Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 327

My Trip to Turkey

I am en route to Istanbul now with a layover, at this moment, as we speak, in London’s Heathrow airport. I’ll be in Turkey for nearly three weeks. This is a trip sponsored by my home institution, the General Alumni Association of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As is true of most universities, UNC has a vibrant travel program for alumni. Trips can be on the expensive side, but they are usually fantastic. As the guest lecturer, I get a free trip out of it.

There are four peopl...

The Death of Judas in the NT

In this and the next couple of posts I will be talking about what we know was in Papias’s five-volume book, now lost, Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord. As I previously indicated, the only reason we have any clue about the matter is that later church fathers quoted a few passages from the book. Would they had quoted more! But what they give us is very tantalizing.

The first passage I want to discuss involves the death of Judas Iscariot. To make sense of what Papias has to say, I need to p...

The Lost Writings of Papias

In this thread I have been discussing documents known from early Christianity that no longer exist and that I very much wish would be discovered. So far I have talked about the lost letters of Paul, the writings of Paul’s opponents, Q (the source used by Matthew and Luke for many of their sayings of Jesus), and the Signs Source (a collection of Jesus miraculous activities used by the Gospel of John). With this post I move outside the New Testament to indicate documents that certainly at one t...

Losing Religion in America

As many of you know, there was a major poll done recently by the Pew Research Center involving religion in America. The results were published about three weeks ago, and the findings were striking indeed. Among the most intriguing were that the percentage of people identifying themselves as Christian in the U.S. has declined by nearly 8% in just seven years. That corresponds to those who consider themselves not “religiously affiliated” in any way, which, for the purposes of this poll, meant t...

The Nature of John’s Signs Source

I have given one of the major pieces of evidence that there was a Signs Source that was used by the author of the Gospel of John, a written document that enumerated seven miraculous deeds of Jesus that were designed to show that he was a divine being, the Son of God. There is another piece of evidence. It is the concluding comment of chapter 20 of the Gospel, which I have already quoted a couple of times:

“Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, but these are written so t...

Some Evidence for a Signs Source in John

I started this mini-thread by mentioning one of the now-lost documents of early Christianity that I would love to have discovered, the alleged “Signs Source” of the Gospel of John. Before giving the evidence that there may have been some such source, I went off on a tangent, in order to show that John has a different view of Jesus’ spectacular deeds from what you find in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In these earlier Gospels, Jesus does “miracles,” both because he feels compassion for those in nee...

Why Jesus Does Miracles

I seem to be taking a very circuitous route (as you may have noticed) to the question of why we might think that the author of the Gospel of John had access to a written source that gave him his information about the “signs” that Jesus did during his public ministry. To get to that point, I have been discussing how John’s view of Jesus’ spectacular deeds differed significantly from the view of the Synoptics. I have stressed that whereas in John Jesus does signs in order to prove that he is th...

The Temptation Narrative Missing from John

In my previous post I started to discuss the hypothetical Signs Source that some scholars have claimed lay behind the accounts of Jesus’ miracles in the Gospel of John – one of the now lost documents of early Christianity (assuming it once existed) that I very much wish could be discovered. Before giving evidence that there was some such written source, I started in the last post by discussing the distinctive view of Jesus’ spectacular deeds in the Fourth Gospel, where they are called “signs”...

Signs in the Gospel of John

For many decades now there have been scholars who have been convinced that the Gospel of John is based, in large part, on written, but no-longer surviving, sources. It is much debated whether John relied on the Synoptic Gospels for any of its stories, or whether in fact its author had ever read (or even heard of) Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

There are very few verbatim overlaps between John and the others, and outside of the Passion narrative there is not a lot of overlap in the stories told. Som...

Back To the Discovery of Lost Early Christian Writings

I have decided to return to the thread that I unceremoniously cut off nearly two months ago. At the time – in the middle of the thread — I decided to start discussing my book on memory and the historical Jesus, since I had just finished it and wanted to get some feedback (which was all terrifically helpful, thank you all very much!). I then got onto some personal reflections about Moody Bible Institute and related topics. But now I’m ready, all this time later, to pick up the thread.

The thre...