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The OTHER Apocalypse of Peter (Stranger still…)
In a previous post I discussed the Apocalypse of Peter that was considered by a number of early Christians to be an inspired book of Scripture. There is another early Christian book with the same name, which is differentiated from the “proto-orthodox” one I’ve already discussed by being normally referred to as the “Coptic Apocalypse of Peter.” It is intriguing both because it has a view of Christ completely different from what became the orthodox view (here the man Jesus and the divine Christ are actually different beings who are temporarily united up to the point of Jesus’ death), and because it claims those with a different view (e.g., the view that “Christ died for the sins of the world”) are the heretics! Here is how I discuss it in my book Lost Christianities: ****************************** Among the gnostic attacks on the superficiality of proto-orthodox views, none is more riveting than the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter discovered at Nag Hammadi. This is not to be confused with the proto-orthodox Apocalypse of Peter in which Peter is given a […]
August 10, 2022
An Equally Strange View of the Crucifixion
Yesterday I posted about the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter, which clearly differentiated between the man Jesus and the spiritual being, the Christ, who inhabited him temporarily – leaving him at his suffering and death since the divine cannot suffer and die. That understanding of Jesus Christ is sometimes called “docetic,” but strictly speaking that’s not quite right. The term docetic comes from the Greek word DOKEO which means “to seem” or “to appear.” It refers to Christologies in which Jesus was not a real flesh-and-blood human but only “seemed” to be. In reality, what they saw, heard, and touched was a phantasm. That is not what is going on in the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter. Here there really is a man Jesus – flesh and blood like the rest of us. But he is indwelt by a divine being who leaves him at his death, abandoneding him to die alone on the cross. That is similar to a docetic view, but also strikingly different. I call it a “separationist” Christology because it separates Jesus from […]
August 11, 2022
Reminder about My Gospels Course This Weekend
This is a reminder (or a minder, if you missed it the first time) that I will be doing an eight-lecture online course this coming weekend, four lectures on on Saturday and four on Sunday, with Q&A following each, on the four canonical Gospels. Here was the original announcement from a couple of weeks ago. ****************************** I am pleased to announce that I will be doing another online course, the second in the series: How Scholars Read the Bible. The first, if you recall, was a six-lecture course on Genesis. This one will be an eight-lecture course called: The Unknown Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. As with all the courses I do online, this one will NOT be in connection with the blog per se – it is part of my separate venture (Bart Ehrman Professional Services) that you can find at my personal website http://www.bartehrman.com. I am announcing it here on the blog because I know some of blog members will be interested (and some would be rather aggravated if I […]
August 2, 2022
Anyone in/around Asheville NC in August?
BE Bloggers! I’m going to be in the Asheville NC area (Waynesville, actually) August 9-28 or so. I’m out there a good bit, but not usually for this amount of time. If any of you are in the area, let me know: if there are a few of you, maybe we could work out a blog dinner. It would be for blog members only; each person would pay for him/herself; and we would spend an evening engaged in interesting discourse! Let me know — not here but on my private email — and we’ll see what, if anything, can happen! [email protected]
Is That One a Difference or a Contradiction?
In my previous post I began discussing the difference between differences and contradictions. I see contradictions as a kind of difference, one that cannot be reconciled. Some statements are just different: Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer; Jimmy Carter was president. Different but not mutually exclusive. Others are contradictory: Jimmy Carter became president in 1976; Jimmy Carter became president in 1992. Both can’t be true at the same time. UNLESS you figure out a way to reconcile them, for example, by saying that Jimmy Carter became president twice, once in 1976 and again in 1992. But THAT reconciliation can be shown to be false by other facts (that at Bill Clinton became president in 1992). Eventually in a case like this, one has to concede: yes, the two statements about Jimmy Carter are in fact contradictory. In this instance, one of them is true and the other false. In other instances, you can have contradictory statements *both* of which are false (Bill Clinton first became president in 1962; Bill Clinton first became president in 2002). […]
August 16, 2022
Writings of the Apostles in the Canon of the New Testament
How did we get the twenty-seven books of the New Testament? And why? I’m in the middle of a thread that is meant to provide a *sketch* of how it happened; I’ll be writing a book on the question, and these are my preliminary thoughts about the topics that I’ll be covering, one at a time. In previous posts I’ve pointed out that the early Christians started out with a canon of Scripture: as Jews they had the Hebrew Bible as an authority for understanding their beliefs, ethics, and religious practices; but as Christianity began to develop its own distinctive views on things, church leaders came to think needed authoritative direction – especially since so many different Christian groups had so many different views on so many issues (not just what to believe but also how to live, how to behave, how to worship together, and so on). What could be decisive authorities? Here’s where I pick up in my thinking: The Need for Apostolic Authorities It was widely known that Jesus himself had […]
August 20, 2022
How Did They Decide Which Books to Include in the New Testament Canon?
