Page 181 – The Bart Ehrman Blog

BREAKING NEWS! A Significant New Non-Canonical Gospel Fragment

There is potentially exciting news just out this afternoon. Karen King, scholar of Coptic and Gnosticism at Harvard Divinity School, an expert on the Gnostic Gospels, has just released information about a newly discovered papyrus manuscript – a small fragment the size of a credit card. It is a Gospel fragment of only eight lines. But they are significant lines. On them, Jesus appears to refer … to his wife!! FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, LOG IN AS A MEMBER. IF YOU DON"T BELONG YET -- BETTER JOIN!! Here are the graphics and some links. This is just breaking news, so I don’t have anything more to say about it. Front of fourth-century papyrus fragment Karen L. King's translation of the 8 lines from the front. Papyrus front text: Karen L. King 2012 Karen L. King's translation of the 6 lines on the back. Fourth-century CE codex in Coptic on reverse side. Papyrus reverse side text: Karen L. King 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/us/historian-says-piece-of-papyrus-refers-to-jesus-wife.html?src=me&ref=general&_r=0 http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/18/fragment-suggests-jesus-was-married/ And here’s a draft of [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-30T11:49:05-04:00September 18th, 2012|Christian Apocrypha, History of Biblical Scholarship, Religion in the News, Women in Early Christianity|

How My Loss of Faith Affected My Scholarship

As I was making the long series of posts about my relationship with Bruce Metzger, in response to a question of how he reacted to my loss of faith, I got a number of interesting questions from readers. One that particularly struck me – as it caused me to think for a bit – was about how my loss of faith affected my scholarship. That’s a really good question. And now that I’ve thought it over a bit, I think the answer is a little surprising. To my knowledge, my loss of faith has had almost ZERO effect on my scholarship. That seems weird, since my scholarship is on the New Testament and the history of early Christianity, and you would think that if I were no longer a believer, that it would certainly change how I look at both the NT and the history of the early church. But in fact, I don’t think I have had any change of scholarly views at all to accompany my loss of faith. FOR THE REST OF [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:22:15-04:00September 17th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

On the Blog Itself

I am taking a moment out from a hectic life (who *doesn’t* have a hectic life?!?) to think a bit about the blog, and how it is going. Here are just a few reflections. We got it up and running at the beginning of April, so we have been at it now for just over five months. My goals at the outset were to disseminate knowledge about the New Testament and early Christianity as much as was within my abilities, and to raise money for charities dealing with hunger and homelessness. As I’ve stated frankly before, it was the charity that drove the idea at the outset, and that keeps me going now as we are well into things. As much as I enjoy answering questions and dealing with hard (and not so hard) historical and literary issues involving early Christianity and its literature, if it weren’t for the charity angle, I simply wouldn’t be doing this. It’s too much work! In terms of the work, I think I’ve been averaging about 6 posts [...]

BDEhrman2012-09-16T21:21:00-04:00September 16th, 2012|Public Forum|

Possibilities for the Afterlife

IN MY BIBLE INTRODUCTION, I INTRODUCE STUDENTS TO SOME OF THE OPTIONS WITH RESPECT TO THE AFTERLIFE, IN VIEW OF PAUL’S INSISTENCE IN 1 CORINTHIANS THAT THE FUTURE WILL INVOLVE A PHYSICAL RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD FOR ETERNAL LIFE – A VIEW NOT SHARED BY MANY OF HIS READERS, BOTH THEN AND NOW! ******************************************************************************************************************** Some interpreters have thought that Paul and his Corinthian opponents disagreed about the resurrection because they had fundamentally different understandings about the nature of human existence, both now and in the afterlife. Perhaps it would be useful to reflect on different ways that one might conceive of life after death. Annihilation. One possibility is that a person who dies ceases to exist. This appears to have been a popular notion in the Greco-Roman world, as evidenced by a number of inscriptions on tombstones that bemoan the brevity of life which ends in nonexistence. One of the most widely used Latin inscriptions was so popular that it was normally abbreviated (like our own R.I.P. for “Rest in Peace”) as N.F.N.S.N.C.: “I was [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:22:23-04:00September 15th, 2012|Afterlife, Book Discussions, Paul and His Letters|

