Loading...Polycarp’s letter to the Philippians, which I began discussing yesterday, consists largely of general moral exhortations. The Philippians are to love one another and to pray for one another and to give alms whenever possible; their wives are to
Get access to Dr. Ehrman's library of 4,000+ articles plus five new articles per week about the New Testament and early Christianity. It costs as little as $2.99/mth and every cent goes to charity!
Unlock 4,000+ Articles Like This!
I learned from your blog posts about Essenes that they were ascetics who deliberately removed themselves from the larger society to follow the divine law more strictly. Jesus went the opposite way, in fact immersing himself deeper into the regular folks including riff-raff so to speak. Then I also started reading about desert fathers, anchorites and so on, the ascetics of early Xtianity. If Jesus seem to have repudiated the practice of isolation/asceticism through his own life’s example, how come it springs up again and gained reverence and authority ? It seems that Jesus would have been against closing yourself off from humanity.
It started about 300 years after Jesus, among his followers who were intent on devoting themselves completely to spiritual things in stead of the physical pleasures of life. By that time Christians knew about Jesus’s own life only through thge Gospels, not by personal acuqaintance with his story.
Bart, Id like to ask some advise if I may. I’m new to New Testament and recently I was reading a disagreement between two scholars. Each made their case pro and con and ultimately I had to decide who’s case was more persuasive to me. But then I realized that whenever I disagree with a scholar about *anything* I am disagreeing with someone about a text that I can’t even *read* unless they *translate* it for me.
Something about that seemed. . . wrong.
What would your advise be to a lay person who finds themselves in this position? How can one make a responsible and informed decision on these kinds of matters without having any academic expertise in the field?
Great question, and without an easy answer. The only real answer is to read LOTS. What I generally do when reading in fields I don’t know much about (astronomy, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, etc.) (tends to be the sciences just now), is figure out who are the most widely recognized experts in the field and read *them*; when they disagree, if I find one argument more persuasive than another, I go with it. On MAIN things the top iexperts tend to agree. When it comes to anything involving religion/Bible/etc. it sometimes helps to consider whether the author has any personal stake in the matter. If two “experts” disagree on, say, whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem or not, and one of them holds to the inerrancy of the Bible and the other simply is inbterested in it as historical question, then that may weigh in a bit on your judgment (since the first hsa an obligatoin to argue one side and the other is, in principle, open to either); when that’s the case, you need to look carefully at the arguments themselves and decide (for yourself) if there are flaws or holes in either one of them.
A very helpful response. Thank you kindly! And don’t worry, I learned VERY quickly to stay away from apologetics altogether.
Since Paul must have written dozens of letters in his missionary journeys, why do scholars think that we only have seven?
It’s something I’m deeply pondering. He must have written hundreds. I’d like to come up with a hypothesis at some point. At this stage I’m mainly surprised that the quesiton almost nevcer has even occurred to scholars who talk about the formation of the canon (I read three of them today!)
Dr. Ehrman,
Polycarp is quoting 1st and 2nd Timothy in this epistle. And you said in the other post that he probably wrote to the Philippians sometime after 110 CE. So, does that mean these pseudo-Pauline epistles had to be written in the 90s CE? If so, how would they have been thought of as Pauline so quickly? Thanks!
They are usually dated around then. Most pseudepigraphic writings are accepted as authentic right off the bat. In the modern period, the “Hitler Diaries” were thought to be authentic as soon as they appeared, and authenticated by experts. It wasn’t long before they were shown to be forged. (Unlike the Pastorals, though, the process of detection wsa made possible by the use of modern methods of examination and analysis on the originals themselves.) But throughout antiquity, forged writings were rarely identified as forgeries on the spot, so far as we know.
Using the word Proto-orthodoxy doesn’t do justice to the remarkable diversity of cosmogonies, christologies, and philosophies that existed in the Roman Empire over the first three centuries resulting in the Roman Catholic religion. Orthodoxy implies something that already exists. To truly describe the historical diversity that existed at the time, it would be better to refine the taxonomy of competing viewpoints with more granularity. Using the word Proto-Orthodoxy oversimplifies the taxonomy by lumping groups into those that represented the winning theology and those that represent the losing theology (heresies). The issue is analogous to the Russian Revolution. We don’t call the Bolsheviks proto-orthodoxy just because they eventually gained dominance. There already was an orthodoxy represented by the White Russian coalition. In this sense, the Jewish culture represented orthodoxy. Proto-Christianity better describes the general environment as does Judeo-Christianity better describes the eventual winners.
Orthodoxy was not particularly internally coherent either, I’d say.
But when we say “proto-orthodoxy” we are always using it with a caveat that we are talking about a number of particularly trenchant doctrinal ideas/practices: there is one God; he created all things; Christ is his son; he was born of a virgin; he was raised from the dead; it was his death that brought salvation, etc. THese are all hotly debated in the second and third canturies, but came to be “resolved.” That led to huge other problems/issues. And there was enormous diversity among the “proto-orthodox” on other issues. (It’s kinda like differentiating between the Methodists and the Roman Catholics; it’s not that we are saying every Methodist or Roman CAtholic thinks the same things!)