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Was Jesus a False Prophet?
As many of you know, I started a podcast awhile back, called Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. It’s not connected with the blog, but it deals with stuff most blog members would be interested in. (And hey, it’s free! Available both as a podcast on all the main podcast servers and on Youtube.) A new episode comes out every Tuesday, and it occurred to me that you might be interested in knowing what’s happening on it. So, I’ve decided to make weekly announcements here, in case you’re interested in going there! This past Tuesday, the topic I discussed with my host Megan Lewis, was “Was Jesus a False Prophet.” Here’s the description, in case you’d like to check it out. Historical scholars for over a century have maintained that Jesus predicted that the end of history as we know it was to come in his own generation. Conservative Christians — laypeople and scholars alike — have insisted that this is a complete misportrayal of Jesus. And many people — possibly most? — believe that if […]
May 1, 2023
Creation Stories of the Ancient World (Part 2): An Ancient Egyptian Account
Was the account of creation found in Genesis comparable to (or even borrowed from?) other ancient accounts in scattered throughout the world at the time? Last month my colleague Joseph Lam, an expert in the Hebrew Bible and the languages and literature of the Ancient Near East provided us with a guest post about some of the creation stories found outside Scripture in non-Israelite cultures — stories in circulation before the ones written in Genesis (https://ehrmanblog.org/creation-stories-of-the-ancient-world-part-1-on-enuma-elish-and-genesis-1-guest-post-by-joseph-lam/) Here now is a second and equally interesting post dealing with stories from ancient Memphis Egypt (not Tennessee!)! This is the topic of his lecture course for the Great Courses/Wondrium, “Creation Stories of the Ancient World” (links at bottom) **************************** In my last blog entry, I offered a brief description of the Babylonian Creation Epic, Enuma Elish, and reflected on how one might imagine its relationship to the seven-day creation story of Genesis 1. In this post, I turn to an enigmatic but fascinating text from ancient Egypt known as the Memphite Theology that has also been compared with Genesis […]
May 11, 2023
Did Early Christians “Invent” Memories of Jesus?
I’ve been talking about how we remember things — or misremember things, or make up memories of things — as a way of getting to the question of how, in our heads, we think about what Jesus said and did. This is all part of my larger project that came incarnated (inletterated?) in my book Jesus Before the Gospels. As I point out early in the book, we remember most things just fine, but we also often get things either partially or completely wrong. Memories can be frail, faulty, and false. And not just our individual memories, but also the “memories” we have as a society. In previous posts I illustrated the point by talking about social memories of Abraham Lincoln and Christopher Columbus. But what about faulty memories of Jesus (see my last post if it doesn’t make sense to talk about “remembering” someone we never knew!). To get to this question, in my book, I talk about some of the modern representations of Jesus by current-day scholars and popular authors – for example, Jesus […]
May 17, 2023
How Can We Get Behind “False Memories” of Jesus to the Historical Facts?
I’m discussing how in both the ancient and modern worlds people have constructed “false memories” of who Jesus really was. In this post I give a brief explanation of how scholars became increasingly aware of the problem and, for a time, thought they had found a solution: Mark’s Gospel is the unembellished version and so we need to stick mainly with that! How’d they come up with *that* one? And is it true? This is taken from my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** Throughout the history of scholarship, especially since the nineteenth century, scholars have realized that Christians in the early years after Jesus’ death were not only altering traditions about Jesus’ life and teaching that they inherited, they were also inventing them. We do not need to wait for non-canonical Gospels such as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, or the Gospel of Nicodemus for “distorted” memories of Jesus to surface among authors and their readers. (Recall: by “distorted memory” I simply mean any recollection of the past that […]
May 18, 2023
Does Mark Present the Bare-Bones Facts about Jesus’ Life?
In my previous post I showed how scholars in the 19th century came to think that our shortest and evidently-least-embelished Gospel Mark gave the accurate account of Jesus ‘ life, so that any reconstruction of what Jesus really said and did simply could simply assume that Mark provides the essential information. But is that right? It eventually came to be seen as wrong. Here’s how I discuss the matter in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** The problem with Mark is that it is so terse that there are huge gaps in the narrative. It is hard to determine what is driving Jesus’ action and what his ultimate objective is. To solve that problem 19th-century scholars writing about Jesus filled in the gaps either with inventive narratives they spun out of their own imagination or with psychological analyses about what must have been motivating Jesus at one point of his life or another.[1] All of these efforts were rooted in the sense that Mark is the earliest and most historical account without any […]
May 20, 2023
Stories of Jesus Passed on By Word of Mouth. When Scholars First Took Oral Traditions Seriously.
