Page 115 – The Bart Ehrman Blog

Could Most People Write in Antiquity?

I am ready now to discuss in a couple of posts the issue of whether Jesus' brother James actually wrote the book of James, or if it was someone else wanting his readers to *think* it was him. To make sense of what I want to say about it at the outset (it will take a couple of posts), I've decided I need to re-post an old post on a broader and even more interesting question: who actually *could* write back then? Today most anyone can (just, well, check out the Internet!). But who could in, say, first-century Palestine. It seems so counter-intuitive that many people simply, without looking at any of the evidence, intuitively don't believe it. But the answer is, very, very few people indeed. A tiny slice of a minority. Here is what I said about the matter in the original post (devoted specifically to the question of whether Jesus' disciple Peter could have written 1 Peter). ************************************************************************************* In his now-classic study of ancient literacy, William Harris gave compelling reasons for thinking [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:39-04:00July 22nd, 2019|Catholic Epistles, Reflections and Ruminations|

Did James Write James?

In two previous posts I gave an overview of the letter of James, one of the real gems hidden away in the New Testament (it takes 15 minutes to read it, max. Try it! Great little book.) Now I want to devote several posts to address the question I was originally asked about it. Was it really written by James, the brother of Jesus, as traditionally claimed? I deal with that question at some length in my book Forgery and Counterforgery. I think the discussion is accessible to the non-expert. Here is how I begin (some of this has been edited to make it slightly more user-friendly). It ends up being an important issue: do we have a writing from Jesus’ own brother? Now *that* would be interesting! But, alas, I think not. *************************************************** The letter of James begins simply enough: “James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes in the dispersion, greetings” (1:1). A number of persons are named James in the New Testament, including the father [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:39-04:00July 21st, 2019|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Reader’s Questions|

Is History a Four-Letter Word?

Most people on the planet simply are not interested in history. I’d say that’s true of most American high school and college students. History classes can be dreadfully boring, especially with the wrong teacher -- and it is very hard to be a good teacher of history. In high school, I had almost no interest in my history classes. Names, dates, things that happened that had no relevance to anything I was interested in or what I felt like doing day to day. Ugh. But a good history teacher is a marvel to behold. There is so much about the past that is fascinating, and, of course relevant. And so, as it turns out, I’ve turned into a professional historian. Go figure. I’ve been thinking about this because of that debate I had on Monday with Peter Williams, a very bright evangelical Christian and a fine scholar of ancient Semitic languages who firmly believes that the Bible conveys God’s Truth, in every way, so that there are no mistakes of any kind in it. Peter [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:39-04:00July 19th, 2019|Bart's Critics, Canonical Gospels, Reflections and Ruminations|

Changing Your Mind. Or Not.

Two things have happened to me this week that have made me think rather intensely about the path I’ve taken in life, and how radically it has swerved from the paths of others who were like me at the age of 20. I emphasize “who were like me.” The reality is that the path I was on already at 20 was (now I see) extremely weird, and to outsiders looks more than a little bizarre. I was a hard-core evangelical Christian dedicated to ministry for the sake of the gospel. Not exactly what most 20-year olds (including any of my many high school friends) were doing at the time. If ever I want a conversation-stopper at a cocktail party, all I need do is say something about my past. Still, given that as my starting point, what happened next is even more highly unusual. And I was abruptly reminded it of it this week, twice. First, on Monday I had a radio/podcast debate here in London on “Premier Christian Radio” (it is the leading Christian [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:39-04:00July 17th, 2019|Reflections and Ruminations|

Did It Hurt to Be Martyred? The Surprising Answer. Guest Post by Stephanie Cobb.

One of my most accomplished former students is Stephanie Cobb, now the George and Sallie Cutchin Camp Professor of Bible in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond. While doing her PhD at UNC, Stephanie became deeply interested in the accounts of martyrdom in early Christianity, leading to a dissertation with one of the best titles ever (it really does describe the book but it’s unusually clever): Dying to be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts. Stephanie has become one of the leading experts in this field, backed up now with an intriguing and important second book on the martyr texts. It will be of particular interest to members of the blog and so I’ve asked Stephanie to make some guest posts about it. Here is the first. ********************************************************* Bart recently asked if I would be interested in writing a few posts about my latest book, Divine Deliverance: Pain and Painlessness in Early Christian Martyr Texts. But before diving into Divine Deliverance itself, I want to back [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:39-04:00July 16th, 2019|Book Discussions, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Was James the Actual Brother of Jesus?

