Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend by Bart D Ehrman (PDF)

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Bart Ehrman, author of the highly popular books Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code, Lost Christianities, and the New York Times bestseller Misquoting Jesus, here takes readers on another engaging tour of the early Christian church, illuminating the lives of Jesus’ most intriguingfollowers: Simon Peter, the Apostle Paul, and Mary Magdalene. What does the Bible tell us about each of these key followers of Christ? What legends have sprung up about them in the centuries after their deaths? Was Paul bow-legged and bald? Was Peter crucified upside down? Was Mary Magdalene a prostitute? In this lively work, Ehrman separates fact fromfiction, presenting complicated historical issues in a clear and informative way and relating vivid anecdotes culled from the traditions of these three followers. He notes, for instance, that there is no evidence to suggest that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute (this legend can be traced to a sermonpreached by Gregory the Great five centuries after her death), and little reason to think that she was married to Jesus. Similarly, there is no historical evidence for the well-known tale that Peter was crucified upside down.A serious book but vibrantly written and leavened with many colorful stories, Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene will appeal to anyone curious about the early Christian church and the lives of these important figures.”An informed but breezy look at the myths surrounding Jesus’ most influential followers…. This book contains valuable historical scholarship. It also encourages readers to approach the Scriptures with fresh and enlightened eyes.” –Christian Science Monitor

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “An informed but breezy look at the myths surrounding Jesus’ most influential followers…. This book contains valuable historical scholarship. It also encourages readers to approach the Scriptures with fresh and enlightened eyes.”–Christian Science Monitor”With penetrating insight, backed up by first class scholarship and communicated in comprehensible English, Bart Ehrman examines in a new light the interpretive process that gathered around Jesus and his followers both before and after the gospels were written. In so doing he opens new wide vistasinto the origins of Christianity and sets the stage for a dramatic rethinking of the Christian creeds. It is a terrific book for open minds seeking truth in ancient religious formulas, but a frightening book for those who think they already possess infallible or inert truth.” –John Shelby Spong, author of The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible’s Terrible Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love, and Bishop, The Episcopal Church”Bart Ehrman has done it again! He has marvelously succeeded in producing a riveting but historically credible account of three of the most important early followers of Jesus, shedding important new light on the very foundations of early Christianity. Ehrman is a master at telling his story, atseparating fact from fiction, and carefully weighing all the evidence. He has done more than any scholar of our time to share the fascinating results of responsible historical investigations with the wider public.” –James D. Tabor, author of The Jesus Dynasty: A New Historical Investigation ofJesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth ofChristianity”Drawing widely from history, scripture and extra-biblical writings, he studies the many stories of the lives of the first-century ‘Peter, Paul and Mary, ‘ arguing that inclusion of some accounts in the canon should not elevate these texts above the others, some of which were accepted early on by thechurch but later excluded from the canon. As with his other works, Ehrman presents his case clearly and succinctly.”–Publishers Weekly (starred review)”Provides intriguing information on these New Testament personages. One will read accounts, for instance, in which Peter brings a smoked tuna back to life and in which Mary Magdalene travels to France to become an early missionary. Both stories are fictional but, Ehrman emphasizes, help showsomething of the ideas present in the early church period.”–Library Journal”Bart Ehrman offers a startlingly fresh look at three of the prime early followers of Jesus–startling in its emperor’s-new-clothes intelligence and Ehrman’s envigorating dare for his readers to confront him with the fact that he’s often skating merrily on thin ice, but ice all the same. I read himalways with addictive pleasure in his brilliance and his generous-hearted eagerness to tell us all he knows, which is very much indeed.”–Reynolds Price, author of The Good Priest’s Son: A Novel, A Serious Way or Wondering: The Ethics of Jesus Imagined, and Kate Vaiden “An informed but breezy look at the myths surrounding Jesus’ most influential followers…. This book contains valuable historical scholarship. It also encourages readers to approach the Scriptures with fresh and enlightened eyes.”