Search
Advanced search
Was Paul a Misogynist?
Now I can consider whether Paul himself actually wrote 1 Cor 14:34-35 — a passage that tells women they are not allowed to speak in church — or if it was, instead, inserted into his letter by someone else later. It’s an important issue: if Paul did write the passage, and if he also wrote 1 Timothy (widely thought to be written by someone else *claiming* to be Paul) then by modern standards, at least, he would not be considered to have a, well, liberated view of women. I begin with a paragraph that ended my post two days ago, to set the context for the rest of what I have to say: *********************************************************************** Paul’s attitude toward women in the church may strike you as inconsistent, or at least as ambivalent. Women could participate in his churches as ministers, prophets, and even apostles, but they were to maintain their social status as women and not appear to be like men. This apparent ambivalence led to a very interesting historical result. When the dispute over the […]
January 18, 2018
Illuminating Exercises: The Position Paper Assignments for My NT Greek Class
Classes started last week, and for the first time in roughly forever I’m teaching a new course. I posted the syllabus for my course on the Greek New Testament last week. Here are the instructions I give the students for writing their weekly position papers. These are exercises you too might be interested in – they are easily done, but highly illuminating. Or at least they are meant to be. Some of them (such as the first) make best sense in the context off a class discussion, where I can point out things that some readers wouldn’t pick up on; others (such as the second and third) are pretty self-explanatory. The final two involve “collations” of manuscripts. That involves taking a portion of a Greek manuscript (ancient hand-written copy) and comparing it word for word, letter for letter, with a modern printed Greek edition of the same passage, in order to note each and every difference, in order to see how alike they are. That’s the first step to establishing the differences among our surviving […]
January 20, 2018
Pontius Pilate: A Sensitive Guy….
QUESTION: Could Pilate have conceded over burial rights also? Granted this may not extend to those accused of treason, but as Pilate did permit some local customs, does this not open up sufficient space for Josephus’ claim over burial rights to be taken seriously? RESPONSE: This question arose a couple of weeks ago after I had returned briefly to an older conversation about whether Jesus would have been buried on the afternoon he was crucified. I tried to show that if so, this would have been in clear violation of policy and precedent. Part of the entire punishment for capital offenses — especially crimes against the state (e.g., claiming to be a ruler of a people ruled instead by Rome) — was to be left *on* the cross for days, as a public display, and a humiliation and denigration: bodies were left subject to the elements, the scavengers, and natural decay. The Romans wanted everyone to know that THIS is what happens to those who cross the power of Rome. A number of readers […]
Tags: Craig Evans, Josephus, Pontius Pilate
January 21, 2018
Pilate, Who Never “Learned His Lesson”
This is the second of my two posts from over three years ago that try to show that Pilate almost certainly would not have removed Jesus’ body from the cross on the afternoon of his death simply because not to do so would have been in violation of Jewish sensitivities. (NOTE: Pilate is not said to have done so for the other two who were crucified with Jesus. Are we to think he made an exception in Jesus’ case, since, after all, he was far more important?) To make the best sense of this post it is important to keep in mind what I said in the previous one. In his response to my views of in How Jesus Became God – that Jesus most likely was not given a decent burial on the day of his crucifixion by Joseph of Arimathea – Craig Evans has maintained, among other things, that Pilate was not the kind of governor who would ignore Jewish sensitivities. For Craig, Pilate started his rule by making a big mistake of […]
Tags: Craig Evans, Pontius Pilate
January 22, 2018
Was Jesus Given Special Treatment?
Every now and then on the Blog I get bored with a topic and simply want nothing more to do with it (for a while). For some reason I feel like that about this question of whether Jesus was really buried on the afternoon of his death. It’s an effort to respond even to the comments. But for some reason I can’t seem ever just to let it die (so to speak). Still, this is my last post about the matter for the next 29 years. I think. I just want to make one major point, which probably has relevance to a range of topics we deal with here on the blog. For most of us, if we had to pick one person to name as the Single Most Important and Influential Figure in the history of Western Civilization, it would almost certainly be Jesus. Who else would it be? There are others that people today might choose – Hitler, Constantine, Caesar Augustus, pick your name. But I think it’s pretty obvious that none of […]
January 23, 2018
Is Paul Given Too Much Credit?
