Page 194 – The Bart Ehrman Blog

Errant Texts and Historians

QUESTION: In your debates with James White and Dan Wallace, you argued that we cannot know what the original autographs of the NT said because we don't have the originals. In your debate with James White, you even commented that the 2nd or 3rd copier of the text of Mark could have radically altered the text so that the way it came down to us is radically different than the autographs. You've argued that this is the case even for classical writings or any textual document from antiquity. Now, if you believe we cannot know what the originals said because we don't have the autographs, then how could you know that Paul met with James and Cephas, and use that as an argument proving that we know Jesus existed? Is it not possible (according to your view) that Galatians has been radically altered? In other words, it seems that you either have to sacrifice your skepticism regarding textual criticism or sacrifice your certainty for the historicity of Jesus. RESPONSE: This is a great question! So, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:15-04:00November 20th, 2013|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Jesus and Brian!!!
Gallery
Jesus and Brian!!!

Jesus and Film, Public Forum

Jesus and Brian!!!

I am pleased to be able to announce that a conference will be held this summer that looks to be outrageously fun and interesting. It will be at King’s College, London. And it will be on the Life of Brian and the Historical Jesus. I have been asked to give one of the papers, and how could I refuse! I’m going to have to cut short a family vacation in France, but there’s no way I’m missing this. Here’s the publicity for it. Jesus and Brian Or: What have the Pythons done for Us? A Biblical Studies Conference King’s College London, The Strand, London WC1 Safra Lecture Theatre Friday June 20th to Sunday June 22nd, 2014 Monty Python’s Life of Brian provoked a furious response in some quarters when it first appeared in 1979, even leading to cries of ‘blasphemy’. However, many students and teachers of biblical literature were quietly, and often loudly, both amused and intrigued. Life of Brian in fact contains numerous references to what was then the cutting edge of biblical scholarship [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:15-04:00November 20th, 2013|Jesus and Film, Public Forum|

Is The NT Portrayal of Jesus Accurate? Debate With Craig Evans

This video is of a debate that I participated in nearly two years ago in Nova Scotia with Dr. Craig Evans, a very well-known and widely published scholar of the New Testament who is also a conservative evangelical Christian (not “ultra-conservative,” and nowhere near a fundamentalist – but still conservative). He is the author of Jesus and His World: The Archaeological Evidence and Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels. This was the first of two debates that took place, in two different locations,on subsequent evenings. The topic of the debate was: “Does the New Testament Present a Reliable Portrait of the Historical Jesus.” As you might imagine, Craig Evans argues that Yes, it does. I argue that No, it does not. Both of us, naturally enough, focus our attention on the four Gospels of the New Testament. We each gave an opening speech of 30 minutes; and then we had a chance for a rebuttal, followed by some Q & A. I have to say, this was one of the favorite debates that I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:13-04:00November 17th, 2013|Bart's Debates, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Video Media|

Problem on the Site

My assistant and computer guru Steve Ray noticed yesterday (Saturday, November 16) that comments were not getting posted on the site. There was a technical malfunction, unrelated to him, me, or the CIA (the real one or the secondary one in D.C., so far as I know....). This is the note he posted on my facebook page. Please ... take note! Greetings Blog Members. Technical Notice. There was a database corruption on the blog server today due to JetPack, one that did not allow comments to record. If you left a comment between 6am to 6pm EST, please consider submitting it again. If any member notes that their account is not working properly (cannot access membership content), please email your password to [email protected] and it will be manually reset. Sorry for any inconvenience. S. E. Ray, Bart's Assistant. Additionally, the inbound links still result in membership access issues, even after logging in. Developers are looking into this and will not get back to us until Monday, 11/18/2013. However, if you login directly at https://ehrmanblog.org/login/ member posts are [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:15-04:00November 17th, 2013|Public Forum|

Why Historians Can Talk “About” the Resurrection

In this final post (for now) on the historian and miracles, I want to emphasize one point that I raise of my own volition, and answer one question that has been asked by a reader. First, a point to emphasize (I borrow this from my forthcoming book on How Jesus Became God), on whether my stand on miracles just means that I’m a crazy secularist…. The reason that historians cannot prove or disprove whether God has performed a miracle in the past – such as by raising Jesus from the dead – is not because historians are required to be secular humanists with an anti-supernaturalist bias. I want to stress this point because conservative Christian apologists, in order to score debating points, often claim that this is the case. In their view, if historians did not have anti-supernaturalist biases or assumptions, they would be able to affirm the historical “evidence” that Jesus was raised from the dead. I should point out that these Christian apologists almost never consider the “evidence” for other miracles from the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:15-04:00November 15th, 2013|Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Historians and the Problem of Miracle

