Tag: Bart Erhman

Here’s the link to this article by Bart Ehrman.

March 11, 2023

Is there any way to consider the God portrayed in Job as a morally upright being who deserves complete devotion?  Read the account yourself.  I have summarized the “folktale” of Job (found in Job 1-2, 42) in my previous post.  This is a tale that portrays God, Job, and the reason for human suffering very differently from the (different) composition of Job 3-42, a set of dialogues between Job and his friends and eventually God that I will discuss in my next posts.  For now I’m interested in the reasons God crushes the righteous Job with suffering in the tale.

The overarching view of suffering from the story is clear: sometimes suffering comes to the innocent in order to see whether their pious devotion to God is genuine and disinterested.  Are people faithful only when things are going well, or are they faithful no matter what the circumstances?  Obviously for this author, no matter how bad things get, God still deserves worship and praise.

But serious questions can be raised about this perspective, questions raised by the text of the folktale itself.  For one thing, many readers over the years have felt that God himself is not to be implicated in Job’s sufferings, since after all, it is the Satan who causes them.  But a close reading of the text shows that in fact it is not that simple.  It is precisely God who authorizes the Satan to do what he does; Satan could not do anything without the Lord directing him to do it.  Moreover, in a couple of places the text indicates that it is God himself who is ultimately responsible.  After the first round of Job’s sufferings God tells the Satan that Job “persists in his integrity, although you incited me against him, to destroy him for no reason” (2:3).  Here it is God who is responsible for Job’s innocent sufferings, at the Satan’s instigation.  Moreover, God points out that there was “no reason” for Job to have to suffer.  This coincides with what happens at the end of the tale, where Job’s family come to comfort him after the trials are over, showing him sympathy “for all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him” (42:11).

God himself has caused the misery, pain, agony, and loss that Job experienced.  You can’t just blame the Adversary.  And it is important to remember what this loss entailed: not just loss of property, which is bad enough: but a ravaging of the body and the savage murder of Job’s ten children.  And to what end?  For “no reason” – other than proving to the Satan that Job wouldn’t curse God even if he had every right to do so.  Did he have the right to do so?  Remember, he didn’t do anything to deserve this treatment.  He actually was innocent – as God himself acknowledges.  God did this to him in order to win a bet with Satan.  This is obviously a God above, beyond, and not subject to human standards.  Anyone else who destroyed all your property, physically mauled you, and murdered your children – simply on a whim or a bet– would be liable to the most severe punishment that justice could mete out.  But God is evidently above justice and can do whatever he pleases, if he wants to prove a point.

What then are we to make of this view of suffering, that it sometimes comes as a test of faith?  I suppose people who have a blind trust in God might see suffering as a way of displaying their devotion to him, and this could indeed be a very good thing.  If nothing else it can provide inward fortitude and a sense that despite everything that happens, God is ultimately in charge of this world and all that occurs within it.  But is this really a satisfying solution to the pain and misery that people are compelled to endure?  Are we really to imagine a divine being who wants to torment his creatures in order to see whether or not he can force them to abandon their trust in him?  What exactly are they trusting him to do?  Certainly not to do what is best for them: it is hard to believe that God inflicts people with cancer, flu, or AIDS in order to make sure they praise him to the end.  Praise him for what?  Mutilation and torture?  For his great power to inflict pain and misery on innocent people?

It is important to remember that God himself acknowledged that Job was innocent – that is, that he had done nothing to deserve his torment.  And God did not simply torment him by taking away his hard-earned possessions and physical health.  He killed Job’s children.  And why?  To prove his point; to win his bet.  What kind of God is this?  Many readers have taken comfort in the circumstance that once Job passed the test, God rewarded him – just as God rewarded Abraham before him, and Jesus after him, just as God rewards his followers now who suffer misery so that God can prove his case.  But what about Job’s children?  Why were they senselessly slaughtered?  So that God could prove a point?  Does this mean that God is willing – even eager – to take my children in order to see how I’ll react?  Am I that important, that God is willing to destroy innocent lives just to see whether I’ll be faithful to him, when he has not been faithful to me?

Possibly the most offensive part of the book of Job is the end, when God restores all that he has lost as his reward.  Including additional children.  Job lost seven sons and three daughters, and as a reward for his faithfulness, God gave him an additional seven sons and three daughters.  What is this author thinking?  That you can replace children?  That the pain of a child’s death will be removed by the birth of another?  That children are expendable and replaceable like a faulty computer or DVD player?  What kind of God is this?  Do we think that everything would be made right if the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust were “replaced” by having six million additional Jews born in the next generation?

As satisfying as the book of Job has been to people over the ages, I have to say I find it supremely dissatisfying.  If God tortures, maims, and murders people just to see how they would react – to see if they would not blame him, when in fact he is to blame – then this does not seem to me to be a God worthy of worship.  Worthy of fear, yes.  Of praise?  No.

Here’s the link to this article written by Bart Ehrman.

March 9, 2023

In my previous post I explained how the book of Job comprises both a folk-tale written in prose about a righteous man named Job (chs. 1-2; 42) and a set of dialogues written in poetry between Job, his so-called friends, and eventually God (chs. 3-42).   These are two different compositions with two different authors living at two different times with two different understandings of why Job and people like him suffer.

To unpack these understandings, I begin with the folktale as discussed in my book God’s Problem (HarperOne, 2008).

******************************

The Folktale: The Suffering of Job as a Test of Faith

The action of the prose folktale alternates between scenes on earth and in heaven.  It begins by indicating that Job lived in the land of Uz; usually this is located in Edom, to the southeast of Israel.  Job, in other words, is not an Israelite.  As a book of “wisdom,” this account is not concerned with specifically Israelite traditions: it is concerned with understanding the world in ways that should make sense to everyone living in it.  In any event, Job is said to be “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil” (1:1). We have already seen that in other books of wisdom, such as Proverbs, wealth and prosperity come to those who are righteous before God; here this dictum is borne out.  Job is said to be enormously wealthy, with 7000 sheep, 3000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, 500 donkeys, and very many servants.  His piety is seen in his daily devotions to God: early every morning he makes a burnt offering to God for all his children, seven sons and three daughters, in case they have committed some sin.

