Reader’s Questions Archives - Page 27 of 28 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Bart responds to readers, friend and foe, as time allows.

Autobiographical: Metzger and Me. My First Work on the Text

QUESTION: Hey Bart, I know you studied under Bruce Metzger and my question is how did he feel about your skepticism toward the trustworthiness of the N.T? RESPONSE: Bruce Metzger and I had a long and very close relationship. I was his student for seven years and his research assistant for the New Revised Standard Version (he was the chair of the translation committee) for a couple of years. He directed my masters and PhD theses; he helped me break into publishing; he worked to get me into editorial positions for journals and monograph series; he guided my research until I struck out on my own. I dare say I was closer to him than any student that he had in his four decades of teaching at Princeton Theological Seminary. He became a kind of father figure for me. He was a great New Testament scholar and a great man. I first heard of Bruce Metzger when I was in college studying Greek. My Greek professor at Wheaton, Gerald Hawthorne, knew that I was [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-11T13:41:51-04:00July 8th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Income from Books

QUESTION: Do you mind if I ask you about how the financial incentives for you compare between these types of projects? I assume that your books for scholars are not expected to make much money directly, although they are important for your career in other ways. Textbooks are very expensive compared to popular books; for example the list price for your textbook “The New Testament” (paperback) is $65. That’s actually not particularly high as textbooks go, but still at least three times as expensive as your popular books. Its also longer of course at 600 pages vs e.g. about 250 pages for “Misquoting Jesus” so they must take you longer to write. How does the compensation on your end compare? RESPONSE: Not a problem -- there's nothing very secretive about it. The first thing to say, though, is that authors have NO say (*NO* say!) over the price of their books. Publishers don't even ask for an author's opinion! Scholarly books are not profitable, and usually pay nothing or next to nothing. In lots [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:35:31-04:00July 4th, 2012|Book Discussions, Reader’s Questions|

Would We Recognize an Original Manuscript?

READER'S QUESTION: Were we to have any *original manuscript* of any NT document in our midst, would we be able to recognize and confirm it as such? If so, how? BART'S RESPONSE: Now that’s a question I’ve never been asked before! And in fact, that I’ve never really thought about before. It’s been fun to reflect on it a bit. To get to the short answer: I think the answer would almost certainly be "No". The reasons are of particular interest, though. Suppose by chance a very early copy of the Gospel of John appeared. How would we date it? Manuscripts are dated on the basis of palaeography – an analysis of the handwriting. Since, before the invention of printing, handwriting changed slowly, over periods of time, we can collect specimens of Greek manuscripts (or Latin or Coptic etc.) and find ones that have dates written on them. We can then establish what Greek handwriting looked like at one period or another. This, of course, has all been done for us already by experts [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:36:05-04:00June 26th, 2012|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

The Hebrew Bible and Its Sources

QUESTION: Do you have a suggestion for a book concerning the OT's construction? I believe in the History of God (by K. Armstrong) she mentioned that there were about five distinct writers for the OT. Is this the scholarly view and do you have a book suggestion to delve deeper into it? RESPONSE: Right! The Old Testament (for Christians; otherwise: the Jewish Scriptures, the Hebrew Bible; the Tanakh – these are all more or less synonyms.) It’s been on my mind a lot lately. Right now, my current writing project is a college-level textbook on the entire Bible, Genesis to Revelation. This seems to me to be way too much to cram into a semester, but as it turns out, something like half the colleges in the country teach biblical courses this way, rather than having Hebrew Bible in one semester and New Testament another. And, in my judgment, the textbooks currently available for the course are not as good as they should be. So my publisher, some years ago, urged me to write [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:36:13-04:00June 25th, 2012|Book Discussions, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reader’s Questions|

Why Did “Orthodox” Christianity Win: Part 2

In my previous post I talked about the “Eusebian model” for understanding the relationship of orthodoxy and heresy in earliest Christianity, and then about the counter-view set forth by Walter Bauer in his important study of 1934. What do scholars think today? Only the most conservative scholars (fundamentalists and extremely conservative evangelical Christian scholars) still hold to a Eusebian view. For them, not only was Eusebius’s form of orthodoxy taught by Jesus (who told his disciples that he was fully God and fully man, etc.), but their *own* view of the faith was taught by both Jesus and all his disciples. No one else thinks so. Jesus did not teach his disciples the Nicene Creed! FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click here for membership options. If you don't belong yet, JOIN!! Bauer’s view has been enormously influential on critical scholarship, although no one today accepts the details of Bauer’s very detailed exposition. And everyone recognizes that there are major problems with the case that Bauer built. Many of [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-07T14:44:07-04:00June 23rd, 2012|Fourth-Century Christianity, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reader’s Questions|

Why Did “Orthodox” Christianity Win?

