Page 171 – The Bart Ehrman Blog

The Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library

In this thread on the discovery of ancient Christian texts, I have mentioned the serendipitous discovery of both the Nag Hammadi Library in Egypt and the Dead Sea Scrolls in what is now Israel. It might be useful for me to say something about both of these discoveries. In this post and the next I will talk about the Nag Hammadi Library. I have taken this discussion from my New Testament textbook. But let me reproduce the discussion with a warning. Caveat lector! My friend Mark Goodacre, NT scholar at Duke and inveterate destroyer of New Testament scholarly myths, has called this account (which is the standard account found among NT scholars) into question. Mark is on the blog. Maybe he will be inspired to respond! In any event, here is the tale of the discovery from my undergraduate textbook: ************************************************ It is an intriguing story, this chance discovery of a cache of ancient Christian documents in 1945, in a remote part of Upper Egypt, a story of serendipity, ineptitude, secrecy, ignorance, scholarly brilliance, murder, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:45-04:00June 17th, 2015|Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

What I Saw at St. Catherine’s Monastery

In my last post I began to relate an anecdote about a traveling adventure I had several years ago, when giving lectures for a UNC trip to Egypt and Jordan with a stop at the famed St. Catherine’s monastery in the southern part of the Sinai peninsula, the place where Tischendorf had discovered the biblical manuscript codex Sinaiticus in the mid 19th century, and where a fire at the monastery in the 1970s had uncovered a hidden room found to contain manuscripts, including the pages from the Old Testament of the codex Sinaiticus that Tischendorf had not come away with from the monastery when he took the bulk of the manuscript with him back to Russian. (That is the longest sentence I’ve ever produced on the blog; it’s because I’m reading Proust right now….) For me, one of the highlights of this trip was to be a visit to the monastery, a place that I had wanted to see for years. It is located in a completely barren location in the wilderness and is the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:45-04:00June 15th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

St. Catherine’s Monastery

In my previous post I talked about Constantin von Tischendorf and his discovery of the Codex Sinaiticus in St. Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai peninsula in 1844 and then 1859. I have a personal anecdote to relate about the manuscript, one of the most interesting things every to happen to me on my various travels hither and yon. To make sense of the anecdote I need to provide some background information. As I indicated in my previous post, when Tischendorf discovered the codex Sinaiticus (as it was later called), he considered it to be the most ancient biblical manuscript then known to exist. He was right. It was. Tischendorf claimed that the manuscript was gifted to him by the head of the monastery. The monastery later claimed, and still claims to this day, that he stole it from them. The manuscript consists of... THE REST OF THIS POST IS FOR MEMBERS ONLY. If you don't belong yet, JOIN!!! It doesn't cost much at all, and every penny goes to charity!! The manuscript consists of both [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:45-04:00June 14th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Fourth-Century Christianity, New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

Tischendorf and the Discovery of Codex Sinaiticus
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Tischendorf and the Discovery of Codex Sinaiticus

Book Discussions, Fourth-Century Christianity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts

Tischendorf and the Discovery of Codex Sinaiticus

PLEASE NOTE: I am incommunicado for a few days on a gulet in the Aegean Sea on the west coast of Turkey. I have asked Steven, our blog support, to add some posts for me in my absence; I prepared these in advance knowing I would be out of reach. Here is one of them. I’m afraid I will not be able to respond to comments on the next few posts until I return to some form of civilization that supports Internet and all things electronic. So sorry! **************************************************** In my previous post on the discovery of biblical manuscripts, I mentioned the most intrepid of manuscript-hunters of modern times, Tischendorf. His story is very interesting. Here is what I say about him and his most famous discovery in my book Misquoting Jesus. The one nineteenth-century scholar who was most assiduous in discovering biblical manuscripts and publishing their texts had the interesting name Lobegott Friedrich Constantin von Tischendorf (1815-74). He was called “Lobegott” (German for “Praise God”) because before he was born, his mother had seen [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:30-04:00June 12th, 2015|Book Discussions, Fourth-Century Christianity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

