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The Book of Revelation in Historical Context
I resume here my thread on the book of Revelation, trying to situate it in its historical context. This will not be a long thread, in no small measure because I am not an expert on this very complicated book and have not written extensively about it. I’ve thought that maybe it would be a good trade book at some point, in which case I would spend a year or so reading everything. And then I would have lots of other posts! But if that happens, it will be some years down the line. Assuming the world hasn’t been destroyed by that time. Here I talk about putting Revelation into its historical context. Again, this is taken from my textbook on the New Testament. ********************************************** The Revelation of John in Historical Context I have already pointed out that the book of Revelation is virtually unique among apocalypses in that it does not appear to be pseudonymous. I say that it does not “appear” to be pseudonymous because the author simply calls […]
Tags: Revelation
February 24, 2015
The Book of Revelation as an Apocalypse
I can now give a brief description of how the book of Revelation functions as an apocalypse – that is, how the features of the genre, that I’ve already mentioned, work themselves out in the narrative of the book. Again, this is taken from my textbook on the New Testament. ******************************************************** In general terms, Revelation corresponds to the basic description of apocalypses that I have given. It is a first-hand account written by a prophet who has been shown a vision of heaven that explains the realities of earth, a vision that is mediated by angels and that is chock-full of bizarre and mysterious symbolism. The nature of the book is indicated at the outset, in the magnificent vision of the exalted Christ that the prophet describes in ch. 1. Here Christ appears as “one like a Son of Man” (cf. Dan 7:13-14, where the phrase describes the cosmic judge of the earth) and is seen walking amidst the seven golden lampstands (i.e., he is present among the seven churches of Asia Minor, 1:20), with […]
Tags: apocalypse, Revelation
February 25, 2015
My Debate with Dan Wallace: Is the Original NT Lost?
On February 1st, 2012 I had a public debate with Dan Wallace, professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary. The event was sponsored by The Ehrman Project, which, despite its name, is something I’ve never had anything to do with (I believe it is now defunct); it is/was an attempt by conservative Christians to debunk what I have written and taught (and thought, and thought about thinking). We held the event on my turf, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Memorial Hall Performing Arts Theater. It was a large and responsive crowd. As you might expect, I argue that even though we have thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament, we do not have many *early* ones — and hardly any *really* early ones. That is why we can not (always? ever?) know with absolute certainty what the authors of the New Testament originally said. That matters for lots of reasons, one of which is that fundamentalist Christians but their faith in the very words of the Bible. […]
Tags: Dan Wallace, original new testament
March 7, 2015
Finally! How To Understand the Symbols of Revelation
First let me apologize for being absent from the blog for three days. As you probably know, the South got nailed with a storm on Wednesday evening. Among other nasty things, it knocked my power out – and I was powerless, so to say, until yesterday (Friday) afternoon. This wasn’t a *complete* disaster: I had virtually nothing to do but sit in front of my fireplace and read books, and I read an *unconscionable* amount – more than I’ve read in any two-day period in my life! That part was good. But I was without access to email or Internet, and so the blog had to take a hit. But I’m back now and the future looks good. Speaking of the future, I wanted to make one more post on the book of Revelation. Two questions I often get asked about it (including from readers of the blog) are whether the symbolism is meant to keep Roman authorities from understanding what was in the book in order to protect the author from persecution and whether […]
Tags: Revelation, symbols
February 28, 2015
Did Nazareth Exist?
One question I repeatedly get asked is about my opinion on whether the town of Nazareth actually existed. I was puzzled when I started getting emails on this, some years ago now. What I came to realize is that mythicists (i.e., those who think that there never was a man Jesus; he was invented, a “myth”) commonly argue that Nazareth (like Jesus) was completely made up. I still get the emails today – a couple within the past month. I tried to deal with this issue at length in my book Did Jesus Exist? But since I get asked the question still, apparently by people who haven’t read my book (!) – I thought I would repeat some of what I say there. Here is an excerpt on the issue: Did Nazareth Exist – Jesus’ Hometown One supposedly legendary feature of the Gospels commonly discussed by mythicists is that the alleged hometown of Jesus, Nazareth did not exist but is itself a myth. The logic of this argument, which is sometimes advanced with considerable vehemence and force, […]
Tags: Mythicists, Nazareth
April 1, 2022
More on the Name “Nazareth”
My post on the archaeological proof that Nazareth did in fact exist elicited a number of responses, some of them asking for more details – especially about whether the name of the town could have been invented by someone who thought Jesus was a “Nazirite.” I actually deal with that question in my response to mythicists in my book Did Jesus Exist? There I deal with the arguments of mythicists Frank Zindler and G.A. Wells. Here is what I say there: ************************************************************** Frank Zindler, for example, in a cleverly entitled essay, “Where Jesus Never Walked,” tries to deconstruct on a fairly simple level the geographical places associated with Jesus, especially Nazareth. He claims that Mark’s Gospel never states that Jesus came from Nazareth. This flies in the face, of course, of Mark 1:9, which indicates precisely that this is where Jesus did come from (“Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee”), but Zindler maintains that that verse was not originally part of Mark; it was inserted by a later scribe. In my view, this making a […]
Tags: Mythicists, Nazareth
March 3, 2015
Was Jesus From Nazareth?
