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New Testament Texts and Manuscripts

The Gospel of Matthew: For Further Reading

Now that I’ve devoted two posts to the major sine qua non of Matthew’s Gospel – one that lays out its major themes and emphases, the other that deals with who wrote it, when, and why, I can provide a bibliography  of important works, written by scholars for non-scholars.  You may find one or more of these useful if you choose to to explore Matthew’s Gospel further.  I have given brief annotations for each book to give you a sense of what it’s about and so help you decide which, if any, might be worth your while. I have divided the list into three sections: Books that provide important discussion of Matthew in general or with respect to a particularly key topic. Commentaries that give lengthy introductions to all matters of importance about the Gospel and then go passage by passage to provide more detailed interpretation (that’s where you can dig more deeply into “what does this particular word actually mean?”; “what is the real point of this passage”; “how does this passage [...]

2025-01-23T12:08:16-05:00January 19th, 2025|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

The Hobby Lobby, the Museum of the Bible, and Incredible Academic Fraud

It's amazing how much fraud goes on in the study of ancient manuscripts, sometimes to the tune of millions of dollars, often, these days, oddly, in highly religious circles.  Here's the final part of my discussion of fraud connected with New Testament fragments from about five and a half years ago (May, 2020). ****************************** An article appeared in The Atlantic this past week that exposes academic fraud at the highest levels, involving millions of dollars, unscrupulous scholars, and evangelical Christians so intent on proving the truth of the Bible that they were willing, even eager, to engage in unethical and fraudulent activities to do so.  It seems weird, but the case involves Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. The article was written by one of the country’s best investigative journalists, Ariel Sabar, who earlier had exposed for once and all the modern forgery known as “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” in another article in the Atlantic  (I’ve blogged on this forgery a number of times as the story unfolded; just search for “Jesus’ wife” on [...]

2024-12-01T21:22:04-05:00December 11th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts|

The Low-Down on That First-Century Gospel of Mark

Several people have asked about what ever happened to that so-called first-century copy of the Gospel of Mark that I mentioned in my just-finished post on mummy-masks.  I explained what happened when the mystery finally got solved about five years ago.  Here's what I said then.  (It gets even more bizarre later, as I'll explain in the next post that was published about a year after this one.)   ****************************** [Originally published October 15, 2019] There’s been a new and rather astonishing development in the story involving the so-called “First Century Gospel of Mark.”  If you recall, a few years ago some textual scholars began to claim that we now have in our possession the oldest copy of Mark (by a long shot) ever to be discovered.  The existence of the manuscript was first announced in 2012 by Prof. Dan Wallace of Dallas Theological Seminary, in a public debate he was having, as it turns out, with me at UNC Chapel Hill. Until now, our first fragmentary copy of Mark could be dated to around [...]

2024-12-03T10:41:23-05:00December 10th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts|

Final Reflections on Mummy Masks and Manuscripts

OK, I am at the tail end of this thread on mummy masks and the alleged discovery of a first-century fragment of Mark’s Gospel.   This thread was first posted in 2015.  Here is how I ended it then. But I did want to provide access to an interesting article and penetrating set of questions on the issue published a week ago on CNN by my friends Candida Moss and Joel Baden (they crank out a lot of articles on issues in biblical studies, especially as items appear in the news).  Candida is a Professor of New Testament at Notre Dame and Joel is a Professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale.  I’ve re-posted this article with permission.  It comes from CNN: Was oldest gospel really found in a mummy mask? ****************************** (CNN) Media outlets have been abuzz this week with the news that the oldest fragment of a New Testament gospel -- and thus the earliest witness of Jesus' life and ministry -- had been discovered hidden inside an Egyptian mummy mask and was going to [...]

2024-12-01T21:07:00-05:00December 8th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts|

A True Expert Speaks About Mummy Masks and Papyri

  In our age of the superiority of non-expertise, occasionally an authority speaks out who reveals the truth.  Here is a case in point, when a true expert on ancient papyri explains what's going on with those mummy masks I've mentioned in earlier posts. Again, this is from 2015; things have changed in terms of the specific case, but not necessarily in terms of the frauds that some people are willing to engage in for the sake of their historical and religious claims. Here is what I said about it nine years ago. ****************************** One of the things that I find disconcerting about all the discussion about whether it is legitimate to destroy mummy masks in order to get NT papyri is that the only people who seem to know anything about what has been found (this alleged first century copy of the Gospel of Mark) are not experts in the specific fields in which expertise is required, both to dismantle masks and to date papyri.  As it turns out, they're all friends [...]

