Loading...I continue here with some comments about my pop quiz (see: https://ehrmanblog.org/my-faux-pop-quiz-this-semester/ and https://ehrmanblog.org/does-basic-information-about-the-nt-matter-my-pop-quiz/ ), and some of the reasons I ask the questions – that is, what I try to teach from the answers (so that the quiz is not designed to see how much the students know already). Here are two more of the questions:
- In what century were they (the books of the NT) written?
Answer: First century CE. I use this question to explain the modern usage, among historians (and others!) of BCE and CE. Of course all of us (well, all of us my age) grew up with the dating system BC and AD. Most people don’t actually know what those abbreviations mean. Nearly everyone gets “BC”: Before Christ. But I remember – or maybe I misremember – being taught when I was young that A.D. stood for “After Death.” Well that ain’t right. And a second’s reflection shows why. It would mean there would be no dates for the years between Jesus’ birth and his death! A.D. therefore stands for the Latin phrase Anno Domini, “Year of our Lord.” I’ve never figured out why one abbreviation is based on English and the other Latin; maybe someone can on the blog can tell us?
In the meantime, here’s something else most people don’t know. In correct usage…
The rest of this post is only for members. If you’re not one, there’s no time like the present. Apart from that being literally true, it’s true for the case in point. You should join now. You’ll get tons of benefit, and every penny of your small membership fee goes to help those in need. So there’s no downside!
Bart: “I’ve never figured out why one abbreviation is based on English and the other Latin; maybe someone can on the blog can tell us?”
Because Bede’s ante incarnationis dominicae tempus was just too much of a pain in the ass for English speakers.
Oh, and just to be a further pain in Latin-English asses, the data don’t ‘show’ anything but rather they may be interpreted. There’s nothing wrong with the passive voice.
But is BC a modern English invention then? Why not A.I., e.g.? Too much like A.D.? (And why Bede?)
On data: yup. I’m just tryin’ to explain it’s plural.
What’s wrong with the data “showing”? I remember in grad school, when I was frequently being aggravated about the results of one of my experiments, a wise post-doc reminding me, “The data have spoken, young Stephen, the data have spoken.”
It is my understanding that virtually every secular scholar of the New Testament and the life of Jesus rejects Luke’s and Mathew’s nativity accounts as fairytales. The consensus is that Jesus was most likely born in Nazareth at a date both unknown and unknowable. Since the birthdate is unknowable it is perfectly reasonable to assume the Christian calendar assumed date is reasonable. Those who mock the undeniable fact that the birth of Jesus is the zero point of Western/Christian calendar are bigots. It is sheer ignorance to assert that Jesus was born in 6 bc or ad 4 since there isn’t a scintilla of reliable evidence to support the assertion! If the western calendar had originated with the Arabs and used the birth of Mohammed as its zero point, anyone today who substituted abbreviations referring to Mohammed with ce and bce would be condemned as an Islamophobe! And rightfully so. It’s funny that every person that I challenge who uses ce cannot tell me what the devil common era refers to and y it begins with the birth of Jesus.
Yup, and not just secular Jews. Lots of Christian scholars as well.
Not to belabor this (and unrelated to the calendar Era issues), is there any evidence that Jesus was in his early 30s when crucified? Thank you.
There’s evidence, but none particularly convincing. Luke’s Gospel alone says Jesus was “about thirty” when he began his ministry (3:23); so the ministry does not to seem long, hence early 30s. The idea that it lasted three years comes only from John, because Jesus is said to celebrate three different (annual) Passover feasts there.
Thank you.
So would saying first century AD be wrong?
No, that would be correct. Only if you use a number would it be wrong.
I’ve gotten the impression that the gospels were written in adequate to more than adequate Greek, so the native language of these authors might have been Greek. If not then they were well-schooled in Greek. Disciples, one would think, would have little to no Greek or would have Greek heavily “accented” with Aramaic, which seems to be the case for the John of Revelations. Paul’s Greek has been described as elegant and sophisticated. If this is true, it implies a formal education in Greek or perhaps he was a native speaker of Greek. Both of these alternatives weaken the idea that Paul’s native language would have been the one we’d expect if he had been a garden variety Jew of his time– is that correct or likely? If, for instance Paul had thought in Hebrew, could he have produced the Greek of the epistles? If Paul was fluent in Greek as an acquired language, what inferences can we make about his origin and education?
Paul gives almost no indication of knowing Hebrew or Aramaic. He grew up in the Diaspora in a Greek-speaking region, and almost certainly Greek was his primary language. He must have been raised and educated outside of Israel.
