scribal activity Archives - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Are Their Any Completely Anti-Heretical Manuscripts?

READER COMMENT/QUESTION: The whole thread on the “The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture” is really really great! Thanks!! QUESTION: are the shorter version in Luke 22:19-20 and the “bloody sweat” in Luke 22:44 documented by the same manuscripts? Or do these variants appear in different manuscripts? In other words: do we have an “entirely docetic” manuscript of Luke? (incidentally, I see that both variants are in chapter 22 very close to each other). Thank you very much!!! RESPONSE: Ah, this is a great question. The answer to the first question is no. The manuscripts that contain the shorter reading in Luke 22:19-20 (that is, the form of the text in which Jesus does NOT say that the bread represents his body “given for you” and that the cup is “the new covenant in my blood poured out for you”) are not the same ones that contain the shorter reading in Luke 22:43-44 (the “bloody sweat”; in this case the manuscripts with the shorter reading do NOT have the account of Jesus’ sweating great drops of [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:15:29-04:00October 13th, 2015|Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

Luke’s Last Supper and Orthodox Corruptions of Scripture

I can now wrap up my discussion of the textual problem of Luke 22:19-20 and the intriguing question of what Jesus said at his Last Supper (according to Luke). I have argued so far that the longer (more familiar) form of the text, found in most surviving manuscripts, is actually a change made by scribes, not what Luke originally wrote (this is where Jesus indicates that the bread is his body given for others and that the cup is the new covenant in his blood shed for others). I set *up* that discussion by referring to one of the debates over the nature of Christ in precisely the time period when the change was made: the second century, when Christians were debating whether Jesus was so completely divine that he was not actually human. Various Christians that scholars call “docetists” said the answer was no. The label for these Christians comes from the Greek word doceo, “to seem,” or “to appear,” because these people said that Christ “appeared” to be human and “seemed” really to [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:15:44-04:00October 12th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

The Striking Conclusion: Jesus’ Last Supper in Luke

This sub-thread about the Last Supper and the death of Jesus in the book of Luke (and Acts), part of a longer thread on The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, has (itself) taken a rather remarkably circuitous route. Let me remind you how we started this little side-trip. First the biggest picture. I am describing my book – originally written over twenty years ago now (my God, how does this happen???) – about how scribes in the second and third Christian centuries changed their texts in order to make them more obviously “orthodox” and less susceptible to use by Christians who held Christological views deemed “heretical.” The current sub-thread has all been on one textual variant, a passage in Luke 22:19-20, the account of Jesus at his last supper. If you recall, there are two forms of the text, one much longer than the other. We are asking whether Luke originally wrote the longer version of the text (so that scribes shortened it by taking out a verse and a half) or if he wrote the [...]

BDEhrman2017-11-27T20:29:44-05:00October 10th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

The Last Supper in Luke: An Important Textual Problem

The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture argues that there are textual variants still preserved among our manuscripts of the New Testament that were generated by scribes who were trying to oppose various kinds of “heretical” Christologies, including the one I discussed yesterday, which said (at least which its opponents said that it said) that Christ did not have a real flesh and blood body, and that as a result he did not really experience pain and death, but only appeared to do so. The proto-orthodox theologians who responded to this view insisted that Jesus really was human, and they argued that it was precisely the bodily, human nature of Christ that allowed him to bring salvation. By shedding his (real) blood and experiencing a (real) broken, crucified body, Christ brought about salvation for the world. The docetists (those who claimed that Christ only “seemed” to have a body that could bleed and die), in the opinion of their opponents, had gone way too far in asserting that Christ was a divine being. If he wasn’t human, [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:17:56-04:00September 29th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

How Can You Know A Scribe’s Intentions?

My next step in this thread about my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture will be to discuss the various Christological views known from the second century (Docetic Christologies, adoptionic Christologies, separationist Christologies; and Modalistic Christologies), and then I will try to show how textual changes made by scribes in the period reflect opposition to this, that or the other Christology, in support of the “Proto-orthodox” Christology that came to dominate the early Christian tradition. Before doing that, I need to clear out one final piece of underbrush. The argument of my book was that Christological changes of the text were “intentional” not simply accidental. But that raises a very large question that I have not addressed on the blog, even though I have discussed intentional changes a number of times. It is this: how can we determine the “intention” of a scribe? This is part of a much larger question that literary scholars have dealt with for many decades now, going back at least to the middle of the twentieth century, to what is [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:18:19-04:00September 25th, 2015|Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, New Testament Manuscripts|

How Consistent are Orthodox Corruptions of Scripture?

The goal of my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture was to show all the places that I could find of where early Christian scribes modified their texts of the New Testament in order to make them more amenable to their own (the scribes’ own) polemical purposes, particularly with respect to the Christological debates they were involved with. I will describe these second and third century debates in subsequent posts. (Recall: there are very good reasons for thinking that the vast majority of “intentional” changes in the text of the NT were made already by around the year 300 CE – so it is debates in this earlier period that really matter for understanding textual changes.) In my previous post I indicated how I went about finding the data: I carefully combed through our most exhaustive textual apparatuses verse by verse, throughout the entire New Testament, examining every textual variant that is noted in them – many thousands indeed! – and looking to see which ones were closely, relatively closely, or distantly tied to Christological [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:18:28-04:00September 23rd, 2015|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, New Testament Manuscripts|

On Falsification and Forgery

On Friday I will be giving a talk at a symposium at York University in Toronto that will be focusing on the use of forgery in the early Christian apocrypha, sponsored by Tony Burke of York U. and Brent Landau at the University of Texas. Website is here: http://tonyburke.ca/conference/ I thought it might be interesting to excerpt a portion of my talk here, as it covers some ground that I recently have gone over on the blog, but from a different perspective. (More on the bloody sweat! But in relation to early Christian practices of literary deception.) In any event. Here is a portion of what I’m planning to say. *************************************************** I first became interested in the field of apocrypha and early Christian literary forgery about 25 years ago, when I was principally obsessed with New Testament textual criticism. Almost everyone else at the time who was also obsessed with the manuscript tradition of the New Testament was principally obsessed with one question only: how do we establish the original text of the New [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-11T15:55:44-04:00September 22nd, 2015|Forgery in Antiquity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

How Do You Research Orthodox Corruptions?

