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The Birth of Jesus in Matthew

Here I continue my seasonal reflections about the Christmas accounts in the New Testament. Yesterday’s blog was about the account of Jesus’ birth in Luke; today I talk about Matthew. Even a casual reading shows that these are two very different accounts. Matthew has nothing about the birth of John the Baptist, the Annunciation, the census, the trip to Bethlehem, the shepherds, the presentation in the Temple. Matthew’s version, as a result, is much shorter. Most of his stories are found only in his account. And some of the differences from Luke appear to involve downright discrepancies, as I will try to show in another post. For now: Matthew’s version. Matthew begins with a genealogy of Jesus. Luke also has a genealogy, but it is given after Jesus is baptized in ch. 3, instead of where you would expect it, at his birth in ch. 1. I’ll explain my view of that in a later post. After the genealogy of Matthew in which Jesus is traced to David, the greatest king of Israel, and to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:11-04:00December 12th, 2018|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

Free Memberships for Those Who Need Them!

Thanks to the incredible generosity of members of the blog, I am happy to announce that again this year 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. 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: 1) Your first and last name. 2) Your preferred personal email. 3) Your preferred user name (no spaces). 4) Your preferred password (should be 8 or more characters, no spaces). The donors will remain anonymous, but here let me publicly extend my heartfelt thanks [...]

admin2025-07-16T17:30:23-04:00December 11th, 2018|Public Forum|

The Birth of Jesus in Luke

As I indicated yesterday, I'm doing a series of posts leading up to Christmas, dealing with the accounts of Jesus' birth in the New Testament. Here's a discussion of the one most familiar to people, found in the Gospel of Luke. ********************************************************************************** As I’ve indicated, it is only Matthew and Luke that tell the tales of the infancy narrative, and the annual “Christmas Pageant” that so many of us grew up seeing is in fact a conflation of the two accounts, making one mega-account out of two that are so different up and down the line. And so, the Annunciation to Mary is in Luke, the dream of Joseph in Matthew; the shepherds are in Luke, the wise men in Matthew; the trip to Bethlehem is in Luke, the Flight to Egypt is in Matthew, and so forth and so on. You can compare them yourself, up and down the line, and see the differences. In this post I want to focus on Luke’s account. Then I will look at Matthew’s. And then I will [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:11-04:00December 10th, 2018|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

What Can We Know about Jesus’ Birth?

Browsing through holiday-season blogs from previous eras, I came across my first small thread on Christmas from exactly six years ago. I had forgotten about this. Some of the material has shown up occasionally in the intervening years, but maybe it's a good time to repost a bit of it. Here is the first: an account of what we can, and cannot, know about Jesus' birth. Bethlehem? Virgin? Date? Or even... year? ************************************************************************** I have decided to provide a series of posts related to the stories of Christmas in the New Testament. This first post more or less states some of the basic information that most readers know, but that it’s worth while stressing as a kind of ground clearing exercise. To begin with, we are extremely limited in our sources when it comes to knowing anything at all about the birth of Jesus. In fact, at the end of the day, I think we can’t really know much at all. Just to cut to the chase, I think that it is most probable that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:11-04:00December 9th, 2018|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

Another Chance: Donating Free Memberships

In years past, when I’ve solicited donations to provide free year-long blog memberships to people in need, who really would love to be on the blog but simply cannot afford it because of personal circumstances, I’ve been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support. For one reason or another that has not happened as much this year. There have been a number of you who have donated, and for that I’m deeply, deeply grateful. But the numbers are serious down – so much so that I asked my assistant Steven Ray if the post went out as normal or if there was some kind of glich. No glich. It’s just one of those years. But I want to mention it again, a second time, just in case anyone was primed for a nudge. I’ll be announcing the possibility of free memberships to those who need them in three days, and do not want to have a situation where there are dozens of needy and eager potential blog members that I/we cannot accommodate. So if you can [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:11-04:00December 8th, 2018|Public Forum|

Did Jesus Write Anything in the New Testament?