Is the apostle Paul given more credit than he deserves by modern scholars? Here is what has (recently) raised the question for me. As many readers of the blog know, the corpus of early Christian writings known as the “Apostolic Fathers” is a collection of ten (or eleven) proto-orthodox authors who were, for the most part, producing their writings just after the New Testament period. For anyone interested I have a two-volume edition / translation of these important texts, The Apostolic Fathers, in the Loeb Classical Library series (Harvard University Press, 2004) (it gives the original Greek on one side of the page and an English translation on the other) (the books are included, only in English, in my anthology After The New Testament). These are fascinating books – they include a number of letters (e.g. by Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp of Smyrna, and one later attributed to Clement of Rome – the last of which was actually written before some of the books of the New Testament), some treatises (e.g., the book of Barnabas), […]
January 24, 2018
Are Paul and Jesus on the Same Page?
In response to my previous post on the importance of Paul, I have had several people ask me about the relationship between the teachings of Jesus and Paul: are they actually representing the same religion? I dealt with that question some years ago on the blog. Here is the first of two posts on the issue. ****************************** I have spent several posts explicating Paul’s understanding of his gospel, that by Christ’s death and resurrection a person is put into a restored relationship with God. He had several ways of explaining how it worked. But in all of these ways, it was Jesus’ death and resurrection that mattered. It was not keeping the Jewish law. It was not knowing or following Jesus’ teaching. It was not Jesus’ miracles. It was not … anything else. It was Jesus’ death and resurrection. I then summarized in my previous post, the teaching of Jesus himself, about the coming Son of Man and the need to prepare by keeping the Law of God, as revealed in the Torah, as summarized […]
January 26, 2018
What Is My Best Book for a General Audience?
I recently received this question for the Mailbag, dealing, roughly, with my own personal feelings about my “best” work. QUESTION: A mailbag question that I am not sure I have read your thoughts on; what do you feel is your best published work for lay people and why? Just curious! RESPONSE: Ah, this is a difficult question to answer. The books you write are kind of like your children: you love each and every one of them with every ounce of your being! And you’re not supposed to have favorites. OK, but people do. So there are three ways I look at this issue. One is, what is the book that is most useful for lay people? Another is: what is the book that most laypeople themselves have found most useful? And yet other is, what do I myself think is my very best book for lay people? I’ll try to answer all three. Before I do, I need to be clear that I’m talking now only about my trade books for a […]
January 28, 2018
Jesus and Paul: Similarities and Differences
In my previous post I raised the question of whether Jesus and Paul represent fundamentally the same religion or not. Here I continue the discussion by pointing out what seem to me to be the main similarities and differences between them, as I spelled it out in a post several years ago: ******************************************************************* I have been talking about the relationship of Jesus’ proclamation of the coming Kingdom of God to Paul’s preaching about the importance of the death and resurrection of Jesus. In the previous post I argued that the fundamental concerns, interests, perspectives, and theologies of these two were different. In this post I’d like to give, in summary fashion, what strikes me as very similar and very different about their two messages. Again, in my view it is way too much to say that Paul is the “Founder of Christianity”: that assumes that he is the one who personally came up with the idea of the importance of the death and resurrection of Jesus for salvation, whereas almost certainly this view had […]
Tags: Gospel of Jesus' Wife, Paul
January 29, 2018
Misquoting Jesus and My Fundamentalist Faith
As I was saying in my previous post, when I decided to write Misquoting Jesus my friends thought I was nuts. Even specialists in the New Testament are not, as a rule, interested in textual criticism, the scholarly endeavor to reconstruct the original Greek text of the New Testament given the fact that we have thousands of manuscripts with hundreds of thousands of minor differences among them, and even some rather major differences. New Testament scholars know *that* much about the manuscripts, but most scholar don’t have a deep knowledge of the situation. That is for one main reason: they find the topic terribly technical and massively boring! So if scholars who have devoted their lives to the study of the New Testament aren’t interested in knowing more about textual criticism, why would lay people who are just lookin’ for something interesting to read on the weekend? Who in the world would want to buy a book about *that*? But I obviously did find it interesting. By this point in my life (I was writing […]
January 30, 2018
Conservative Reactions to Misquoting Jesus
I don’t think I was prepared for the reaction that my book Misquoting Jesus elicited, especially among conservative evangelical Christians. I was suddenly transformed from being a competent scholar with whom others might disagree here or there to being a Major Public Enemy. Conservative scholars said all sorts of bizarre things about me in the wake of the book. My long-time acquaintance and occasional debate opponent, Craig Evans, wrote, in a book, that I had become an agnostic as soon as I realized that there were lots of textual differences among our manuscripts, and he pointed out how absurd that was. It was indeed absurd – but not because this was why I became an agnostic but because Craig assumed (and informed his readers) that it was. My realizing that there are differences among our manuscripts had precisely NOTHING to do with my becoming an agnostic, and Craig should have known that. If he didn’t know it, he could have asked me. But instead he made this outrageous claim to his conservative readers, eager to […]
February 1, 2018
Do the Differences in Our Manuscripts Matter?
