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An Error in Mark? Did Scribes Change It?
In a previous post I discussed “accidental” changes of the text by scribes who appear simply to have made a mistake. There are other changes that almost certainly were not made by a slip of the pen (as when an entire verse is added!) and it seems clear in these instances that scribes changed the text because they chose to do so, for one reason or another. You can never tell for certain, of course — the scribes aren’t around to interview about the matter; so it’s often a judgment call. And often the judgment is rather difficult to make and involves an interesting issue (or two). I’ll be illustrating the issue (how to tell if a change was an accident or made on purpose) by dealing with three of the most interesting textual variants in the Gospel of Mark, one of which is an easy problem to solve, one that is a bit more difficult, and one that has generated a lot of discussion over the years and no firm consensus. The one textual […]
Tags: Gospel of Mark, scribal tendencies, textual criticism, textual variants
November 15, 2022
On a couple of personal notes…
These aren’t related to the blog per se, but, well, to me. In case you’re interested…. 1. As many of you know, I’m starting a podcast, Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. In fact, it’s starting tomorrow. We will be debuting with two episodes, the first that explain the title and a bit of why we chose it, how it relates to my life personally (my views of the Bible as they developed), and what it all means. The second will be more specific about Christian scribes copying their texts. My host is Megan Lewis, who is *terrific*; it includes Q&A (questions previously submitted on the topic) and a couple of other features.. You will be able to find it wherever you do your podcasts AND, if you prefer video, on my Youtube page. 2. Unrelated to that or much anything: my editor from Yale University Press emailed me today to tell me that my recent book Journeys to Heaven and Hell has been chosen for the New Yorker’s “Best Books of 2022.” An academic book?? Go figure. […]
October 31, 2022
Did God Mock Jesus on the Cross? A Scribal Change?
I’ve started to show that scribes sometimes changed the New Testament texts they were copying in ways that certainly seem “intentional” (in addition to making many more simple, accidental, slips of the pen). I last gave an example from the beginning of Mark’s Gospel that appears to be a case where scribes altered a text because it seems to make a mistake. Here I’ll give a second instance, this time from near the ending of Mark, a passage that is exceedingly interesting but for a comletley different reason. One of the most intriguing variations in Mark’s Gospel comes in the Passion narrative, in the final words attributed to Jesus in the Gospel. Jesus is being crucified, and he says nothing on the cross until he cries out his final words, which Mark records in Aramaic: “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” Mark then translates the words into Greek: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus then utters a loud cry and dies. What is striking is that in one early Greek manuscript BREAK (the […]
Tags: Gospel of Mark, scribal tendencies, textual criticism, textual variants
November 16, 2022
Do We Know How Mark Began His Gospel? Another Scribal Change
I have been talking about different kinds of changes made in our surviving New Testament manuscripts, some of them accidental slips of the pen (that’s probably the vast majority of our textual variants) and others of them intentional alterations. One of the points that I’ve been trying to stress is that at the end of the day it is, technically speaking, impossible to know what a scribe’s “intentions” were (or if he had any, other than the intention of copying a text). None of the scribes is around to be interviewed, and so – as with a lot of history – there is a good bit of scholarly guess-work that has to be done. This guess work is not simply shooting in the dark, however. And it is dead easy for a highly trained expert to tell the difference between informed guesswork and just plain guesswork. But at the end of the day we are always talking about historical probabilities, not historical certainties, when it comes to figuring out why a scribed decided to change […]
Tags: Gospel of Mark, scribal tendencies, textual criticism, textual variants
November 17, 2022
Why Would Scribes Mess with Mark’s Very First Verse?