How Are Manuscripts Discovered

PLEASE NOTE: I am incommunicado for a few days on a gulet in the Aegean Sea on the west coast of Turkey. I have asked Steven, our blog support, to add some posts for me in my absence; I prepared these in advance knowing I would be out of reach. Here is one of them. I’m afraid I will not be able to respond to comments on the next few posts until I return to some form of civilization that supports Internet and all things electronic. So sorry! **************************************************** In this thread I have been discussing documents from early Christianity that I would very much like to have discovered. In my last post I mentioned the fact that documents that *do* tend to be discovered are either texts that we already have copies of (the Gospel of John, the book of Revelation, etc.) or of books that we did not previously know existed (the Letter of Diognetus, or most of the writings in the Nag Hammadi library). Here is a related question from a reader [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:30-04:00June 11th, 2015|Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

The Discovery of Lost Documents

PLEASE NOTE: I am incommunicado for a few days on a gulet in the Aegean Sea on the west coast of Turkey. I have asked Steven, our blog support, to add some posts for me in my absence; I prepared these in advance knowing I would be out of reach. Here is one of them. I’m afraid I will not be able to respond to comments on the next few posts until I return to some form of civilization that supports Internet and all things electronic. So sorry! **************************************************** I’ve been discussing lost books from early Christianity that I very much wish would be discovered. Like everyone else interested in this field, I would of course love to have *all* the now-lost books to be turned up. Unfortunately, we probably don’t even know what the majority of the lost books even were, and have no concrete reason for thinking that they ever existed. Here is a related question that a member of the blog asked a couple of weeks ago: QUESTION: What do you think are the odds that a really startling discovery like [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:30-04:00June 10th, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Papias and the Eyewitnesses

I have been discussing the writings of Papias, his lost five-volume Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord. Scholars of the New Testament have long ascribed huge significance to this work, in no small part because Papias claims to have ties to eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus. In my view this championing of Papias is misguided. I say something about that in my new book on Jesus Before the Gospels (or whatever we end up calling it); I will probably be going into a more sustained analysis in my scholarly book that I’m working on next on memory and the historical Jesus. The excitement over Papias as a link to our eyewitnesses is based largely on the following passage that is quoted from his writing by Eusebius in his early-fourth-century Church History. This was written about 200 years after Papias, but Eusebius had read Papias’s book and so could quote from it. In his discussion of the book Eusebius mentions the references to Papias in the writings of Irenaeus, from around 180 CE, just [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:30-04:00June 9th, 2015|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers|

Lecture: Jesus and the Historian

On Tuesday, February 25, 2014 I gave a lecture at Dickinson College (Carlisle Pennsylvania) on "Jesus and the Historian," in the Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium. In the lecture I deal with the historical problems posed by the surviving Gospels for evaluating the evidence for the life and teachings of Jesus. Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition (The quality is not as good as one might hope, but it's the best we can do given the original source)

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:12-04:00June 7th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Video Media|

Wine in the Kingdom

Writing my last post on Papias made me think of something that is rather humorous even if it is only very tangentially related. If you recall, Papias claimed that Jesus taught the following about the future utopian kingdom on earth: The days are coming when vines will come forth, each with ten thousand boughs; and on a single bough will be ten thousand branches. And indeed, on a single branch will be ten thousand shoots and on every shoot ten thousand clusters; and in every cluster will be ten thousand grapes, and every grape, when pressed, will yield twenty-five measures of wine. When I was writing up that post, I was reminded of the story in the Gospel of John in which Jesus turns the water into wine. Jesus appears to have enjoyed wine in great abundance. The story in John is particularly interesting, and what is humorous to me is how I’ve heard it interpreted by well-meaning conservative Christians who were certain that Jesus would not ever encourage people to partake of alcoholic beverages. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:30-04:00June 6th, 2015|Canonical Gospels|

A Fantastic Saying of Jesus in Papias

I have mentioned one of the intriguing traditions found in the now-lost Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord by the early second century proto-orthodox church father Papias (his account of the death of Judas). Here is another one. In this one Papias is relating what he has heard that Jesus taught. As you’ll see, it is not a teaching that is found in the New Testament Gospels, or in fact in any other Gospel source we have. What is most striking, in some ways, is that Papias claims that he has a clear line of tradition going straight back to Jesus to confirm the reliability of the saying: he learned this from “elders” (that is, senior Christians) who heard from John the son of Zebedee, one of Jesus’ closest disciples, that this is something Jesus used to say. So this is not an “eyewitness” account (or, rather, not an “earwitness” account) – it is an account that we get from Papias who got it from others who got it from John who got it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:30-04:00June 5th, 2015|Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers|

