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More Intriguing Problems with 1 Thessalonians 2:7

The textual problem of 1 Thess 2:7, as I have started to outline it, is an unusually interesting one for textual critics, since the arguments for one reading or another seem to cancel each other out so neatly. It is a difference of only one letter. Did Paul remind the Thessalonians that when he and his missionary colleagues were with them they became like “infants” among them rather than great, powerful, and demanding apostles? Or did he say they became “gentle” among them? Now, you might be saying: Who Cares? Well, it does matter to New Testament interpreters. It may not matter like having a passage that determines a major doctrine (Who was Christ? Was his death an atoning sacrifice? Is there a trinity?). But there are lots of things that matter that are not major doctrines. Any scholar of the New Testament wants to know the basic gist of each book of the New Testament; and its major themes and ideas; and the meaning of each of its passages; and the meaning of each [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:25:09-04:00August 11th, 2015|Paul and His Letters|

The Textual Problem of 1 Thessalonians 2:7

Now that I have discussed the purpose of 1 Thessalonians and spent a couple of posts talking about one of its most interesting passages, on which the modern Christian notion of a “rapture” is based, I am able to return to my point of departure, a textual variant found in 1 Thess. 2:7. This variant has nothing to do with the question of what Paul thought would happen when Jesus returned, sometime in his lifetime. It is an earlier part of the letter where Paul is reminding the Thessalonians of the time that he had spent with them when he converted them to their new faith. This is a very joyful part of the letter, one of the most sentimental passages of all of Paul’s letters, where he speaks of the relationship he had with his converts when he was there. But the description is a bit hard to pin down, in part because of this one textual variant. The variant depends on the presence or non-presence of just one letter of the alphabet. Some [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:25:24-04:00August 10th, 2015|Paul and His Letters|

The Myth of the Rapture: Calling a Spade a Spade

I am sometimes torn between wanting to be sensitive to people’s deeply rooted religious convictions and calling a spade a spade. think many readers would be surprised (and dubious) that have this sensitivity, since I’m often blasted precisely for trouncing people’s religious beliefs. But that’s almost never my intention. The one exception is when it comes to fundamentalism. I have no qualms about attacking Christian fundamentalist thinking head-on. But even then try to be sensitive to the people holding onto this kind of thinking, and I try to engage it with reason and evidence rather than with ridicule. But there are times when it is worthwhile calling a spade a spade, and sometimes we ought to just do that. I’ve been thinking about the passage summarized in the post yesterday from 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, the passage from which the fundamentalist view of the “rapture” principally comes from. Jesus returns on the clouds of heaven, the dead in Christ rise first, and then those who are alive who are his followers are snatched up into the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:27:13-04:00August 8th, 2015|Paul and His Letters, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Return of Jesus (Rapture?) in 1 Thessalonians

Since I’ve started talking about Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, the earliest Christian writing of any kind that we have, in preparation for discussion one tiny little textual variant in 1 Thess. 2:7,which involves only the presence or absence of a single letter in a single word, but on which the meaning of the passage hinges, I can’t let the opportunity pass without saying something further by way of background (none of which is especially relevant to this particular textual variant!) on the letter. The reason: this is the letter that modern-day conservative Christians who believe that the “rapture” is about to occur base their views on. The “rapture” is a modern doctrine/idea. Even though some conservative Christians think this is one of the main points of the Christian faith, historically it has rarely been that. In fact, for most of history, most Christians simply haven’t believed in a rapture. The doctrine of the rapture is that Jesus will be returning from heaven (sometime soon) and when he does those who had believed in [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:27:34-04:00August 6th, 2015|Paul and His Letters|

Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians

In my two previous posts I discussed a textual variant that could be explained either as a scribal accident or as an intentional change. I thought it might be interesting to point out a few other variants that also could go either way. These are all intriguing problems in and of themselves, and by talking about them I can illustrate a bit further the kinds of quandaries textual critics find themselves in when trying to decide what an author wrote when we have different versions of his words in different manuscripts. My plan right now is to look at three variants in three different mini-threads (all of them subsumed under the larger thread of why I wrote The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture). Today is one of my favorites, a particularly thorny issue found in 1 Thessalonians 2:7. I can’t get to a discussion of that issue without providing some important background; just the very basics of the background will take me two posts, before I can even start to explain the textual problem. First Thessalonians [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:27:46-04:00August 5th, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters|

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 [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:34:13-04:00July 12th, 2015|Heresy and Orthodoxy, Paul and His Letters|

Jesus, Matthew, and the Law

In my previous post I discussed the differences – what strike me, at least, as the differences – between the Gospel of Matthew and Paul’s letter to the Galatians and with respect to whether the followers of Jesus are to follow the law or not. Matthew’s Gospel indicates that the law will not cease to be in force until the heavens and earth pass away, and that Jesus’ followers need to follow the law to the limit, to follow it even better than the scribes and Pharisees do. Paul, on the other hand, insists that the followers of Jesus must not think that they have to follow the law. Any gentile who thinks he has to be circumcised, or to follow other aspects of the Jewish law, is in danger of losing salvation. I would like to clarify one point about my view and explain one of its complications. Clarification: in my post I was not discussing whether Paul saw eye-to-eye with Jesus about this issue. My post was about the Gospel of Matthew. I [...]

