INTRODUCTION
Professor Biography ............................................................................i
Course Scope .....................................................................................1
LECTURE GUIDES
LECTURE 1
Reading Other People’s Scriptures ....................................................4
LECTURE 2
Hinduism and the Vedas...................................................................11
LECTURE 3
What Is Heard—Upanishads ............................................................19
LECTURE 4
What Is Remembered—Epics ..........................................................26
LECTURE 5
Laws of Manu and Bhagavad Gita ...................................................33
LECTURE 6
Related Traditions—Sikh Scriptures .................................................40
LECTURE 7
Judaism—People of the Book ..........................................................47
LECTURE 8
Five Books of Torah ..........................................................................54
LECTURE 9
Prophets and Writings ......................................................................61
LECTURE 10
Apocrypha and Dead Sea Scrolls.....................................................68
ii
LECTURE 11
Oral Torah—Mishnah and Talmud ....................................................75
LECTURE 12
Related Traditions—Zoroastrian Scriptures 82
LECTURE 13
The Three Baskets of Buddhism 89
LECTURE 14
Vinaya and Jataka 96
LECTURE 15
Theravada Sutras 103
LECTURE 16
Mahayana Sutras ...........................................................................111
LECTURE 17
Pure Land Buddhism and Zen ........................................................118
LECTURE 18
Tibetan Vajrayana ...........................................................................126
LECTURE 19
Related Traditions—Jain Scriptures ...............................................134
LECTURE 20
Five Confucian Classics .................................................................141
LECTURE 21
Four Books of Neo-Confucianism...................................................149
LECTURE 22
Daoism and the Daodejing .............................................................156
LECTURE 23
The Three Caverns of Daoist Scriptures ........................................163
LECTURE 24
Related Traditions—Shinto and Tenrikyo .......................................170
LECTURE 25
Christian Testaments Old and New ................................................177
LECTURE 26
Gospels and Acts............................................................................184
LECTURE 27
Letters and Apocalypse ..................................................................191
LECTURE 28
Apocryphal Gospels .......................................................................198
LECTURE 29
Related Traditions—Mormon Scriptures.........................................206
LECTURE 30
Islam and Scriptural Recitation .......................................................213
LECTURE 31
Holy Qur’an ....................................................................................220
LECTURE 32
Hadith and Sufism ..........................................................................228
LECTURE 33
Related Traditions—Baha’i Scriptures ............................................235
LECTURE 34
Abandoned Scriptures—Egyptian and Mayan................................243
LECTURE 35
Secular Scripture—U.S. Constitution .............................................250
LECTURE 36
Heavenly Books, Earthly Connections ...........................................257
iv
SUPPLEmENTaL maTERIaL
Recommended Texts and Translations ..........................................264
Bibliography ....................................................................................268
Christian Testaments Old and New
Lecture 25
D
espite the fact that all Christians view the Bible as authoritative, there is a tremendous variety of doctrine and practice among different denominations in Christianity. In the next few lectures, we’ll look at the origins and different voices within the Christian portion of the Bible, the New Testament. Today, the Christian Bible is nearly everywhere; it is the most published book in history, with more translations into more languages than any other text, sacred or otherwise. Yet the Bible’s path from the ancient world to contemporary bookshelves and pulpits has been rather complicated.
There’s a fascinating story behind the book that is familiar to so many.
Hebrew Scriptures in Greek
• Christianity began in 1st-century Palestine as a Jewish reform movement. Jesus and his earliest followers were Jews who spoke Aramaic and could read the Hebrew scriptures. Jesus was apparently a charismatic teacher and miracle worker, but he didn’t write anything himself, and no firsthand accounts of him have survived in Aramaic or Hebrew. The only records we have are in Greek; thus, everything we know about Jesus has been edited and translated at least once.
• According to Christian sources from the late 1st century (especially Acts 2–3, 8), in Greek, Jesus’s followers saw him as the fulfillment of Hebrew prophecies. They claimed that his life had been foretold in some of the Psalms, that he was the future prophet that Moses had spoken of in Deuteronomy 18, and that Isaiah’s description of God’s suffering servant in Isaiah 53 was about Jesus. There were some creative reinterpretations in these readings.
o For instance, although there had been a long tradition in Judaism of a coming Messiah, the term messiah (“anointed one”) is always used in the Tanakh to refer to a human figure.
o The notion that the Messiah would be a spiritual rather than a political leader and that he would suffer for the sins of others was a Christian reinterpretation.
• The larger point here is that the first Christians did not have any sacred texts of their own; they accepted the Jewish scriptures as authoritative. But Christianity’s rise to prominence didn’t begin until it was taken out of its original Jewish context and put into the larger Greco-Roman world by missionaries. Gentile Christians and even Jewish converts outside of Palestine
adopted the Septuagint—the The first generations of
Christians did not have their
Greek translation of the Hebrew own sacred text, and the one Bible—as their first scripture. that eventually came together o But translations can be is removed from the historical tricky. For example, the Jesus who stands at the center
of the faith.
Septuagint translated the Hebrew word almah
(“young woman”) in Isaiah 7:14 as parthenos, or “virgin”; thus, the verse reads, “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.”
o Early Christians, reading the Greek version, seized upon this as a prophecy of Jesus’s virgin birth, even though the Hebrew doesn’t exactly say that.
The First Christian Writings
• The first Christian writings were not the Gospels but the letters of Paul, the earliest of which, 1 Thessalonians, was written about 49–51 C.E., about 20 years after the death of Jesus. Paul began as an opponent of Christianity, but after a visionary experience, he joined the Christian movement and became one of its most successful missionaries.
• Paul went on three missionary journeys though Palestine, Turkey, and Greece, preaching the Christian gospel, establishing local congregations, then moving on. Every so often, Paul wrote letters, in Greek, back to the Christian communities he had founded or, in the case of Romans, to a Christian community he hoped to visit.
• In these letters, Paul clarifies doctrine, answers questions, calls people to repentance, and inspires new Christians to greater faith and commitment. He gives no indication that he thought his compositions should stand side-by-side with Hebrew scriptures. His letters were to specific people in response to specific needs. When we read them today, we’re overhearing written conversations from long ago, which are sometimes difficult to interpret.
