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Why Do Historians Treat Jesus Differently from Every Other Historical Figure?
I’m starting to think there must be a better way to explain to laypeople – and even to scholars – the best way we can show what the historical Jesus himself said and did. Since I was a graduate student I have done what every other budding New Testament scholar was doing: name the “criteria” that are used to show which elements of the Gospels are legendary and which are historical, explain their logic, justify them, and then use them. Now I’m starting to think that just ain’t the way to go. In case you don’t know, scholars use a set of criteria to decide what is authentic to the life of Jesus. The reason we need to do that is that we don’t have any audio or video recordings of his life, or stenographic accounts of his teachings, or highly reliable, fully documented, authoritative records of his activities. What we have are accounts written decades later (30-65 years later, at best), by people who did not know him, living in different parts of the […]
October 19, 2022
Little Known Aspects of The Golden Rule as Found in the Sermon on the Mount
Possibly the best-known teaching of Jesus is the Golden Rule, “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” Many people would consider this the very core of Jesus’ teaching, the one line that sums up his entire message about how people ought to behave and live their lives. And so it probably seems strange that there are scholars who doubt that he actually said it. Do they have good grounds for thinking so? In a later post I’ll consider a couple of the best arguments against thinking Jesus said it and then (spoiler alert!). I’ll explain why, in the end, I don’t find the arguments convincing. I think Jesus probably did say it, and even if he didn’t actually say it, I think it brilliantly encapsulates his message. In this post I’ll set up the discussion by explaining the first appearance of the words in any of our sources, i.e., the Gospel of Matthew. Before getting to the Gospel of Matthew, I should acknowledge that some of you might be thinking: of […]
October 22, 2022
What Does It Mean to Be an Active Research Scholar? Editing Scholarly Journals (And Why Is Peer-Review Important?)
Being a research scholar means a lot more than sticking your head in books and articles and churning out publications. Here I explain an area of pure volunteer work with little glory but lots of grind. ****************************** A Research Scholar’s Editorial Work One aspect of the life of a professional scholar that may not be well known to the general public involves editorial work. For some scholars, this kind of work takes an enormous expenditure of time and effort, although much of the work, and many of the hours, are not transparent or evident to outsiders. I have done a lot of editorial work over the years, but I do not think that my case is at all exceptional. A lot of my colleagues have done less, but some have done a good deal more. Many scholars see editorial work as a major component of “service” to the discipline. Which means that, for the most part, it is really important but normally thankless! As is my wont I will use my own experience as a […]
Tags: academic journals, editorial boards, Professional Scholarship, Vigiliae Christianae
October 20, 2022
Armageddon in Biden and the Bible
On Thursday October 6, President Biden made an unusually scary statement, in response to Putin’s threat of using nuclear weapons in Ukraine: “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.” He then added: “I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily (use) a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon.” Armageddon has long been on my mind. As many of you know, my next book, coming out on March 12, is called Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End. The book is obviously not about our current political-military crisis but about where the notion of Armageddon came from, how the view that it is very near has almost never done much good, but often created serious mayhem and harm, and why the conservative Christian understanding of it based on the book of Revelation is a complete misinterpretation. Biden wasn’t talking about that. But he was talking about how current events could indeed lead to cataclysmic disaster for the human race. […]
October 23, 2022
Can’t We Just Get Rid of Some of the Books of the Bible?
Here’s an interesting question I received from a blog reader long ago! 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 […]
Tags: New Testament canon
October 25, 2022
Blog Dinner in London on Monday June 12. Interested?
I’m heading over the pond this week, for most of the summer, and would like to do a blog dinner on Monday, June 12, 2023. Possibly a pint in advance. Somewhere in central London.
May 29, 2023
I’ll Be In Denver November 17. Interested in a Blog Dinner?
I will be in Denver for the annual Society of Biblical Literature Meeting, starting a week before Thanksgiving. Anyone out that way interested in a blog dinner, Thursday November 17? Possibly a drink t in advance. Somewhere near the Convention Center. Are you in the vicinity? Interested? If we can get 3-4 (and no more than 7) people together, I’d be happy to do it. No obligations other than: Being a blog member Showing up Talking Paying for whatever you ingest. Whatever you exgest is free. If you’re interested, do NOT reply here as a comment. Send me an email at [email protected]. Hope it happens!
October 13, 2022
My New Podcast. Help! I Need Questions.
