luke Archives - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Why It Didn’t Happen that Way. The Stories of Jesus’ Birth

In the previous post I began to discuss (as a review for many readers of the blog) the historical problems with the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke. The point of the discussion is that the stories cannot be accepted as historically accurate. This is a huge issue mainly for fundamentalist Christians and conservative evangelicals – and those they have managed to persuade that if a story does not describe what actually happened, then it is worthless and should simply be thrown out. For others – whether theologians, pastors, parishioners, or simply lay-folk interested in Christianity – the stories are important for other reasons, for example in the ideas they are trying to convey. In any event, here is the second post dealing with the historical problems that arise when you compare the two accounts to one another. ***************************************************** It may be possible to reconcile these accounts if you work hard enough at it. I suppose you’d have to say that after Joseph and Mary returned to Nazareth, as in Luke, they decided to move [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:15:17-04:00June 2nd, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

Another “True” Story that Didn’t Happen? Jesus’ Birth in Luke

I have been trying to illustrate the point that critical scholars who remain Christian have long made, that there can be stories in the Bible that are not historically accurate but that are trying to convey larger theological truths. My first illustration had to do with the death of Jesus; in this post and the next, I will deal with the birth of Jesus. This is a topic I’ve dealt with several times over the years on the blog; but it’s worth covering it again! I’ve drawn this discussion, again, from my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. ***************************************************** “True” Stories that Didn’t Happen (at least as narrated): Jesus’ Birth in Luke We may take an example from the familiar stories at the beginning of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. These are the only Gospels that narrate the events of Jesus’ birth (in both Mark and John, Jesus makes his first appearance as an adult). What is striking – and what most readers have never noticed – is that the two accounts [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:15:26-04:00June 1st, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

Evaluating My Debate on the Book of Acts

I have now completed my posts on the debate I had with myself in front of my New Testament class on the question of whether the New Testament book of Acts is historically reliable. If you want to see the whole debate, just read the posts in sequence: the affirmative speech arguing Acts is indeed reliable; the negative speech arguing that it is not; the negative rebuttal of what the affirmative side said; and finally the affirmative rebuttal of what the negative side said. In class I delivered the speeches one after the other. When “affirmative” I was wearing a sport coat, but no cap; when “negative” I was wearing a baseball cap but no sport coat – just so students would realize that it was a “different” speaker speaking. I have pointed out on the blog before that even though I do a lot of public debates, I often find them more than a little frustrating and frequently (in fact, almost always) ask myself, in the course of the debate, why I’m doing this [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:20:46-04:00April 6th, 2016|Acts of the Apostles, Bart's Debates, Public Forum|

Is Acts Historically Reliable? The Affirmative Rebuttal

I have been (intermittently) discussing the debate that I had with myself in front of my New Testament class on the resolution, Resolved: The Book of Acts is Historically Reliable. So far I have indicated what the Affirmative side argued in favor of the resolution; what the Negative side argued against the resolution; and what the Negative side said in its rebuttal to the first Affirmative speech. NOW, at last, I can indicate what the Affirmative side said in its rebuttal to the two Negative speeches. Recall: in this post I’m not indicating what I really thing; I’m indicating what I would argue if this were the side I was required to argue (and what I did argue in class that day). Here it is: ******************************************************** Despite what the negative side has maintained, we remain convinced that the New Testament book of Acts is historically reliable. The first point to stress is that it is of utmost importance that we not impose modern standards of historical accuracy on an ancient text. Of course the author [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:19:26-04:00April 5th, 2016|Acts of the Apostles, Bart's Debates, Paul and His Letters|

Is Acts Reliable? The Negative Rebuttal

What follows is the “negative rebuttal” of the speech given by the “first affirmative” in its support of the resolution, “Resolved: The Book of Acts is Historically Reliable.” If you need to refresh yourself on what the affirmative team argued, you can find it on the March 24 post, here: https://ehrmanblog.org/is-acts-historically-reliable-affirmative-argument/ In the first negative speech (yesterday’s post) the negative team argued its case, without direct reference to the affirmative side. This, now, is the negative response to what the affirmative said (the next post in the thread will be the affirmative rebuttal to the negative side) (recall: this was a debate I staged with myself in front of my New Testament class earlier this semester. I didn't read this speech: I winged it. But this is the essence of what I argued, on the negative side against the affirmative) *************************************************************** If you choose to go point by point through the affirmative team’s case that the book of Acts is historically reliable, you will find that they have advanced their views on very thin grounds. [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:19:01-04:00March 31st, 2016|Acts of the Apostles, Bart's Debates, Public Forum|

Is the Book of Acts Historically Reliable? The Negative Case.

This post will lay out the Negative case, arguing against the resolution, Resolved: The Book of Acts if Historically Reliable. Again, I am not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing with this argument; I’m giving it as I would in a debate. ********************************************************** The New Testament book of Acts is not historically reliable. Before showing that to be the case, I want to make two preliminary remarks, both of them related to the question of what it means for an ostensibly historical account (a narrative of what allegedly happened in the past) to be reliable. First, when readers today want to know whether the book of Acts is reliable, they mean that they want to know whether the events that it narrates actually happened in the way it describes. Or not. Readers are not primarily interested in knowing if he wrote his account the way other authors in his day would have done. They are mainly interested in knowing whether his narrative happened the way he says it did. Second, it is indeed important to know whether [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:18:23-04:00March 30th, 2016|Acts of the Apostles, Bart's Debates, Public Forum|

Is the Book of Acts Historically Reliable? Smoke and Mirrors.

