Category: Christian History
Weekly Roundup – 10.5.18
Here’s the Weekly Roundup! (Note: there will be no Roundup next Friday.) Over at bibleinterp.com there is an excerpt from John: Interpreted by Early Christian and Medieval Commentators (Eerdmans, 2018) entitled “The Spiritual Gospel: The Gospel of John in the Early Church.” In this excerpt Bryan Stewart… Continue Reading “Weekly Roundup – 10.5.18”
Bart Ehrman: Converting to Christianity and the Problem of Eyewitnesses
Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, sixth edition (OUP, 2016), 85-86. Suppose I am a Greek-speaking worshiper of the goddess Artemis from Ephesus. I listen to a stranger passing through town who tells of the wonders of… Continue Reading “Bart Ehrman: Converting to Christianity and the Problem of Eyewitnesses”
Bart Ehrman: The Spread of Early Christianity
Bart Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, sixth edition (OUP, 2016), 83-84. Without a doubt, the most important thing that was happening for early Christianity was the spread of the religion from its inauspicious beginnings as a tiny sect of… Continue Reading “Bart Ehrman: The Spread of Early Christianity”
Bart Ehrman: Emperor Trajan’s Provisos to Pliny the Younger
Bart D. Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World (Simon and Schuster: 2018), 187. [In his letter to Pliny the Younger concerning how to deal with Christians] Trajan does stress two provisos. Christians were not to be sought out. There… Continue Reading “Bart Ehrman: Emperor Trajan’s Provisos to Pliny the Younger”
Bart Ehrman: Canonical Questions
Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, sixth edition (Oxford University Press, 2016), 14. It appears then that our New Testament emerged out of the conflicts among Christian groups, and that the dominance of the proto-orthodox position was… Continue Reading “Bart Ehrman: Canonical Questions”
Bart Ehrman: Early Persecution of Christians Was Rare
Bart D. Ehrman, The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World (Simon & Schuster: 2018), 179. At the outset I need to stress that organized opposition to the Christians came, for the most part, in isolated incidents. The church did not experience… Continue Reading “Bart Ehrman: Early Persecution of Christians Was Rare”
Bart Ehrman: Variety of Early Christian Sects
Bart Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, sixth edition (Oxford University Press, 2016), 5. If we turn the clock back 1,850 years to the middle of the second century, we find people calling themselves Christian who subscribe to beliefs… Continue Reading “Bart Ehrman: Variety of Early Christian Sects”
L. Michael White: The Gospel of John and the Breach with Judaism
L. Michael White, Scripting Jesus: The Gospels in Rewrite (HarperOne, 2010), 360. The Gospel of John thus represents a social situation of much greater separation of the Christian community from its Jewish neighbors. The theme of rejection of the message about Jesus has not been magnified… Continue Reading “L. Michael White: The Gospel of John and the Breach with Judaism”
Michael Kok: The Rotten Foundation of Papias
Michael J. Kok, The Gospel on the Margins: The Reception of Mark in the Second Century (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2015), 104-105. [Papias’] main source was the elder John, a figure who remains as elusive as ever. It is unlikely that he was a personal… Continue Reading “Michael Kok: The Rotten Foundation of Papias”
The Amateur Exegete 