dictating because maybe it’s easier on his vision, and doesn’t he also call someone a wall?
Oh I found a pre-existing tradition for Jesus, it’s Ebla. They abstractly worship The Word, The Voice and a few other concepts.
They have henotheism. For their highest God, Hayya, they forgive sins from holy water from the temple’s freshwater springs in bowls (common folk), baths (Kings). First worship is found at rivers, like the River Euphrates that they call “The Great Cold River” which is “The Great River”.
It may be a continuūm of worship beginning with pre-history:
• the Sumerian Creator/Water/Magic God Enkil becomes
•the Semetic Akkadian Creator/Water/Magic God Ea who becomes
•• the Semetic Aramean Ebla God Hayya (who retains the Ea theophoric) who imho likely becomes
•the Mandaean God Hayyi, because they add the letter i to a lot of things.
The Nasoreans likely originate at Nasiriyah because it has the stelae commemorating when the Sargon of Akkad fam integrated Ebla.
And Ebla area temples are the closest in architectural plans to Solomon’s Temple.
They have names like Adam and Isayah and David. This is probably the origin for Petra’s continuously-running water Pool and Garden Complex.
‘First worship is found at rivers, like the River Euphrates that they call “The Great Cold River” which is “The Great River”.’
We all know that the two ancient civilizations, Egyptian and Mesopotamian, were founded on major rivers. It is interesting to speculate on how this may have influenced the legends of neighboring countries, some semiarid such as Israel. Were the people, such as Canaanites, jealous of Egypt’s good fortune? Possibly.
I don’t think the Canaanites had the imagination and complexity for a fake founder from a Great River Civilization.
The names Ibarum and Sarrai are names of Sargon of Akkad’s family. The Akkadian Empire. In Ebla these dynastic names then replace Adamu (Governor) as Ibram, Eber, Barama, and Isara. They also have Ishmaels, Israels, Esau, Isayah, and the only David found so far outside of Palestine.
Ebla has the first use of Aram as a place name.
Fast-forward centuries — Amorite nomadic herders take over after a period of lawlessness to become the Babylonian Empire. Amorites also take over Ebla, adopting the Ebla names because they are actually, like, titles. The king’s flock alone can total 60k.
~1650 BCE Ebla is razed.
~1600 CE, Amorites with names like Salitus (title fake-out, it means Governor) and Yaqub (a name first found in Mesopotamia) begin ruling from the Nile Delta (Biblical Land of Goshen). Yaqub also has colonies from Canaan to Nubia.
Canaan’s colonization following instability along the Euphrates is discussed on the 15th C King of The Habirus inscription: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Idrimi
Imo, the Book of Revelation uses symbols of the conflict between the Akkadian Eblaites and Babylonian Amorites to politely comment on relations with Rome.
Since 2 Cor and Philipians are only products edited from different Pauline texts, the critical question seems to be how they ended up in the same Pauline Corpus. It seems that they must have been created in the same center which, for some reason, decided to edit Paul’s texts and then distribute them in competition with other centers distributing the original letters. The same with the letters of other authors supplementing Paul’s letters – they had to be created and added in the same center that edited Paul’s letters. Have biblical scholars developed Zuntz’s ideas into a more concrete model? Is there any reconstruction of the distribution of letters starting with Pauline and ending with the first Pauline Corpus? Where can you find it?
I can’t think of a reason all these productions were made in the same place. Many of them have very different persepctives, and it’s usually thought that sensible place for Corinthian splicing would be Corinth and Philippian splicing Philippi.
I’m not sure which of Zuntz’s ideas you’re referring to. I’m afraid we can’t reconstruct the process of distribution for the early decades of Paul’s letters, since we have almost literally no evidence.