–Christian Science Monitor “With penetrating insight, backed up by first class scholarship and communicated in comprehensible English, Bart Ehrman examines in a new light the interpretive process that gathered around Jesus and his followers both before and after the gospels were written. In so doing he opens new wide vistas into the origins of Christianity and sets the stage for a dramatic rethinking of the Christian creeds. It is a terrific book for open minds seeking truth in ancient religious formulas, but a frightening book for those who think they already possess infallible or inert truth.” –John Shelby Spong, author of The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible’s Terrible Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love, and Bishop, The Episcopal Church “Bart Ehrman has done it again! He has marvelously succeeded in producing a riveting but historically credible account of three of the most important early followers of Jesus, shedding important new light on the very foundations of early Christianity. Ehrman is a master at telling his story, at separating fact from fiction, and carefully weighing all the evidence. He has done more than any scholar of our time to share the fascinating results of responsible historical investigations with the wider public.” –James D. Tabor, author of The Jesus Dynasty: A New Historical Investigation of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth ofChristianity “Drawing widely from history, scripture and extra-biblical writings, he studies the many stories of the lives of the first-century ‘Peter, Paul and Mary, ‘ arguing that inclusion of some accounts in the canon should not elevate these texts above the others, some of which were accepted early on by the church but later excluded from the canon. As with his other works, Ehrman presents his case clearly and succinctly.”–Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Provides intriguing information on these New Testament personages. One will read accounts, for instance, in which Peter brings a smoked tuna back to life and in which Mary Magdalene travels to France to become an early missionary. Both stories are fictional but, Ehrman emphasizes, help show something of the ideas present in the early church period.”–Library Journal “Bart Ehrman offers a startlingly fresh look at three of the prime early followers of Jesus–startling in its emperor’s-new-clothes intelligence and Ehrman’s envigorating dare for his readers to confront him with the fact that he’s often skating merrily on thin ice, but ice all the same. I read him always with addictive pleasure in his brilliance and his generous-hearted eagerness to tell us all he knows, which is very much indeed.”–Reynolds Price, author of The Good Priest’s Son: A Novel, A Serious Way or Wondering: The Ethics of Jesus Imagined, and Kate Vaiden “An informed but breezy look at the myths surrounding Jesus’ most influential followers…. This book contains valuable historical scholarship. It also encourages readers to approach the Scriptures with fresh and enlightened eyes.”–Christian Science Monitor”With penetrating insight, backed up by first class scholarship and communicated in comprehensible English, Bart Ehrman examines in a new light the interpretive process that gathered around Jesus and his followers both before and after the gospels were written. In so doing he opens new wide vistasinto the origins of Christianity and sets the stage for a dramatic rethinking of the Christian creeds. It is a terrific book for open minds seeking truth in ancient religious formulas, but a frightening book for those who think they already possess infallible or inert truth.” –John Shelby Spong, author of The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible’s Terrible Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love, and Bishop, The Episcopal Church”Bart Ehrman has done it again! He has marvelously succeeded in producing a riveting but historically credible account of three of the most important early followers of Jesus, shedding important new light on the very foundations of early Christianity. Ehrman is a master at telling his story, atseparating fact from fiction, and carefully weighing all the evidence. He has done more than any scholar of our time to share the fascinating results of responsible historical investigations with the wider public.” –James D. Tabor, author of The Jesus Dynasty: A New Historical Investigation ofJesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity”Drawing widely from history, scripture andextra-biblical writings, he studies the many stories of the lives of the first-century ‘Peter, Paul and Mary, ‘ arguing that inclusion of some accounts in the canon should not elevate these texts above the others, some of which were accepted early on by thechurch but later excluded from the canon. As with his other works, Ehrman presents his case clearly and succinctly.”–Publishers Weekly (starred review)”Provides intriguing information on these New Testament personages. One will read accounts, for instance, in which Peter brings a smoked tuna back to life and in which Mary Magdalene travels to France to become an early missionary. Both stories are fictional but, Ehrman emphasizes, help showsomething of the ideas present in the early church period.”–Library Journal”Bart Ehrman offers a startlingly fresh look at three of the prime early followers of Jesus–startling in its emperor’s-new-clothes intelligence and Ehrman’s envigorating dare for his readers to confront him with the fact that he’s often skating merrily on thin ice, but ice all the same. I read himalways with addictive pleasure in his brilliance and his generous-hearted eagerness to tell us all he knows, which is very much indeed.”–Reynolds Price, author of The Good Priest’s Son: A Novel, A Serious Way or Wondering: The Ethics of Jesus Imagined, and Kate Vaiden About the Author Bart Ehrman chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. One of the major public experts on early Christianity, Jesus, and the New Testament, he has appeared on NBCs Dateline, A&E, the History Channel, CNN, and a number of nationally syndicated NPRprograms, and has taped several highly popular lecture series for “The Teaching Company.”