When I finished my dissertation on a technical area within textual criticism – it was an analysis of the quotations of the Gospels in the writings of the fourth-century church father Didymus the Blind, in an attempt to demonstrate what the manuscripts at his disposal in Alexandria Egypt must have been like – I very much wanted to continue to work in the field of textual criticism, but I wanted to do some research that had some broader applicability and wider interest to scholars who were not purely technicians in this one rather arcane subdiscipline within New Testament studies. I had always been especially interested in the detective work involved in solving textual problems in the New Testament. Where there are important passages that have important variants among the various manuscripts, how do you decide which variants are “original”? I’ve always loved that kind of problem, maybe because I’ve always been such an inveterate debater, and arguing for a plausible solution to a textual conundrum involves, virtually every time, mounting a convincing argument in the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-29T15:57:40-04:00September 21st, 2015|Book Discussions, Heresy and Orthodoxy, New Testament Manuscripts|

Why Intentional Changes of the Text Might Matter

In doing the research that led up to my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, I came to see that the variations of our manuscripts were important not only because they could tell us what the original writers said in the books that later became the New Testament, but also because they could tell us about what was influencing the anonymous and otherwise unknown scribes who produced the copies of these books in later times. As I pointed out in a previous post, scholars have long thought – with good reason – that most of the intentional changes of the text (that is, the alterations that scribes made on purpose – at least apparently on purpose – as opposed to simple scribal mistakes) were made sometime in the first two hundred years of copying. If these changes were indeed made intentionally, then the scribes who made them must have had a reason for wanting to make them. They were consciously changing their texts in places. They weren’t doing that in millions of places, but in [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:19:09-04:00September 16th, 2015|Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

My Focus on Christology in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture

In the last couple of posts I have talked about the basic thesis that lay behind my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. After doing my dissertation I became interested in seeing how theological disputes in early Christianity may have affected the scribes who were copying the texts that later came to be collected into the canon of the New Testament. Rarely had a study of this sort been pursued before, and never thoroughly and rigorously. Here let me provide a bit more background. First, for reasons I have stated earlier in this very-long thread, there is a broad consensus among textual scholars that the vast majority of textual variants found in all of our manuscripts down to the invention of printing (and beyond!) were probably generated in the first 200 years of copying. This has to do with the phenomenon that I have earlier called “the tenacity of the tradition.” If you recall, this is the phenomenon that later scribes appear not to introduced new readings into the tradition (at least not very often [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:19:30-04:00September 13th, 2015|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

The Unusual Thesis of The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture

As I started to point out in my previous post, the overarching idea behind my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture was that scribes copying their sacred texts in the early centuries of Christianity were not immune from the theological controversies raging in their day, but that they were, in some sense, participants in those disputes. In pursuing that idea, I had to bring together two fields of academic inquiry that were almost always kept distinct from each other – the study of the manuscripts of the New Testament and the investigation into the development of early Christian theology. The vast majority of scholars who worked on manuscripts were not informed about the social and doctrinal history of early Christianity (except in rather broad and basic terms) and the vast majority of scholars who worked on the theological controversies of the early church were almost completely ignorant of the manuscript tradition of the New Testament. I wanted to bring the two together. Let me again say that I was not the first to come up [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:19:36-04:00September 12th, 2015|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts|

Back to the Question: The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture

This is by far the most unusual thread I have had in the three and a half years of doing the blog. It started with a question that I began to address on June 30. It is now September 11. I have had a few brief interludes dealing with other things, but almost all the posts in the intervening weeks (months!) have been background that I needed to lay out to answer the question. And in fact the background has been only to answer one part of the question. Here was the original question: READER’S QUESTION: 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? RESPONSE: OK, so to understand my response it is important to bear in mind what I have been discussing all this time. Here I will summarize. Roughly speaking [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:19:49-04:00September 11th, 2015|Book Discussions, Heresy and Orthodoxy, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Why Did Scribes Add the Bloody Sweat?

I have explained why it is almost certain that Luke did not himself write the passage describing Jesus “sweating blood” in Luke 22:43-44: the passage is not found in some of our oldest and best manuscripts, it intrudes in a context that otherwise is structured as a clear chiasmus, and it presents a view of Jesus going to his death precisely at odds with what Luke has produced otherwise. Whereas Luke goes out of his way to portray Jesus as calm and in control in the ace of death – evidently to provide a model to his readers about how they too suffer when they experience persecution – these verses show him in deep anguish to the point of needing heavenly support by an angel, as he sweats great drops as of blood. But if the verses were not originally in Luke, why were they added by scribes? The key to answering the question comes from considering two data. First, when were the verses added to the text? And second, how were they first “used” [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:23:53-04:00September 12th, 2012|Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reader’s Questions|

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