Page 169 – The Bart Ehrman Blog

The Textual Problem of 1 Thessalonians 2:7

Now that I have discussed the purpose of 1 Thessalonians and spent a couple of posts talking about one of its most interesting passages, on which the modern Christian notion of a “rapture” is based, I am able to return to my point of departure, a textual variant found in 1 Thess. 2:7. This variant has nothing to do with the question of what Paul thought would happen when Jesus returned, sometime in his lifetime. It is an earlier part of the letter where Paul is reminding the Thessalonians of the time that he had spent with them when he converted them to their new faith. This is a very joyful part of the letter, one of the most sentimental passages of all of Paul’s letters, where he speaks of the relationship he had with his converts when he was there. But the description is a bit hard to pin down, in part because of this one textual variant. The variant depends on the presence or non-presence of just one letter of the alphabet. Some [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:20-04:00August 10th, 2015|Paul and His Letters|

A Thief in the Night

Discussing the mythology found in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 has made me remember something that happened some 35 years ago. It’s a pretty funny story. At the time I was still a church going Christian. The church I was attending was evangelical, but I was moving away from a conservative theology and its strict, literal interpretation of the Bible. I was becoming socially quite liberal, and was starting to take a more liberal view of the Bible. I still thought that in *some* sense it was the Word of God, but I did not think that it was infallible or true in every way. I had already come to see that parts of it contradicted one another, that there were historical implausibilities, and mistakes of various kinds. For me at that stage, the Bible was not so much the words God had given his human authors as it was a book that was written with real religious insight by special authors whose words were a medium through which God could deliver his message to humans. It wasn’t [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:20-04:00August 9th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Myth of the Rapture: Calling a Spade a Spade

I am sometimes torn between wanting to be sensitive to people’s deeply rooted religious convictions and calling a spade a spade. think many readers would be surprised (and dubious) that have this sensitivity, since I’m often blasted precisely for trouncing people’s religious beliefs. But that’s almost never my intention. The one exception is when it comes to fundamentalism. I have no qualms about attacking Christian fundamentalist thinking head-on. But even then try to be sensitive to the people holding onto this kind of thinking, and I try to engage it with reason and evidence rather than with ridicule. But there are times when it is worthwhile calling a spade a spade, and sometimes we ought to just do that. I’ve been thinking about the passage summarized in the post yesterday from 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, the passage from which the fundamentalist view of the “rapture” principally comes from. Jesus returns on the clouds of heaven, the dead in Christ rise first, and then those who are alive who are his followers are snatched up into the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:20-04:00August 8th, 2015|Paul and His Letters, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Return of Jesus (Rapture?) in 1 Thessalonians

Since I’ve started talking about Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, the earliest Christian writing of any kind that we have, in preparation for discussion one tiny little textual variant in 1 Thess. 2:7,which involves only the presence or absence of a single letter in a single word, but on which the meaning of the passage hinges, I can’t let the opportunity pass without saying something further by way of background (none of which is especially relevant to this particular textual variant!) on the letter. The reason: this is the letter that modern-day conservative Christians who believe that the “rapture” is about to occur base their views on. The “rapture” is a modern doctrine/idea. Even though some conservative Christians think this is one of the main points of the Christian faith, historically it has rarely been that. In fact, for most of history, most Christians simply haven’t believed in a rapture. The doctrine of the rapture is that Jesus will be returning from heaven (sometime soon) and when he does those who had believed in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:20-04:00August 6th, 2015|Paul and His Letters|

Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians

In my two previous posts I discussed a textual variant that could be explained either as a scribal accident or as an intentional change. I thought it might be interesting to point out a few other variants that also could go either way. These are all intriguing problems in and of themselves, and by talking about them I can illustrate a bit further the kinds of quandaries textual critics find themselves in when trying to decide what an author wrote when we have different versions of his words in different manuscripts. My plan right now is to look at three variants in three different mini-threads (all of them subsumed under the larger thread of why I wrote The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture). Today is one of my favorites, a particularly thorny issue found in 1 Thessalonians 2:7. I can’t get to a discussion of that issue without providing some important background; just the very basics of the background will take me two posts, before I can even start to explain the textual problem. First Thessalonians [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:20-04:00August 5th, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters|

