|
2004 Season
 Bart Ehrman is the Bowman-Gray Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He came to UNC in 1988, after four years of teaching at Rutgers University. He completed his M.Div. and Ph.D. degrees at Princeton Seminary, where his 1985 doctoral dissertation was awarded magna cum laude. Since then he has published extensively in the fields of New Testament and Early Christianity, having written or edited eight books, numerous articles, and dozens of book reviews. Among his most recent books are a college-level textbook on the New Testament, two anthologies of early Christian writings, and a study of the historical Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet -- all published by Oxford University Press. He is currently at work on a Greek-English Edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press).
Prof. Ehrman has served as President of the Southeast Region of the Society of Biblical literature, chair of the New Testament textual criticism section of the Society, book review editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature, and editor of the monograph series The New Testament in the Greek Fathers (Scholars Press). He currently serves as co-editor of the series New Testament Tools and Studies (E. J. Brill) and on several other editorial boards for monographs in the field.
Winner of numerous university awards and grants, Prof. Ehrman is the recipient of the 1993 UNC Undergraduate Student Teaching Award, the 1994 Phillip and Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement, and the Bowman and Gordon Gray Award for excellence in teaching.
Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (2003)
Lost Scripture: Books That Did Not Make it Into The New Testament (2003)
The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (2003)
Excerpt of Chapter Six from Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
"Christians 'In the Know': The Worlds of Early Christian Gnosticism"
by Bart D. Ehrman
PG. 122 - HERESIES AND ORTHODOXIES
The Tenets of Gnosticism
As we have seen, Gnostic Christians maintained that in the beginning there was only One. This One God was totally spirit, totally perfect, incapable of description, beyond attributes and qualities. This God is not only unknown to humans; he is unknowable. The Gnostic texts do not explain why he is unknowable, except to suggest that he is so “other” that explanations—which require making something unknown known by comparing it to something else—simply cannot work.
Continued...
|
