Loading...What were the key issues, controversies, developments, and concerns of the Christian communities of the first three centuries? These are the topics considered in my book After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed, 2015).
In the previous post I explained that the book is a collection of most of the most important writings from the second and third centuries — the period right after the books of the New Testament were themselves written. Here I talk about the various themes that I used to organize my collection, themes that I judged to be the most significant for anyone trying to understand Christianity in earliest times. This will take two posts.
******************************
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!
Hi Bart I’m a little confused. Is the gospel of John written with the intention of trying to prove that Jesus is YHVH or does it still hold Unitarian beliefs at conception and it’s the post interpretations of it that give us such vivid “trinity” dogma from it? Thanks-
The Gospel of John never speaks of YHWH but clearly differentiates Jesus from God, even though Jesus claims some level of unity with him. For Jewish writers (and most everyone who had any connection withJudaism), there was only one God, who in the Hebrew Bible is named YHWH. Tha’ts the God Jesus prays to in John.
I think this best answers my Quora ?: https://www.quora.com/How-can-you-disprove-the-existence-of-the-Mosaic-triune-God
I use 3 AI’s to give me answers: Poe, Gemini, & Bing. The good thing about Poe is it can further elaborate on the 1st answer.
But of course it can also spout rubbish!
At Saint Catharines Monistary they (the monks) are in the process of digitizing all their books. I wonder, and hope, a new wealth of information becomes available.
Hi bart
How do you think the legend of 500 people seeing jesus at the same time could form, do you think its possible that there was a rumor that paul just happened to belive. But i dont get it why paul says some of them are still alive does he invite them in some way to check but if so wouldnt it be impossible because corith is so far from jerusalem.
There’s a whole field of scholarship devoted to rumor and gossip, and it’s very hard to know how any particular one began, especially if it comes from long ago. But yes, I think it must have been a rumor that Paul heard and repeated. There are,of course, tons of rumors reported inthe Gospels and ooutside f them. IN a sense, all or at least most of the legendary/fictional elements of the Gospels are rumors that get recorded.
Your comments regarding the dynamic of Christians being mocked and their aggressive apologetic prompts me to think of how this could play out as literature.
R.G. Price, The Gospel of Mark as Reaction and Allegory, argues that Mark – which is the first gospel written – is really in this vein, i.e. written as a critique of how unconvincing Christianity is. After all the Jewish and Christian god was crucified and Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Jewish temple.
Removing that Price is a Jesus denier, my question is: Based on the literature of the time which you cite, could such dynamics have been strong enough at the time Mark was written? If not, then Price’s interpretation could not have been the theme of Mark’s author.
Yes, you nail the problem. Mark doesn’t speak about God being crucified, etc. I do think, though, that Mark very much was interested in showing how Jesus could be the messiah even though he was crucified, against Jewish criticisms, and that in fact Mark shifts it to argue that Jesus was the messiah precisely *because* he was crucified.
Hi bart
Was jesus appearing to the 12 apostles a early tradision? it is not in mark but mark dosent have even the appearence to peter, mayby the writter of mark just dosent care about appearences. It in 1 Corinthians 15: 3-8 i suppose peter woulnt have to know about the tradision that jesus appeared to all of them.
It’s certainly before 1 Corinthians, so yes, it’s early.
Unrelated question. In Revelation 1:7, is John of Patmos claiming that when Jesus returns even the Roman soldiers who nailed Jesus to the cross will be alive to see his return?
Revelation 1:7 “Look! He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him, and all the tribes of the earth will wail on account of him.”
No — he’s quoting Scripture, and he probably just means “those who rejected him.” He MAY have in mind “the Jews” (about whom he has nothing positive to say)
The *major* issue for the church is (and has always been) how believers attain salvation — and the fact that Jesus promised: “everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”
Bringing the message that oneness with God is available to everyone — for the mere asking! 🙂 — was the very reason “the Word became flesh” in Jesus of Nazareth.
Disagreements over his mother’s erstwhile (or perpetual) virtue, the bizarrely cannibalistic overtones in taking literally his lament at the Last Supper, etc., pale.
