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Who Really Wrote the Pentateuch (if not Moses)? The JEDP Hypothesis
I have been discussing the sources of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), sometimes also called the Torah or the Law of Moses. So far I have explained the kinds of literary problems that led scholars to realize that these books were not the writing of a single author, but represented a combination of earlier written accounts. The traditional “documentary hypothesis,” as it is called, was most famously formulated by the nineteenth-century German scholar, Julius Wellhausen, who, along with some of his predecessors, called the sources J E D and P. This was the standard view of the matter back when I was doing my PhD in biblical studies way back when. Here is how the hypothesis worked, in nuce. (Again, this is taken from my textbook on the Bible). ****************************** The J source was the first source to be written. From it comes a number of the stories in Genesis and Exodus, including, for example the second creation account and the story of Adam […]
May 13, 2021
More Recent Scholarship on Who Wrote the Pentateuch
I am now nearly finished talking about the “Documentary Hypothesis” devised by scholars of the Hebrew Bible to account for the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. I have already discussed the traditional view developed in the nineteenth century, especially as it was laid out by Julius Wellhausen (the JEDP hypothesis). But that was a long time ago. What do scholars say today? As one might expect, the discussions have not gotten simpler but more complicated. Here is what I say, briefly, about that in my undergraduate textbook on the Bible. It’s about as much as most beginning students (and most people in general) need to know. ****************************** The Scholarly View Today It is impossible to speak about a single scholarly opinion about the Documentary Hypothesis today. Some scholars reject the idea that J and E were separate sources; some think that there were far more sources than the four; some propose radically different dates for the various sources (for example, one increasingly popular proposal is that the earliest sources […]
May 15, 2021
Why the Spirit Mattered for the Earliest Christians
During the earlier parts of this thread on the Trinity, I kept thinking that by the time I got to the Holy Spirit there wouldn’t be much to say: it’s all about the Father and Son. And even as I started planning this final part on the Spirit, I thought I would do it in a post, maybe two. But now that I’m digging into it, I’m realizing that the one-or-two post thing doesn’t make sense without a lot of background. Now I’ve decided I need to take the long path to get there. Consider it the scenic route. I’ve been talking so far about the Spirit in the Hebrew Bible – from Genesis 1 up through the prophets. The Spirit is far more important for early Christianity, and hence for the New Testament, than for ancient Israelite religion (and hence the Old Testament), but I don’t believe I’ve ever articulated the reasons fully, either in writing or speaking. For a long time, I’ve thought it works like this, in a nutshell. (This may seem […]
May 16, 2021
Paul’s Community at Corinth
By far Paul’s fullest discussion of the Spirit in the life of the Christian community comes to us in 1 Corinthians 12-14. To make sense of that discussion, I need to say something about the letter of 1 Corinthians in general, and the community to which it is addressed. Here is the introduction to the letter I give in my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Oxford University Press): **************************** Corinth was a large and prosperous city south of Thessalonica, in the Roman province of Achaia, of which it was the capital. Located on the isthmus dividing the northern and southern parts of modern-day Greece, it was a major center of trade and communication, served by two major ports within walking distance. The city was destroyed in 146 b.c.e. by the Romans but was refounded a century later as a Roman colony. In Paul’s time, it was a cosmopolitan place, the home of a wide range of religious and philosophical movements. Corinth is perhaps best remembered today […]
April 16, 2021
Other New Testament References to Books Outside the Hebrew Bible: Platinum Guest Post by Doug Wadeson
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Tags: Platinum
April 26, 2021
Volunteer Needed to Read Audio Posts!
I need a volunteer!! As you know, we produce audio versions of every post that appears on the blog, available to members who subscribe at the Gold and Platinum tiers. We have two volunteers who take turns, on alternating weeks, to read the posts: John Paul Middleworth has been reading away, post after post; since we began this audio venture; over the past few months, his colleague-volunteer has been Sam Devis. I’m very sorry to report that Sam needs to move on to other things. He will be sorely missed. And now we need a replacement. The task obviously requires the ability to read clearly and well and the time to do it – five posts every other week. It does not require much technological skill or expertise. Ben Porter, our expert in all things technical is already doing that. (In case you wondered, these audios do not compete with those recorded by our other stalwart audio volunteer, John Mueller, who since 2017 has produced the weekly Bart Ehrman Podcast. If you don’t know about […]
April 27, 2021
Live Chance to Ask Me Anything! This Sunday!
This Sunday (5/2/21) 3:00-4:15 pm I will be holding a live ABA (“Ask Bart Anything”). It will be over Zoom and will be open to anyone on the planet who wants to come. The format: I will take live questions both orally and through chats. The questions can be on ANY topic that anyone is interested in. If it is something I don’t know anything about (i.e., most things) or that I would rather not talk about (that little incident when I was 16….) I’ll just say so. I will get through as many questions as I can, answering easy ones briefly and taking as long as I need to deal with more complicated ones. My only request will be that questions are direct questions, not lectures, sermons, admonitions, condemnations, expositions of one’s favorite views, or statements of one’s opinions so the rest of the world can hear and convert. Interested? There is no need to register, no obligation of any kind. And no cost. Free to all. BUT: If you you are willing and […]
My Smithsonian Seminar: This Saturday!!
