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Loading...Last week in my class on “Jesus in Scholarship and Film” we were discussing the intriguing little fact that when Jesus is baptized, the voice of God that comes from heaven to call him his Son says different things in each of the three Synoptic Gospels (there is no voice in the Gospel of John). How does one explain that? It made me think of the Gospel of the Ebionites, and I started wondering if I ever talked about it on the blog.
It turns out the answer is yes. Here is a post devoted to it, from years ago — which begins with a general discussion of it along with two other “Jewish-Christian Gospels,” and ends with a description of its rather clever way of reconciling the three accounts of the voice from heaven.
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Yesterday in my graduate seminar we spent three hours analyzing the three so-called “Jewish-Christian Gospels.” These are very tricky texts to deal with. We don’t have any manuscripts of them – even small fragments. They come to us, instead, in the quotations of church fathers such as Origen, Didymus the Blind, Jerome, and Epiphanius. These (orthodox) church fathers sometimes quoted or referred to one or the other of the Gospels in order to relate what it said; and sometimes it was in order to attack what it said. There are all sorts of questions raised about these no-longer surviving Gospels in these quotations.
A good part of the problem is that
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The fathers virtually all believed or assumed that the various Jewish-Christian Gospels were in fact only one Gospel not three (some scholars think there were only two), that it was called something like “the Gospel according to the Hebrews,” that it had been written originally in Aramaic (or Hebrew), and that it was in fact an altered version of the canonical Gospel of Matthew, in use among a sect of Jewish Christians (i.e., those who thought that one should keep the Jewish law as well as believe in Jesus as the Messiah). Much of that simply can’t be true – especially that it (or all of them) were originally written in Aramaic as a version of Matthew.
Scholars call the three Gospels that are ferreted out from the various quotations the Gospel of the Nazareans, the Gospel of the Ebionites, and, as I said, the Gospel According to the Hebrews. One of the hot questions among scholars right now is if there were really three of them, or only two; if there were two, then the Nazareans and the Hebrews were one and the same.
Anyway, for my class I had my students translate all of the Greek quotations of these Gospels (a number of the quotations are preserved only in Latin; I didn’t have them deal with these in the original language since some of the students don’t know Latin yet). And then we discussed them, in some depth (though even so we were just scratching the surface).
Right now I’m particularly intrigued with the Gospel of the Ebionites. It is found in quotations only of Epiphanius – a late fourth century church father quite famous, or rather infamous, for his 80-book refutation of every heresy on the planet, called the Panarion (which means “medicine chest”: in it he provides the antidote for the bites of the serpents of heresy) (!). There are eight quotations (some scholars count them only as seven). One that I have long been intrigued by is cited below.
For background: as you may have noticed if you’ve read the NT Gospels carefully enough, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke the voice that comes from heaven at Jesus’ baptism says *different* things. In Matthew it says “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased”; in Mark it says “You are my beloved son, with you I am well pleased”; and in Luke it says “You are my son, today I have begotten you.” (That version of Luke is found only in some manuscripts, but elsewhere I have argued at length that it was in fact the original version of Luke, only later changed by scribes to make it coincide with the words of the voice as found in Mark.)
So, not just modern readers but early Christians wondered, on occasion: what did the voice really say? Which version is right?
The Gospel of the Ebionites provides an attempt to show that they could *all* be right. Here we learn that the voice spoke three times, saying something different each time. I think this is *great*! Here’s the quotation (the “it” at the beginning is referring to the Gospel of the Ebionites):
And after a good deal more, it says: “When the people were baptized, Jesus also came and was baptized by John. When he came up out of the water, the heavens opened and he saw the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, descending and entering him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my beloved Son, in you I am well pleased.’ Then it said, ‘Today I have given you birth.’ Immediately a great light enlightened the place. When John saw this,” it says, “’he said to him, Who are you Lord?’ Yet again a voice came from heaven to him, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.’ And then,” it says, “John fell before him and said, ‘I beg you, Lord — you baptize me!’ But Jesus restrained him by saying, ‘Let it be, for it is fitting that all things be fulfilled in this way.’” (Epiphanius, Panarion, 30, 13, 3-4)
This Gospel may have been, in part, a kind of harmony of the Gospels, that tried to smooth over the differences among them. Whether that’s what it was in toto or not, this passage certainly is a great way to reconcile the three versions of the voice — even if its solution does strain credulity a bit!
This reminds me of how some people try to reconcile how the four Gospels each have the inscription on the cross read a little differently. I’ve heard people say that it was written in different languages, so the differences are based on how one translates the inscription. Did this discrepancy get any attention among the early church fathers? I can see someone doing a conflation, like, “This is Jesus the Nazarene, the King of the Jews.” And do you think the idea of such an inscription is factual? Seems like a provocative thing to put on a cross without explanation for those looking on.