• Somewhat strikingly, Paul doesn’t have much to say about the life of Jesus; he mainly talks about his death and resurrection. Perhaps this is because Paul didn’t know the Jesus who existed before the Crucifixion, or perhaps Paul was adapting the Christian message to fit his audience.
o Yet Paul also drew heavily on Hebrew concepts. In one of the rare instances where Paul reports Jesus’s words, he says that at the Last Supper, Jesus blessed the bread and wine and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood” (1 Cor. 11:25); in a later letter, he refers to himself as a “minister of a new covenant” (2 Cor. 3:6). These seem to be allusions to the new covenant promised by the prophet Jeremiah many centuries earlier (Jer. 31:31–33).
o Later Christians would speak of their scriptures as a “new covenant,” a phrase that was translated into English as “New Testament,” but in Paul’s lifetime, we still don’t have a Christian Bible.
The Gospels and Other Books
• Just before 70 C.E., when the Romans destroyed the Jewish temple, an anonymous Christian wrote a biographical sketch of Jesus’s life. This would later be called the Gospel of Mark.
o Within the next couple of decades, two more Christians produced revised, expanded versions of Mark’s gospel, apparently drawing on a short collection of Jesus’s sayings now called Q (Matthew and Luke).
o In about 90 C.E.—some 60 years after Jesus’s death—yet another gospel was written, based on a different set of sources that seem to have been connected with the apostle John.
• Over the next century, Christians continued writing new documents, including letters, sermons, histories, apocalyptic discourses, and more gospels. These all circulated separately and were accepted as authoritative by some local congregations and not others.
• By the end of the 2nd century, most Christians accepted the four standard gospels and some set of Paul’s letters, but other books were disputed, including Hebrews, Revelation, 2–3 John, Jude, and 2 Peter, along with writings that never made it into the New Testament: the Didache, Shepherd of Hermas, Epistle of Barnabas, Apocalypse of Peter, and 1 Clement.
• These writings were sometimes read in church services, along with selections from the Septuagint, and were consulted when doctrinal questions arose. To promote a unity of belief and practice, it eventually became necessary to sort out which writings were to be considered reliable and authoritative.
o In the 2nd century, a bishop named Marcion (d. c. 160) proposed a radical suggestion. In reading the Septuagint, Marcion came to the conclusion that the Jewish god of the Old Testament was an angry, vengeful deity who was entirely separate from, and inferior to, the God preached by Jesus.
o He argued that the Christians should declare themselves a new religion, drop the Jewish scriptures altogether, and adopt a small canon consisting of just 11 books: a shortened version of the Gospel of Luke and 10 letters of Paul. His ideas didn’t go far; Marcion was excommunicated and the church reaffirmed its belief in the Septuagint as sacred scripture.
• But if Marcion’s Bible would have been too small, others worried that the list of sacred texts might grow too large and encompass all sorts of contradictory writings. It appears that Christian leaders came to evaluate texts on three criteria: Did they claim to be written by apostles or their associates? Were they accepted by numerous communities of Christians? Did they teach doctrine in harmony with the four gospels and the major letters of Paul?
• In the 4th century, we begin to get lists of commonly accepted texts, and finally, in an Easter letter of 367, Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, provides the first list that exactly matches the 27 books of the New Testament today. These consist of the four gospels; the book of Acts; 21 letters, mostly written by Paul; and the book of Revelation.
• Athanasius’s letter didn’t entirely settle the matter. The earliest surviving manuscript copies of the complete Christian Bible are from the late 4th and early 5th centuries, and they still include some noncanonical writings, but for the most part, there came to be a sharp division between the sacred texts on Athanasius’s list—that is, the New Testament—and other early Christian writings that might be considered useful and inspiring but not scripture.
Later Developments and Translations
• In the early 16th century, the issue of the Christian canon was reopened by Martin Luther. Luther had published a German translation of the New Testament in 1522, but when his translation of the complete Bible appeared in 1534, he placed the books of the Apocrypha in a separate section between the Old and New Testaments.
o Luther also had grave doubts about the doctrinal reliability of Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation. He kept them in the New Testament but moved them all to the end to signal his wariness about them.
o The Catholic Church responded in 1546 with a decree from the Council of Trent reaffirming its position that the Deuterocanonical books (the Apocrypha) are of equal authority with the rest of the Bible.
• Luther’s German Bible was enormously influential, in part because of the invention of the printing press about a century earlier. For the first time, ordinary Christians could acquire personal copies of the Bible and study them on their own. Indeed, one of the rallying cries of the Reformation was sola scriptura (“by scripture alone”), the idea being that the final authority in Christianity ought to be the Bible rather than tradition or church authorities.
• This sort of independent-minded attitude toward scripture worried many in the Catholic hierarchy. After Luther’s German Bible, the floodgates of vernacular translations opened, culminating in 1611 with the King James Bible.
• When Reformers decided to base their faith on the Bible, it became crucially important to have the most accurate version possible. This meant going back to the original Greek, but unlike the Jewish Tanakh, for which there was a standard text produced by the Masoretic scribes, there was no standard Greek New Testament. Instead, there were dozens of hand-copied manuscripts, no two of which were exactly the same.
• The turn back to Greek sources occurred just about the time that the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire fell to Muslim invaders in 1453. Eastern Orthodox scholars fled to Europe with their precious Greek manuscripts, multiplying the number of manuscripts available. The discovery of additional manuscripts has continued; today, there are more than 5,700, most of which are mere fragments.
• By the late 19th century, it had become obvious that the celebrated King James Bible was not as accurate as it could be. A Revised Version of the King James appeared in 1885, followed by the Revised Standard Version in 1952. Entirely new translations, based on modern scholarly reconstructions of the Greek New Testament soon followed. Today, the standard academic Bible is the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV).
Suggested Reading
American Bible Society, “The State of the Bible, 2013.”
Armstrong, The Bible: A Biography.
Coogan, ed. The New Oxford Annotated Bible.
Harris, The New Testament: A Student’s Introduction.
