We now come to one of the most popular members of the contemporary informal Bible studies establishment: Bart Ehrman. I am going to select one of his more accessible efforts, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. I have a copy of the fifth edition. I suggest that he makes assertions which people who do not have advanced knowledge and critical skills may well take as being beyond doubt.
A former Christian of some Protestant variety, Ehrman’s Protestant assumptions show, as early as p.4 of the volume, in his list of the Christian books of the Old Testament. His list does not include a number of books which the Catholic and Orthodox Churches today accept, as had many, if not the majority, in the ancient Church, as evidenced by the very oldest manuscripts, such as the codices Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus, Vaticanus, and Ephraemi Rescriptus, the four oldest surviving exemplars.
Ehramn’s comment is: “The Roman Catholic Church, for example, accepts an additional twelve books (or parts of books) … Protestant Christians usually call these books the “Apocrypha.” Since they did not form part of the Hebrew Bible, I will not be including them in this chart or discussing them at any length.” (4) But what does the Hebrew Bible have to do with it? Neither did the Hebrew Bible or the Jews include and accept the New Testament, so if we are taking the Hebrew as our guide, why not exclude the whole New Testament, too? But, as we have seen, the so-called Apocrypha were accepted by the early Christians themselves and by that 50% of today’s Christians who are Catholic, and the 12% who are Orthodox, and others besides. How can one claim to be impartially discussing early Christian writings when one cavalierly excludes texts which were circulated as scripture by early Christians and their contemporary descendants alike? I can see nothing in this but Protestant prejudice: the assumption that real Christianity is Protestant. Ehrman is not studying early Christianity, but Protestantism.
At page 8, Ehrman dogmatically states as a fact that the books of the New Testament were written “to different communities …” We have recently seen that the evidence for this theory could be described as “quite weak.” But that is being generous to the modern critics. We know that many of the epistles were anciently known as the catholic epistles, that is, the letters written to all churches. For example, in stark contradiction to Ehrman’s assertion, the Epistle of St Jude is addressed to: “those who are called, beloved in God the Father and kept safe for Jesus Christ.” So too, the second epistle of St Peter sends its blessings to “those who have received a faith of equal value to ours through the righteousness of our God and saviour Jesus Christ …” In short, the epistles Jude and 2 Peter are explicitly addressed to all the faithful and not to one community.
Then, consider the Epistle of St James. It opens: “James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes in the dispersion, greetings.” At the least, this was addressed to all Jewish Christians; but it leaves open the question of whether it might not be intended for all Christians, including Gentiles, since they could now be considered part of the true Israel. The first epistle of St Peter is addressed to “the chosen sojourners of the dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia.” This surely includes Gentiles, for 1 Peter 1:18 must refer to Gentiles, the “you” whose ancestors worshipped idols of silver and gold. To call these “communities” is to deprive the word of meaning. Ehrman’s naked declaration that each book of the New Testament was written “to different communities …” is patently a dramatic overstatement, and ignores the very real possibility that, in the form they were included in the New Testament, they had been redacted to be pertinent to all. For those who wish to research the evidence that St Paul intended his epistles, at least as he had them published, for all Christians, see David Trobisch’s Paul’s Letter Collection. Again, I am not asserting that Trobisch is necessarily correct, although I think that in many respects he has a powerful thesis, but I am more modestly proposing that a reader of Ehrman’s dogmatic assertions would never guess that there was space for reasoned dissent.
Further, I maintain that even St Paul, who addressed all but one of his letters to specific churches, told the Colossians to read the letter to the Laodiceans, and vice versa, indicating that it is perfectly possible to write to someone a message which one knows and intends to be pertinent to a much larger group. A letter can be written to one party, e.g. the Laodiceans with a message which is known and intended to be for a larger audience, and even with an eye for posterity. That is, Paul’s letters are not counted among the “Catholic Epistles” because they were addressed to particular churches, but other than the personal greetings and comments, their contents were patently relevant to all churches, and may have been written with that awareness, and edited to be more applicable.
Note that the second epistle of St Peter, which, as we saw was addressed to all Christians, teaches: “just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.” (ESV)
It is not just assumed, but explicitly stated, that St Peter wrote his letters to you, in Greek humin. Since 2 Peter is addressed to all the faithful, it follows that he not only believes all the faithful have access to the letters, but that they were in fact written to them. So if we are indeed studying early Christian literature, then we need to study what they understood by “early Christian literature,” and this evidence, together with the fact that the Gospels, Acts, epistles, and the Apocalypse were all placed in one volume, is very good reason to think that the early Christians did not understand the New Testament documents as anything but the heirloom of all Christians.
On the same page, Ehrman asserts that the titles to the Gospels we know today “were not found in the original texts of these books. Instead, their authors chose to remain anonymous.” This is a rather striking comment, for the simple reason that neither Ehrman nor any other person alive today has “the original texts of these books.” If he does have the originals, he should publish them forthwith. The oldest texts, according to my research, are papyri numbers 52, 90 and 104, which contain only portions of the Gospels of Ss John and Matthew. They are dated to the second century. They are only fragments, and none include the opening or the closing, so Ehrman cannot rightly assert that the names of the evangelists did not appear on the originals.
Now, to be fair, some scholars do claim to be able to deduce that the titles to the Gospels were added only after they had been written. In a future instalment, we shall examine their hypotheses more closely, but let us be clear: without direct evidence, academics can only build theories. Once more, my point is that Ehrman gives the false impression that his opinion is an established fact of history.
To take another example, on p.8, he states that not all the epistles are, “strictly speaking, items of personal correspondence. The book of Hebrews, for example, appears to be an early Christian sermon.” (8) Yet, in each of the earliest four surviving New Testament manuscripts, Alexandrinus and the others mentioned above, Hebrews is given a title, “To the Hebrews” and is placed with the letters of St Paul, between 2 Thessalonians and 1 Timothy; indicating that the early Church treated it as an epistle of that saint. Its final words are “Brothers, I ask you to bear with this message of encouragement, for I have written to you rather briefly. I must let you know that our brother Timothy has been set free. If he comes soon, I shall see you together with him. Greetings to all your leaders and to all the holy ones. Those from Italy send you greetings. Grace be with all of you.” (13:22-25, NAB). That is the close of a letter.
So, in the light of this ending, and given that the early Christians saw it as a letter of St Paul, why does Ehrman call it an early Christian sermon? If it lacks the traditional opening of letters, it may just as well be that the opening was edited for wider dissemination to give it a very strong, very powerful opening:
Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs. (Hebrews 1:1-4)
This would appear to be what has happened with the Epistles of St Jude and First John. I have no evidence that this was so, but given that the ending is so patently appropriate for a letter, this solution is at least open, and means that the declarations of Ehrman and the informal Bible studies establishment are at best theories offered with rather little evidence, and as often as not, overlooking whatever is contrary.
As a final note, note how Ehrman says it was not a letter but a sermon. I have mentioned this fallacy before, the “fallacy of the arbitrarily excluded alternative.” Terms like “letter” and “sermon” are modern terms for specific genres, and while in the ancient world, there were words for genres, the writers of the not beholden to the rhetorical principles of the Hellenistic world. If they wanted to write something which had some of the features more literate Greeks and Romans would call a letter, and some of the features of a sermon, then they would. But I very much doubt they stopped and thought about it. Once more, something in Ehrman’s mind is unhesitatingly taken as a fact and projected back into the world of the apostles.