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Agreeing to Do the Textbook
In my previous post I indicated that I was not at all inclined to write a textbook on the New Testament. In fact, before the editor at Oxford University Press asked me to do it, I had never given it a moment’s thought – except for that moment when I thought (some years before), that whatever I did with my publishing career, I did *not* want to write such a thing. Looking back on it, I’m not sure why I was so dead set against it. I suppose it was because my plan was to write scholarship for scholars and nothing but scholarship for scholars. About a week after I turned down the offer to do the textbook, she called me again to see if I had changed my mind. No, I hadn’t. But I had started thinking about it. When she called me the third time I had begun to think that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all. There were several reasons I had begun to change my mind. For […]
Tags: New Testament, textbook
September 23, 2014
A Historical Approach to the New Testament
In my previous posts I talked about how I came to be convinced to write my textbook on the New Testament, back in the early to mid 1990s. Once I agreed to do it, the first step was to decide exactly what *kind* of Introduction to the New Testament I wanted it to be. This was a problem, because I was pretty sure that the kind of introduction that I would like to write would not be the kind of introduction that college professors would like to use. There were already lots of textbooks on the New Testament available at the time. I myself had used two different ones over the years, one that was filled with all sorts of jargon and assumptions that made it way over my students heads (that one didn’t last! but for years it was one of the most widely used on the market); the other one was very sensitive to the theological interests of the authors and, presumably, of the students, and that was very heavy on using each […]
Tags: New Testament, textbook
September 25, 2014
Placing the New Testament in Its Own Historical Context
In my previous post I began to discuss how I chose, back in the mid 1990s, to conceptualize my New Testament textbook, not as a theological/interpretive introduction to the NT, or as a literary introduction, but as a rigorously historical introduction. Among other things, that meant treating the books of the New Testament as *some* of the early Christian wriitngs, which needed to be discussed in relation to other early Christian writings produced at about the same time. In this post I’ll talk about one other feature of a more historical approach to the New Testament. Almost all the other introductory textbooks available at the time, as I indicated yesterday, began with a kind of obligatory appendix on the “background” to the New Testament – information on the historical, political, social, and religious matrix out of which the New Testament sprang (first the Greco-Roman context and then Jewish). Once all *that* was over with, these textbooks typically moved to talk about the writings of the New Tesatment without incorporating any insights from the world in […]
Tags: biographies, genre, Gospels
September 26, 2014
The (Ancient) Genre of the Gospels
In this thread I’ve been talking about how I conceived of my New Testament textbook, some 20 years ago now, as a rigorously historical introduction. I’ve been stressing that one of the ways it is historical is that it takes seriously the Greco-Roman milieu out of which it arose, and that one of the key implications is that one needs to read the NT books in light of the ancient genres which they employ. My argument in the book (and in general!) is that if you misunderstand how the ancient genre works, you will misunderstand the book. The Gospels, I argue, are written as Greco-Roman biographies. Here is an excerpt where I describe what that means and why it matters, again from the first edition of my textbook. ********************************************************* We have numerous examples of Greco-Roman biographies, many of them written by some of the most famous authors of Roman antiquity, for instance, Plutarch, Suetonius, and Tacitus. One of the ways to understand how this genre “worked” is to contrast it with the way modern biographies […]
Tags: biographies, genre, Gospels
New Discussion Forum: Suggestions?
Thanks to the hard work of my computer assistant, Steven Ray –if you have any website or related needs, he’s the guy to hire! – we are nearly ready to make a major change in the Bart Ehrman Blog, a.k.a. the CIA. Because of regular and repeated requests, we are going to add a Discussion Forum, open to all paid members. At present, as you know, the only way to “discuss” anything on the blog is by asking me a question, or by making a comment, on one of my posts. Occasionally one person will respond to another person’s question or comment, but that’s about the extent of conversation among participants. Everything, more or less, begins with my post and all comments pretty much pass through me. With a discussion forum, on the other hand, anyone can start a thread of their own and people can interact on the question/topic, talking with one another directly instead of through me. When I’ve mentioned the possibility of setting up such a thing for the blog, I have […]
September 28, 2014
Gift Subscriptions!!!
