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A Newly Discovered Gospel? Was Jesus Married with Children???
I have been repeatedly asked about the brand new news story, that a new Gospel has been discovered that shows that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and that they had children. If this sounds like (bad) fiction to you (think Da Vinci Code) (or for movies: think “Last Temptation of Christ”), it is. The claim is completely bogus. This “new” Gospel is not a Gospel, but a text that scholars have known for roughly forever. It’s not a Christian text (ostensibly). It’s about Joseph (as in the Old Testament) and his wife Asenath. Rather than explaining why the new claims about this text are not worth taking seriously (no scholar will), instead of explaining the whole situation myself, I give you a post made by Bob Cargill, assistant professor of classics and religious studies at the University of Iowa. I reproduce his post here with Bob’s permission. It’s a bit long for this blog, but I thought you should get the whole shooting match before you. *************************************************************** Review of “The Lost Gospel” by […]
Tags: Jesus' wife, Joseph and Aseneth, Simcha Jacobovici
November 13, 2014
Our Anonymous Gospels, Starting with Luke
Over the past few weeks I’ve had several people ask me about why the Gospels of the New Testament are attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It’s a great question, and one that I want to do some more intense thinking and reading about myself. So I thought I would lay out some of the basics here in a series of posts, and think aloud a bit about why I think the Gospels got the names they did. To begin with, it’s important to recognize that the Gospels themselves are completely anonymous. None of the authors identifies himself by name. The Gospels are all written in the third person about what “they” – other people – were doing (including, of course, and principally, Jesus). There are only a couple of exceptions to the third-person narratives of the Gospels, and even in these cases the authors do not given their own names. The first is in the Prologue to Luke’s Gospel, Luke 1:1-4, where the author says: Just as many have attempted to write a […]
Tags: authorship, Gospel of Luke
November 14, 2014
Did the Beloved Disciple Write the Gospel of John?
I have started a series of posts dealing with the authorship of the Gospels – specifically, why they were eventually named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. My first point, in my previous post and in this one, is that the books are completely anonymous. Their authors never divulge their names. Eventually I may want to address the question of why that is. But for now, my point is that despite what people might commonly think, the books are anonymous. I pointed out yesterday that even though the author of Luke does not tell us his name, he does write in the first person (“I”/ “we”) in the opening of his Gospel. That never happens in either Matthew or Mark, but it does happen again in the Gospel of John. In fact, it is widely claimed – sometimes even by scholars who should know better – that the author identifies himself as the “beloved disciple” who appears several times in the Gospel of John, and only in this Gospel. On a number of occasions the author […]
Tags: authorship, beloved disciple, Gospel of John
The Year’s Society of Biblical Literature Meeting
This coming week, on Thursday, I head off to the annual Society of Biblical Literature, which this year is being held in San Diego. I’m not sure if I’ve discussed the meeting on the blog before. It is the main professional meeting that I go to every year; it’s always held the weekend before Thanksgiving (well, Saturday through Tuesday). I go on Thursday evenings because I always have a commitment there first thing Friday morning. The SBL is a learned society for all professors of biblical studies – and graduate students and others academically committed to the field. It’s not a really a conference that layfolk would or should be interested in. It is a group of serious scholars talking serious scholarship using serious scholarly jargon based on scholarly assumptions. Not fit for normal human consumption. When I say a “group,” that makes it sound rather small, like a couple of dozen people. And it’s not actually that kind of group. It’s a group of many thousands. The Society meets at the same time, in […]
Tags: SBL, Society of Biblical Literature
November 15, 2014
When Did the Gospels Get Their Names?
When Did the Gospels Get Their Names? In this series of posts on the authors’ names associated with the New Testament Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – we have so far seen that the texts themselves are completely anonymous. The authors of two of these works (Luke and John) do speak in the first person in a couple of instances, but they do not say who they are. By the end of the second century, roughly a century after the books were written, they were being called by the names that are familiar to us today. So naturally one might wonder, when were they given these ascriptions? When Did the Gospels Get Their Names: Evidence Contrary to what you may sometimes have heard, there is no concrete evidence that the Gospels received their familiar names early on. It is absolutely true to say that in the manuscripts of the Gospels, they have the titles we are accustomed to (The Gospel according to Matthew, etc.). But these manuscripts with titles do not start appearing until […]
Tags: Canonical Gospels
November 17, 2014
The Gospels are Finally Named! Irenaeus of Lyons.