I’m discussing how scholars came to realize that Mark our earliest Gospel is not simply a nuts-and-bolts, unembellished, accurate report of what Jesus said and did. This kind of scholarship reached a kind of climax about a century ago with a group of scholars called “form critics.” To make sense of what they said and why they said it, I need to start where I left off yesterday — and so I’ll repeat the end of yesterday’s post to get us a running start on today’s, taken from my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne 2016). ****************************** Where did the stories found in the Gospels themselves come from? The “form critics” (a term I’ll explain below) maintained that they did not come from authors who were themselves followers of Jesus or who acquired their information directly from eyewitnesses. The stories instead came from oral traditions in circulation in the years prior to the Gospels. The authors of the Gospels – all of them, not just Mark – wrote down stories that had been passed along by word […]
May 21, 2023
Didn’t the Disciples Memorize Jesus’ Teachings and Accounts of His Life?
I’ve been talking about how scholars began to realize in the early 20th century that the stories of Jesus in the Gospels were based on oral traditions that the Gospel writers inherited decades earlier. But is that really a problem? Here’s how I discuss the issue in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** Many people, when they first consider the reality that the traditions in our Gospels must have circulated orally for decades before being written down, come up with a commonsensical response. Surely the sayings of Jesus, and the accounts of his life, were actually memorized by his followers, so that they would be preserved accurately. Aren’t oral cultures known for being able to preserve their traditions spotlessly? After all, since they didn’t have written records to keep their memories alive, people in such cultures must have worked with special diligence to remember what they learned and to pass their stories along seamlessly from one person and one generation to the next. Right? Unfortunately, decades of intense research have shown that this […]
May 23, 2023
More Problems with Thinking Jesus’ Followers Memorized the Stories about Him
In my previous post I began to explain the problems with the idea that Jesus’ followers, like all good students of Rabbis in the Jewish tradition, were trained to memorize what he said and did, so that the Gospels provide us with reliable accounts of his life. This idea was most forcefully promoted by Swedish scholar Birger Gerhardsson and was popular for a while in scholarly circles. But it is widely seen today as problematic. Here is how I continue to explain some of the issues in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** An even bigger problem is that we have clear and certain evidence that Jesus’ followers were not passing along his teachings, or accounts of his deeds, as they were memorized verbatim. This is one of the complaints that other scholars generally lodge against Gerhardsson – he does not engage in a detailed examination of traditions that are preserved in the Gospels in order to see if his theory works. What is the evidence that Jesus’ teachings were preserved word-for-word […]
May 24, 2023
Do Modern Mideastern Customs of Story Telling Show that the Gospels Are Accurate?
I’ve been discussing modern explanations of how the traditions about Jesus found in the Gospels could in fact be historically accurate even if they were passed on by word of mouth over the years and decades before anyone wrote them down. The natural suspicion is that stories that get told and retold by different story tellers in different times and places year after year will change, somewhat significantly, and that some tales and sayings attributed to an important figure will be invented, with no historical basis at all. It happens all the time. It probably has happened to you. Someone says you did or said something and it’s just not true. Most of them time when you find out about it you are not amused – especially if it’s someone who actually knows you. At other times you might think it is indeed amusing. But isn’t it different with the ancient world, and especially with stories being told about Jesus? In my previous posts I talked about the theory of a New Testament scholar (Gerhaardson) […]
May 25, 2023
Do Modern Mideastern Story Tellers Show How the Ancient Traditions of Jesus Were Circulated?