In my next post I will be staking stake out the “negative” side on the debate I had with myself in class, arguing against the resolution, Resolved: The Book of Acts is Historically Reliable. I have already made the affirmative case; in the negative I will argue that the book is not reliable (that first speech was a set speech, prepared without reference to anything the affirmative side said). I will then give a negative refutation of the affirmative’s first speech, and I will end with an affirmative rebuttal of the negative’s two speeches. Before I do all that, however, I need to take a time-out and explain one negative counter-argument that would take too much space if it were simply part of a longer post laying out the negative position. The affirmative side in the debate argued that based on archaeological evidence Luke can be shown to have presented accurately the laws, custom, and geography mentioned or alluded to in the book of Acts: there really was an Areopagus where philosophers gathered, as mentioned [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:17:53-04:00March 29th, 2016|Acts of the Apostles, Bart's Debates, Public Forum|

Is Acts Historically Reliable? The Affirmative Argument

I am ready now to explain how I did the debate with myself in front of my undergraduate class on the resolution, Resolved: The Book of Acts is Historically Reliable. As always happens in a debate, the Affirmative side goes first and gives a prepared speech. In arguing for the affirmative, I made the following points. (Note: I’m not saying I personally agree with these points, just as I’m not going to be saying that I agreed with the Negative points. I’m simply making the best case I can for both positions.) THE REST OF THIS POST IS FOR MEMBERS ONLY. If you don't belong yet, JOIN! The Book of Acts is Historically Reliable, as can be seen by considering three major points First, the author of the book of Acts explicitly tells us that he was concerned and committed to present a historically accurate account of the history of the early church. The author of Acts, of course, was the author of the Gospel of Luke, and the preface to Luke served as [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:17:32-04:00March 24th, 2016|Acts of the Apostles, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Jesus’ Virgin Birth in Mark (Reader’s Mailbag February 26, 2016)

It is time for the weekly Readers’ Mailbag. This week I will be dealing with only one question, one that I find particularly intriguing. If you have any questions you would like me to answer, either in a comment or in the mailbag, let me know. I can’t answer every question I get, either because I don’t know the answers (often enough!) or because I can’t get to them all. But I take them all seriously and will do my best to get to yours! ******************************************************* QUESTION: I've read of one NT scholar who is critical of your reasoning in How Jesus Became God. He says that your argument from silence is fallacious. For example, he says that just because the virgin birth is absent in Mark's gospel does not constitute evidence that the writer did not believe in the virgin birth. RESPONSE: Great question. The first and most obvious thing to point out is that there is no way to know what another person believes (either the person who wrote Mark or [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:50:24-04:00February 26th, 2016|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

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 [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:54:33-04:00March 19th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

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 [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:54:50-04:00March 17th, 2015|Canonical Gospels|

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 [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:55:02-04:00March 16th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

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 – [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:57:25-04:00March 9th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

Why Was Jesus Born of a Virgin in Matthew and Luke?

A few days ago I raised the question of why anyone should think that you have to believe in the Virgin Birth in order to be a Christian. The reality is, of course, that many Christians do not believe in it, but recognize that it is a story meant to convey an important theological point – a point that could be true whether or not the story happened – that Jesus was uniquely special in this world, not like us other humans, but in some sense the unique Son of God. Just as the moral of a fairy tale is valid (or not) independent of whether the tale happened, so too with stories like this in the Gospels, whether you choose to call them myths (in a non-derogatory sense), legends, tales, or simply “stories intending to convey a theological truth.” It is interesting, and not often noted, that Matthew and Luke – the two Gospels (in fact, the two NT books altogether) that recount the story of the Virgin Birth – do so for different [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-09T16:07:12-05:00December 24th, 2014|Canonical Gospels|

Similarities and Differences: The Synoptic Problem

In yesterday’s post I mentioned my New Testament class, and that one of the main lessons I’m trying to convey in it is that each of the Gospels has to be read for what *it* has to say. This requires the reader to bracket information that is conveyed in some other Gospel (or that they’ve heard before elsewhere), to see what the meaning of this particular text is. That shouldn’t be such a hard idea to grasp. If I write a book about Jesus, I don’t expect or want my readers to read my book in light of what some other author said (say, Reza Aslan or Bill O’Reilly), interpreting my views in light of the other person’s views, as if my views, as I state them, are not enough or sufficient. And yet people regularly read the Gospels as if Mark must mean the same thing that John does, or that this passage in Matthew makes best sense in light of that other passage in Luke, and so on. We don’t do that [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-25T12:36:43-05:00February 11th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Teaching Christianity|

Who Wrote Luke and Acts?

In this thread I have been discussing whether Luke, the gentile physician, the traveling companion of Paul, wrote the Third Gospel. The first point I’ve made, over a couple of posts, is that the idea that Paul *had* a gentile physician as a traveling companion is dubious. That notion is derived from the mention of Luke in the book of Colossians, but Paul almost certainly did not *write* Colossians. Paul does mention a companion named Luke in the book of Philemon, but he does not say anything at all about him (not, for example, that he was a gentile or that he was a physician). Still, one could argue – and many have! – that whatever his name, it was a companion of Paul who wrote the books of Luke and Acts. The main argument in favor of that thesis – with which I heartily disagree – is the presence of the “we-passages” in Acts, that I mentioned previously. My view is that these passages do NOT demonstrate that the author was Paul’s traveling companion. [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:37:48-04:00September 3rd, 2013|Acts of the Apostles, Canonical Gospels, Reflections and Ruminations|