The Need for Context

I AM NOW REVISING THE NEW TESTAMENT PORTION OF MY BIBLE INTRODUCTION, AND THOUGHT THAT SOME OF THE SECTIONS IN IT MAY BE OF BROADER INTEREST. AND SO I WILL POST A FEW OF (WHAT STRIKE ME AS) THE MORE INTERESTING PARTS HERE ON THE BLOG OVER THE NEXT WEEK OR SO. THE FOLLOWING IS HOW I BEGIN THIS SECOND SECTION. BEFORE THIS PORTION ARE AN OPENING EIGHT CHAPTERS DEVOTED TO THE HEBREW BIBLE. THEN THERE IS THIS TRANSITIONAL CHAPTER, FOLLOWED BY FIVE ON THE NT. TO GET GEARED UP FOR THE NT, I START AS FOLLOWS. THIS WILL SOUND FAMILIAR TO YOU IF YOU’VE READ SOME OF MY OTHER BOOKS ********************************************************************************************************************** Throughout our study so far we have seen why it is important to know the context of a biblical writing if we want to interpret it correctly. You cannot understand what Isaiah meant when he said that “a young woman has conceived and will bear a son, and you will call him Immanuel,” without knowing that he spoke these words in the context [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:23:28-04:00September 14th, 2012|Book Discussions, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture|

Autobiographical. Metzger and My Loss of Faith

I have come now, by an unusually circuitous route, to answer the question that got me started in talking about my relationship with Bruce Metzger, my work for the NRSV Bible translation committee, my view of the NRSV as a translation, the textual problems of Luke 22:19-20 and 22:43-44 and, well sundry other things. The reader’s question was how Metzger responded to my loss of faith. When I first got to know him, I was a strong evangelical Christian. In the years before he died, I had become an agnostic. How did he respond to that. After all that I’ve written in these posts, I’m afraid the direct answer will be a bit of a disappointment. The answer is: I don’t know. FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click here for membership options. If you don't belong yet, JOIN!! Metzger and I never talked about either my faith or his. He was my teacher and I was his student, and we talked almost exclusively about scholarship: New Testament studies, [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-27T16:30:23-04:00September 14th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Autobiographical: Back to Metzger and Me

After all the tangents and side-tracks, I can return now to my reminiscences of my relationship with Bruce Metzger. Perhaps I should say a few things about his personality, as I perceived and experienced it. I think everyone who knew him would say that he was a true Christian gentleman. He was respectful of all people, polite to a fault, and cordial. But he was not someone that anyone became intimate with. I am absolutely positive that I came to be closer to him than any PhD student he supervised in his 40 plus years teaching at Princeton Theological Seminary. He as much as told me so. I knew his wife and his two sons (a bit); he invited my family to Christmas dinner; for several weeks I lived with him and his wife in their home. But there was always a kind of distance to him as well. He never let down his hair. The best I can put it is that he was cordial rather than warm and intimate. He was a shy [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-11T13:50:37-04:00September 12th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Did Scribes Add the Bloody Sweat?

I have explained why it is almost certain that Luke did not himself write the passage describing Jesus “sweating blood” in Luke 22:43-44: the passage is not found in some of our oldest and best manuscripts, it intrudes in a context that otherwise is structured as a clear chiasmus, and it presents a view of Jesus going to his death precisely at odds with what Luke has produced otherwise. Whereas Luke goes out of his way to portray Jesus as calm and in control in the ace of death – evidently to provide a model to his readers about how they too suffer when they experience persecution – these verses show him in deep anguish to the point of needing heavenly support by an angel, as he sweats great drops as of blood. But if the verses were not originally in Luke, why were they added by scribes? The key to answering the question comes from considering two data. First, when were the verses added to the text? And second, how were they first “used” [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:23:53-04:00September 12th, 2012|Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reader’s Questions|

Jesus’ Death in Mark and Luke

It is one thing to be able to establish the emphases of both Mark and Luke in their accounts of Jesus going to his death. (See my previous post). It is harder, and more speculative, to establish why they chose to portray Jesus in these ways. But there are some good, plausible views of the matter. I’ll start with Mark. In Mark Jesus appears to be in shock, is silent the entire time, seems not to understand why this is happening to him, up to the end, when he cries out asking God why he has forsaken him. And then he dies, never having received an answer. What is most striking is that even though Mark’s Jesus may not know why, when it comes to the time, he has to suffer like this, the reader does (and so, of course, does Mark). The moment that Jesus dies, two things happen: the curtain in the temple is ripped in half and the centurion confesses that he is the son of God. The curtain was the barrier [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:24:02-04:00September 10th, 2012|Canonical Gospels|