2024-12-01T21:02:56-05:00December 7th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts|

Can We Defend Destroying Mummy Masks?

Here is my second re-post from 2015 about destroying ancient mummy masks in hopes of finding manuscripts. In yesterday’s post I cited an article by Mary-Ann Russo that explained the situation about the mummy masks that were being destroyed in order to acquire papyrus fragments of the New Testament.  The scholar mainly cited in that article as being involved in that process was Craig Evans, a friend of mine with whom I have had several public debates.  Craig feels that he has been somewhat misrepresented in this article, and sent me a clarification.  I have asked and received his permission, and this is what he says:  (NOTE: after this paragraph is a lengthier explanation and justification of what they are doing when destroying mummy masks): Last summer I gave a presentation on the number, age, and reliability of New Testament manuscripts. In this lecture I described the effort under way in recent  years to recover manuscript fragments, including biblical manuscripts, from ancient cartonnage, including mummy masks. All of these materials are from Egypt. [...]

2024-12-01T20:52:00-05:00December 5th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts|

Destroying Mummy Masks

Is it OK to destroy ancient mummy masks in hopes of finding yet something more valuable out of them? I have just returned from my annual professional meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, where thousands of biblical scholars come to read academic papers to one another, sit on panels to review books or discuss topics, and, well, schmooz.  These days I mainly schmooz.  But I did go to a few sessions, including one particularly intriguing panel discussion of a fantastic new book on the corrupt ways manuscripts are allegedly discovered these days, written by papyrologist (expert in the study of ancient papyri manuscripts) Roberta Mazza, Stolen Fragments: Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts  Among the intriguing topics that come up in her full-scale attack on scholars who rely on the black market to get their "ancient manuscripts" was the issue I've dealt with before on the blog, the case of the "first-century Gospel of Mark" (which was decidedly not from the first century, we found out) said to be [...]

2024-12-01T20:41:19-05:00December 4th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts|

Misquoting Jesus and My Fall From Fundamentalism

Is the Bible the inerrant Word of God or a very human book with all the problems that normally entails?  For me, realizing that we don’t have the Bible in its original form was important to my thinking as I moved away believing the Bible had come straight to us from God. I’ve been talking about all this as background to my book Misquoting Jesus (Harper, 2005).  In the following excerpt I begin to explain the wide-ranging implications of my new way for understanding the New Testament. My previous post ended with my realization, as stated in my book, that “there are more variations in the New Testament than there are words in the New Testament.”  Lots and lots of conservative Christian scholars have maligned me putting it this way, even though they know it’s true.  They just think it’s too radical.  Little do they know (until I inform them) that the phrase came to me from the textual scholar they adore above all others, my mentor Bruce Metzger, who used to say it all [...]

2024-08-16T10:20:48-04:00August 11th, 2024|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts|

Why I Wrote Misquoting Jesus

My book Misquoting Jesus was the biggest surprise of my career.  No one thought (as colleague scholars frequently told me, somewhat emphatically, in advance) that a book like this would go *anywhere*.  A discussion of changes made by scribes while copying the manuscripts of the New Testament?  What?  Even New Testament experts were and are by and large simply uninterested in the field, considering it a technical, detailed, and incredibly dull enterprise.  My friends in graduate school thought i was an odd-duck for wanting even to study the matter, let alone devote a lot of my scholarship to it.  And to think about writing a  book for non-scholars about it?  Yikes. I've been devoting posts to explaining the various books I've written, and so now it's time to hit this one.  This will take will take three posts, all excerpted from the Introduction to the book (Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (Harper, 2005).  In this opening bit I give the autobiographical background to why I originally got [...]

Interested in Textual Criticism? Probably My Most Useful (Edited) Book

Many people on the blog are interested in textual criticism, the field that examines our surviving manuscripts of the New Testament to figure out what the authors originally wrote and to see how and why their writings came to be changed by later scribes.  One of the most important books I've published was one I didn't write (!), an edited collection of essays by leading scholars in the world on various aspects of the topic.  The book was for academics, but some of you might be interested in what it was all about.   I was asked about it many years ago on the blog, and thought reposting the question and response would be a good way to introduce it here.   QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman, in your first and second edition of The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis that you co-edited with Dr. Michael Holmes, what was your role in editing, especially since some articles were beyond your admitted expertise? RESPONSE: This is actually a [...]