In the previous post we saw that the Gospels almost certainly circulated anonymously at first, just as they were composed anonymously. It is an interesting question why the authors all chose to remain anonymous instead of indicating who they were. I have a theory about that, and I may post on it eventually when I get through a bit more of this thread on why the Gospels ended up with the names they did. At this stage, what we can say with certainty is that the Gospels are quoted in the early and mid-second centuries by proto-orthodox Christian authors, who never identify them as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. That is especially significant when we come to Justin around 150-60 CE, who explicitly quotes these books as “Memoirs of the Apostles,” but does not tell us which apostles they are to be associated with. This is in Rome, the capital of the Empire, and the seat of what was probably the largest, and certainly the most influential, church at the time. Some thirty years after […]
Tags: four gospels, Irenaeus
November 18, 2014
The Four Gospels in the Muratorian Fragment
I argued in my previous post that sometime between Justin, in Rome around 150-60, and Irenaeus in 185 the Gospels had begun to be known as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In my opinion this did not happen earlier (if some of you are wondering about the witness of Papias, I’ll say something about him in a few later posts). In terms of his personal and ecclesiastical life, Irenaeus is best known as the bishop of Lyons in Gaul (i.e., the ancient forerunner of Lyon, France). But he spent significant time in Rome itself before his appointment in Gaul, and he considered the Roman church to be the center of Christendom at his time. There is another witness to the fourfold Gospel of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John from Irenaeus’s time, and also from Rome. This comes to us in a fragmentary Latin text discovered in the 18th century and called the Muratorian Fragment. This document was discovered by an Italian scholar named Lodovico Antonio Muratori in the Ambrosiana Library (and so it is named […]
Tags: four gospels, Muratorian fragment
November 20, 2014
Papias and the Gospels: Some Background
In my previous post I argued that sometime in the second half of the second century, an edition of the four Gospels was compiled by an unknown editor/scribe, and place in circulation in Rome, in which the texts were identified, definitively and possibly for the first time, as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Now the question is: why did these names come to be chosen? This is a complicated question, and the answer is neither straightforward nor easy. But I can state its broad contours simply: for two of the authors, Matthew and Mark, there were much older traditions indicating that they had written Gospels, and the editor of the Roman edition of the four Gospels latched onto these traditions and assigned two of his Gospels to them; and for the other two Gospels, the unknown Roman editor used internal hints within Luke and John themselves to derive the names of their authors. First I’ll deal with Matthew and Mark, beginning with this post. The old traditions that Matthew the tax collector and Mark the […]
November 22, 2014
Why Don’t You Believe Like Your Teacher, Dr. Metzger?
QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman just out of curiosity, why do people pit you against your teacher Dr. Bruce Metzger? Did Metzger also find the construction of the originals impossible due to the late manuscript attestation and the inability to know what the original looked like? Or did your teacher, Dr. Metzger, disagree and hold to biblical inerrancy? RESPONSE: It’s a very good question and it has a very straightforward answer. The people who do this are all, to my knowledge, conservative evangelical Christians who find it upsetting over two of the things that I say: (1) that I am now no longer a believer because I do not think the Christian faith can adequately explain how a good and powerful God can be in control of this world when there is so much senseless pain, misery, and suffering in it and, completely unrelatedly (2) that since we do not have lots of early manuscripts of the New Testament (let alone the originals) there are places where we cannot know for sure what the authors originally wrote. […]
Tags: Bruce Metzger
November 24, 2014
Papias as an Earwitness?