Jesus Going to His Death in Luke

In previous posts I have given some of the reasons for thinking that Luke did not write the account of Jesus “sweating blood” in his prayer before his arrest. A lot more could obviously be said, but anyone who wants more can just look up the discussion in my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. For the purposes of the blog, two BIG questions remain: why does Luke change Mark’s portrayal of Jesus going to his death so that now he is so clearly calm and collected? And why did later scribes change Luke’s portrayal by adding the two verses in question? I’ll answer the first question in this post and the next, the second in a third post in a couple of days. The first thing to stress is that Luke’s emphasis can be found not only in this passage but in others as well, as a redactional comparison with Mark shows (i.e., seeing what Luke has edited – or “redacted” -- in Mark’s version, by what he has added, omitted, and changed) FOR [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:24:09-04:00September 9th, 2012|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

An Interlude: My Other CIA

This post is a one-day interlude from my posting on the textual problem of Luke’s passage on the “bloody sweat,” which was a sidetrack from my postings on problems I had with the NRSV, which were a sidetrack from my postings on my relationship with Bruce Metzger, which got started by a question about how he reacted to my loss of faith, a question I have not yet answered. This post is irrelevant to all that, but if I don’t post on it now, I never will. So, this blog is not the one and only Christianity in Antiquity in my life. The other is a reading group that I host once a month, of graduate students and faculty (mainly graduate students) from UNC and Duke, which I started, I don’t know 15 years or more ago, and that I called Christianity in Antiquity (CIA) because I thought I would be clever. My self-deception on such points, obviously, has still not worn off. FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:24:17-04:00September 7th, 2012|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

More on The Bloody Sweat

I mentioned that I first got interested in the textual problem of Luke 22:43-44 (“the bloody sweat”) when I was taking a graduate seminar at Princeton Theological Seminary, my first year in the doctoral program. The seminar was devoted (the entire semester) to the Greek exegesis of Luke. My fellow student, Mark Plunkett, presented a seminar paper in which he dealt with the passage. He was not at all interested in the textual question of whether vv. 43-44 were original. He was assuming that there were not, but it had nothing to do with his presentation. In his presentation he argued that there was a clear structure to the passage of Jesus’ prayer before being arrested (in Luke’s source this takes place in the Garden of Gethsemane, but Luke doesn’t say so) and he made a convincing argument (to my mind). And then I realized that the structural argument was relevant to the textual problem of whether the verses were original or not. While we moved on to other things in the seminar that afternoon, [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:24:24-04:00September 6th, 2012|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Problems with the NRSV (Part 5)

My problems with the NRSV continued - Part 5! Trust me, I eventually get back to the question of my relationship with Bruce Metzger. I keep getting sidetracked, but the tracks on the side are interesting. At least I *think* they are!! In my last post, I pointed out that the famous passage of the so-called “bloody sweat” in Luke 22:43-44 is thought by some scholars not to have been original to the Gospel of Luke. I count myself in that number. Problems with the NRSV - The Bloody Sweat One of my very first scholarly articles was devoted to the question. I wrote it when I was a first-year graduate student – or rather, co-wrote it, with a friend of mine who was in the Ph.D. program at Princeton Seminary with me. A fellow named Mark Plunkett did a study of the passage of Jesus’ prayer before his arrest and realized something about the structure of the passage. In turn, I realized that if he was right, the two verses about the bloody sweat [...]

BDEhrman2022-07-05T08:46:25-04:00September 5th, 2012|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Problems with the NRSV (Part 4)

My problems with the NRSV - Part 4 of a 5 Part series. I will give just one other textual disagreement that I have with the translators of the NRSV. By “textual” disagreement I mean a disagreement over what the original Greek text of a passage was that should have been translated. For this second example, I’ll stick with Luke, and again with the Passion narrative. Luke & the NRSV The full passage of Jesus’ prayer in the garden in Luke 24:39-46 reads as follows in the NRSV: FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click here for membership options. If you don't belong yet, JOIN!! 39 He came out and went, as was his custom, to the mount of Olives; and the disciples followed him. 40 When he reached the place, he said to them, “Pray that you may not come into the time of trial.” Then he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, knelt down, and prayed, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup [...]

BDEhrman2022-07-04T19:47:21-04:00September 4th, 2012|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Problems with the NRSV (Part 3)

My analysis of the problems with the NRSV continues in Part 3! Translators of the Bible have a terrifically complicated, difficult, and usually thankless task. I knew that, of course ever since taking Greek back in college. But I did not relate to the problems emotionally until I started publishing translations of my own. It’s HARD. My first translation project was a two-volume edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library (published by Harvard University Press). It was at that point that I realized that what translators do is not at all what the rest of us do who can teach the ancient languages and read Greek and assign Greek translation exercises to classes of graduate students. When you are with a class of students, you can sit around the table, discuss the various options about how a text can be translated, and talk about the pros and cons of various English renditions. Make a few suggestions for how to provide nuance to a rendering. Explicate the fuller meaning of the Greek by [...]

