Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Some readers questions and some responses by Bart Ehrman I continue to get excellent questions from readers of the blog.
[00:00:10] I can't devote a post to all of them. I do answer all the ones I get in the comments section, but I do like to address a few of them publicly for everyone to see every week or so. Here's a current outstanding batch read 2 Thessalonians if it was written a few years after first Thessalonians, couldn't Paul have changed his mind on how imminent the end times were? And also if he asked Timothy to write to the Thessalonians and use First Thessalonians as a template so they know it was from Paul and Paul would sign it in the end, wouldn't that explain things just as well as a later forger?
[00:00:46] Barthes replies Yep, anything's possible.
[00:00:49] Some people, for example, continue to think that Paul also wrote 3rd Corinthians and the letter to the Laodiceans, but that's almost certainly not the case. It's always a judgment call though.
[00:01:01] But in the case of Second Thessalonians, it appears even to those who hold authenticity that it was written soon after First Thessalonians, not years later.
[00:01:11] That makes it less likely that he completely flip his views. I give a fuller discussion of the accounts of the arguments in my book Forgery and Counter Forgery.
[00:01:21] There's also no evidence of people in the ancient world ever assigning letters like this to colleagues or to secretaries and then signing them off.
[00:01:28] The only time that appears to happen, for example Cicero and Tyro, is when it's a very brief form letter. If you do a word search for secretaries on the blog, you'll see some extended posts on the question.
[00:01:43] Question Would you deem John chapter 16, verse 15 as original text? If so, why?
[00:01:50] Note the verse says all that the father has is mine. For this reason I say that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.
[00:01:58] There is a textual variant though, and some manuscripts don't have this verse.
[00:02:03] Barthes Response the verse is missing in our oldest manuscript. P66 are one of our best other ones Codex Sinaiticus.
[00:02:13] These two are closely related genealogically and often show readings that are variant in other manuscripts.
[00:02:20] The question is whether the verse was more likely added or deleted. It's in all the other Greek manuscripts and was corrected by Sinaiticus by a corrector. There doesn't seem to be a lot of reason for a scribe to add it, but there's a good reason for thinking that it was deleted.
[00:02:38] The previous sentence ends with the words and he will declare it to you.
[00:02:44] And so does this sentence of verse 16, and he will declare it to you. In Greek it is kaia nagulemon.
[00:02:53] It is usually thought that a scribe who was copying this mistakenly skipped from the end of the previous sentence, which he just copied, to the end of this one that he had not copied, thinking that he had indeed just copied this line, and he kept writing from that point, not realizing that he had left out a sentence.
[00:03:11] That's supported by the fact that the vocabulary, the writing style and the idea are entirely consistent with the author of John itself. So it looks like the verse was omitted accidentally by an ice skip from the words ending on one line to the same words ending the next line, a phenomenon known as parablepsis. Or I skip occasioned by Homo teluton, which is lines having the same thing, the same ending. And now that's something I didn't learn in Sunday school.
[00:03:40] Question I'm reading through your book Armageddon now, and a question occurs to me regarding the authorship of Revelation.
[00:03:47] What exactly do we know about John the Elder and do you think he was the author of Revelation?
[00:03:54] I've read how you dispel the idea of John Barzebede being the author, but I haven't come across any of your thoughts regarding John the Elder. He yet Barth's Response John the Elder is a rather obscure figure about whom we only hear later, starting with Papius around 130 CE or so, and then in later still writers who were apparently influenced by Papius statements, especially Eusebius.
[00:04:19] It's only Eusebius and not Papias who indicates that John the Elder may have been the author of Revelation.
[00:04:25] Eusebius of course, was writing two centuries after Revelation, and by that time it was widely said to have been written by John, since of course that's what it claims in Revelations chapter one, verse four.
[00:04:38] And usually that was taken to mean John the son of Zebedee, one of Jesus closest disciples, also said by this time to have been the author of the Gospel of John, whose author never identifies himself.
[00:04:51] But there were already compelling arguments that the author of Revelation could not be the author of the fourth Gospel, especially those made by Dionysius of Alexandria in the mid third century and quoted by Eusebius. And so Eusebius salvaged the situation by suggesting that Revelation could have been written by the other John.
[00:05:11] I don't think there's any way he could know one way or the other. There's simply no compelling evidence.
[00:05:16] But it became a theory propounded down till today.
[00:05:20] About all we can say is. Is that revelation was written by someone named John. But who that John was is anybody's guess.