Yesterday I started to talk about why historians cannot demonstrate that a miracle such as the resurrection happened because doing so requires a set of presuppositions that are not generally shared by historians doing their work. Over the years I’ve thought a lot about this question, and have tried to explain on several occasions why a “miracle” can never be shown, on historical grounds, to have happened -- even if it did. Here is a slightly different way of approaching the matter, as I expressed it in an earlier publication on the historical Jesus: ******************************************************** People today typically think of miracles as supernatural violations of natural law, divine interventions into the natural course of events. I should emphasize that this popular understanding does not fit particularly well into modern scientific understandings of "nature," in that scientists today are less confident in the entire category of natural "law" than they were, say, in the nineteenth century. For this reason, it is probably better not to speak of supernatural violations of "laws," but to think of miracles [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:14-04:00November 15th, 2013|Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

History is Not the Past

Yesterday I started to answer a question from a reader who pointed out that just as the existence of Jesus is multiply attested, so too is Jesus’ resurrection. And so if *one* is established as historical, doesn’t the other one *also* have to be seen as historical? And if one is considered non-historical, doesn’t that show that the other is probably also non-historical? These are great questions, but I think the answer to both of them is “no.” Yesterday I showed why multiple attestation strongly supports the existence of Jesus. Some readers objected to that, but I should reiterate – this is simply a common sense principle that all of us use every day to decide if something happened (say, what happened at lunch yesterday). Today I want to show why multiple attestation can *not* be used to support the resurrection of Jesus. I begin by pointing out something that hasn’t occurred to a lot of people, but is nonetheless a fundamental point. History is not the past. This may come as a surprise, but [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:14-04:00November 13th, 2013|Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Multiple Attestation for Jesus

I had an interesting email from a reader the other day, in which he pointed out that the “multiple attestation” for the existence of Jesus is virtually matched by the “multiple attestation” for the resurrection of Jesus. At first I thought his point was the Christian apologetic one, that therefore since the resurrection is just as well (not quite, but still pretty well) attested as the very existence of Jesus, doesn’t that show that Jesus was probably raised from the dead? When I responded to that question, it turned out that he was actually saying the opposite: since we (meaning he and I) don’t believe that Jesus was raised from the dead, but *that’s* well attested, doesn’t that call into question the very existence of Jesus, which has comparable attestation. Multiple attestation can’t “show” it, in this view. As I think about it now, my response to *both* points (the Christian apologetic and the non-christian mythicist) is probably the same, that when dealing with the two phenomena – 1. the existence of Jesus and 2. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:14-04:00November 12th, 2013|Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Who Can Still Be A Christian?

QUESTION: If historical Jesus scholars believes that Jesus' main message was the imminent apocalypse, and that didn't happen, how can anyone who believe that remain a Christian, given that Jesus was wrong on the main focus of his life? RESPONSE: This is a great question, and one I get asked a lot. Let me say at the outset that I think it is exactly right in its evaluation of who Jesus was. As I’ve explained in a lot of places, for over the past century – since Albert Schweitzer’s classic, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), the majority of NT scholars in Europe and the United States have been convinced that Jesus was indeed an apocalyptic preacher, like others of his day. Apocalypticism appears to have been widespread throughout Palestinian Judaism at the time. In rough form (with lots of variations) it was held by the Pharisees (who believed in the “resurrection” at the end of the age, an apocalyptic idea; they therefore probably held to other apocalyptic notions), by the Essenes who produced [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:14-04:00November 10th, 2013|Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Video: Forgery in the New Testament

On Monday, March 21, 2011, I gave a lecture at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club of California, underwritten by The Bernard Osher Foundation. The moderator was Alan Jones, Dean Emeritus, Grace Cathedral. Below is a link to the lecture. I gave the lecture soon after my book Forged: Writing in the Name of God. Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are appeared. In that book I try to present, to a lay audience, the evidence that scholars have found compelling that not only are some books *outside* the New Testament written (falsely) in the names of the apostles (for example, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas, the Apocalypse of Paul, and so on: these were not really written by Peter, Thomas, or Paul, as everyone agrees) but also books written *inside* the New Testament. This does not apply to "anonymous" books, where an author does not provide his name (e.g., Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John -- the authors themselves do not say who they are, it was only later [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:14-04:00November 8th, 2013|Book Discussions, Forgery in Antiquity, Video Media|

