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Are These Really Contradictions? My Response to Matt Firth


Thanks Matt for your thoughtful comments on the four contradictions I discussed in my opening post.  I agree – this form of debate is much better than the oral back and forths I’m used to on a stage in front of an audience, where it’s so easy to say something unwittingly that is completely stupid or wrong.  With this format I’m able to think about it a bit before saying something completely stupid! I appreciate your attempts to reconcile the contradictions.   For years I wished I could reconcile all the ones I found – and did my best to do so, using many of these kinds of arguments.  I ended up thinking it just didn’t work.  I’ll try to explain below why I think so, step by step.  I’ve decided that it would be easier for readers of the blog to be able to compare your reconciliations with my responses directly, and so I have copied your comments and will be giving my responses in green so they will be easily distinguished. Blog readers: this […]

April 22, 2019

Papias and the Writers of the New Testament: Guest Post by Stephen Carlson


Here is another post by Stephen Carlson on that mysterious figure named Papias, an early second century writer who claims to have had information from reliable witnesses about the authors of the New Testament, and who may indicate that the “John” who wrote the Gospel is different from the “John” who wrote Revelation.  Or does he?  If the *apostle* John did not Revelation, should it be in the New Testament?   Puzzling and hard to figure out — but here is what Stephen says about it. – Stephen Carlson is the author of The Gospel Hoax and The Text of Galatians and Its History. *********************************************************************************** What Papias Says About His Own Work In our last post, we looked at the title of Papias’s work, Exposition of Dominical Oracles, and surveyed the considerable scholarly controversy about the nature of Papias’s work. Many scholars take the position that it was a commentary on the sayings of Jesus, perhaps with some narrative elements, but others contend that it was a commentary on at least the Gospel of Matthew, or […]

April 25, 2019

Paul in Hell. The Apocryphal Apocalypse of Paul.


You may have not noticed, since so much else has been happening on the blog lately (guest posts, a debate, etc.), but I have a very loose thread  going on my book on the guided tours of heaven and hell, a scholarly monograph that deals with the Christian versions of “katabasis” (the technical term for “going down” — that is, someone going down into the underworld and then reporting what he saw) in relation to Greek, Roman, and Jewish versions.  The clear focus will be on the Christian texts, but to make sense of them it helps do see how they are similar to and different from those found in the surrounding cultures. My first chapter will provide a set of comparisons of several earlier narratives (Odysseus’s encounter with the dead in the Odyssey book 11, Aeneas’s  descent to Hades in Aeneid book 6, and the vision of Enoch in 1 Enoch 21-22) with the most famous and popular Christian account, the Apocalypse of Paul, which probably dates from the early fifth century but may […]

April 26, 2019

Similarities and Differences: Which Matter the Most?


I have been thinking a lot about the categories of “similarities” and “differences” recently.  In fact, now that I look back, I’ve been thinking about these categories for about forty years.   It’s funny the things we think about.   But for a scholar of early Christianity, these categories matter a lot. When I was a conservative evangelical Christian, reading, studying, and thinking about the Bible, I was completely focused on similarities.   This book, this passage, this teaching is very similar to that one.    I did focus on differences about lots of *other* things (other than the Bible).  That person is Jew and not a Christian, and therefore will have to face judgment and be condemned, unlike *me* a Christian.  Or that person is a Roman Catholic and so is not a real Christian and therefore…   Or that person does not have the right theology about salvation, or Christ, or predestination, or the Bible, and therefore…. So I knew and thought about differences a lot and knew that they were highly significant. Even eternally significant.  Anyone who […]

April 29, 2019

Death and the Meaning of Life


Different understandings about what happens to us at death embody and promote different views about what we consider to be the ultimate reality of life, what it is that we think — at the deepest level of our being — provides meaning for our existence and makes sense of the world we encounter while still breathing. I have given four examples from the ancient world.  Each of them portrays a different sense of ultimate reality, of one thing, in each case, that establishes, determines, and directs everything that finally matters for human existence in general – for all people who have ever lived – and for our specific existence in particular.   All four involve trips to the realms of the dead, in order to see what happens for those who are no longer living.  Each is meant to show what we should live for now, based on what the ultimate meaning of life is, what the very root and fabric of human existence consist of.  In this post I’ll talk about two of them. When […]