In yesterday’s post I discussed a textual variant in Mark 1:1 that could be explained either as an accidental slip of the pen or an intentional alteration of the text. We’re plowing into some heavy waters here, but it involves some intriguing stuff that I can say with assurance you didn’t ever learn in Sunday School… Just by way of basic review (basics not involving heavy waters, but that you *also* didn’t hear in Sunday School), there are thousands of textual witnesses to the NT (Greek manuscripts, manuscripts of the versions, writings of the church fathers who quote the text); these witnesses attests hundreds of thousands of variants among themselves; the vast majority of those differences are immaterial and insignificant and don’t matter for much of anything; some of them are highly significant indeed. Most of the changes were made by accident. Some were consciously made by scribes who wanted to change the text. And in Mark 1:1 we have a variant where it is hard to tell which it is. At issue are the […]
Tags: Gospel of Mark, textual criticism
November 19, 2022
Me and the “Truth”: A Bit of Autobiography
I decided recently to reread my book Forged: Writing in the Name of God; How the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (which, in my view, has one too many titles….). It was a surprise: I really didn’t remember a good bit of the opening part. And oh boy, I liked it better than I expected (usually when you read your old stuff you just roll your eyes). One of the theses of the book is that even in the ancient world, people thought that if someone wrote a book claiming to be a famous author (when they were someone else) was seen as a form of lying. I start the book with my own relation to lying and truth. I’m sure you have your own stories to tell. Here’s part of mine: ****************************** On a bright sunny day in June, when I was fourteen years old, my mom told me that she and my dad were going out to play a round of golf. I did a quick calculation in my head. […]
November 20, 2022
Religion and the Wrecking Ball of Truth
In my last post I began to discuss the importance of “truth” to conservative evangelical Christianity, through a bit of autobiography. You don’t need to have read that post for this one, so I begin here with the final paragraph that I left off with there. This is from my book Forged. ****************************** One of the ironies of modern religion is that the absolute commitment to truth in some forms of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity, and the concomitant view that truth is objective and can be verified by any impartial observer, has led many faithful souls to follow the truth wherever it leads, but where it leads is often away from evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity. That is to say, if you can, in theory, verify the “objective” truth of religion, and then it turns out that the religion being examined is verifiably wrong, where does that leave you? For many one-time evangelical Christians it leaves them in the wilderness outside the evangelical camp, but with an unrepentant view of truth. Objective truth, to paraphrase the […]
November 22, 2022
What Is Paul’s First Surviving Letter All About? 1 Thessalonians
In my two previous posts I discussed a textual variant that could be explained either as a scribal accident or as an intentional change. I thought it might be interesting to point out a few other variants that also could go either way. These are all intriguing problems in and of themselves, and by talking about them I can illustrate a bit further the kinds of quandaries textual critics find themselves in when trying to decide what an author wrote when we have different versions of his words in different manuscripts. My plan right now is to look at three variants in three different mini-threads (all of them subsumed under the larger thread of why I wrote The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture). Today is one of my favorites, a particularly thorny issue found in 1 Thessalonians 2:7. I can’t get to a discussion of that issue without providing some important background; just the very basics of the background will take me two posts, before I can even start to explain the textual problem. First Thessalonians […]
November 25, 2022
How Changing a Single Letter of a Single Word Can Change the Meaning of a Passage
Now that I have discussed the purpose of 1 Thessalonians I would like to discuss a scribal change of the text – a change that involves just a single letter of a single word. Which did Paul originally write? The word *with* the letter or the word *without* it? How you decide the question changes the meaning of the passage. Yikes. A single letter? The passage occurs in an earlier part of the book where Paul is reminding the Thessalonians of the time that he had spent with them when he converted them to their new faith. This is a very joyful part of the letter, one of the most sentimental passages of all of Paul’s letters, where he speaks of the relationship he had with his converts when he was there. But the description is a bit hard to pin down, in part because of the presence or non-presence of just one letter of the alphabet. Some manuscripts have it, and others don’t. And it is very hard to decide which reading is […]
November 27, 2022
Do We KNOW What Paul Wrote? If You Think So, Answer This….
