Book Notice: The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World
Just a couple days ago I received the new book by Bart Ehrman entitled, The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World (Simon and Schuster, 2018). I had received a pre-published copy of the book several months ago and have been working through it.
The reason I have a keen interest in this volume is because it covers a lot of the same ground of my recent book which was released last year, Christianity at the Crossroads: How the Second Century Shaped the Future of the Church (SPCK/IVP Academic, 2017).
Currently, I am about 3/4 of the way through Ehrman’s volume and plan to review it formally … Continue reading...
The Heresy of Orthodoxy: Was the NT Text Reliably Transmitted?
This post is the final installment in a series of videos where Andreas Köstenberger and I discuss the theory of Walter Bauer on unity and diversity in early Christianity.
These discussions are based on our book, The Heresy of Orthodoxy: How Contemporary Culture’s Fascination with Diversity Has Reshaped Our Understanding of Early Christianity (Crossway, 2010).
You can find the prior four installments here, here, here, and here.
In this last video, we tackle the very important issue of textual transmission. Skeptics have argued that the wild theological diversity in early Christianity would not only have led the church to have different canons, but it would also … Continue reading...
Were the Stories of Jesus Radically Changed Before They Were Written Down? My Review of Bart Ehrman’s Latest
If one accepts the dating of some modern scholars, the earliest canonical gospel–the Gospel of Mark–was not written until 70 AD or later.
This means there was a gap of time of about 40 years between the life of Jesus and our earliest Gospel that records his words and deeds.
What happened to the stories of Jesus during this period of time? Since such stories were largely passed down orally, can this process be trusted? Did Christians change the stories along the way? Is it reasonable to think that Christians could have even remembered the details accurately?
These are the questions raised in Jesus Before the Gospels, Bart Ehrman’s … Continue reading...
Did Papias Know the Apostle John?
I just received in the mail the latest issue of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society. And I noticed that it contained my review of Monte Shanks’ recent volume, Papias and the New Testament (Pickwick, 2013). (I can’t keep track of when my book reviews appear!).
Seeing this review reminded me of one of the key debates in discussions of the emerging New Testament canon, namely whether Papias, the bishop of Hierapolis in the early second century, knew the apostle John. This is a key question simply because Papias provides one of the earliest explicit references to the gospels of Mark and Matthew.
So, where did Papias get … Continue reading...
Two Very Different Books on the Reliability of the Gospels
I have just finished reading Bart Ehrman’s Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior (HarperOne, 2016), and Brant Pitre’s The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ (Image, 2016).
And I can’t imagine two books about Jesus more different from one another.
Not surprisingly, in his new volume (released again right before Easter!) Ehrman continues his life-long campaign to attack the reliability of the canonical gospels and to raise doubts about their authorship and origins. Time and time again he asserts that the gospels were late, anonymous productions, written by authors with no connections to the historical … Continue reading...