The *crucial* issue was raised by the Rich Young Man who asked: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”
The answer from Jesus is as simple and straightforward (see Mt 11:25//Lk 10:21) as it is profound and surpassing — an insight that still reverberates two millennia later in the words of a famous sage from our own era: “All you need is love.” 😇
Throughout the gospels — from the reply he gave to this first interlocutor to his final parable of the “Sheep and the Goats” — wasn’t Jesus perfectly clear about what brings salvation?
And isn’t this “Good News” for seekers, also *Bad News* for a superfluous, institutionalized church?
Authenticity aside, did Jesus ever suggest that salvation is anything *other* than a 100% personal, individual undertaking? Did he even hint that a relationship with the Father is not *entirely* one-on-One?
He explicitly repudiates the “Abraham is our Father” rationalization (Jn 8:39), echoing the judgment of his mentor on this (Mt 3:9//Lk 3:8). Likewise, he dismisses as irrelevant (or, at least, unavailing) a “did we not prophesy… and cast out demons… and do many mighty works in your name” defense (Mt 7:22).
All the quotes I can find have Jesus assuring that “all you need is love” (in that other John’s refrain 😉) of God and neighbor (Mk 12:29-31//Mt 22:37-39//Lk 10:27).
In fact, he not only seems fixated on expressions of the latter (e.g., advising the RYM to adhere to the Ten Commandments), but is mostly dismissive of Jewish traditions (dietary fastidiousness, ritual ablution, Temple sacrifice, etc.) WRT the former as implicitly more pro forma than devout.
Aside from the strange (and IMHO more than a little implausible) authority to “bind” and “loose” that Jesus putatively bequeathed to the first pope, is there *any* reason to think that church proclamations and/or dispensations aren’t as useless as tits on a papal bull? 😏
He most often appears to be speaking about repenting and being saved to groups of people.
Asceticism, repentance and apocalypticism were obviously axiomatic for Jesus or he wouldn’t have been a disciple of John the Baptist.
But it wasn’t proclaiming David’s conquering Son of Man that made Jesus the most important religious figure in history. It was the revolutionary, transcendental, spiritual gestalt he propounded that brought him renown.
Even fundamentalists don’t contest that Christian history was preserved entirely by word of mouth for decades before anyone put quill to papyrus. Nor is there (AFAIK) any dispute that these ‘telephone’ tales of Jesus’ words and deeds circulated in compartmentalized (i.e. memorable) “pericopes.”
The authenticity of individual pericopes can be assessed via the textual criticism criteria you often cite. But wasn’t their chronological ordering in the gospels an entirely editorial decision? Could the sequence we got be other than pure speculation — by authors working many decades after and miles away from the events narrated?
How do we know, for instance, that Jesus didn’t make the “some of you standing here” statement at the *beginning* of his ministry, or his Beatitudinal pronouncements at the *end*?
How and why Jesus underwent this spiritual evolution is an issue for theologians. But where and when? Those are historical questions for scholars.
Do they ever get asked?
Yup. But of course there is no way to give a definitive answer, since no relevant evidence exists. We simply can’t tell if Jesus’ views changed over time. For that matter, we don’t know how long his ministry actually lasted. In Mark it appears to be a few months only, from Fall to Spring.
Both Matthew and Luke adopted the timeline they got from Mark. So assuming there’s nothing indicative in (what little survived of) the works that never got the Papal Seal of Approval, the only remaining source is John. 🙄
The good news about John’s version of the Good News is that, even if he *was* familiar with any of the synoptics (IMHO an unconvincing reach, but apparently a trending view among your compadres), we can be confident that he disregarded Mark’s timeline.
Although as you note, the synoptics allow for a public ministry of as brief as a few months, John characterizes Jesus’ ill-fated sojourn to Jerusalem as the *third* Passover in his narrative — which would perforce require a timespan >2 years.
Further, John places one of the few pericopes he actually shares with the synoptics — the “Cleansing of the Temple” — as the inaugural, public event of Jesus’ ministry, rather than the Sadducee-offending showstopper that brought it to a brutal and untimely end.
The bad news about relying on John’s Good News is that this author’s account is, far and away, the least credible.
But, admittedly, a Jesus who “was in the beginning with God” could hardly have progressed from there. 😏
Your objective analysis of the surviving record, professor, makes your scholarship invaluable.
However, (bet you saw that coming 😏) it appears to be entirely through a “Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium” lens.
