Re: Bernard Muller's 'case'
Posted: Sat Nov 01, 2014 11:25 am
Huon, in another thread, flags an interesting older book by Bart Ehrman -
Huon wrote:Bart D. Ehrman wrote a book entitled
In this book, as a whole, Ehrman sets as his goal to determine which passages of the NT are likely to be "the orthodox corruptions of the Scripture",
- THE ORTHODOX CORRUPTION OF SCRIPTURE: the effect of early Christological controversies on the text of the NT
New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
ie. added by the later orthodox editors in order to counter various beliefs that they charged were "later heresies".
And he finds quite a few of these. Many such corruptions are to be found in the NT, or so it seems.
Quite a wide variety of Adoptionist Christians are attested in the early Christian times from various sources. Among them were both the Jewish-Christian groups such as the Ebionites, and the Gentile Christians, such as the followers of the "heretical teacher" Theodotus who was active in Rome at the end of the second century. So the Adoptionists' beliefs were clearly far from uniform.
The belief that Jesus was God already in his lifetime was still questioned even as late as in the fourth century. Indeed, Emperor Julian, writing ca. 361-3 CE, still claimed that:
(_The Apostate_, ix. 326)
At any rate neither Paul nor Matthew nor Luke nor Mark ventured to call Jesus God. But the worthy John, since he perceived that a great number of people in many of the towns of Greece and Italy had already been infected by this disease, and because he heard, I suppose, that even the tombs of Peter and Paul were being worshipped - secretly, it is true, but still he did hear this, - he, I say, was the first to venture to call Jesus God. And after he had spoken briefly about John the Baptist he referred again to the Word which he was proclaiming, and said, "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us."