QUESTION: Do you think Jesus was born in Nazareth? A few weeks ago I went to both Bethlehem and Nazareth. I always thought Jesus was born in Nazareth but most there focused on Bethlehem as Jesus’s birth place. Is there strong evidence for either? RESPONSE Yes, when you visit Israel today, or when you ask any Bible-believing Christian, or when you ask most any Christian, or most any other human being, you will hear that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. The reason is not hard to find: the only references to Jesus’ birth in the New Testament squarely place his birth in Bethlehem. There are, as many of you know, only two passages of the New Testament that narrate the events surrounding Jesus’ birth: Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2. And they both agree in placing it in Bethlehem. And yet there are compelling reasons for questioning that view, so that a large number of critical scholars – even prominent Roman Catholic scholars – think that it is more likely that Jesus was born in […]
Tags: birth of Jesus, Nazareth
March 4, 2015
Bethlehem and Nazareth in Matthew
In my last post I showed why it is virtually certain that Jesus’ home town was Nazareth. All of our sources agree that he was from there, and it is very hard to imagine why a Christian story teller would have made that up. But now the question is whether that was also his place of birth. The only two accounts we have of Jesus’ birth, Matthew and Luke, independently claim that even though he was raised in Nazareth, he was actually born in Bethlehem. So isn’t that the more likely scenario? Born in Bethlehem but raised in Nazareth? You might think so, given the fact that this is what is stated in our only two sources of information, and that they independently agree about the matter (based on their own sources, the no longer existing M – Matthew’s source or sources – and the no longer existing L – Luke’s source or sources). But there are reasons for thinking that we cannot trust these accounts, for three reasons: THE REST OF THIS POST IS […]
Tags: Bethlehem, matthew, Nazareth
March 5, 2015
Bethlehem and Nazareth in Luke: Where Was Jesus Really Born?
Yesterday I discussed Matthew’s account of how it is that Jesus came to be born in Bethlehem, if in fact he “came” from Nazareth. Of course, critical scholars suspect Matthew has placed Jesus’ birth there to fulfill Michah’s prophecy (5:2) that a great ruler (the supposed messiah) would come from Bethlehem. For Matthew it is because Joseph and Mary were originally from Bethlehem. That was their home town. And the place of Jesus’ birth. Two or more years after his birth, they relocated to Nazareth in Galilee, over a hundred miles to the north, to get away from the rulers of Judea who were thought to be out to kill the child. (That in itself, I hardly need to say, seems completely implausible, that a local king is eager to kill a peasant child out of fear that he will wrest the kingdom away from him….) Luke has a completely different account of how it happened. In Luke, Bethlehem is decidedly not Joseph and Mary’s home town. The whole point of the story is that […]
Tags: Bethlehem, birth of Jesus, Nazareth
March 6, 2015
A Source for the Birth Narratives in Matthew and Luke?
QUESTION: What’s your take on the independence or interdependence of Mt 1-2 and Lk 1-2. Do you think Luke’s infancy narratives are based on Matthew’s? Or vice versa? Or on some other unknown earlier common source? Or neither and they’re both independent? It sounds like you’re advocating independence. But if they are separate and independent, then we have to account for common elements in the two. Some commonalities are easier to explain (e.g., location in Bethlehem [Micah 5.2]; mother’s name Mary [Mk 6.3]), but others less so (e.g., both have the same name Joseph for Mary’s husband even though that name is not in Mark or Q; both have the unexpected and unprecedented miracle story of a virgin birth). Thoughts? RESPONSE: This is a great and very perceptive question. It is rooted in my thread, just finished, on Bethlehem and Nazareth, in which I argued that both Matthew and Luke have given us stories to explain how Jesus could be the messiah – who (in their opinion) was to be born in Bethlehem – […]
Tags: birth narrative, luke, matthew
March 9, 2015
Is “Jehovah” in the Bible?
