CHAPTER 3: A MASS OF VARIANT VIEWS
1. Of course when trying to understand these different points of view we need to engage in the work of interpretation. Contrary to what some people assume, texts don’t speak for themselves. They must be interpreted. And this can never be done “objectively,” as if we, the readers, were robots; texts are interpreted subjectively by humans. From a historical-critical perspective, though, each author of the New Testament should be read and interpreted on his own terms, without having some other author’s terms imposed on him.
2. Some scribes copying Luke took out this prayer, evidently because they did not like its implication that Jesus wanted the Jews to be forgiven for having him crucified. For further discussion of this issue see pp. 188–89.
3. You can see this yourself by reading Isaiah 7 and 8: Isaiah is making the point that before a child who is soon to be conceived is born and gets very old, the enemies of the people of Israel will disperse and no longer trouble them.
4. See the discussion of the passage in the commentary by Raymond Brown, The Gospel According to John (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1966), vol. 1.
5. See the discussion on p. 155.
6. My interpretation of Paul has been heavily influenced by E. P. Sanders; see his now classic book Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1977). For other ways of reading Paul found among other historical critics see John Gager, Reinventing Paul (New York: Oxford, 2002), and Stanley Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
7. In Paul’s view, doing good deeds will naturally occur in the wake of one’s coming to be in a right standing before God (being justified); but good deeds do not contribute to attaining that right standing.
8. Some scholars have seen an exception in Acts 20:28, but I think this is a misreading of the verse. For a full discussion see my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 203. The other possible exception, Luke 22:19–20, is a scribal addition to the text, not original to Luke; see ibid., pp. 197–209.
9. On this being the original wording of the text, see ibid., pp. 62–67.
CHAPTER 4: WHO WROTE THE BIBLE?
1. Some critics of one of my earlier books, on the problem of suffering, wryly suggested that the title “God’s Problem” should instead be entitled “God’s Problem According to Bart Ehrman”—but obviously that’s not what I myself would call the book!
2. We also have relatively full Acts of Andrew, Peter, Thomas, and Paul—these, too, are interesting for seeing what legends sprang up, but they are of little use historically. For a nice collection of these texts, see J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
3. On literacy in the ancient world, see William Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); for literacy specifically among Palestinian Jews, see Catherine Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2001).
4. To cite one well-known example of this ignorance of Jewish customs: Mark 7:3 indicates that the Pharisees “and all the Jews” washed their hands before eating, so as to observe “the tradition of the elders.” This is not true: most Jews did not engage in this ritual. If Mark had been a Jew, or even a gentile living in Palestine, he certainly would have known this.
5. The Gospels were written much earlier: Mark, possibly around 70 CE, Matthew and Luke, around 80 to 85; John, around 90 or 95.
6. The church historian Eusebius calls Papias “a man of very small intelligence” (Eusebius, Church History 3.39).
7. This is a consensus view among scholars today. For one thing, Matthew used Mark as a source for many of his stories, copying out the Greek word for word in some passages. If our Matthew was a Greek translation of a Hebrew original, it would not be possible to explain the verbatim agreement of Matthew with Mark in the Greek itself.
8. Depending on whether this is information that he heard directly from “the elder” or from a “companion” of one of the elders.
9. Another tradition in Papias that no one thinks is historically accurate: he writes that Judas, after the betrayal, bloated up, becoming so fat that he couldn’t walk down the street because not even his head could fit between the buildings, until eventually he more or less exploded and died. It’s a terrific story, but not one that anyone believes.
10. The reason for thinking that “Luke” was Paul’s traveling companion is that in four passages of Acts, the author uses the first-person plural “we.” These “we passages” (e.g., Acts 16:10–16) have been taken to suggest that the author was with Paul for these particular incidents. Other scholars have noted, however, that the passages begin and end remarkably abruptly. Moreover, the author never says anything like “I then joined Paul and we did this or that.” Why the abruptness? It is now widely thought that the author was not Paul’s companion but that one of his sources was some kind of travel diary that he uncovered in his research and that used the first-person plural.