I’ve started talking about the epistle of James, first in relation to Paul (yesterday) and then in relation to … James, the man himself, Jesus’ brother (today). My ultimate goal is to explain why I’m sure James himself did not write the letter (later). But in the meantime I’ve received a question that I should probably address first: did Jesus really have a brother named James? Uh… don’t a lot of Christians think that Jesus never had any siblings (since his mother remained a virgin)? How do you explain him having a brother? I’ve talked about this on the blog before, but in the current context, it’s worth talking about again. Here’s the question and my response: ************************************************************ QUESTION: In what way was the James you are talking about here, the “brother” of Jesus? Was he another one of Mary’s sons from Joseph? Was he another one of Joseph’s sons from a previous relationship? RESPONSE: One of the non-canonical books from early Christianity that I regularly teach is called the Proto-Gospel of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:38-04:00July 15th, 2019|Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus|

Is the Book of James Attacking the Teachings of Paul?

Yesterday I began answering a question about the New Testament book of James. The most interesting thing about the book, for most readers, is that it *seems* at least to be attacking a view vigorously espoused by the apostle Paul. Are these authors at odds with each other? Here is where I pick up on that discussion in my book Forged. My sense is that a lot of readers of the blog will not anticipate where I stand on the issue. ************************************************************************** There is one issue that the author is particularly concerned with, however. It is an issue that reflects a bone of contention with other Christians. There are some Christians who are evidently saying that to be right with God, all one needs is faith; for them, doing “good works” is irrelevant to salvation, so long as you believe. James thinks this is precisely wrong, that if you do not do good deeds, then you obviously don’t have faith. What use is it, my brothers, if a person says he has faith but has [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:38-04:00July 14th, 2019|Catholic Epistles, Paul and His Letters|

One of My Favorite Letters in the New Testament: The Book of James

Sometimes the questions I get from readers are short and to the point, but require long answers over a number of posts. Here’s one of the recent ones: QUESTION: Could you write a blog on the book of James and why it is considered a forgery? RESPONSE: I think this question deserves an entire thread of responses. I haven’t talked much about the letter of James on the blog (at least so far as I can remember and tell!). So why not? It’s a short “book” – just five brief chapters. You can read it in fifteen minutes. Go ahead! What I say about it will then make better sense. The best known feature of the letter is that it *seems* to be opposing the writings and teachings of Paul. But does it? Martin Luther, father of the Reformation, thought so. He included the book only as an appendix to the New Testament. I talk about the letter, and the reasons I don’t think it was actually written by James, the brother of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:38-04:00July 12th, 2019|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Reader’s Questions|

Sad News From Larry Hurtado

Many readers on the blog will know of Larry Hurtado, a prominent New Testament scholar who has been influential as one of the most regular and reliable bloggers on issues of relevance to the study of early Christianity. Larry has announced that he is very ill and will no longer be able to participate in either scholarship or the promotion of early Christians studies to a broader reading audience. This is very sad, especially for us who know him. (I will give his announcement about his illness and the prospects at the end of this post.) I have known Larry for over thirty years. He started out as a New Testament textual critic, with his first book a published version of his dissertation: Hurtado, Larry W. (1981). Text-Critical Methodology and the Pre-Caesarean Text: Codex W in the Gospel of Mark. Studies and Documents. 43. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. It's not something you will want to try to reading, unless you're an expert on Greek and the Greek manuscript tradition of the NT. Trust me. But I used [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:38-04:00July 10th, 2019|History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum|

The Legality, Morality, and Scandal of Acquiring Ancient Manuscripts: Guest Post by Jennifer Knust

Here is the final part of Jennifer’s Knust’s quest to trace the history of an intriguing Christian manuscript she came across, suspecting it had come to Duke ultimately as a result of Nazi looting decades earlier. Now she details how she tried to track it down. The entire episode leads her, then to reflect on the Green Family Collection, a group of manuscripts and antiquities purchased by the owners of the Hobby Lobby and the basis of the “Museum of the Bible” in Washington D.C. Any visitor to the museum might assume that acquiring such treasures would be relatively simple and involve no issues of legality, morality, and scandal. On the contrary…. Jennifer Knust’s most popular books are To Cast the First Stone and Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity. ************************************************* Part III: Manuscripts are Commodities The Antiquariat was (and is) a bookstore. Günther Koch was a bookseller. Indeed, in a counter-claim filed against the Rosenthals in the 1950s, he described himself as uniquely qualified for the position he undertook during and after the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:38-04:00July 9th, 2019|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts|

