Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 341

Introduction to My Introduction (to the NT)

I have decided to add an “Introduction” to my textbook,The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. I is very similar (indeed!) to the introduction that I have now in my Introduction to the entire Bible. The whole idea is to get students to see why taking an academic course on the NT is very important. Here is the new Introduction, in full:

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Introdu...

The Life of Brian & The Apocalyptic Jesus

On the blog some months ago I mentioned the “Jesus and Brian” conference in London this past summer, devoted to exploring the Historical Jesus in light of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. The event was held at the King’s College London, Edmond J Safra Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand, London WC2R 2LS on June 20-22nd, 2014. I gave one of the talks at the conference, and it is provided here thanks to the labors of the audio-video team at Kings College and oursupport person,Steven Ray who...

The New Discussion Forum!!! Soon Up and Running.

A new day is dawning. We have decided to establish a Discussion Forum for the blog. It will be up and running very soon, probably later today. Many thanks to Steven Ray, my assistant in all things technical and technological, for all his hard work in getting this set up.

The forum is designed to provide an outlet for members of the Bart Ehrman Blog (Christianity in Antiquity: The CIA) to have discussions *among themselves* about issues of interest to them. The one major proviso is that these i...

Jesus Sweating Blood: Transcriptional Probabilities

I’ve been discussing the kinds of evidence that textual critics appeal to in order to make a decision concerning what an author originally wrote, when there are two or more different forms of the text – that is, where a verse or passage is worded in different ways in different manuscripts. And I have been using the passage found (only) in (some manuscripts of) Luke of Jesus’ bloody sweat as an example. Yesterday I discussed one kind of “internal” evidence. Remember: external evidence deals wi...

Jesus’ Sweating Blood and “intrinsic” evidence

In yesterday’s post I mentioned some of the kinds of “external” evidence that textual scholars look at when trying to establish the “original” text of a document (that is, the wording of the text as the author originally wrote it) when different manuscripts have different wordings for this or that passage. In this post I’ll talk about one kind of “internal” evidence that is used to assist in making this kind of decision.

There are two kinds of internal evidence that are usually called (1) intr...

External Evidence in Textual Criticism

When I realized that I did not want to spend my life as a text-critical technician – collating and classifying Greek manuscripts – it became obvious to me the way to go. Textual critics at the time generally understood that there were two major tasks in the discipline: to establish the original text (that is, the text in the words written by the actual authors, as opposed to the changes of the text made by later scribes) and to write the history of its transmission (seeing how it had been mod...

Textual Scholars as Technicians

I’ve been trying in the posts of this thread to explain why textual critics are often thought not to be expert in the wide range of topics that other New Testament scholars are well versed in. They are instead frequently seen as technicians who do the really hard, dirty work that no one else is either that interested in doing or knowledgeable about, even though some of it (not all) is thought to be necessary and important as a kind of preliminary exercise. But it’s to be done by others.

I, on...

On Changing One’s Mind

I thought today I would break up the monotony of the current thread by posting on something completely different. It will take me a couple of posts to finish up my reflections on what kind of training is necessary to make a good textual critic – which is really a sub-thread (OK, call it a tangent) within my larger thread about how I went about writing my textbook and what changes I made in it. And I’ll get back to both the sub-thread and the larger thread. But this post is on something else....

A Text-Critical Dissertation

The point of this short thread dealing with my graduate training is to explain why it is that lots – probably most – New Testament scholars do not consider textual critics to be competent in a wide range of fields normally associated with New Testament scholarship. I know that must seem very strange to outsiders, but it’s the case. Textual critics are often thought of as a rather strange group of technicians without broad competency in the areas that other New Testament scholars are intereste...

My Graduate Training (Textual Criticism??)

I saw my master’s thesis as the perfect assignment to get me grounded in the entire, complicated field of New Testament textual criticism. Ever since then I’ve been in favor of students writing master’s theses, even if it is not required for a master’s program. For one thing, doing so gets you into the frame of mind that you need to be in when you get to the point of writing a dissertation at the PhD level – which for most students is the first time they write a book. The masters thesis is us...