Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 291

Metzger and the Squirrel Part 2: Another Blast from the Past

I’ve decided that I can’t do just one Blast from the Past this week, since the one I chose was a two-part post, and I can’t leave anyone hanging. Here is the all important (and in some ways more interesting) part two of my Metzger and the squirrel story, from exactly four years ago.

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As I indicated on my previous post, for years friends of mine were eager for me to find out whether the story about Metzger and the squirrel really...

Bruce Metzger and the Squirrel: A Blast from the Past

A Blast From the Past: four years ago I posted the following, an amusing anecdate about my mentor in graduate school (and beyond) the illustrious New Testament scholar Bruce Metzger.

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As with all great men, Metzger was widely talked about among those who knew and revered him. There were lots of stories told about Metzger at Princeton Seminary. Someone should probably collect and publish them. I was especially intereste...

Two Versions of Constantine’s Vision

In this thread I am discussing the conversion of the emperor Constantine to Chrsitianity. I have already given the political and military background to his conversion, and said something about his religious affiliations prior to converting. Now I can begin to address what we know about the conversion itself.

We have three principal sources of information for the vision(s) of Constantine that led to the conversion. The first comes to us in a flattering speech – known as a panegyric – delivered...

Constantine Before His Conversion

We have comparatively excellent sources for Constantine’s adult life, including his own writings, laws he enacted, a biography written about him by the fourth-century Christian bishop of Caesarea and “father of church history” Eusebius, and other contemporary reports. But we are handicapped when it comes to his life prior to his accession to the throne, including his religious life. For this we have very slim records. We do know he was born in the northern Balkans, and so it can be assumed th...

Constantine and the Battle at the Milvian Bridge

As I indicated in my previous post, when Constantine had been acclaimed emperor by his troops in Britain (at the city of York) in 306 CE (upon the death of his father Constantius), it was taken as a license for Maxentius to assume power in Rome. The reason is this. Diocletian, as we have seen, had tried to move the empire to a new system of governance, the Tetrarchy, in which four leaders, all chosen for their experience and skills, would rule. When a senior member in the East or West retired...

Knowing the “Original” Text — of the NT or of Isaiah. Weekly Readers’ Mailbag July 17, 2016

How can we absolutely know whether we have the original words of the New Testament? And weren’t books of the Old Testament edited progressively over time, so that their texts were even more fluid than those of the New Testament? These are the two questions I address in this week’s Readers’ mailbag. If you have a question you would like me to address, let me know!

QUESTION

“So that there are some places where specialists cannot agree on what the text originally said, and there are some places...

How Constantine Became Emperor

As background to the conversion of the emperor Constantine I have been explaining how Diocletian had set up the Tetrarchy with a sensible order of succession, so that the Roman emperors would be chosen on a rational basis rather than simply because of accidents of birth or the whims of the army. His plan ended up not working.

Because of health issues, after a long and successful reign of over two decades, Diocletian decided to retire from office on May 1, 305. For the sake of a smooth success...

Preface to Constantine: The Rule of the Four

In this post I want to explain how Constantine came to power. It is an unusually complicated story, with all kinds of names and dates that only inveterate historians could love. I’ll give a simple version of it here, more suitable for those of us who are mere mortals.

The reason it matters is that Constantine’s predecessor’s Diocletian vision of a Tetrarchy (= Rule of Four), in which the empire would be ruled by two senior emperor (each called an Augustus) and two junior emperors (each called...

The Emperor Constantine: Some Background

Time for something new, about as different from the Pentateuch as you can get while still staying in the ancient world.

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about the Emperor Constantine over the past ten months and have decided to devote a thread to him on the blog. His conversion to Christianity is usually considered a major turning point in the history of the Christian religion. Before he became Christian all the Roman emperors were, of course, pagan, and some of them, including his immedi...

Are the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Manuscripts Reliable? A Blast From the Past

A reader has perspicaciously pointed out to me that a particularly relevant post from three years ago (June 7, 2013) makes an important contribution to the topic I’ve been discussing about the Pentateuch. This post is not about whether the events described in the Hebrew Bible are accurate, but whether we have accurate manuscripts of these accounts. I talk a lot on the blog about manuscripts of the New Testament. What about manuscripts of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible? My post back then was i...