The narrator then moves to a heavenly scene in which the “heavenly beings” (literally: the sons of God) appear before the Lord, “the Satan” among them.  It is important to recognize that the Satan here is not the fallen angel who has been booted from heaven, the cosmic enemy of God.  Here he is portrayed as one of God’s divine council members, a group of divinities who regularly report to God and, evidently, go about the world doing his will.  Only at a later stage of Israelite religion (as we will see in chapter 7), does “Satan” become “the Devil,” God’s mortal enemy.  The term “the Satan” here in Job does not appear to be a name so much as a description of his office: it literally means “the Adversary” (or the Accuser).  But he is not an adversary to God: he is one of the heavenly beings who reports to God.  He is the adversary who plays “devil’s advocate,” as it were, who challenges conventional wisdom in order to try to prove a point.  In the present instance his challenge has to do with Job.  The Lord brags to the Satan about Job’s blameless life and the Satan challenges God about it: Job is upright only because he is so richly blessed in exchange.  If God were to take away what he has, the Satan insists, Job would “curse you to your face” (1:11).  God doesn’t think so, and gives the Satan authority to take everything away from Job.  In other words, this is to be a test of Job’s righteousness: can he have a disinterested piety, or does his pious relationship to God depend entirely on what he manages to get out of the deal?

The Satan attacks Job’s household.  In one day, the oxen are stolen away, the sheep are burned up by fire from heaven, the camels are raided and carried off, all the servants are killed, and even the sons and daughters are mercilessly destroyed by a storm that levels their house.  Job’s reaction?  As God predicted, he does not utter curses for his misfortune: he goes into mourning:

Job arose, tore his robe, shaved his head, and fell on the ground and worshiped.  He said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” (1:20)

The narrator assures us that in all this “Job did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing” (1:22).   One might wonder what “wrongdoing” God could possibly do, if robbery, destruction of property, and murder is not wrong.  But in this story, at least, for Job to preserve his piety means for him to continue trusting God, whatever God does to him.

The narrative then reverts to a heavenly scene of God and his divine council.  The Satan appears before the Lord, who once again brags about his servant Job.  The Satan replies that of course Job has not cursed God – he has not himself been afflicted with physical pain.  But, he tells God, “stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh and he will curse you to your face” (2:5).  God allows the Satan to do so, with the proviso that he not take away Job’s life (in part, one might suppose, because it would be hard to evaluate Job’s reaction were he not alive to have one).  The Satan then afflicts Job with “loathsome sores…from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head” (2:7).  Job sits on a pile of ashes and scrapes his wounds with a potsherd.  His wife urges on him the natural course, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God and die.”  But Job refuses, “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad”? (2:10).  In all this Job does not sin against God.

Job’s three friends then come to him – Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite.  And they do the only thing true friends can do in this kind of situation, they weep with him, mourn with him, and sit with him, not saying a word.  What sufferers need is not advice, but a comforting human presence.

It is at this point that the poetic dialogues begin, in which the friends do not behave like friends, much less like comforters, insisting that Job has simply gotten what he has deserves.  I will talk about these dialogues later, as they come from a different author from the prose narrative.  The folktale is not resumed until the very conclusion of the book at the end of chapter 42.  It is obvious that a bit of the folktale has been cut out in the process of combining it with the poetic dialogues: for when it resumes, God indicates that he is angry with the three friends for what they have said, in contrast to what Job has said.  This cannot very well be a reference to what the friends and Job said in the poetic dialogues, because there it is the friends who defend God and Job who accuses him.  And so a portion of the folktale must have been cut off when the poetic dialogues were added.  What the friends said that offended God cannot be known.

But what is clear is that God rewards Job for passing the test: he has not cursed God.  Job is told to make a sacrifice and prayer on behalf of his friends, and he does so.  God then restores everything that had been lost to Job, and even more: 14,000 sheep, 6000 camels, 1000 yoke of oxen, and 1000 donkeys.  And he gives him another seven sons and three daughters.  Job lives out his days in peace and prosperity surrounded by children and grandchildren.

This is an intriguing understanding of why there is suffering — it comes as a test.  It is not the view you find in the other part of Job, the forty chapters of poetic dialogue between Job and his “friends.”  But what do you think of it as an evaluation for why people (even the Jobs of the world) suffer?  I’ll explain what I think of it in the next post.

Here’s the link to this article by Bart Ehrman.

March 8, 2023

After I finished my short thread of posts about the problem of suffering a couple of weeks ago, I realized that it might be helpful for me to discuss one or two of the books of the Bible that deal with the issue head-on — in part because many people don’t read these books much, even if they know about them, and in part because many people who *do* read them don’t know how expert interpreters have explained them.

For no book is this more true that that gem in the Hebrew Bible, the book of Job.  Or rather those two books, the two books of Job.

To talk about Job and what it is really about will require several posts.  This is the first, an introduction to the single most important issue connected with the book that most people have never heard and that completely affects how the book is to be interpreted.

This is how I discuss it in my book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question — Why We Suffer (HarperOne, 2008).

