Three days after I came home from our first expedition of the season (to Albania and Greece), I took off again—this time, on a road trip. With two other guys, we drove north to Ann Arbor to photograph the Greek New Testament manuscripts at the University of Michigan. UM boasts the largest collection of Greek NT MSS in America: 1 out 6 MSS are in their collection! We will be photographing all of them except for the papyri which have already been digitized.

Two teams went to Ann Arbor this week. Four people flew in and four drove. We are a little slow in setting up, but the library has cooperated marvelously with us. We are occupying four tables in the manuscript room—about one third of the whole room! Altogether, there are over 20,000 images to shoot. But to date, far and away the most challenging manuscript has been codex 2364, or shelf number MS 182. For starters, this is an ultra-tiny manuscript. It measures 3.5 inches by 2.75 inches—barely larger than the fragmentary leaf known as P52. Think of a 3 x 5 card and cut it in half. That’s pretty close to the size of this document. But it’s also just as thick as it is tall!

The text is 12th–13th century, and it includes the four Gospels. Yes, all of them. The handwriting is so small that it’s hard to believe that such delicate work could have been achieved eight hundred years ago. I am not sure how it would have been done; if anyone has a clue, I’d appreciate the information. The font size is about 3 points. It looks like this. So, not only is it difficult to imagine someone producing this text, it is also difficult to imagine the kind of person who could read it. Continue Reading »

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Wednesday, June 18, 2008. The day started at 11 am at the Greek Bible Institute in Pikermi, just outside of Athens. Late start because we thought driving to the famed monasteries of Meteora would take four hours. Four of us (Billy Todd, Tim Ricchuiti, Brian Wright, and Dan Wallace) shoehorned ourselves into a tiny car, and took off for the road north. But we were not prepared for what would await us today.

We took the E75 up the east coast of Greece’s mainland. For the most part, a very fine, modern highway. After we had traveled for about 2 & ½ hours, we got an email on Tim Ricchuiti’s cell phone from Jeff Baldwin, the director of the Greek Bible Institute and a former student of mine. Jeff grew up in Greece (his dad, Bill Baldwin, another Dallas Seminary grad, was the founder of the school decades ago) and is completely bilingual. He has many friends in low places (since he’s not Orthodox), but even low places here are sometimes high enough. As I said, we were headed for the monasteries built high up on top of rocks that ascend straight up into the heavens hundred of meters above the town below. We thought we would visit them today, and tomorrow see if we could examine some manuscripts there. The monasteries here have nearly 60 Greek New Testament manuscripts. In centuries past, the only way that people could get to the top of these rocks was to get pulled up on a rope. But once, when a rope broke, the rules changed. Now, there are steps to the heights. A veritable stairway to heaven. Led Zeppelin would be envious. We were eager with anticipation (as much as four Testoterone-laden eggheads can be). But the email from Jeff changed our plans instantly.

For the rest of the story, you’ll have to go to www.bible.org. The link to the essay is here.

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In 1844, the Tübinger Jahrbuch published an essay by F. C. Baur to the effect that John’s Gospel should be dated no earlier than AD 160, and probably closer to 170. Baur came to this conclusion because he was heavily influenced by G. F. Hegel, the father of the “dialectic” named after him. Hegelian dialectic is known today mostly by its curt description: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. That is, one school of thought exists, followed by one that is strongly opposed to it. As these two duke it out, a third school emerges which gleans from the pugilists certain harmonizable ideas, thus reaching a compromise or, more accurately, a new synthesis. Baur applied HD to the New Testament and came to the conclusion that the Gospel of John was probably the last book of the NT to be written. It synthesized the Peter school of Jewish Christianity with the Paul school of the mission to the Gentiles, forming a new amalgam that attempted a harmonization between the two. Hence, it could not have been written in the first century, according to Baur, since such a rapprochement did not exist historically in the first century.

Baur went on to wrestle with the implications of Hegelian dialectic for all of NT history and early Christianity. He is rightly called the “Father of the Tübingen School” of theology. This was both a movement and a place. The movement was essentially the implications of Hegelian dialectic teased out for the NT. The school was a university, with its own seminary, in southern Germany, about 20 minutes from Stuttgart (by way of Autobahn; I’ll drive). The university was founded in 1477; the Protestant seminary in 1536. Both thrive today. Continue Reading »

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I learned something really important on day two of the Greer-Heard Forum: fried fish and dark beer taste even better when you’re sitting around a bunch of theologues. Thoughts of blood barely trickling through my arteries were squeezed out by images of Martin Luther engaged in his famous “table talk,” enjoying a catch from Katie’s fish pond and nursing a mug of her homemade brew. We didn’t have any famous scholars in our midst on Saturday night, but we were surrounded by great food and stimulating conversation about the theological controversies of our day. Indeed, the lectures we had heard just hours before provided plenty of grist for the mill.