Carrier, Bayes Theorem, and Jesus’ Existence

As most of you know, I’m pretty much staying out of the mythicist debates. That is for several reasons. One is that the mythicist position is not seen as intellectually credible in my field (I’m using euphemisms here; you should see what most of my friends *actually* say about it….) – no one that I know personally (I know a *lot* of scholars of New Testament, early Christianity, and so on) takes it at *all* seriously as a viable historical perspective (this includes not just Christians but also Jews, agnostics, atheists – you name it), and my colleagues sometimes tell me that I’m simply providing the mythicists with precisely the credibility they’re looking for even by engaging them. It’s a good point, and I take it seriously. In that connection I should say that I can understand how someone who hasn’t spent years being trained in the history of early Christianity might have difficulty distinguishing between serious scholarship that is accepted by experts as being plausible (even when judged wrong) and the writings of others [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:14-04:00November 7th, 2013|Bart's Critics, Bart's Debates, Historical Jesus, Mythicism|

New Hermeneia Manuscript
Gallery
New Hermeneia Manuscript

Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Religion in the News

New Hermeneia Manuscript

Yesterday I provided background for my post of today by talking about the five hermeneia manuscripts of the Gospel of John that were discussed by Bruce Metzger in a publication in 1988. The reason that is now timely is that a new manuscript has just recently been identified with the same phenomenon. This time it is a Coptic manuscript that survives only in a fragment, of John chapter 3. The person who has identified it is Brice Jones, a PhD candidate in New Testament at Concordia University in Montreal. Brice is developing an expertise in textual criticism and the study of manuscripts, and this is a terrific discovery. Below is the notice that he sent around a few weeks ago reporting his find (in his own words, of course). FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click here for membership options. If you don't belong yet, JOIN NOW!!! Yesterday I provided background for my post of today by talking about the five heremeneia manuscripts of the Gospel of John that were [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:14-04:00November 6th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Religion in the News|

Fortune Telling with Manuscripts

An interesting new manuscript of the Gospel of John has just been identified. I’ll give some information on it in the next post, but to make sense of it I need to provide some background. This is pretty esoteric stuff (i.e., hardly anyone but hard-core experts knows about it), but it’s pretty interesting. In 1988 my mentor, Bruce Metzger, published an article called “Greek Manuscripts of John’s Gospel With ‘Hermeneia.’ ” In this article he identified five Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of John with an unusual feature. These papyrus manuscripts date from the third (or possibly fourth) to the seventh centuries. The unusual feature in them is that on the bottom of one or more pages (fourteen instances altogether among the five manuscripts) after the portion of the text of John’s Gospel , they have written the Greek word “hermeneia,” which is then followed by some kind of phrase or other. These phrases are such things as “If you believe it will be a joy to you” or “it is a good deliverance” or [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:14-04:00November 5th, 2013|New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

Video: Misquoting Jesus

I have decided to add a new feature to my blog. There have been a number of video's recorded of my lectures and interviews, and I thought it might be interesting to post these on occasion here on the blog combined with my added comments. My most successful popular book so far has been Misquoting Jesus. After it was out for a while and finally "took off," I got asked to give a bunch of lectures on the topic. In fact, I still *do* give lectures on the topic. Well, usually, it's the same lecture! So I won't be posting every one of them -- one is enough. This is one of the earlier ones I did, at Stanford University on April 25, 2007. This was part of Stanford's Heyns Lecture Series. The lecture was given at Cubberley Auditorium, Stanford University Campus. The lecture was called "Misquoting Jesus: Scribes Who Altered Scripture and Readers Who May Never Know." The original flyer announcing the event is here in PDF format. One of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:13-04:00November 3rd, 2013|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Video Media|

Writers Who Contradict Themselves

In response to the question of why the authors of the New Testament sometimes contradict themselves, I’ve so far discussed two phenomena: (1) sometimes (as with Paul) an author changes his mind about something over time, and (2) sometimes an author (as with John) incorporates a number of earlier sources in his or her writing when these sources are sometimes at odds with one another, thereby creating discrepancies, or “literary seams” as I called them in my previous post. Now I deal with a third and final thing (there may be more explanations, but these are the ones I’ve thought most about). In my view, authors – not just NT authors, but authors in general (and whatever we can say about the writers of the NT, at least we can say they were authors!) – often simply are careless and don’t notice mistakes. This is not only true of authors, it’s true of readers. Very often, when I point out internal discrepancies, for example, in the Gospel of John or in the Book of Acts, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:13-04:00November 1st, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