I am very pleased to announce that we have a new addition to the Blog. This could help you, me, and a person you love. Or like. Or would like to like. A friend, a colleague, a family member. The new addition: the possibility of a GIFT SUBSCRIPTION. Many, many of you know of someone who would benefit from the blog. By giving a gift subscription, you would make it possible. It’s obvious why that would be a benefit to the person to whom you give the gift. They would have full access to these virtually daily discussions of all things having to do with the New Testament and Christianity in Antiquity. The gift It benefits you because you feel oh so good about yourself. And it benefits me because it contributes to my ultimate objective in running the blog in the first place – raising revenues for charities that deal with hunger and homelessness. And so I would like to challenge all of you to think of someone who would enjoy being on the […]
September 29, 2014
The Importance of a Comparative Approach to the NT
I started this thread thinking that I would devote it to discussing the changes that I am making in the sixth edition of my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. But I realized, once I started, that I needed to explain more fully what the textbook was at its inception back in the mid 1990s before talking about changes that I’m making now. And so my past few posts have been about how I imagined the book to be a distinctively *historical* introduction to the New Testament and about what that actually meant in terms of how I approached the task. One other aspect of this being a historical introduction (as opposed to a theological or principally interpretive or mainly literary introduction) is that I wanted the book to be rigorously comparative in its orientation. What I mean is this. When people read the New Testament, they naturally assume that it is *one* book. After all, you buy it as one book. It has covers. It has a table […]
Tags: comparative approach
September 30, 2014
On Boring Textbooks
There is one other general principle that I tried to follow when writing my NT textbook in the 1990s. In my experience, most textbooks – not just in biblical studies, but in all fields – suffer from one ubiquitous problem. They are BORING. A guiding principle for me was to try my best to keep from boring readers to death. I’ve always been amazed over the years how otherwise intelligent human beings can take really fascinating material and make it dull, uninteresting, soporific, and general snooze-worthy. Take the Hebrew Bible – the Christian Old Testament – for example. It’s an amazing book, filled with incredibly interesting stories, and beautiful poetry, and gut-wrenching reflections on life and the disasters that happen within it. How can you make the boring? Simple! Ask someone to write a textbook on it. The New Testament too is a really interesting book – even apart from being the most important book in the history of Western civilization. Any textbook written for undergraduates will be, for many of them, their first (and […]
October 2, 2014
Getting Started on My NT Introduction
So far I have been talking about how I conceived of my textbook when I first started working on it in the mid 1990s, stressing in particular that I wanted to approach the task from a rigorously historical perspective. I should say again, I really was not sure that anyone would be interested in a textbook like that. The only think comparable that I knew about at the time was a textbook by Joseph Tyson, a fine scholar at SMU, whose book, though, was not widely used. In addition, I heard, while I was doing the research for my book, that an Introduction was being written by none other than Raymond Brown. I thought that this was *certain* to make my book a non-entity. Many of you may not know who Raymond Brown was. At the time, he was arguably the premier scholar of the New Testament in North America. He was extremely learned; incredibly deep; unusually insightful. He had read everything. He was tremendously energetic. He trained some of the finest scholars of my […]
October 3, 2014
Where Do You Start an Introduction to the NT?
One of the hardest parts of writing an Introduction to the New Testament is figuring out where to begin. If someone were writing a literary introduction, or even a theological one, it might make best sense to begin at the beginning, with the Gospel of Matthew, and then continue through the New Testament all the way to the book of Revelation. But what if one is writing an Introduction from a *historical* perspective? Matthew wasn’t the first Gospel to be written; Mark was. So doesn’t it make better sense (after discussing the Greco-Roman and Jewish milieu out of which these books arose) to start with Mark? But the problems go even deeper. The Gospels were not the first books written: Paul’s letters were written earlier. Students almost never know this; they simply assume that since the Gospels occur first in the NT, and since they talk about Jesus, who lived before Paul, that they were written before Paul. So if one wants to deal with the NT historically, doesn’t it make best sense to begin […]
October 6, 2014
Getting the Facts of My Life Straight
I have to admit, I sometimes get a bit tired of being the whipping boy for fundamentalist and conservative evangelical Christian apologists. If they would deal with my views head on and actually get the facts of my life right, it would be one thing. But when they publicly accuse me of holding, or having held, positions that I never did – when they are flat our wrong in what they say about me — it gets under my skin. The first time I noticed this in a big way was when Craig Evans – a long time colleague and friend – indicated, in writing!, that the reason I had become an agnostic was that I came to realize that there were differences in our manuscripts of the New Testament. Good grief. I had known about differences in our manuscripts from the time I was sixteen years old!! I had studied them and known all about them in all the years I was a fundamentalist. These differences had nothing – Zero, Nada, Not a Thing […]
Where Does One Deal with Textual Criticism?