THAT is interesting. I wonder, then, who would have given him the order to persecute the primitive, nascent, groups of Jews who revered Jesus? Or maybe he did it on his own initiative? How would he even have known about such groups? How could he even have found them? Were there “informers”? Or– maybe he lied about his own history. What a witness we have in Paul! A liar! With hallucinations! Or maybe only delusions. Delusions might not be so bad. Maybe I’m too harsh. That’s possible too. But I’m really starting to wonder about that Paul guy…
No one did. He didn’t like what he heard and went from there. Probably some folk showed up in his synagogue. We don’t know how he “persecuted” them. Took them out and beat them up?
Do you mean outside of Israel or outside of Judea?
Israel didn’t exist at the time, of coruse; I simply mean the Jewish homeland, comprising both Judea and Galilee.
Bravo Professsor! The dating info was always a necessary beginning of the year lesson during my 47 years of teaching history in public secondary schools (junior high to community college). I began it by comparing different calendar systems. I also remember having to explain that 5,000 years ago is not 5,000 BCE! And the numbering of centuries, etc., etc. As for the late great Stephen Jay Gould, his baseball analogies helped me understand natural selection.
Well, in support of your hobbyhorse, give a second look at “none of the Gospels actually claim to be written by these people.” The pronoun “none” is singular, requiring therefore a verb in the singular: claimS. The verb should match the subject, not the (plural) object of the preposition (Gospels). This is a common grammatical error (like “could care less”), one which you in general avoid.
17 lashes.
That’s right — absolutely right. None is singular. And it’s a lesson. Spend more time typing and proof-reading. Well, OK, it ain’t gonna happen. But still….
You guys are bringing back images of Mrs. West (9nth grade English) beating her desk with a ruler as we recited sentence diagrams!
Yeah, I had an 8th grade teacher who didn’t use the ruler to beat the *desk*….
I thought the issue with “After Death” was not the 33 years after Jesus’s birth and his crucifixion, but the issue of whether Christ is yet alive today. It’s sort of like saying, “Jesus would turn in his grave.”
Not sure I”ve heard that one. Most Christians certainly think he died, just that he didn’t stay dead. So the dating goes to the year of the crucifixion.
Bart: “But is BC a modern English invention then?”
Well, it wasn’t invented by the Sumerians.
“Why not A.I., e.g.? Too much like A.D.? (And why Bede?)”
Bede, because he was English? Not quite. Although he didn’t invent anno Domini (that was Denis the Short, aka Dionysius Exiguus, modeled on anno Diocletiani), Bede was the one who popularized it. So we are still left with the fact that Bede’s ante incarnationis dominicae tempus was simply too much of a pain in the ass to say. That, and eventually people realized that dating from the Incarnation would create a gap of 9 months between the virginal conception and the birth of Christ. Thus a new phrase was coined, ante Christum natum, which was subsequently shortened to ante Christum, which was adopted by the Germans, English, and only lightly modified by the French,who always have to be different.
Besides, A.I. would not be too much like A.D. since ante is not comparable to anno, nor does contain any reference to Dominus.
Sorry you asked?
Terrific. Where are you getting (or where did you get) all this? By being “too much like” I meant would the abbreviation itself not be distinctive enough. If that wasn’t the problem, why didn’t they use A.I. and A.D.?
Bart: “Terrific. Where are you getting (or where did you get) all this?”
Bill Storey made us read Bede at Notre Dame; you taught me about Dennis the Short; and the rest came from The Oxford Companion to the Year: An exploration of calendar customs and time-reckoning by Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens. OUP 2000.
Maybe also because even the vast majority of us who had a little high school Latin cannot (never could) speak it? Yes I figured out ante incarnationis dominicae tempus after staring at it a bit but if I heard it in a lecture it would have been lost!
Interestingly there was a recent article in the British Catholic magazine The Tablet in which one of the writers (having been criticised by readers for using ‘CE’ on the grounds that she was ‘denying Christ’) responded by looking at the whole BCE/CE/BC/AD debate. She also came to the conclusion (like Professor Ehrman) that no-one really knows why we have Latin AD and English BC. I think BC is the most contentious as most people these days (and probably for many years in the past) don’t tend to use AD when it is obvious that it is the AD dates that are being referred to. So the battleground tends to be around BC/BCE as that is necessary for clarity as those dates are less commonly used in general writings/conversation etc. I would argue though that ‘Before Christ’ is slightly less provocative to a non-Christian than ‘In the year of our Lord (AD’).
