Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 13

Acts of the Jewish Christians: Rethinking Their Role in the First Jewish-Roman War – Platinum Post by Rizwan Ahmed

“[T]hey went after the high priests. It was against them that the main rush was made, and they were soon caught and killed. The murderers, standing on their dead bodies, ridiculed Ananus..they threw out the dead bodies without burial.” (Josephus, “The Jewish War”) When the question arises whether early Jewish Christians participated in the First [...]

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My Least Favorite Passage of the Pastorals: Those Silent and Submissive Women….

I'd like to conclude this thread on the Pastoral epistles by discussing at greater length the one passage that I think has done more damage than nearly any other.  It involves women in the church.  The story of women in the entire Bible is long and complex, but it starts in the beginning (Genesis 1-2) and [...]

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The Pastoral Epistles. For Further Reading

Here is an annotated list of books on the Pastoral Epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, most of them relevant to all the Deutero-Pauline epistles with a couple of commentaries that deal with 2 Thessalonians.  One benefit of serious commentaries is that they always begin by discussing major critical issues in understanding a [...]

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More Evidence That the Pastoral Epistles Were Written After the Days of Paul

I now conclude this short thread and who wrote the Pastoral epistles, when, and why by picking up on my previous argument: that aspects of these letters reveal a church situation after Paul’s day when proto-orthodox Christians were appealing to the authorities of the clergy, the creed, and the canon of Scripture to support their [...]

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The Later (post-Pauline) Context of the Pastoral Epistles

In my previous post I showed why the vocabulary of the Pastoral epistles and the kinds of problems they address suggest that they were written after Paul’s time, by a follower who was using his name.  As I indicated there, of particular importance for establishing they do not come directly from Paul is the way [...]

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Who Wrote the Pastoral Epistles? When? And Why?

Now that I have given an overview of each of the Pastoral epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, I can turn to the key question of whether Paul actually wrote them, when they were written, and why.  This will take several posts. I have taken the information with some revision by book, The [...]

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The Pastoral Epistles of 2 Timothy and Titus in a Nutshell

I continue now with my nutshell overviews of the Pastorals by summarizing 2 Timothy and Titus.  I begin with a 50-word overview of the book Timothy. 2 Timothy, a more intimate letter (allegedly) by Paul to Timothy, recounts their past relationship, expresses hope that his disciple will come to visit him in prison in Rome, [...]

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The Pastoral Epistle of 1 Timothy in a Nutshell

In this series providing summaries of each book of the New Testament “in a nutshell” I have dealt with three of the letters that claim to be written by Paul but probably were not: Colossians, Ephesians, and 2 Thessalonians.  We now come to the three letters that are grouped together and called the “Pastoral Epistles,” [...]

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In the Weeds with the Author of 2 Thessalonians

I thought it migh be interesting for readers who like on occasion to get down into the weeds of scholarship to see a more detailed argument for how the *similarity* of 2 Thessalonians to 1 Thessalonians suggests not that Paul wrote both of them but that a later author (of 2 Thessalonians) was imitating Paul's [...]

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2 Thessalonians, The Modern State of Israel, World War III, and the Return of Jesus

An obscure verse in 2 Thessalonians may conceivably lead to World War III.  OK, it sounds sensational and implausible, but hear me out. The following is taken from my book Armageddon (Simon & Schuster, 2023), edited for this occasion. ****************************** Evangelical Christians historically have believed that the Bible predicts the future, that many prophecies are being fulfilled [...]

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