I think the inscription is factual, yes. And some church fathers had to deal with it like they did with other seemingly minor but highly intriguing discrepancies. My faovrite has always been whether Peter denied Jesus three times before the cock crowed or, rather, crowed twice.
Any scholarly attempts to associate the tradition of the Syriac (ie, Aramaic) Diatessaron with any of the various gospels of/to the Hebrews? Not that they were one and the same, but it’s interesting to see this tendency toward harmonization existing in Epiphanius’ copy of the gospel of the Ebionites and the Syriac Diatessaron.
I”m sure there has been, but off hand I don’t know. I have to say, Diatessaronic studies is the single most complex and convoluted aspect of texual analysis out there. It is incredibly complicated and I don’t know if angels fear to tread there, but I do…. (There’s been huge changes in the assumptions, methods, and approaches over the past 20 years; it’s actually been simplified a bit, but still it’s a head-spinner)
Being rationalistic about all of this, and granting that Jesus existed and went through John the Baptist’s immersion ceremony (for whatever reason) we should also realize that there was no voice– that that part of the narrative is pure invention. And then ask how the people who created that bit of fiction might have been motivated to produce the different variations of what was said. And if it’s missing from John– why? The author of John had access to, and used, a different narrative than the synoptics, and in that narrative there was no reference to a voice? Could that have been a more primitive narrative tradition? Could the John author have been unaware of the other, later, and more embellished source material used by the synoptics? And then the author of John imposed upon HIS source a higher Christology than that of the synoptics??
It’s possible. But it is usually thought that John presupposes knowledge of a baptism tradition because of the Baptist’s comment about seeing the Spirit of God descend on Jesus. He wouldn’t want to narrate the event, though, because of the obvious problems the idea of Jesus’ baptism (my someone else!) for the remission of sins poses.
Today, I myself came up with a really brilliant way of eliminating all the contradictory statements in the Bible. To accept my approach, it only requires that you adhere to the Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics which, in a nutshell, says that every possibility that is aligned with the laws of nature comes to fruition in some universe or the other.
So the idea is basically this: every contradictory statement or piece of information that appears in the Bible is not really contradictory, but only *seems* so (I guess, I would have to call my apologetic endeavour “The Quantum Docetic Apologetics”). In reality, what happened is that the universe split every time God was about to do or say something; He actually did and said many different (even antithetical sometimes – He’s mysterious) things at the same time, but all of these things were realized in different branches of the multiverse.
This means that God the Father really did say 3 different things at Jesus’s baptism, and the Gospels infallibly record them, in a kind of miraculous way that transcends the limitations of our universe (in which only one particular thing or event could have been possibly happened and recorded).
It is axiomatic to the “Many World” interpretation of quantum physics that the infinitely branching universes it posits are inherently and unalterably isolated from one another. Any intercourse at all, including any communication, across the divide(s) is perforce barred.
Thus, there would not only be an infinite number of universes in which “the voice from heaven” made each version of the pronouncement we have, but additional infinities of timelines where it pronounced “Mary had a little Lamb of God’ and even “There once was a man from Nazareth, whose…” (well, you get the idea. 😉)
The point is that only ONE version can occur in each universe, and none of the others could end up being recorded in ours.
An Occam assessment of the double-slit experiment makes me a Copenhagen fan. Everett’s “Everything that CAN happen does” hypothesis seems to me to not only be utterly unhelpful — for any purpose — but its total disconnection of all worlds from all others corollary makes it unfalsifiable and, therefore, a religious, not scientific, precept.
On the plus side, the “Many Worlds” interpretation does, at least, provide fundamentalists with an example of science merely propounding an alternative article of faith. 😏
I like how you show how conflations can originate! Seemingly purported to be directly from the First Church of Jerusalem — I’d believe it because James is the poor of the family.
Evangelions would be Greek because Jesus is rejected. So diaspora correspondence, like in Egypt, was in Greek. Public appearances of he and his dad together, imho, Aramaic.
Not Hebrew. Jordan baptism includes “people from the other side of the Jordan”. Josephus’ Antiquities also reference these people with John the Baptist.
As if the *camel* coat wasn’t giving it away. Lots of bodies of water to choose from, they chose the one that united Jews and Arabs.
Josephus wrote of an Aretas “uniting Jews and Arabs” to beseige the temple of Jerusalem with John Hyrcanus who had his ears cut off. Hmm, Peter, where’d you go?
Josephus also named an’Obodas Aretas’. There’s inscriptions to a deified king Obodas *Theos* in Israel in Jesus’ time.
