Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Do you understand the entire New Testament? Announcing my new blog thread by Bart Ehrman Most readers of the blog are interested either passionately, intently, deeply, moderately, or somewhat in, well, the New Testament, but many do not actually know much about it as a whole. You may well be the exception, but hey, all of you are exceptional. My view is that anyone who claims to be a New Testament aficionado should be familiar with the basic contents of each book and know the essential facts about it, both its major themes and emphases, and its basic historical context, when it was written, by whom, and for what reason.
[00:00:44] On the most basic level, that would mean being able to state what any of the 27 books is about in one sentence.
[00:00:51] How many of you can summarize the major themes and emphases of the Gospel of Luke in one sentence? Or, well, second Thessalonians or First Peter or Ephesians. My guess is very few indeed.
[00:01:05] Or how many can explain what we know about the author of any of these books without looking it up? Yeah, exactly.
[00:01:13] But where does one go for information like that in one handy packet? Well, the packets are a bit hard to find, especially when we're talking about information that is critically informed by scholarship as opposed to so much other information out there.
[00:01:27] I have decided to address this problem by developing the by far longest thread in the blog's history, dealing with the entire New Testament, one part and one book at a time.
[00:01:40] The basic plan of the thread is to devote two major posts to each book of the New Testament, going in canonical order from Matthew to Revelation.
[00:01:50] The first post will begin by summarizing what the book's about, its major themes, and its emphases in one sentence. Necessarily, this will be a broad statement, but the idea is to make it informed, accurate, and distinctive, so that the sentence on Mark isn't virtually the same as the one on Luke or the one on Galatians is not just like the one on Romans, let's say.
[00:02:11] The rest of the post will be setting out hopefully in a thousand to twelve hundred words, but we'll see a summary exposition of these themes and emphases to provide a bit of a bigger picture.
[00:02:22] These posts will provide a kind of thematic, literary overview of the book.
[00:02:29] The second post will deal with the historical details about the book. Who, when, and why, that is, what can we say about the author, why it is attributed to one person or another, whether it's John or Paul or Peter, and whether it is likely that that person actually wrote it, and why scholars have come to that judgment when it was probably written, or what appears to be the social or the historical situation that prompted the author to write it in the first place.
[00:02:59] After those initial two posts will come several other posts on the book dealing with various key and or especially interesting aspects that I've either dealt with before in the misty dark past somewhere or other, or straight out of my head for the occasion.
[00:03:14] Then I'll move on to the next New Testament book until I'm done.
[00:03:18] I'm not planning, though, again, we'll see, of doing only this for the foreseeable future. On the blog, I will break up the thread to get to all the things as well. Variety is the spice of blog life, but my idea is to get it all done at some point, and then I will publish the whole thing as a unit, and among other things, I'll present all the one sentence summaries in a single post for easy access.
[00:03:43] I'll begin the thread with a single post on what is the New Testament? A very brief overview of its essential features. The kind of thing that everyone should know in case someone, say your plumber, your pickleball partner, your future spouse should ask, hey, what is the New Testament? With this guidance you'll be able to answer quickly and efficiently and then get on with the kitchen sink, the game, or eternal marital bliss.
[00:04:08] The next post will be on the Gospels as a whole. Then we'll start with Matthew.
[00:04:15] I may adjust the strategy midstream and or do more or less on any one book or section as the Spirit My Spirit leads. But this is the basic plan. I hope you find it useful and enjoyable.
[00:04:28] For those who want more in depth coverage, let me say here at the outset that you may find useful the fuller treatment in my university level textbook the New A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings.
[00:04:40] I first published that book in 1997. At the time the market was flooded with New Testament textbooks and frankly I didn't like any of them. Almost all of them focused on exegesis, the interpretation of the texts, which of course is absolutely crucial for understanding the New Testament. But most of these were heavily focused on the theological meaning and the significance of the texts, even the textbooks written for undergraduates in secular sett writings, or on literary analysis per se, which is also crucial, of course.
[00:05:12] By contrast, I wanted to write a book that was also deeply concerned with historical issues. How these books were situated in the historical context out of which they emerged, both Greco Roman and Christian, what we can know about their dates and authors, why in their context they were emphasizing the points that they were making, whom among other Christians they were arguing with, and what we can know about the historical Jesus and the historical Paul and so on.
[00:05:41] I wrote my book not knowing if anyone, well, any professors would be interested in any of the such things for their undergraduates, but guessing they might be. Oh boy, I was right. The book is now in its 8th edition, which I asked my colleague Hugo Mendez to rewrite and to edit with me. It came out this past year, so it's about as up to date as you can get, or at least as up to date as we could make it. Among other things, it includes bibliographies at the end of every chapter for further reading on each book of the New Testament and all the issues addressed. If you want to buy a used copy of an earlier edition, you can find them cheap.
[00:06:15] My posts, of course, will not require any background reading in this or any other book, or any knowledge at all. But I do intend them to be useful not only to raw beginners, because we all were raw beginners at some point, but intermediate experts and even the cognoscentia mongers. As always, I'm open to feedback and to suggestions.
