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What Are Orthodoxy and Heresy?


In my previous post I began to explain what I meant by the title of my 1993 book, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.   One of the terms of the title is non-problematic:  by “Scripture” I meant specifically the writings of the New Testament.  Another term, “corruption,” is a bit trickier, and as  I indicated I was using it both in a technical sense to refer to any kind of alteration of a text by a scribe who was copying it (that is what textual critics have traditionally called any change of the text, since for them the most important thing was the “original” text as written by the author) and in an ironic sense because I wanted to talk about changes of the text away from, rather than toward, a possible heretical meaning. And that takes me to the other two terms of importance, “orthodoxy” and “heresy.” These are two much debated terms, and part of the issue has to do with their literal or etymological meaning.   In terms of etymology, the word “orthodoxy” comes […]

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July 2, 2015

A Radically Different View of Orthodoxy and Heresy


In my last post I started discussing the terms “orthodoxy” and “heresy,” pointing out that their traditional/etymological meanings are not very helpful for historians.   “Orthodoxy” literally means the “right belief” about God, Christ, the world and so.   That means it is a theological term about religious truth.   But historians are not theologians who can tell you what is theologically true; they are scholars who try to establish what happened in the past.  And so how can a historian, acting as a historian, say that one group of believers is right and that another is wrong? The problem with the two terms came to particular expression in a book written in 1934 by a German scholar named Walter Bauer.  The book was auf Deutsch, but its English title is Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity.   For my money, this was the most important book on early Christianity written in the 20th century.   It completely revolutionized how we are to understand the theological controversies that were wracking the Christian church in its early years. If you recall, […]

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July 3, 2015

Evaluating the Views of Walter Bauer


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 only known particularly in Rome.   Once this Roman form of Christianity had more or less swept aside its […]

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July 4, 2015

How Diverse Was Early Christianity?


In order to get to the question of what motivated my book The Orthdox Corruption of Scripture, and to explain more fully what the book was about, 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.   Several readers have asked where we now stand on the issue, some 80years 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 …. THE REST OF THIS POST IS FOR MEMBERS ONLY.  If you don’t belong yet, […]

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July 6, 2015

Doesn’t the New Testament Show that Christianity Was Originally Unified?


In my discussions so far of orthodoxy and heresy in early Christianity I have been talking about Walter Bauer and his classic work, which argued that as far back as we can trace the Christian movement in numerous regions of Christendom, we find forms of the Christian faith that were later deemed heretical.   “Heresy” is not necessarily, therefore, a later corruption of the orthodox truth.  In some places it was the “original” form of the religion. Some readers have objected that it doesn’t make sense to start with the second century evidence in order to say what Christianity was originally like, since Christianity originated long before all that, in the first century. I think that’s absolutely right.   And so the question is what the first century evidence – that is, the writings of the New Testament – can tell us. Let me stress a point I have already made, that … THE REST OF THIS POST IS FOR MEMBERS ONLY.  If you don’t belong yet, JOIN UP!!  It doesn’t cost much, and every penny goes […]

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July 7, 2015

Taming the Diversity of the New Testament


In my previous post I started to show why it is difficult to use the New Testament itself as 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. It is true that the NT is the earliest set of Christian writings that we have, and that most of the books can probably be dated to the first Christian century.  We don’t have any other books (well, virtually any other books) this early (I don’t think the Gospel of Thomas can date to the first century; the one exception to the rule would probably be 1 Clement, which is usually dated to the mid 90s CE, and which is, indeed, a proto-orthodox writing). The two problems I’ve isolated with using the NT to demonstrate early Christian unity are that:  1) The reason we have these books and no others from the time is that these are the books that later orthodox church fathers deemed scripture and worked to […]

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July 8, 2015

A Milestone on the Blog


I am happy to announce a milestone in the life of the blog. As everyone who has been on the blog for any length of time has heard me say ad nauseum, the principal reason I started the blog, and continue to do it, is not – is decidedly not – because I feel constantly driven to post my views about the intellectual matters that are important to me:  the historical Jesus, the writings of Paul, the formation of the New Testament, the early Christian apocrypha, the Apostolic Fathers, the history of early Christianity, the manuscript tradition of the early Christian writings, etc. etc.   I started the blog, instead, as a way of raising money.   And I continue to do it in order to raise money. I don’t mean to sound crass about it, but if it wasn’t for the money, I wouldn’t do it.  There’s no way on God’s Green Earth I would do it.   I continue to post 5-6 times a week, almost always around 1000 words per post.   That takes about an […]

