Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 318

The Textual Problem of 1 Thessalonians 2:7

Now that I have discussed the purpose of 1 Thessalonians and spent a couple of posts talking about one of its most interesting passages, on which the modern Christian notion of a “rapture” is based, I am able to return to my point of departure, a textual variant found in 1 Thess. 2:7. This variant has nothing to do with the question of what Paul thought would happen when Jesus returned, sometime in his lifetime. It is an earlier part of the letter where Paul is reminding the Thessalonians of...

A Thief in the Night

Discussing the mythology found in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 has made me remember something that happened some 35 years ago. It’s a pretty funny story.

At the time I was still a church going Christian. The church I was attending was evangelical, but I was moving away from a conservative theology and a strict, literal interpretation of the Bible. I was becoming socially quite liberal, and was starting to take a more liberal view of the Bible. I still thought that in *some* sense it was the Word o...

The Myth of the Rapture: Calling a Spade a Spade

I am sometimes torn between wanting to be sensitive to people’s deeply rooted religious convictions and calling a spade a spade. think many readers would be surprised (and dubious) that have this sensitivity, since ’m often blasted precisely for trouncing people’s religious beliefs. But that’s almost never my intention. The one exception is when it comes to fundamentalism. have no qualms about attacking Christian fundamentalist thinking head-on. But even then try to be sensitive to the people...

The Return of Jesus (Rapture?) in 1 Thessalonians

Since I’ve started talking about Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, the earliest Christian writing of any kind that we have, in preparation for discussion one tiny little textual variant in 1 Thess. 2:7,which involves only the presence or absence of a single letter in a single word, but on which the meaning of the passage hinges, I can’t let the opportunity pass without saying something further by way of background (none of which is especially relevant to this particular textual varian...

Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians

In my two previous posts I discussed a textual variant that could be explained either as a scribal accident or as an intentional change. I thought it might be interesting to point out a few other variants that also could go either way. These are all intriguing problems in and of themselves, and by talking about them I can illustrate a bit further the kinds of quandaries textual critics find themselves in when trying to decide what an author wrote when we have different versions of his words i...

Mark 1:1 as an Intentional Alteration of the Text

In yesterday’s post I began to explore a textual variant in Mark 1:1 that could be explained either as an accidental slip of the pen or an intentional alteration of the text. We’re plowing into some heavy waters here – I know some members of the blog like me to go deeper into serious scholarship on occasion, and others would rather prefer that I not. But here I am, in the thick of it.

All of the posts in this thread are a lead up to answer the question from weeks ago now, about what led me to...

A Variant in Mark 1:1 — Accidental or Intentional?

I have been talking about different kinds of changes made in our surviving New Testament manuscripts, some of them accidental slips of the pen (that’s probably the vast majority of our textual variants) and others of them intentional alterations. One of the points that I’ve been trying to stress is that at the end of the day it is, technically speaking, impossible to know what a scribe’s “intentions” were (or if he had any, other than the intention of copying a text). None of the scribes is a...

An Intentional Change in Mark 15:34

I have started giving some instances of what appear to be “intentional” changes made by scribes, as opposed to simple, accidental, slips of the pen. In my previous post I pointed to an example in Mark 1:2, in which scribes appear to have altered a text because it seems to embody an error. If I’m wrong that this is the direction of the change – that is, if the text that I’m arguing is the “corruption” is in fact the original text – then there is still almost certainly an intentional change sti...

Illustration of a Textual Change: Did Mark Make a Mistake?

I have started discussing “intentional” changes of the text of the New Testament – that is alterations found in manuscripts of the New Testament that appear to have been made by scribes who *wanted* to change the text, presumably in order to make it say (more closely) what they wanted it to say. Let me illustrate my discussion by dealing with three of the most interesting textual variants in the Gospel of Mark, one of which is an easy problem to solve, one that is a bit more difficult, and on...

Intentional Changes of the Text

I’m getting back now, with this post, to the thread that I started a full month ago in response to a question a member of the blog had related to the field about one of my books that deals with the textual criticism of the New Testament. Just to bring us all back up to speed, I will here repeat the question and briefly summarize what I have covered so far.

READER’S QUESTION:

Dr. Ehrman, I do not know if others would find this interesting, but I would love to know how you developed the idea f...