Paul has his own mailing list for the recipients of the original letters. One of them creates 2 Cor and has its own mailing list related to its own range of influence. The Philipians recipient who made the changes has a different address list. How do these changed epistles end up in one collection? One solution is to search for them individually and find epistles in different places. The second solution is that someone received all of Paul’s letters and made changes not because of the chosen theological perspective, but only to create a collection that would appeal to different theological perspectives and offer it to different audiences. In addition, he hired ghostwriters to add 4 letters (3 + Hebrews).
Both solutions seem possible but highly unlikely.
The simplest solution is a team of ghostwriters and editors creating a narrative and teaching within an epistolary novel . Ultimately, creative writing is always very popular and there is nothing that cannot be written to look authentic.
Assessing authenticity only based on the text always ends with an alternative with two solutions. Looking for one solution, I see hope only in the analysis of the technical issues surrounding the creation of Pauline Corpus.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1enzT7MJ09HT2y2ImKkpzWLK9DAQz_AXs/view?usp=drivesdk
Acknowledging that Paul made the largest contribution in making Jesus Lord and King for thousands of years, he was a dumb.
Son of Man is likely Eblaite lineage. A First Kingdom governor is called Adamu, which is just a proper name for their word for man, ‘adamʻ. They are unusual in that a group of citizens elect their ruler, so like Athens and Rome’s First Citizen. They then get conquered by the ‘world’s first empire’ 👇
Son of God would be Akkadian lineage, because Ebla, the ‘world’s first recorded power’ is integrated into the ‘world’s first empire dynasty’ by the “world’s first living God-king’ Narram-Sin as memorialized in the Nasiriyah stele.
Nasiriyah = Nasoreans. There was known two-way travel, there’s a Canal of Ebla near Bosra.
Eblaites believed in resurrection, they wrapped their folks as swaddled babies for a rebirth. They talked to them. There’s no mourning tradition for their kings.
They made lots of copies of their texts, so maybe Nabonidus in translating Narram-Sin’s cuneiform and other ancient birdsmash knew about them.
Dr. Ehrman, Mike Licona and other evangelicals use dictation as an excuse for how John and James would have been able to produce letters despite being illiterate. I know you have said there is no evidence of a secretary translating as they took dictation, but my father-in-law (a pastor) insists they were originally dictated in Aramaic and then translated later. What reasons do we know that 1/2/3 John and James were originally Greek compositions and not translations?
Whenever someone says something like this, ask them waht evidence they have. Among other things, just to take James as an example, it is filled with Greek philosophical terms and topoi and Greek linguistic features not found in a Semitic language. So too the Johannine corpus: this is composition Greek, not translation Greek. This may have been questioned occasionally say 70=80 years ago, but I don’t know of any scholars holding to this view any more. The philological analyses are pretty decisive. As to secretaries, what can I say. You either look at the evidence or you choose not to. I spell it out in my book Forgery and Counterforgery. If anyone has come up with a counter-argument, I haven’t heard of it yet!
Hi again,
Here’s my second inquiry:
What do Christians mean when they say that the punishment for sin is death and that Jesus’ sacrifice took away the punishment of death? What is the divine punishment of death?
God told Adam that if he disobeyed he would die. After that, everyone disobeyed. The punishment is death. Jesus died to pay the punishment/penalty for others.
I love this. John Locke “blank slate theory”. So through most of human kind we blame Eve who wasn’t even directly told to avoid which tree. & no the serpent didn’t lie. but she is condemned.
Adam where did he get learned? from naming the animals!
As far as Jesus’ death, that condemned the whole world to God’s wrath, rather than saving it.
other things: Jesus was tried for violently disturbing the business at the Temple [in line with St Paul], rather than his gang. I grew up thinking if this wasn’t his house, why did he get involved. Just like the reason for John the Baptist’s execution, he was getting involved in stuff that was not core to either of their ministries.
Zuntz dates Pauline Corpus to 100 CE. The Gospels are first attested in 1 Clem dated 97-140CE.
Isn’t the Antiquities of the Jews from 94 CE the source for the historical Jesus? Assuming that Paul’s letters are a fictional epistolary novel.