Do you know about the Smithsonian Associates? It’s a great organization that, among other things, puts on lectures and day-long seminars by scholars and experts in all sorts of areas, including religion. For years and years they were live events in Washington D.C. as part of the Smithsonian (on the Mall); for the past year or so they have been remote Zoom events. In some ways, these Zoom events are even better: you can come without flying to D.C.! I will be doing an event this Saturday, May 1. It’s an all-day affair with four hour-long lectures and Q&A after each. The topic is “Four Controversies in Early Christianity.” Are you interested in getting a ticket? Check it out. Below is a description of my talks — three of which I’ve never given before and a fourth that I’ve never given publicly before! And here is the link to the registration page, to purchase tickets and register: https://smithsonianassociates.org/ticketing/tickets/more-great-controversies-in-early-christianity-bart-ehrman-ponders-four-new-questions Another Four Controversies in Early Christianity Bart D. Ehrman Numerous significant issues were debated by […]
How the “Delay” of the End (Jesus’ Return) Affected Paul’s Communities
A key to understanding the central role of the Holy Spirit in the early Christian communities is to realize that the earliest Christians did not think there was going to be on ongoing Christian community. I discussed that a bit in my previous post and here I can continue the thought The apostle Paul is our earliest Christian author, and it appears that on this particular point he was in agreement with his predecessors, the very first followers of Jesus who came to believe he had been raised from the dead. They thought that the messiah’s resurrection demonstrated that the resurrection had already begun, and they expected, then, that it would be completed right away. It is clear this this is what Paul thought. Just consider the earliest of his letters that still survives, 1 Thessalonians. Scholars usually date the letter to 49-50 CE or so, just some 20 years after Jesus’ death. Paul had earlier brought his missionary zeal to Thessalonica, and while there he converted a number of people. Based on what he […]
May 18, 2021
Paul and that Peculiar Church in Corinth
To explain why the Holy Spirit was so central to the earliest Christian communities we know about, we have to explore what we can know about earliest churches. The ones we know best about are those associated with Paul, since Paul is our earliest Christian author, and in his letters he refers to church activities. Nowhere is that more true than in the two-letter correspondence with the Corinthians. 1 and 2 Corinthians gives us a lot to go on when we want to know what this particular Christian community was like – that is, how it did as a distinct and coherent religious group in the midst of its wider society, what activities it engaged in as a group, how it was organized, how it worshiped, and so on. We know so much about such issues because the community was riddled with problems. Paul wrote his letters to address the problems, and so by looking carefully at what he wrote, we can understand not only what he thought was going wrong in the church but […]
May 19, 2021
How Paul Started the Church in Corinth
I have begun to talk about Paul’s church in Corinth and the correspondence he had with it. For a bit more background I want to explain how he actually started it. Corinth was apparently a city he had not visited before, yet he went there and managed to convert a large group of people to his Christian message. How did that happen? Here is how I explain what we know in my textbook The New Testament (Oxford University Press). ************************ After leaving Thessalonica, Paul and his companions, Timothy and Silvanus, arrived in Corinth and began, again, to preach the gospel in an effort to win converts (2 Cor 1:19). Possibly they proceeded as they had in the capital of Macedonia, coming into town, renting out a shop in an insula, setting up a business, and using the workplace as a forum to speak to those who stopped by. In this instance, the book of Acts provides some corroborating evidence. Luke indicates that Paul did, in fact, work in a kind of leather goods shop in […]
May 20, 2021
Paul’s (Misunderstood) Message to His Corinthian Converts
I have been discussing how Paul established the church in Corinth; this is important information for anyone interested in knowing what kinds of problems arose in the church — some of them rather amazing, for a group Paul calls “the saints”! Here is how I discuss Paul’s message in my textbook on the New Testament: ****************************** During their stay in Corinth, Paul and his companions appear to have converted a sizable number (dozens?) of pagans to the faith. The book of Acts indicates that they spent a year and a half there. Paul himself makes no clear statement concerning the length of his stay, but there are indications throughout his letter that the Christians in Corinth, or at least some of them, had an unusually sophisticated understanding of the faith. Indeed, some of the Corinthians had so much knowledge of their faith that they took Paul’s gospel simply as a starting point and developed their views in vastly different directions. What can we say about the message that Paul originally preached to these people? […]
May 22, 2021
The Coming of the Spirit at the End of Time
Even though the Spirit of God shows up here and there throughout the Old Testament, starting of course already in Genesis 1:2, continuing on occasion through the narratives and in the prophets, it is not really a central narrational or theological theme. That contrasts with the New Testament. Here the Spirit of God is enormously important, on every level. The historical reason for that is that the earliest Christians believed that with the death and resurrection of Jesus they had entered into the End of the Ages. They were living at the end times. As we have seen, the resurrection of the dead – when God raised bodies back to live, some to face judgment and others to be given an eternal reward – was to transpire at the end of this age; in the Bible this future resurrection was first spoken of explicitly in Daniel 12:1-3, the last chapter of the final book of the Hebrew Bible to be written. But the idea of a future resurrection became a widely accepted theological notion in […]
May 25, 2021
Several Letters in One? What about Second Corinthians?