Mark 1:1 as an Intentional Alteration of the Text

In yesterday’s post I began to explore a textual variant in Mark 1:1 that could be explained either as an accidental slip of the pen or an intentional alteration of the text. We’re plowing into some heavy waters here – I know some members of the blog like me to go deeper into serious scholarship on occasion, and others would rather prefer that I not. But here I am, in the thick of it. All of the posts in this thread are a lead up to answer the question from weeks ago now, about what led me to write The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. I’ve found that I can’t really get to that without providing some substantial background on what it is the field of textual criticism actually does. So where we are just now, by way of review: there are thousands of textual witnesses to the NT (Greek manuscripts, manuscripts of the versions, writings of the church fathers who quote the text); these witnesses attests hundreds of thousands of variance among themselves; the vast [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:19-04:00August 4th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts|

A Variant in Mark 1:1 — Accidental or Intentional?

I have been talking about different kinds of changes made in our surviving New Testament manuscripts, some of them accidental slips of the pen (that’s probably the vast majority of our textual variants) and others of them intentional alterations. One of the points that I’ve been trying to stress is that at the end of the day it is, technically speaking, impossible to know what a scribe’s “intentions” were (or if he had any, other than the intention of copying a text). None of the scribes is around to be interviewed, and so – as with a lot of history – there is a good bit of scholarly guess-work that has to be done. This guess work is not simply shooting in the dark, however. And it is dead easy for a highly trained expert to tell the difference between informed guesswork and just plain guesswork. But at the end of the day we are always talking about historical probabilities, not historical certainties, when it comes to figuring out why a scribed decided to change [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:03-04:00August 3rd, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, New Testament Manuscripts|

An Intentional Change in Mark 15:34

I have started giving some instances of what appear to be “intentional” changes made by scribes, as opposed to simple, accidental, slips of the pen. In my previous post I pointed to an example in Mark 1:2, in which scribes appear to have altered a text because it seems to embody an error. If I’m wrong that this is the direction of the change – that is, if the text that I’m arguing is the “corruption” is in fact the original text – then there is still almost certainly an intentional change still involved, but made for some other reason. But either way, the change does not appear to have been made simply by inattention to detail. Here I’ll give a second instance from Mark of what appears to be an intentional change. I stress that these alterations “appear” to be intentional since, technically speaking, we can never know what a scribe intended to do. I use the term I simply to mean an alteration to the text that a scribe appears to have made [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:03-04:00August 2nd, 2015|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts|

Illustration of a Textual Change: Did Mark Make a Mistake?

I have started discussing “intentional” changes of the text of the New Testament – that is alterations found in manuscripts of the New Testament that appear to have been made by scribes who *wanted* to change the text, presumably in order to make it say (more closely) what they wanted it to say. Let me illustrate my discussion by dealing with three of the most interesting textual variants in the Gospel of Mark, one of which is an easy problem to solve, one that is a bit more difficult, and one that has generated a lot of discussion over the years and no firm consensus. This will take a couple of posts. In a still later post I will talk about the criteria and arguments that scholars typically use in order to resolve these questions. I will be alluding to those criteria and arguments here in my explanations of why one form of the text appears to be what the author originally wrote, and the other form of the text appears to be the scribal [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:03-04:00July 31st, 2015|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts|

Intentional Changes of the Text

I’m getting back now, with this post, to the thread that I started a full month ago in response to a question a member of the blog had related to the field about one of my books that deals with the textual criticism of the New Testament. Just to bring us all back up to speed, I will here repeat the question and briefly summarize what I have covered so far. READER’S QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman, I do not know if others would find this interesting, but I would love to know how you developed the idea for The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. How did you go about researching it? How long did it take? Is it a once in a lifetime work? RESPONSE: To start with, I have devoted a number of posts to unpacking what the title of my actually means. First, in several posts, I’ve explained what the term “orthodoxy” means to scholars of early Christianity, and what it doesn’t mean. To sum up as succinctly as I can (for fuller [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:03-04:00July 30th, 2015|Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