Johnson, The New Testament: A Very Short Introduction.
Peters, The Voice, the Word, the Books.
Questions to Consider
1. In what ways does the Christian Old Testament differ from the Jewish Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible?
2. Why did it take more than 300 years for the Christian New Testament to be canonized in its current form?
Gospels and acts
Lecture 26
these four accounts say.
Matthew and Mark
Judaism, actually fulfilled the Law of Moses.
and he preaches of the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven.
tight biography from them because it’s not exactly clear what happened when.
o In fact, the four gospels are not really like modern biographies because they don’t try to recount Jesus’s life in detail from beginning to end. Rather, they offer a few characteristic acts or sayings of Jesus to give readers a sense of the man.
o Yet on closer inspection, the narratives are not exactly in random order. The stories of Jesus’s preaching, as opposed to his actions, are grouped into five sections, the first of which is the Sermon on the Mount.
o Many scholars have suggested that this is not coincidental. Matthew may have organized Jesus’s major sayings into five discourses that are reminiscent of the five books of Moses. In other words, the basic structure of the book of Matthew presents Jesus as the new lawgiver.
o The gospel ends with an account of the Last Supper, Jesus’s arrest, Crucifixion, burial, and resurrection.
• With the opening of the Gospel of Mark, it’s clear that something new is happening. Mark, using political and theological terms of the time, proclaims: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God” (New International Version: “The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the son of God”).
o Even though Jesus’s identity is made clear to readers from the beginning, those who are around Jesus during his lifetime don’t seem to realize who he is, in part because he tells those who figure out that he is the Messiah not to tell anyone.
o Mark uses many of the same stories and sayings that are in Matthew, but he constructs a portrait of Jesus as a suffering Messiah, which is not exactly what people of the time expected.
• The Gospel of Mark seems truncated compared to Matthew. It begins with Jesus’s baptism instead of his birth, and it ends rather abruptly. There is an account of the Last Supper, followed by Jesus’s arrest, Crucifixion, and burial. It then tells the story of Mary Magdalene; Mary, the mother of James; and Salome finding the tomb empty three days later.
o A man in white appeared, telling the women that Jesus had been resurrected and instructing them to tell Peter and the other disciples. The earliest and most reliable manuscripts end with this: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (NRSV).
o This is an unsatisfying ending. A longer ending of 10 additional verses was added to the text later, but scholars are unsure whether there was an original conclusion that was somehow lost earlier or whether Mark had intended to leave his readers wondering about what had happened to Jesus.
o There’s a good chance that the short ending was deliberate. Like Matthew, the Gospel of Mark is not a biography of Jesus; it’s an invitation to readers to believe. The question is: Now that you know about Jesus’s identity as the Messiah, are you going to be like his disciples who abandoned him to the Roman authorities and the women who fled in terror, or are you going to join Mark in proclaiming the good news?
Luke and John
• The Gospel of Luke is much smoother and more refined than Matthew and Mark. The author says that he has put together his account from earlier sources. He addresses someone named Theophilus (“lover of God”) and never specifically identifies himself as Luke. In fact, none of the earliest manuscripts of any of the four gospels indicates who wrote them; the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were attached to the gospels in the 2nd century.
• Luke starts with the birth of John the Baptist, followed by the angel’s annunciation to Mary that she would be a virgin mother. We learn of Jesus’s birth, and then there is one story from his late childhood before the gospel moves on to his ministry when he turned 30, beginning with his baptism by John.
o Again, we get stories of healings, exorcisms, parables, moral teachings, and debates with religious authorities—many of which we have already seen in Matthew and Mark, though in a different order and with subtle variations.
o Luke gives more attention to women, prayer, the Holy Spirit, and some of the disreputable elements of society, such as tax collectors, the poor, and Samaritans. Like the other gospels,
Luke concludes with the Passion narrative of Jesus’s death and resurrection.
• The first three gospels are often called the Synoptic Gospels, from a Greek word meaning “seen together.” The Gospel of John, however, is different. Rather than short, independent episodes, it features lengthy discourses in which Jesus, far from trying to hide his identity, openly proclaims his divine status.
• There are only a few stories in John, apart from the Passion John is often considered the most spiritual or mystical of the four New Testament gospels.
narrative, that appear in the other gospels. John has
no exorcisms, no parables, and no proclamations of the coming Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus’s ministry in John’s gospel spans several years, with multiple trips to Jerusalem, and the Last Supper is not the Passover meal.
• The Gospel of John is organized into two parts: Chapters 1–12 make up the “book of signs,” that is, miracles demonstrating that Jesus is the Messiah or even God himself in human form, and chapters 13–20 are the “book of glory,” in which Jesus fulfills his divine destiny through his death and resurrection. John ends with an epilogue containing stories about Peter and the risen Lord.
Source Criticism and Redaction Criticism
• Since the 2nd century, Christians have wanted to weave these four accounts together into a single harmonious record of Jesus’s words and deeds. Unfortunately, there are just too many differences and contradictions.
• The last two centuries have seen the rise of the historicalcritical method in biblical studies. Scholars try to read the text as carefully as possible, then come to their own reasoned conclusions, without relying on tradition or theology. The goal in such an approach is to make observations and provide explanations that people from different religious perspectives, or even no religion, could agree on.
• One of the major puzzles in New Testament source criticism is the relationship among the three Synoptic Gospels. The wording is often so similar that it is obvious that some of the gospel writers were copying from each other, yet there are significant differences among the three gospels, as well.
o Based on detailed analysis, the most widely accepted solution to the so-called “Synoptic problem” is the two-source hypothesis. Most scholars believe that Mark was written first; then, Matthew and Luke independently produced revised versions of Mark, omitting some details and stories and adding others.
o The second source is a hypothetical collection of Jesus’s sayings called Q (from German quelle, or “source”). This would explain why the material that Matthew and Luke have in common that is not in Mark nearly always consists of sayings rather than stories.
• After a consensus was reached about sources, scholars began to analyze exactly what changes Matthew and Luke had made to the Gospel of Mark and to speculate on the theological motivations behind those editorial choices. This approach to the New Testament is called redaction criticism.
