Historians rely upon a different NT than the one we use. Their NT doesn’t include a single miracle.
Scholars reject some of Paul’s letters because they are too long.
They use different standards than I do.
What the NT describes fits perfectly with the testimonies of hundreds of millions of people for 2 thousand years and from a myriad of age groups, locations, both genders, and from all over the world.
My testimony is practically identical To Ehrman’s. Our testimonies match hundreds of millions of others who have been born from above. Christ rose from the grave and we can call upon him and He will join us in our lives, is what the NT proclaims, IMO.
Klax, I wouldn’t believe a word of any of this, I would reject all of it in a heartbeat, I wouldn’t care an iota, if He had not made Himself real to me.
That’s why I love him. He is not churches and steeples and bells or a book. He is not doctrine. He is not the sum total of our best opinions. He just is. He is knowable like anyone else. I don’t want to preach, but I do want to try to make clear that He is real and alive and He loves you and me so.
Summary of the reasons for thinking Ephesians is not by Paul:[39]
The language and style are different. Ephesians contains 40 new words, e.g. 1:3 “heavenly places”; “family, or fatherhood” (3:15). 1:19 has four different words for “power”; Ephesians and Colossians use a different word for “reconcile” from Paul’s word (Col 1:20, 22; Eph 2:16). And they both use many very long sentences, e.g. 1:3-14; 1:15-23; 3:1-7; 4:11-16; 6:14-20. Also Col 1:9-20.
Ephesians is similar to Colossians at many places. Eph has 155 verses, 73 of which are similar to ones from Col: e.g. Eph 4:1-2 ≈ Col 3:12-13, Eph 5:19-20 ≈ Col 3:16-17, Eph 6:21-22 ≈ Col 4:7-8.
Ephesians takes many key ideas from Colossians. Wisdom, mystery. The word of truth. Gospel of salvation. Saints of God.
The New Oxford Annotated Bible Page 272 NT: There are important contrasts between Ephesians and the letters that we can confidently ascribe to Paul. Many of the words in Ephesians do not appear elsewhere in the apostle’s correspondence, and some important terms have a different meaning here from their meaning in letters that are surely Paul’s. The style, with its loose collection of phrases and clauses and long sentences, is not characteristic of Paul’s writing. Ephesians is, therefore, judged to be a forgery.
Ephesians has never been a favorite of mine so I could care less. But these arguments seem very dubious to me, especially the latter two. Same person writing two different letters to different people is only too likely to say a lot of the same things. And people do change their vocabulary over time using different words to describe things as they think about them more. There are other explanations as well, such as various types of collaboration. I have to wonder if scholars would argue that posts of the same person on the internet must be written by a different person because of a change in style and vocabulary? This is not to discount all of the arguments regarding Paul’s authorship for all of the epistles, since I find the arguments in the case of some of them a little more credible than in this case.
The Pauline authorship of Ephesians, Colossians, and 2 Thessalonians are disputed but the consensus is that they may have been written by Paul. Those to Timothy and Titus are probably not written by Paul. And it is near unanimous that Hebrews was not written by Paul, but then that one doesn’t even claim to be written by Paul.
Ehrman’s analysis of the book of Ephesians shows that the text, filled with long Greek sentences, doesn’t match with Paul’s peculiar Greek writing style, made of short sentences.
Of course, Paul may well have provided the ideas, and a student or scribe wrote down the words. That happens today a lot. Ghost writers actually write a lot of popular author’s books. You don’t really think all those former presidents and First Ladies wrote the books attributed to them, do you?
“Both Tertius and Silvanus were skilled Christian scribes, who assisted the writers of the New Testament. It is unlikely that Paul literally penned any of his letters that were of great length.”
I think to announce to the world that the NT has 400,000 errors in it is deceitful
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
51
You’re being silly. I wish I could literally take what he placed in my heart and place it inside of every person in the world–just for a few minutes. Then you would believe.
“O! So that’s what it’s all about! He is alive! He IS”
True but this doesn’t also justify the positive claim that Paul wrote them or this is what happened.
The competent scholars I read all know authors can change their vocabulary at times, writing style or make use of a secretary (not that this helps if Paul is dictating the letter). The problem as I see it is that Christians are often engaged in defending an a priori belief that if an NT work claims to be written by someone it must be. But this is not how history is done. If you want to defend or deny Pauline authorship of a work, the burden of proof lies on both parties. You have to demonstrate Pauline authorship, demonstrate forgery or end with a judgment of non liquet.
We know that many documents in antiquity were written pseudonymously. In fact, there are also writings falsely attributed to Paul outside the New Testament. The Epistle to the Laodiceans and 3 Corinthians. You also have the correspondence between Paul and Seneca. Then you have 3 Pauline works inside the New Testament (the pastorals) that very strongly look like forgeries written in Paul’s name.
Sometimes those desiring to maintain traditional authorship of the Gospels ask why a Gospel would be attributed to a lesser person like Mark instead of a famous apostle if the connection is fabricated. Certainly a valid question. But the case of Paul is exactly the opposite. If you were going to write an epistle in someone’s name, who better than him? He is a prime candidate. The record shows this. Or even with some other works in the NT, who better than Peter (the evidence for 2 Peter being a forgery is as strong as the pastorals–in fact, its probably the latest NT work written coming from the early second century). Given all the extra-canonical gospels, epistles and works not written by their self-attested namesakes in early Christianity, and that we have several known forgeries in Paul’s name, every single work alleging to have been written by Paul has to be justified.