2024-08-09T09:37:30-04:00August 7th, 2024|Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

More on the Initial Debacle on First-Century Mark (in relation to the Dead Sea Scrolls)

In my previous post -- originally put up on the blog in April 2012 -- I explained how in a debate I had in February of that year, evangelical New Testament scholar and textual critic Dan Wallace to my surprise (shock!) announced that now for the first time we actually have a copy of the Gospel of Mark from the first century, not long after the book was written, and that it confirms what he has said all along, that we have the original text of the New Testament.  But he wouldn't tell us anything about the copy -- how big it was, who established its date, whether the date had been corroborated, etc. Here I continue, again from the post in 2012, edited a bit. ************************** Over the two months since the debate Dan has been repeatedly asked for more information, and he will not give it. I don’t know if he owns the manuscript, if he has seen the manuscript, if it is his book that will contain information about [...]

2024-07-17T12:48:43-04:00July 20th, 2024|Bart's Debates, New Testament Manuscripts|

The Debacle Over the First-Century Copy of Mark

This morning I had a long interview with BBC4 (radio) in London about a new book that is coming out by renowned expert in ancient manuscripts (mainly classical) Roberta Mazza, that deals at length with the debacle over the alleged first-century copy of the Gospel of Mark.  It was a debacle because it was based on bogus claims. I was intimately connected with the beginning of the affair back in 2012, and in looking over the blog see I haven't dealt with it at any length for many years.  I've decided to repost a series of blogs that spanned eight years to show how the whole thing unfolded.  It took that long for the truth to come out.  Here is the first post I made (with a few edits), published about two months after the rather unpleasant business began. ************************** On February 1 [2012] I had a public debate in Chapel Hill with Daniel Wallace, a conservative evangelical Christian New Testament scholar who teaches at that bastion of conservative dispensationalist theology, Dallas [...]

2024-07-17T12:43:02-04:00July 18th, 2024|Bart's Debates, New Testament Manuscripts|

How Can We Possibly Know a Scribe’s Intentions? My Most Important Theoretical Reflection

Can we know what a scribe intended to do when he changed the text? Is it actually possible to know what anyone INTENDS?  Isn't that technically impossible, unless we get into their minds somehow?  I had to deal with this issue in the Orthodox Corruption of Scripture and there I laid out the theoretical premises I have/had, to allow me to say that a scribe intended to change a text.  It's a view that most readers completely overlooked, including a bunch of my critics. *********************** Intentionality as a Functional Category The other theoretical claim that I made in Orthodox Corruption involved the broader concept of what it means to describe a scribal alteration of the text as “intentional.”   I have been deeply interested in the question of “intention” for many years, as a philosophical problem (there is considerable philosophical discourse on it, of course), an issue in literary interpretation (especially since Wimsatt and Beardsley’s famous “Intentional Fallacy”), and, naturally, as it relates to scribes. Most textual critics have unproblematically talked about scribal changes being either accidental [...]

2024-07-10T12:29:21-04:00July 9th, 2024|Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

Are Scribes of Texts Actually Authors?

In my overview of the responses to my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture in the Afterword I wrote of the 2nd edition, I began to address some major questions.  In the book I argued that scribes of the New Testament intentionally changed the text in places in order to make it more orthodox in its theology or to circumvent its use by "heretics" who had other views.  That raises a question:  are scribes who change the text to make it say something different actually *authors* instead of mere copyists?  Here's how I discuss the issue at the beginning of my Afterword. ************************ I see no need here to restate the original thesis of The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.  There is one issue connected with it, however, that has not been clear to some of its readers that does need to be addressed.  In the book I never claimed and certainly never meant to claim that the majority of all textual variants in the tradition were “intentional” (a term I will be discussing [...]

2024-07-12T08:16:36-04:00July 7th, 2024|Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, 2nd edition

I get asked a lot about my various books, and I often mention one of my books when no one has asked (you may have noticed).  It occurred to me that it might be useful for me to present some blog posts on what each book is about. Probably my best known academic book was The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (Oxford University Press, 1993).   Twenty years after it was published I was asked to do a second edition, in which I would explain where the thing had originally come from (in my head) and what had happened in the field since it's original publication. Here is the Afterword to the 2nd edition (slightly edited) where I try to explain why I wrote it and what I was trying to accomplish with it.  (It includes reflections on an alleged "original text" of the New Testament). *******************************   The following sketch is intended to reflect on what has been achieved in the field of New Testament textual criticism since I first published The Orthodox Corruption of [...]