Other Accounts of the Death of Judas

As I indicated in the previous post, there are two versions of the death of Judas Iscariot in the New Testament. These versions have some striking similarities, but at the end of the day, I think they cannot really be reconciled with one another. After the New Testament period, there were legends about Judas’s death that continued to be invented and circulated. I discuss one of them in my college-level textbook on the New Testament, in a side-bar that I meant to be a kind of humorous human interest story. Here is what I say there: When trying to determine which stories in the Gospels are historically accurate, we need to look not only at the Gospels of the New Testament, but at all the surviving ancient narratives that discuss Jesus’ life. In many instances, however, the accounts are quite obviously legendary, written for the entertainment, edification, or even instruction of their readers. One occurs in a fourth- or fifth-century document known as the Gospel of Nicodemus (also called the Acts of Pilate). In one [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:29-04:00June 4th, 2015|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Doctrine, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

My Trip to Turkey

I am en route to Istanbul now with a layover, at this moment, as we speak, in London’s Heathrow airport. I’ll be in Turkey for nearly three weeks. This is a trip sponsored by my home institution, the General Alumni Association of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As is true of most universities, UNC has a vibrant travel program for alumni. Trips can be on the expensive side, but they are usually fantastic. As the guest lecturer, I get a free trip out of it. There are four people connected with the blog on the trip (maybe more: but there are four that I know of so far). (It may seem strange, but one does not have to be an alum of the university to go on an alumni trip!) It is intentionally a small group, just twenty-five of us. Turkey is one of the great places on earth, with a massive and varied cultural history. My lectures concern only one small part of the Turkish legacy. As it turns out, this [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:29-04:00June 3rd, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Death of Judas in the NT

In this and the next couple of posts I will be talking about what we know was in Papias’s five-volume book, now lost, Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord. As I previously indicated, the only reason we have any clue about the matter is that later church fathers quoted a few passages from the book. Would they had quoted more! But what they give us is very tantalizing. The first passage I want to discuss involves the death of Judas Iscariot. To make sense of what Papias has to say, I need to provide some context. Many people don’t realize that Judas’s death, after he betrayed Jesus, is not mentioned in three of our Gospels: Mark, Luke, and John. It is mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew, however, and just as important, in the book of Acts, written by the same author who produced the Gospel of Luke (so, well, let’s call him Luke). What is striking is that the descriptions of Judas’s death in these two accounts are at odds with one, even [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:29-04:00June 2nd, 2015|Acts of the Apostles, Canonical Gospels|

The Lost Writings of Papias

In this thread I have been discussing documents known from early Christianity that no longer exist and that I very much wish would be discovered. So far I have talked about the lost letters of Paul, the writings of Paul’s opponents, Q (the source used by Matthew and Luke for many of their sayings of Jesus), and the Signs Source (a collection of Jesus miraculous activities used by the Gospel of John). With this post I move outside the New Testament to indicate documents that certainly at one time existed that I wish we still had. One such document was a five-volume book produced by a church father named Papias. We don’t have this long book any longer. In fact we don’t have any of the writings from Papias. We know about him, and his writings, only because later church fathers refer to him. He is first mentioned in the writings of Irenaeus, the bishop of Gaul and himself the author of a long five-volume work that attacked heretics (especially Gnostics). Irenaeus’s book is known [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:29-04:00June 1st, 2015|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reflections and Ruminations|

Losing Religion in America

As many of you know, there was a major poll done recently by the Pew Research Center involving religion in America. The results were published about three weeks ago, and the findings were striking indeed. Among the most intriguing were that the percentage of people identifying themselves as Christian in the U.S. has declined by nearly 8% in just seven years. That corresponds to those who consider themselves not “religiously affiliated” in any way, which, for the purposes of this poll, meant they were atheist, agnostic, or basically no religion at all. This category is up nearly 7%. Here are the findings in the salient paragraph, drawn from the full account at http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/ The major new survey of more than 35,000 Americans by the Pew Research Center finds that the percentage of adults (ages 18 and older) who describe themselves as Christians has dropped by nearly eight percentage points in just seven years, from 78.4% in an equally massive Pew Research survey in 2007 to 70.6% in 2014. Over the same period, the percentage of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:29-04:00May 30th, 2015|Reflections and Ruminations, Religion in the News|