So if Jesus can speak unseen, can his speak dad speak from on high? A nice crechy foggy place? A German scholar finds “descend like a dove” to be Aramaic idiom for “straight down.”
And Abraham uses ‘begotten’ to choose from among his sons his successor .
While I’m not commenting per-se, I would like to request references to specific scholars rather than the generic “oh a lot of really smart guys agree with me.” Well, that’s kind of the way it comes across to me. Though an active Christian for 50 years, I have only started down this path of examination in the last year.
Yup! That can be frustrating. But I also find that appealing to specific authorities/ bibliographyy cna be offputting for a lot of lay folk. If you have any particular points you’d like reading on (one at a time!) I can probablyl suggest some things. In my book, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, I do that — providing annotated bibliographies at the end of each chapter. You may want to take a look at that for openers. Or ask on the blog.
Did the Ebionites understand the concept of Jesus being the son of God in the same way that the other Christians at the time understood it?
Most Christians by this time thought that Jesus was in some sense God, not just by adoption. But there was a wide range of views. I discuss this in my book How Jesus Became God.
The “full” inscription on the Cross,INRI, including “Nazarenus/Nazoraios/Notzri” is only to be found in John.I always found it implausible that “Nazarenus” would be translated as “from Nazareth”,as the Titulus Crucis was supposed to be informative of the crime(s) committed by the executed,not of their procedence. Secondly,almost no one in Jerusalem would have known where Nazareth was.
It seems to me that, if John is right, Notzri, meaning “sectarian,Nazorean,Notzri in Hebrew to this day,was part of the accusation,namely,heretic,blasphemer.
It was never completely clear to me whether the Priests accused Jesus of blasphemy.But if they did,then Notzri was an additional accusation (beyond the seditious “King of the Jews”).Blasphemer should have satisfied the Priests.When Peter is identified as a follower of Jesus in the trial venue ( I personally don’t think that trial ever happened),the only thing they could have had against him at the time was the charge of sectarian/blasphemer,as Jesus had not yet been brought before Pilate.
Interesting how the root Netzer נצר works both as the root for “branch”or”scion”(of David)as in Isaiah ,and as the root of Naotzrat, Nazareth,meaning *not*”branch” but “guardian”,as Nazareth was on a cliff,from which Jesus was almost thrown over.
Where can I read more about John’s version of the Titulus?
You may be interested in Raymond Browns commentary on John in the Anchor Bible, or his large commentary on the Passion narratives,The Death of the Messiah. He will comment on it and everything else you’re interested in. And yup, lots of false etymologies going on back there…
Hello Dr. Ehrman
You’re a busy man so I’ll get right to the point. A watched one of your lectures in which you claim, “Jesus certainly existed”. This appears to be at odds with the standards of ancient history. It’s my understanding that the historical method only evaluates likelihood not certainty. I’m I missing something?
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Craig
Well, UNC certainly lost to Virginia last night! When I say that, I’m 100% certain, even though technically I could be wrong. It may be every news source and eyewitness is lying about it. But at some point 99.999% certainly is just as easily called certainty. I don’t put a statistical evaluation on historical events (despite my having just done so), but I really don’t think there’s any legitimate doubt that, whatever else you say about him, Jesus at least existed.
In one respect, I think everyone born into a Christian family started with a harmonized Bible. Its the one with all the pictures/cartoons of Robert Taylor dressed up as Jesus that we had in Sunday School!
Are churches today still trying to harmonize those books so the flock thinks there is only one story?(rhetorical comment)
Looks like an attempt to shore up Mark’s adoptionism and make it more explicit. Even that is still a higher Christology than Roman 1, though.
I have an off-topic question that I’ve been meaning to ask for a while. Given the dubious nature of the first two chapters in Luke’s gospel, what do serious historians and biblical scholars think of the claim that Jesus of Nazareth and John the Baptist were cousins? If they weren’t cousins, then what would be the theological advantage of claiming they were? I guess one possibility would be that to make John inferior to Jesus, Luke would need a reason why Mary and Elizabeth would visit each other, prior to either of them giving birth, and having them be cousins would do. So, if the claim that Jesus and John were cousins was invented by Luke to have the unborn John be inferior to the unborn Jesus then, historically, Jesus and John were almost certainly not cousins. It seems to me the claim that they were cousins was invented for theological reasons and is therefore unfounded.
Most historical scholars don’t think they were in any way related. This is just Luke establishing a lineage and trying to show that even though John came first he was secondary (he leaps in the womb in joy when he realizes the mother of Jesus has turned up on the doorstep!)
The Heavenly voice at the Baptism:
it seems not particularly creative to conflate the versions into a thrice repeated announcement.
As far as it being ” a supernatural event”,any of the versions would suffice. The grand design is clear .
