Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 318

How Consistent are Orthodox Corruptions of Scripture?

The goal of my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture was to show all the places that I could find of where early Christian scribes modified their texts of the New Testament in order to make them more amenable to their own (the scribes’ own) polemical purposes, particularly with respect to the Christological debates they were involved with. I will describe these second and third century debates in subsequent posts. (Recall: there are very good reasons for thinking that the vast majority of...

On Falsification and Forgery

On Friday I will be giving a talk at a symposium at York University in Toronto that will be focusing on the use of forgery in the early Christian apocrypha, sponsored by Tony Burke of York U. and Brent Landau at the University of Texas. Website is here: http://tonyburke.ca/conference/ I thought it might be interesting to excerpt a portion of my talk here, as it covers some ground that I recently have gone over on the blog, but from a different perspective. (More on the bloody sweat! But in re...

How Do You Research Orthodox Corruptions?

When I finished my dissertation on a technical area within textual criticism – it was an analysis of the quotations of the Gospels in the writings of the fourth-century church father Didymus the Blind, in an attempt to demonstrate what the manuscripts at his disposal in Alexandria Egypt must have been like – I very much wanted to continue to work in the field of textual criticism, but I wanted to do some research that had some broader applicability and wider interest to scholars who were not...

Do I Have a Grudge against Bruce Metzger?

QUESTION:

A more personal question: did you have a grudge against Dr. Bruce Metzger? I have always seen conservative textual critics and scholars pit you against Dr. Metzger’s views.

RESPONSE:

When I first read this question I was very surprised indeed. A grudge against Bruce Metzger???

Metzger, as many readers of this blog know, was my teacher and mentor, and I never had anything but the most profound and utmost respect for him, from the moment I first had the privilege of meeting him until...

Live Stream the Debate Tonight

One of the readers of the blog has submitted this:

Found this claim:
Livestreaming is happening for the Friday night debate, “Did the Historical Jesus Claim to be Divine?”
Instructions: To view the event you must have an account with livestream.com. If you do have an account, just sign in to your account to view. If you do not have an account you will have to go through the process of creating an account with Livestream.com.
Just copy and paste the URL below and follow the instructions.

http...

Magic and Manuscripts

In my post yesterday I mentioned something about the importance of our surviving manuscripts for understanding practices of magic in the early Christian tradition. Several people have asked me about it, so I thought I would follow it up.

There’s been a lot written about magic over the years. When talking about antiquity, “magic” is not what we think of today: we think of illusion artists who do tricks in order to make think something has happened which in fact has not. In antiquity, magic was...

Debate in Dallas on Friday

For anyone in the Dallas area: On Friday (two days! Sept. 18) I will be having a public debate with Justin Bass, a Christian apologist and pastor with a PhD from Dallas Theological, on the question “Did the Historical Jesus Claim To Be Divine?” Dr. Bass thinks the answer is YES. I think the answer is NO. It should be an interesting back and forth. If you want to hear the arguments, come and see it. Free admission. And my arguments will be worth every dime you pay to hear them. (It will be a...

Why Intentional Changes of the Text Might Matter

In doing the research that led up to my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, I came to see that the variations of our manuscripts were important not only because they could tell us what the original writers said in the books that later became the New Testament, but also because they could tell us about what was influencing the anonymous and otherwise unknown scribes who produced the copies of these books in later times.

As I pointed out in a previous post, scholars have long thought – w...

Why Bother With Anything *Except* the “Original” Text??

In this post I would like to tie a couple of strings together that have been more or less hanging. In a couple of earlier posts I asserted my view that we were probably as “close to the originals” of the New Testament writings as we are ever likely to get, that barring some spectacular new discoveries (such as the original themselves!) or some fantastic changes in method, we simply are not going to be able to know whether we are right or wrong in the textual decisions we have made about which...

My Focus on Christology in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture

In the last couple of posts I have talked about the basic thesis that lay behind my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. After doing my dissertation I became interested in seeing how theological disputes in early Christianity may have affected the scribes who were copying the texts that later came to be collected into the canon of the New Testament. Rarely had a study of this sort been pursued before, and never thoroughly and rigorously.

Here let me provide a bit more background. First,...