11. See the discussion on p. 134.
12. I earlier indicated that Revelation was one of the eight books certainly written under the name of its actual author because it doesn’t claim to be by John the son of Zebedee. Many later Christians who accepted it as part of the canon thought it was by a different John, known as John the Elder. This puts the book of Revelation in a different category from the book of James, which was accepted as canonical precisely because it was thought to be written by Jesus’ brother.
13. This is widely claimed among New Testament scholars writing commentaries on such books as the Pastoral Epistles; experts in ancient literary forgery have long known that the claim is bogus. See the works cited in note 14. For a very accessible discussion by a conservative scholar, see Terry L. Wilder, Pseudonymity, the New Testament, and Deception: An Inquiry into Intention and Reception (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004).
14. The only thorough discussion of virtually all the relevant data is Wolfgang Speyer, Die literarische Fälschung im heidnischen und christlichen Altertum (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1971). But a fascinating account of some aspects of the problem can be found in Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
15. This book can be found in Elliott, Apocryphal New Testament, pp. 379–82.
16. A good translation, with introduction, is provided by John Collins in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. James H. Charlesworth (New York: Doubleday, 1983), vol. 1, pp. 317–472.
17. Two recent refutations of the idea that the neo-Pythagoreans engaged in forgery for this reason are given by Jeremy N. Duff, “Reconsideration of Pseudepigraphy in Early Christianity” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oxford, 1998) and Armin Baum, Pseudepigraphie und literarische Fälschung im frühen Christentum (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2001).
18. Tertullian, On Baptism, 17. “The Acts of Paul and Thecla” can be found in Elliott, Apocryphal New Testament, pp. 364–74.
19. This anecdote can be found in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers 5, 92–93.
20. The one that survives can be found in Elliott, New Testament Apocrypha, p. 546.
21. See Elliott, Apocryphal New Testament, pp. 68–83.
22. This book is also sometimes called the Gospel of Nicodemus. See Elliott, Apocryphal New Testament, pp. 169–85.
23. For more detailed explanations of the standard scholarly views see my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction, chapter 24, which also provides bibliography of other scholarly works.
24. See the discussion by Victor Paul Furnish in Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. D. N. Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), vol. 2, s.v. “Ephesians, Epistle to the,” pp. 535–42.
25. In Philippians 1:1 Paul does mention bishops (plural) and deacons, b
ut he does not tell us what these people did or in what sense, if any, they may have been in leadership roles in the church.
CHAPTER 5: LIAR, LUNATIC, OR LORD? FINDING THE HISTORICAL JESUS
1. It is sometimes thought that the historian Suetonius also makes reference to Jesus. When discussing the expulsion of the Jews from Rome under the reign of Claudius, some twenty years after Jesus’ death, Suetonius writes that it occurred because of riots that had been “instigated by Chrestus.” Some scholars have argued that this is a misspelling of the name Christ, and that Jews in Rome were in an uproar over the claims of Christians that Jesus was the Messiah. This is a possibility, but even if it is true it once again does not provide us with any concrete historical information about Jesus’ life. The other possibility is that Suetonius means what he says, and that the riots were started by a man named Chrestus.
2. For a full discussion of this text and the others mentioned in this section, see John Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 1991), vol. 1.
3. See Galatians 4:4; Romans 15:7; 1 Corinthians 9:5; Galatians 1:19; 1 Corinthians 15:5; 1 Corinthians 11:22–25; 1 Corinthians 7:10–11; and 1 Corinthians 9:14.
4. For more information, see my New Testament: A Historical Introduction, chapter 7.
5. Some scholars think that the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas, with its 114 sayings of Jesus, most of which are not found in the New Testament, may also preserve some authentic traditions from the life of Jesus.
6. First published in 1906, it is still very much worth reading (New York: Macmillan, 1978).
7. On the meaning and nature of Jewish apocalyptic thought, see pp. 77–79.
8. This is argued persuasively by E. P. Sanders in his classic study, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985).
9. Outstanding exceptions are the publications by the Jesus Seminar and several of its members, including Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), and John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994).
10. See Dale Allison, Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest Christian Tradition and Its Interpreters (London: T. & T. Clark, 2005).
