Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 352

You need to be logged in to see this part of the content. Please Login to access.

So here’s a topic I haven’t addressed for nearly a year and a half! The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife. New developments happened about six weeks ago. I meant to post on them, other things got in the way, I put it off, so now I’m way behind the times. But in case you haven’t kept up with the story from other venues, I thought I should say something about it. It’s all extremely interesting.

I won’t review everything I’ve said about the fragment already, but will give just a three-sentence summation of w...

Once it came to be realized that Mark’s Gospel – the earliest of our surviving accounts of Jesus – was driven not purely by historical interests in order to record biographical information with historical accuracy, but was (like the other Gospels) written in order to convey theological ideas in literary guise, the movement to use Mark to write a “Life of Jesus” more or less collapsed on itself, for a time and among most New Testament scholars. What arose from the ashes of this “Quest of the H...

You need to be logged in to see this part of the content. Please Login to access.

Up until the 1920s, critical scholars who were deep into questions of New Testament studies had focused a lot of their attention (not all of it, obviously) on questions of textual criticism (how do we know what the “original” text was?) and source criticism (what are the written sources lying behind the New Testament – especially the Gospels?). The former was a matter of concern largely because it was thought that the words of Scripture were inspired by God – so it was important to know what...

You need to be logged in to see this part of the content. Please Login to access.

Just to give a bit of background to the work I’ve just started doing on the question of the oral traditions about Jesus in the years before the Gospels were written, some initial points:

1) I am not, decidedly NOT, the first scholar to think this might be of some interest! On the contrary, it has long been intriguing to scholars, and there are a number of important books that have appeared in recent years, for example, James Dunn,The Oral Gospel Tradition(just last year!) and, even better know...

You need to be logged in to see this part of the content. Please Login to access.

In my previous post I indicated that I am debating over my next trade book (for general audiences. The one I described there has to do with how Christians appropriated the Jewish Scriptures for themselves, leading to (and being implicated in) the rise of Christian anti-Judaism. It’s a fascinating topic, and I’m definitely planning on writing the book. But something else has come up that is driving my research right now instead, and Isuspectthis will be the next book. But I’m happy to hear you...

You need to be logged in to see this part of the content. Please Login to access.