I have mentioned two apocryphal letters forged in the name of Jesus himself, one written to a King Abgar and the other, well, dictated to the cherubim in heaven from the cross. Several readers have asked me about New Testament examples, one in the famous story of the woman taken in adultery in John 8, and the other the seven letters allegedly dictated by Christ in Revelation 2-3. As to the first, yes, as many of you already know, even though there is an account of Jesus writing on the ground in John 8 (he is writing, by the way, not doodling; the Greek is fairly clear on the point) (we are not told *what* he is writing; there are about 97 theories about that, each one the favorite of one person or another….), this account was not originally in John. It is a scribal addition to the story. (BTW: one recent NT scholar, Chris Keith, has written an entire book arguing that the passage was inserted by scribes precisely to show that Jesus was [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:11-04:00December 7th, 2018|Historical Jesus, New Testament Manuscripts|

An Intriguingly Legendary Account of Jesus’ Death

Here is some more of the intriguing (later) Gospel, allegedly written by none other than Joseph of Arimathea, the figure who, in the New Testament Gospels, buried Jesus. It is entirely apocryphal of course, based on some information from the Gospels, later legends, and an extremely vivid imagination! The point of these posts has been to talk about whether Jesus ever wrote anything. Here he does, kind of. While hanging on the cross. You don’t find stories like *this* every day! This is my own translation, taken from the book The Other Gospels, co-edited/translated with my colleague Zlatko Plese. *********************************************************** Jesus Put on Trial (1) At three o’clock on the next day, the fourth day of the week, they brought him into the courtyard of Caiaphas. Annas and Caiaphas said to him, “Tell us, why did you carry off our law? And why have you preached against the promises of Moses and the prophets?” But Jesus made no answer. Again a second time, when the multitude was also present, they said to him, “Why do [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:10-04:00December 5th, 2018|Christian Apocrypha|

Did Jesus Write a Letter to Joseph of Arimathea

Did Jesus write a letter to Joseph of Arimathea? In yesterday’s post on the letter forged in Jesus’ name, allegedly to the king of Edessa Abgar, I mentioned another text in which Jesus is alleged to have written a letter. This one is even stranger. Far stranger. It is a letter he writes from the cross to the cherubim in heaven. It’s in a (much) later gospel called the Narrative of Joseph of Arimathea, an account of Jesus’ Passion allegedly written by the obscure figure in the NT Gospels who buried him. Among other things, it gives us “information” on the two robbers who were crucified with him. Here I explain what the text is and then give the opening scenes. Tomorrow I will give the rest of it (it’s a short gospel). All of this comes from the book I co-produced with my colleague Zlatko Plese, The Other Gospels, a book you might be interested in getting! It gives about 40 Gospel texts (many of them only in fragments) from early Christianity. The [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:10-04:00December 4th, 2018|Christian Apocrypha|

Do Any Forgeries Claim to be Written by Jesus?

I have received an interesting question about ancient forgeries. If we have lots of forgeries in the name of Peter -- and lots of others in the names of other apostles: Paul, James, Jude, Thomas, Philip, etc. etc. -- why don't we have any forgeries allegedly written by Jesus himself? As it turns out we do. The most famous was, at one time, well known indeed. Here is the question and my response. QUESTION: If Peter was named as an author of these works, why not name Jesus then of others(that we know of )? Was it understood within the community that, and why, he chose not to write his views down -- or was this too bold of a move even for a shameless forger? Or he was still deemed less accessible than his followers? RESPONSE: Yes indeed, there is a one-time famous correspondence between Jesus and a king who lived in Edessa in Syria named Abgar.. I have translated it anew for the book I published (on all earliest Christian Gospels) with [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:10-04:00December 3rd, 2018|Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity, Reader’s Questions|

Gift Memberships 2018!

It is already December (sigh....) and we are now blasting from one holiday to the next. For the occasion, I want to open up a holiday giving option that can help out people who really want to be on the blog but cannot afford the membership fees. As many of you know, for the past five of years, thanks to a number of generous donors, we pulled this off in a big way. It has happened in two stages. It 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. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:10-04:00December 2nd, 2018|Public Forum|

Could Peter Have “Written” 1 and 2 Peter Some Other Way?

