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Working as a Secretary for the New Revised Standard Version
Here I continue with some reminiscences of my work with my mentor Bruce Metzger. ****************************** When I was still a graduate student in the PhD program at Princeton Theological Seminary, Metzger invited me to serve as a secretary for the committee that was producing the new revision of the Revised Standard Version translation of the Bible. The RSV (on which the new translation was to be based) had come out in 1952, and it had caused a huge furor at the time. It was an “official” revision of the King James Bible, that was supposed to update the language (English has changed a lot since 1611), to take into consideration new manuscript discoveries (especially important for the New Testament, since the KJV was based on only a few medieval manuscripts that were not of very high quality; hundreds of better ones had since been discovered, and to incorporate the findings of modern Biblical scholarship). The RSV of 1952 was an “official” translation because it was authorized by the National Council of Churches in the U.S. […]
September 16, 2021
Was Peter the First Pope?
Several people have recently asked (in reference to that pop quiz I gave to my class this semester) whether it is in fact right that Peter was the first pope. I dealt with the question a few years ago, along with another interesting tradition about Peter. Here’s the question I got and my response. QUESTION: Is there any historical evidence that the apostle Peter was the first Bishop of Rome and that he was martyred upside down on a cross? RESPONSE: Ah, I get asked this one (or these two) on occasion. I dealt with them both in my book Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene (which, by the way, was a blast to write). First I’ll deal with Peter in Rome – which will take a couple of posts; then the question of his martyrdom. Here is what I say about the first in my book ****************************** In some circles, Peter is best known as the first bishop of Rome, the first pope. In the period I’m interested in for this book, however, […]
September 18, 2021
Then Who WAS the First Bishop of Rome (if not Peter)?
In my previous post I addressed question from a reader whether Peter was really the first bishop in Rome (that is, the first Pope). I guess I could have just answered the question with one word: no. But it took a post to explain. Now I want to move to the obvious corollary. If not Peter, then who?? The ancient traditions about the leadership of the church of Rome is a bit confused. According to the second-century Irenaeus, the first leader known by name (after the apostles) was a man named Linus, who was appointed to the office by Peter and Paul (Against Heresies 3, 3, 3). In one place the father of church history, Eusebius, appears to agree with this, to some extent, when he says that “the first to be called bishop after the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul was Linus” (Church History, 3, 2); but here Linus is appointed not by Peter, but by someone else, after Peter’s death. And to confuse things even further, just a few paragraphs later Eusebius phrases […]
September 19, 2021
Was Peter Crucified Upside Down?
I few days ago I started answering a question about Peter that came to me in two parts: was Peter the first pope and how did Peter actually die (crucified upside down)? I’ve taken two posts to deal with the first question and will deal with the second — more of a human interest story, I suppose — here in this one. The oldest account of Peter’s death by martyrdom is certainly odd, but is not widely known. Here is what I say about it in my book Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene. ****************************** Peter as Martyr The death of Peter by execution is already alluded to in the Gospel of John – which evidently, then, had been written after the event occurred. As Jesus tells Peter after the resurrection: When you were younger, you girded yourself and walked wherever you wanted; but when you grow old, you will reach out your hands and another will bind you, and lead you where you do not want to go. (21:18) The author concludes this quotation by […]
September 21, 2021
How Becoming an Agnostic Affected My Personal Life
I was just now looking through some old posts on the blog (there are lots of them! If you join, you have full access!), and came upon this one from almost exactly four years ago. It involves a question I get asked a lot by people who have left the faith or find themselves moving in that direction. It involves how my relationships with others changed as I went from being a very conservative evangelical Christian to becoming an agnostic/atheist. My answer today would be the same…. QUESTION Would you be willing to elaborate on how your changing views affected your relationships with friends and family and how people reacted to your changing perspective? Thanks so much! RESPONSE As it turns out, in my case, the biggest “problem” for my relationships with family and friends was not so much when I became an agnostic, over twenty years ago now, but when I left the evangelical beliefs I had held as a young adult to become a “liberal” Christian with critical views of the […]
September 22, 2021
Reminder: My Public Lecture on the Book of Revelation — This Saturday!