I am pleased to announce that I have indeed decided to start a Podcast (NOTE: this will not be replacing the Bart Ehrman Blog Podcast; it is a completely different beast, in which I am interviewed, as opposed to the already important [!] podcast, on which volunteers read my posts to encourage listeners to join the blog). And here, before starting, I need some assistance (see below). But first, let me give you a few of the details. It will be a weekly podcast, called Misquoting Jesus, with Bart Ehrman. It will cover many of the same sorts of things we do on the blog — NT, historical Jesus, writings and life of Paul, the rest of the NT, all aspects of early Christianity such as non-canonical Gospels, the role of women, heresy and orthodoxy, Christianization of the empire, persecution and martyrdom, Jewish-Christian relations, and on and on. We will initially release several episodes (i.e. on the first day), and after that it will be one a week. It will always appear on a Tuesday, time […]
October 14, 2022
The Strange World of Textual Criticism
I’ve been asked a good bit lately by readers of the blog and random emailers how we can know, or if we can know, what the authors of the New Testament actually wrote — if we don’t have their original copies. By far my best selling book (Misquoting Jesus) is about that, as is my best known scholarly book (The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture). It’s the issue I first got most interested in (as an 18 year old!) when it came to serious scholarship, and its the field of study I devoted nearly twenty years to it as a scholar. So, well, I’m interested! It’s been over seven years since I gave anything like a full explanation of the entire field of New Testament “textual criticism” (which does not mean what a lot of people think!), and I’ve decided it’s high time I go over it again. This will take a number of posts! ****************************** The first thing to emphasize is that the term “textual criticism” is a technical term with a very specific meaning. […]
Tags: manuscripts, textual criticism
October 27, 2022
The Greek Manuscripts of the New Testament
I have begun to explain the field of “textual criticism,” the academic discipline that tries to establish what an author actually wrote if you don’t have his original but only copies made from later times. In this post I begin to summarize some of the most important information about the textual “witnesses” to the text of the New Testament. I won’t be going into this information at any serious length. We could have many, many, many posts on virtually every single detail that I mention. You don’t want that. Trust me. There are three kinds of witnesses to the text of the New Testament, that is to say, three kinds of documents that can help us establish what the authors actually wrote. First, obviously, are the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. These are copies of the New Testament in the language in which the books were originally written, produced by later scribes, who were copying earlier copies that had been made by scribes who were copying earlier copies that were made by scribes…. well […]
Tags: manuscripts, textual criticism
October 29, 2022
Trying to Make Scholarship Interesting
I’ve long been interested in thinking about how to make boring subjects interesting. I’ve become especially attuned to the issue recently as I’ve begun to read a lot more scholarship in fields completely unrelated to mine. Some scholars have a gift in being able to reach low level mortals like me. My own field is not nearly as complicated as the hard sciences (always hard for me, at least!) but every field has its technicalities and jargon and wide range of not-widely-shared assumptions, perspectives, and history of investigation. And so I was struck when I ran across this post from some years ago, and realized that it’s still the sort of thing I think about roughly every day. ****************************** The difficulty in presenting serious scholarship to a lay audience is how to make something that can be very dry and technical and detailed and, well, boring to most human beings actually interesting and lively and thought provoking. It is obviously quite easy to make something interesting dull. University professors are unusually skilled at doing that. […]
Tags: textbooks
November 2, 2022
October Gold Q&A
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October 17, 2022
Did Jesus Give the Sermon on the Mount?
Did Jesus actually say the Golden Rule as found in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7; the saying is in Matt. 7:12). I have talked about the Sermon and why it is so important for Matthew’s Gospel (in a previous post: Little-Known Aspects of the Golden Rule as Found in the Sermon on the Mount) and now it is time to say something controversial about it. I don’t think Jesus ever gave the Sermon on the Mount. That’s not just a crazy idea I came up with one day. It’s a widespread view among historical scholars, for reasons that would not be hard to figure out. Just think about the logistics of the issue for a second. The Sermon goes on for three entire chapters. These are not concise chapters; in our Bibles today, they are 111 verses in total (48 + 34 + 29) – saying after saying after saying, one after the other, some one-liners, some extended instructions, some parabolic-like illustrations. It is an amazing collection of Jesus’ teachings, by far his […]
October 26, 2022
Is it Possible Jesus Didn’t Teach the Golden Rule?
Did Jesus actually teach the Golden Rule? Or was it foisted on his lips after his death by later followers? I have already written a couple of posts on the Golden Rule in the two places it occurs in the New Testament, Matthew 7:12 and Luke 6:31 (see: Little-Known Aspects of The Golden Rule as Found in the Sermon on the Mount and Did Jesus Give the Sermon on the Mount? ). Normally the rule is phrased like this: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” I noted, though, in the Greek clauses are reversed. A literal translation of Matthew’s version would be “Everything you want other people to do for you, you likewise do for them,” to which Matthew, importantly, adds “for this is the Law and the Prophets” (meaning that if you follow this rule, you will be following the entire will of God as revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures; Matthew 7:12); Luke is quite similar “Just as you wish people to do for you, do likewise for them” (Luke […]
October 30, 2022
What Are Ancient “Versions” of the New Testament?
