Loading...Here is the second of three posts on my first book-length study — my dissertation on a particular aspect of how we can determine what the original words of the New Testament were and how they came to be changed over time. The dissertation was directed by Bruce Metzger, and it dealt more directly with the rather technical issue of the Gospel quotations of the fourth-century church father Didymus the Blind.
When I first started thinking about how to write up this second post, I remembered one of my clearest pieces of advice that I ever gave to myself, many years ago now, based, already then, on substantial experience. Never , ever, EVER ask a graduate student what s/he is writing the dissertation on. They invariably will tell you, and it will take a half hour, and your eyes will glaze over in 30 seconds. So just don’t do it. With that principle in mind, I think I had better not go into all the ins and outs of the dissertation. I’ll just go into some of them. 🙂
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Ahh, Misquoting Jesus. That was the book that got me hooked on you. It’s still on my shelves.
I was reading an on-line article on John Bahcall yesterday. He was a renown astrophysicist born in Shreveport in 1934. I mention that as I am five years younger and grew up there. He started out at LSU and transferred to Cal-Berkely, where he discovered physics. The article said he was the national debate champ, which reminded me of you. He never received a Nobel, but a colleague did. He deserved one. A truly great scientist and a good man.
BTW, this week’s Misquoting Jesus was tremendously interesting to me. Keep up the good work! I look forward to it every Tuesday.
Have you revised your conclusions about the subject since you initially finished your degree and published the book? Have you continued to study the subject, or perhaps engaged in any scholarly debate that encouraged you to reexamine the work, or alter your conclusions? I am considering purchasing the book and I just wondered if your conclusions then are still valid in your view.
Are you talking about my first book Didymus the Blind and the Text of the Gospels? No, I haven’t continued working in that area; in fact I haven’t even worked with Greek manuscripts at a hard-core systematical level more broadly for over thirty years. My book Misquoting Jesus, though, is one I’ve thought about, talked about, and written about perennially, and I completely stand by that one.
Thank you Dr Ehrman. This is a fascinating post. I think you should write a popular book based on your original Didymus (scholarly) work. I’d buy a copy (but then I buy all your popular books 🙂). On a more serious note, would computers/AI make it much easier now to do the laborious research work you had to do, eg. cross referencing Didymus’s Gospel quotes?
I can’t BEGIN to tell you how much easier it would be. I had to do all the numerical calculations — thousands of them — more or less by hand, without spreadsheets. Incredibly painstaking. AI — it’s nowhere near ready for that kind of thing. But at the rate it’s being developedm maybe next thursday….
Hi bart
Some cristians say that daniel 9 predicts the death of jesus but even if you take the starting date of the 490 year 444 bce it still does not add up. What do you think how does it influence the hile ressurecrion story?
Christians who use aniel (not just ch. 9) for this kind of purpose always have to play with the numbers rather seriously; but whoever gives you the calculatoin usually explains their rationale. As they’ve been doing for a couple hundred years.
Hi why do you think we have found so few artifqcts of yahweh (i think only one picture survived.
It was against Torah to make an image of him. (It’s in the Ten commandments, as you will sson see by visiting the Lousisiana classroom nearest you!)
How difficult is it to date the Septuagint. Hebrew to Greek, the date seems elusive.
The way to do it is to see when Greek-speaking Jewish authors appear to be familiar with a Greek translation of the OT. It must be sometime in the second c. BCE. But part of the bigger problem is that there was not *a* Septuagint. There were lots of Greek translations in veraious times and places that eventually came to be more or less standardized.
It’s easy to make generalizations. It’s harder to delve deep into the weeds. It’s harder still to come up with actually useful and valid generalizations based on all that weeds work. I know how to make generalizations. I have some experience with the weeds. But that third part is pretty much beyond my ADHD addled and now aging mind. Thanks again for doing what you do!
Dr Ehrman, apocalypse of Peter and apocalypse of paul both portray hell as run by angels measuring our gods justice. When did the change happen to the current popular image of hell being run by devils and Satan rather than by agents of god? Would there be any support for that current view in the biblical material?
These “angels” eventually came to be seen as “bad angels,” that is, demons You find the “Devil” ad his henchmen responsible for torments in hell by the time of the Descent into Hades narrative of the Gospel of Nicodemus, possibly 6th c. I’m not sure when the idea i first kicked in though. (The Apocalypse of Paul is getting his info rom the ApocPeter, with additional traditions. )
Altruism is a nessasary component of our evolutionary heritage, we need to cooperate if we expect to survive. I can’t see how what Jesus said would have had any impact on it other then to remind people of the importance of working together.
I’ll be trying to show that altruism toward *strangers* is precisely not in our evolutionary heritage — only altruism to those close to us. That can be seen, among other things, most clearly in the study of our close primate relatives.
Professor, you noted “people who have PhD’s get frustrated with people who want to claim to be “experts” in a field….”
I would like to hear your view on authors like Charles Mann (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus) who are careful Journalist reporting on others work (with citations ad nauseum) popularizing conclusions lay readers are otherwise unaware of… such as the possibility pre Columbian American civilization populations reached 100 million only to be virtually wiped out by European diseases.
Thanx in advance
I certainly think non-experts can summarize and explain the work of experts, and if they do so accurately they are doing all of us a real service.