Reminder! This Saturday, September 18, I will be giving a lecture with Q&A on the book of Revelation; I’m calling it “Expecting Armageddon: What the Book of Revelation Reveals.” Wanna come? The event is a fundraiser (not for the blog, but) for my Department of Religious Studies, which is trying very hard to sustain its work in training graduate students. My own students are becoming experts in the kinds of things I do, engaging in serious research in the study of the New Testament and the history of early Christianity, teaching important aspects of the field to undergraduate students, and communicating broadly this kind of knowledge to broader audiences in the population at large. It is very important work, not just for the graduate students themselves but for the people they do and will teach and reach, as we try to keep the public educated in what we actually know based on scholarship on these issues of broad importance. But we are having trouble providing students with the funds they need to complete their training. […]
September 10, 2021
Did Paul Want to Please the Jerusalem Apostles? Guest post by Richard Fellows
Blog Member Richard Fellows earlier provided us with a controversial post connected with his publication: “Paul, Timothy, Jerusalem and the Confusion in Galatia” Biblica 99.4 (2018) 544-566.” The earlier post is here: (Was Paul Really at Odds with Peter and James? Guest Post by Richard Fellows | The Bart Ehrman Blog) Now he follows it up with a second; one more is yet to come. ************************ In my previous guest post I proposed that the Galatians had come to believe that Paul now believed in circumcision, and that they thought that it was only to please the Jerusalem apostles that he was not recommending circumcision to them. In this post we will confirm this proposal using the letter alone. By finding the theme that is highlighted by repetition and by the letter’s structure, we will identify the conclusion that Paul wants his audience to draw. Those preparing presentations are advised, “Tell them what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you have told them”. Paul does this in Galatians. […]
September 26, 2021
Why and When Did We Get This Canon of the New Testament?
One of the questions I get most often is about the canon of the New Testament. I got the question yesterday, after a lecture (on some other topic). The question is actually a series of related questions: We have twenty-seven books in it. Who decided? On what grounds? And when? I’ve dealt with these matters on the blog before. Maybe it’s time to do it again! The first thing to emphasize is that the most common answer one hears to these questions is completely wrong. My sense is that people have this answer because they read it someplace, or heard it from someone who had read it someplace, and that someplace was one place in particular: Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code! (If you don’t know, I wrote a book explaining the historical mistakes in Brown’s book, Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code. It was a particularly fun book to write. Some of the mistakes were real howlers…) Contrary to what Brown says (and claims is a historical fact, and NOT part of […]
September 25, 2021
Christian Stereotypes of “the God of the Old Testament.” Marcion is Alive and Well and Well and What To Do About It. Guest Post by Marc Zvi Brettler
An important book on understanding the Bible recently appeared: The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christian Read the Same Stories Differently, by Marc Zvi Brettler and Amy-Jill Levine. I have asked both authors to provide a guest post or two, and here is the first. Marc Brettler has long been a prominent scholar of ancient Judaism. Since 2015 he has been the Bernice and Morton Lerner Professor in Judaic Studies at Duke University. ******************** Marcion, an early church theologian active in the first part of the second century, taught that the God of the Old Testament, typified by wrath, was distinct from the loving God of the New. His biblical canon excluded the entirety of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament. (His NT canon was also different than the one the Church ultimately settled on, but that story needs to wait for another day.) His views were rejected by the nascent church, and he was ultimately excommunicated in about 140. As a professor of biblical studies, I know that his legacy continues. This […]
September 23, 2021
Why these Caricatures of the Old Testament God? Guest post by Amy-Jill Levine
We earlier had a guest post by Marc Zvi Brettler, an internationally renowned scholar of ancient Judaism, as related to his book The Bible With and Without Jesus (HarperOne, 2020), co-authored with New Testament scholar (and my long-time friend) Amy-Jill Levine. Many of you will know of Amy-Jill: she is an extremely popular lecturer, full of energy, humor and wit, author of numerous important books on Jesus and the New Testament. Here now is her follow-up post, a complement to Marc’s. ******************************* My friend and frequent co-author, Marc Zvi Brettler, just posted on this blogsite, “Marcion is Alive and Well – and What to do About It.” Marcion, back in the second-century C.E., distinguished between what he perceived to be the angry and inept Old Testament God and the wise and loving God of the New Testament. Although Christian authorities proclaimed this view heretical, it still has traction. When we hear the contrast between the “Old Testament God of wrath” and the “New Testament God of love,” or other such comparisons that throw the Old […]
September 28, 2021
What Do I Think of the New Revised Standard Version?
