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The Later (post-Pauline) Context of the Pastoral Epistles
In my previous post I showed why the vocabulary of the Pastoral epistles and the kinds of problems they address suggest that they were written after Paul’s time, by a follower who was using his name. As I indicated there, of particular importance for establishing they do not come directly from Paul is the way in which “false teachings” are attacked in the Pastorals, for the author’s basic orientation appears to be very much like what we find developing in second-century proto-orthodox circles. In some ways, to understand this different orientation we have to think about how it is that one kind of Christianity came to be dominant within the rising religion. Christianity of the second and third centuries (long after Paul) was widely diversified, with all sorts of teachers teaching all sorts of things (with numerous questions unresolved: how many gods are there? Was Christ human? Divine? Both somehow? How? What books are Scriptural authority? How should the church be organized? Etc. etc.). But out of that wild diversity one Christian movement of the […]
June 18, 2025
More Evidence That the Pastoral Epistles Were Written After the Days of Paul
I now conclude this short thread and who wrote the Pastoral epistles, when, and why by picking up on my previous argument: that aspects of these letters reveal a church situation after Paul’s day when proto-orthodox Christians were appealing to the authorities of the clergy, the creed, and the canon of Scripture to support their views, in contrast to those of “false teachers. The Creed Proto-orthodox Christians of the second and third centuries felt a need to develop a set of doctrines that were to be subscribed to by all true believers. As was the case with the proto-orthodox clergy, the proto-orthodox creed was acclaimed as a creation of the apostles themselves: hence the name of the most famous of these statements of faith, devised in the fourth century and known today as the Apostles’ Creed. The proto-orthodox creeds affirmed beliefs that were denied by other groups who claimed to be Christian, and they repudiated beliefs that these other groups affirmed. For example, Gnostic Christians claimed that there were many gods, not just one; and […]
June 19, 2025
How We Know the World Was Created in 4004 BCE…
In my Bible Intro, I included a number of “boxes” that deal with issues that are somewhat tangential to the main discussion, but of related interest or importance. Here’s one of the ones in my chapter on Genesis, in connection with interpretations that want to take the book as science or history. For a lot of you, this will be old news. But then again, so is Genesis. ******************************
June 25, 2025
Understanding the Hebrew Bible: The “Old” Testament in Modern Scholarship
Would you like some help in understanding the Hebrew Bible? I have two unofficial announcements to make (official ones are yet to come). The first is that we are producing a third edition of my texbook: The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction (Oxford University Press) which provides up-to-date scholarship on the entire Bible from Genesis to Revelation, book-by-book. I say “we” because I’ve been fortunate to acquire a co-author to edit the portion on the Hebrew Bible, Joel Baden (PhD Harvard, 2007), Professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale University. I love teaching Hebrew Bible (I’ve taught it at both Rutgers and UNC), but it’s obviously not my main area of expertise. Joel is one of the top scholars in the world. He has produced already an incredibly well-received course for us for Biblical Paths in Religion: “The Rise and Fall of Biblical Israel” (also available to anyone in the Biblical Studies Academy. AND (second unofficial announcement), in the fall he will be doing a full semester-long course on Hebrew Bible, in the same venue. To […]
June 24, 2025
One of the Stranger Stories of Scripture
Here is another tidbit from the original version of my Bible Introduction. It may be old news for a lot of you, but it’s fun to write this kind of thing up for college students, who have never heard of such a thing! ****************************** One of the most mysterious and even bizarre stories in Genesis happens right at the beginning of the flood narrative, where we are told that the “sons of God” looked down among the human “daughters,” saw that they were beautiful, and came down and had sex with them leading, to the Nephilim. The word Nephilim means “fallen ones.” According to Numbers 13:33, the Nephilim were giants. So what is going on here in Genesis? Apparently there were angelic beings (the “sons of God”) who lusted after human women, cohabited with them, and their offspring were giants. It is at that point that God decides to destroy the world. The situation was too weird even for him.
June 26, 2025
Who Was the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53?
Here is another post on the Hebrew Bible from the blog in 2012, written while I was working on the first edition of my Bible Introduction. It is an excerpt from my first rough draft of a discussion of an unusually important passage in the book of Isaiah. Brief context: at this point I was discussing Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55), almost universally thought by scholars to be written by a different author from chapters 1-39 (themselves written by Isaiah of Jerusalem in the 8th c. BCE). Second Isaiah was writing after the destruction of Judah and Jerusalem (including the temple) in 586 BCE, while the leaders of the people and many of the elite had been taken into exile in Babylon, in what is known as the Babylonian Captivity.