July 11, 2015

Orthodoxy and Heresy in the New Testament Itself


I am now getting back to the question of early Christian diversity – all in the context of setting up the answer to the question I got about what I had in mind when I decided to write my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.   I have been discussing the views of Walter Bauer, in his classic work, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, who maintained that from the earliest of times, so far as we can tell from our surviving records, Christianity was not a single unitary thing with one set of doctrines that everyone believed (orthodoxy), except for occasional groups that sprang up as followers of false teachers who corrupted that truth they had inherited (heresies).  Instead, as far back as we can trace the history of theology, Christianity was always a widely disparate collection of various beliefs (and practices).  In the struggle for converts, one form of the Christian faith ended up becoming dominant.  When it did so, it declared itself orthodox and all other forms of the faith heretical; and then […]

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July 12, 2015

Earliest Christian Diversity


In keeping with the current topic of the diversity of early Christianity, I thought I could say something about a book that I just read that I 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 ways differently from most of us who are text-people; and she […]

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July 13, 2015

Orthodoxy and Proto-Orthodoxy


Orthodoxy and Proto-Orthodoxy – the current thread on the diversity of early Christianity actually began as a response to a question raised by a reader, which was the following: Dr. Ehrman, I do not know if others would find this interesting, but I would love to know how you developed the idea for The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. How did you go about researching it? How long did it take? Is it a once-in-a-lifetime work? My initial thought was that I would be able to answer the question in roughly five or six posts.   But here it is, two weeks later, and I haven’t even started to answer it because it has taken this long to describe what I mean by the term “orthodox.”   And I haven’t finished doing even that!  But I hope to do so with this post. Orthodoxy and Proto Orthodoxy – Right Belief vs False Belief To this point I have tried to explain why so many scholars for the past 80 years or so have been convinced that we cannot […]

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July 14, 2015

What Is Textual Criticism?


In discussing the background to my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture I have so far been talking about the issue of early Christian diversity, so as to explain what the term “orthodox” in the title means.  I now want to turn more fully to a discussion of the term “corruption,” and to do that I need to provide some basics about the general field of inquiry that the book is devoted to, the textual criticism of the New Testament. The first thing to emphasize is that the term “textual criticism” is a technical term with a very specific meaning.  Lay people often misuse the term, not knowing that it refers to a particular and highly specialized field of study.   The term does *not* simply mean “the study of texts” or “literary analysis of texts” or anything similar.   Thus, if someone is engaged, for example, in the interpretation of a text, that is *not* “textual criticism.” Instead, textual criticism is the discipline that seeks to reconstruct the text that an author wrote when we no […]

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July 15, 2015

Google Cambridge Lecture on Forged


On April 7, 2011, I visited the Google Cambridge l in Cambridge, MA to discuss my book Forged. In my talk I explain how ancient writers sometimes falsely claimed to be a famous person in order to encourage people to read their books.   This practice of “literary forgery” was relatively common in the ancient world, but it was also widely condemned.  In my book I focus on instances of this practice in early Christianity — some of them appearing within the New Testament. Please adjust gear icon for high-definition.

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July 19, 2015

New Testament Manuscripts: Good News and Bad News


In my previous post I started talking about the different kinds of manuscripts of the New Testament we have, as a prelude to my discussion of my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.  I now want to say something further about these manuscripts and how they can help us reconstruct what the authors of the NT originally wrote (and why they pose problems for us to that end). Below is what I say about the matter in my textbook on the New Testament, in the new sixth edition that has just appeared. **************************************************** When trying to reconstruct what the authors of the New Testament actually wrote, based on the surviving copies, we have both good news and bad news. The good news: We have more manuscripts for the New Testament than for any other book from the ancient world—many, many more manuscripts than we have for the writings of Homer, Plato, Cicero, or any other important author. We have something like 5,700 manuscripts of the New Testament—from small fragments of tiny parts of a single […]

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July 18, 2015

The Versional Evidence for the New Testament


When scholars try to establish what an ancient author wrote, they can do so only on the basis of the surviving evidence.  That seems, well, rather obvious, but the reality is that most people have never thought about that.   It just seems that if you pick up a copy of Plato, or Euripides, or Cicero, that you’re simply reading what they wrote.  But it’s not that simple.  In none of these cases, or in any other case for any other book from the ancient world, do we actually have the person’s actual writing.  All we have are later copies, and invariably these copies are filled with scribal mistakes.  Scholars who are “textual critics” try to reconstruct the text that the author produced, to the best of their ability. I have been talking about the challenges of doing that with the New Testament.  In many, many ways we are much better situated with the New Testament than with any other ancient book (or set of books) from the ancient world.  We have WAY more evidence – […]