Day two of the Forum featured Michael Holmes (Bethel University), Dale Martin (Yale University), David Parker (Birmingham University), and William Warren (New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary). Each man spoke for approximately 30 minutes, followed by 25 minutes of interaction with the keynotes, Ehrman and Wallace. In keeping with the spirit of the previous night’s dialog, Holmes and Warren took Wallace’s “side,” while Martin and Parker were on Ehrman’s. Each lecture was quite different and made its own contribution, as I’ll try to briefly show below. Continue Reading »

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I have argued in previous installments of this series that in John 10:28-30 Jesus claims to be “one” with the Father in the exercise of the divine prerogative and power of giving eternal life to the people of God and preserving them against any spiritual attack. Christ’s use of the monotheistic statement of YHWH in the Old Testament that he alone is God because no one can snatch them from his hand (Deut. 32:39; see also Is. 43:13), which Christ applies to himself and to the Father, sets us up to understand “I and the Father are one” also as an allusion to the Old Testament’s most famous monotheistic affirmation, the Shema (Deut. 6:4).

Those who deny that Jesus Christ is one God with the Father point to certain elements of the context to show that such an interpretation is mistaken. Immediately before Jesus’ famous statement in John 10:30, he states, “My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all” (v. 29 ESV, HCSB, NASB, NET). Jesus says two things here about the Father that anti-Trinitarians often understand as implying that Jesus is not God.

First, Jesus says that the Father gave him his sheep. Why would the Father need to give the Son anything if he possesses it necessarily by virtue of his being God? Continue Reading »

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For a long time, Albania has closed its doors to western scholars. Last summer, a four-person team from the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts went to Tirana to photograph 13 manuscripts in the National Archive. They were unprepared for what would happen on their first day on the job. They saw an old typewritten, in-house catalog of manuscripts, and noticed that there were forty-seven (47) NT MSS! The Dallas Morning News reported on this to some degree, featuring a full-page article on the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. Continue Reading »

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I know that I am not very faithful. I want to be, but I have this the problem—an infection, an inclination, an uncanny ability to disappoint people. No, I am not just saying that to identify . . . I really do have this ability. I have won the gold medal in the triathlon of let-down, disenchantment, and flake-out. Be it forgetfulness, thoughtlessness, or just plain selfishness, I can make a mess of things. I am often faithless, to others and to God.

Yet, at the same time, while I have periods of faithlessness, I still believe—in God. In other words, I am never perpetually faithless. Confused maybe, but not faithless. I do know whom I have believed in.

I am going to take an odd and probably unexpected turn now. One of the most oft quoted passages of Scripture with regards to our tendency to weaken our grip on faith is 2 Tim. 2:13.

2 Timothy 2:13 “If we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself.”

Normally, we would turn to this passage and wipe the sweat off our brow in relief. Phew . . . When we are faithless, Christ will remain faithful. Faithful to what? To us! In other words, we may let him down, but he will never let us down. While I believe that this principle is true and can be found in many passages of Scripture, I don’t believe that this is what is being taught here. This verse is misused and the real message here is lost. Continue Reading »

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Conversation involve questions. The asking of questions is either meant to illicit and answer or to provoke thought that provides an answer, even if the answer is a tentative “I don’t know.” I often tell my students that it is better to have an informed “I don’t know” than a forced make-ready answer.

When it comes to Christ, when it comes to following Christ, when it comes to who Christ is and what he did, there are some questions that need to be asked. The answers to these questions will and do divide. The division regards differences in beliefs, convictions, or knowledge concerning the object.

Christ asked Peter a very divisive question: “Who do you say that I am?” Others had differing opinions. Some said Elijah. Others John the Baptist. The contrastive de tells us that Christ was asking what Peter thought in contrast to what the others thought. “You are the Christ, the son of the living God,” he answered (Matt. 16:16). With this answer Peter contrasted his beliefs about Christ with all the others who gave different options. Peter believed he was right and the others wrong.

This was an early confession, a creed, a statement of faith that was in response to a question. It was not from the lips of Christ, but one of his followers. Peter was the first to put his theology into a creed. This creed not only separated him from other contemporaries, but has separated Christianity as a confession of faith from all other alternatives since. “Who do you say that I am?”