I recently discussed how I became a secretary for the New Revised Standard Version translation committee as a grad student. Several people have asked me what I think of the translation, and if I have any problems with it. My answer is pretty straightforward and comes in two parts: I think it is the best Bible translation out there and I have lots of problems with it. (!) The reality is that *every* Bible scholar has *lots* of problems with virtually every Bible translation. Even the best. Generally speaking, I have two kinds of problems with the NRSV: some have to do with the translation itself, others have to do with the Greek reading that the translators decided to translate. I’ll deal with the first set of problems in two posts, and second in the next two posts. Every biblical scholar will have problems with the way translators have rendered this, that, or the other passage. Scholars disagree on everything! (Well, almost everything.) There are a few passages that have always irritated me from the […]
October 2, 2021
More of My Work for the NRSV Bible Translation Committee
A CONTINUATION OF MY POSTS OF MY RELATIONSHIP WITH BRUCE METZGER I served as one of the secretaries for the NRSV, as explained in my as explained in my post of Sept. 16th, for a couple of years. It was not onerous work and was quite a privilege to be able to associate with some of the greatest biblical scholars and Semitic philologists of the time. I was, of course, a complete nobody. Some of the members of the committee treated me (and the other secretaries) as complete nobodies (these tended to be the less qualified and more insecure members of the committee; I won’t name names!); others treated me (and the others) in a dignified and respectful way, realizing that we were, after all, just graduate students, but knowing that we were advanced and heading into academic careers of our own. When I graduated from my PhD program I was teaching part time at Rutgers, but I did not have a full time, tenure-track position there. It was a slightly oppressive situation, as adjunct […]
September 29, 2021
Behind the Scenes of the New Revised Standard Version
Here I will give two rather humorous stories (at least to me) connected with my work as the administrative assistant for the revision of the Revised Standard Version. In that capacity I was, of course, present for the various deliberations of the committee. Among the many issues they discussed was what to call the new revision. Ultimately it stood in the tradition of the “Authorized Version” – the technical name of the King James Version. In 1881, the KJV underwent an “official” revision (i.e., authorized by the ecclesiastical authorities who owned the copyright) in the Revised Version. Its committee received a lot of flak for the changes it made. Even though it was an English revision, there were several Americans who were on the committee. As part of their terms of involvement, they agreed not to publish an American version of the translation (making changes as they saw fit and bringing spelling and punctuation into conformity with American usage) for 20 years; and so in 1901 was published the American Standard Version. As I mentioned […]
September 30, 2021
A More Serious (Specific) Problem with the NRSV Translation
In my last post I mentioned John 3:22 as a verse that is mistranslated in the NRSV, leading to problems; but the problems of interpretation are not that enormous there – the translators simply removed an internal inconsistency by the way they mistranslated the verse. This second problem, the subject of this post, is more severe. A mistranslation has completely altered the meaning of a passage; it is the result of a very good motive – to make the translation gender-inclusive. But motive has led to a very bad result in this case. The policy of the NRSV was to render gender neutral statements in a gender neutral way. If a passage refers to humans in general, then it does not make sense to translate it as referring only to “men” (or only to “women” for that matter). And so instead of “man” the translators chose to use “person” or “human” or – if the mortality of people is the issue – “mortals” or … whatever; instead of “men” they used “people,” “humans,” etc. That’s […]
October 3, 2021
An Impromptu FREEBIE. A Zoom Lecture Tomorrow Morning!
