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The Revolutionary Understanding of Orthodoxy and Heresy: An Evaluation of Bauer’s Views
In my last two posts I talked about the relationship of orthodoxy and heresy in early Christianity. The standard view, held for many many centuries, goes back to the Church History of the fourth-century church father Eusebius, who argued that orthodoxy represented the original views of Jesus and his disciples, and heresies were corruptions of that truth by willful, mean-spirited, wicked, and demon inspired teachers who wanted to lead others astray. In 1934 Walter Bauer challenged that view in his book Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity. Bauer argued that in many regions of the church, the earliest known form of Christianity was one that later came to be declared a heresy. Heresies were not, therefore, necessarily later corruptions of an original truth. In many instances they were the oldest known kind of Christianity, in one place or another. The form of Christianity that became dominant by the end of the third century or so was the one known particularly in Rome. Once this Roman form of Christianity had more or less swept aside its […]
November 18, 2023
Wasn’t Early Christianity Basically Unified? Why Fret About Occasional Diversity?
I have spent three posts talking about the terms “orthodoxy” and “heresy” and why they are problematic; in doing so I have been explaining both the traditional view of the relationship of orthodoxy and heresy (as found, for example, in the writings of Eusebius) and the view set forth, in opposition, by Walter Bauer. So, where do we now stand on the issue, some 90 years after Bauer’s intervention? As I indicated in my last post, there are some problems with Bauer’s analysis, but also much positive to say about it. Conservative scholars continue to hold to a more traditional view (e.g., conservative Roman Catholic and evangelical scholars); others find it *basically* convincing, even if they would write the details up very differently from Bauer. I am very much, and rather enthusiastically, in this latter camp. It was when I was in graduate school, as a committed evangelical myself, but as one who was moving away from my conservativism based on my detailed research into the New Testament and the history of the early Christian […]
November 19, 2023
My New Course: November 11 — The Scribal Corruption of Scripture
Just a reminder, in case you haven’t noticed or don’t remember! I will be doing a new online course on Saturday, November 11: “The Scribal Corruption of Scripture: How the Bible was Changed and Why Readers May Never Know.” The general topic will sound familiar to many of you — it is the kind of thing I discuss in my book Misquoting Jesus and that I”ve dealt with on the blog at times. But this course will be different. Among other things, it will provide much fuller explanations about: How scribal changes affect major issues in understanding the New Tesament Why decisoins about the original text are so complicated. What motivated scribes to alter the texts in places. Whether we can be reasonably sure that we know what an author wrote (the answer here will surprise many of you, in a way that you won’t expect to be surprised) How *exactly* do scholars make decisions about what the text said and why a scribe changed it. In addition, I’ll be discussing a number of textual […]
November 5, 2023
Send in your Questions! November Gold Q&A
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November 9, 2023
But Your Own Teacher Bruce Metzger Didn’t Think That!
In my previous post, and a number of times elsewhere, I mentioned my mentor at Princeton Theological Seminary, Bruce Metzger. Over the years I’ve been asked a number of times why, if he was my teacher, I don’t agree with him on so many things. Usually this comes as an accusation more than as a genuine query. Here’s a reworking of a response I gave to the issue about ten years ago. ****************************** Prof. Metzger was not just a brilliant scholar but also a deeply committed Christian, an ordained Presbyterian minister, who believed in the inspiration of the Bible and in the literal truth of the statements found in the Christian creeds, about the incarnation, the virgin birth, the resurrection of Jesus, and so on. Behind the question are usually the unexpressed statements: he was more learned than you, he knew what you do, he was your teacher, but he disagreed with you. What’s wrong with you that you would disagree with your own teacher?? It’s a good question and it deserves a straightforward answer. The people […]
November 21, 2023
How the Canon Itself Tames the Diversity of the New Testament
The writings of the New Testament do not provide good evidence that Christianity started out as an original unity, only to come to be fragmented with the passage of time into the second and third Christian centuries — so I argued in the previous post. Quite the contrary. And yet having them all in the same book (between covers) does seem to readers to suggest an overarching unity. That’s what I want to talk about here. For the most part, the books of the NT are the earliest Christian writings we have, and most of the books can probably be dated to the first Christian century. Probably not 2 Peter. Possibly not Acts. But the others? Probably. Only a couple of other Christian books are to be dated this early. None of the other Gospels (including the Gospel of Thomas, I would say). But 1 Clement, is usually dated to the mid 90s CE and the Didache in its final form may be from around 100 CE (they are both in the collection known as […]
November 22, 2023
How Paul’s Own Writings Show the Earliest Church Was Split Over “Orthodoxy” and “Heresy”
November 24, 2023
An Intriguing and Unusual Demonstration of Early Christian Differences…
Nine years ago when I was discussing on the blog the topic of the current thread — the wide diversity of early Christianity — I took the occasion to mention a book that I had just read and found to be unusually interesting and enlightening. It is by two Italian scholars, married to each other, who teach at the Università di Bologna: Adriana Destro, an anthropologist, and Mauro Pesce, a New Testament specialist whose teaching position is in the History of Christianity. Their book is called Il racconto e la scrittura: Introduzione alla lettura dei vangeli. It is about all the things I am currently interested in: the life of Jesus as recounted by his earliest followers, the oral traditions of Jesus, and the Gospels as founded on these oral traditions. In it they develop a theory that I had never thought of before. I’m not sure all the evidence is completely compelling, but the overall view is very interesting and very much worth thinking about. As an anthropologist, Prof Destro looks at things in […]
November 25, 2023
Do You Want to Take the Final Exam for My Course: “Birth of Christianity”?