CHAPTER 6: HOW WE GOT THE BIBLE
1. Many theologians maintain that God was at work behind the entire process to ensure that it worked out in the long run. In that case it is a mystery why the process was not clearer, smoother, and faster (we are talking about God, after all).
2. See my Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005).
3. Two of the more intelligent critiques on the web are by Daniel Wallace, “The Gospel According to Bart,” at http://www.bible.org/page.php?page_id=4000, and Ben Witherington, “Misanalyzing Text Criticism—Bart Ehrman’s ‘Misquoting Jesus,’” at http://benwitherington.blogspot.com/2006/03/misanalyzing-text-criticism-bart. html. In addition, three books were published in response from conservative perspectives: Dillon Burroughs, Misquotes in Misquoting Jesus: Why You Can Still Believe (Ann Arbor: Nimble Books, 2006); Timothy Paul Jones, Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies in Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus (Downer’s Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2007); and Nicholas Perrin, Lost in Transmission: What We Can Know About the Words of Jesus (New York: Thomas Nelson, 2008).
4. I have never, in print or in an interview, indicated that I lost my Christian faith because of textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament. As I explain in chapter 8 (and discuss in my book God’s Problem, HarperOne, 2008), it was the problem of suffering that eventually led me to become an agnostic.
5. Later Christian theologians found another reference to the Trinity in Matthew 28:19–20: the “name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Certainly all three members of what was to become the Trinity are mentioned there, and I do not think this is a case where scribes added the reference to the text later: it is in all of our manuscripts. But the critical relationship of the three is not indicated, and that is the key point: here there is no word of the three each being a separate divine person and the three together being the one triune God.
6. Some theologians differentiate between books that are inspired by God and books that are part of the canon; for them, the canonical books are inspired and other books may be as well.
7. The word “canon” comes from the Greek kanon, which means straight edge or a measuring stick. It came to refer to any recognized collection of texts.
8. Some scholars no longer see the term “Gnosticism” as informative, useful, or accurate for describing these groups; see Michael Williams, Rethinking Gnosticism: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), and Karen King, What is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
9. Like the other Nag Hammadi documents, the Gospel of Thomas was originally written in Greek; what we have now is a later Coptic translation.
10. For a further discussion, see my book Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), chapter 3.
11. See, for example, sayings 3, 11, 22, 28, 29, 37, and 56; see also my discussion in The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 208–13.
12. See the discussion in Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 191–201.
13. This has been disputed by a few scholars, including Mark Hahnemann, The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), who dates the list to the fourth century.
14. Bauer chose not to include a discussion of the books of the New Testament in his analysis, in part because many of them are impossible to locate geographically.
15. See my discussion in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), chapter 1.
16. Over the past century, copies of New Testament books have been found, but there is no way of knowing whether these were proto-orthodox copies. For example, the Gnostics made extensive use of the Gospel of John, and so it is impossible to tell whether an early fragment of John discovered in Egypt was used by a proto-orthodox church or a Gnostic one.
17. For translations and discussions of all these texts, see James Robinson, The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 4th ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996); Charles Hedrick and Paul Mirecki, The Gospel of the Savior: A New Ancient Gospel (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 1999); and Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer, and Gregor Wurst, The Gospel of Judas, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2008).
18. As just one example, the head of the Christian training school in Alexandria during Athanasius’s lifetime, a scholar called Didymus the Blind, had a larger, more inclusive canon than Athanasius.
CHAPTER 7: WHO INVENTED CHRISTIANITY?
1. Some expected a priest who would deliver the authoritative interpretation of God’s law. Among the Jews in the Dead Sea Scrolls community there was an expectation that there would be two Messiahs, one a priest and the other, possibly, a king like David. See John Collins, The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature (New York: Doubleday, 1995).
2. See Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho, translated by Thomas Falls, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2003).
3. The authoritative source for Greek and Roman attitudes toward Jews and Judaism is Menahem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1974–85).
4. The Roman responses to the Jewish uprisings in Palestine in 66–73 CE and 132–35 CE—the first of which led to the destruction of the Temple and the second to the expulsion of the Jews from the land—
should not be seen as persecutions against the Jews for being Jewish. These were politico-military responses to political uprisings. Jews elsewhere in the empire were not targeted.
Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them) Page 31