QUESTION: What I have been wondering lately is "why" did Christianity win out. There seemed to be much competition in the ancient world between the pagan polytheisms and monotheistic religions. Competition not only between the Jewish religion and Christian religion but within Christianity. I would be interested in why you think the current version of Christianity won out. Was it purely a matter of cultural evolution and this form of Christianity seemed to benefit people the most, easiest to adhere to, most flexible. RESPONSE: In my previous post I tried to deal (briefly!) with the first part of this question: why did Christianity succeed in the first place, so that it eventually became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. In this post I will deal (briefly again!) with the second question: why did a certain form of Christianity – widely labeled “orthodox” – end up triumphing within Christianity, when there were so many other forms of Christianity that were competing for dominance? This too is not at all an easy question, and I have [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-07T14:34:22-04:00June 22nd, 2012|Fourth-Century Christianity, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reader’s Questions|

The Growth of Early Christianity: A Clarification

In my last post I was discussing why / how Christianity succeeded in taking over the Empire, and a number of readers have pointed out that the conversion of Constantine had something to do with it. Yes indeed!! Constantine had EVERYTHING to do with it. If he/that hadn’t happened, there’s no telling what would have been. Constantine was the real game-changer. But my post (I wasn’t clear about this: my mistake) wasn’t dealing with the cataclysmic events of the fourth century; I was trying to talk about what was going on *before* the game changed. The question I had and have is how Christianity managed to grow exponentially from the time of the apostles up to the early fourth century, when everything took a radical turn with the conversion of the emperor (which led, before century’s end, to Christianity becoming the state religion!). If we assume that the New Testament is basically right, just for the sake of the argument (and in this it cannot be wrong by much, any way you look at it) [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-04T13:39:30-04:00June 20th, 2012|Constantine, Fourth-Century Christianity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Spread of Christianity|

Why Did Christianity Succeed?

QUESTION: What I have been wondering lately is "why" did Christianity win out. There seemed to be much competition in the ancient world between the pagan polytheisms and monotheistic religions. Competition not only between the Jewish religion and Christian religion but within Christianity. I would be interested in why you think the current version of Christianity won out. Was it purely a matter of cultural evolution and this form of Christianity seemed to benefit people the most, easiest to adhere to, most flexible. RESPONSE: There are actually two questions here, both of them really interesting and really important! One is: why / how did the “orthodox” form of Christianity manage to become dominant within the religion. I will take a stab at answering that question in a couple of days, but be forewarned: it’s not easy, especially in a 1000-word post on a blog! The other question is at least as interesting and even harder to answer: how / why did Christianity manage to become the dominant religion of the entire Roman Empire, so that [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-09T13:17:55-04:00June 19th, 2012|Constantine, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reader’s Questions, Spread of Christianity|

Some Reading Suggestions on the New Testament

QUESTION: I've enjoyed reading "Jesus Interrupted" and "Misquoting Jesus". I am also listening to two of The Teaching Company courses you recorded - "The New Testament" and "Lost Christianities". Here is my question: Can you suggest additional books by other authors that provide balanced information on the New Testament? Such a bibliography would be a nice addition to your web site. RESPONSE: Ah yes! It’s important to hear various (balanced) views. I tell my students this and they sometimes are surprised, since they think that I imagine that my view is the only one worth hearing! But in my textbook on the New Testament (The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings) I provide suggestions for further reading at the end of each of the thirty chapters, for each relevant topic. I include, in virtually every chapter, an important book that I completely disagree with. Students, of every age, should get a range of perspective, weigh evidence, and make a decision for themselves. FOR THE REST of this Response, go to [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:38:30-04:00June 17th, 2012|Book Discussions, Reader’s Questions, Teaching Christianity|

Should We Change the Canon of Scripture?

QUESTION: Given the criteria used to determine what would go on to constitute the New Testament canon, how is it that Hebrews and the book of Revelation remain part of the canon? I understand that Christians came to believe that they were authored by the apostles which is why they made it into the canon, but we now know that they weren't authored by Paul or John..so why are they still in the NT? RESPONSE: Interesting idea! I sometimes get asked what I would exclude from the canon if given the choice, and I almost always say 1 Timothy (because of what it says about women in 2:11-15, and how the passage has been used for such horrible purposes over the years). But, well, it ain’t gonna happen. I don’t get a vote. And that’s the problem with Hebrews and Revelation – and all the other books that were admitted when Church Fathers (wrongly) thought they were written by apostles of Jesus (in this case Paul and John). No one is going to give any [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:39:17-04:00June 10th, 2012|Catholic Epistles, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Was Jesus an Essene?