2024-07-12T08:13:50-04:00July 6th, 2024|Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

Finishing and Publishing My Dissertation

This is the third and final post I'll do on my dissertation on the Gospel quotations in the writings of Didymus the Blind, advised by the great New Testament scholar Bruce Metzger. Different dissertation advisors have different approaches to supervising a dissertation. Some are extremely hands on, to the point of working over every thought and every sentence. Not too many are like that, because if they were, they would never do anything else with their life. Plus, the idea is for the student to figure it out and get good at it. That takes some trial and error. Other advisors go for the big picture and like to talk over the big ideas. Others basically don’t give a rip how the dissertation is coming along – they want to see it at the end, and when it’s done, they’ll tell the student whether it’s good enough or not. Others … well, there are lots of other approaches. Metzger took an approach that other students may have found frustrating, but that was absolutely [...]

My First Book! A Dissertation on Textual Criticism of the New Testament

Last night someone asked me about my very first book.  My answer wasn't what they were hoping for; the book was not an insightful discussion of Jesus or the Gospels or how we got the Bible for a general audience.  It was my published dissertation, a work of scholarship on the Greek manuscript tradition of the NT written for the six people in the world who would care. But it's kind of an interesting story anyway, in part because it deals with the fundamental issue of how scholars try to decide what the authors of the NT originally wrote.  It went at the issue in a highly specific and detailed way, that one probably would not think of off the bat.  I talked about it on the blog many years ago, and will devote to it three posts again. ****************************** I have talked about Bruce Metzger, my mentor in graduate school, for both my Master's degree and my PhD,  a number of times on the blog. When I entered my PhD program at Princeton Theological [...]

2024-06-24T10:11:38-04:00June 26th, 2024|Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

A Debate with Peter Williams on Textual Variants

To put an end to this thread on the textual variants of the New Testament, and whether they matter, and thought that it might be good to give an alternative perspective that I first posted, well, ten years ago.  Earlier than that, on January 3rd, 2009,  Peter J. Williams and I appeared as guests on  "Unbelievable," a weekly program on UK Premier Christian Radio, moderated by Justin Brierley.   For this show we discussed my book "Misquoting Jesus" (In the UK the book, for some reason, is titled is "Whose Word Is It?"). Peter Williams is a British evangelical Christian scholar -- a very smart one, who knows a *lot* about the manuscripts of the NT -- who believes in the reliability of the New Testament and that thinks that my position is too pessimistic and extreme.  He did his PhD at Cambridge.  Peter is the author of Can We Trust the Gospels? and C S Lewis vs the New Atheists. Here's our back and forth.  See what you think! Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition: [...]

2024-06-13T00:34:09-04:00June 16th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Video Media|

Why Textual Variants Matter Even for Those Who Do NOT Think the Bible is Infallible

In this thread I am discussing why it matters that there are so many variants in our surviving manuscripts of the New Testament.  It does not matter because there are any “fundamental Christian doctrines” at stake, per se, but for other reasons.  As I sketched in my previous post, it should matter for anyone who believes that God gave the very words of the Bible, since the facts that we don’t *have* the original words in some cases and that in many other cases the words themselves are in doubt, should call that belief into question.  (I should point out that with the Hebrew Bible we are in MUCH worse shape in knowing what anything like the “original”  -- whatever that might be – was.  The textual situation there is really quite dire.) The second group that the variants should interest would include just about anyone -- whether scholar, student, or general reader – who is interested in knowing what the various authors of the Bible had to say about this, that, or the other [...]

2024-06-13T00:34:03-04:00June 15th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts|

Why Bible-Believing Christians Care About Textual Variants

In my previous post I began a discussion of why textual variants (that is, different wordings of the verses of the NT) found in the manuscripts might matter to someone other than a specialist who spends his or her life studying such things.  Most of the hundreds of thousands of variations are of very little importance for anything, as most people – even specialists – would admit.   Only a minority really matter.  And none of these seriously threatens any significant, traditional, Christian doctrine.   But I’ve argued that this should not be the criterion used to establish their importance.  Lots of things in life are important that have nothing to do with traditional Christian doctrines! I would say that the variations in the manuscripts of the New Testament should seem important to three groups of people.  If you’re not in one of these groups, then they probably are not all that important to you! (1)  Fundamentalist and conservative evangelical Christians who believe that the Bible is an inerrant or infallible revelation from God, with no mistakes [...]

2024-06-13T00:24:42-04:00June 13th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts|
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