The Book of Job: An Overview

Most people who read Job do not realize that the book as it has come down to us today is the product of  different authors, and that these different authors had different, and contradictory, understandings of why it is that people suffer.  Most important, the way the story begins and ends – with the prose narrative of the righteous suffering of Job, whose patient endurance under duress is rewarded by God – stands at odds with the poetic dialogues that take up most of the book, in which Job is not patient but defiant, and in which God does not reward the one he has made to suffer but overpowers him and grinds him into submission.  These are two different views of suffering, and to understand the book we have to understand its two different messages.^[i]

As it now stands, with the prose narrative and the poetic dialogues combined into one long account, the book can be summarized as follows: it begins with a prose description of Job, a very wealthy and pious man, the richest man in the eastern world.  The action moves up to heaven, where God speaks with “the Satan” – the Hebrew word means “the adversary” – and commends Job to him.  The Satan claims that Job is pious toward God only because of the rewards he gets for his piety. God allows the Satan then to take away all Job has: his possessions, his servants, and his children; then, in a second round of attacks, his own health.  Job refuses to curse God for what has happened to him.  Three friends come to visit him and comfort him; but it is cold comfort indeed.  Throughout their speeches they tell Job that he is being punished for his sins (that is, they take the “classical” view of suffering, that sinners get what they deserve).  Job continues to insist on his innocence and pleads with God to allow him to present his case before him.  At the end of the dialogues with the friends (which take up most of the book), God does show up, and overwhelms Job with his greatness, forcefully reproving him for thinking that he, God, has anything to explain to Job, a mere mortal.  Job repents of his desire to make his plea before God.  In the epilogue, which reverts to prose narrative, God commends Job for his upright behavior, and condemns the friends for what they have said.  He restores to Job all of his wealth, and more; he provides him with another batch of children, and Job lives out his life in prosperity, dying at a ripe old age.

Some of the basic discrepancies between the prose narrative with which the book begins and ends (just under three chapters) and the poetic dialogues (which take up nearly forty chapters) can be seen just from this brief summary.  The two sources that have been spliced together to make the final product are written in different genres: a prose folktale and a set of poetic dialogues.  The writing styles are different between these two genres.  Closer analysis shows that the names for the divine being are different in the prose (where the name Yahweh is used) and the poetry (where the divinity is named El, Eloah, and Shaddai).  Yet more striking, the portrayal of Job differs in the two parts of the book: in the prose he is a patient sufferer, in the poetry he is thoroughly defiant, and anything but patient.  Correspondingly he is commended in the prose but rebuked in the poetry.  Moreover, the prose folktale indicates that God deals with his people according to their merit, whereas that the entire point of the poetry is that he does not do so – and is not bound to do so.  Finally, and most important, the view of why the innocent suffer differs between the two parts of the book: in the prose narrative, suffering comes as a test of faith; in the poetry, suffering remains a mystery that cannot be fathomed or explained.

To deal adequately with the book of Job, then, we need to look at the two parts of the book separately, and explore at greater length its two explanations for the suffering of the innocent.

[i].  As you might imagine, the literature on Job is vast.  For introduction to some of the most important critical issues, see the discussions and bibliographies in Collins, Hebrew Bible, 505-17; Coogan, Old Testament, pp. 479-89; and James Crenshaw, “Job, Book of” in Freedman,  Anchor Bible Dictionary, vo. 3, pp. 858-68.

Here’s the link to this article by Bart Ehrman.

March 4, 2023

Can we trust a source such as Papias on the question of whether our Gospel of Matthew was written by the disciple Matthew and that our Gospel of Mark was written by Mark, the companion of the disciple Peter?

It is interesting that Papias tells a story that is recorded in our Matthew but tells it so completely differently that it appears he doesn’t know Matthew’s version.  And so when he says Matthew wrote Matthew, is he referring to *our* Matthew, or to some other book?  (Recall, the Gospel he refers to is a collection of Jesus’ sayings in Hebrew; the Gospel of Matthew that *we* have is a narrative, not a collection of sayings, and was written in Greek.)  If he *is* referring to our Matthew, why doesn’t he see it as an authoritative account?

Here’s the conflicting story.  It involves the death of Judas.  And it’s quite a story!  Here is my translation of it from my edition, The Apostolic Fathers (Loeb Classical Library, vol. 1; 2004).

But Judas went about in this world as a great model of impiety. He became so bloated in the flesh that he could not pass through a place that was easily wide enough for a wagon – not even his swollen head could fit. They say that his eyelids swelled to such an extent that he could not see the light at all; and a doctor could not see his eyes even with an optical device, so deeply sunken they were in the surrounding flesh.  And his genitalia appeared more disgusting and greater than all formlessness, and he bore through them from his whole body flowing pus and worms, and to his shame shame, he emitted pus and worms that flowed through his entire body.

And they say that after he suffered numerous torments and punishments, he died on his own land, and that land has been, until now, desolate and uninhabited because of the stench. Indeed, even to this day no one can pass by the place without holding their nose. This was how great an outpouring he made from his flesh on the ground.” [Apollinaris of Laodicea]

You gotta love it.  But, well, what does one make of it?  Matthew’s Gospel – the one we have in the New Testament – also describes the death of Judas.  But it is not like this at all.  According to Matthew, Judas hanged himself (Matt. 27:5).  If Papias saw Matthew’s Gospel as an eyewitness authority to the life of Jesus and those around him, why didn’t he accept its version of Judas’s death?

Another alternative is that when Papias describes a Gospel written by Matthew, he isn’t actually referring to the Matthew that we now have.  Recall: Papias says two things about the “Matthew” he is familiar with:  it consists only of sayings of Jesus and it was composed in Hebrew.  Neither is true of our Matthew, which does have sayings of Jesus, but is mainly composed of stories about Jesus.  Moreover, it was not composed in Hebrew but in Greek.[1]

It is possible, of course, that like other early Christian scholars, Papias thought Matthew was originally composed in Hebrew when it was not.  But it is also possible that these later writers thought Matthew was written in Hebrew because they knew about Papias’s comment and thought he was referring to our Gospel.  But he appears not to be:  Matthew is not simply a collection of Jesus’ sayings; and in the only place that Papias’s comments overlap with (our) Matthew’s account (the death of Judas), he doesn’t appear to know (our) Matthew.

If Papias was not talking about our Matthew, was he talking about our Mark?  As Papias’s quotation about Mark that I cited yesterday indicates, he considered “his” Mark to be problematic because of its disorderly arrangement: that’s why he says that the preaching of Peter was not given “in order.”   But that somewhat negative remark in itself is odd, because he doesn’t make the same comment about Matthew, even though the narrative outline of our Matthew is pretty much the same as our Mark – with additional materials added in.

