Ehrman did not choose that title and was not happy with it. He wanted to call the book Lost in Transmission, which would have been in keeping with two prior titles (Lost Christianities and Lost Gospels), but the publisher wanted something more provocative and chose Misquotong Jesus against his will. He himself though the title was misleading.
Ehrman didn’t say all church leafesr, but, in point of fact, there are still demoninations that do it.
When it comes to Biblical scholars, that is true. Traditional authorships are defended only by religious apologists, and not from a basis of critical scholarship.l authorship.)
You misunderstand what Ehrman was saying. He was saying nobody ever appended prior work and attributed it to the original author (we have the book of Isaiah as a great example of that). he was saying that it was not considered acceptable, as it is sometimes claimed, to completely fabricate something and attribute it to another author. The pseudoepigraphs in the NT are complete fabrications, not emendations to the claimed authors. They are outright forgeries.
Wow. Almost all of this is wrong. You didn’t even get the date of the destruction of Jerusalem right.
The way the books of the NT are dated has nothing to do with miraculous claims, but by such things references to dateable historical events and to dependence on prior works. There is a lot more than that, none of it quick or simple to explain, but none of it having to do with “secular” rejection of miracles either. In point of fact, most critical scholarship has been done by believers.
Mark knws about the destruction of Israel, therefore Mark is post-70 (just like you would assume that anything you read which shows knowledge of 9/11 was written after 9/11, even if it portrayed somebody allegedly “predicting” it).
Matthew and Mark are both dependent on Mark, which makes them both necessarily post-70 as well, and more like post-80 since it took roughly ten tears for books to become widely copied and disseminated (they didn’t just hit the stores like they do to day). Luke also arguably (I would say [i[very* arguably) shows knowledge of Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities, which was written about 93 CE. Luke does show knowledge of Paul’s death, by the way - Acts 20:25.
The authorship traditions of the Gospels are refutable in numerous ays (especially Matthew) having nothing to do with some imagined “secular” conspiracy to deny miracles (though it would be pretty piss poor scholarship to accept any supernatural claim at face value).
Seeing this topic, it reminded me of another rather erudite thread from some time past that might be of interest to the OP and others participating. It was however closed and locked for no apparently logical reason, so I couldn’t perform a “Lazarus”, as I wanted to… Do we have accurate copies of the bible?
Heck, Daniel knew about the destruction of Jerusalem after the killing of a Messianic Prince- was Chapter 9 written after 70 AD? And the last holdout of the Jewish Uprising was finally squashed in 73 AD at Masada.
Re the World Trade Center’s destruction- Google up “World Trade Center”, “Steve Jackson” and “Illuminati New World Order” (the 1995 card game) for a weird coincidence.
Have you read John A.T. Robinson’s REDATING THE NEW TESTAMENT? A post-70 AD writing of all or most of the NT is not settled.
The Gospel of Mark has a few passages which seem to allude to the Jewish Uprising, but he no where specifically mentions it. The fact that such an important event is no where specifically mentioned in any of the gospels inspired John A.T. Robinson to write Redating the New Testament. In this book Robinson argued that all of the gospels, even that of St. John, was written before 66 AD. Robinson was a bishop of the Church of England. However, in his early book, Honest to God, he expressed a theology that was almost agnostic.
You of course meant, “Matthew and Luke.” In my comment I acknowledged that Luke probably used Mark as a source. I said that an early date for Luke meant an earlier date for Mark.
Daniel 9 refers to the sacking of Jerusalem by Antiochus in 168 BCE. The murder of an “anointed one” refers to the murder of the high priest, Onias III (all high priests were “anointed ones”)
The “anointed prince” referred to by Daniel is a different character altogether, and refers to Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who freed the Jews from captivity in Babylon.
In mainstream critical scholarship, it is very much settled. Bishop Robinson’s was not a credentialed historian or critical scholar and his dating of the NT, while embraced by traditionalsits, has not been taken seriously in mainstream scholarship. Robinson also thought all of the Pauline epistles were authentic - something you’d be hard put to find even conservatives to defend anymore.
After reading your comment, I re read my copy of the New Jerusalem Bible from Acts 20 to 28 where it ends. These chapters include quite a few "we’ and “us” references which I, and many Bible scholars, believe refer to St. Luke himself, meaning that this is an eye witness account. Although Paul expects to be persecuted, and acknowledges that he may be executed, nowhere did I read any mention that he was executed.
I am not assuming any secular conspiracy to deny the miracles. The great majority of the secular scholars do not deny the miracles, they certainly do not prove that they did not happen. However, the assumption that the miracles did not happen would incline them to choose late dates for the writing of most of the New Testament books. If the authors used as reference material oral traditions they heard from those who were not eye witnesses the miracles are less accurately attested to, than if the authors were able to talk to eye witnesses.
In chapter 28:8-10 Luke, who has joined the narrative, recounts miraculous cures of people on Malta, where the ship that was taking St. Paul and St. Luke to Rome was ship wrecked.
Q has been reconstructed from passages that Luke and Matthew share, which are not found in Mark. Q is usually considered to have been written from an oral tradition.
In 1945 four primitive gospels not found in the New Testament were discovered at Nag Hammadi. One of them, The Gospel of St. Thomas, resembled the reconstructed Q. I unfortunately do not have my copy in front of me. Nevertheless, one of these primitive gospels says that after the crucifixion various apostles wrote accounts of the ministry of Jesus. That seems plausible to me.
Eusebius, who wrote his History in the forth century, said that St. Matthew wrote an account of the ministry of Jesus.
The editors of the Jerusalem Bible accept the theory that the Gospel of St. Matthew that appears in the New Testament was composed largely from Mark and Q. They suggest that passages not found in either, or in Luke, come from a more primitive gospel written by St. Matthew.
