Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 337

Talks at the Smithsonian, March 21

My friends at the Biblical Archaeology Society sent this around to some people on their mailing list, announcing my talks on March 21 in Washington DC – talks not for them (the Biblical Archaeology Society) but for the Smithsonian. Here is the announcement, with the blurb and description of the talks. Maybe some of you can come!

***********************************************

If you plan to be in Washington DC during March you might try to catch his lectures while you are here.

To register for h...

Why Are Evangelical Scholars So Interested in Finding a First-Century Manuscript?

I have thought of a couple of scenarios that would make the discovery of a first -entury papyrus copy – even a small fragment of Mark – VERY interesting, for all of us, not just for evangelical Christian scholars intent on destroying antiquities in order to get their hands on it. (Well, I’ve thought of these scenarios as others have suggested them….) I’ll give the scenarios at the end of this post. But first, assuming, as it is *relatively*, but not absolutely probable that we should, that th...

How Accurate Are our Earliest NT Manuscripts?

QUESTIONS

I have received the following three, interrelated, questions from an inquiring mind that wants to know, all of them involving the potential accuracy of the manuscript tradition of the NT based on what we can deduce from the early papyri. My responses will follow.

In your last debate with Dr. Wallace, he seemed to argue, in part, for the relative integrity of the early NT manuscript tradition. He referred to p75 as being representative of other early NT MSS in that, while obviously the...

Would a First-Century Fragment of Mark Matter?

As you know, there is a good deal of discussion going on about the destruction of mummy masks in order to uncover New Testament papyri. One point that I am not seeing discussed strikes me as the most important of all, and I want to address that here.

But before doing so, I want to ask two questions, that maybe someone on the Blog can answer for me. The first is actuallyseveral questions: exactly how many masks are we talking about here? How many have been destroyed? And how many have been sing...

An Expert Talks About Mummy Masks and Papyri

One of the things that I find disconcerting about all the discussion about whether it is legitimate to destroy mummy masks in order to get NT papyri is that the only people who seem to know anything about what has been found (this alleged first century copy of the Gospel of Mark) are not experts in the specific fields in which expertise is required, both to dismantle masks and to date papyri. As it turns out, they’re all friends of mine. Craig Evans is a New Testament scholar, but he is not...

Defending the Destruction of Mummy Masks

In yesterday’s post on New Manuscripts and the Destruction of Antiquities, I cited an article by Mary-Ann Russo that explained the situation about the mummy masks that were being destroyed in order to acquire papyrus fragments of the New Testament. The scholar mainly cited in that article as being involved in that process was Craig Evans, a friend of mine with whom I have had several public debates. Craig feels that he has been somewhat misrepresented in this article, and sent me a clarificat...

New Manuscripts and the Destruction of Antiquities

As many of you know, in 2012 I had a public debate in Chapel Hill with Dan Wallace, professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary, on the question of whether we have the original New Testament or not. During the debate he dropped a bombshell, on me and all of us. He mysteriously claimed that now we have a first-century copy of the Gospel of Mark. This would be a copy well over a century older than any other that exists, and would give us a copy that is very close in date to the or...

Whom Do We Admit into our Graduate Program?

So, now finally to get to the question I was asked, which led me into a discussion of what our graduate program entails. Here was the original question

QUESTION: Can you write something about the background of your PhD students, how you selected them, what makes a prospective doctoral candidate stand out against the pack, whether there is a huge academic gulf between knowledge and argumentative skills of your undergraduates and research students.

RESPONSE: Like all good graduate programs, ours...

Public Reactions to Muslim Extremists

I have never used this Blog as a platform for my particular political views (even though I suppose they are easily enough seen by a careful reader) or to convert anyone to them. And I’m not about to start now. But I do have a category of comment on the blog, not used very often, on “Religion in the News.” And a couple of news items appeared this past week that are “close to home” for me – one involving Duke University, which is literally close to home (less than a mile from where I live, move...

New Testament Programs and Ancient Med.

Teaching graduate students in the field of Ancient Mediterranean Religions – even if one’s subfield is the New Testament and early Christianity – can be very different from teaching the same field in a divinity school, as I began to indicate last time. At least it is very different from the field as it was taught at Princeton Theological Seminary, where I went. New Testament faculty there principally taught courses on exegesis – that is the interpretation of Scripture. These courses did have...