Yes, those of us who say, “The data are…” are becoming rare. Language evolves and it’s the common usage that wins out. “Hopefully” used as a sentence adverb is an example of incorrect usage that has become acceptable. As another example, I suspect that criterion will go the way of datum.
I strongly disagree with your comment about plural forms and other “incorrect” English usage.. There used to be a distinction between datum and data carried over from the Latin. But many (most?) native English speakers now think of data as a collective noun equivalent to “information”. Also, context matters. If I were writing a paper to be graded by a university professor like you, I would go with “data are”. If I am talking to a friend or writing them an email, I would never refer to data with a plural form. And as I just did, I always refer to a single person of unspecified sex as “they” or “them”. It is very old usage — centuries. So it’s more natural and much preferable to “he or she” or “him or her”. For anyone interested in this topic, I highly recommend the book “Talk on The Wild Side: Why Language Can’t Be Tamed” (2018) by Lane Greene “Language is the most human invention. Spontaneous, unruly, passionate, and erratic it resists every attempt to discipline or regularize it–a history celebrated here in all its irreverent glory.”
I notice that Green used subjects and verbs. OK then. I’m not trying to legislate standardization. I’m saying some word usage is more stylish than others. And what’s the argument against that?
I completely agree that some word usage is more stylish or more effective than others and I am pretty sure Greene would too. That’s a principle underlying his job as an editor. My objection is to your claim that “[t]he only reason is [sic] sounds strange is that almost no one says it correctly. There are all sorts of things like this. For example ‘I could care less’ (as people always say) makes no sense….” If almost no one says something “correctly”, that’s good reason to re-evaluate what you think of as “correct”. Predominant usage may not be the only thing that matters, but it should generally count for quite a lot, even more so in informal speech than formal writing. If you go to a dictionary like Miriam Webster for usage advice on each of these two examples, you will find first acceptance of the singular construction with the word data. Second, while “couldn’t care less”, is older than “could care less” and this is a common language peeve, the reality is that these are informal idiomatic expressions and both variants mean exactly the same thing.
Prof Ehrman,
Please, were the four canonized gospels the only ones from the 1st Century or there were others which did not make into the canon of NT?
Luke mentions “many” others (1:1-4); so there almost certainly were others. But none of them survives.
Dr. Ehrman,
1 Corinthians 16:8 “…I will stay on at Ephesus until Pentecost…” For Paul and others, At this time, was Pentecost still largely thought of as the Jewish festival of Shavuoth, or was it already the Christian festival celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples of Jesus after his Ascension?
It was still strictly a Jewish festival. The idea of a “Day of Pentecost” is not attested until decades after Paul (in Acts); I don’t know when Christians devoted a festival to it, but it would have been long after that.
Prof Ehrman,
I am particularly interested in your view on this because you were a Christian and now a Non-Christian, hence your wide appreciation of both spectrums.
Q1. Please what is your take on the thought that the Bible ought to be read and understood with a spiritual mind (whatever that means) and not the canal mind. Do you hear of such comments and how do you respond to them?
Q2. Lastly, do your detractors sometimes employ this ‘spiritual intellect’ technique in dismissing some of your views?
1. I don’t think there is a “spiritual” mind that is different from a “carnal” mind. Your brain is simply your brain. You don’t have two of them. 2. Sure: it’s simply a way of saying that even if my opponent’s views make more sense, I’m not going to accept them.
With regard to the authorship of the gospels, which book(s) would you recommend for a curious layman interested in “who wrote the gospels” (including arguments for and against “Mathew”, “Mark”, “Luke”, and “John” as the authors)?
I’ve devoted a number of posts to the matter (look for “authors”?); I talk about it at length in a number of my books, e.g. Jesus interrupted and Forged.
Great. thx.
My first thought about A.D. was that Dionysius Exiguus only invented that particular term and that B.C. came later, my speculation was that perhaps counting back to mark historic events wasn’t that important at the point where A.D. was coined. I found that Wikipedia supports this idea, at least that B.C. came “much later” but unfortunately with no citation in this case. I checked on etymonline.com which is pretty thorough in its research on the published origins of words and some phrases and they state…
“B.C. – abbreviation of Before Christ, in chronology, attested by 1823. The phrase itself, Before Christ, in dating, with exact years, is in use by 1660s.”
https://www.etymonline.com/word/B.C.#etymonline_v_40712
Edit: Actually, this thread points to a book that documents instances of “before Christ” being written all the way back to 612 A.D.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/244910/why-is-b-c-before-christ-in-english-but-a-d-anno-domini-in-latin
Very interesting and helpful, thanks. As to the second “Edit”: I haven’t looked, but how could you have the English phrase “Before Christ” before you have English?