The Book of Acts
• After the four gospels, the next book in the New Testament is Acts. It’s basically an account of the early Christian community after Jesus’s resurrection and tells of missionary efforts and the founding of the church. But it’s not exactly an independent work. It’s addressed to Theophilus, and it appears to be a sequel to Luke’s gospel, written by the same originally anonymous Christian writer.
• Acts begins with the resurrected Jesus being taken up to heaven, followed by the descent of the Holy Spirit upon his disciples at the Jewish festival of Pentecost. Then follows stories of miraculous healings, proclamations of the Christian gospel, and persecutions, mostly focused on the apostle Peter.
• Peter has a revelation directing him to take Christianity to both Jews and non-Jews; then, the second half of Acts focuses on Paul, who does just that. Finally, Paul is arrested in Jerusalem, and when he appeals the charges, he is sent to Rome for trial. The book ends with Paul in the capital city of the empire, under house arrest but preaching the gospel freely.
• One of the major themes in the book of Acts is relations between Christians and Jews. A crucial question is whether Christianity is a sect of Judaism or whether it’s more of a new, independent religion. Acts 15 speaks of a gathering of apostles and elders who debated the issue of whether Gentile converts could worship Jesus without first becoming Jews.
• The rest of Acts follows Paul in his missionary endeavors, and indeed, Paul was the most successful of the early Christian missionaries. In the next lecture, we will look more closely at Paul and the Gentile mission, as well as the remaining writings in the New Testament.
Suggested Reading
American Bible Society, Synopsis of the Four Gospels, Revised Standard Version.
Attridge, ed., Harper Collins Study Bible.
Barton, ed., Cambridge Companion to the Gospels.
Collins, Introduction to the New Testament.
Ehrman, The New Testament.
Puskas and Crump, An Introduction to the Gospels and Acts.
Throckmorton, Jr., Gospel Parallels.
Questions to Consider
1. What does it mean for Christianity that the New Testament has four equally authoritative yet different accounts of the life of Jesus?
2. What are the Synoptic Gospels, and why are they called that?
3. What interpretive tools have scholars developed to make sense of the origins and meaning of variations among the gospels?
Letters and apocalypse
Lecture 27
S
o far, we’ve talked about five books in the New Testament—the four gospels and Acts. Of the next 22 books, 21 are letters, most of which are ascribed to Paul, and the final book is Revelation, an apocalyptic treatise. Letters were apparently a key mode of communication, instruction, and doctrine in the early church. In this lecture, we’ll begin with a detailed analysis of one particular letter, 1 Thessalonians, which was written by Paul to a Christian community he had founded, probably around 50 C.E. If we knew nothing else about Christianity, what could we discern from this letter? We will then close the lecture with a brief survey of the other books in the New Testament.
1 Thessalonians
• In his letter to the Thessalonians, Paul expresses warm feelings for the members of this community, yet he has been a bit worried about them. The letter is his relieved response to a good report he has received about them. In various verses, he says that he is like a brother, a father, and even a mother to the community. He seems to be pulling out all the stops in his efforts to keep them on his side.
• It seems that the
Thessalonians converted in response to some
phenomenon that they interpreted as the Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians was probably written around 50 C.E., making it our earliest extant Christian document.
Holy Spirit. The letter tells us that they are not converted Jews but former pagans or idol worshippers. This is interesting because Acts, written several decades later, tells us that Paul attended the synagogue in Thessalonica and attempted to persuade the Jews that Jesus was the promised Messiah.
• In several verses, Paul mentions that the Thessalonians faced persecution, though once again, Paul’s text doesn’t quite match up with Acts. From the narrative there, we might expect animosity from the local Jewish community, but Paul tells us that the opponents of the new Christians in Thessalonica are other Gentiles.
• The new Christians in Thessalonica seem to have assumed that if they converted, they would escape death. But some of those who had embraced Paul’s new religion had since passed on, and it seemed as if they would not have a share in Christ’s new kingdom after all. In his letter, Paul assures the Thessalonians that Christians who have died will enjoy equal blessings with believers who are still alive. When Christ comes again, deceased Christians will rise from their graves.
o Paul explains that the righteous will be taken up from the earth and, thus, will avoid the destruction that God will pour out on the wicked.
o This is the origin of the belief of some contemporary Christians in the rapture. But note that Paul assumes that Jesus’s Second Coming will occur within the lifetime of himself and many of his original readers.
• Paul also mentions several doctrinal points: God had raised Jesus from the dead; the Holy Spirit will aid believers; prayer matters; Satan is trying to hinder the work; and Jesus will rescue believers from the “coming wrath” and will return again soon, after which Christians will be with the Lord forever.
• Note that there is nothing in the letter about atonement or forgiveness of sins, events from Jesus’s life, moral instructions from the Sermon on the Mount, baptism, or the Eucharist. Paul never quotes from the Jewish scriptures, and he doesn’t discuss the metaphysical nature of Christ. Instead, 1 Thessalonians seems to be
a document of an apocalyptic sect that was expecting the end times to arrive at any moment.
Other Pauline Letters
• Like 1 Thessalonians, the other letters of the New Testament offer evidence of early Christian beliefs and practices, but none was composed as a comprehensive introduction to the religion. And they are not always consistent in their viewpoints.
• After the book of Acts, there are nine Pauline letters addressed to various Christian communities, arranged by length, from longest to shortest. Then follow four letters from Paul to individuals, again in order of descending length.
• Romans lays out Paul’s most extensive theological arguments. All humans are sinners, he says, and are subject to God’s judgment, but they can be justified, or proclaimed righteous, through their faith in Christ. This process of reconciliation with God is available to both Jews and non-Jews, apart from the Law of Moses.
o Paul then warns Gentile converts not to think themselves superior to the Jews; God will still be faithful to his promises to Israel.
o Paul quotes liberally from the Jewish scriptures and provides careful, sophisticated arguments. For many, Romans represents the pinnacle of Christian theology.