The Nature of John’s Signs Source

I have given one of the major pieces of evidence that there was a Signs Source that was used by the author of the Gospel of John, a written document that enumerated seven miraculous deeds of Jesus that were designed to show that he was a divine being, the Son of God. There is another piece of evidence. It is the concluding comment of chapter 20 of the Gospel, which I have already quoted a couple of times: “Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, but these are written so that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you might have life in his name.” (20:30-31) The reason this verse seems to suggest the existence of a signs source is that it doesn’t really make very much sense where it now occurs, at the end of the stories of Jesus’ resurrection (Note: as I’ve indicated before, scholars frequently think that chapter 21 of John was tacked on later, in a second edition; [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:29-04:00May 28th, 2015|Canonical Gospels|

Some Evidence for a Signs Source in John

I started this mini-thread by mentioning one of the now-lost documents of early Christianity that I would love to have discovered, the alleged “Signs Source” of the Gospel of John. Before giving the evidence that there may have been some such source, I went off on a tangent, in order to show that John has a different view of Jesus’ spectacular deeds from what you find in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In these earlier Gospels, Jesus does “miracles,” both because he feels compassion for those in need and in order to illustrate his teaching that the Kingdom of God was soon to appear. In John, however, he does “signs” to prove that he really is a divine being. So, what evidence is there that John’s accounts of Jesus’ signs derive from a previously existing, but no longer surviving, written source? The evidence does not make a slam-dunk case, and so the matter is debated among scholars. I’ve long thought, though, that there probably was some such source. First, some basic factual information. These are the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:29-04:00May 27th, 2015|Canonical Gospels|

Why Jesus Does Miracles

I seem to be taking a very circuitous route (as you may have noticed) to the question of why we might think that the author of the Gospel of John had access to a written source that gave him his information about the “signs” that Jesus did during his public ministry. To get to that point, I have been discussing how John’s view of Jesus’ spectacular deeds differed significantly from the view of the Synoptics. I have stressed that whereas in John Jesus does signs in order to prove that he is the Son of God so that people would come to believe in him, in the Synoptics Jesus refuses to do signs in order to prove his divine identity. But why then does he do miracles in the Synoptics? I suppose the common answer is probably right: he does miracles out of compassion for those who are suffering. But there is more to it than that. The miracles in the Synoptics do demonstrate that what Jesus says is true. But in these Gospels what [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:29-04:00May 26th, 2015|Canonical Gospels|

The Temptation Narrative Missing from John

In my previous post I started to discuss the hypothetical Signs Source that some scholars have claimed lay behind the accounts of Jesus’ miracles in the Gospel of John – one of the now lost documents of early Christianity (assuming it once existed) that I very much wish could be discovered. Before giving evidence that there was some such written source, I started in the last post by discussing the distinctive view of Jesus’ spectacular deeds in the Fourth Gospel, where they are called “signs” rather than “miracles.” In that post I argued that John has a completely different view of these deeds from that found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In these Synoptics Jesus refuses to do miracles in order to prove his identity. When he is asked to do so, he indicates that “no sign will be given to this generation” – apart from the sign of Jonah. Not so in John. Jesus does signs. They are designed to make people believe who he is (4:54). And the Gospel writer himself indicates that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:29-04:00May 25th, 2015|Canonical Gospels|

Signs in the Gospel of John

For many decades now there have been scholars who have been convinced that the Gospel of John is based, in large part, on written, but no-longer surviving, sources. It is much debated whether John relied on the Synoptic Gospels for any of its stories, or whether in fact its author had ever read (or even heard of) Matthew, Mark, and Luke. There are very few verbatim overlaps between John and the others, and outside of the Passion narrative there is not a lot of overlap in the stories told. Somewhat like the Synoptics John does have the healing of a Capernaum official’s son, the feeding of the 5000, and the walking on the water – all told in striking different ways. John’s four other miracles (which he doesn’t call miracles, but “signs”) are unique to his account (including the favorite miracle on college campuses everywhere, the turning of water into wine, and the favorite of most Hollyood screen writers, the raising of Lazarus). Moreover, the teachings of Jesus are highly distinctive in John. Almost nothing [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:29-04:00May 23rd, 2015|Canonical Gospels|

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