There were other organizational dilemmas that I faced in doing my textbook. As I indicated, I decided to begin with chapters on the Greco-Roman world and the Jewish world of the New Testament, and – before getting to the Gospels themselves – a chapter on the controversies in early Christianity that led to the formation of the 27-book NT canon. But there was one other rather fundamental issue. If I was talking about the canon of the NT before getting into a discussion of the NT books – shouldn’t I also talk about the text of the NT, that is, the surviving manuscripts of the NT, before discussing individual books? Many readers on the blog will be familiar with the textual problems posed by the New Testament. In broad outline, the problems are no different from those posed by every book, or sets of books, from the ancient world, whether the Hebrew Bible, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the plays of Euripides, the writings of Plato on down to the plays and essays of Seneca to […]
Tags: manuscripts, textual criticism
October 7, 2014
My Training as a Textual Critic
In some of my previous posts I’ve indicated that since I was known as a textual critic (one who worked with Greek manuscripts of the New Testament in order to determine both what the authors originally wrote and how the text came to be changed over the centuries) I was not widely seen as a candidate for writing a New Testament textbook for undergraduates. Several readers have expressed some perplexity over this. Aren’t textual critics, by their very nature, background, and training, proficient in the wider field of New Testament studies? The answer may surprise you: it may be that they should be, but many (at one time, most) are not. It’s a little hard to explain why, but I’ll try. As is my wont, I’ll start autobiographically. In my case, the great bulk of my graduate training actually had very little to do with textual criticism. When I came to Princeton Theological Seminary as a master’s student ) in 1978 (after I had finished my BA in English at Wheaton college), I was required […]
Tags: textual criticism
October 9, 2014
My Graduate Training (Textual Criticism??)
I saw my master’s thesis as the perfect assignment to get me grounded in the entire, complicated field of New Testament textual criticism. Ever since then I’ve been in favor of students writing master’s theses, even if it is not required for a master’s program. For one thing, doing so gets you into the frame of mind that you need to be in when you get to the point of writing a dissertation at the PhD level – which for most students is the first time they write a book. The masters thesis is usually much shorter – say 100-120 pages. But the layout tends to be similar. Most theses I’ve been involved with, including my own, have entailed an introduction, three chapters, and a conclusion. So the student learns to think in terms of writing chapters, each of which has its own thesis and point; but all of them work together in order systematically to set forth the overarching thesis of the work. This is a hard transition for some students, who for their […]
Tags: PhD, textual criticism
October 10, 2014
A Text-Critical Dissertation
The point of this short thread dealing with my graduate training is to explain why it is that lots – probably most – New Testament scholars do not consider textual critics to be competent in a wide range of fields normally associated with New Testament scholarship. I know that must seem very strange to outsiders, but it’s the case. Textual critics are often thought of as a rather strange group of technicians without broad competency in the areas that other New Testament scholars are interested in – for example, the Jewish environment or the Greco-Roman worlds from which the New Testament emerged, the historical Jesus, the interpretation of and historical problems associated with the Gospels, the life and letters of the apostle Paul, the theology of the different NT writers, and on and on. The reason for this is that to be competently trained in textual criticism is a long and hard process and it’s very difficult to do that *and* to learn all the other things that most other NT scholars are competent and […]
Tags: dissertation, textual criticism
October 11, 2014
On Changing One’s Mind
I thought today I would break up the monotony of the current thread by posting on something completely different. It will take me a couple of posts to finish up my reflections on what kind of training is necessary to make a good textual critic – which is really a sub-thread (OK, call it a tangent) within my larger thread about how I went about writing my textbook and what changes I made in it. And I’ll get back to both the sub-thread and the larger thread. But this post is on something else. Changing one’s mind. The reason this has become a topic of interest for me – today, for instance – is that I just finished reading something that I wrote ten years ago and something that I wrote on the same topic seven years later, just three years ago, and noted that, well, I had changed my mind! Reversed directions. Completely altered not only what I thought but what I said. And that has led me to reflect on the phenomenon of […]
