I mentioned in my previous post that in 2012 I was asked to write an article on Newsweek about the Christmas story. Before it appeared I posted it on the blog; here it is in full (at least as I sent it in to the magazine), in two parts.
Here is the first half:
******************************
This past September, Harvard University professor Karen King unveiled a newly discovered Gospel fragment that she entitled “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.” This wisp of a papyrus has stirred up a hornet’s nest and raised anew questions about what we can know about the historical Jesus of Nazareth, and about whether there are other Gospels outside the New Testament that can contribute valuable information. Few questions could be more timely, here in the season that celebrates Jesus’ birth.
The fragment is just a scrap – the size of a credit card – written in Coptic, the language of ancient Egypt. It contains only eight broken lines of writing, but in one of these Jesus speaks of “my wife.” Conspiracy theorists immediately leaped on the news as if it were a revelation from on high and claimed that it vindicates the views of Jesus’ matrimonial state set forth by that inestimable authority, Dan Brown, in his blockbuster novel, The Da Vinci Code. Conservative Christians cried “foul” and insisted that such an insignificant piece of papyrus proves nothing. King and her colleagues have taken the middle ground and argued that since the fragment is to be dated to the fourth Christian century, some three hundred years after Jesus and any of his relatives passed from the scene, it can tell us what later Christians believed about Jesus, but not what actually happened during his life.
As it turns out, most experts of early Christianity have come to think the fragment is a hoax, a forgery produced in recent years by an amateur who, unlike King and scholars of her stature, was not well-versed in the niceties of Coptic grammar and so was unable to cover up the traces of his own deceit. The final verdict is not yet in: we are still to learn the results from the scientific analysis of the ink, to see if it is in fact ancient or modern. But even if, as appears likely, the text is a fake, it does once again alert us to the fact that there are Gospels about Jesus that have come down to us from the ancient world, which present information at odds with widely held views.[2020 BTW: it is now known to be a fake; you can see some posts on it on the Blog. Just do a word search for Jesus’ Wife]
As Christians around the world now remember Jesus’ birth, it is worth considering that …
THE REST OF THIS POST is for members only. If you don’t belong yet, give it a shot. It doesn’t cost much and pays huge dividends. And every penny goes to charity!
“Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”
I still have the issue of Newsweek December 17, 2012. The magazine cover says “Who was Jesus?” by Bart D. Ehrman. It’s a collector’s item to me.
Wow.
Isn’t every miracle story by definition “far-fetched”? If only they were referred to as “absurd improbablities,” as in “in this absurd improbablity, Jesus defies the laws of gravity….”
Bart, I’m wondering how you view the birth narrative from Matthew and Luke with a historian’s eye. In many parts of, say, the passion narrative, we can divide it up unto things historically supportable (eg jesus was crucified), things that may have happened but the evidence is less clear (eg Jesus’ body disappeared from the tomb), and things that from a historical analysis standpoint are historically unlikely (eg Jesus actually died and then rose from the dead).
But the nativity doesn’t appear *at all* in the earliest Gospel of Mark. Do you see any parts of the account in Matthew/Luke that would fall into the historically likely category (perhaps something as simple as that Jesus was born in Bethlehem?), or is it more likely just a wholesale myth that grew up over the years between the crucifixion and the later gospels?
As a Christian I certainly take inspiration from the nativity story but I’ve never as an adult felt that much or any of it has the feel of a historical account, or even that the writer intended it to be a historical account.
I think it is likely Jesus was born to two Jewish peasants named Joseph and Mary who lived in Galilee. Other than that, I don’t think there’s much there we can say is historical.
Could you write an article on the problem of hapax legomena in the New Testament?
Not sure. What’s the problem?
The problem with hapax legomena was (I assumed) that since they occur only once we don’t know what they mean. At least if they’re not regular conjugations or appear in some other text.
Ah,usually in the NT a hapax legomenon refers to a word that occurs only once *there*. Most of the time they occur lots of other places in our millions of words of ancient Greek. Those that do *not* occur anywhwere else (there are a few) are pretty easy to figure out from the context or from their etymology. It’s different in the Hebrew Bible. There we don’t have lots of other texts in Hebrew to use to figure out what words mean, and it can get very, very tricky. Semitic linguists rely on similar roots occurring in other related languages where their meaning is more clearcut, to provide some clues.
Bart,
Do I understand correctly that Matthew and Luke are considered to be written independent from each other?
When, why do they have a number of similar points, like:
– Virginity of Mary;
– (Illogical) Joseph’s genealogy;
– Invented journey to Bethlehem;
– Jesus’ veneration by shepards/magi; etc.
Also, if Matthiew came up with the idea of virgin birth from the almah → parthenos mistranslation, how did Luke arrive at the same idea? Or is it Q that had a Jesus’ saying like “My mom was a virgin”?
The only two points that are actually shared are that his mother was a virgin and he was born in Bethlehem. These were early rumors about Jesus that came to be fleshed out in different ways by different story tellers.
“…they sound implausible and “obviously” made up, as legends and fabrications.” I used to be incredulous that people could believe the story of Joseph Smith and his deeply flawed book, but over time came to realize that all mainstream religions including my own (Christianity) had implausible stories and claims and that there are many strong factors such as family and culture that influence our willingness to believe the unbelievable, even over our rational faculties.
Dr. Ehrman,
Is the Pontius Pilate stone discovered at Caesarea Maritima in 1961 authentic?
Archaeologically, is this the closest that we’ve come to the historical Jesus?
Absolutely is. There are other important archaeological finds: for example the burial box of Caiaphas.
The inestimable authority of Dan Brown.
Hysterical…