Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 9

Who Was the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53?

Here is another post on the Hebrew Bible from the blog in 2012, written while I was working on the first edition of my Bible Introduction.  It is an excerpt from my first rough draft of a discussion of an unusually important passage in the book of Isaiah. Brief context: at this point I was  [...]

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One of the Stranger Stories of Scripture

Here is another tidbit from the original version of my Bible Introduction.  It may be old news for a lot of you, but it's fun to write this kind of thing up for college students, who have never heard of such a thing! ****************************** One of the most mysterious and even bizarre stories in Genesis [...]

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How We Know the World Was Created in 4004 BCE…

In my Bible Intro, I included a number of "boxes" that deal with issues that are somewhat tangential to the main discussion, but of related interest or importance. Here's one of the ones in my chapter on Genesis, in connection with interpretations that want to take the book as science or history. For a lot [...]

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Understanding the Hebrew Bible: The “Old” Testament in Modern Scholarship

Would you like some help in understanding the Hebrew Bible?  I have two unofficial announcements to make (official ones are yet to come).  The first is that we are producing a third edition of my texbook:  The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction (Oxford University Press) which provides up-to-date scholarship on the entire Bible from Genesis [...]

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Acts of the Jewish Christians: Rethinking Their Role in the First Jewish-Roman War – Platinum Post by Rizwan Ahmed

“[T]hey went after the high priests. It was against them that the main rush was made, and they were soon caught and killed. The murderers, standing on their dead bodies, ridiculed Ananus..they threw out the dead bodies without burial.” (Josephus, “The Jewish War”) When the question arises whether early Jewish Christians participated in the First [...]

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My Least Favorite Passage of the Pastorals: Those Silent and Submissive Women….

I'd like to conclude this thread on the Pastoral epistles by discussing at greater length the one passage that I think has done more damage than nearly any other.  It involves women in the church.  The story of women in the entire Bible is long and complex, but it starts in the beginning (Genesis 1-2) and [...]

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The Pastoral Epistles. For Further Reading

Here is an annotated list of books on the Pastoral Epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, most of them relevant to all the Deutero-Pauline epistles with a couple of commentaries that deal with 2 Thessalonians.  One benefit of serious commentaries is that they always begin by discussing major critical issues in understanding a [...]

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More Evidence That the Pastoral Epistles Were Written After the Days of Paul

I now conclude this short thread and who wrote the Pastoral epistles, when, and why by picking up on my previous argument: that aspects of these letters reveal a church situation after Paul’s day when proto-orthodox Christians were appealing to the authorities of the clergy, the creed, and the canon of Scripture to support their [...]

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The Later (post-Pauline) Context of the Pastoral Epistles

In my previous post I showed why the vocabulary of the Pastoral epistles and the kinds of problems they address suggest that they were written after Paul’s time, by a follower who was using his name.  As I indicated there, of particular importance for establishing they do not come directly from Paul is the way [...]

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Who Wrote the Pastoral Epistles? When? And Why?

Now that I have given an overview of each of the Pastoral epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, I can turn to the key question of whether Paul actually wrote them, when they were written, and why.  This will take several posts. I have taken the information with some revision by book, The [...]

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