April 30, 2019

Contradictions and Contradictions: Final Response to Matt Firth


Matt: thanks for your additional comments.   I’ve given my replies below.  At the outset I should say that I’m not sure I understand what a “genuine contradiction” would look like for you.    If you have two authors who at least appear to contradict each other, surely the best explanation will not be one that: Suggests an author / speaker really doesn’t mean what he says but means something else. Suggests an option that has never ever happened, to our knowledge. With that in mind, I turn to your new explanations.  I’ll respond in green.   Thanks very much, Bart, for these interesting responses. I will get straight into explaining why I still don’t think you have shown that the examples you have offered are genuine contradictions. In the case of Luke 24 you say that the grammar of the Greek indicates that ‘Luke is extremely careful to date the entire sequence of chapter 24, at the beginning of each major paragraph. It all happens on the day of the resurrection.’ But we know from Acts, […]

May 3, 2019

Why Did Ancient Christian Forgers Commit Forgery?


Here is an intriguing question I received recently about the use of literary “forgery” in antiquity.  A “forgery,” in the technical sense I’m using it, refers to a very specific phenomenon: it is not simply making up a false story or perpetrating some other kind of falsehood.  It refers, specifically, to a book whose author falsely claims to be a (famous) person.   If I wrote a novel and claimed I was Stephen King, that would be a forgery. Sometimes these books are called “pseudonymous” (which means “going under a false name”).  That sounds less offensive, but it means the same thing (literally: “the name is a lie”).   There were lots of forgeries in antiquity – many of which were uncovered back them, a number that have been exposed in modern times.  My books Forged and Forgery and Counterforgery discuss the phenomenon more broadly but with a special focus on Christian texts of the first four centuries (the first book is for a general audience, the second is a scholarly analysis). Here is the question I […]

May 5, 2019

Could Christian Forgers Justifying Lying?


Yesterday, in response to a question, I started to discuss the age-old problem of literary forgery (authors lying about their true identity), and specifically the question of why Christians would engage in it.  In my two books on the topic I spend considerable time trying to demonstrate that forgery was indeed understood – in antiquity – to involve lying, and that the authors who claimed (falsely) to be Plato or Galen or Peter or Paul knew they were lying.  But why would they do that?  Especially the Christians? Here is a fuller answer that I give at the end of my book: Forged: Writing in the Name of God.  It follows a discussion of a number of modern (mainly 19th century) forgeries of Gospels, including the ones that claim that, for example, Jesus went to India as a young man to learn the ways of the Brahmins….   ************************************************************** Christian Forgeries, Lies, and Deceptions This issue of modern hoaxes brings me back to a question that I have repeatedly asked in my study of forgeries:  […]

May 6, 2019

Early Christian Liars


Yesterday I started explaining in some depth how forgers in early Christianity – that is, authors who falsely claimed to be, say, Peter or Paul or James (as in the case of the authors of 2 Peter, 1 Timothy, the Proto-Gospel of James, etc.) – could justify their lies.  I need to stress, the idea that they were lying is not just a modern one.  The ancients talk about forgery a good deal; they never approve of it and they explicitly called it lying.  Yet people did it, producing forgeries far more often than happens today.   How did they live with themselves – especially those Christians who insisted that nothing was more important than “truth”? I pointed out yesterday that there were very broadly speaking two views of lying in early Christainity: 1) that it was sometimes acceptable; 2) it was never acceptable in any circumstance whatsoever.   It’s not hard to see where forgers lined up on the spectrum. Here I continue the discussion, repeating the final paragraph of yesterday’s post for context.  This is […]