QUESTION: I was wondering how big of an influence you think the Essenes had on Jesus and his teachings, and if there's any evidence that he and John The Baptist were students of that philosophy. Jesus' apocalyptic teachings seem to align with them a lot. RESPONSE: Great question! When the Dead Sea Scrolls (= DSS) were discovered in 1947, it was quickly realized that this was a library of documents produced by the Jewish group known from other ancient authors (such as Josephus and Pliny the Elder) as the Essenes (this identification is debated among some scholars; but the solid majority of scholars agree today that the “Essene” hypothesis is right). The Essenes were known from antiquity for being a rigorously ascetic group. The DSS themselves were an entire library of writings. Some of them were copies of biblical books (Hebrew Bible) – significant because they were about a thousand years older than the oldest copy otherwise available. Others were previously unknown works: commentaries on biblical books, apocalyptic treatises, instructions for how the community was [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:39:38-04:00June 7th, 2012|Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Which Bible Translation Do I Prefer?

QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman, most of your readers in the ancient languages that the Bible was written in, therefore must rely on translations. Clearly no one translation is conclusive, but for clarity of reading and reliable research, can you recommend some translations to us? Conversely, do you have any that readers should avoid, because of clear bias or a little too loose? RESPONSE: When I published Misquoting Jesus, I received a lot of emails from a lot of people asking a lot of questions. But the one question I got asked more than any other was this one (in various forms): which translation of the Bible do I recommend? I should have answered it in the book itself; it would have made my life oh so much easier. There are lots and lots of good translations that are available today. The first thing to stress about them is that just about every one of them (just about! I’m sure there are exceptions, although offhand I can’t think of any) has been done by bona [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:40:02-04:00June 5th, 2012|Christian Apocrypha, History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Am I an Agnostic or an Atheist?

QUESTION: If you don't think God exists, why do you refer to yourself as an agnostic? If this is your perspective, why not refer to yourself as an atheist? Could it be that you don't believe the Christian God exists, but are open to the possibility that some kind of higher power exists (this is my perspective) and this is why you call yourself agnostic? ANSWER: I have been getting this question a lot, and so I’ve decided to try to explain my position a bit more fully here in this post. The first thing to say is that I had no idea how militant both atheists and agnostics could be about their labels, until I became an agnostic myself! FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a member. If you don't belong yet, JOIN!! ANSWER [continued]: As a believer, I pretty much thought they were two amicably related positions, one saying that there is no God and the other saying that s/he doesn’t know if there is a God. But [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:40:26-04:00June 2nd, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Reader’s Questions|

Question: Would I Be Personally Devastated if the Mythicists Were Right?

QUESTION: Was also wondering - and maybe you addressed this in your book ... would you feel an emotionally traumatic disappointment if it was conclusively proved that Jesus was indeed a mythical figure? In all honesty how would you feel if it were true beyond a doubt that all the arguments the 'mythicists' have presented were found to be correct (or mostly correct) regarding his assumed existence? This question is not meant to be offensive or unnecessarily provoking - I'm just curious. RESPONSE: I don’t address this in the book, and I think it is a terrific question! The reason I do is this. I think every historian of religion who makes a case for one thing or another needs to be queried: what is at stake for you in the matter? For example, I have participated a number of public debates with conservative evangelical Christian scholars who have wanted to insist that they can PROVE, historically, that Jesus was raised from the dead. Now I should state with vigor and emphasis – the only [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:41:56-04:00May 28th, 2012|Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Reader’s Questions|

Question on How We Got the Canon of the New Testament

QUESTION: I just read Jesus, Interrupted … and have now seen that you have written quite a few books and articles. I am particularly interested in how the books of the New Testament were chosen and why/how the others were not. Can you recommend a good read for this? RESPONSE: Ah, this is one of the BIG questions of early Christian studies! I have been interested in it for over 35 years. My first PhD seminar in graduate school was devoted to just this question, and I started thinking about it years even before that! I do address the question in several of my books. As you know from having just read Jesus Interrupted, I devote a good chunk of chapter 6 to it; in particular it is the overarching subject of Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (that book is my long version of the answer!). FOR THE REST of my response, log in! If you don't belong, please join today! It only takes a small contribution [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:42:44-04:00May 24th, 2012|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Did the Gospels Originally Contain Miracle Stories?