Christian Manuscripts and Nazi Loot: Guest Post by Jennifer Knust

This now is the second of Jennifer Knust’s three posts on her current project, tracing the history of a Christian manuscript she came upon from the rare book collection at Duke University. Her research led her to booksellers in London, Munich, and Amsterdamn, and implicates the Aryanization policies of the Nazis. Who knew New Testament scholarship could be so interesting? Find below what she has to say. Jennifer Knust’s most popular books are To Cast the First Stone and Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity. ************************************* Part II: Nazi Loot? My own project began when Aaron Ebert, a doctoral student at Duke University, noticed that the manuscript he was studying was one of three purchased by Duke from the London bookseller Raphael King in the 1950s. Very little information about Mr. King is available, so Aaron reached out to the Ludwig Rosenthal Antiquariaat, a venerable antiquarian bookstore now located in the Netherlands that once owned another of Duke’s manuscripts also sold by King, Greek MS 018. According to an important volume on Byzantine [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:38-04:00July 8th, 2019|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts|

Tracking Down Stolen Manuscripts: Guest Post by Jennifer Knust

I have asked my friend and colleague Jennifer Knust (Professor of early Christianity at Duke) to write some guest posts for us on the blog. Jenny is the author of Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity, and she has also recently published the definitive study of the famous passage of the “Woman Taken in Adultery” (containing the line “Let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her” – a passage not originally in the New Testament), a long, sophisticated, and learned book (co-authored with Tommy Wasserman), called To Cast the First Stone; and I had suggested she write about that for us. Maybe she will later. But for now she has decided to post about some very exciting current research she’s doing, as we speak: tracking down the history of a Christian manuscript that was plundered by the Nazis. Intriguing stuff. This will take several posts. ***************************************************** Jennifer Wright Knust Duke University “In this kind of world no blueprint instructs us how to house what we [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:38-04:00July 7th, 2019|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts|

Heightened Opposition to Jews in Early Christianity
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Heightened Opposition to Jews in Early Christianity

Book Discussions, Jews and Christians in Antiquity

Heightened Opposition to Jews in Early Christianity

I have been outlining some of the issues that I may talk about in a book on the rise of anti-Judaism in early Christianity, if I write it. In previous posts I have detailed some of the uglier Christian attacks on Jews and Judaism, almost all of them tied to Christian ways of reading the Old Testament that different from traditional, Jewish readings. Some Christians claimed that Jews misread what God had told them in the Scripture, and that this is what led them to reject their messiah, and since they had rejected their messiah, God had rejected them. Christians, not Jews, were the people of God. Jews were condemned. It’s not a happy history, and it gets worse. In my book I will not move into the later consequences of the Middle Ages down to modernity – restrictions on what Jews could do for a living, on where they could live, on how they could engage with others in their communities; eventually the pogroms and expulsions; and so on. I will be focusing only [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:38-04:00July 5th, 2019|Book Discussions, Jews and Christians in Antiquity|

When Christians Went on the Attack Against Jews

I return now, for a couple of posts, to my thoughts on the rise of anti-Judaism in the early Christian tradition, and my thesis that it was largely driven by a different way of reading the Bible, that the Christians insisted the Jewish scriptures were looking forward to Jesus as a suffering messiah who would die for sins, and in doing so fulfilled all sorts of prophecies, and most Jews thought this entire view was nonsense, if not blasphemous. Here is where my thoughts move on from what I said in the last post on the matter. Should you need to refresh your memory, it is here: https://ehrmanblog.org/why-christians-needed-an-old-testament-pagan-attacks-on-the-faith/ An important point to stress is that Christians recognized that if their own interpretations of the Jewish Bible were correct, the Jews’ own interpretations were necessarily invalid. As I argued in Triumph of Christianity, the distinctive feature of early Christianity vis-à-vis all the other religions of the Roman world – including Judaism – was that Christians argued their views provided the way of salvation and the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:21-04:00July 3rd, 2019|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Jews and Christians in Antiquity|

Is the Qur’an More Reliable than the New Testament?

I often get asked questions about the Qur’an, and I almost always do not answer them, most because I can’t answer them. I’m not an expert on the Qur’an, and tend to talk only about things I have done serious and sustained research on. Otherwise I’m just spreading stuff I’ve heard, and I’m no more authoritative on that than anyone else. So what’s the point of my talking about it? But one question that I get frequently, especially from Muslim readers, is about the manuscript tradition of the Qur’an in relation to the New Testament. Even though I’m not an expert on the manuscript tradition of the Qur’an (oh boy am I not an expert), I know enough to answer with some authority this particular question. The question is whether it simply isn’t true that the Qur’an is more reliable than the New Testament. What the questioner almost always means by that is that the ancient manuscripts of the Qur’an tend to be amazingly similar to one another. Virtually identical up and down the line. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:21-04:00July 2nd, 2019|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Why Was the World Created in 4004 BC?
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Why Was the World Created in 4004 BC?

Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reflections and Ruminations, Religion in the News

Why Was the World Created in 4004 BC?

Why was the world created? We appear to be living in an age where science no longer matters. As you may know, the English word "science" comes from the Latin term "scientia," which means "knowledge.: People who reject "science," well, what is it they're rejecting? We live in dangerous times. Apart from the more obvious examples of this rejection that you can find in the newspaper every day (involving a human-induced apocalypse of biblical proportions), there are still, of course, a large number of "creationists" out there, who not only deny evolution (as a student now then will always tell me, with passion in his voice, "Hey, it's ONLY a theory!!") but who also subscribe to a young earth theory. The earth has just been around for about 6000 years. Really. When I was a fundamentalist I knew people who seriously claimed not only that dinosaurs and humans were walking around the earth together, but that fossils that appear to date to millions of years earlier were put into the geological record by Satan, who [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:20-04:00July 1st, 2019|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reflections and Ruminations, Religion in the News|

Would You Be Willing To Donate a Membership?

Twice a year on the blog, around mid-year and Christmas, I open up a possibility to help out people who really want to be on the blog but cannot afford the membership fees. We are at that point! So here is the semi-annual appeal for you to pitch in, as you feel moved. We've been doing this for nearly six years. It all started off when two anonymous donors proposed that they provide some funds to pay for memberships for a few people who wanted to be on the blog but because of personal circumstances, could not afford the membership fees. I put out the offer on my Facebook page, asking if anyone was in that boat, and within twenty minutes I had thirty requests –all from people who were eager to join but simply did not have the means to do so. I had to shut down the offer nearly as soon as I made it. This made me suspect that there were a lot more people out there like that. And so [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:20-04:00June 30th, 2019|Public Forum|

Do You Need a Free Membership?

Thanks to the incredible ongoing generosity of members of the blog! I am happy to announce that there are a limited number of free one-year memberships available. These have been donated for a single purpose: to allow those who cannot afford the annual membership fee to participate on the blog for a year. I will assign these memberships strictly on the honor system: if you truly cannot afford the membership fee, but very much want to have full access to the blog, then please contact me. Do NOT reply here, on the blog, as a comment. Please send me a separate email, privately, at [email protected]. In your email, let me know your situation (why you would like to take advantage of this offer) and provide me with the following information: Your first and last name. Your preferred personal email. Your preferred user name (no spaces). Your preferred password (should be 8 or more characters, no spaces). Country located The donors will remain anonymous, but here let me publicly extend my heartfelt thanks for such kind [...]

admin2025-07-16T17:31:35-04:00June 30th, 2019|Public Forum|

Is There a Way to Know if a Manuscript is the “Original”?

In response to the recent flurry of posts on the question of a “first-century Mark,” I have received a very interesting question: suppose there *were* a first-century Mark that was discovered (hey, it’s possible! And we’re holding our breaths – what an amazing find it would be).. Would there be a way of showing it was the actual original Mark, the one the author himself wrote with his own hand? I was asked this question on the blog seven years ago, and responded to it by saying I had never thought about it before. (!) Below is the original question and my initial reflections. My views haven’t matured much during the past seven years (and they ain't the only thing), so I give my initial response. If someone can improve on it, let me know. First here is this week’s way of asking the question: QUESTION: Suppose someone did claim to have found the original…. I get that you can show something isn’t original, such as by dating it to two hundred years later. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:20-04:00June 28th, 2019|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Flat-out Lies or Willful Ignorance. How Do They Get Away With It?

Sometimes it’s enough to make my blood boil. Maybe someone can explain it to me. If you were to interview the 7,346,235,000 occupants of this planet, you would find *no* group of people who declare themselves MORE committed to “truth” than the evangelical Christians. Evangelical Christianity, historically, is about nothing other than the Truth. Jesus himself said “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no one comes to the Father except by me” (John 14:6); and “You shall know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free” (John 8:32). The Christian faith, for these people, is all about finding the Truth that leads to eternal life. So why do so many of their spokespersons simply tell lies? Or at least propagate willful ignorance? Those are the two choices: they either know what they’re saying is absolutely false or they don’t go to the bother of finding out, when the information is readily available to anyone who wants to take 38 seconds to look for it. I don’t get it. Well, OK, I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:20-04:00June 26th, 2019|Bart's Critics, Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

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