June 28, 2025
Another Puzzling Figure in the Hebrew Bible: Woman Wisdom?
Here is another tidbit from the Hebrew Bible section of first edition of my textbook that covered Genesis to Revelation, book-by-book, now being edited for a third edition with Joel Baden. ******************************
June 29, 2025
The Pastoral Epistles. For Further Reading
Here is an annotated list of books on the Pastoral Epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, most of them relevant to all the Deutero-Pauline epistles with a couple of commentaries that deal with 2 Thessalonians. One benefit of serious commentaries is that they always begin by discussing major critical issues in understanding a book: authorship, date, historical context, major themes, disputed issues, and so on. ******************************
June 21, 2025
My Least Favorite Passage of the Pastorals: Those Silent and Submissive Women….
I’d like to conclude this thread on the Pastoral epistles by discussing at greater length the one passage that I think has done more damage than nearly any other. It involves women in the church. The story of women in the entire Bible is long and complex, but it starts in the beginning (Genesis 1-2) and continues all the way through. The traditional Christian views ultimately derive from the New Testament. In an earlier set of posts I explained why women were actually prominent, important, and authoritative leaders of the Christian church in its earliest days – they were unusually present and active in the Jesus movement while he was living, as well as in the earliest churches we know about, those connected with Paul (who has received a rather unfair rap as one of the world’s great misogynists). But it was not long before men took over the movement and suppressed women’s voices and roles. We are obviously still living with that today, in a world where the largest Christian body, the Catholic Church, still […]
June 22, 2025
The Letter to Philemon in a Nutshell
I come now to the final Pauline letter of the New Testament, Philemon. If you recall, Paul’s letters are ordered by length; this is by far the shortest, a real one-pager. Given it’s brevity, I’ll be dealing with its major themes and emphases and the questions of Who, When and Why in just this one post. First, a 50-word summary: Paul’s letter to his former convert Philemon concerns Philemon’s slave Onesimus, who has fled from his master, possibly with stolen goods, found Paul in prison, converted, and begged him to intervene on his behalf– which Paul does by urging Philemon to receive his slave as a fellow believer, without punishment. Here is how I discuss the letter in my book The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Oxford University Press), edited a bit.
July 2, 2025
Paul’s Letter to Philemon: For Further Reading
Here is a list of readings on Philemon, all of which are relevant to all the undisputed Pauline epistles, with a couple of commentaries specifically on this significant, short letter. One benefit of serious commentaries is that they always begin by discussing major critical issues in understanding a book: authorship, date, historical context, major themes, disputed issues, and so on.
July 5, 2025
Philemon and the Morality of Slavery
Here are a few more comments about the short letter of Paul to Philemon, whose major themes and emphases I discussed yesterday. It may indeed seem a rather peripheral letter – it’s a private letter about a slave returning to his master, not about Paul’s great theological views or highly informative discussions of his life. But even so, this brief one-pager can provide us with some important insights into Paul’s view of his apostolic ministry, and even more about the role of social justice in his ministry (specifically: does he condone slavery?).
July 3, 2025
Should We Keep “Slaves” in the New Testament?
I’ve been talking about Paul’s view of slavery, in light of the book of Philemon; this seems to be a good time to talk about a very big issue connected with translating the New Testament from Greek into English. It may seem fairly straightforward, but in fact it is incredibly thorny: what English word is best to use for the Greek word that refers to a person who is owned by another and compelled (on every level) to do what the owner requires? It’s “slave,” right? How can it be complicated? Let me put it in a bigger picture.
July 6, 2025
Paul and His Most Famous Woman Disciple
I have now finished my summaries and discussions of each of the thirteen Pauline letters, “In a Nutshell.” In this long thread we have now covered 18 of the New Testament’s 27 books, which, by my math, means we are two-thirds of the way through this thread. Nine more gems to go. I’d like to pause at this stage and provide a few other posts on Paul and his writings, specifically by talking a bit about Paul as found in early Christian writings outside the New Testament. I have a fuller discussion of the historical and legendary tales about Paul in my book Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend (Oxford University Press, 2006). This post and the next will contain excerpts discussing Paul and his female follower Thecla, one of the most famous early Christian women of all history (though widely forgotten today, she was virtually a household name throughout the Middle Ages.) ****************************** The Acts of Paul and Thecla One of the most popular legends about the apostle Paul […]
July 8, 2025
Chastity Within Marriage? Paul Taught THAT?