QUESTION: How firmly grounded in reality is the claim of Jehovah’s Witnesses that the ‘divine name’ (Jehovah) belongs in the New Testament? RESPONSE So this is an interesting question, with several possible ramifications. At first I should explain that the divine name “Jehovah” doesn’t belong in *either* Testament, old or new, in the opinion of most critical scholars, outside the ranks of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. That’s because Jehovah was not the divine name. So here’s the deal. In the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) God is given a number of different designations. Sometimes he is called God (the Hebrew word is El, or more commonly – by far – the plural form of that word, ELOHIM); or The Almighty (SHADDAI), or God Almighty (EL SHADDAI), or Lord (ADONAI), or – well, or lots of other things. But sometimes the God of Israel is actually given his personal name. Like everyone else, he has a name. And his name was יהוה (in English letters, that looks like YHWH). Written Hebrew, as you probably know… THE […]
Tags: Jehovahs Witnesses, YHWH
March 10, 2015
Lost Christian Writings: The Letters of Paul
QUESTION: What lost early Christian books would you most like to have discovered? RESPONSE: Ah, this is a tough one. There are lots of Christian writing that I would love to have discovered – all of the ones that have been lost, for example! But suppose I had to name some in particular. Well, this will take several posts. To begin with, I wish we had the other letters of Paul. Let me explain. In the New Testament there are thirteen letters that claim Paul as their author. But scholars since the nineteenth century have argued that some of these do not go back to Paul. There is no absolute consensus on the issue of course; fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals argue that all thirteen go back to Paul; some critical scholars agree (not many!); others think that ten go back to Paul. But the most widespread view is that six claim to be written by Paul even though he didn’t write them. The six are … THE REST OF THIS POST IS FOR MEMBERS […]
Tags: Lost writings, Paul
March 11, 2015
Why I Wish We Had More of Paul’s Letters
In the previous post I began to answer the question of which lost books of early Christianity I would most like to have discovered, and I started my answer with the earliest writings of which we are familiar, the letters of Paul, most of which (presumably) have been lost. I would love for us to find some of them. I doubt if we ever will, but who knows? Maybe someone will announce that one is to be published later this year! Seriously, we would all love to have more letters from Paul, and not merely for sentimental reasons (Oh, wouldn’t that be *nice*?). Paul is without a doubt the most important figure in the Christian tradition next to Jesus himself. His writings have served as a basis for Christian ethical and theological thought for centuries. And yet we know so little about what he thought and taught. When people read Paul’s letters, they frequently neglect to realize that these are all “occasional” writings. By that I do not mean that Paul occasionally wrote letters, but […]
Tags: letters of Paul
March 12, 2015
Paul’s “Exceptional” Letter to the Romans
I wanted to follow up on a comment that I made in my last post about all of Paul’s letters being “occasional” (i.e., written to deal with certain situations that had arisen in his churches), with one partial exception: his letter to the Romans. Now would be a good time to explain why Romans is the exception. Here is what I say about the occasion and purpose of Romans in my discussion of the book in The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. ******************************************************** In one important respect the letter to the Romans is unlike all of Paul’s other letters: it is written to a congregation that Paul did not establish, in a city that he had never visited (see 1:10-15). Given what we have already seen about Paul’s sense of his apostolic mission, this should immediately give us pause. Paul’s other letters were written to deal with problems that had arisen among those whom he had converted to faith in Christ. That clearly is not the case here. Why, though, […]
March 13, 2015
Taking the Temperature of the Blog
I would like to take a brief pause to take the temperature of the blog and to get some feedback from you about how you think it’s going. There are some general issues and one specific concern. If you’re not interested in responding to the general questions, please do skip to the end, to the specific concern, and weigh in with your opinion. FIRST, THE GENERAL ISSUES. The blog continues to grow and to raise significant money for charity – which, as you know, is its raison d’être. Of course I enjoy communicating information, knowledge, views, theories, opinions, and perspectives on early Christianity – from the historical Jesus to the writings of Paul to the early Gospels to the formation of the New Testament canon to the surviving manuscripts to the early Christian apocrypha to, well, to on and on and on. And for users of the blog, *this* is the ultimate point. I blog, you pay, we donate, and everyone’s happy. But that happiness is rooted in how well the communication is going. And […]