• Paul’s response to questions he had received on practical matters from the community at Corinth is found in 1 Corinthians. Paul stresses the need for unity, explains his authority as an apostle, and gives specific advice. He condemns those who use the gifts of the Spirit as occasions to look down on others, and he reaffirms the significance of the doctrine of resurrection in Christian theology.
• The book of 2 Corinthians has several jarring shifts of tone and topic; in fact, many scholars believe that it was originally two or more separate letters that were fused together. Paul goes from what
is essentially a travelogue to a defense of his ministry and a plea for reconciliation, to an appeal for donations to a fund for poor Christians in Jerusalem, to a denunciation of other missionaries.
• Galatians is Paul’s angriest, most polemical letter. Apparently, the Christians at Galatia had been visited by other missionaries who told them that Gentile converts had to be circumcised, contrary to what Paul had preached and the decision of the Jerusalem Council.
• Philippians is a letter written by Paul from prison to strengthen the faith of Christians at Philippi, and Philemon is a short note written on behalf of a runaway slave, addressed to his Christian master.
• The seven letters discussed thus far are all regarded as authentic and were composed from 50 to 60 C.E., but scholars are divided about whether Colossians and 2 Thessalonians were written by Paul or a later disciple or admirer. There is broad consensus that Ephesians, 1–2 Timothy, and Titus are from a later period, perhaps 80–110 C.E., and were attributed to Paul to increase their credibility.
• Hebrews is a sermon in the guise of a letter that explains Jesus’s relationship to the Israelite priesthood, proclaiming Christ as the high priest who offered himself as the final sacrifice for sin. Hebrews relies heavily on allusions to Jewish scripture and ritual, and it explores the idea that faith provides insight into heavenly realities. It doesn’t sound much like Paul, and even early church fathers doubted that it had been written by him.
General Epistles and Revelation
• The remainder of the New Testament consists of short letters attributed to James, Peter, John, and Jude and the book of Revelation. These letters are often referred to as “general epistles” because they seem to have been written to Christians in general rather than to specific congregations or individuals.
o They take up such themes as proper Christian conduct, the dangers of false teachers, the seeming delay of Jesus’s Second Coming, and the centrality of love in Christian thought and action.
o The questions of when and by whom these documents were written are matters of debate, and indeed, there were disputes in the 2nd through 4th centuries about whether they should be included in the Christian canon, but most scholars today date them from the late 1st century to the beginning of the 2nd.
• Revelation is a work of apocalyptic literature, of which there were many examples, both Jewish and Christian, in the late Second Temple period and early centuries of the Common Era. Typically, these texts present a dualistic worldview, with sharp demarcations between the wicked majority and an oppressed minority of the righteous, who are looking for God to bring his wrathful judgment down upon their opponents.
• True to form, the book of Revelation presents itself as a series of visions and prophecies about the end times, when God will intervene directly to destroy the wicked and establish a new heaven and a new earth. There is a great deal of cryptic, sometimes violent imagery, with blood, trumpets, war, natural disasters, angels, and so on.
• The New Testament concludes with an urgent affirmation that this world is coming to an end. One might argue that a great deal of the New Testament was written as a response to what might seem to have been a failure on Jesus’s part. The three Synoptic Gospels portray Jesus as the Messiah, an anointed leader or liberator, who proclaimed that God’s kingdom was close at hand, yet his death left the work unfinished. Jesus must be coming back at some point to usher in the new kingdom he had promised.
o Paul and the Christians in Thessalonica expected his return momentarily, but when it looked as if the Second Coming might take some time, a more formal church organization developed.
o Some scholars have seen the Gospel of John as spiritualizing the concept of God’s kingdom, at least to some extent, and 2 Peter, probably the last book written in the New Testament, suggests that human timetables aren’t applicable to the Lord and that the delay is actually a manifestation of God’s mercy; he’s giving people more time to repent.
Conclusions about the New Testament
• The New Testament is an eclectic collection that Christians over the centuries have found inspiring, comforting, and motivating. In fact, perhaps part of what is means to be Christian is to continually read, interpret, apply, and argue over these texts.
• Some believers find the scholarly historical-critical method of scripture study somewhat threatening. When we look for contradictions and inconsistencies or judge sacred texts by the standards of science, archaeology, and literary scholarship, don’t we diminish their authority? These are ultimately theological questions, but we can point to three observations that might be helpful in this regard.
o Fundamentalism, like the historical-critical method, is a relatively new phenomenon. Ideas of biblical infallibility, inerrancy, and literalism themselves have a history and can be debated without overthrowing the whole religion.
o The focal point of Christianity is a person, not a book, and although the New Testament is one of our primary means of understanding that person, there are others.
o Finally, although it appears that there is a great deal of the human element in the sacred texts of Christianity, the New Testament never claimed to be an eternal text that had its origins in heaven. How could something human-made have ultimate significance? The religion itself offers a helpful analogy: Just as Jesus was considered in mainstream Christianity to have been both fully human and fully divine, so too, the New Testament
is regarded by believers as the product of both human effort and divine inspiration.
Suggested Reading
Brettler, Enns, and Harrington, The Bible and the Believer.
Dunn, ed., The Cambridge Companion to St. Paul.
Gager, Reinventing Paul.
Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard, Jr., Introduction to Biblical Interpretation.
Pagels, Revelations.
Sprong, Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World.
Wright, Paul in Fresh Perspective.
Questions to Consider
1. Why have letters played such a crucial role in Christian doctrines and history?
2. How much of Christian teaching has been shaped by Paul, and what other strands are there in traditions and texts from the early church?
apocryphal Gospels
Lecture 28
E
arly Christians adopted the Jewish practice of reading selections from the Old Testament on the Sabbath, and those readings were eventually supplemented with excerpts from the Gospels and other New Testament writings, especially the letters of Paul. But in the centuries before there was an official, widely accepted New Testament, this presented a problem. There are many writings from the early centuries of Christianity that at least some believers thought of as scriptural but that were ultimately rejected by majority opinion. As we’ll see in this lecture, some of these are quite different from those texts that eventually made their way into the New Testament.