Apart from that, Papias indicates that Mark’s Gospel gives an exhaustive account of everything Peter preached and that it gives it without changing a thing.    The reality is that there is no way that anyone could think that the Gospel of Mark in our Bibles today gives a full account of Peter’s knowledge of Jesus.  Our Gospel of Mark takes about two hours to read.  Are we to think that after spending months (years?) with Jesus, Peter had no more than two hours’ worth of memories?

Of course it may be that Papias is exaggerating for effect.   But even so, since he does not appear to be referring to the book we call Matthew, why should we think that he is referring to the book we call Mark?  And that, therefore (as Papias indicates) Mark’s Gospel is actually a transcription of Peter’s version of what Jesus said and did?

Despite repeated attempts over the centuries by readers to show that Mark’s Gospel is “Peter’s perspective,” the reality is that if you simply read it without any preconceptions, there is nothing about the book that would make you think, “Oh, this is how Peter saw it all.”  Quite the contrary – not only does Peter come off as a bumbling, foot-in-the-mouth, and unfaithful follower of Jesus in Mark (see Mark 8:27-32; 9:5-6; 14:27-31), but there are all sorts of stories – the vast majority – that have nothing to do with Peter or that betray anything like a Petrine voice.

There is, though, a still further and even more compelling reason for doubting that we can trust Papias on the authorship of the Gospels.  It is that that we cannot really trust him on much of anything.  That may sound harsh, but remember that even the early Christians did not appreciate his work very much and the one comment we have about him personally from an educated church father is that he was remarkably unintelligent.

It is striking that some modern authors want to latch on to Papias for his claims that Matthew and Mark wrote Gospels, assuming, as Bauckham does, that he must be historically accurate, when they completely overlook the other things that Papias says, things that even these authors admit are not and cannot be accurate.  If Papias is not reliable about anything else he says, why does anyone think he is reliable about our Gospels of Matthew and Mark?  The reason is obvious.  It is because readers want him to be accurate about Matthew and Mark, even though they know that otherwise you can’t rely on  him for a second.

Does anyone think that Judas really bloated up larger than a house, emitted worms from his genitals, and then burst on his own land, creating a stench that lasted a century?  No, not really.  But it’s one of the two Gospel traditions that Papias narrates.  Here is the only other one.  This is the only saying of Jesus that is preserved from the writing of Papias.  Papias claims that it comes from those who knew the elders who knew what the disciple John the Son of Zebedee said that Jesus taught:

Thus the elders who saw John, the disciple of the Lord, remembered hearing him say how the Lord used to teach about those times, saying:

The days are coming when vines will come forth, each with ten thousand boughs; and on a single bough will be ten thousand branches.  And indeed, on a single branch will be ten thousand shoots and on every shoot ten thousand clusters; and in ever cluster will be ten thousand grapes, and every grape, when pressed, will yield twenty-five measures of wine.  And when any of the saints grabs hold of a cluster, another will cry out, ‘I am better, take me, bless the lord through me.” (Eusebius, Church History, 3.39.1)

Really?  Jesus taught that?  Does anyone really think so?  No one I know.  Does Papias think Jesus said this?   Yes, he absolutely does.   Here is what Papias himself says about the traditions of Jesus he records in his five-volume book, in Bauckham’s own translation:

I will not hesitate to set down for you along with my interpretations everything I carefully learned from the elders and carefully remembered, guaranteeing their truth.”

So, can we rest assured about the truth of what Papias says, since he can provide guarantees based on his careful memory?   It doesn’t look like it.  The only traditions about Jesus we have from his pen are clearly not accurate.   Why should we think that what he says about Matthew and Mark are accurate?  My hunch is that the only reason readers have done so is because they would like him to be accurate when he says things they agree with, even when they know he is not accurate when he says things they disagree with.

However one evaluates the overall trustworthiness of Papias, in my view he does not provide us with clear evidence that the books that eventually became the first two Gospels of the New Testament were called Matthew and Mark in his time.

[1] That is obvious If Matthew was based in large part on the Gospel of Mark, as is almost everywhere conceded.  Matthew agrees with the Greek text of Mark verbatim throughout his account.  The only way that would be possible is if he was copying the Greek text into his Greek text.

Here’s the link to this article written by Bart Ehrman.

March 2, 2023

I have begun to discuss the evidence provided by the early church father Papias that Mark was actually written by Mark.  He appears to be the first source to say so.  Does he?  And if so, is he right?

Here’s how I begin to discuss these matters in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (edited a bit here).

******************************

Papias is often taken as evidence that at least two of the Gospels, Matthew and Mark, were called by those names already several decades after they were in circulation.

Papias was a Christian author who is normally thought to have been writing around 120 or 130 CE.  His major work was a five-volume discussion of the teachings of Jesus, called Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord. [1] It is much to be regretted that we no longer have this book.   We don’t know exactly why later scribes chose not to copy it, but it is commonly thought that the book was either uninspiring, naïve, or theologically questionable.  Later church fathers who talk about Papias and his book are not overly enthusiastic.  The “father of church history,” the fourth-century Eusebius of Caesarea, indicates that, in his opinion, Papias was “a man of exceedingly small intelligence” (Church History, 3.39).

Our only access to Papias and his views are in quotations of his book in later church fathers, starting with the important author Irenaeus around 185 CE, and including Eusebius himself.  Some of these quotations are fascinating and have been the subject of intense investigation among critical scholars for a very long time.  Of relevance to us here is what he says both about the Gospels and about the connection that he claims to have had to eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus.

