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 discusses the way early Christian writers viewed and used the fourth... Continue Reading →
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 Jesus, of his miracles and supernatural wisdom. I become intrigued. When... Continue Reading →
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 Jesus' Jewish followers in Jerusalem - the Gospels indicate that there... Continue Reading →
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 was to be no witch hunt, no tracking down of criminals.... Continue Reading →
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 what led to the development of the Christian canon as we... Continue Reading →
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 perennial violent persecution. The idea that Christianity was an illegal religion... Continue Reading →
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 that no modern eyes has seen or ear heard; Christians who... Continue Reading →
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 into a total rejection of Jesus and the one sent from... Continue Reading →
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