Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 321

How Diverse Was Early Christianity?

In order to get to the question of what motivated my book The Orthdox Corruption of Scripture, and to explain more fully what the book was about, I have spent three posts talking about the terms “orthodoxy” and “heresy” and why they are problematic; in doing so I have been explaining both the traditional view of the relationship of orthodoxy and heresy (as found, for example, in the writings of Eusebius) and the view set forth, in opposition, by Walter Bauer. Several readers have asked where...

Evaluating the Views of Walter Bauer

In my last two posts I talked about the relationship of orthodoxy and heresy in early Christianity. The standard view, held for many many centuries, goes back to the Church History of the fourth-century church father Eusebius, who argued that orthodoxy represented the original views of Jesus and his disciples, and heresies were corruptions of that truth by willful, mean-spirited, wicked, and demon inspired teachers who wanted to lead others astray.

In 1934 Walter Bauer challenged that view in...

A Radically Different View of Orthodoxy and Heresy

In my last post I started discussing the terms “orthodoxy” and “heresy,” pointing out that their traditional/etymological meanings are not very helpful for historians. “Orthodoxy” literally means the “right belief” about God, Christ, the world and so. That means it is a theological term about religious truth. But historians are not theologians who can tell you what is theologically true; they are scholars who try to establish what happened in the past. And so how can a historian, acting as a...

What Are Orthodoxy and Heresy?

In my previous post I began to explain what I meant by the title of my 1993 book, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. One of the terms of the title is non-problematic: by “Scripture” I meant specifically the writings of the New Testament. Another term, “corruption,” is a bit trickier, and as I indicated I was using it both in a technical sense to refer to any kind of alteration of a text by a scribe who was copying it (that is what textual critics have traditionally called any change of the...

What is An Orthodox Corruption of Scripture?

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 for _The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture_. How did you go about researching it? How long did it take? Is it a once in a lifetime work?

MY RESPONSE:

Ah, this is a great question and it will take a number of posts to lay it all out, as it is a very complicated affair. But it could make for an interesting thread. We’ll see!

To begin with, I need to say somethi...

Guest Post by Brice Jones on the Reliability of the Early Manuscripts

Here is a second guest-written post dealing with manuscripts. We are unusually lucky over the past two days! This one is by Brice Jones, another ancient manuscript person who happens to be on the blog. Brice runs his own blog devoted to issues related to papyrology (roughly: the study of ancient papyri manuscripts). His very useful blogsite is: http://www.bricecjones.com/blog

Brice here is responding to some rather extravagant claims made by Craig Evans (my friend and erstwhile debate opponen...

Guest Post – Brent Nongbri on Manuscript Discoveries

Today we have a guest post – another one from Brent Nongbri, who, if you remember, did his PhD in New Testament at Yale and is currently an Australian Research Council (ARC) Research Fellow in the Department of Ancient History at MacQuarie University in Sydney Australia. He is one of the leading researchers on ancient manuscripts in the world, and among his other many fine virtues, is a member of the blog.

You may recall that I raised the question a week or ten days ago about why archaeologis...

Kickstarting a Debate

I periodically get asked to have a public debate with a mythicist on the question of their real concern: Did Jesus Exist? I have regularly declined these offers, for a variety of reasons:

The question is not really a matter of dispute among experts, even though mythicists as a rule would like it to be and sometimes even insist it is. But the reality is this: if you were to look at the program of the annual meeting of (the many thousands of English-speaking) professors of Biblical Studies, th...

Questions on the Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library

I have received a number of questions from readers about the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library, arising out of my earlier discussion of it and the beginning of the back and forth I’m having with Mark Goodacre (as we await his reply to my initial response; he is overseas attending an academic conference and has his hands tied up just now). Here I will deal with two questions, one that’s a zinger and the other that has been asked by several readers.

First the zinger. The reader noted that I...

Contradictory Stories and Historical Method

I was surprised and intrigued to see the reactions I received to my post in which I responded to Mark Goodacre’s five points calling into question the traditional story of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library. In it I pointed out that just because a story changes over time does not mean that the gist of the story is false. If some tellings indicate that the jar was two feet tall and others that it was six, or that there were two people involved or seven, this does not indicate that the st...