The arguments is this work doesn’t look like any of the letters all scholars think are Pauline so authenticity is leaned against here. Many scholars are careful to note they do not often have certainty in this field.
We must also consider external attestation. The earliest Pauline manuscript collection is p46 ca 200. We can look at Marcion’s list ca. 140 but to be honest, in this time of forgeries, what is the earliest references and attestation to Ephesians being written by Paul outside the self-ascription in the New Testament? 20 years, 40 years? 80 years?
The critical scholars I read don’t make many of the silly arguments or errors many pious Christians accuse them of. They are coming at the works from a completely different perspective. For the actual historians, any positive claims must be justified.
So some scholars have listed why they think Paul didn’t write Ephesians. Merely coming up with logically possible explanations for their reasons does NOT justify that Paul actually wrote Ephesians.
So I would simply ask everyone, if you want to engage in a historical discussion and think Paul wrote Ephesians, why do you think that? What is the positive evidence for Ephesians being written by Paul?
Scholarship is divided on the issue but many do put forth positive reasons in this case. What are they?
I disagree with the statement that I disagreed with: that scholars reject some of Paul’s letters because they are too long. What you’ve listed here are a bunch of other reasons, including that the sentences of Ephesians, rather than the book itself, are too long.
As for my own opinion of the authorship of Ephesians, I don’t have strong feelings on the matter. I tend to view it as Pauline. I think its style and substance is closer to that of the undisputed Pauline letters than that of the Pastoral epistles, which for me counts both against Pauline authorship of the Pastorals and for his authorship of Ephesians and Colossians. But I am not an expert and don’t pretend to have studied the arguments in any depth.
The criteria used for rejecting possible authors of NT epistles and the letters themselves for being too lengthy is a stretch
I agree wholeheartedly with this statement:
"An example of his intrusive polemical concern is his discussion of what we can and cannot know about Jesus’ resurrection. He points out that historians cannot answer the question of whether God actually raised Jesus from death and exalted him to heavenly glory. Historians can observe that early believers claimed to have seen the risen Jesus and can trace the effects of these claims, but as historians they cannot judge whether these claims are valid or not, for that is a theological or philosophical judgment. Ehrman professes to have no concern for either establishing or refuting these claims; he aims simply to trace their historical effects.
But he wanders from these strictures in a section where he likens early Christian experiences of the risen Jesus to such hallucinatory phenomena as “visions” of deceased loved ones. And such phenomena aren’t true analogies. The grief experiences he cites don’t typically involve a resurrected loved one in glorified form, who is exalted to heavenly glory at God’s right hand. This fact suggests that something other than grief experiences was at work in the “visions” of the risen Jesus. Ehrman’s discussion seems more intended to counter Christian apologists’ references to resurrection appearances than to offer a balanced consideration. His earlier claim about sidestepping the question of the validity of early Christian claims seems coy."
Larry W. Hurtado is professor emeritus of New Testament language, literature, and theology at the University of Edinburgh.
First then, whatever these men may be as Biblical critics, I distrust them as critics. They seem to me to lack literary judgement, to be imperceptive about the very quality of the texts they are reading. It sounds a strange charge to bring against men who have been steeped in those books all their lives. But that might be just the trouble. A man who has spent his youth and manhood in the minute study of New Testament texts and of other people’s studies of them, whose literary experience of those texts lacks any standard of comparison such as can only grow from a wide and deep and genial experience of literature in general, is, I should think, very likely to miss the obvious thing about them. If he tells me that something in a Gospel is legend or romance, I want to know how many legends and romances he has read, how well his palate is trained in detecting them by the flavour; not how many years he has spend on that Gospel. But I had better turn to examples.
In what is already a very old commentary I read that the fourth Gospel is regarded by one school as a ‘spiritual romance’, ‘a poem not a history’… After a man has said that, why need one attend to anything else he says about any book in the world? Note that he regards Pilgrim’s Progress, a story which professes to be a dream and flaunts its allegorical nature by every single proper name it uses, as the closest parallel. Note that the whole epic panoply of Milton goes for nothing…Then turn to John. Read the dialogues: that with the Samaritan woman at the well, or that which follows the healing of the man born blind. Look at its pictures: Jesus (if I may use the word) doodling with his finger in the dust; the unforgettable nv vuz (13:30). I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this. Of this text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage – though it may no doubt contain errors – pretty close up to the facts; nearly as close as Boswell. Or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors, or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative. If it is untrue, it must be narrative of that kind. The reader who doesn’t see this has simply not learned to read. I would recommend him to read Auerbach."
Have you read The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe or Mere Christianity?
1 Like
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
58
Ralphie. It’s easy to make it work if one wants to, because the accounts are excellent, as Lewis said, qualitatively unique. It’s not quite so easy to make it all work, with goodwill, as a shared, avalanching delusion - with hysterical shared hallucinations - based on a remarkable working class humanist who - deludedly - believed He was the Jewish messiah, but it is do-able. It takes a little effort.
I love CS Lewis but he is prone to false dichotomies. Of course you can look at John and find many examples of historical narration. It is a reframing of history from the divine perspective.
Ive never seen historical reportage or an autobiography that has “in the beginning was the word, and the word was God.”
And is he using the PA to discuss John? A story which most scholars will tell you was never part of John’s gospel.
Vinnie
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
60
Yes, liar, lunatic or Lord is one as well. It’s not as catchy if you add a 4th option of “charismatic teacher whose followers thought he rose from the dead and subscribed to increasingly high Christologies over time.”