QUESTION: I have looked up the content of all the papyri I'm aware of (off of links on wikipedia, so who knows if they're accurate). It is my understanding that although p52, p90, and p104 are dated around 125-150 AD, they contain fragments of John 18 and Matt 21 only, and that it's not until 200 AD that manuscripts emerge which actually contain accounts of supernatural actions by Jesus. So, it's possible that accounts of miracles existed in copies that got destroyed, but is it fair to say that the earliest available copies of accounts of Jesus's supernatural actions date from around 200 AD? In other words, assuming people on average had kids by age 20 back then, and thus 20 years counts as a generation, is it fair to say that the earliest available accounts of miracles by Jesus were written by the great, great, great, great, great, great, grandson of somebody who would have been alive at the same time as Jesus? RESPONSE: This is an interesting question! It is true that we do not start getting [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:42:52-04:00May 21st, 2012|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Why Did Jesus Go To Jerusalem?

QUESTION Just what did the historical Jesus think he was doing that last week in Jerusalem? It looks to me like he was working as hard as he could to get himself killed. If that's what he was doing, then why was he doing it? RESPONSE Interesting question! There have been scholars, of course, who have argued that this is precisely what Jesus was doing, that he went to Jerusalem in order to be crucified. It is interesting that those who take that view cover as wide a range of ideology and theology as you could possibly imagine. Conservative Christian thinkers (from protestant fundamentalists to Roman Catholic theologians to … well, take your pick) have long thought that the point of the Jerusalem trip was in fact the crucifixion, since this was all part of God’s plan. Jesus’ mission on earth was to be crucified; he went to Jerusalem to make it happen. This is what I myself thought for many, many years. On the other side of the theological spectrum is someone like [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:43:00-04:00May 18th, 2012|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Question on Mistakes in Ancient Sources

QUESTION A question that has long bothered me insofar as NT history is concerned: How is it that authors from the times and places mentioned in the NT got historical facts wrong? Or, more to the point, how can we compare our relatively scant evidence to what would have been first-hand experience of these authors? Granted, in some cases there was some 'bending' going on to support major theological ideas; but in less-important cases it seems less likely that they would have gotten things wrong. RESPONSE: This is a good question, one that my students ask a lot. In particular, how can scholars today think they know more about early Christianity than the early Christians themselves? How can we know more about Jesus than the people of his own time? I think the answers can be fairly uncontroversial, when we think about it a bit. For one thing, all of us get things wrong, all the time, about matters within our own experience. When my wife asks me for driving directions from Durham [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:43:15-04:00May 15th, 2012|Reader’s Questions|

Dates of the Gospels

EMAIL QUESTION How are the dates that the Gospels were composed determined? I've read that Mark is usually dated to 70 or later because of the reference to the destruction of the temple. Is this the only factor that leads scholars to conclude that it was composed in 70 CE or later or are there other factors? I've heard that Luke and Matthew are likewise dated aroun 80-85 CE to give time for Mark to have been in circulation enough to be a source for them. Is this accurate? How is John usually dated to around 95 CE (or whatever the correct period is) since it is usually described as independent of the other Gospels? RESPONSE This is a great question, and one that I get asked a lot. How do we actually know when the Gospels were written? It is actually a difficult question to answer, but the things you’ve already read and heard cover some of the important territory. So let’s start on some basics that I think everyone can agree on. (Well, [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:43:50-04:00May 7th, 2012|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

A Final (for now) Post on the Resurrection

A final posting, for now, on the question I was asked on the resurrection. Most people – even those who believe in Jesus’ resurrection – never stop to think about what the idea of resurrection would have meant to first century Jews. Jesus’ followers, of course, were just that, Jews from Palestine in the first century. Today people (Christians) are so accustomed to thinking of Jesus’ resurrection that there is nothing odd about it – it fits directly into our (their) way of thinking about the world. But in fact the very notion of resurrection is a thoroughly Jewish notion with deep roots in the Jewish apocalyptic (as opposed, say, to the American capitalistic) world view. Throughout most of their earlier history, Jews did not hold to the idea of a resurrected afterlife. In the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament), most authors (e.g., of Job and Ecclesiastes) think that death is the end of the story, so that there is no afterlife, or that if there is an afterlife it is a shadowy [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:45:46-04:00April 29th, 2012|Afterlife, Canonical Gospels, Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reader’s Questions|

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