The Gospel of Peter
• In 1886–1887, a French archaeological team was excavating some graves dating from the 8th to the 12th centuries in Akhmim in Upper Egypt. One grave, apparently of a Christian monk, contained a small parchment codex with excerpts from four noncanonical Christian writings, including the Gospel of Peter. The manuscript itself is probably from the 7th or 8th century, but the version of the gospel it contains appears to be one that was known in the 2nd century.
• We don’t have the entire gospel, but what we have narrates Jesus’s death and resurrection in much the same terms as the four canonical gospels, with some subtle variations and extra details.
o Although it tends to put more blame on the Jews than on the Romans, it indicates that ordinary Jews began almost immediately to regret Jesus’s execution (new information), and when their leaders heard this, they asked the Romans to post guards at the tomb. We even get the name of the officer in charge of the mission, Petronius.
One of the new details that might have worried earlier Christians was this: “He held his peace, as if he felt no pain.” Did Jesus only seem to suffer?
• Perhaps most significantly, we get an account of the resurrection itself. The solders on guard saw two men—perhaps angels— descend from heaven. The stone sealing the tomb rolled away on its own, and the two went inside. Shortly thereafter, three men emerged, with the third being helped along by the others and followed by a cross. The three figures became enormous. A heavenly voice asked, “Have you preached to those who sleep?” (the dead), and the cross answered, “Yes.”
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas
• For a long time, Christians and historians alike believed that the church was established shortly after Jesus’s resurrection, and a series of heretical movements followed that challenged both orthodoxy and the authority of church leaders. Key points of contention in the 2nd century included the relationship of Christianity and Judaism, the role of ecstatic prophecy, and whether Jesus had given secret higher teachings to his closest disciples.
• The early church fathers described some of these ideas as deviations from orthodoxy; indeed, most of what we knew about these movements came from the writings of their opponents.
o Starting in the latter half of the 19th century, however, archeologists began uncovering some of the texts written by those who had been branded as heretics, and it seems there was considerable confusion in the early centuries of the Common Era about the tenets of the faith.
o Rather than a simple story of orthodoxy and heresy, it now appears that there were many different strains of early Christianity, all with their own traditions and sacred texts and all vying for position.
What we think of as “orthodoxy” today was simply the winner in these theological disputes, and those ideas became truly dominant only with the church councils of the 4th century.
• Alongside the four gospels that were eventually accepted into the New Testament, there were competing accounts of Jesus’s life, such as the Gospel of Peter, that we now categorize as apocryphal (“hidden”) gospels. These texts often told very different stories, sometimes based on quite different notions of how Jesus could be both human and divine. One of the most famous of these apocryphal writings is the Infancy Gospel of Thomas.
• This gospel originated in the 2nd century and was once a popular work. It begins with a story of the five-year-old Jesus creating 12 sparrows out of mud, then commanding them to leave. Not long afterward, Jesus was walking though the village and another child ran into him. The young Jesus angrily said, “You will go no further on your way.” Because everything Jesus said came true, the other child fell down dead. The gospel contains several stories of miraculous healings or times when Jesus was smarter than his teachers or when he changed the order of nature to help out his parents.
• The Infancy Gospel of Thomas ends with the tale of Jesus being lost in Jerusalem when he was 12 and ending up in the temple (also found in Luke), but the familiar conclusion to the narrative—that “Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and grace”—feels somewhat different in the Infancy Gospel. There, Jesus is not presented as perfect from the beginning; we have seen him learn to control his supernatural powers and turn them to good ends.
The Gospel of Mary
• Some of the apocryphal gospels are today known only in a few fragments. For instance, we have only about nine manuscript pages from the Gospel of Mary, a 2nd-century text, written in Coptic, that was discovered in 1896 but not published until 1955.
The first six pages are missing, and then we get some of Jesus’s final teachings to his disciples before he ascended to heaven.
o As the disciples are mourning his departure, Mary (presumably Mary Magdalene) joins them, and Peter says, “We know that Jesus loved you more than the other women. Tell us the words of the Savior that you remember, which you know and we do not, since we did not hear them.” Mary replies, “What is hidden from you I will tell you.” She starts to report what the Lord had told her in a vision; then, four pages are missing.
o When the manuscript resumes, it seems that Mary is telling the disciples about how the soul ascends past seven powers or authorities: darkness, desire, ignorance, envy of death, the kingdom of the flesh, foolish wisdom of the flesh, and wrathful wisdom. One of those listening, Andrew, challenges Mary, saying he doesn’t believe these are the words of the savior, but a paragraph or so later, the disciples accept Mary’s words, and they begin to preach them widely.
• The Gospel of Mary wasn’t accepted into the Christian canon, but it is an example of Gnostic Christianity, a form of the faith that competed with proto-orthodoxy in the early centuries.
o Some of the general beliefs of the Gnostics included the notion that matter and spirit were opposed to each other, that this material world of evil had been created by a lesser god or demiurge, and that some people have within them a spark of the divine, imprisoned in a corruptible physical body.
o Gnostics also believed that Jesus was a pure spiritual being who was sent by the highest God to teach them the special knowledge (gnosis) and ascetic practices that would lead to liberation from material existence.
• We began to understand Gnosticism much better after 1945, when a fieldworker near the Upper Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi found
a large clay jar sealed with bitumen. Inside were 13 codices bound in leather and written in the Coptic language.
o The 13 codices contained 52 separate works, mostly Gnostic texts. Although the physical books were dated to the 4th century, the writings they contained had been originally composed in Greek much earlier, then translated into Coptic.
o Among the Nag Hammadi texts were four that might be considered apocryphal gospels, including what is probably the most important example of the genre—the Gospel of Thomas.
The Gospel of Thomas and the Didache
• When the Gospel of Thomas appeared in one of the Nag Hammadi codices, scholars recognized it from three Greek fragments that had been discovered in 1896 and 1903 in Egypt.
o In 1896, a decade after the Gospel of Peter was found, two Oxford archaeologists discovered a series of garbage dumps associated with the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus, about 100 miles south of Cairo.
o Because Oxyrhynchus had been an administrative center, the trash included thousands of Greek and Latin papyri, discarded over the course of a nearly a millennium. Among the finds were some biblical fragments from both the Old and New Testaments and a few early noncanonical Christian writings, including some apocryphal gospels.
o In the first year of excavation, a bit of papyrus was found containing seven sayings of Jesus; two similar fragments were discovered in 1903. The full significance of these fragments was not realized until the discovery of a complete Coptic translation of the Gospel of Thomas in the Nag Hammadi library 42 years later.