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July 20, 2015

Patristic Evidence for the New Testament


Yesterday I discussed very briefly the benefits and difficulties of versional evidence for establishing the text of the New Testament.   As it turns out, it is a very big and complex issue, or rather sets of issues.   There are large and difficult books written on very small aspects of the versions.   One, still authoritative, treatment of the whole shooting match, with extensive bibliography (which is now, of course, out of date), is one of the magna opera of my mentor, Bruce Metzger, The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origin, Transmission, and Limitations (1977).   It’s a great book, arguably his most impressive. In this post I would like, to move into a very brief discussion of one other area of evidence for the text of the New Testament, the Patristic sources.   The term “patristic” stands for “fathers” (Latin: patres) of the church – that is, the early church authors who quoted the books of the New Testament in the course of their writings.  This too is an exceedingly thorny area of scholarly investigation, and […]

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July 21, 2015

How Did Scribes Change Their Manuscripts?


As I have indicated in my recent posts, we have far more copies of the NT than of any other book from antiquity –and as a result, far more differences among our copies (i.e. more mistakes).  In addition. we have ancient translations of the NT (the early “versions”) and quotations of the NT in the writings of church fathers.  These also provide further pieces of evidence – as well as further variations in wording. As a result, it is a very complicated business trying to establish what the authors of the NT originally wrote.  Scholars continue to debate the precise wording of this that or the other verse. In some cases we simply will never know. Two points are critically important when considering all these differences.  The first is one that I always state, even though my evangelical debate opponents frequently pretend that I never say it at all.  But, in fact, I always say it: the vast majority of these (hundreds of thousands!) of differences are insignificant, immaterial, and don’t matter for thing other […]

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November 9, 2022

Accidental Scribal Changes


As I stressed in my most recent post, the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of differences among out surviving manuscripts (and versions, and patristic citations) are of very little or no importance in trying to establish what the authors of the NT originally wrote.   There are others that matter, and matter a lot.  Those tend to be the ones that are the most interesting.   But there are many, many more differences that are easy to detect and of no real significance. Most of these differences appear simply to be accidental mistakes.  We can never be absolutely certain, of course, if a change was made by accident or not.   But in a huge majority of cases, there seems to be little reason to doubt it. The *reasons* mistakes were made are not hard to detect, but are nonetheless  hugely interesting for a reason I will explain in my next post.  The reality is that scribes were human beings and they made mistakes.   Of course, in theory, they didn’t *have* to make mistakes.   Throughout the […]

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July 24, 2015

The Significance of an Astounding New Discovery


Those of you who follow the news have heard that a truly great manuscript discovery has been made public this week, coming out of the University of Birmingham, England.   The university has a very important collection of manuscripts, and for New Testament scholars it is famous for its Institute devoted to the study, analysis, and editing of Gospel manuscripts, an institute headed by my long-time friend and colleague David Parker, indisputably one of the top NT textual scholars in the world. But the discovery that has been made is not connected to the New Testament.  It is connected to the Qur’an.  Since 1932 the university has had, among its collected works, a virtually full two page fragment of the Qur’an.   Recently they decided to see if they could come up with a (relatively) precise date for these pages.   And so they had a carbon-14 dating done.   The results are nothing less than astounding.  See, e.g., http://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/23/opinions/quran-manuscript-analysis/index.html Let me say that carbon-14 dating is indeed a science, but it’s not a highly exact science.  It dates […]

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July 25, 2015

More on the Discovery of Ancient Qur’an Fragments


My post on Saturday about the discovery of two pages of the Qur’an in the library of the University of Birmingham that appear to date from the time of Mohammed himself. or a decade or so later, evoked more than the usual response.   My facebook post has received nearly 260,000 hits.   I think before that my previous highest hit total was 25,000 or so.   Amazing amount of interest in this. And so I’m going to do something I’ve never done before on the 3+ years of the blog:  I’m going to post several comments that I have received (on the assumption that many people reading the blog do not read all the comments and my responses to them) (if I’m completely wrong about that, I’d like to know) (though I’m not sure how I could ever get enough responses to see that I’m *completely* wrong.  🙂 )    will say something  about each one – the first two are typical of several that I’ve gotten.  The last two are hard-hitting and particularly informative.   (I will not […]

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July 27, 2015