In one of the most famous passages quoted by Eusebius, Papias indicates that instead of reading about Jesus and his disciples in books, he preferred hearing a “living voice.”   He explains that whenever knowledgeable people came to visit his church, he talked with them to ask what they knew.  Specifically he spoke with people who had been “companions” of those whom he calls “elders” who had earlier been associates with the disciples of Jesus.   And so Papias is not himself an eyewitness to Jesus’ life and does not know eyewitnesses.   Writing many years later (as much as a century after Jesus’ death), he indicates that he knew people who knew people who knew people who were with Jesus during his life.  So it’s not like having firsthand information, or anything close to it.  But it’s extremely interesting and enough to make a scholar sit up and take notice.

Richard Bauckham [In his book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses] is especially enthusiastic about Papias’s testimony, in part because he believes that Papias encountered these people long before he was writing, possibly as early as 80 CE, that is, during the time when the Gospels themselves were being composed [Papias himself, as you can probably guess, says nothing of the sort].  Bauckham does not ask whether Papias’ memory of encounters he had many decades earlier was accurate.  But as that is our interest here, it will be important to raise the questions ourselves.

Two passages from Papias are especially important, as Bauckham and others have taken them to be solid evidence that the Gospels were already given their names during the first century.  At first glance, one can see why they might think so.  Papias mentions Gospels written both by Mark and by Matthew.   His comments deserve to be quoted here in full.  First on a Gospel written by Mark.:

This is what the elder used to say, “when Mark was the interpreter [Or: translator] of Peter he wrote down accurately everything that he recalled of the Lord’s words and deeds – but not in order.  For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied him; but later, as I indicated, he accompanied Peter, who used to adapt his teachings for the needs at hand, not arranging, as it were, an orderly composition of the Lord’s sayings.  And so Mark did nothing wrong by writing some of the matters as he remembered them.  For he was intent on just one purpose: not to leave out anything that he heard or to include any falsehood among them.”  (Eusebius, Church History, 3. 39)

Thus, according to Papias, someone named Mark was Peter’s interpreter or translator (from Aramaic?) and he wrote down what Peter had to say about Jesus’ words and deeds.  He did not, however, produce an orderly composition.  Still, he did record everything he ever heard Peter say and he did so with scrupulous accuracy.  We will see that these claims are highly problematic, but first consider what Papias says also about a Gospel by Matthew:

And so Matthew composed the sayings in the Hebrew tongue, and each one interpreted [Or: translated] them to the best of his ability.  (Eusebius, Church History, 3. 39)

There are numerous reasons for questioning whether these passages – as quoted by Eusebius — provide us solid evidence that the New Testament Gospels were given their names in the late first or early second century.

First, it is somewhat curious and certainly interesting that Eusebius chose not to include any quotations from Papias about Luke or John.  Why would that be?  Were Papias’s views about these two books not significant?  Were they unusual?  Were they contrary to Eusebius’s own views?  We’ll never know.

Second, it is important to stress that in none of the surviving quotations of Papias does he actually quote either Matthew or Mark.  That is to say, he does not give a teaching of Jesus, or a summary of something he did, and then indicate that he found it in one of these Gospels.  That is unfortunate, because it means that we have no way of knowing for certain that when he refers to a Gospel written by Mark he has in mind the Gospel that we now today call the Gospel of Mark.  In fact there are reasons for doubting it, as I will show in my next post.

[1] See the Introduction and the collection of all the fragments of Papias that I give in The Apostolic Fathers, vol. 2 pp. 85-118.

Here’s the link to this article written by Bart Ehrman.

March 1, 2023

Did Mark write Mark?   A couple of weeks ago I did an eight-lecture course on the Gospel of Mark for my separate (unrelated to the blog) venture, a series of courses on “How Historians Read the Bible” (the courses are available on my website: www.bartehrman.com).  It was a blast.  One of the things I loved about doing it was that I was able to read and reread scholarship on Mark and I learned some things I had long wondered about, and re-learned other things that I used to know.

One of the things I had to think seriously about for the first time in some years was the question of why church fathers in the second century (but when?) began claiming that our second Gospel was written by John Mark, allegedly a secretary for the apostle Peter.  That took me straight back to the question of the reliability of an early Christian writer named Papias (writing around 120 or 130 CE?).

Papias gets used all the time as proof that Mark wrote Mark.  Conservative Christian scholars cite him on the point as “gospel truth.”  But for the past 30 years I’ve found the evidence unconvincing.  I’ve written about the issue briefly on the blog before, but I decided to look up my lengthiest discussion of the matter in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016) and lo and behold, I made some points there that I didn’t remember!

I thought it would be worthwhile to present that discussion here.  It tries to show why Papias’ witness is so problematic for establishing the authorship of both Mark and Matthew, the only two Gospels he mentions in the snippets of his writings we still have.  This will take three posts.

In this one I give the backdrop to the testimony of Papias.

******************************

The Gospel writers are all anonymous.  None of them gives us any concrete information about their identity.  So when did they come to be known as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?   We might begin by considering the earliest references to the books, which occur in a group of authors who were writing, for the most part, immediately after the New Testament period.   These are the so-called “Apostolic Fathers.”  That term is not meant to indicate that these authors themselves were apostles, but that, in scholarly opinion starting hundreds of years ago (though no longer), they were companions of the apostles.   Theirs are among our earliest non-canonical writings.[1]

In the various Apostolic Fathers there are numerous quotations of the Gospels of the New Testament, especially Matthew and Luke.   What is striking about these quotations is that in none of them does any of these authors ascribe a name to the books they are quoting.  Isn’t that a bit odd?   If they wanted to assign “authority” to the quotation, why wouldn’t they indicate who wrote it?