I’m teaching The Birth of Christianity this semester, a course that deals with the history of Christianity from right after the New Testament up to about the conversion of Constantine. Want to take my Final Exam? Well, I ain’t gonna grade it if you do. But here are the instructions I gave to the class so they could know what to expect — including the ten POSSIBLE essay questions, from which I will choose two for them to answer, in essays they could take one hour (each) to write. What do you think? Could you nail it? The Birth of Christianity, Reli 208 Final Exam Questions Our final exam is scheduled for Tuesday, December 12 at (gulp) 8:00 – 11:00 am in our regular classroom. The exam will consist of ten short answer identification questions and two essays. The exam will be closed book, closed notes, and open mind. You will need to write out your answers in a blue book (bring several) with pen and ink! Identifications The first section of the […]
November 26, 2023
Is There Any Sarcasm in the New Testament?
Every now and then someone asks me if there is any sarcasm used in the New Testament. You would think the answer would be fairly obviously, No. But, well, I’ve dealt with the issue before, and my response was Yes. Let me start by giving a definition of sarcasm. You can find various definitions just on the Internet, but the basic idea is that sarcasm is a form of humor that used irony in order to mock another. It is difficult to identify sarcasm in ancient writings. In fact, as you’ve probably noticed, sometimes it’s hard to know if someone is being sarcastic when they are speaking directly to our face. The way we typically detect sarcasm is by the context of the comment and the non-verbal signs given – the facial expression, for example, or the tone of voice used and the words orally emphasized. You have none of that for the writings of the New Testament – only a bit of information about context (inferred from the text itself) and no non-verbal signs. […]
November 29, 2023
Were Jesus’ Miracles in the Original Texts of the Gospels?
Here’s an interesting question I received from a reader many years ago that I had forgotten all about, but I bet it’s one some others have had (If you know the “Jefferson Bible” you’ll see it has a long history of sorts): QUESTION: I have looked up the content of all the papyri of the New Testament I’m aware of (i.e. the most ancient manuscripts) . It is my understanding that although p52, p90, and p104 are dated around 125-150 AD, they contain fragments of John 18 and Matt 21 only, and that it’s not until 200 AD that manuscripts emerge which actually contain accounts of supernatural actions by Jesus. So, it’s possible that accounts of miracles existed in copies that got destroyed, but is it fair to say that the earliest available copies of accounts of Jesus’s supernatural actions date from around 200 AD? In other words, assuming people on average had kids by age 20 back then, and thus 20 years counts as a generation, is it fair to say that the earliest available accounts […]
December 2, 2023
Was Jesus Considered a Miracle Worker During His *Lifetime*?
In my discussion of whether the historian can deal with the category of miracle, I’m now at the point where I can deal directly with the miracles ascribed to Jesus. This is an issue that I have dealt with in several books, including, most recently, Jesus Before the Gospels. It will take three posts for me to cover the waterfront here. This is how I began dealing with the issue in the book.
December 3, 2023
What’s the *Point* of Jesus’ Miracles?
I have been talking about the stories of Jesus’ miracles, and am raising the question of whether they necessarily go all the way back to Jesus’ lifetime, as tales told while he was still living. I pick up where I left off last time, after showing that Jesus’ miracle-working abilities increased with the passing of time. ****************************** Not only does Jesus become increasingly miraculous with the passing of time, these miracles are all told in order to make a point. The stories about Jesus as the miraculous Wunderkind reveal that he really was the Son of God endowed with supernatural power straight from the womb; as a five-year old he was already the Lord of life and death; as the resurrected savior he was manifestly a superhuman being of giant proportions. In more general terms, the miracles in our later accounts repeatedly show that Jesus was the spectacular Son of God. He was far superior to all his enemies (even if these were only the aggravating kids down the street). He was more powerful than […]
December 5, 2023
So: Did Anyone Think of Jesus as a Miracle-Worker Before His Crucifixion?
