Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 326

The Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library

In this thread on the discovery of ancient Christian texts, I have mentioned the serendipitous discovery of both the Nag Hammadi Library in Egypt and the Dead Sea Scrolls in what is now Israel. It might be useful for me to say something about both of these discoveries. In this post and the next I will talk about the Nag Hammadi Library. I have taken this discussion from my New Testament textbook.

But let me reproduce the discussion with a warning. Caveat lector! My friend Mark Goodacre, NT sc...

What I Saw at St. Catherine’s Monastery

In my last post I began to relate an anecdote about a traveling adventure I had several years ago, when giving lectures for a UNC trip to Egypt and Jordan with a stop at the famed St. Catherine’s monastery in the southern part of the Sinai peninsula, the place where Tischendorf had discovered the biblical manuscript codex Sinaiticus in the mid 19th century, and where a fire at the monastery in the 1970s had uncovered a hidden room found to contain manuscripts, including the pages from the Old...

St. Catherine’s Monastery

In my previous post I talked about Constantin von Tischendorf and his discovery of the Codex Sinaiticus in St. Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai peninsula in 1844 and then 1859. I have a personal anecdote to relate about the manuscript, one of the most interesting things every to happen to me on my various travels hither and yon.

To make sense of the anecdote I need to provide some background information. As I indicated in my previous post, when Tischendorf discovered the codex Sinaiticus (a...

Tischendorf and the Discovery of Codex Sinaiticus

PLEASE NOTE: I am incommunicado for a few days on a gulet in the Aegean Sea on the west coast of Turkey. I have asked Steven, our blog support, to add some posts for me in my absence; I prepared these in advance knowing I would be out of reach. Here is one of them. I’m afraid I will not be able to respond to comments on the next few posts until I return to some form of civilization that supports Internet and all things electronic. So sorry!

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How Are Manuscripts Discovered

PLEASE NOTE: I am incommunicado for a few days on a gulet in the Aegean Sea on the west coast of Turkey. I have asked Steven, our blog support, to add some posts for me in my absence; I prepared these in advance knowing I would be out of reach. Here is one of them. I’m afraid I will not be able to respond to comments on the next few posts until I return to some form of civilization that supports Internet and all things electronic. So sorry!

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The Discovery of Lost Documents

PLEASE NOTE: I am incommunicado for a few days on a gulet in the Aegean Sea on the west coast of Turkey. I have asked Steven, ourblog support,toadd some postsfor me in my absence; I prepared these in advance knowing I would be out of reach. Here is one of them. I’m afraid I will not be able torespond tocomments on the next fewposts until I return tosome form of civilization that supports Internet and all things electronic. So sorry!

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I’ve be...

Papias and the Eyewitnesses

I have been discussing the writings of Papias, his lost five-volume Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord. Scholars of the New Testament have long ascribed huge significance to this work, in no small part because Papias claims to have ties to eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus. In my view this championing of Papias is misguided. I say something about that in my new book on Jesus Before the Gospels (or whatever we end up calling it); I will probably be going into a more sustained analysis in my...

Lecture: Jesus and the Historian

OnTuesday, February 25, 2014 I gave a lecture at Dickinson College (Carlisle Pennsylvania) on “Jesus and the Historian,” inthe Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium. In the lecture I deal with the historical problems posed by the surviving Gospels for evaluating the evidence for the life and teachings of Jesus.

Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition (The quality is not as good as one might hope, but it’s the best we can do given the original source)

Wine in the Kingdom

Writing my last post on Papias made me think of something that is rather humorous even if it is only very tangentially related. If you recall, Papias claimed that Jesus taught the following about the future utopian kingdom on earth:

The days are coming when vines will come forth, each with ten thousand boughs; and on a single bough will be ten thousand branches. And indeed, on a single branch will be ten thousand shoots and on every shoot ten thousand clusters; and in every cluster will be te...

A Fantastic Saying of Jesus in Papias

I have mentioned one of the intriguing traditions found in the now-lost Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord by the early second century proto-orthodox church father Papias (his account of the death of Judas). Here is another one.

In this one Papias is relating what he has heard that Jesus taught. As you’ll see, it is not a teaching that is found in the New Testament Gospels, or in fact in any other Gospel source we have.

What is most striking, in some ways, is that Papias claims that he has...