BDEhrman2022-07-03T16:27:08-04:00March 27th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Paul and His Letters|

Is Paul at Odds with Matthew?

In yesterday’s post I indicated that I really very much wish that we could have some of the writings produced by Paul’s opponents in Galatia. They believed that in order to be a follower of Jesus, a person had to accept and follow the Law of Moses as laid out in the Jewish Scriptures. Men were to be circumcised to join the people of God; men and women were, evidently, to adopt a Jewish lifestyle. Presumably that meant keeping kosher, observing the Sabbath, and so on. Anyone who didn’t do this was not really a member of the people of God, since to be one of God’s people meant following the law that God had given. Paul was incensed at this interpretation of the faith and insisted with extraordinary vehemence that it was completely wrong. The gentile followers of Jesus were not, absolutely not, supposed to become Jewish. Anyone who thought so rendered the death of Jesus worthless. It was only that death, and the resurrection, that made a person right with God. Nothing else. [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:53:57-04:00March 25th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Paul and His Letters|

Lost Letters of Paul’s Opponents

I’m back now to my thread on the lost writings of the early Christians that I would love to have discovered. Onr bunch that would be absolutely fantastic to have would be the letters of Paul’s *opponents.* I get asked all the time if I think that Paul is the true founder of Christianity and whether we should call it Paulinanity instead of Christianity (and related questions). My answer is decidedly NO. For two main reasons. The first is the most obvious: Paul did not himself invent Christianity. He inherited it. It is difficult to establish a firm chronology of Paul’s life. There are scholars who have devoted many years just to this topic. It’s messy and complicated. My colleague from Duke, Douglas Campbell, has just written an-over-400-page book dealing just with the chronology of Paul’s *letters*, Framing Paul: An Epistolary Biography. It is about how to situate the surviving letters of Paul (Douglas accepts ten of the thirteen as authentic – all but 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) chronologically in relation to one [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:54:13-04:00March 23rd, 2015|Paul and His Letters|

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, [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:55:09-04:00March 13th, 2015|Paul and His Letters|

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 [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-11T17:27:32-04:00March 11th, 2015|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

New Boxes on Problematic Social Values in the New Testament

I have been posting some of the new “boxes” that will appear in the sixth edition of my textbook. These boxes are meant either to raise interesting historical issues that are somewhat tangential to the main discussion or to broach complex issues without easy solution that are meant to force students to think for themselves. I include two such boxes here in this post – the first is a new one for the sixth edition, but I thought it would be interesting to pair it with a somewhat related topic drawn from a post already in the fifth edtiion. Both boxes have to do with the New Testament and social realities of its day – the early Christian approbation of the institution of slavery and Jesus’ teachings that run precisely contrary to what today we might think of as solid family values. **************************************************************** Box 22.12 What Do You Think? The New Testament and Slavery Many people who read the book of Philemon simply assume that Paul writes the letter in order to urge Philemon to [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T16:28:30-04:00October 30th, 2014|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters|

New Boxes on Jesus as God in the NT

Here are two more “boxes” that will now appear in the sixth edition of my New Testament textbook. If you’ve read my recent book, How Jesus Became God, you’ll see that both of these boxes are based on views that I develop at length there. One of the tricks in writing a textbook is figuring out how to say something in a way that is succinct and interesting, when there is not much space to cover a topic fully (so, my first box here covers in 326 words what I take an entire chapter to develop in my book!) The problem is that sometimes the coverage is so succinct that it is no longer accurate and / or interesting. It’s always a balancing act. In any event, here are the two boxes. ******************************************************* Box 19.2 What Do You Think? Humans Exalted to Heaven at the End of Their Lives What do you imagine the early Christians would think had happened to Jesus once they came to believe that he had not only been raised from [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T16:28:46-04:00October 28th, 2014|Book Discussions, Paul and His Letters|

ANT: Methods of Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church

I will return to some possible improvements in the blog (not just in raising money from it) soon. today, though, I want to return to my book After the New Testament. Just yesterday I finished reading the page proofs for it, by working through the 98-page chapter on early Christian apocrypha (selections of non-canonical Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypses: great stuff, but a lot of reading!). I celebrated with a cigar in Wimbledon Park in the late afternoon sunshine. Life could be worse. As I indicated before, I’ve added two entirely new sections to this anthology of ancient texts, one on Women in Early Christianity (the Introduction of which I have given, over the course of two posts) and one on “Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church.” I think this latter is an intriguing, and a highly important, topic. Here is what I say in the Introduction to it in the second edition of the book, with a brief bibliography that follows. ************************************************************* As we observed in chapter 9, the Bible was important from the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T16:39:13-04:00August 8th, 2014|Book Discussions, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Hypothetical Problems with Copies of Philippians