I know your critical opinion about TF. That’s why I took this opinion for granted.
And I finally read Josephus. Josephus presents SignProphets to the audience in a colorful way, on the one hand condemning the heroes and on the other hand promoting them in a specific way as those who dare to oppose the prevailing social relations.
The audience heard the stories about Jesus and others and wanted more. A simple mechanism ” – Tell us more about Jesus. – I don’t know anything else. – Then find out.”
These people listening to Josephus wanted to be like those Jews and Greeks from TF.
Writers helped with this. They invented and added the missing historical tradition. Apostle and gospels. The Apostle knew as much about Jesus as Josephus. The Gospels – passion narrative plus more and more and more.
Now it’s time for the final question – did Josephus invent Jesus or was he based on some story when writing TF?
How could Josephus have invented Jesus when there are stories about Jesus known from writings in the 50s decades before he started writing?
Paul’s letters, are dated by content to 40-63CE. The problem is that the letters are known only from the Corpus Pauline which, according to consensus, was created around 100 CE (G. Zuntz’s famous hand-drawn diagram). 10 letters written by 2-3 ghostwriters and subjected to intensive editing. Is Paul as an author a historical or invented figure? No biblical scholar can answer this. Only opinions based intuition are available. This alternative has no solution. The text itself makes it impossible to distinguish historical tradition from invented tradition.
Gospels – dating from 70CE to .. 1Clem? (97-140CE).
We have arguments for early dating of letters and gospels. We have arguments for late dating.
Josephus is between.
There in fact is not a consensus on the matter, at all. Zuntz of course was writing many decades ago. And biblical scholars do answer the question of Paul’s existence, all the time, but probably not in the way you’d prefer. 🙂
Another scenario – our searcher found some set of Paul’s original uncut letters. Then he has to make all the editing changes and gluing various texts together and creating new ones. Otherwise, they will not be included in one collection. Even if he was up to such a task, he would not decide to do it. He found the original letters himself and doesn’t know how many copies there are and where they are. There is no control over it and this excludes such far-reaching interference.
Pauline Corpus is a content product. As well as fake letters added to the supposedly real ones.
“Real” letters – they are also a product. There were no homogeneous original texts because their original circulation is theoretically possible but very unlikely. Story of Apostle was created for higer good and later developed.
My preferences change so often that I stopped tracking them myself. Thank you very much for your concern.
There are no criteria that could determine the authenticity of the letters and Paul himself (as the author). Regardless of the consensus, both conflicting solutions are equally possible. I don’t have to convince anyone of this. It’s just the way it is. The result of the biblical scholars’ vote does not change this.
So we must leave the text alone and address other complementary problems in the hope that these results will provide one answer.
They don’t have much to explore. Actually, there is only one.
How was the corps created?
Let’s assume that the epistles were found individually in different places as part of the heritage rescue commission. This in itself seems unrealistic due to the vast expanse of the Empire, but this is not the main problem. It turns out that the Christian community started by Paul is dominated by redacted copies, amalgams and fakes. As if the main goal of all these copyists was to endlessly correct the Apostle from various theological perspectives. Our brave seeker finds nothing authentic, nothing cut-and-dried almost everywhere. Complete absurdity.
Dr. Ehrman, I have heard the argument that Jesus’ disciples dictated their gospels to Greek writers, and that is why the gospels were written in Greek, not Hebrew (and that is how Matthew or John could be the authors, even if they were illiterate).
What do you think about this argument? Is it plausible? Is it used in academia?
I show why this can’t work in my book Forgery and Counterforgery, based on all the evidence we know of from the ancient world about secretaries. Most peole who make an argument like this are just repeating what they’ve heard: they have’n’t actually looked at evidence. Ask one of them some time: where do we know of an author in antiquity who dictated a book in one language and had a secretary take his words and translate them into another language to be published in that form? They won’t have an answer.
There’s no evidence that I’ve been able to find. Look up the word “secretaries” on the blog and you’ll see some posts on it.