I have discussed Papias a number of times on the blog in the past, but have not given any substantial time to him in a about a year and a half. He is an important figure for historians of early Christianity, because, as I pointed out in my previous post, he was a proto-orthodox author from the first part of the second century. More than anything, conservative biblical scholars have latched on to Papias because in their opinion he provides direct evidence that the Gospel of Matthew really was written by Matthew, and the Gospel of Mark was really written by Mark. I’ll be dealing with the evidence from Papias on both matters in subsequent posts. What is even more remarkable is that some conservative scholars have actually argued that Papias gives us evidence about Luke and John, even though in none of the surviving fragments does Papias so much as *mention* Luke and John!! Scholars can be amazingly inventive sometimes….. Before discussng what Papias says about the two Gospel-writers that do get mentioned in […]
Tags: Papias
November 25, 2014
Believing Papias When It’s Convenient
In my previous post I stressed that, contrary to what you sometimes may have heard or possibly will hear, Papias is not a *direct* witness to what the apostles of Jesus were saying. That is an important point because of the most important “testimony” that Papias gives, a testimony that is often taken as very strong evidence that the second Gospel of the NT was written by Mark, the companion of Peter, and that the first Gospel was really and truly written by Matthew, the disciple of Jesus. If these claims were right, they would be highly significant. Matthew would have been written by someone who was there to see these things happen; and Mark’s account would be based on arguably the most important witness to Jesus’ life.. Here is what Papias says. Remember, when he indicates what “the elder” says, he is indicating what he has learned from a person who was allegedly “companion” of the elder; the elder was someone who allegedly knew the apostles. “And this is what the elder used to […]
Papias on Matthew and Mark
In my previous two posts I showed why Papias is not a reliable source when it comes to the authorship of Matthew and Mark. If you haven’t read those posts and are personally inclined to think that his testimony about Matthew and Mark are accurate, I suggest you read them (the posts) before reading this one. In this post I want to argue that what he actually says about Matthew and Mark are not true of our Matthew and Mark, and so either he is talking about *other* Gospels that he knows about (or has heard about) called Matthew and Mark, that do not correspond to our Matthew and Mark, or he simply is wrong. I’ll reverse the order in which his comments are given, and deal with Matthew first. In the quotation of the fourth century historian Eusebius, we read this: And this is what [Papias] says about Matthew: “And so Matthew composed the sayings in the Hebrew tongue, and each one interpreted [Or: translated] them to the best of his ability.” The problems […]
November 26, 2014
Why Are the Gospels Anonymous?
In my previous posts I have tried to establish that the four Gospels circulated anonymously for decades after they were written. To some modern readers that seems surprising. Why wouldn’t the authors name themselves? Surely they named themselves. Didn’t’ they? The clear answer is, no, they did not. But why? There have been a number of theories put forth over the years. Possibly the most popular one (at least it’s the one I’ve heard most often) is that the Gospel writers thought that what was most important was the message they wanted to convey about the life, teachings, deeds, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The authors did not want their own persons to “get in the way” of the message, and so they wrote their Gospels anonymously. In rough outline I suppose that might be true, but I would refine the idea a bit myself – as I will in a moment. Before doing so, I should respond to an objection to this view. Most of the *other* books of the New Testament identify their […]
Tags: anonymity, Canonical Gospels
November 28, 2014
Do Textual Variants Really Matter for Anything?
QUESTION: I got the impression (I can’t remember where or if you said this… or if Bruce Metzger said it) that no significant Christian doctrine is threatened by text critical issues… and so, if that is the case, who cares if, in Mark 4: 18, Jesus spoke of the “illusion” of wealth or the “love” of wealth. I mean, who cares other than textual critics and Bible translators? RESPONSE: This is a very good question, and one that I get a lot. I’ve given an answer to it before on the blog, but since it periodically reappears, I thought that maybe I should give it another shot. The first thing to emphasize is a point that I repeatedly make and that many people seem never to notice that I make (especially my fundamentalist friends who very much object to my views about textual criticism): of the many hundreds of thousands of textual variants that we have among our manuscripts, most of them are completely unimportant and insignificant and don’t matter for twit. Why should […]
Tags: textual variants
November 29, 2014
Why Was The Gospel of Matthew Attributed to Matthew?
I have now gotten to a point where I can discuss why the four Gospels were specifically given the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Recall the most important points of my preceding posts on the blog so far: the Gospels were all written anonymously and they circulated anonymously, for years and decades; we have no certain evidence that they – these particular Gospels — were called by their familiar names until around 180 CE, in sources connected with Rome (Irenaeus and the Muratorian Fragment); my hypothesis is that an edition of these four Gospels was published in Rome sometime between Justin in 150-60 CE (he quotes the Gospels but does not name them) and Irenaeus in 180-85 CE. That edition gave these Gospels their now-familiar names. If all that is correct, then there is no reason to think that people widely associated them with their familiar names before that. The reason this became a widespread tradition is that it was started by a single editor – possibly based, of course, on things being […]
Tags: Gospel of Matthew
December 1, 2014
Why Was the Gospel of John Attributed to John?