May 7, 2019

Wine Flowing in the Kingdom: Guest Post on Papias by Stephen Carlson


Here is yet another guest post by Stephen Carlson on the intriguing but puzzling quotations from Papias, the elusive second century church father who wrote a five-volume book called “Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord.”   What was this book, and does it give us any information from outside the Gospels – from an extremely early source – about the sayings of Jesus? In this post Stephen addresses one of the most, well, unusual passages known to be from Papias’s work.  As you’ll see, in this account Jesus thought that in the millennial kingdom yet to come, the wine will be flowing…. I have broken the post into two because of its length.  Part 2 will come next. Stephen Carlson is the author of The Gospel Hoax and The Text of Galatians and Its History. *************************************************************** The Fertility Tradition in Papias In our last post, we looked at the preface of Papias’s Exposition of Dominical Oracles, and noticed that it mentions two kinds of content in the work. One kind of content is characterized by […]

May 8, 2019

What Kind of Book Was Papias Writing? Guest Post by Stephen Carlson


This is the second part of Stephen Carlson’s guest post on the important but now-lost work of the early-second century Christian author Papias.  In the previous post he talked about the mind-boggling abundance of wine and wheat there would be in the kingdom, based on Papias’s reporting of a “word of the Lord.”    Now he explains that saying, and in doing so develops a bold way of understanding what kind of book Papias actually was trying to write.   Most of us have long assumed it was a kind of commentary on Jesus’ teachings.  But was it? Stephen Carlson is the author of The Gospel Hoax and The Text of Galatians and Its History. **************************************************************** Scholars have long noticed that this fertility tradition has important links with the late first-century Jewish apocalypse 2 Baruch 29.5 (“Also the earth will give its fruits, one in ten thousand. And one vine, there will be on it a thou­sand twigs. And one twig will make a thou­sand clusters, and one cluster will make a thou­sand grapes, and one grape […]

May 10, 2019

Did Jesus Go to India? A Modern Gospel Forgery.


Did Jesus go o India? Last week I mentioned in passing the little-known fact that the apocryphal idea that Jesus traveled to India as a child to learn from the Brahmins, comes to us not from ancient forgeries but relatively modern ones.   That raised some interest among readers, and I realized that I haven’t actually dealt with this intriguing issue on the blog before.  But I did deal with it in one of my books on forgery, the one written for a general audience, Forged: Writing in the Name of God. In that book, I devote a final chapter to modern examples of the ancient phenomenon, of forgeries of Gospels.  I will spread this discussion out over several blog posts, for your reading pleasure. Here is how I begin the chapter and then discuss the first example, a particularly influential forgery (even though most people who have been influenced by its views have never actually heard of the book!. Did Jesus Go To India? Let’s Find Out More When I give public talks about the […]

May 13, 2019

When Did Jesus Become Sinless?


I recently received a question from a blog member about when it was in the Christian tradition that Jesus came to be thought of as “perfect,” without sin.   I feel no great need to answer the question myself because my friend and occasional guest blog poster Jeffrey Siker, long-time professor of New Testament at Loyola Marymount University, has written an entire book on the topic.   And so I asked him to prepare some blogposts, and here’s the first one. For what it’s worth, he and I both liked very much the title he wanted for the book, Jesus the Perfect Sinner; but, as often happens, the publisher went with something less scintillating: Jesus, Sin, and Perfection in Early Christianity. But the cover of the book is to die for. – Jeffrey Siker is also the author of Liquid Scripture: The Bible in the Digital World and Homosexuality and Religion: An Encyclopedia.   **********************************************   Jesus and Sinlessness   How and when did Jesus come to be viewed as sinless in earliest Christianity?   Surprisingly, this question […]

May 14, 2019

Judging the Debate!


Now that my debate with Matthew Firth over the contradictions in the Gospels has ended, I would like to know your reactions.   Any reactions are fine.   There is the obvious question of which side you found more convincing, but also the less obvious question of why that is.  What about the argument, or counter-argument, was compelling or not compelling? Part of the problem, of course, is that virtually everyone listening in on the debate already had a pretty firm idea of what they think about the issues.   And because of “confirmation bias” we tend to agree with what we already think, and anyone who says it is obviously right!  (Hence the problem with most viewers of both FOX and MSNBC.)   But for my money, the most interesting responses come from people who have changed their minds.  Still, in all the public debates I’ve had, in front of many thousands of people, I almost never have heard of anyone changing their mind. So what’s the point?   I often ask myself that!   And often I ask it […]