In my previous post I discussed a seemingly-plausible explanation for how modern ways of telling stories in small communities in the Middle East today can show that the Gospels may well represent literal word-for-word depictions of what Jesus said and did. Here I show why in fact the theory does not work, as laid out in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (Harper, 2016) ****************************** As we have seen, Bailey argued that modern tellers in the Middle East today work in a small community context, where the stories of a village’s past (its key figures, its main events) are circulated in group meetings in the presence of others who observed the events as well and make sure to correct what a particular story teller says when he gets a detail awry. That, Baily argues, is what happened in the ancient world as well — so stories about Jesus were preserved intact through the presence of others who knew them and could provide checks and balances for accuracy. The problem is that this claim (whether or […]
May 27, 2023
Are *Groups* of Story Tellers (Think: Ancient Followers of Jesus) More Likely to Preserve Traditions Accurately than Individuals?
This post will conclude my mini-thread trying to show that modern practices of story telling in the Middle East, during a community ritual called the haflar samar, in which groups of knowledgeable people ensure that stories are never significantly changed, has no bearing on the question of whether ancient stories told about Jesus were preserved accurately over time. Here I take on a bigger question, as addressed in in my book Jesus Before the Gospels: Does this group context for telling the stories ensure that they are accurate? Actually, modern psychological studies suggest that just the opposite is normally the case. Cognitive psychologists have studied the phenomenon of “group memory” and have reached several very important conclusions that might be surprising. One is that when a group “collectively remembers” something they have all heard or experienced, the “whole” is less than the sum of the “parts.” That is to say, if you have ten individuals who have all experienced an event, and you interview the ten separately, you will learn a good deal about what […]
May 28, 2023
Blog Announcement: Comments!
Just so you know! Tomorrow I’m heading to the Galapagos and will not have reliable wifi for about a week. That WON’T affect the blog posts — I’ve got them all lined up and ready to roll. BUT, I won’t be able to respond to comments. But feel free to make them at will. I will get to them when I return from the land of Darwin to the land of AI. And maybe I should start using AI to respond to comments, for the sake of all involved! (But never fear: it ain’t gonna happen.)
May 12, 2023
Did Morton Smith Forge the Secret Gospel of Mark?
Last month (April 2023) I published a thread of blog posts on the intriguing and controversial Secret Gospel of Mark, allegedly discovered by Columbia University scholar Morton Smith in the library of the Greek orthodox monastery Mar Saba twelve miles southeast of Jerusalem. He did not actually discover the Gospel itself, but (allegedly) discovered a letter that described and quoted it, allegedly written by the church father Clement of Alexandria (200 CE or so), allegedly copied by a scribe of the eighteenth century in the back blank pages of a seventeenth-century book otherwise (actually) containing the letters of Ignatius of Antioch (110 CE or so), in which Clement allegedly discusses a potentially scandalous edition of Mark’s Gospel allegedly used by a nefarious Gnostic group called the Carpocratians. Confused yet? Read the posts, starting with this one from April 12: https://ehrmanblog.org/do-scholars-ever-forge-gospels In my posts I did not give any evidence to show that this “alleged” discovery might not have been a discovery but a forgery, possibly by Smith himself, even though from the outset some (many?) […]
- Canonical Gospels
- Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)
- History of Biblical Scholarship
- Public Forum
May 30, 2023
More on Secret Mark as a Forgery (by Morton Smith?)
Here now is the second of my two posts on reasons for suspecting that Morton Smith himself may have been the one who forged the “letter of Clement” that discusses the “Secret Gospel of Mark” (see my post from yesterday). Again taken from my article, “Hedrick’s Consensus on the Secret Gospel of Mark,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 11 (2003) pp. 155-64. ****************************** (2) Several things that are hard to explain about the “discovery.” For those who want to show the letter is authentic (i.e. really written by Clement of Alexandria), these are the issues to address. I leave off several other matters that some have raised, such as
May 31, 2023
Jesus, Eyewitnesses, and Stories Floating Around….
I return now to questions about how early Christians “remembered” Jesus as they told and retold stories about him. People often claim that the Gospels must be accurate because they are based on eyewitness testimony that was carefully guarded to ensure its accuracy. But let’s think about that for a bit in realistic terms. Here is how I discuss the matter in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (Harper One: 2016). ****************************** If during the 40-65 years separating Jesus’ life and the surviving Gospels, his sayings and deeds of Jesus were not memorized by his followers and then passed down, verbatim, through the church, and if they were not circulated accurately within informally controlled settings, how were they being told and retold? One obvious point to stress, which has not occurred to everybody, is this: stories about Jesus were circulating even during his lifetime. Moreover, even then they were not being told only by eyewitnesses. When someone who saw Jesus do or say something then and told someone else who wasn’t there, it is impossible […]
June 1, 2023
Who Was Spreading the Stories about Jesus Before the Gospels?
