Did the Early Church Fathers Think That They Were Inspired Like the Apostles?
A number of years ago, Albert Sundberg wrote a well-known article arguing that the early church fathers did not see inspiration as something that was uniquely true of canonical books.[1] Why? Because, according to Sundberg, the early Church Fathers saw their own writings as inspired. Ever since Sundberg, a number of scholars have repeated this claim, insisting that the early fathers saw nothing distinctive about the NT writings as compared to writings being produced in their own time period.
However, upon closer examination, this claim proves to be highly problematic. Let us consider several factors.
First, the early church fathers repeatedly express that the apostles had a distinctive authority … Continue reading...
New Publication: “Manuscripts, Scribes, and Book Production in Early Christianity”
A number of years ago my wife purchased a Kindle e-reader from Amazon. Now, she reads a number of her books digitally. And she is not alone. It seems like our modern world has become to digest books more and more in a digital format–e-readers, ipads, digital phones, etc. Much of this technical innovation is positive. People can easily access material in ways never before available.
However, in the midst of this technological innovation, our modern concept of the “book” has been transformed. It has largely ceased to be a physical object that you can touch, hold, and smell, and now has become entirely digital. Books are merely words, and … Continue reading...
10 Misconceptions about the NT Canon: #9: “The Canonical Gospels Were Certainly Not Written by the Individuals Named in Their Titles”
Note: this is the ninth installment of a blog series announced here. The full series can be found here.
One of the most commonly made claims regarding the canonical gospels is that they were not written by the individuals named in their titles. Instead, we are told that these gospels were written later in the first century by anonymous individuals outside of Palestine who were not eyewitnesses of any of the events that they record. After all, the text of the gospels themselves offers no indication of their authorship. And the gospel titles, it is argued, were added at a later point—probably the middle of the second century—in … Continue reading...
World Magazine and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife
I just noticed that the most recent print edition of World Magazine had a write up on the recent “discovery” of the so-called Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, a purportedly fourth-century Coptic gospel where Jesus refers to “my wife.” The online link can be found here.
The World Magazine article referred to my original discussion of this fragment published on the TGC website here. The article picked up on one of the most critical points I was trying to make in my original discussion: “of all the known ‘gospels’ of Christ, ‘only Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are dated to the first century.'”
This is a rather simple, … Continue reading...
The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife—Authentic or Not?
Yesterday, during the break for my Gospels class (and ironically just prior to my lectures on apocryphal gospels), I received the big news about the discovery of a new apocryphal gospel fragment. This fragment—aptly named The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife—contains a story where Jesus refers to “My wife” and is dated to the fourth century. No doubt this will reignite the firestorm felt during the release of The Da Vinci Code many years ago, and the major media outlets will be asking again about whether Jesus was married.
Since yesterday’s announcement, I have been inundated with emails and phone calls asking for my assessment of this new fragment. So, I … Continue reading...