Almost certainly the first apostolic father is the book of 1 Clement, a letter from the church of Rome to the church of Corinth written around 95 CE (and so, before some of the last books of the New Testament) and traditionally claimed to have been composed by the third bishop of Rome, Clement.   Scholars today widely reject that claim, but for our purposes here it does not much matter.   Just to give an example of how the Gospels are generally treated in the Apostolic Fathers, I quote one passage from 1 Clement:

We should especially remember the words the Lord Jesus spoke when teaching about gentleness and patience.  For he said: “Show mercy, that you may be shown mercy; forgive, that it may be forgiven you.  As you do, so it will be done to you; as you give, so it will be given to you; as you judge, so you will be judged; as you show kindness, so will kindness be shown to you; the amount you dispense will be the amount you receive.” (1 Clement 13:1-2)

This is an interesting passage, and fairly typical, because it conflates a number of passages from the Gospels, containing lines from Matthew 5:7; 6:14-15; 7:1-2, 12; Luke 6:31, and 36-38.   But the author does not name the Gospels he has taken the texts from, and certainly doesn’t attribute them to eyewitnesses.  Instead, he simply indicates that this is something that Jesus said.

The same is true of other Apostolic Fathers.   In chapter one of the intriguing book known as the Didache, which contains a set of ethical and practical instructions to the Christian churches, the anonymous writer quotes from Mark 12, Matthew 5 and 7; and Luke 8.  But he never names these Gospels.  Later he cites the Lord’s prayer, virtually as it is found in Matthew 6; again he does not indicate his source.

So too, as a third example, Ignatius of Antioch clearly knows Matthew’s story of the star of Bethlehem (Ignatius, Ephesians 19) and Matthew’s story of Jesus’ baptism which was undergone “in order to fulfill all righteousness” (Smyrneans 1).  But he doesn’t mention that the account was written by Matthew.   Similarly, Polycarp of Smyrna quotes Matthew chapters 5, 7, and 26 and Luke 6, but he never names a Gospel.

This is true of all of our references to the Gospels prior to the end of the second century.   The Gospels are known, read, and cited as authorities.  But they are never named or associated with an eyewitness to the life of Jesus.  There is one possible exception:  the fragmentary references to the Gospels of Matthew and Mark in the writings of the church father, Papias.

[1] For a translation of their writings, with introductions, see Bart D. Ehrman, The Apostolic Fathers, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.:  Harvard University Press, 2003).  I have used this translation for all my quotations.

Here’s the link to this article written by Bart Ehrman on February 26, 2023.

In my previous posts I discussed a class I once taught at Rutgers University on how the various biblical authors deal with the problem of suffering – the problem of how there can be such horrible suffering in a world that is said to be controlled by an all-loving and all-powerful God (who therefore wants the best for people and is able to provide it).  Many of my students, as I pointed out, think that there’s an easy answer:  we suffer because of “free will.”  If we weren’t free to love and hate, to do good and do harm, we would just be robots or computers, not humans.  If God wanted to create humans, as opposed to machines, necessarily we have to be free to hurt others.  And many people do so, often in horrendous ways.

Does that solve the problem?  Naturally we dealt with that issue in my class.  Here is how I discussed those conversations in my book on suffering, God’s Problem: How The Bible Fails to Answer our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer (Oxford University Press, 2008).

*******************************

It was, in fact, fairly easy to show my students some of the problems with this standard modern explanation that suffering comes from free will.  Yes, you can explain the political machinations of the competing political forces in Ethiopia (or in Nazi Germany or in Stalin’s Soviet Union or in the ancient worlds of Israel and Mesopotamia) by claiming that humans had badly handled the freedom given to them.  But how can you explain drought?  When it hits, it is not because someone chose not to make it rain.  Or how do you explain hurricanes that destroy New Orleans?  Or tsunamis that kill hundreds of thousands overnight?  Or earthquakes, or mudslides, or malaria, or dysentery?  And so on.

Moreover, the claim that free will stands behind all suffering has always been a bit problematic, at least from a thinking perspective.  Most people who believe in God-given free will also believe in an afterlife.  Presumably people in the afterlife will still have free will (they won’t be robots then either, will they?).  And yet there won’t be suffering (allegedly) then. Why will people know how to exercise free will in heaven if they can’t know how to exercise it on earth?

In fact, if God gave people free will as a great gift, why didn’t he give them the intelligence they need to exercise it so that we could all live happily and peaceably together?  You can’t argue that he wasn’t able to do so, if you want to argue he was all powerful.  Moreover, if God sometimes intervenes in history in order to counteract the free will decisions of others — for example, when he destroyed the Egyptian armies at the Exodus (they freely had decided to oppress the Israelites) or when he fed the multitudes in the wilderness in the days of Jesus (people who had chosen to go off to hear him without packing a lunch), or when he counteracted the wicked decision of the Roman governor Pilate to destroy Jesus by raising the crucified Jesus from the dead — if he intervenes sometimes to counteract free will, why does he not do so more of the time?  Or indeed, all of the time.

At the end of the day, one would have to say that the answer is a mystery.  We don’t know why free will works so well in heaven but not on earth.  We don’t know why God doesn’t provide the intelligence we need to exercise free will.  We don’t know why he sometimes contravenes the free exercise of the will and sometimes not.  But the problem is that if in the end the question is resolved by saying it is a mystery, then we no longer have an answer.  We are admitting there is no answer.  The solution of free will, in the end, ultimately leads to the conclusion that we can’t understand, even though we imagine we are giving an answer.

As it turns out, that is one of the common answers asserted by the Bible.  We just don’t know why there is suffering.  But other answers in the Bible are just as common — in fact, even more common.  In my class at Rutgers I wanted to explore all these answers, to see what the Biblical authors thought about such matters, and to evaluate what they had to say.

Based on my experience with the class, I decided at the end of the term that I wanted to write a book about it, a study of suffering and biblical responses to it.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I wasn’t ready to write the book.  I was just 30 years old at the time, and although I had seen a lot of the world, I recognized that I had not seen nearly enough of it.  A book like this requires years of thought and reflection, and a broader sense of the world and fuller understanding of life.