This is the final, and most important, of my posts on the miracles of Jesus. In it I raise the question – without being able to come to an absolutely definitive answer – of whether Jesus was thought to be a miracle worker already in his life time or if, instead, miracles came to be ascribed to him only later by followers who believed he had been raised from the dead. I incline toward the latter view. To set the stage for and make sense of what I have to say, I include the final comments from the previous post: ****************************** In the other two Synoptics there is a different understanding, one that can be seen most clearly in the saying preserved in Matthew 11:2-6. Here we are told that John the Baptist, who is now in prison, has heard about “the deeds of Christ,” and sends some of his disciples to him to ask if he is the one to come at the end of time, or if there is someone else. Jesus replies: […]
December 6, 2023
Was Joseph the Actual Father of Jesus? Announcing a Special Online Christmas Course
I’m pleased to announce that I will be doing a special event this Christmas season, a two-lecture online course called Jesus: The Actual Son of Joseph: Evidence From the New Testament Itself. This is a topic I have long thought about casually but never really dug into until recently. And when I dug, I started realizing that in fact there’s a lot buried, more than I expect. There are very good reasons for thinking that a number of the earliest sources of the New Testament (Paul, Mark, the sources of Matthew and Luke), as well as the latest (John), not only did not KNOW the tradition about Jesus being born of a virgin, but actually maintain (in some places) and suggest (in others) that he was not. Whoa. In two lectures delivered remotely on Sunday December 10, I’ll be laying the case out in full. Obviously what someone (say the authors of the Gospels) *thought* about the circumstances of Jesus’ birth (whether those who indicate his mother was a virgin and those who indicate she […]
November 27, 2023
American Support of Israel: A (Widely) Unknown Part of the History
Since the horrific sequence of events that started on October 7, I have been asked about the historical roots of the conflict. Much of the important information is well known and easily accessible, from the biblical accounts of the Conquest of the Promised Land, up through 1948, on to the Second Intifada, till today. I won’t be covering this information here, and I will not be offering my political or personal opinions on the matter. I will instead provide some important and widely unknown historical information on one of the significant aspects of the matter. In a section of my book Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says About the End, published earlier this past year, I discussed how the expectation that “The End is Near,” largely based on interpretations of the book of Revelation, came to affect broad swaths of American culture in ways that almost no one would suspect. I should say emphatically that I’m not one of those religion scholars who thinks religion is at the heart of everything. But it is at […]
December 9, 2023
When Modern Christians Came to Think “The End is Near”
Israel and Palestinians: in my previous post I began to explain why Christians in Britain and America (some of them highly influential on foreign policy in both places) came to support the re-establishment of the state of Israel in the early 19th century. I pick up the discussion there, with another excerpt from my book Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says About the End (Simon & Schuster, 2023). This one too veers into a direction I imagine you won’t expect. ****************************** For years evangelical Christians had been convinced that Scripture predicted Jews were to return to the Holy Land to reestablish themselves there as a sovereign state. After all, the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah had reported God’s words to his people Judah: “I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you … and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you to exile” (Jeremiah 29:14). If the end was near, as indicated by the events in France, then the […]
December 10, 2023
Jesus in Illuminated Manuscripts and Legends: Video Post
Here’s something I’ve dug out of the archives! I was asked to speak at the Getty Museum, in the Harold M. Williams Auditorium in Los Angeles, California on Thursday, September 22, 2011 during the exhibition “In the Beginning Was the Word: Medieval Gospel Illumination.” Illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages are significant for the literary texts they preserve. But they are also important, historically and culturally, for their illustrations of the life of Jesus and other figures associated with him. These artistic representations tell tales of their own, and the visual stories are not always found in the corresponding texts. A careful examination of these images shows clearly and convincingly that medieval artists were familiar not only with the stories of the canonical Gospels but also with many noncanonical apocryphal tales of Jesus. The apocryphal stories, in some instances, were understood to be “Gospel truth” on par with accounts found in Scripture. In any event, here is the lecture that I gave: Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition: Details on the “In the Beginning […]
Tags: illuminated gospels, Jesus legends
December 7, 2023
I’m Lecturing on a Cruise this Summer. Interested in coming?
Everyone is traveling these days. I’m traveling these days. Hey, wanna travel with me? This summer I’m doing a tour (and giving lectures) on a cruise to historic coastal cities and religious sites of Western Europe, from Amsterdam to Lisbon, July 30 – August 10. This is gonna be an unusually good trip, with awe-inspiring scenery, gorgeous medieval towns/cities, important religious sites (including Santiago de Compostela), and some of the most amazing museums in the known universe. Included on the tour are some of my all-time favorite cities: Amsterdam, Bruges, and Lisbon. And it includes a bunch of places I’ve never seen but always wanted to, Honfleur (Normandy Beaches), St. Malo (Mont St-Michel), Tresco (Isles of Scilly off the coast of Cornwall; I’ve been to Cornwall a ton, but never the Isles), Concarneus, France (Brittany!), Santiago de Compostela (whoa…), Oporto Portugal. How good can it get? The cruise is being organized / run by Thalassa Journeys, best known for their small-group educational tours for university groups. In this case the small group is not college […]
December 1, 2023
Gold Q&A!! Ask Your Questions!
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December 2, 2023