Do we know the original wording of the New Testament? Here I continue! When scholars try to establish what an ancient author wrote, they can do so only on the basis of the surviving evidence. That seems, well, rather obvious, but the reality is that most people have never thought about that. It just seems that if you pick up a copy of Plato, or Euripides, or Cicero, that you’re simply reading what they wrote. But it’s not that simple. In none of these cases, or in any other case for any other book from the ancient world, do we actually have the person’s actual writing. All we have are later copies, and invariably these copies are filled with scribal mistakes. Scholars who are “textual critics” try to reconstruct the text that the author produced, to the best of their ability. I have been talking about the challenges of doing that with the New Testament. In many, many ways we are much better situated with the New Testament than with any other ancient book (or […]
Tags: New Testament versions
November 5, 2022
Do Church Fathers Show What the Authors of the NT Actually Wrote?
What other resources do we have to figure out what the authors of the New Testament originally wrote, if we don’t have their actual writings themselves? In this post I move into a very brief discussion of one other area of evidence for the text of the New Testament, the Patristic sources. The term “patristic” stands for “fathers” (Latin: patres) of the church – that is, the early church authors who quoted the books of the New Testament in the course of their writings. This too is an exceedingly thorny area of scholarly investigation, and one that I have long been deeply interested in. It is the area that I did my PhD research and dissertation in. So here’s the deal. As I have pointed out before, we don’t have complete manuscripts of the New Testament until the middle of the fourth century – some 300 years after the books were written. We do have earlier fragmentary papyri manuscripts of this, that, or the other part of the NT, and for that we are all […]
Tags: church fathers, New Testament
November 8, 2022
How Can “Group Hallucinations” Possibly Happen?
When I lecture or debate on whether it is possible to “prove” the resurrection of Jesus on historical grounds, I talk about how — whether you believe in the resurrection or not — almost certainly the reason the disciples originally *believed* Jesus had been raised is that one or more of them had a vision of him after he died. (Believers would say their “vision” was something they actually saw; non-believers would say they were mistaken for one reason or another, or they imagined it, etc — that it was a hallucination of some kind). But it is often noted that in the New Testament, after his death Jesus appears not only to individuals (Peter, Paul, and Mary, for example) (!) but to groups (the “twelve,” the “apostles” and “500 people” at one time, according to 1 Cor. 15:5-8). But how could *that* be possible? One person might mistake something she saw for a person, or dream they saw someone, or whatever. But *groups* of people? How can historians possibly explain “group visions” of a […]
Tags: hallucinations, Mary, the historical Jesus
November 13, 2022
Was Paul Thinking about Committing Suicide?
A blog reader recently asked me about an intriguing passage in Paul’s letter to the Philippians where he says that “To live is Christ, to die is gain” (1:21) and then goes on to say that he is not sure “what to choose” — to “depart to be with Christ” or “to remain in the flesh” (1:22). Choose? Most people have never looked at the passage carefully, but as often happens, have simply skirted over it without paying it much attention. But think about it. What is Paul saying exactly? In what sense does he have a “choice”? Is he thinking about taking matters in his own hands? Isn’t that the ultimate sin? I talk about the matter briefly in my textbook on the New Testament. Here is what I say there: ****************************** In an intriguing book that discusses suicide and martyrdom in the ancient world (A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom among Christians and Jews in Antiquity. HarperSanFrancisco, 1992) Arthur Droge and James Tabor argue that the modern notion that suicide is a “sin” […]
Tags: Paul, Philippians, suicide
November 6, 2022
Why Paul Was Persecuted (Or Claimed He Was). Guest Post by Daniel Kohanski
I am pleased to publish this guest post by Platinum blog member Dan Kohanski, on an intriguing and important topic for understanding both the life (and writings) of Paul and the earliest history of the Christian movement. As you know, Platinum level members get a several perks — I do a quarterly webinar with any of them who want to come (and provide a link to the recording afterward for those who can’t make it) and they are allowed to publish posts for other Platinums. Every month or so, the members vote on one of the platinum posts to appear on the blog for everyone to see. This one is the current winner! If you are interested in participating at the Platinum level, check it out: Register – The Bart Ehrman Blog And for now, check out Dan’s post. He will be happy to respond to your comments. ****************************** (This article is based on research I’ve been doing for my new book, A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World, to be […]
November 10, 2022
Intriguing Scribal Errors Made by Accident
As I stressed in my most recent post, the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of differences among out surviving manuscripts (and versions, and patristic citations) are of very little or no importance in trying to establish what the authors of the NT originally wrote. There are others that matter, and matter a lot. Those tend to be the ones that are the most interesting. But there are many, many more differences that are easy to detect and of no real significance. Most of these differences appear simply to be accidental scribal errors. We can never be absolutely certain, of course, if a change was made by accident or not. But in a huge majority of cases, there seems to be little reason to doubt it. Why Are There Mistakes in Manuscripts? The *reasons* mistakes were made are not hard to detect, but are nonetheless hugely interesting for a reason I will explain in my next post. The reality is that scribes were human beings and they made mistakes. Of course, in theory, they […]
Tags: accidental changes, scribal tendencies
November 12, 2022