But this was not the end. As I will attempt to demonstrate, there was a progressive development of a creedal belief in the New Testament that distinguished Christianity as a distinct system of belief. Continue Reading »

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You’ve heard it thousands of times: “Don’t worry; everything will work out just fine.” It’s the eternal optimism that is borne not in the crucible of reality but in the wishful thinking of the American dream, of Hollywood make-believe, or of a naïve Pollyanna outlook. All of us know it isn’t completely true—we know of children who were cut down by cancer or drunk drivers, of drug addicts who came from good homes, of family men who lost their jobs, of soldiers who returned from battle with one less limb—or in a body bag. We know of countless tragedies and needless suffering, yet we repeat the myth to our children without blinking an eye: “Don’t worry; everything will work out just fine.”

This Pollyanna view of life is not a modern invention. It’s as old as Alexander the Great. Even St. Paul uttered something like this. The difference is that Paul did not write a sanguine blank check; he conditioned his sentiment with important qualifiers, and he defined the ‘good’ as other than comfort and wealth. Continue Reading »

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I now turn to what is without a doubt the most popular interpretation of John 10:30 other than the traditional Trinitarian understanding, namely, the view that Jesus was asserting only that he and the Father were one in “purpose.” I should state at the outset that everyone agrees that from a New Testament perspective Jesus and the Father are one in purpose. The issue is whether the unity of which John 10:30 speaks is specifically a unity of purpose rather than a unity of divine power, nature, or identity. In other words, the claim to be considered here is whether John 10:30 means nothing more than that Jesus is united in purpose with the Father.

Those who promote the “one in purpose” view in order to combat Trinitarian theology can point out that some mainstream Christian scholars have also interpreted John 10:30 in this way. Continue Reading »

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When Christian leaders talk about how to live a godly life, they eventually turn to the gray areas—those things that are right for some but wrong for others. You know the list: drinking, smoking, watching R rated movies, playing cards, dancing, using colorful language, listening to Country-Western music (OK—that last one is not a gray area; it should be taboo for everyone), etc. That’s the short list. And the way the instruction on such matters goes is all too often along these lines: First, our freedoms in Christ are articulated, clearly stated, appreciated. Next come the qualifiers: ‘but don’t exercise your freedom in Christ if it will make someone uncomfortable, cause someone to judge you, is not entirely loving, etc.’ This would be bad enough if it just ended there. By the time all the qualifications are stated, the freedoms that we allegedly have are almost all stripped away. Paralysis begins to set in. But the coup de grace comes with a single verse from 1 Thessalonians, utilized as a weapon against all those who enjoy their lives in Christ: “But even if what you do is loving, makes no one uncomfortable, doesn’t cause anyone to judge you, remember that you are responsible to ‘avoid every appearance of evil.’ So, if in doubt, don’t do it.”

That’s how the verse reads in the KJV: “Avoid every appearance of evil.” It’s 1 Thess 5.22 and it puts a damper on everything. But does it really mean this? Does it really mean that even if something looks like it’s evil to some, we can’t enjoy it? Hardly. Continue Reading »

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Did the Christian Gospel borrow from other Greek myths?

Can one approach the Gospels historically or is it just a matter of blind faith?

Was Jesus a legend dreamed up by zealous people or is he truly Lord of all?

Listen now to the Converse with Scholars boadcast as we welcomed Greg Boyd and Paul Eddy to discuss issues relating to the historical Jesus.

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One of the many, many New Testament texts that orthodox Christians historically have regarded as testifying to the deity of Jesus Christ is John 10:30, in which Jesus famously says, “I and the Father are one” (Greek, ego kai ho pater hen esmen). But in what sense does Jesus mean that he and the Father are “one”? We may identify at least three main views: Continue Reading »

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In the movie National Treasure a small team of amateur archeologists and treasure-seekers stumbles across the lost books from the ancient library of Alexandria. They discover many other treasures, of course, but this is what piqued my interest the most! Unfortunately, the tale is all fiction: the ancient library of Alexandria, which was by many accounts the single largest library in the ancient world, was completely burned down more than two millennia ago. The best estimates are that 400,000 manuscripts were lost.

Just as National Treasure is a historical revisionist’s pipedream, so is the idea that Alexandria was a singular occurrence. The fact is that it’s been repeated multiple times, even in recent history. To be sure, with the invention of the printing press, copies can be exact. So even if some first editions are destroyed, there are almost always others of the same in different locations. Not so with handwritten manuscripts, however. Each is unique, and each has its own story to tell. But when these manuscripts are destroyed, stolen, dissected, worm-eaten, or otherwise damaged, the information they provide is lost. Continue Reading »

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Mark Roberts did a great job on Converse with Scholars. Join us as we interview him about the reliability of the Gospels. You can listen to the broadcast here or download it. Visit Mark’s site and take a look at his book.

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