In recent posts I’ve been talking about 1 Corinthians and its understanding of the Christian community in the important city of Corinth. We know about the community because of Paul’s letters written to it. In the New Testament of course, we have 1 and 2 Corinthians. (OUTSIDE the New Testament we have 3 Corinthians! It also claims to be written by Paul, but is a forgery; I’ll talk about it in a later blog post). They are both pretty long letters, and give us a lot of information. That’s especially true for a reason most Bible readers don’t know, and would have no way of knowing. Scholars have long argued that 2 Corinthians is not just a single letter. Almost all critical scholars think it is two letters that have been cut and pasted together; and some scholars (including me) think it is actually five letters combined — all written at different times for different occasions. That may really matter, because it means we can trace a bit of the *history* of the community’s relationship with […]
May 26, 2021
Are There Actually Five Letters in 2 Corinthians (so that it is 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 Corinthians?)
In my previous post I tried to show why most critical scholars think that the letter of 2 Corinthians is actually two different letters that have been spliced together. When I was back in graduate school, I learned – to my surprise – that there were scholars who thought that in fact 2 Corinthians was made up of five different letters, all spliced together. At first that struck me as a bit crazy, but as I looked at the evidence I began to see that it made a good bit of sense. I’m not completely committed to that idea, but I’m inclined toward it. My sense is that this is the view of a sizeable minority of critical scholars, but I have no data, only anecdotal evidence, to back that up. In any case, what matters more is what you yourself might think of it. I won’t be giving the evidence in full, but here is how I lay it out for students to consider in my textbook on the New Testament for undergraduates. To […]
May 27, 2021
Gold Members Month of May Q&A
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May 18, 2021
The Coming of the Spirit on the Day of Pentecost
In a previous post I discussed the prophet Joel, who used a disaster that had struck as the occasion to make his proclamation about the will of God. A horrible plague of locusts had hit the land of Judah that had decimated the crops and food supply; Joel proclaimed that it was a warning from God that if his people did not return to him, matters would get worse – they would be invaded by a foreign army from the north (the Assyrians) and face massive destruction. This would be the “day of the LORD,” which was not to be seen as a happy prospect. But as with many prophets of coming destruction, Joel also indicated that God would have pity on his people if they would turn to him in repentance. After the horrible events to come, God would bring salvation to Judah, removing the foreign threat and restoring the earth; there would be abundant rain, plentiful crops, productive livestock. The years of drought, famine, and military invasion would end, and all would be […]
May 29, 2021
On Being an Agnostic Atheist
Bart Ehrman on Being an Agnostic. One question I regularly get asked is about where I stand on the agnostic-atheist divide — that is, which am I. I usually confuse people when I tell them I’m both. I’ve posted about this on the blog before, but it’s been a while, so I thought I should give it another airing here. When I became an agnostic – 25 years ago? I’m not even sure anymore – I thought that “agnosticism” and “atheism” were two *degrees* of basically the same thing. My sense is that this is what most people think. According to this idea, an agnostic is someone who says that s/he does not *know* whether God exists, and an atheist is someone who makes a definitive statement that God does *not* exist. Agnostics don’t know and atheists are sure. At the time I was rather surprised that so many agnostics and atheists (most of whom had this view I’ve just described) were so militaristic about their own positions. As I found, to my chagrin (having […]
May 23, 2021
What About Authors Who “Just Want to Sell Books”?
I was looking through some old posts from years ago, and came across this one, which continues to be an issue for me. It’s the kind of thing I continue to hear on occasion, and so I thought maybe it was worth approaching again. Sometimes I hear someone criticize me, or another author, by saying “he just wants to sell books.” That has always struck me as a very strange thing to say. Of course I want to sell books. Why else would I write books? Would I want to write books so no one would read them? What people actually *mean*by that comment, of course, is more snide and offensive. What they mean is: “he will say anything in a book in order to get people to buy it.” There may indeed be authors for whom this is true. I can’t speak for them, only for myself. This is a charge I really bristle at. Almost no one of course comes out and actually makes the charge directly. But it must be what they […]
May 30, 2021
The Holy Spirit in Charge of the Church (?)
In my earlier posts I started to show the early Christians believed that because they were living at the very end of time. This was an interim period between the time when the resurrection of the dead began with Jesus being raised and was soon to culminate with the general resurrection, in which all who had ever died would be brought back to life to face judgment. Most important for our purposes here, these Christians thought God had sent the Spirit upon them in fulfillment of the prophecies of Scripture, especially Joel 2. The Spirit was both the sign of the end of time and a helper for those living in it. Since now God was closer to his people than ever, arguably since the Garden of Eden (as the End was beginning to be more like the Beginning), he communicated with them directly, as he had once upon a time. Now was the time that he gave dreams, visions, and prophesies directly to people, not just isolated prophets, in order to convey to them […]
June 1, 2021