Here is the last of my three posts digging down deeper into the question of whether Peter would have, or could have, written the books we now call 1 and 2 Peter, composed in highly literate Greek by someone skilled in Greek composition. ****************************** It should come as no surprise that Peter could not write Greek (or Aramaic, for that matter). As it turns out, there is New Testament evidence about Peter’s education level. According to Acts 4:13, both Peter and his companion John, also a fisherman, were agrammatoi , a Greek word that literally means “unlettered,” that is, “illiterate.” And so, is it possible that Peter wrote 1 and 2 Peter? We have seen good reasons for him not writing 2 Peter, and some reason for thinking he didn’t write 1 Peter. But it is highly probable that in fact he could not write at all. I should point out that the book of 1 Peter is written by a highly educated, Greek-speaking Christian who is intimately familiar with the Jewish Scriptures in their [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:10-04:00November 30th, 2018|Acts of the Apostles, Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

Were First-Century Jewish Boys Taught to Read and Write?

In this post I continue to dig down into whether a poor Aramaic-speaking fisherman in rural Galilee could compose a highly sophisticated Greek treatise such as 1 Peter. In my last post I dealt broadly with the question of how many people in antiquity could write. In this post I turn my attention to Peter’s own historical context, Roman Palestine. Is it true that boys were consistently taught literacy there and that it’s plausible that one of them could write rhetorically effective Greek compositions? I take the discussion, again, from my book Forged. ****************************** It is sometimes thought that Palestine was an exception, that in Palestine Jewish boys all learned to read so that they could study the Hebrew Scriptures, and that since they could read they could probably write. Moreover, it is often argued that in Palestine most adults were bilingual, or even trilingual, able to read Hebrew, speak the local language Aramaic, and communicate well in the language of the broader empire, Greek. Recent studies of literacy in Palestine , however, have shown [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:10-04:00November 28th, 2018|Early Judaism|

Seriously. How Many People in Antiquity Could Write?

I have received some push-back from readers who object to my view that Simon Peter, Jesus’ disciple, a fisherman from rural Galilee whose native language was Aramaic, living among lower-class people who spoke Aramaic, almost certainly could not have written a highly stylized and sophisticated Greek treatise such as we find in the book of 1 Peter. My sense is that I will never convince anyone who thinks that it is simply “common sense” that of course he could learn to write Greek if he wanted to and did so at the end of his life. But I’m bound and determined to try! (It used to be “common sense” that the sun revolved around the earth, after all…. Just because it’s something we’ve always heard and thought doesn’t make it true!) I’ve dealt with literacy issues on the blog before, but I think I need to give a fuller explanation of my views. The fullest is in my book Forgery and Counterforgery, but I”ve decided not to go there, since it is not really written [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:42:57-04:00November 27th, 2018|Catholic Epistles, Reflections and Ruminations|

Who Wrote 1 Peter?

This post is to close out my discussion of 1 Peter, from the New Testament. Who actually wrote it? Spoiler alert: we don’t know, but it probably wasn’t Peter. On several occasions on the blog I’ve talked about the issue, most recently at length in a repost earlier this year: https://ehrmanblog.org/did-peter-use-a-secretary-for-his-writings-a-blast-from-the-past/ That’s where I give the fuller story. For now I give just the simple side of things, as I lay it out in my undergraduate textbook on the New Testament. Following this post I will start talking about how and why the books assigned to Peter did or did not make it into the New Testament. If you recall, the whole reason I got into this thread in the first place (which I foolishly thought would take 2-3 posts) is that I became intrigued by the question of why 2 Peter made it into the New Testament but the Apocalypse of Peter did not. As I will explain in the next post, I have far fewer questions about 1 Peter (which, like the other [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:42:57-04:00November 26th, 2018|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

The Situation Behind the (“Forged”) Book of 1 Peter

I am in the midst of talking about works attributed to Peter, the chief disciple, which have come down to us from the early church. I should be clear, I think each and every one of these writings was “forged.” I don’t think Peter himself wrote any of them – 1 Peter, 2 Peter, the Gospel of Peter, the Apocalypse of Peter, or any of the other Petrine works that we now have. Each was written by a different author, but each author claimed to be Peter, Jesus’ right hand man. The book most widely accepted in the early church as having actually come from Peter is the book we call 1 Peter, from the New Testament. Yesterday I started talking about what is in it. Today I follow up on that discussion by explaining its apparent historical context and the approach the pseudonymous author takes in dealing with the problems he (and his ostensible audience) are confronting. Again, this is taken from my textbook on the NT. ***************************************************** The Context of Persecution Those [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:42:57-04:00November 25th, 2018|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