It also seems that the idea of God causing Jesus “to be born again” is a metaphor for everyone’s Baptism as essential to Christian practice. In Jesus’ “Ur-Baptism” he takes the lead in the Baptismal rite, now officially cemented.The Baptism on the Jordan adds a hierarchical motive to John’s original motive,ie,the remission of sins.
Still unclear to me:
Jesus was blameless,uncorrupted by sin. That’s why Satan considered it so crucial to tempt him,in which case,I assume, Jesus would have had to return to the Jordan or otherwise atone.Which is inconceivable.
So why did Jesus need to be baptized? Original sin was not yet anyone’s doctrine. The Baptism story,then,seems to be told, embellished,to show how a new baptized Christian becomes a son/daughter of the Church,all of them brothers and sisters, just as Jesus’ becomes God’s
beloved son at his own Baptism.
But then, blameless babies began to be baptized. Blameless? Perhaps original sin wields its Damocles sword on them. Or,perhaps,the rite no longer applies to them as a needed remission of sins, but as a welcome to the Church’s family.
Complicated.
Yup, why indeed. Matthew is the only one who seems to see the problem. In his exchange with the Baptist, Jesus says he has to do it “to fulfill all righteousness” — i.e., it’s the right thing to do even though he doesn’t have to do it himself. He sets the example. It’s not a very compelling position, imo.
Thank-you! I’m inching through the ebook version until my print copy arrives. I also just found that you have online courses. Splendid!
Dr. Ehrman, do you know about how many manuscripts of Luke say, “today I have begotten you?” Are we talking one or two, ten or more, etc? Could you give an estimate?
One Greek, several Latin. But it is our earliest attested form by Justin and then by other fathers. The argument for it’s authenticity is based largely on other consideratoins, but this small group of witnesses is signficant.
Bart,
One of the many scholars I’ve been able to read (and listen to alot of his college lectures) since I retired is Robert Eisenman. Oh boy. He is obviously very intelligent with a wide breath of knowledge teaching classes across many diverse subjects including Islam, Christianity, Dead Sea Scrolls, OT, etc
Similar vibe I get when listening to the late Marvin Minsky’s lectures at MiT…brilliant, Entertaining, but…
Lots of Rabbit Holes!
Do you have any overall thoughts on his work that come to mind you would like to share? (He has a very low opinion of Paul to put it mildly…and a very high one of James bro of Jesus)
TY for his time on this,
SC
Eisenman is very erudite. His views of James are completely untenable in my view. Frankly, I don’t think I know any expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the NT, or early Christianity who finds them persuasive, but maybe I just don’t get out enough….
Since Q provides almost no narrative, and “there is no voice in the Gospel of John” (which is unsurprising in as much as there isn’t even a *baptism* in the Gospel of John! 😵), the canon appears to provide only Mark’s account of the proclamation from heaven.
In this case it seems Matthew is the synoptic plagiarist who preserved his source, and Luke (in the earliest texts, at least, and as attested in patristic commentary) who modified the wording of the divine affirmation by replacing the discordantly banal “in whom I am well pleased” with the other half of the quote from Psalms.
Do you think it more likely that Luke came to the (perfectly sensible) conclusion that the “voice from heaven” in fact quoted the passage from scripture, supposing that Mark’s account was an emendation by that author, presumably for theological reasons, and took it upon himself to restore what he deduced was the original wording? Or that he simply veered from Mark in favor of the wording in some other source(s) — whether from one of the other predecessor(s) whose writings he mentions in his prologue, or, perhaps, oral traditions known to him — to complete the quote from Psalms?
I think he veered. The quotation fits well with his theological views of the signficiance of Jesus’ baptism, as reflected elsewhere in Luke-Acts. Mark is also from Scripture, but is a combination of Ps. 2:7 and Isa 42:1 (he also makes an intriguing combination in 1:2-3); Luke had good reason then to go with all of the Psalm quote. I guess there’s no way to know what he thought of his predecessor at that point, though 1:1-4 shows he was not all that sympathetic to Mark generally.
Would you please express your opinion about the Shroud of Turin and please don’t fall into the totally wrong one of it being a medieval forgery. There is no evidence whatsoever of paint or any other artist’s medium. The carbon 14 tests from the 1980s were done on the medieval repairs along the edge which completely invalidated the results. The most recent tests are of pollen found on the actual shroud surface, of stone dust in the knee and the nose that were found to be from the Jerusalem gates, and the results are first century. Besides, all the evidence of a severe beating of the face, the extreme scourging (“mark him well”), the cap of thorns and the clear depiction of crucifixion describe only one person in history, Yeshua the Nazarene. Thank you.
Sorry. I appear to have the totally wrong opinion. It’s definitely a medieval production.