I’m now twenty years older [OK, with this blog post thirty-five years older!], and I still may not be ready to write the book.  It’s true, I’ve seen a lot more of the world over these years.  I’ve experienced a lot more pain myself, and have seen the pain and misery of others, sometimes close up: broken marriages, failed health, cancer taking away loved ones in the prime of life, suicide, birth defects, children killed in car accidents, homelessness, mental disease — you can make your own list of your past twenty years.  And I’ve read a lot: genocides and ethnic cleansings not only in Nazi Germany but also in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and now Darfur; terrorist attacks, massive starvation, epidemics ancient and modern, mudslides that kill 30,000 Columbians in one fell swoop, droughts, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis.

Still, even with twenty years of additional experience and reflection, I may not be ready to write the book.  But I suppose in another twenty years, with the horrible suffering in store for this world, I may still feel the same way.  So I’ve decided to write it now.

Here’s the link to this article written by Bart Erhman on February 23, 2023. Click here to read the first article in this series.

In my previous post I began to talk about how thinkers in the Jewish and Christian traditions have wrestled with the problem of suffering.  I indicated that the technical term for this “problem” is “theodicy,” and it is often said to involve the status of three assertions which all are typically thought to be true by those in these two religions, but if true appear to contradict one another.  The assertions are these:

God is all-powerful.

God is all-loving.

There is suffering.

How can all three be true at once?  If God is all powerful, then he is able to do whatever he wants (and can therefore remove suffering).  If he is all loving, then he obviously wants the best for people (and therefore does not want them to suffer).  And yet people suffer.  How can that be explained?   As I pointed out some thinkers have tried to deny one or the other of the assertions: either God is not actually all powerful, or he is not all loving, or there is no suffering.

But as I explain in the introduction to my book God’s Problem (Oxford Press, 2008) …

******************************

Most people who wrestle with the problem want to say that all three assertions are true, but that there is some kind of extenuating circumstance that can explain it all.  For example, in the classical view of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, as we will see at length in the next couple of chapters, God is certainly all powerful and all loving; one of the reasons there is suffering is because his people have violated his law or gone against his will, and he is bringing suffering upon them in order to force them to return to him and lead righteous lives.

This kind of explanation works well so long as it is the wicked who are the ones who suffer.  But what about the wicked who prosper while the ones who try to do what is right before God are wracked with interminable pain and unbearable misery?  How does one explain the suffering of the righteous?  For that other explanations need to be used (for example, that it will all be made right in the afterlife – a view not found in the prophets but in other biblical authors) (there are, as I’m suggesting, other explanations as well in the Bible and in popular thinking).

Even though a scholar of the Enlightenment – Leibniz – came up with the term “theodicy,” and even though the deep philosophical problem has been with us only since the Enlightenment, the basic “problem” has been around since time immemorial.  This was recognized by the intellectuals of the Enlightenment themselves.  One of them, the English philosopher David Hume, pointed out that the problem was stated some twenty-five hundred years ago by one of the great philosophers of ancient Greece, Epicurus:

Epicurus’s old questions are yet unanswered:

Is God willing to prevent evil but not able?  Then he is impotent.

Is he able but not willing?  Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing?  Whence, then, evil?^[i]

As I was teaching my course on biblical views of suffering at Rutgers, over twenty years ago (well… thirty-five now!!), I began to realize that the students seemed remarkably, and somewhat inexplicably, detached from the problem.  It was a good group of students: smart and attentive.  But they were for the most part white, middle-class kids who had not experienced a lot of pain in their lives yet, and I had to do some work in order to help them realize that the problem of suffering was in fact a problem.

This was the time of one of the major Ethiopian famines.  In order to drive home for my students just how disturbing suffering could be, I spent some time with them dealing with the problem of the famine.  It was an enormous problem.  In part because of the political situation, but even more because of a massive drought, there were eight million Ethiopians who were confronted with severe shortages and who, as a result, were starving.  Every day there were pictures in the papers of poor souls, famished, desperate, with no relief in sight.  Eventually one out of every eight died the horrific death of starvation.

That’s some two million people, starved to death, in a world that has far more than enough food to feed all its inhabitants, a world where American farmers are paid to destroy their crops, a world where most of us in this country ingest far more calories than our bodies need or want.  To make my point, I would show pictures of the famine to the students, pictures of emaciated Ethiopian women with famished children on their breasts, desperately sucking to get nourishment that would never come, both mother and children eventually destroyed by the ravages of hunger.

Before the semester was over, I think my students got the point.  Most of them did learn to grapple with the problem.  When the course had started, many of them had thought that whatever problem there was with suffering could be fairly easily solved.

The most popular solution they had was one that I would judge most people in our (Western) world today still hold on to.  It has to do with free will.  According to this view, the reason there is so much suffering in the world is that God has given humans free will.  Without the free will to love and obey God, we would simply be robots doing what we were programed to do.  But since we have the free will to love and obey, we also have the free will to hate and disobey, and this is where suffering comes from.  Hitler, the Holocaust, Idi Amin, corrupt governments throughout the world, corrupt humans inside government and outside of it – all of these are explained on the grounds of free will.

As it turns out, this was more or less the answer given by some of the great intellectuals of the Enlightenment, including Leibniz, who argued that humans have to be free in order for this world to be the best world that could come into existence.  For Leibniz, God is all powerful and so was able to create any kind of world he wanted; and since he was all loving he obviously wanted to create the best of all possible worlds.  This world – with freedom of choice given to its creatures – is therefore the best of all possible worlds.

Other philosophers rejected this view – none so famously, vitriolically, and even hilariously as the French philosopher Voltaire, whose classic novel Candide tells the story of a man (Candide) who experiences such senseless and random suffering and misery, in this allegedly “best of all worlds,” that he abandons his Leibnizian upbringing and adopts a more sensible view, that we can’t know the whys and wherefores of what happens in this world, but should simply do our very best to enjoy it while we can.^[ii]  Candide is still a novel very much worth reading – witty, clever, and damning.  If this is the best world possible – just imagine what a worse one would be.

******************************

I will continue my reflections on the matter starting at this point, in the next post.

[i].  David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (the sentiments are those expressed by his fictitious caracter named Philo). Xxx?

[ii]. Voltaire.  Candide: or Optimism.  Tr. Theo Cuffe (New York: Penguin, 2005).

