Do modern scholars ever produce “ancient” forgeries? In particular, have experts in the New Testament and early Christianity ever gone out on a limb and forged a Gospel, claiming to have discovered it, and tried then to convince others that it is ancient and authentic? [...]
In my previous post I pointed out that scribes appear to have changed their texts of the New Testament in ways that reflected the rising anti-Jewish sentiment of the early Christian centuries. For me, by a wide margin, the most intriguing example of this is [...]
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 [...]
As I have indicated in my recent posts, we have far more copies of the NT than of any other book from antiquity –and as a result, far more differences among our copies (i.e. more mistakes). In addition. we have ancient translations of the NT [...]
What other resources do we have to figure out what the authors of the New Testament originally wrote, if we don't have their actual writings themselves? In this post I move into a very brief discussion of one other area of evidence for the text [...]
Do we know the original wording of the New Testament? Here I continue! 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 [...]
I have begun to explain the field of “textual criticism,” the academic discipline that tries to establish what an author actually wrote if you don’t have his original but only copies made from later times. In this post I begin to summarize some of the [...]
In my previous post I talked about the church Father Epiphanius's attack on a heretical group of Gnostics called the Phibionites. They allegedly based their practices on a now-no-longer-surviving book the Greater Questions of Mary (Magdalene). Epiphanius indicates he knows the book. Did he? Did [...]
THIS POST RESUMES MY RECOLLECTIONS OF MY INTERACTIONS WITH BRUCE METZGER, MY MENTOR. Remember: when I say "textual criticism" in this post, I am NOT referring simply to the "study of texts." Textual criticism is the technical term used by scholars (in all fields) to [...]
Ever since I started publishing books for non-scholars, I've been attacked by evangelical Christians for my views of the Bible. Then, somewhat ironically, about nine years ago I came under attack by the nemeses of evangelical Christians, the "mythicists," who claim that Jesus never existed. [...]