Many who unlike John A. T. Robinson believe that the Gospel of St. John was not written in its final form by the apostle, nevertheless, believe that part of it did come from an account written by St. John.
My theory is that the Gospel of St. Thomas was written by the apostle St. Thomas, and that another apostle wrote Q.
Keep in mind, all of this is necessarily speculative.
All of this is irrelevant. The number of “secular scholars” who have spent any time worrying over scripture is a tiny fraction of the overall number of scholars who have investigated them and the overwhelming majority of the religious scholars side with the later dates.
Pick up a copy of The New Jerome Biblical Commentary some time, and read the passages dating the various works of the New Testament. Then note the authors of the various sections. None of them are “secular” scholars. (Heck, you can pick up a copy of the 40+ year old The Jerome Biblical Commentary or Kümmel’s Introduction to the New Testament from the late 1960s and find much of the same information with the same mix of religious scholars as authors carrying on the tradition of scholarship from earlier in that century.) Later dating is neither secular prejudice nor a new idea.
He says it’s the last time they will see him, which means the author knew Paul had been executed. In Acts 28:30, the author also says that Paul lived in Rome for two years, which is an elliptal way of saying that’s when he died.
The lack of an explicit mention of Paul’s alleged martyrdom in Acts is not evidence of a pre-70 date in any case. Luke was circumspect about it for the same reason the synoptic Gospels are circumspect about Pilate’s involvement in the crucifixion - he didn’twant to antagonize the romans. He knows that his audiemce knows what happened to Paul, but he ends his narrative by saying that Paul continued to preach “unhindered” in Rome “for two years.” This shows clear awareness of Paul’s execution, but glosses the details for politic reasons and his statemnet that Paul preached for those two years “ἀκωλύτως” - “without restriction,” “unhindered”) for two years is a little disingenuous since it elides the fact that he was (allegedly) killed after those two years. The author was trying not to make waves.
Luke’s story was finished then anyway. He wasn’t writing a biography of Paul, but an apologia for the Pauline Christian movement.
The plausibility or impluausibility of miracles has absolutely notrhing to do with how the books are dated with the exception of the fact that scientific methodology does not permit an acceptance that people can predict the future (that is, any writing which shows specific knowledge ofa historical event had to have been written after that event).
There are no eyewitness testimonies to any of the allged miracles of Jesus.
Faith healing is, and always has been, a commonplace superstition, but since alleged eyewitness testimonies of miraculous healing are impressive to you, check out what Tacitus said the Roman Emperor Vespasian did in front of witnesses:
Histories 4:81
Also, not to put to fine a point on it, but first hand accounts of “miraculous” events are also a fairly common feature of fiction - something we know the author of Luke-Acts was perfectly capable of.
No, Q is a Greek literary composition, not a transcription from an oral tradition (which would have been Aramaic), but it probably does ultimatly have an origin in some kind of oral sayings traditions (it just had to go through a couple of changes before it became Q).
Thomas is a sayings Gospel like Q. It does not say anything about the crucifixion. The rest of the Nag Hammadi books are not “primitive,” they are 2nd and 3rd Century apocrypha whose content has little or no historical validity.
Eusebius quotes Papias as saying that Matthew wrote a sayings Gospel ofJesus in Hebrew, but Canonical Matthew is neither a sayings Gospel, nor was it written in Hebrew. The assignment of that author to Canonical Matthew is essentially baseless, especially since it is dependent on secondary sources like Mark and Q.
The material original to Matthew is mostly the material where (as with Luke), he does not have Mark or Q as a guide and is forced to create on his own - basically this amounts to the infancy and appearance narratives where Matthew and Luke (both lacking sources for that material) go off in wildly divergent directions.
This is actually possible, but that material would not include any of the miracles or the resurrection. Those are later accretions.
This is not impossible (though, both Q and Thomas appear to be layered works - i.e. new material was added over time, and it is more likely that they were based on a prior oral tradition rather than written directly by apostles), but it should be pointed out that neither Thomas nor Q have any miracle stories, nor do they say anything about the resurrection. They are both just sayings gospels - stuff Jesus said - with very little narrative naterial.
In Acts 20:25 St. Paul says, "And now, behold, I know that ye all among whom I have gone preaching the kingdom of God, shall see my face no more. In 21:13 he predicted his death in Jerusalem. Also, by then he was several decades older than the average life expectancy at the time. Finally, transportation at the time was slow and dangerous. For all of these reasons, it was reasonable for St. Paul to give his friends a permanent goodbye.
Acts 28:30 reads, “And Paul dwelt two whole years in his own hired house, and received all that came in unto him.” Many scholars believe that after his visit to Rome he traveled to Spain.
While this is likely true, I’m skeptical that any more than a minority of the laity really cares–and you didn’t really address that, so I’m curious of your thoughts.
You also need to draw a distinction between “priests” (here I’m assuming things based on your choice of title) who have gone to seminary and studied theology, vs. the more numerous “preachers”, “pastors”, and “reverends” who may or may not have done so.
My experience has been that the average lay believer, when presented with historical studies and evidence disputing authorship (or, for that matter, translation accuracy) will have one of the following two responses:
“You’d have to talk to my minister–I don’t know about all that, but he says differently and I’m listening to him.”
“God wouldn’t let the copy of the Bible that I am reading be an inaccurate guide to his Word and desires, therefore you are wrong and your evidence is irrelevant.”
While I acknowledge the possibility of a 3) “That’s interesting, give me some sources so I can read more about that and consider it.”, I’ve never personally encountered it outside of a Religious Studies classroom setting.
You are also still stuck with all the evidence FOR a post 70 (really post-80, and probably post-90) dating for Luke-Acts. The fact that Luke didn’t want to say anything directly about thr Romans killing Paul does not make that evidence go away.