Because of some weird circumstances, I will need to record a lecture for my undergraduate class tomorrow morning, September 21st. As some of you know, I hate recording a lecture to an empty room. I prefer an audience. Are you free to come? The lecture will be on “The Early Christian Apologists.” It will take place at 11:00 am, Eastern time, on Zoom. Are you free to come? Below is the link. I do not know yet if I will be able to release the recording to the public. The “Apologists” were the early Christians intelligentsia who defended the Christian claims against the charges of their pagan adversaries that Christians were hateful atheists who engaged in wild licentious activities. The apologists tried to refute the charges and to argue for why Christianity was in fact the ultimate “truth.” The event will be free, but as always, I would encourage a donation to the blog. Any amount is welcome. Pay what you think it’s worth! If, well, anything at all. And if you can’t afford anything […]
September 20, 2021
Jewish Indifference to Jesus and the Problems It Caused: Platinum Guest Post by Dan Kohanski
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Tags: Platinum
September 21, 2021
What Do YOU Think? The Experience of Death.
A month ago I decided to add a new feature to the blog, a periodic post that asks you to share your personal view about something, your honest opinion based on serious expertise or complete non-expertise. These posts are (and will be) called “What Do You Think?” I will NOT be responding to your replies/comments. I’ll simply be posting them so you can express yourself and have others can see your views. (As always, I will not be allowing comments that are rude to others or irrelevant to the question – for example, castigations of particular politicians that many but not all of us may despise, on one side of the political chasm facing us or the other. Or that try to proselytize others to your religious beliefs). Others of course can comment on your comment as they choose — and I hope they do. I’ll be listening in, for my own fun, education, and edification! The topics are meant to involve the BIG QUESTIONS. This one is related to the previous one but is […]
October 5, 2021
What Do Translators Translate? It’s Not So Obvious…
Translators of the Bible have a terrifically complicated and difficult (and usually thankless) task. I always knew that, of course, with my head – ever since taking Greek back in college. But I did not relate to the problems emotionally until I started publishing translations of my own. It’s HARD. My first translation project was a two-volume edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library (published by Harvard University Press). It was at that point that I realized that what translators do is not at all what the rest of us do who can teach the ancient languages and read Greek and assign Greek translation exercises to classes of graduate students. When you are with a class of students, you can sit around the table, discuss the various options about how a text can be translated, talk about the pro’s and con’s of various English renditions, make a few suggestions for how to provide nuance to a rendering, explicate the fuller meaning of the Greek by paraphrasing a phrase or a clause in […]
October 6, 2021
My Relationship with Bruce Metzger: More on the Personal Side
After all the tangents and side-tracks, I can return now to my reminiscences of my relationship with Bruce Metzger. Perhaps I should say a few things about his personality, as I perceived and experienced it. I think everyone who knew him would say that he was a true Christian gentleman. He was respectful of all people, polite to a fault, and cordial. But he was not someone that anyone became intimate with. I am sure that I came to be closer to him than any PhD student he supervised in his 40 plus years teaching at Princeton Theological Seminary. He as much as told me so. I knew his wife and his two sons (a bit); he invited my family to Christmas dinner; for several weeks I lived with him and his wife in their home. But there was always a kind of distance to him as well. He never let down his hair. The best I can put it is that he was cordial rather than warm and intimate. He was a shy man. […]
October 7, 2021
John Shelby Spong: In Memoriam
I was very sorry to learn last month that John Shelby Spong died (Sept. 12, 2021; age 90). Many of you know who he was; for those who don’t: he was one of the most important spokespersons of our generation for a critical understanding of the Bible for the general public, in particular for Christians. He himself was a Christian. In fact, for many years he was a bishop in the Episcopal church (bishop of Newark NJ from 1979-2000). Even though Spong never left the Christian faith, he certainly had a rigorously historical understanding of the faith and he spent many years writing influential books and lecturing around the world to proclaim it. He was not well-loved among traditional Christians, and was openly declared a heretic by other church leaders. That was because his historical studies led him to realize that the Bible cannot be interpreted as the literal, historical truth. Some other Christian bishops found his views dangerous and many people today, both Christian and non-Christian, do not understand how a real Christian can […]
October 9, 2021