BDEhrman2022-07-04T19:10:42-04:00September 3rd, 2012|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Problems with the NRSV Bible (Part 2)

My problems in the NSRV Bible are covered in this 5 part series. In my last post, I mentioned John 3:22 as a verse that is mistranslated in the NRSV, leading to problems; but the problems of interpretation are not that enormous there. The translators simply removed an internal inconsistency by the way they mistranslated the verse. This second problem, the subject of this post, is more severe. A mistranslation has completely altered the meaning of a passage; it is the result of a very good motive – to make the translation gender-inclusive. But motive has led to a very bad result in this case. The Problems with the NSRV Bible: Gender The policy of the NRSV Bible was to render gender-neutral statements in a gender-neutral way. If a passage refers to humans in general, then it does not make sense to translate it as referring only to “men” (or only to “women” for that matter). So instead of “man” the translators chose to use “person” or “human” or – if the mortality of people [...]

BDEhrman2022-07-04T18:37:03-04:00September 3rd, 2012|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Problems with the NRSV (Part I)

My problems with the NRSV. One of the pleasures and difficulties I am finding with this blog is that it is oh so easy to get sidetracked from my original plan and intention. The current series of posts was originally a response to the question of how Bruce Metzger reacted to my loss of faith. (To anticipate the final answer: I don’t think he had much of a reaction at all!) But instead of dealing with that question directly, I decided to use it as an opportunity to talk about my long-term relationship with Metzger; this has occupied a large number of posts. The most recent of those had to do with my work for/with him on the New Revised Standard Version. In response to those posts, several people have asked me questions about the NRSV, and now I am dealing with/ responding to these. But I promise: I will get back to the original question eventually! Problems with the NRSV On the NRSV, several people have wanted to know if I had problems with [...]

BDEhrman2022-07-04T18:14:28-04:00September 1st, 2012|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Carlo Martini, in memoriam

I was very sorry today to learn that Carlo Martini passed away. He was an important textual scholar who was best known for other things -- in particular for being in the very higher reaches of the Roman Catholic church hierarchy. He was the cardinal of Milan (Italy) and for a while was thought to be a candidate to be the next pope. He was 85 at his death. I never met him, but I long knew of him and actually had correpondence with him when I was a graduate student. He was a terrific scholar of the Greek New Testament, an expert in the Greek manuscripts. He wrote a very important book (in Italian) on one of the most important biblical manuscripts, codex Vaticanus. As one of the premier experts on the text of the New Testament, he was a member of the five-person committee that was responsible for editing the version of the Greek NT that is used everywhere throughout hte world today. Metzger was another member of the committee, and so they [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:25:10-04:00August 31st, 2012|Reflections and Ruminations|

Another Take on Jesus’ Existence

Some readers have objected to my insistence that New Testament scholars, on the whole, do not take seriously the claims of the mythicists that Jesus never existed. I have always stressed that Jesus' existence is known (and can be demonstrated) by thousands of New Testament scholars. But I have also always stressed that scholarly consensus on this issue is not in itself *evidence* (my detractors among the mythicists seem to overlook this little point, when they claim that I argue that since the consensus says something it must be true; that's not my view at all!). At the same time, it is worthwhile knowing what the experts say -- whether talking about the age of our universe (13.8 billion years; but I wouldn't be able to calculate that myself); about the theory of evolution (Hey, it's just a *theory*! yes, but so too is the "theory" of gravity!!); about the forgery of the Hitler diaries; or about anything else that involves expertise. At the same time, it is worthwhile in all these cases to know what [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-15T11:06:11-05:00August 30th, 2012|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Public Forum|

Problems with Other Translations

I have indicated that my preferred translation is the NRSV. Everyone, of course, has their favorite. My judgment is that among main-line, serious biblical scholars, the NRSV is far and away the preferred translation. But it is not so among general readers. I believe the King James Bible (the KJV) (or its slight revision: The New King James) and the New International Version (NIV) are better sellers among the population at large. So let me say a few words about these two. (Some readers of this blog will want to write to me to ask what I think of their own preferred translation: the Jerusalem Bible; the New English Version; the New American Standard Bible; etc etc. Most of the time I tell them that it’s fine. It just isn’t the one that I think is the best) First: The King James. Published in 1611, the KJV (or “Authorized Version” as it was called, since it was a translation “authorized” by the head of the Anglican Church – guess who? King James of England), is [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:25:18-04:00August 29th, 2012|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

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