The final two arguments that conservative critics of Misquoting Jesus have made, time and time again, are that (a) none of the variations in our manuscripts is particularly significant and (b) at the end of the day, we really do know what the original words of the New Testament were – far better than for any other book from the ancient world. These are two points that my old friend and debate opponent Dan Wallace makes emphatically every time he hears a whiff of my name. On the matter of significance there are a couple of things to be said. The first is that some readers of my book have misunderstood my claims and have thought that I was saying something like “There are manuscripts of the New Testament that get rid of the resurrection!” or “There are manuscripts of the New Testament that deny God exists!” or “There are manuscripts of the New Testament that claim that Jesus was a Zoroastrian!” or some such thing. That’s obviously not at all what I’ve ever said […]
February 2, 2018
Do We KNOW the Original Words of the NT?
A final post on the conservative evangelical critics of my book Misquoting Jesus. One of the most common views they express is that we are virtually certain about what the authors of the New Testament wrote. We have thousands of manuscripts, and are better informed about the text of the New Testament than for any other book from the ancient world. By way of response, to begin with, I completely agree (of course!) that we have thousands of New Testament manuscripts of the New Testament and are better informed about its text than any other book in the ancient world that is absolutely right. (It’s not surprise why we have so many more manuscripts of the NT than for any other ancient book, btw. Who was copying manuscripts in the Middle Ages – whence the vast bulk of our manuscripts derive? Monks in Christian monasteries. What books were Christian monks more inclined to copy — the writings of Sophocles or the writings of Scripture?) My conservative opponents sometimes press the fact that we are well […]
February 5, 2018
Jesus Kissing Mary Magdalene: A Blast From the Past
Now for something *completely* different. Here is a question that was asked and answered almost exactly four years ago, of ongoing intrigue! ****************************************************************** QUESTION: I know that the “Gospel of Philip does not have much if any real historical veracity to it about Jesus’ life, but does the references about Jesus and Mary Magdalene being lovers and the holes in the papyrus ‘kissing’ verse (verses 32 and 55 in your “Lost Scriptures” book), help support the view that this most likely Gnostic Christian sect truly believed and taught that Jesus and Mary M were married? RESPONSE: Yes, this is one of those questions I get asked about on occasion. I have a reasonably full discussion of the relevant issues in my book Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene. In the book I put the discussion in the context of – yes, you guessed it — Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, the one source many people turn to for the Gospel of Philip. (!) Here’s what I say there: ************************************************************** Some of the historical claims about the […]
Tags: Da Vinci Code, mary magdalene
February 6, 2018
Small Differences that Make a Difference
Here is something different on the significance of textual variants for understanding the Greek New Testament. Most of the hundreds of thousands of variations are completely insignificant in the big overall scheme of things (e.g., misspelled words and slips of the pen); others involve enormous differences that matter a lot (the story of the woman taken in adultery). Lots of others are between the two, small differences that are interesting for how they might change the meaning of a passage slightly but possibly significantly. This semester I’m teaching an intermediate Greek class for the Classics Department with some exceptionally bright undergraduates who are already proficient in the ancient language. Yesterday we in class we translated the birth narrative of Luke 2, and I realized anew how a slight change can be important. Among the changes attested in our manuscripts is one whose significance had never registered with me. Luke 2:1-5 indicate that Caesar Augustus send out a decree for “the entire world” to be enrolled, and that Joseph needed to enroll in the town of […]
February 7, 2018
How Was Jesus *Really* Born? The Proto-Gospel of James
In my last post I mentioned the Proto-Gospel of James in relation to a textual variant (in Luke) that indicates that Mary gave birth not *in* Bethlehem but *en route* there. That made me think it would be a good time to say something about what else is in this intriguing book. You can find my recent translation of it in the collection of non-canonical Gospels that I edited, translated, and introduced with my colleague Zlatko Plese, called The Other Gospels. Here is what I said about the Proto-Gospel many years ago now on the blog, with an excerpt from the translation of one of the most amazing sections, to whet your appetite. ********************************************************************************************* In my graduate course last week, we analyzed the Proto-Gospel of James (which scholars call the Protevangelium Jacobi — a Latin phrase that means “Proto-Gospel of James,” but sounds much cooler….). It is called the “proto” Gospel because it records events that (allegedly) took place before the accounts of the NT Gospels. Its overarching focus is on Mary, the mother […]