Yes, he was an impoverished, Jewish peasant living under the caliga heel of foreign occupation — and during a time of cultural obsession with apocalyptic prophecy.
True, he explicitly predicted the imminent arrival of the messianic liberator prophesied by Daniel some two centuries earlier, God’s avenging “Son of Man.”
I’ll not only see *all* of that, but raise you a hypothesis that Jesus probably spent a decade or more of his unaccounted “missing years” at the Qumran monastery of the (apocalypse-obsessed) Essenes.
That would explain:
1.) how a presumptively illiterate, peasant tekton from a tiny hamlet in the Palestinian outback managed to acquire a Pharisee/Sadducee confounding knowledge of scripture and history,
2.) his bizarrely excessive asceticism and rigorous devotion to solitary meditation and prayer,
3.) why he began as a disciple of a fellow extremist (on *all* of the above BTW🤔) as part of a small band of devout, brother monks who chose to abandon their reclusive, cloistered life on ‘a mission from God’ to warn the hoi polloi of the looming apocalypse.
But…
Jesus only *began* as a disciple of the doomsday preacher who went on to fame and misfortune as John the Baptist.
The protege of “the voice of one crying in the wilderness” eventually propounded a *far* more sophisticated message than a prosaic warning that “the axe is laid to the root of the trees.”
Did predicting TEOTWAWKI make Jesus the most influential spiritual figure in history? Or was it his paradigm-shattering, soul-penetrating insights? His advocacy of the life-transforming, salvific power in having unconditional love and unqualified compassion for friend and foe alike? His propounding priorities that eschew attachment to temporal (inherently transitory) things such as wealth, power, and even familial relationships?
The apocalyptic preachings of Jesus (and his mentor) clearly proved to be mistaken. The Messiah did *not* appear to overturn the world order and establish the Kingdom of God on earth. The Son of Man was a no-show! 😞
Fortunately, that no longer mattered.
Somewhere along the way Jesus began teaching that what *did* matter was coming to understand that when your self-centered, self-destructive, little brother finally comes to his senses and returns home, you should welcome him with joy and forgiveness. Not just for his sake, but for your own! 😇
Jesus would undoubtedly have begun his ministry by following in the footsteps of his mentor, i.e., preaching the imminent arrival of the hellfire-and-damnation Messiah.
I assume, however, that scholars don’t share the apologist assumption that Jesus taught everything, everywhere, all at once.
Surely the world-conquering “Son of Man” prophesied by King David (and John the Baptist) is, at best, incompatible with, if not outright contradictory to, the preternaturally limitless compassion and forgiveness of the “Son of God.”
Doesn’t this make it more likely that apocalyptic concerns predominated in the *earlier* part of Jesus’ ministry — notwithstanding where gospel authors, far removed in time and place from the events, located these teachings in their hearsay narratives?
Consider the circumstances in which the “Son of Man” is explicitly mentioned in (foundational) Mark.
In eight of the thirteen instances where Jesus uses this honorific it is in a ‘royal we’ type substitution for a simple, mundane pronoun (Mk 2:10, 2:28, 8:31, 9:31,10:33,10:45,14:21,14:41) — each a one-two punch at its own plausibility!
First, how could Jesus have been warning of the looming wrath about to be wrought by God’s Messiah, if he *was* that Messiah — and, therefore, already “in your midst”?
[almost out of words 🙄]
Second, the third-person wording, already awkward on the lips of Jesus, becomes downright suspicious flowing from the quill of an apologist-author. It smacks of interpolation/substitution by someone disposed to seeing his sources through rose-colored, “Second Coming” glasses.
FWIW there is also a passage in Mark 9 where a dual-use Son of Man (both as the looming, cosmic conquerer and as a self-reference) puts in an appearance — in an editorial comment by the author (Mk 9:9), followed by another quote attributed to Jesus (Mk 9:12). The latter BTW is not only similarly improbable, but includes an allusion to some OT prophecy that eludes me.
This leaves only three of the thirteen mentions of the “Son of Man” in Mark that unambiguously references Daniel’s world-beating Messiah who will bring an end to history (Mk 8:38; 13:26; 14:62).
And in an ironic post script to this recitation, the last of *these* is quoting Jesus’ rejoinder to the High Priest at his trail before the Sanhedrin — an event that Mark’s source couldn’t possibly have witnessed in the first place. 😧