• Remarkably, the Gospel of Thomas does not include any stories about Jesus. Instead, there are 114 independent quotations, in seemingly random order, said to have been recorded by Thomas
Selections from the Gospel of Thomas
These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down.
(1) And he said, “Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death.” (Lambdin, trans.)
(2) Jesus said: “Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All.” (Lambdin, trans.)
(3) Jesus said: “If those who lead you say to you, ‘See, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves you will dwell in poverty, and it is you who are that poverty.” (Lambdin, trans.)
(19) Jesus said: “Blessed is that which existed before coming into being. If you exist as my disciples and listen to my sayings, these stones will minister unto you. Indeed, you have five trees in paradise, which do not move in summer or winter, and whose leaves do not fall. Whoever is acquainted with them will not taste death.” (Layton, trans.)
(75) Jesus said: “There are many standing at the door, but it is the solitaries who will enter the bridal chamber.” (Layton, trans.)
(77) Jesus said: “It is I who am the light upon them all. It is I who am the all. It is from me that the all has come, and to me that the all has extended. Split a piece of wood: I am there. Lift up a stone and you will find me there.” (Ehrman, trans.)
(98): Jesus said: “What the kingdom of the father resembles is a man who wanted to assassinate a member of court. At home, he drew the dagger and stabbed it into the wall in order to know whether his hand would be firm. Next, he murdered the member of court.” (Layton, trans.)
(114) “Simon Peter said to them, “Mary should leave us, for females are not worthy of the life.” Jesus said, “Look, I am going to guide her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Ehrman, trans.)
Didymus, Jesus’s twin brother. The existence of a text containing nothing but quotations demonstrated the possibility that the hypothetical document called Q (the source for Matthew and Luke) might also exist, even though the Gospel of Thomas did not itself turn out to be Q.
• About half the sayings in Thomas are similar to those in the three Synoptic Gospels, but the wording is different enough that it doesn’t seem as if the author was drawing from Matthew, Mark, or Luke. The Gospel of Thomas appears to be an independent compilation of oral traditions about Jesus, dating from the late 1st or early 2nd century (about the time of the New Testament gospels), though hardly anyone believes that all these statements originated with Jesus himself.
• The quotations that are not in the New Testament are perhaps even more interesting. They seem to have a Gnostic flavor to them, focusing on secret wisdom and how knowledge of one’s true nature can lead to eternal life. Many of the sayings seem puzzling to us today, but some early Christians regarded the Gospel of Thomas as an authoritative sacred text.
• In 1873, a document known as the Didache (“Teachings”) was discovered in a monastery library in Constantinople. It was compiled about 100 C.E. and was accepted as scripture by many Christians in the 2nd to 4th centuries. This short work includes ethical teachings, guidance for fasting and prayer, and instructions for rituals and the Eucharist. Because the Didache wasn’t attributed to a specific apostle, it didn’t make it onto Athanasius’s list of accepted scriptural texts in 367 C.E. and was gradually lost and forgotten.
Suggested Reading
Ehrman, Lost Christianities.
_______, ed., Lost Scriptures.
Ehrman and Pleše, trans., The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations.
Foster, The Apocryphal Gospels: A Very Short Introduction.
Layton, trans., The Gnostic Scriptures.
Pagles, The Gnostic Gospels. ———, Beyond Belief.
Questions to Consider
1. What are the criteria by which early church fathers decided which writings should be included in the New Testament, and what were some of the texts that didn’t make the cut?
2. How do apocryphal gospels differ from the canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? What makes the Gospel of Thomas special?
Related Traditions—mormon Scriptures
Lecture 29
appeared in print.
Overview of Mormon Scriptures 15 million members worldwide. authoritative are often religious boundary markers. doctrinally creative sect of Christianity.
primarily of revelations given to Joseph Smith; and the Pearl of Great Price, a relatively short work that contains some of Smith’s lesser-known writings, including excerpts from his inspired revision of the Bible, selections from an autobiographical essay, and a translation of Egyptian papyri from mummies that had come into his possession.
• The Doctrine and Covenants, divided into 138 chapter-like sections, is fairly typical of the sacred texts of new religious movements. It contains revelations given to the founder that were edited and revised by Smith and his successors over several decades. The contents are eclectic, including prophecies, commandments, scriptural exegesis, doctrinal exposition, and instructions for church organization, as well as advice and comfort for Mormon emigrants. Appended to the end of the book are two official declarations—one ending the practice of polygamy in 1890 and the other rescinding the priesthood ban for black members in 1978.
• Latter-day Saints assert that they have four “standard works” (their parlance for sacred texts), but actually, they have five. The fifth, rather unusually, is oral rather than written scripture; it is the text of their temple ceremony.
o As you recall, the Hindu Brahmans resisted putting the Vedas into written form for a long time, because they believed that doing so would make the holy words common and accessible to all. It was important that the Vedas be internalized though memorization and that they were passed on directly from those who had already mastered their meanings; they needed to be spoken aloud, in specific ritual contexts, in order to actualize their sacred power.
o This is similar to the way that Mormons feel about the temple ceremony, or endowment. This is a sort of initiation rite that portrays the creation of the world and the fall of Adam and Eve in a scripted drama, along with covenants and blessings directed toward individual believers. The text of the endowment ceremony was, for the most part, composed by Brigham Young
based on an outline and key elements that had been entrusted to him by Joseph Smith.
o Most Latter-day Saints encounter the words of the ceremony only orally, as it is performed. Although many Latter-day Saints have the script memorized, the words are considered so sacred that Mormons are forbidden from repeating them outside the temple or even discussing the details of the endowment.
The Book of Mormon
• The primary sacred text of Mormonism is the Book of Mormon. This scripture claims to be a translation of an ancient
mormon chapels feature Protestant-style Sunday services that are open to all, but admittance to their temples is granted only to adult Latter-day Saints who meet strict standards of worthiness and faithfulness.
record from the Americas, recounting the 1,000-year history of a society transplanted from Judea to the New World.
