Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 320

Contradictions and Silly Claims by Textual Critics

A couple of posts ago I mentioned a comment that I used to make (and still would be happy to make) that rankled some of my colleagues and has led some of my conservative evangelical critics to claim that I’m contradicting myself and can’t figure out what to think. Or, rather, they claim that I present one view to scholars and a different view to popular readers in order to sensationalize the truth in order to sell books, presumably so I can make millions and retire in a Swiss villa in the Alp...

Textual Criticism Syllabus

This semester I am teaching my PhD seminar in precisely the topic I’ve been discussing for the past number of weeks, New Testament textual criticism. Here, for your reading pleasure, is the syllabus for the class.

Reli 809: New Testament Textual Criticism

Instructor: Bart D. Ehrman

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Fall 2015

Course Description

This class focuses on one of the foundational disciplines of biblical studies. New Testament textual criticism has experienced a signif...

Ruffling the Feathers of My Fellow Textual Critics

I seem to get under the skin of a lot of my fellow textual critics. Or at least a lot of them find my views somewhere between troubling and irritating. That became most clear when I published my book Misquoting Jesus. From what I can gather, the most common complaints about the book were about its perceived “tone.” Some scholars thought that I made the situation of our manuscripts to be worse than it really is. I, on the other hand, am not so sure about that.

What has probably struck me the m...

How God Could Become a Human

I have finished my posts on the passage of the so-called “bloody sweat” in Luke 22:43-44. I devoted some considerable time to this text (for a second time on the blog) because I wanted to use it to set up a discussion in response to a question that a reader asked (that I started answering a very long time ago. June 30 in fact….) about what motivated me to write my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. Now, after setting the stage for about two months, I’m able to answer the question. Abo...

Did Scribes Add the Passage of the Bloody Sweat?

In my previous posts I’ve been puzzling over the textual problem of Luke 22:43-44, the so-called “bloody sweat” passage, where Jesus, before his arrest, is said to have been in such deep agony that he sweat drops “as if of blood,” so that an angel came down from heaven to minister to him. These verses are found in some manuscripts of Luke, but not others. So which text is “original”? The version of Luke with the verses or the version without them?

In previous posts I have argued that the vers...

The Bloody Sweat and the Scribes Who Changed It

I have been talking about the famous passage in Luke 22:43-44, the account of the so-called “bloody sweat,” where we are told that prior to his arrest, Jesus went into deep agony and began to sweat great drops “as if of blood,” and to be so deeply disturbed that an angel had to come down from heaven to support him.

These verses can be found in a lot of manuscripts, including those used by the translators of the King James Bible, which is why the passage became so familiar to English-Bible rea...

How Textual Criticism Became Relevant

COMMENT:

Dr. Ehrman, I am an enormous fan of you and your work. Truly. But some of the recent claims you’ve made in your blog posts seem rather grandiose. You’re saying that the field of textual criticism was all but dead before you showed up and imparted your uncommon wisdom?

RESPONSE:

WHOA!!! That’s not what I’ve been saying (or *trying* to say) (evidently unsuccessfully!) at all! I’m not claiming that I myself am personally responsible for turning around the discipline. I’m glad this read...

Jesus’ Lack of Agony

Did Jesus feel deep agony in the face of death, in virtual despair up until the end? Or was he calm and collected, confident in both himself and God’s will? It depends which Gospel you read.

And that is one of the reasons (not the only one, as we will see!) that the textual problem of Luke 22:43-44 – the passage that narrates the “bloody sweat” — is so important. If the verses were originally in Luke, then Jesus in Luke, as in Mark, is in deep agony looking ahead to his crucifixion. If the ve...

When I First Realized the Importance of Textual Criticism: The Bloody Sweat

I think I first came to see precisely why textual criticism could be so important my first semester in my PhD program, during a seminar I was taking that had almost nothing to do with the study of the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. It was an “exegesis” course (i.e. focused on interpretation) on the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke – studied, of course, in the Greek). My realization of the importance of text-critical issues was not even connected to my own research. It had to...

An Amusing Anecdote about the State of Textual Criticism

I’d like to sum up my posts so far on the state of New Testament textual criticism – my original field of scholarship – when I entered into the field of student as a graduate student in the early 1980s by telling an anecdote. It has always struck me as rather amusing. (I am basing all this on memory, and as I’ve just written a book on memory, I am acutely aware of how frail this particular human function is. But this is exactly as I remember it!)

I was attending, for the second or third time,...