In trying to figure out what it even means to talk about the “original” text of Philippians (was it what Paul meant to dictate? Was it what he did dictate, if it was different from what he intended? Was it what the scribe wrote even if it was different from what Paul dictated? Was it what Paul corrected after he saw what the scribe incorrectly wrote? Was it the fresh copy that the scribe made even if it was different from the corrected version Paul gave him? What happens if in fact Philippians is two letters that have been spliced together by a later editor, as many scholars believe, rather than just one letter – is the “original” the two different letters originally sent or the spliced together version that Paul did not create but someone else did? Etc. etc.), in trying to figure all this out, several readers have suggested that the easiest way to look at it is that the “original” of Philippians is the letter Paul sent to Philippi, whatever happened, prior [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T16:52:38-04:00June 17th, 2014|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Dictation of Letters: More Complications for Knowing an “Original” Text

I have been talking about the problems in knowing what the “original” text of Philippians is. Even with the following brief review, the comments I will be making in this post will, frankly, probably not make much sense if you do not refresh your memory from my previous two posts. Here I will be picking up where I left off there. We have seen that knowing what the original of Philippians is complicated by the facts that: 1) The letter appears originally to have been two letters, so that it’s hard to know whether the original of each separate letter is to be the original or if the final edited version which Paul himself did not produce is the original; 2) Paul dictated his letters, and the scribe who wrote down his dictation would typically have made a fresh copy of the letter after Paul had made a few corrections – so which is the original: what the scribe originally wrote or the fresh copy he made after the corrections? 3) And if Paul made [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T16:52:45-04:00June 16th, 2014|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Complications with Finding an “Original” Text

I have been asked to comment on whether we can get back to the “original” text of Paul’s letter to the Philippians, and I have begun to discuss the problems not just of getting *back* to the original, but also of knowing even what the original *was*. In my previous post I pointed out the problems posed by the fact that Philippians appears to be two letters later spliced together into one. And so the first problem is this: is the “original” copy the spliced together copy that Paul himself did not create? Or is the “original” the product that Paul himself produced – the two letters that are not transmitted to us in manuscript form any longer, to which, therefore, we have no access (except through the version edited by someone else)? But there are more problems. Here I’ll detail them, in sequence as they occur to me. In what I am going to be saying now, I will simplify things by assuming that – contrary to what I’ve been arguing – Philippians is [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T16:52:54-04:00June 14th, 2014|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

What Would Be the “Original” Text of Philippians?

I have begun to answer a series of questions asked by a reader about the textual history of Paul’s letter to the Philippians. In my previous post I explained why some critical scholars maintain that the letter was originally two separate letters that have been spliced together. That obviously makes the next question the reader asked a bit more complicated than one might otherwise imagine. And it’s not the only complication. Here is the reader’s next question: QUESTION: Do you agree that the first copy of the letter written by Paul to the Philippians was also an original? RESPONSE: First off, my initial reaction that I gave a couple of posts ago still holds. I’m not exactly sure what the reader is asking. If he’s asking whether a copy of the original letter to Philippians is itself an original of Philippians, then the answer is no. It is not the original. It is a copy of the original. Big difference. But what if this copy was exactly like the original in every single respect – [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T16:53:01-04:00June 13th, 2014|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Are There Two Letters to the Philippians?

In my previous post I answered, in short order, a series of questions that a reader had about the “original” text of Paul’s letter to the Philippians. I will now take several posts in order to address some of the questions at greater length. Here was the first one: QUESTION: Would you agree that the letter written to the Philippians was an original writing of Paul? The short answer is Yes – it is one of the undisputed Pauline letters. The longer answer is, well, complicated. Scholars have long adduced reasons for thinking that this letter of Paul was originally *two* letters (or parts of two letters) that were later spliced together into the one letter we have today. I explain the reasons for thinking so in my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. Here is what I say there. (If you want to follow the argument particularly well, I’d recommend reading the short letter of Philippians, and then reading what follows by looking up the passages referred [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T16:53:20-04:00June 11th, 2014|Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Do We Have the Original Text of Philippians?

QUESTIONS: Would you agree that the letter written to the Philippians was an original writing of Paul? Do you agree that the first copy of the letter written by Paul to the Philippians was also an original? Assuming there were errors made by the person(s) who copied the original letter of Paul to the Philippians, would you agree that the first copy even with some errors still had the original context of the first letter. If you do agree, then is it totally accurate to say that we don’t have the original letter of Paul written to the Philippians? Don’t you think that it’s more accurate to state that we do have the original but it has been altered to some degree? Has the letter to the Philippians written by Paul been altered so much that we can’t really know what the original proclaimed? RESPONSE: These are great questions. They have the benefit of making very concrete some of the things that I have said, in general terms, about the textual tradition of the New [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T16:53:29-04:00June 10th, 2014|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

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