• The book begins about 600 B.C.E., when a Jewish prophet named Lehi was warned by God to take his family and flee from Jerusalem shortly before the Babylonian Conquest. Lehi and his family wandered in the desert for eight years, then were commanded by God to build a boat and sail to America.
o Lehi and his son Nephi continued to receive divine revelations, including the news that a Messiah, Jesus Christ, would someday be born in Israel and would atone for the sins of the world. Those who accepted this novel doctrine became known as Nephites, while their unbelieving relatives were called Lamanites.
o The Book of Mormon tells of the interactions between these two peoples, along with another group who had also emigrated from Jerusalem with a member of the royal house of David in tow.
o There is a long succession of wars, political intrigues, missionary efforts, sermons, and confrontations with religious dissenters, punctuated by miracles and revelations. We also read lengthy discussions of the destiny of the house of Israel, covenants, prophecy, sin, repentance, and Christian ethics, all within the context of a sweeping historical narrative.
o About halfway through the book, escalating military conflicts lead to a breakdown of the social order. After natural disasters wreak havoc on a wicked society, the few who had remained faithful to the Nephite prophecies are vindicated by the coming of the resurrected Jesus to the Americas.
o Jesus establishes a church, heals the sick, blesses children, teaches a version of the Sermon on the Mount, and prophesies of relations between Jews and Gentiles in the last days.
o After a couple centuries of peace and prosperity, old antagonisms resurface, eventually leading to a war of extermination. The Nephites are destroyed by the Lamanites about 400 C.E., and the Christian traditions of the New World are lost, aside from this single record, which was buried by the last of the Nephites, the prophet Moroni, who would later appear to Joseph Smith as an angel.
• Aside from the first chapters, which take place in the vicinity of Jerusalem and for which there perhaps is some archaeological evidence, there are no artifacts from the New World that decisively support Joseph’s tale of Nephites and Lamanites.
o Early believers regarded the Book of Mormon as the story of the origins of the American Indians, who would have been descended from the Lamanites; however, more recent LDS interpretations see the events of the Book of Mormon as taking place in a much more limited geographical area (perhaps in Central America), with the Lamanites being absorbed into much larger Native American populations that immigrated across the Bering Strait.
o Historicity matters to most Mormons, in part because Smith’s claims of gold plates made by ancient prophets seem to require some actual historical basis, and because a work of inspired fiction or imaginative inspiration would not have the same moral authority or urgency. Yet Mormons are generally not consumed by questions of archaeological support; they assume that such evidence will someday appear.
• Whether regarded as fact or fiction, the Book of Mormon is something of an anomaly in recent world scripture in that it consists of a coherent, integrated narrative.
o The first quarter of the book includes first-person accounts from Nephi and his brother Jacob in the 6th century B.C.E. These pages, then, are revealed to be a document that was appended by Mormon, writing in the 4th century C.E., to a general history of Nephite civilization. The last 60 pages or so consist of additions made by Mormon’s son, Moroni.
o The various incidents, conversations, speeches, and doctrinal expositions that make up the Book of Mormon are all presented as having been composed and edited by Nephite narrators, who are themselves characters in the story. Thus, there are several layers of possible interpretation; we can track the motives and editorial styles of the various narrators and see how they are depicted as interacting with their source materials.
o The stories can be rather complicated, with flashbacks, parallel narratives, embedded documents, and multiple voices, but for those with the patience to read closely, the chronologies, geographical references, and genealogical relationships are quite consistent—which is remarkable for a text that was dictated orally at one time.
Influence of the Book of Mormon
• Early Latter-day Saints tended to preach from the Bible rather than the Book of Mormon, probably because they knew the Bible better and because they thought that biblically based arguments would be more persuasive to their listeners. In the late 20th century, however, the Book of Mormon became a central component of the religion’s education and worship.
• LDS liturgy has been influenced by the Book of Mormon in that the weekly Eucharist prayers are borrowed from that text and in a few hymns celebrating its coming forth, but there are no formal scripture readings in Mormon services analogous to those in other Christian or Jewish denominations, and there are no LDS holidays or churchwide commemorations based on the Book of Mormon.
• Although Mormons read the book for eternal truths and to discern God’s will for them, recent scholars have seen the text as an important document in American religious history and a rich source for understanding Joseph Smith and the religious movement he founded.
o The editor/prophets Mormon and Moroni were explicitly writing for a future audience, and their enumeration of the sins of modern America—pride, social inequality, skepticism, secret societies, rejection of prophecy and spiritual gifts, and religion as a money-making enterprise—offers insights into the religious and political tensions of Joseph Smith’s day.
o As literature, the Book of Mormon represents an interesting example of rhetoric and narrative technique in the early national period. Theologically, it responds to ambiguities and gaps in the Bible, providing an alternative to Protestant interpretations of Paul and renegotiating the boundaries between the Old and New Testaments. Nephite prophets testify to the enduring nature of God’s promises to Israel, vigorously denying any hint of supersessionism.
o Perhaps most importantly, the Book of Mormon challenges the uniqueness of the Bible. One of its main messages is that God has spoken to many peoples around the world at various times in history. In short, Mormonism does to the Christian Bible what Christianity did to the Jewish scriptures; it expands the canon and, in so doing, offers a broader perspective from which to reinterpret the familiar words.
Suggested Reading
Barlow, Mormons and the Bible.
Bowman, The Mormon People.
Bushman, Joseph Smith.
———, Mormonism.
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price.
Davies, An Introduction to Mormonism.
Givens, By the Hand of Mormon.
Gutjahr, The Book of Mormon: A Biography.
Hardy, ed., The Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Edition.
———, Understanding the Book of Mormon.
Skousen, ed., The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text.
Questions to Consider
1. What elements of the Book of Mormon make it a distinct addition to the library of recent world scriptures?
2. Does it make a difference that the Book of Mormon gave rise to a religious community, rather than the much more common pattern of a religious movement developing canonical scriptures over time?