Tags: Proto-gospel of James
February 9, 2018
Beginning the Triumph of Christianity
I’m in Washington D.C., where I just now gave my first “book talk,” a reading from part of my new book The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World, at the wonderful bookstore, “Politics and Prose.” The book is officially published on Tuesday! And for those interested, this is how I begin the Preface, on a personal note before getting to the matter at hand. *************************************************** In my junior year of college I took a course in English literature that made me understand for the first time how painful it can be to question your faith. The course introduced me to poets of the nineteenth century who were struggling with religion. Even though I was a deeply committed Christian at the time, I became obsessed with the work of the great Victorian poet of doubt, Matthew Arnold. Nowhere is Arnold’s struggle expressed more succinctly and movingly than in that most famous of nineteenth-century poems, Dover Beach. The poem recalls a brief moment from Arnold’s honeymoon in 1851. While standing by an open […]
February 11, 2018
The Conversion of Constantine
My book comes out tomorrow and I’m very excited! Here is a foretaste of what is in it. This is how I begin Chapter 1, which focuses on the conversion of Constantine. ***************************************************** Few events in the history of civilization have proved more transformative than the conversion of the emperor Constantine to Christianity in the year 312 CE. Later historians would sometimes question whether the conversion was genuine. But to Constantine himself and to spiritual advisors close to him, there appears to have been no doubt. He had shifted from one set of religious beliefs and practices to another. At one point in his life he was a polytheist who worshiped a variety of pagan gods — gods of his hometown Naissus in the Balkans, gods of his family, gods connected with the armies he served, and the gods of Rome itself. At another point he was a monotheist, worshiping the Christian God alone. His change may not have been sudden and immediate. It may have involved a longer set of transitions than he later […]
February 12, 2018
Being Blindstruck by Triumph
O frabjous day, callouh, callay. My book was published, just today! The Triumph of Christianity was, in some senses, many years in the making. Here is how I talk about how the idea for it first blindsided me, two decades ago. ************************************************************* The idea for this book struck me twenty years ago during my first trip to Athens. I was keen to explore the archaeological wonders of the city, and most especially the Agora and the Acropolis. The Agora was the ancient center of the city and is still filled with monumental buildings: the old Athenian meeting place called the Metroon; the impressively reconstructed Southern Stoa with its rooms, shops, and areas for people to mingle; and a number of ruined sacred sites – including the single best preserved Greek temple to come down to us from antiquity, one dedicated to the Greek god Hephaestus, god of volcanos, fire, and metal working. Constructed from 449 BCE- 415 BCE during the glory days of Athens, it is a large and imposing structure in the […]
February 13, 2018
A Welcome Review of The Triumph of Christianity
It is every author’s dream to have a book reviewed in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. I’ve never had that happen before. Until now. This Sunday The Triumph of Christianity will be reviewed by Tom Bissell, whose writings some of you may know. Most reviews in the NYT bring out both the outstanding features and the shortcomings of the book under consideration. A damning review can be devastating. Rarely is a review all praise. I would say this one is extremely generous and exceedingly gratifying, written by a knowledgeable scholar who “got” the book. You can see it here, with graphics: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/books/review/bart-d-ehrman-the-triumph-of-christianity.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbook-review&action=click&contentCollection=review®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=6&pgtype=sectionfront But here is the text of the review itself: ************************************************************** THE TRIUMPH OF CHRISTIANITY How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World By Bart D. Ehrman 335 pp. Simon & Schuster. $28. “I used to believe absolutely everything that Bill just presented,” the scholar Bart D. Ehrman once said during a 2006 debate with the conservative theologian William Lane Craig. “He and I went to the same evangelical Christian college, Wheaton, where these things are taught. … […]
February 15, 2018