The So-Called First Letter of Peter

I am nearly at the end of my discussion of “Petrine” works in early Christianity, the books that some early Christian or another had been written by Peter, the closest disciple to Jesus in the New Testament. There are other books connected with Peter that I have chosen not to talk about, at least at this point, including legendary accounts of his missionary activities, some of which are really interesting and were, at one point, highly influential. At this stage, though, I’m talking only about books that we know were thought to be legitimate parts of the New Testament in one circle or another: 2 Peter, the Apocalypse of Peter, and the Gospel of Peter. And it has occurred to me (just this morning!) that I haven’t said anything yet about the one book connected with Peter that almost *everyone* we know of (who said anything about the matter) thought was part of canonical Scripture: the book of 1 Peter. I will want to say a few things about this book before getting back to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:42:57-04:00November 23rd, 2018|Catholic Epistles|

Thanksgiving Musings 2018

Some musings on this Thanksgiving, 2018. To be honest, like so many others, I find it much easier to be thankful when I have a lot to be thankful for. I suppose being a truly thankful person would entail being thankful even when most of life was very hard and difficult. I’ve had times like that in my life, and at least as I recall, even then I found things to be thankful for – a loving family and the possibility, at least, of a good future at least. But lots and lots of people don’t have even those. Maybe thankfulness isn’t for everyone. On the other hand, there are lots and lots of people (I know a number of them, and I know *about* far more) who have masses and masses of good things, unbelievably good things, who aren’t thankful at all. They are simply greedy. No matter how much they have, it is never enough. Instead of being grateful for their good fortune, they relentlessly reflect on how they want more and more, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:42:57-04:00November 22nd, 2018|Reflections and Ruminations|

Deciding on Which Books Should Be in the New Testament

I am in the midst of a thread in which I explain why it is puzzling that the Apocalypse of Peter did not make it into the New Testament, when the book of 2 Peter did. So far I have talked about both books, as well as the Gospel of Peter, another Petrine book that did not "make it." Now I need to explain how church fathers decided which books would be accepted as official scripture and which not. I've dealt with the issue on the blog several times over the years, the first time being in response to a question on the matter I received some six years ago. What I said then is what I would still say now! Here it is: QUESTION: I just read Jesus, Interrupted … and have now seen that you have written quite a few books and articles. I am particularly interested in how the books of the New Testament were chosen and why/how the others were not. Can you recommend a good read for this? RESPONSE: [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:42:57-04:00November 21st, 2018|Fourth-Century Christianity, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Question: How Do I Read Books?

Here is a question I get asked regularly, and I"ve just now seen I answered it on the blog many years ago. Worth answering it again! How do I read books? This is what I said in 2012 and it's still true in 2018! ***************************************************************************** QUESTION: How do you go about reading books? Which methods do you use in order to read as much as possibile? How do make plans how much to read? Do you highlight things in books? Do you you’re your own comments? Summaries? Any other tips? RESPONSE: Ah, this is an interesting question. As it turns out, there’s not an easy answer. That’s because there are many different ways I read books, depending on what kind of book it is. I realize we’re talking about books dealing with scholarship – not Victorian novels! But I read different books differently depending on what it is, what it’s about, and what I want/need to get out of it. When I was in graduate school I had a friend who insisted that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:42:57-04:00November 19th, 2018|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Early Debates about the Gospel of Peter

This is the second of my two posts on the Gospel of Peter, and in some ways it is the more important one. Here I talk about what we knew about the Gospel, before it was discovered, from the writings of the ancient church fathers. One of these discussions in particular will provide us with the information I’m heading for, of why the Gospel was not accepted into the canon of the New Testament. (It shows only a single instance of a debate about it, but the terms of the debate are instructive.) These comments come from the “Introduction” to the Gospel that I wrote for the new translation and edition of the early apocryphal Gospels, that I produced with my colleague Zlatko Plese. ************************************************************** The third-century Origen is the first patristic author to mention a Gospel allegedly written by Jesus’ disciple Simon Peter. Origen indicates that the book may have spoken of Jesus’ “brothers” as sons of Joseph from a previous marriage (Commentary on Matthew 10.17). It is not clear that Origen had actually [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:42:57-04:00November 18th, 2018|Christian Apocrypha, Fourth-Century Christianity|

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