If the early Christians decided they needed writings by apostles to provide them guidance in what it meant to follow Jesus – what to believe, how to act, what rituals to follow, how to understand them, etc. – how did they decide? Which writings were they going to include? And which exclude? I continue here my reflections on how we got the 27 books of the New Testament, some preliminary thoughts as I consider how to write a book on the topic down the road. How Decisions Were Made Early church communities, leaders, and individuals accepted and appealed to a range texts written by apostolic authorities. Some Christians revered the Gospel of Thomas, which maintained that it was the secret teachings of Jesus, not his death, that could bring salvation. Other Christians accepted the divine revelation found in one of the Apocalypses of Peter (not the one I described earlier) in which Peter narrates his own most peculiar vision of the crucifixion. It is a puzzling scene that is difficult to imagine. The man […]
August 23, 2022
Problems in the Gospels–How do YOU Talk to Believers About Them? What Do You Think?
I recently received this query by a blog member, and it’s a question I often get, both on the blog and off. I’m hoping that maybe you yourself have some wisdom on it. How do you talk about historical and literary problems (contradictions!) of the Gospels to people who are convinced the Bible has no problems at all? Here the question is articulated very well. What’s your experience and judgment? Let us know what you think! ****************************** QUESTION from a blog reader: I’m fairly knowledgeable about the historical Jesus. When I find myself discussing the gospels with Christians who are not, I’m always tempted to lead with statements that certain things are not accurate: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John didn’t actually write the gospels; the four source hypothesis; contradictions in accounts by the gospels; no post-resurrection appearances in the original version of Mark; etc. This seems like a needlessly negative approach to an informal discussion. Christians most often automatically react that I’m asserting some sort of superiority and even dogmatism over them. Do you have […]
August 21, 2022
A Major Forgery in the Hebrew Bible? Platinum Guest Post by Dennis Folds
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Tags: Platinum
August 8, 2022
Ask Me Anything! Mark Your Calendar.
We will be holding a blog fundraiser, donations voluntary, on Wednesday August 17, 8:00 – 9:15 PM Eastern Time. It will be an Ask Bart Anything. Any question on any topic is welcome. If I am unable to answer, I won’t. I can only think of a few things I’d be unwilling to answer, and I’m not going to tell you what they are. We are raising money for the people suffering in Ukraine, and will split the proceeds between two of our charities: Doctors without Borders and CARE. We are asking for voluntary donations of $30. We would LOVE it if you could give more for this worthy cause. Anyone who comes up with $30,000, I’ll buy you a Happy Meal. But if you can’t afford $30, or can’t afford anything, we completely understand. Give what you can, if you can, and come anyway! All are welcome. I will personally match the amount of donations we bring in up to $5000. Moreover, if there are any individual donations over $1000, I will be happy […]
August 9, 2022
August Gold Q&A
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August 10, 2022
When Did We Get the Final Canon of the New Testament?
I am nearing the end of this thread on the formation of the canon of the New Testament. Rather than going into all the ins and outs of the process, I have been laying out the topics that I hope to address in a book on the matter down the road. I say down the road because it is not the very next book I plan to write, but the one *after* the one I now plan to write. I like to think ahead. Here I talk about when the decisions were finalized (were they?) and what the major significance of “closing” the canon was. A Final Consensus? Many (most?) people imagine that the canon, in the end, was decided by a vote at one of the major church councils, such as the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE (as propounded by that inestimable authority, Dan Brown, in The Da Vinci Code). But the question of the canon was not even on the agenda at Nicaea, or at any of the other major […]
August 24, 2022
The Canon of the New Testament: Why It Matters
With this post I conclude my thread on how we got the canon of the New Testament. In the last post I began to talk about how having a canon affected the way people read the books of the New Testament. Even though there are important *differences* among the various books, when they are all put between the same two covers, people read them as if they were all saying the same thing. Here I pick up right before I left off…. ****************************** There are, for example, four Gospels, each presenting a different understanding of Jesus’ words and deeds. The thirteen letters assigned to Paul contain inconsistencies and incoherencies (especially between the ones he actually wrote and those produced in his name later by others). The alleged writings of James, Peter, John, and Jude also present distinctive messages, sometimes at odds with the others. But when all twenty-seven books were canonized into a single book, the statements of one writing came to be read in light of another, forcing readers (almost always unsuspectingly) to think […]
August 27, 2022
Studying the New Testament in Graduate School
My favorite professor in graduate school once told me he thought that PhDs in New Testament were over-trained for what they had to do. I had finished my degree at the time and was heading off to an on-campus interview at Notre Dame, which was looking for a faculty member who was an expert in Pauline studies. They had a number of other biblical scholars there, but wanted to fill a gap in their curriculum and wanted someone with a specialization in Paul. I didn’t consider myself a Pauline scholar in particular – at the time my research was in analyzing and classifying the Greek manuscript tradition of the New Testament, and even though I had fairly extensive training in Pauline studies, it wasn’t at all my expertise. My professor was telling me to relax: I was more than enough qualified. Looking back, I think he had a point – not about me as a Pauline scholar (in the end they offered me the position, but I turned it down for the offer from UNC) […]
August 30, 2022
Did Jesus Believe in Armed Resistance to the Romans?