May 15, 2019

An Eyewitness to the Crucifixion? Another Modern Forgery


The crucifixion by an eyewitness.  I’ve started to discuss several modern forgeries connected with the life of Jesus.   These are all completely bogus, but they’ve nonetheless fooled a lot of people.  I get emails from people maybe once a month who want to ask me about something they’ve “heard” about Jesus, and it usually turns out that it comes ultimately from one of these things, which someone has read, and then told someone else, who told someone else, who took it as Gospel truth. The Essenes mentioned in this apocryphon are that Jewish sect in the time of Jesus who were a kind of separatist group concerned to retain its own ritual purity in view of the coming apocalypse, which they expected any day now.  Today they are most famous for having produced the Dead Sea Scrolls.  But when this Gospel account was forged, the Scrolls had not yet been discovered. The Essenes were seen at the time as a kind of secretive magical group on the fringes of real Judaism. Again, I have taken […]

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May 17, 2019

How Jesus Became Perfectly Sinless: Guest Post by Jeff Siker


Here is the second guest post by Jeff Siker on how Jesus came to be thought of as completely sinless in early Christianity, a view that probably no one entertained while he was still living.   It’s intriguing and important stuff. Jeff Siker is the author of Jesus, Sin, and Perfection in Early Christianity, Liquid Scripture: The Bible in the Digital World and Homosexuality and Religion: An Encyclopedia. This particular post is available to everyone; to see most of the posts on the blog, and the other posts on this topic itself by Prof. Siker, you will need to join.  Won’t cost much.  Will pay huge dividends.  And all money goes to those in need.  So what’s the downside?     Jesus and Sinlessness, Part 2: From Retrospection to Retrojection In the first blog post I showed how the earliest Christians were forced to make sense of the death of Jesus in light of belief in his resurrection.  Why had the one they “had hoped” would redeem Israel died at the hands of the Romans by means […]

May 19, 2019

Do My Biases Mean I *Have* to Find Contradictions?


I have now had a week to reflect on my debate with Matthew Firth about whether there are contradictions in the Bible.  Now I’d like to give my personal reactions.  I don’t mean for this to be a continuation of the debate per se —  I won’t be adducing more evidence or counter-evidence.  But I thought it might be helpful to put some thoughts on paper (well, on screen) about what a debate like this can show or at least did show, in my opinion.  Matthew is on the blog and he’s perfectly welcome to comment on these posts or even to respond with one or more posts of his own, giving his own second-level reflections. So here are mine.  Since I’d like to flesh these out at some length (since they might be helpful for others thinking generally about their view of the Bible and what constitutes a contradiction), this will take several posts. I begin with the question of whether either of us have a particular agenda/bias that more or less require us […]

May 20, 2019

Being Willing to Accept the Truth


Here I’d like to add just a couple of more reflections on whether critical scholars *have* to claim there are contradictions in the Bible because of their beliefs.  As I tried to state as strongly as I could in my previous post, I think the answer is absolutely not. To begin with, let me stress that I started learning about serious contradictions when I was in a Christian theological seminary taking biblical studies courses with committed Christian teachers who were devoted to the church.   But they were also scholars and refused to accept fundamentalist understandings of the Bible.  Their theology was much more sophisticated than the simple “The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it” mentality I had grown up on. These were incredibly intelligent and learned scholars intimately familiar with the texts in Greek and Hebrew and massively well-read in scholarship going back centuries in various modern languages.    They didn’t accept easy answers and pushed their students to realize that knowing what the New Testament really is, as opposed to what […]

May 21, 2019

Interview for “Letters & Politics” on The Triumph of Christianity


Here is an interview I did on my book The Triumph of Christianity, back on December 25th, 2018, with host Mitch Jeserich.  The program was called “Letters & Politics,” for FM 94.1 KPFA. The theme of my book, as you know, is how the Christians took over the religions of the Roman Empire to become the dominant religion of the west.  Mitch wanted to know about that.  Many years ago, when I started thinking about my book, so did I! Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition:

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May 28, 2019