More Hard Issues on the Qur’an Fragments

My plan is to make this the final post for now on the issue of the Qur’an fragments discovered at the University of Birmingham. Obviously the discussion could go on forever (it’s been going on for 1500 years and is not likely to stop any time soon). But I’m not a scholar of the Qur’an or of Islam, and I would prefer sticking to topics that are within my realm of expertise. I know that comment itself will prompt emails from two groups of people, (a) from Muslims urging me to study the Qur’an so I will see that it is true and convert to Islam and (b) from Christians urging me to subject the Qur’an to the same kind of scrutiny to which critical scholars have subjected the NT, in order to show that Islam too has abundant problems. The reason I know this will happen is because I get both kinds of emails, *all* the time! But I’m sorry to say, I’m not going to convert to Islam and I’m not going to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:03-04:00July 29th, 2015|Reader’s Questions, Religion in the News|

Fundamentalist Mistakes

When, three days ago, I posted my comments about the discovery of a two-page manuscript fragment of the Qur’an that, according to new reports, can be dated (technically, the parchment on which the text is written can be dated) to the lifetime of the prophet Mohammed or to a decade or so later, I had no idea that the post would be such a big deal. The Facebook version of the post has had nearly245,000 hits. and counting. Who would-a thought? There are, as you might imagine, many many comments being made. And it strikes me that many, many of these comments are simply wrong. I won’t be taking them on one at a time. I want simply to say something about a strain of comment that I’m getting (including in private email) from fundamentalists. There are various ways that one can define fundamentalism. (I often say, in jest, that the easiest definition is that a fundamentalist is: “no fun, too much damn, and not enough mental.”) I don’t need to go into a lot [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:03-04:00July 28th, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations, Religion in the News|

More on the Discovery of Ancient Qur’an Fragments

My post on Saturday about the discovery of two pages of the Qur’an in the library of the University of Birmingham that appear to date from the time of Mohammed himself. or a decade or so later, evoked more than the usual response. My facebook post has received nearly 260,000 hits. I think before that my previous highest hit total was 25,000 or so. Amazing amount of interest in this. And so I’m going to do something I’ve never done before on the 3+ years of the blog: I’m going to post several comments that I have received (on the assumption that many people reading the blog do not read all the comments and my responses to them) (if I’m completely wrong about that, I’d like to know) (though I’m not sure how I could ever get enough responses to see that I’m *completely* wrong. :-) ) will say something about each one – the first two are typical of several that I’ve gotten. The last two are hard-hitting and particularly informative. (I will not [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:03-04:00July 27th, 2015|Reader’s Questions, Religion in the News|

Lunch Auction

Possibly of interest to someone in the Dallas area. It's some serious mula, but again it is not to line my pockets -- I will be giving all of the money to charity: https://www.secularbackstage.com/tools/au/Bo/SecularBackstage/euoLfNpv .

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:03-04:00July 27th, 2015|Public Forum|

The Significance of an Astounding New Discovery

Those of you who follow the news have heard that a truly great manuscript discovery has been made public this week, coming out of the University of Birmingham, England. The university has a very important collection of manuscripts, and for New Testament scholars it is famous for its Institute devoted to the study, analysis, and editing of Gospel manuscripts, an institute headed by my long-time friend and colleague David Parker, indisputably one of the top NT textual scholars in the world. But the discovery that has been made is not connected to the New Testament. It is connected to the Qur’an. Since 1932 the university has had, among its collected works, a virtually full two page fragment of the Qur’an. Recently they decided to see if they could come up with a (relatively) precise date for these pages. And so they had a carbon-14 dating done. The results are nothing less than astounding. See, e.g., http://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/23/opinions/quran-manuscript-analysis/index.html Let me say that carbon-14 dating is indeed a science, but it’s not a highly exact science. It dates [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:03-04:00July 25th, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations, Religion in the News|