Some of the same objections to Matthew having written the First Gospel apply to John the son of Zebedee having written the Fourth. Unlike Matthew, John did not copy any of our other Gospel sources, and so that’s not the problem that it is for Matthew (who surely, if he was an eyewitness, would not have taken his stories about Jesus from what he found in someone else’s written text). But there is an even higher probability, bordering on certainty, that John the son of Zebedee could not write. He was a fisherman from rural Galilee. Fishermen were not educated. They were very low class peasants. John would never have gone to school. Where he lived, there *were* no schools. He never would have learned to read. Let alone learned to write. Let alone learned to write in Greek. Let alone learned to write sophisticated, philosophically informed prose narratives in Greek. I think there is virtually no chance that the historical John of Zebedee wrote the Gospel. So why did our anonymous editor living a […]
Tags: Gospel of John
December 2, 2014
Why Was the Gospel of Luke Attributed to Luke?
So far I have tried to explain why, in the proto-orthodox church of the second century, the Gospels of Matthew and John came to be attributed to two of the disciples of Jesus. My thesis is that an edition of the four Gospels appeared in Rome sometime in the second half of the century and that it differentiated the four Gospels by indicating which was “according to” whom. I now can address the question of how the other two Gospels were given their names, and why they were not assigned to disciples of Jesus but to companions of the apostles, Luke the companion of Paul and Mark the companion of Peter. Luke is the easier of the two to explain, and in some ways is the easiest of all four Gospels. That’s because the author provides hints of who he is – or at least hints of whom he wants his readers to *think* he is. The hints do not come in the Gospel of Luke itself. As I have already pointed out, the author […]
Tags: Gospel of Luke
December 4, 2014
Why Was the Gospel of Mark Attributed to Mark?
I come now – at *last*, you might say – to the final post in this thread dealing with how the Gospels of the New Testament came to be named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. I have covered a lot of territory in this thread, arguing that the Gospels were not known by these names until near the end of the second century; that they probably acquired their names because of an edition of the Gospels produced in Rome sometime after the time of Justin Martyr (mid second century), an edition that influenced both Irenaeus and the author of the Muratorian canon, and eventually all of Christendom. This edition named the first and last of the Gospels after two of Jesus’ disciples and the third Gospel after a companion of the apostle Paul. I have explained the reasons in the preceding posts. And now comes the most difficult and puzzling question: why was the second Gospel attributed to Mark? I regularly am asked this question, and usually the questioner expresses it with some surprise: why […]
Tags: Gospel of Mark
December 5, 2014
Gift Memberships on the Blog 2014
‘Tis the season! It’s hard to believe, but the holidays are upon us again. And I want to open up a holiday giving option that can help out people who really want to be on the blog but cannot afford the membership fees. As many of you know, last year, thanks to a number of generous donors, we pulled this off in a big way. It happened in two stages. Two anonymous donors had provided some funds to pay for memberships for a few people who wanted to be on the blog but because of personal circumstances, could not afford the membership fees. I put out the offer on my Facebook page, asking if anyone was in that boat, and within twenty minutes I had thirty requests –all from people who were eager to join but simply did not have the means to do so otherwise. I had to shut down the offer nearly as soon as I made it. This made me suspect that there were a lot more people out there like […]
December 6, 2014
Do You Need A Free Membership?
Thanks to the incredible generosity of members of the blog, I am happy to announce that there are a limited number of free one-year memberships available. These have been donated for a single purpose: to allow those who cannot afford the annual membership fee to participate on the blog for a year. I will assign these memberships strictly on the honor system: if you truly cannot afford the membership fee, but very much want to have full access to the blog, then please contact me. Do NOT reply here, on the blog, as a comment. Send me a separate email, privately, at [email protected]. In your email, let me know your situation (why you would like to take advantage of this offer) and provide me with the following information: 1) Your first and last name. 2) Your preferred personal email. 3) Your preferred user name (no spaces). 4) Your preferred password (should be 8 or more characters, no spaces). The donors will remain anonymous, but here let me publicly extend my heartfelt thanks for such […]