Here’s the link to this article written by Bart Ehrman on February 22, 2023.

This past week I had a long talk with one of my bright undergraduates, a first-year student who had been raised in a Christian context but had come to have serious doubts driven in large part by the difficulty she had understanding how there could be suffering in a world controlled by an all-knowing and all-powerful God.  I naturally resonated with the question, since this is why I myself left the Christian faith.

I get asked about that transition a lot, and it’s been five or six years since I’ve discussed it at any length on the blog.  So I thought I might return to it.  The one and only time I”ve talked about it at length is in my book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer (Oxford University Press, 2008).  Here is how I discuss it there, slightly edited.  (This will take several posts)

*******************************

I think I know when suffering started to become a “problem” for me.  It was while I was still a believing Christian – in fact, it was when I was pastoring the Princeton Baptist Church in New Jersey.  It was not the suffering that I observed and tried to deal with in the congregation that prompted my questioning – failed marriages, economic hardship, the suicide of a teenage son.  It was in fact something that took place outside of the church, in the academy.  At the time I was writing my PhD dissertation and – in addition to working in the church – was teaching part time at Rutgers University.

One of the classes that I taught that year was a new one for me.  Before this I had mainly been teaching courses on the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the writings of Paul.  But I had been asked to teach a course called “The Problem of Suffering in the Biblical Traditions.”  I welcomed the opportunity because it seemed to me to be an interesting way to approach the Bible, by examining the different responses given by biblical authors to the question of why there is suffering in the world, in particular among the people of God.

It was my belief then, and continues to be my belief now, that different biblical authors had different solutions to the question of why God’s people suffer: some (such as the prophets) thought that suffering came from God as a punishment for sin; others thought that suffering came from God’s cosmic enemies, who inflicted suffering precisely because people tried to do what was right before God; others thought that suffering came as a test to see if people would remain faithful despite suffering; others thought that suffering was a mystery and that it was wrong even to question why God allowed it; others thought that this world was just an inexplicable mess and that we should “eat, drink, and be merry” while we can.  And so on.

It seemed to me that one of the ways to see the rich diversity of the Scriptural heritage of Jews and Christians was to see how different authors responded to this fundamental question of suffering..

For the class I had students do a lot of reading throughout the Bible, as well as of popular books that discuss suffering in the modern world, for example Elie Wiesel’s classic Night,^[i]  which describes his horrifying experiences in Auschwitz as a teenager, Rabbi Harold Kushner’s very popular book When Bad Things Happen to Good People,^[ii]  and the much less read but thoroughly moving story of Job as rewritten by Archibald Macleish, in his play J.B.^[iii]

I began the semester by laying out for the students the classical “problem” of suffering and explaining what is meant the technical term “theodicy.”  Theodicy is a word invented by one of the great intellectuals and polymaths of the seventeenth century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who wrote a lengthy treatise trying to explain how and why there can be suffering in the world if God is all powerful and wants the absolute best for people.^[iv]  The term is made up of two Greek words: theos, which means “God,” and dikē, which means “justice.”  Theodicy, in other words, refers to the problem of how God can be “just” or “righteous” given the fact there is so much suffering in the world that he created and is allegedly sovereign over.

As philosophers and theologians have discussed theodicy over the years, they have devised a kind of logical problem that needs to be solved to explain the suffering in the world.  This problem involves three assertions which all appear to be true, but if true appear to contradict one another.  The assertions are these:

God is all-powerful.

God is all-loving.

There is suffering.

How can all three be true at once?  If God is all powerful, then he is able to do whatever he wants (and can therefore remove suffering).  If he is all loving, then he obviously wants the best for people (and therefore does not want them to suffer).  And yet people suffer.  How can that be explained?

Some thinkers have tried to deny one or the other of the assertions.  Some, for example, have argued that God is not really all powerful – this is ultimately the answer given by Rabbi Kushner in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People.  For Kushner, God wishes he could intervene to bring your suffering to an end, but his hands are tied.  And so he is the one who stands beside you to give you the strength you need to deal with the pain in your life, but he can’t do anything to stop the pain.  For other thinkers this is to put a limit on the power of God and is, in effect, a way of saying that God is not really God.

Others have argued that God is not all loving, at least in any conventional sense.  This is more or less the view of those who think God is at fault for the terrible suffering that people incur – a view that seems close to what Elie Wiesel asserts, when he expresses his anger at God and declares him guilty for how he has treated his people.  Others, again, object and claim that if God is not love, again he is not God.

There are some people who want to deny the third assertion; they claim that there is not really any suffering in the world.  But these people are in the extreme minority and have never been very convincing to most of us, who prefer looking at the world as it is to hiding our heads in the sand like ostriches.

******************************

I will continue next time from here.  (You may want to hold off explaining to us all why there is suffering until I finish with the thread; at that point I’ll be asking you what you yourself think)

Most people who wrestle with the problem want to say that all three assertions are true, but that there is some kind of extenuating circumstance that can explain it all.  For example, in the classical view of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, as we will see at length in the next couple of chapters, God is certainly all powerful and all loving; one of the reasons there is suffering is because his people have violated his law or gone against his will, and he is bringing suffering upon them in order to force them to return to him and lead righteous lives.  This kind of explanation works well so long as it is the wicked who are the ones who suffer.  But what about the wicked who prosper while the ones who try to do what is right before God are wracked with interminable pain and unbearable misery?  How does one explain the suffering of the righteous?  For that another explanation needs to be used (for example, that it will all be made right in the afterlife – a view not found in the prophets but in other biblical authors).  And so it goes.

[i]. A new translation is now available by Wiesel’s wife, Marion Wiesel; Night (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006).

[ii]. Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (New York: Anchor, 1981).

[iii]. Archibald MacLeish, J.B.: A Play in Verse.  (Boston: Houghlin Mifflin, 1957).

[iv].  G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God and the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil (Chicago: Open Court, 1985).