Accidental Scribal Changes

As I stressed in my most recent post, the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of differences among out surviving manuscripts (and versions, and patristic citations) are of very little or no importance in trying to establish what the authors of the NT originally wrote. There are others that matter, and matter a lot. Those tend to be the ones that are the most interesting. But there are many, many more differences that are easy to detect and of no real significance. Most of these differences appear simply to be accidental mistakes. We can never be absolutely certain, of course, if a change was made by accident or not. But in a huge majority of cases, there seems to be little reason to doubt it. The *reasons* mistakes were made are not hard to detect, but are nonetheless hugely interesting for a reason I will explain in my next post. The reality is that scribes were human beings and they made mistakes. Of course, in theory, they didn’t *have* to make mistakes. Throughout the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:02-04:00July 24th, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts|

Patristic Evidence for the New Testament

Yesterday I discussed very briefly the benefits and difficulties of versional evidence for establishing the text of the New Testament. As it turns out, it is a very big and complex issue, or rather sets of issues. There are large and difficult books written on very small aspects of the versions. One, still authoritative, treatment of the whole shooting match, with extensive bibliography (which is now, of course, out of date), is one of the magna opera of my mentor, Bruce Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origin, Transmission, and Limitations (1977). It’s a great book, arguably his most impressive. In this post I would like, to move into a very brief discussion of one other area of evidence for the text of the New Testament, the Patristic sources. The term “patristic” stands for “fathers” (Latin: patres) of the church – that is, the early church authors who quoted the books of the New Testament in the course of their writings. This too is an exceedingly thorny area of scholarly investigation, and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:02-04:00July 21st, 2015|History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Proto-Orthodox Writers|

The Versional Evidence for the New Testament

When scholars try to establish what an ancient author wrote, they can do so only on the basis of the surviving evidence. That seems, well, rather obvious, but the reality is that most people have never thought about that. It just seems that if you pick up a copy of Plato, or Euripides, or Cicero, that you’re simply reading what they wrote. But it’s not that simple. In none of these cases, or in any other case for any other book from the ancient world, do we actually have the person’s actual writing. All we have are later copies, and invariably these copies are filled with scribal mistakes. Scholars who are “textual critics” try to reconstruct the text that the author produced, to the best of their ability. I have been talking about the challenges of doing that with the New Testament. In many, many ways we are much better situated with the New Testament than with any other ancient book (or set of books) from the ancient world. We have WAY more evidence – [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:02-04:00July 20th, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts|

Google Cambridge Lecture on Forged

On April 7, 2011, I visited the Google Cambridge l in Cambridge, MA to discuss my book Forged. In my talk I explain how ancient writers sometimes falsely claimed to be a famous person in order to encourage people to read their books. This practice of "literary forgery" was relatively common in the ancient world, but it was also widely condemned. In my book I focus on instances of this practice in early Christianity -- some of them appearing within the New Testament. Please adjust gear icon for high-definition.

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:02-04:00July 19th, 2015|Book Discussions, Forgery in Antiquity, Public Forum, Video Media|

New Testament Manuscripts: Good News and Bad News

In my previous post I started talking about the different kinds of manuscripts of the New Testament we have, as a prelude to my discussion of my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. I now want to say something further about these manuscripts and how they can help us reconstruct what the authors of the NT originally wrote (and why they pose problems for us to that end). Below is what I say about the matter in my textbook on the New Testament, in the new sixth edition that has just appeared. **************************************************** When trying to reconstruct what the authors of the New Testament actually wrote, based on the surviving copies, we have both good news and bad news. The good news: We have more manuscripts for the New Testament than for any other book from the ancient world—many, many more manuscripts than we have for the writings of Homer, Plato, Cicero, or any other important author. We have something like 5,700 manuscripts of the New Testament—from small fragments of tiny parts of a single [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:04-04:00July 18th, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts|

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