Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 336

My Non-Disclosure Agreement and the Gospel of Judas

I broke off the thread on the Gospel of Judas and the non-disclosure agreement that I had to sign at … at the point where I had to sign the non-disclosure agreement! Here I resume.

So the deal was this: in order to be allowed to see the manuscript, to examine it, to have access to a translation of it, to study the translation, and to write an essay based on it for the National Geographic’s intended book on the Gospel of Judas – all of this before anyone else in the universe (apart from Rodolph...

False Rumors (or lies?) About My Teaching

QUESTION:

In my talks with my family I have referenced your work, and my family typically rolls their eyes and tells me that they hold no respect for your work. When pressed on why I have gotten different answers most of them I can dismiss easily but lately they have been sticking to a new story and it goes like this.

“I have a friend from church who has a son and he as a faience who took one of Dr. Ehrman’s classes at UNC. The first day of class he walked in and asked if there were any Christi...

My UNC Seminar Tomorrow

Tomorrow I will be doing an all-day seminar at UNC for the Program in the Humanities and Human Values. This is a terrific organization on campus. Among other things, it puts on weekend seminars — usually Friday afternoon/evening; Saturday morning — that involve four faculty lectures on a set topic. Scheduling was such that we decided to put all four lectures on a Saturday this time. I’ve done these things for 25 years, and love them. *Most* of the time the program chooses a topic and has f...

The Gospel of Judas: Discovery, Restoration, and (Non-)Disclosure

I’ve decided not to give a detailed summary of this thread each time I resume it. To make sense of what I’m saying, you’ll need to go to the beginning a few days ago. Short story, though: it’s about how I came to learn about the discovery of the Gospel of Judas through a phone call from a representative of National Geographic who wanted me to be on the team that established its authenticity, back in the fall of 2004.

Before I flew to Geneva, I learned a great deal more about the text and its d...

How I First Learned that the Gospel of Judas Had Been Discovered

I started this thread by mentioning a non-disclosure agreement I once had to sign, involving the Gospel of Judas. To explain the situation, I have been discussing how I first came to know about the existence of the text. After receiving an out-of-the-blue query about the Gospel of Judas I looked it up to refresh my memory: it was allegedly a book used by a group of Gnostics named the Cainites, a book that told the story of Jesus from the perspective of Judas Iscariot, his betrayer – not in or...

Finding Out about the Gospel of Judas

In my previous post, which started out talking about non-disclosure agreements, I began to explain a time when I myself had to sign one, in reference to the Gospel of Judas Iscariot. To make sense of that, I decided I needed to give the fuller story about how I got involved with the Gospel to begin with. That takes a bit of telling. It all started with an odd phone call, recounted yesterday, in which a distant friend asked me about a Gospel of Judas in fall of 2004, before we had (or knew we...

Non-Disclosure Agreements and the Gospel of Judas Iscariot

A number of people have asked me about scholars and non-disclosure agreements. This is tangentially related to the long thread I’ve just finished on the alleged first-centry copy of the Gospel of Mark. Scholars have told us it exists and that they have had something to do with it. We all *assumed* it was because they had actually seen it and probably studied it; turns out *that* was wrong. They almost certainly haven’t studied it and evidently haven’t seen it.

Why do I say “almost certainly an...

GUEST POST! Dr. Brent Nongbri on How We Date Manuscripts

One of the people we are lucky to have as a member of the blog is Dr. Brent Nongbri, who did his PhD at Yale in 2008 and who is now a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at Macquarie University (see http://www.mq.edu.au/about_us/faculties_and_departments/faculty_of_arts/department_of_ancient_history/staff/dr_brent_nongbri/ ). Among other things Brent is one of the most knowledgeable and productive scholars working in the field of palaeography – the discipline that deals with the dating of ancient m...

Another (Final!) Insight into that Mummy Mask and Papyrus

OK, I am at the tail end of this thread on mummy masks and the alleged discovery of a first-century fragment of Mark’s Gospel. But I did want to provide access to an interesting article and penetrating set of questions on the issue published a week ago on CNN by my friend Candida Moss and her partner-in-all-things-editorial Joel Baden (they crank out a lot of articles on issues in biblical studies, especially as items appear in the news). Candida is a Professor of New Testament at Notre Dame...

Why I’d Be Thrilled If A First-Century Manuscript Appeared

In several posts I have been emphasizing – possibly over-emphasizing – that if a first-century fragment of the Gospel of Mark does ever get published, and if it is in *fact*from the first century (which, I should stress, will be almost *impossible* to demonstrate conclusively), that it is very hard indeed to imagine that it will be any kind of game-changer, that it will tell us something different from what we already think. The reason I have been emphasizing this is because the evangelical C...