In my previous post I summarized the legendary account of Paul and his most famous female disciple Thecla, and ended by quoting the “gospel message” that he preaches in the tale. It’s not at all what you would expect. He says no word about believing in Christ’s death and resurrection. It is all about remaining sexually chaste, even when married. No sex. That’s what God is most interested in. Here are some snippets by way of reminders. Blessed are those who have kept the flesh chaste, for they will become a temple of God. Blessed are those who are self-controlled, for God will speak to them. Blessed are those who have renounced this world, for they will be pleasing to God. Blessed are those who have wives as if they did not have them, for they will be the heirs of God. Blessed are the bodies of the virgins, for these will be pleasing to God and will not lose the reward for their chastity If (since!) this is not the main gospel message […]
July 9, 2025
Paul’s Vision of Heaven and Hell
I now turn to another non-canonical text connected with Paul, one of the most famous throughout the Middle Ages, an account of his journey to observe the fate of souls in the afterlife, both the glories of the saints in heaven and the torments of the sinners in hell. This tale is not simply meant to convey factual information about what happened to Paul once. It is intended to teach a clear lesson. Isn’t all interesting history like that? Here’s how I discuss it in my book Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene (Oxford University Press). This will take two posts. The Apocalypse of Paul Is anyone ever interested in the past for purely antiquarian interests – that is, they just want to know what happened but for no other reason? Well, not usually. Most people think about the past because they are interested in the present. One of the ways that people who are interested in the present use history is by making the past itself present—that is, by making it relevant to […]
July 10, 2025
Did Jesus Exist? Why I Don’t Enjoy Reading the Mythicists
I’ve been doing some reading in preparation for a two-lecture on-line course called “Did Jesus Really Exist” scheduled for July 19. You can find out about it here: https://courses.bartehrman.com/did-jesus-really-exist. It’s a freebie, so, well, feel free to get it for free! Even though I’m pumped to do this course, and I don’t really much enjoy reading about it (that is, reading the work books that argue Jesus did not exist). I once did, back when I wrote my book Did Jesus Exist. But unlike most issues I deal with, I don’t find it very interesting or intellectually challenging. Still it’s a topic that comes up a lot among lay people, especially over the past 20 years or so, and so I feel a need to address it, and will do so with vigor.
July 12, 2025
Fundamentalist Apologists, Christian and Mythicist
As I’ve been reading in preparation for my course on July 19, “Did Jesus Really Exist” (a freebie! Check it out at https://courses.bartehrman.com/did-jesus-really-exist. ) another thought occurred to me, about the similarities between “mythicist” writers (those supporting the idea that Jesus of Nazareth never did exist) and conservative Christian apologists. They seem to have a lot in common, even though they take virtually the opposite views of things. I suppose I noticed that long ago but never delved much into it. But it was probably 15-20 years ago when I was struck by the fact that the mathematical principle, “Bayes’ Theorem” – which works to work out the probability of a cause based on the known effects, and which sure seems highly scientific (in the general sense), and in fact has been used to reach remarkable conclusions in a number of fields – has been applied by two scholars with respect to the historical Jesus: by Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne, a deeply committed Christian, to demonstrate (on statistical probability) that Jesus was probably raised from […]
July 13, 2025
The DeuteroPauline Epistles “At a Glance,” With Questions for Reflection
In this post I give an executive summary (“At a Glance”) of the Deutero-Pauline letters (2 Thessalonians, Ephesians, and Colossians) and then provide some questions for deeper reflection on these books that claim to be written by Paul but are widely considered by critical scholars to be penned by later followers claiming to be him. AT A GLANCE: The Deutero-Pauline Epistles
September 20, 2025
Questions on Forgeries, Historical Errors, and Alterations of Texts!
I’m catching up on posting some of the very interesting questions I’ve received from blog readers. This will take a couple of posts. Here are three excellent ones, all going to the heart of what it means to engage in a historical/critical assessment of the New Testament. QUESTION: Hey Bart, I have a question about the acceptance of the Deutero-Pauline epistles. If they were written while Paul was still alive, it seems like he would have said those weren’t his, and to knock it off. If they were written after Paul had died, it seems like his closest companions would have said that Paul had already died, the epistles were fake, and to knock it off – especially if the epistles were written years after Paul had died. So my question is, why were the Deutero-Pauline epistles accepted?
September 23, 2025