Here’s a post from long ago that deals with an issue that has come up among some blog members recently. Was Jesus in favor of armed resistance? Were he and his disciples armed? Was he killed for insurrection because he actually *was* an insurrectionist? Here is the question in one of the forms I have received it, and my response. QUESTION: What is the scholarly view on this subject: did Jesus himself, his movement and then early Christians walk around with weapons (swords, e.g.) to protect themselves, despite preaching the love for enemies? Do we have any historical evidence of how things looked in this matter? RESPONSE: This is a hugely important question. I dealt with it in my book Jesus Before the Gospels, and don’t think I’m able to say it any better by putting it in other words. So here is what I said there: ****************************** In all four Gospels, at least one of Jesus’ followers is armed when he is arrested. In the Synoptics, this unnamed follower draws his sword […]
Tags: gethsemane, pacifism, sword
August 28, 2022
Reminder: Ask Me Anything! Tomorrow! (Wed. Aug. 17).
Have you signed up yet? See the annoucement below. I hope you can come! ******************* We will be holding a blog fundraiser, donations voluntary, on Wednesday August 17, 8:00 – 9:15 PM Eastern Time. It will be an Ask Bart Anything. Any question on any topic is welcome. If I am unable to answer, I won’t. I can only think of a few things I’d be unwilling to answer, and I’m not going to tell you what they are. We are raising money for the people suffering in Ukraine, and will split the proceeds between two of our charities: Doctors without Borders and CARE. We are asking for voluntary donations of $30. We would LOVE it if you could give more for this worthy cause. Anyone who comes up with $30,000, I’ll buy you a Happy Meal. But if you can’t afford $30, or can’t afford anything, we completely understand. Give what you can, if you can, and come anyway! All are welcome. I will personally match the amount of donations we bring in up […]
August 16, 2022
How Many People Were Literate in Antiquity?
Over the past month I have received a number of questions on the blog about whether it was possible that some of the apostles used “secretaries” to write their books — so that when 1 or 2 Peter, say, claims to be written by Peter, it actually was written by Peter in a sense. Peter told a secretary what to write and the secretary (e.g., Silvanus? 1 Peter 5:12) actually put pen to papyrus. But the thoughts and ideas were all Peter’s. It’s an important question, and I’ve dealt with it a good bit over the years. I actually did a short thread on it over six years ago now here on the blog. I’ve decided to return to the issue. This will take three posts. The first is on what levels of literacy back at the time of the New Testament: how many people cold read and how many write (which is not the same thing in antiquity!); and apart from who could write, who could compose a writing? Here is what I said about […]
Tags: ancient literacy
August 31, 2022
Did Ancient Writers Use Secretaries?
In my previous post I tried to show that the disciples of Jesus were almost certainly not literate. Yet we have books allegedly written by them. Is it possible that people like Peter, John, James, and Jude used a secretary to write their books for them? So that the apostles in the ultimate sense were the “author” but someone else composed the writing for them? To answer the question with something other than common sense (that is, common guessing), we need to know about secretarial practices in antiquity. As it turns out, we do know some things, as I’ll explain in this post and the next. Again, this is taken, in slightly edited form, from my book Forgery and Counterforgery, which goes into a great bit of detail about what we know about writing practices in the ancient world. ****************************** The notion that early Christian authors used secretaries …. is so widespread as to be virtually ubiquitous. There is no need here to cite references; one need only consult the commentaries, not only on the […]
Tags: Forgeries, Paul, pseudepigrapha, secretaries
September 1, 2022
Did the Apostles Use Secretaries to Write their Books?
Here is the third (and last) post on the use of secretaries in the ancient world, in which I discuss the issue of whether illiterate people (like Simon Peter, or John the son of Zebedee) could have had someone else write their books for them – so that 1 Peter *could* in some sense actually be by Peter even if he couldn’t write, or the Revelation of John be by John. In it I continue to consider ways ancient authors used secretaries. Was it actually to have them compose writings for them? (To make best sense of this it would help to read the previous post, where I talk about two of the main ways ancient writers used secretaries. But hey, you don’t *have* to read it. It ain’t required!) Again, the discussion is taken from my book Forgery and Counterforgery (Oxford University Press). ****************************** It is Richards‘ third and fourth categories that are particularly germane to the questions of early Christian forgery. What is the evidence that secretaries were widely used, or used at all, […]
Tags: Forgeries, pseudepigrapha, secretaries
September 4, 2022
Do You Need the Holy Spirit to Interpret the Bible?
Every now and then I receive an email from a devout Christian who tells me that no one (including, well, me) is able to interpret the Bible correctly without guidance of the Holy Spirit. I take this view seriously, but I’ve never found it convincing. Well, OK, I did when I was a student at Moody Bible Institute in the mid 70s; but not for much longer than that afterward. Today, of course, I don’t believe the Holy Spirit can guide one in reading the Bible since, as an agnostic, I don’t believe in the Holy Spirit at all (since I don’t believe in God). But even when I did believe in the Holy Spirit (after Moody), I came to think that it made no sense to claim that a person needed divine guidance through the Spirit to interpret the Bible correctly. This was for two main reasons, both of which — when they occurred to me — struck me as virtually irrefutable. The first is this: if it is true that
Tags: biblical interpretation, Gospel of John
September 7, 2022