March 14, 2015
Quickly on the Blog
This won’t be full post, as I’m taking the day off. But I did want to thank everyone who responded to my question about how the blog was going. If you haven’t responded yet, feel free to do so! I do want to hear from you. There were two comments that have recurred repeatedly that I want to deal with. Lots of people have expressed a wish that there was a search function for the blog. And, well, there is! If you’ll go the upper right side of your screen on any post, you’ll see a magnifying glass. Click that. You can search for anything you like. Others have said that they would like a topical catalogue of posts. There is a *rough* one that is indeed always available, as you’ll see by going to the Member Landing Page or by clicking on Latest Posts. Topics are broad: Greco-Roman Religions; New Testament Gospels; Paul and Pauline Letters; etc. If you are interested in a different, more specific topic, just search for […]
March 15, 2015
The Lost Q Source
I can now return to my thread dealing with a question asked by a reader: if I could choose, which of the lost books from Christian antiquity would I want to be discovered? My first and immediate answer was: the lost letters of Paul. My second answer is what I will deal with here. I would love – we would all love – to have a discovery of Q. Many readers of the blog will know all about Q. Many will know something about Q. Many will have never heard of Q. So here’s the deal. Scholars since the 19th century have worked out the relationship of the Synoptic Gospels with one another. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called “synoptic” because they tell many of the same stories, often in the same sequence, and sometimes in exactly the same words. Synoptic means “seen together.” You can “see” these Gospels “together” by laying them side by side and noting their abundant similarities (and differences). But the only way they could have such extensive similarities (especially the […]
March 16, 2015
Evidence that the Synoptics Are Copying (one another? other sources?)
In yesterday’s post, when talking about the one-time existence of Q, I indicated that scholars have long recognized that there must be some kind of literary relationship among Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the Synoptic Gospels, since they have so many similarities: they tell many of the same stories, often in the same sequence, and sometimes – lots of times – in the very same words. That is to say, someone must be copying someone else, or they are all using the same written sources. Some of my students have trouble seeing that if two documents are word-for-word the same, one must be copying the other (or they both are copying a third source). Older adults don’t seem to have any problem seeing that, right off the bat. But younger adults need to be convinced. And so I do a little experiment with them that more or less proves it. I do this every year in my New Testament class, which normally has 200-300 students in it. I come to class a minute or two late […]
Tags: luke, Mark, Markan Priority, matthew, synoptic gospels
March 17, 2015
Q and The Gospel of Thomas
Before I move on to discuss other lost books from early Christianity that I would love to have discovered (I know, this thread could go on forever, since I would like *every* early Christian writing to be discovered) I need to answer a couple of queries that I have received about the Q source. First, several people have asked me whether it is possible that the Q source is actually what we now call the Gospel of Thomas, one of the books discovered among the so-called Nag Hammadi Library in 1945. I don’t want to go into great depth about the Gospel of Thomas here since, well, it has been discovered and this thread is about book s that have *not* been discovered. But I do need to say some basics about Thomas and its relation to Q. By way of background, let me say something a bit more about the Q-hypothesis. When 19th century German scholars established with a reasonable level of certainty that Mark was the first Gospel written and that Matthew and […]
Tags: Gospel of Thomas, Q
March 18, 2015
Did Matthew Copy Luke or Luke Matthew?
In this thread, which is supposed to be on the lost writings of early Christianity that I would most like to have discovered, I can’t seem to get away from Q, Several readers have asked a pointed question about Q. If you recall, Q is the hypothetical document that contained principally sayings of Jesus, that was evidently used by Matthew and Luke (but not by Mark) in constructing their Gospels. The logic is that if Matthew and Luke both used Mark (which the vast majority of scholars agree about), then one has to explain why they have so many other materials (mainly sayings) in common not *found* in Mark. I have pointed out that Matthew does not seem to have gotten those sayings from Luke or Luke from Matthew, and so they both most have gotten them from some other one-time-existing source. That is what we call Q (for the German word Quelle: Source). But some readers have asked WHY it is unlikely that Matthew got these sayings from Luke or Luke from Matthew. It’s […]
March 19, 2015