Do we really KNOW what the authors of the New Testament wrote? Sometimes we just can’t decide — despite what apologists almost always say (Most apologists, btw, have never actually studied the problem; I’m not trying to be snide or rude when I say that — it’s an empirical fact; even most PhD’s in New Testament Studies have not been trained to determine which actual words of the surviving manuscripts probably go back to the authors). I am now looking at a case in point, a single word in a single passage of Paul’s first epistle to the Thessalonians (see the previous post). The decision of what he wrote comes down to a single letter in the word. Scholars (especially, as it turns out, those few who ARE deeply trained to figure these things out) can’t agree about the single letter. And the decision determines the meaning of the passage. Did Paul remind the Thessalonians that when he and his missionary colleagues were with them they became like “infants” among them rather than great, powerful, […]
November 29, 2022
Can Christianity Be Seen as “Objective” Truth? Modern and Ancient Views.
In a previous post I pointed out that for over the past century modern evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity has been unusually focused on knowing the “objective” truths that can be “proved” about Christianity. In recent times, some have argued evangelical Christianity has become far more focused on social and cultural issues than theological doctrines (when someone says that this is not the evangelical Christianity your grandfather knew, they are apparently talking about me….). And I think that’s true. But even so, apologetics is still BIG in that tradition, and it is almost always based on objective evaluation of the truth. One could argue that this evangelical obsession with religious truth was matched by the commitment to truth in the earliest years of Christianity. Historically, this is one of the features of Christianity that made it distinctive among the religions of antiquity. Most people today don’t realize that ancient religions were almost never interested in “true beliefs.” Pagan religions – by which I mean the polytheistic religions of the vast majority of people in the ancient […]
December 8, 2022
How To Leave the Faith and Not Destroy the Family: Thanksgiving Reflection 2022
My beloved mom died last week. She lived a long and good life; she brought a lot of good into the world and made many people very happy; and she died a good death – peaceful, in comfort, in the presence of family. How good can it get? There are many things I have long been thankful for about my mom. I would like to reflect on one of them here. Many years ago, when I left the Christian faith that my mom held so dear – a faith that meant almost everything to her – it caused her a great deal of pain. But she did not allow our stark differences to destroy our relationship. We continued to love and honor each other even though we were deeply at odds on issues that both of us considered among the most important in our lives. My mom was not raised in a religious household. She grew up in the small town of Burlington Kansas and her parents were not church people. When she was in […]
November 23, 2022
So Which Text is Original?? My View of 1 Thessalonians 2:7
I am about ready to wrap up my discussion of the textual problem of 1 Thessalonians 2:7. When recalling his time with the Thessalonians, when he had worked hard not to be a burden with any of them, did Paul indicate that he and his missionary companions had become “as infants, as a nurse tending her children” or that they had become “gentle, as a nurse tending her children.” It is not an obvious decision, whether you think the change was made accidentally or on purpose. (If you think it *is* obvious, look at the preceding two posts). It seems like it might go either way. I myself have an opinion on the matter (textual scholars tend to have opinions); but I”ll hold off on that for a minute. First: some of you might be wondering–which of these readings do the best surviving manuscripts actually suggest? Is one of the readings (“infants” or “gentle”) better attested than the other? Which reading do our oldest and best manuscripts have? Here, as it turns out, the […]
November 30, 2022
Writing Forgeries to Show the Truth
In my previous post I pointed out a major problem that confronted the earliest Christians, as I discuss in the Preface to my book Forged (HarperOne, 2011). From the beginning the followers of Jesus insisted that they had the “truth” and that it was only by accepting the “truth” about God as revealed by Jesus that anyone could have salvation. But they disagreed on what the truth was. There were numerous widespread views already in the earliest years of Christianity about who Jesus was, what his death meant, how one was to have salvation, whether one had to keep, or begin to keep, the Jewish law, and about lots of other things. How was one to get around these problems? The obvious answer presented itself early on in the Christian movement. One could know what the apostles taught because they left writings behind. These authoritative authors produced authoritative teachings. And so, the authoritative truth could be found in the apostolic writings. Even though this might sound like a perfect solution to the problem, the solution […]
December 10, 2022
Forgeries in the Names of the Apostles: Some of the Most Interesting
As I pointed out in my previous posts, taken from the Preface of my book Forged (HarperOne, 2011), we still have numerous forged documents that emanated from the early church, numerous Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypses (these are the four literary genres of the New Testament) all of them claiming to be written by apostles. Many of these non-canonical books are fascinating and still worth reading.[1] I’ve talked about a number of them on the blog before, but here it may be worthwhile to give a quick summary of some of them. Among the Gospels, for example, there is an account allegedly written by Peter, which gives a detailed narration of the resurrection. This is striking because – most readers have never noticed this – the New Testament Gospels do not narrate the resurrection. They do say that Jesus was buried, and they indicate that on the third day his tomb was empty; but they do not narrate the account of him actually emerging from the tomb. There is such an account in the Gospel […]
December 11, 2022
What about Forgeries IN the New Testament? Is it Possible?