Here I continue my reflections on how stories about Jesus were floating around the Mediterranean world *before* the Gospel writers wrote their accounts (based on these stories). I pick up here with the final paragraph of yesterday’s post, again taken from my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** In other words, a story does not have to be written in the newspaper or broadcast on the evening news or even on modern social media to get around, very widely and very quickly. Moreover, the vast majority of the people telling the story – just within three days – are people who were not eyewitnesses and did not get their information from eyewitnesses. What do you suppose happens to stories when they are told, remembered, retold, and then remembered again, just within three days? Or three years? Or, as in the case of Jesus, 40-65 years? How many changes would be made in them?
June 3, 2023
Being Realistic about How Stories about Jesus Spread before the Gospels
In my previous post I showed how Christian missionaries – the vast majority of them not companions of Jesus or eyewitnesses to his life – were telling stories about Jesus as they moved around in the empire spreading the gospel in the early decades, before the Gospels were written (think Paul and his missionary companions, Timothy, Silvanus, etc – none of them from Israel, none of them having laid eyes on Jesus before his death). The problems of word-of-mouth traditions are even more complicated than I’ve so far discussed, however. Here is how I go on to discuss the matter in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** It was not only these missionaries who were converting others, however. The converts they made were themselves converting people. Take another hypothetical but completely plausible situation: suppose I’m a worshiper of the traditional Roman gods, living in the town of Colossae in, say, the year 50 CE. The missionary Epaphras comes to town and I meet him at his place of business. I’m a highly […]
June 4, 2023
Back in the Saddle Again…
I am now, alas, back from my two-weeks in Galapagos. Whoa…. And I’m getting back to business on the blog. Before leaving I placed a number of posts in queue and these have been published promptly. I’m now starting to deal with the comments that came in during my absence. This’ll take a couple of days, but I will get caught up soon. For those of you who are Gold members, I’ve recorded the monthly hour-long Gold Q&A, soon to be released for your viewing/listening pleasure. For those of you who are not Gold members: this is one of the perks at that level. Take a look at your options and think about it! Register – The Bart Ehrman Blog All other blog things should be flyin’ along as usual. If you have any problems, concerns, suggestions, or briefcases of small unmarked bills, let me/us know…
May 27, 2023
Eyewitnesses and Guaranteed Accuracy
In my book Jesus Before the Gospels, I discuss how “memories” of a famous person based on eyewitness testimony can be easily distorted. Among other examples I use, is a famous miracle-working holy-person from outside the Christian tradition that is in many ways strikingly similar to the situation with Jesus (there are obviously big differences as well). Here is what I say about it in my book: ****************************** To sum up the situation, consider the words of one of the world’s leading experts on false memory, Daniel Schacter: “Numerous experiments have demonstrated ways in which imagining events can lead to the development of false memories for those events.”[1] Does such research have any bearing on the memories about Jesus, a great teacher and miracle worker, by eyewitnesses or by those who later were told stories by eyewitnesses – or even those told stories by people who were not eyewitnesses? Can imagining that a great religious leader said and did something make someone remember that he really did say and do these things? It might be […]
June 6, 2023
Eyewitness Testimony: The Importance of Actual Expertise
It is flat-out amazing to me how many New Testament scholars talk about the importance of eyewitness testimony to the life of Jesus without having read a single piece of scholarship on what experts know about eyewitness testimony. Some (well-known) scholars in recent years have written entire books on the topic, basing their views on an exceedingly paltry amount of research into the matter. Quite astounding, really. But they appear to have gone into their work confident that they know about how eyewitness testimony works, and didn’t read the masses of scholarship that shows they simply aren’t right about it. Here’s how I begin to talk about eyewitness scholarship in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** In the history of memory studies an important event occurred in 1902.[1] In Berlin, a well-known criminologist named von Liszt was delivering a lecture when an argument broke out. One student stood up and shouted that he wanted to show how the topic was related to Christian ethics. Another got up and yelled that he […]
June 7, 2023