Discrepancies Inside the Fourth Gospel

OK, back to contradictions. This thread (such as it is – so far there’s been no thread) began with a reader’s question of how there could be contradictions in the work of a single author? Was he just inattentive? Didn’t he care? Was he sloppy? In the previous post I pointed out that with someone like Paul, it was possible that he changed his mind about some things over the decade covered by his letters. But how about internal contradictions within a book? There are lots of these two? How can they be explained? In some instances they can be explained by the fact that an author has taken a variety of different sources and incorporated them into his writing. On occasion, these sources have discrepancies (sometimes very slight) between them, and the author for some reason or another did not choose to smooth them out. Or he didn’t notice them! (More on that in my next post.) A terrific set of examples comes from the Gospel of John. Most people reading John don’t see [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:13-04:00October 31st, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

Was Paul Contemplating Suicide?

I will get back to contradictions in my next post. For now, something else has come up. In my two previous posts I’ve mentioned Phil. 1:21, where Paul says, “To live is Christ, to die is gain.” I’ve been asked by several blog-readers about this, and it occurs to me that it might be useful to sketch out one set of reflections on the verse, as I lay it out in one of my side-comments in my textbook on the New Testament. Here is what I say there: ******************************************************************************************************************* In an intriguing book that discusses suicide and martyrdom in the ancient world (A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom among Christians and Jews in Antiquity. HarperSanFrancisco, 1992) Arthur Droge and James Tabor argue that the modern notion that suicide is a “sin” stems not from the Bible but from the fifth-century Saint Augustine. Prior to Augustine, suicide per se was not condemned by pagans, Jews, and Christians. On the contrary, in certain circumstances it was even advocated as the right and noble thing to do. Indeed, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:13-04:00October 30th, 2013|Paul and His Letters, Reflections and Ruminations|

A Rather Serious Mistake

In my previous post I started answering the question of why there may be contradictions/discrepancies/differences within the works of a single author. Weren’t they careful? Didn’t they see the problem? I mentioned that sometimes it may be that with someone like Paul, since his letters spanned over a decade, maybe he changed his mind about some things. I certainly don’t think all the same things I did ten years ago; and if you contrast what I thought when I was 19 and when I was 29, it was an *extreme* shift. The example I used was Paul’s sense in his early letters that he would be alive when Jesus returned; but in his later letters he seems to have thought that he might well die first. In that context I mentioned the famous passage in Paul, a favorite in funeral and memorial services, 2 Cor. 5:1: “For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:13-04:00October 29th, 2013|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Are There Contradictions in the New Testament?

QUESTION: If I had collected a lot of stories about a person and put them together into a “biography” I would at least make sure that all the stories were at least somewhat consistent. I don’t understand why the writers of the gospels didn’t make sure their final product made sense – they certainly didn’t seem to have any problems changing things to suit them in many cases. Did they just write down everything they heard without any regard to whether one story or dialog totally contradicted another in the same story? Did they not even care? RESPONSE: This is a great question, and I wish there were a simple (let alone great) answer to it. Let me make a few observations more or less off the cuff, without presuming to make anything like an authoritative pronouncement on the matter…. First, the question refers to internal discrepancies *within* a single author, not to discrepancies between authors. One of the most interesting features of the canonical Gospels’ accounts of Jesus is, of course, that they are [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:59-04:00October 27th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Catholic Epistles, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Upcoming Lectures at the Smithsonian

Now that the government is back in business, the Smithsonian Associates has resumed its work; they sponsor lectures and lecture series in Washington D.C., every week, all the time, and I usually do a day long series of lectures for them once or twice a year, based on a book I have coming out. I’m scheduled for the Spring 2014 in conjunction with my book How Jesus Became God. But I’ll also be doing one this December for the English-only version of the apocryphal Gospels that is to be published by then (edited from the original-language + English version that came out last year; this new one, like the old one, was written, edited, and translated with my colleague at UNC, Zlatko Plese). This first event is scheduled for Saturday Dec. 7; there will be four lectures, two in the morning and two in the afternoon. It’s a killer of a day (for me at least). But anyone in the area should consider attending. You can get further information at their website: http://smithsonianassociates.org/ticketing/index.aspx The following [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:59-04:00October 25th, 2013|Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus|

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