I’ve been talking about some of the early Christian forgeries, books that Christian authors published claiming to be apostles when they were … someone else. Could we have such things actually in the New Testament? That is the topic I discuss in my book Forged (HarperOne: 2011). I give extensive arguments and evidence throughout the book, but here is the opening gambit. ****************************** There are thirteen letters in the New Testament that claim to be written by Paul, including two to the Thessalonians. In the Second Letter to the Thessalonians we find a most intriguing verse, where the author tells his readers that they are not to be led astray by a letter “as if by us” which indicates that the “day of the Lord” is almost here (2 Thess 2:2). The author, in other words, knows of a letter in circulation claiming to be by Paul, which is not really by Paul. This other letter allegedly teaches an idea that Paul himself opposes. Who would create such a forged letter? Obviously someone who wanted […]
December 13, 2022
A Challenge Grant to the Blog! Can You Help Match It?
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November 26, 2022
Do We Have the Original Hebrew Bible (Old Testament)?
On December 10 and 11 I will be giving my eight-lecture remote course on “Finding Moses: What Scholars Know about the Exodus and the Jewish Law.” This was supposed to happen a month earlier, but life got in the way and we had to postpone it. The course is not connected to the blog per se, it is part of my other outreach program the Bart Ehrman Professional Services (BEPS), which hosts public courses and lectures. To find out about the course and others like it, here’s the address: Online Courses by Dr. Bart Ehrman (10% Off First Order) The course is one of a long series that I’ve started on the entire Bible, both Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) and NT. My expertise, of course, is mainly NT and early Christianity; but all the way back in graduate school (about the time the book of Isaiah was written) my secondary field of training was Hebrew Bible, and I taught Introduction to Hebrew Bible at both Rutgers and UNC. Some years ago when I […]
December 1, 2022
Are There Contradictions in the Pentateuch?
Yesterday I began a short thread dealing with problems in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, as a kind of foreshadowing of the sorts of things I’ll be covering in my online course of eight lectures, that I’ll be giving live, with Q&A, on December 10-11; again, if you’re interested, you can find out about the course here: Finding Moses – Online Course Covering the Historicity of the Pentateuch – Bart D. Ehrman – New Testament Scholar, Speaker, and Consultant (bartehrman.com) The course will be a followup to my earlier one on Genesis (called “In the Beginning”). Many of the same problems that I have discussed on the blog and in my course about Genesis apply to the other books of the Pentateuch as well. For many of us, some of the most interesting ones involve contradictions among the various narratives. I talk about that a bit in my book The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction. Here’s some of what I deal with there, edited here and there […]
December 3, 2022
Is The Exodus a Myth?
In my upcoming course on Finding Moses I will be discussing some of the most important features of the foundation of Judaism — in particular, the Exodus and the giving of the Jewish Law, both connected directly in the Hebrew Bible with Moses (8 lectures, given live with Q&A on Dec. 10 and 11: Finding Moses – Online Course Covering the Historicity of the Pentateuch – Bart D. Ehrman – New Testament Scholar, Speaker, and Consultant (bartehrman.com) These are hugely important events for all of world history (without them, we wouldn’t have Judaism, Christianity, or Islam: so imagine what the world would be like otherwise!). And it is very much worth studying what we know about them, both as literary narratives of the Hebrew Bible and in relation to what actually happened historically. I’m giving here just a taste of the sorts of things I’ll be covering in the course. One key question for historians, of course, is “what really happened”? (There are lots of other questions and issues too — we’ll be covering a […]
December 4, 2022