October 12, 2014
Textual Scholars as Technicians
I’ve been trying in the posts of this thread to explain why textual critics are often thought not to be expert in the wide range of topics that other New Testament scholars are well versed in. They are instead frequently seen as technicians who do the really hard, dirty work that no one else is either that interested in doing or knowledgeable about, even though some of it (not all) is thought to be necessary and important as a kind of preliminary exercise. But it’s to be done by others. I, on the other hand, was long intrigued with textual criticism, from my early college days. When I went to Princeton Seminary (already knowing Greek) and took a course with Metzger on palaeography (the study of ancient handwriting in the manuscripts nd related topics) I was thrilled. In that course we learned how to “collate” manuscripts. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Collating manuscripts, for most people, is no fun at all. It involves taking a manuscript – that is, a hand written […]
Tags: textual criticism
October 13, 2014
The Life of Brian & The Apocalyptic Jesus
On the blog some months ago I mentioned the “Jesus and Brian” conference in London this past summer, devoted to exploring the Historical Jesus in light of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. The event was held at the King’s College London, Edmond J Safra Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand, London WC2R 2LS on June 20-22nd, 2014. I gave one of the talks at the conference, and it is provided here thanks to the labors of the audio-video team at Kings College and our support person, Steven Ray who had to manipulate it to improve the quality. Further details about the event can be read here: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/trs/events/jandb/about.aspx Following is the abstract that I gave of my paper, in advance: When the Life of Brian first came out, I was a gung-ho, born-again, evangelical Christian in seminary, studying for ministry. Even though I found parts of the film hilarious (I tried not to laugh), other parts – not. Some of these were predictably offensive to a pious sensitivity (“Always look on the bright side of life”!); but one was […]
Tags: Apocalyptic, historical jesus, King's College London, Life of Brian, Monty Python
October 20, 2014
External Evidence in Textual Criticism
When I realized that I did not want to spend my life as a text-critical technician – collating and classifying Greek manuscripts – it became obvious to me the way to go. Textual critics at the time generally understood that there were two major tasks in the discipline: to establish the original text (that is, the text in the words written by the actual authors, as opposed to the changes of the text made by later scribes) and to write the history of its transmission (seeing how it had been modified over the years in different times and places). And I realized that through no tragic fault or brilliant plan of my own, I had been trained to do both things: the first requires substantial expertise in exegesis (the interpretation of texts), and the second requires a knowledge of early Christian history. These were the two areas I had focused on in my graduate training, in all those years when I wanted, instead, simply to be trained in reading manuscripts. I think it is widely […]
Tags: external evidence, textual criticism
October 15, 2014
Jesus’ Sweating Blood and “intrinsic” evidence
In yesterday’s post I mentioned some of the kinds of “external” evidence that textual scholars look at when trying to establish the “original” text of a document (that is, the wording of the text as the author originally wrote it) when different manuscripts have different wordings for this or that passage. In this post I’ll talk about one kind of “internal” evidence that is used to assist in making this kind of decision. There are two kinds of internal evidence that are usually called (1) intrinsic probabilities and (2) transcriptional probabilities. For now, I’ll focus on the first. Intrinsic probabilities involve determining which of two (or more) forms of the text found in the manuscripts is the one that the author himself was more likely to have written. Suppose you have a verse worded in two different ways. If one of the ways uses the vocabulary and the writing style found elsewhere in the author, and presents ideas that he otherwise attests, whereas the other way includes words and grammatical constructions and ideas that are […]
Tags: intrinsic evidence, textual criticism
October 16, 2014