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I admit it! I bought this book for the very clever title, which made me smile. I read it for the content, which was a fascinating juxtaposition of the lives—what we know from historical sources, as well as the legends and tales passed down through the centuries—of these three important followers of Jesus.Written by New Testament scholar and religious studies professor Bart D. Ehrman in easy-to-understand language, the book is divided into three parts, one each for Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene. The author balances well a Christian believer’s point of view with the scholar’s unflinching look at historical evidence.PETER• Jesus gave Simon the name Cephas, which translates as Peter, and means “rock.” Find out what Catholics think this means, which is different from the Protestant interpretation.• Find out so much about Peter’s personality you will understand him a lot better than you did before.• Find out the answers to a number of perplexing questions: Is Peter the author of the two New Testament letters bearing his name? Was he really the first bishop—and the first pope—of Rome? Were he and Paul really enemies?PAUL• Did Paul really say that women shouldn’t speak in church? Find out a surprising answer that makes total sense.• There are 13 letters in the New Testament attributed to Paul. Guess what? Some are forgeries. Find out which ones are authentic and which ones were written by someone else claiming to be Paul and why this is important.MARY MAGDALENE• Find out why Mary’s role at the empty tomb is so important to the validity of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Is she really the first apostle?• Were Mary Magdalene and Jesus married? Perhaps with children? Could “The Da Vinci Code” have gotten this right? Find out the historical evidence.While some of the information presented is a bit esoteric (or put another way: a bit of a slog), most of it is a fascinating look at historical evidence and what that means for our much-beloved Gospel stories.

⭐Peter Paul & Mary MagdaleneBart Ehrmann is not just re-chewing old cabbage from previous books here, though he is forced by his subject matter to reexamine old ground from a new point of view. The rationale for his title, which he obviously found just too pawkishly juicy to resist, is the way in which the sixties folk pop trio, like the Biblical one, came on the scene in an apocalyptic time bearing a pop-countercultural message, the latter as expressed in what became the Gospels, the latter-day one in such a song as “If I Had A Hammer.”In the Biblical case, unlike the sixties case, this book’s central question is who were these people? Modern Christians seem to be pretty sure they know, for all that their opinions may vary all over the map. By way of illustrating the real problem, Ehrmann would ask, for example, who was Jesus? For all that modern Christians may think they know that one, the reality is that the four different gospels portray four different Jesuses, with radically different personalities. For modern Christians, of course, who read the Bible “as a little child,” if at all, this is not necessarily a crisis of faith. They just go with the Jesus they like best, most usually the rather Buddhistic “cool guy in sandals” Jesus of Matthew, and let it go at that. Obviously for a serious scholar like Ehrmann, that’s not good enough, for understanding either the real Jesus or other such lesser players as Peter, Paul and Mary.Simon-called-Peter, for a start, is particularly problematical, in that, important as he must have been, we only know him from the accounts of others. By all accounts, he was an illiterate Aramaic-speaking blue-collar fisherman, a strange choice for what Jesus called “The rock upon which I will build my church…” especially since Peter seems, by temperament, anything but a rock. As both the apostle who cut off the ear of one of Jesus’ adversaries and who denied Jesus thrice, Peter always seems rather a volatile, constantly doubting, vacillating hothead, to a degree that occasions Ehrmann to suggest that Jesus may have simply been being sarcastic. The writings attributed to Peter, in highly literate Koine Greek, are obviously not really his, nor do we know for sure what he actually may have gone on to do, all accounts being variously unreliable and contradictory. To the Catholic church, he was the first patriarch of Rome, where he was eventually martyred, though alas there is no verifiable record of Peter’s ever actually having visited Rome, and significant reason to suppose that he wouldn’t have in any case, so who was this masked man anyway? For Ehrmann, though, this is just where it gets interesting. Just as important as who Peter really was is the issue of who people, from then to now, have thought he was, as expressed through legendry and literary forgeries about him down through Christian history, which have had such a profound effect on that history and on church doctrine.This is even truer of Saul-called-Paul, the only player, including Jesus himself, who we can be reasonably sure ever existed as a flesh and blood historical character, and who has left us some actual record in his own words. Again, just as important as who Paul was is who people since then have thought he was, with its corresponding influence, for better or worse, on church history and doctrine. Obviously, not all of that has worked out the way Paul himself might have wanted. Of all the New Testament epistles under his name, for example, almost half are later forgeries written by others, and it is in fact the forgeries that have caused him to be remembered mainly, in history and church doctrine, as a woman-hater and an anti-semite, policies plainly contradicted by a careful reading of the epistles Paul actually wrote, but which have caused huge problems for Christianity ever since.Which is not necessarily to say that Paul was really just a misunderstood goodguy, of course. He was, after all, the Pharisee who ultimately hijacked the newborn church from the original Nazarenes and radically transformed it from a Jewish heresy into a paganized, gnosticised mystery cult, with a central message that pretty much flew in the face of what would appear to have been Jesus’ own central teachings, all on the basis of a brief epiphany on the road to Damascus, which may or may not ever have really happened. Paul, who never met Jesus, was no disciple, after all; he seems, in fact, to know practically nothing about Jesus himself. He has none of the things to say about the life or teachings of the real flesh-and-blood Jesus that a disciple normally would, and shows no interest in any aspect of Jesus apart from his spiritual significance as resurrected savior; not so much the Jewish “Messiah,” or “Redeemer,” as simply the paganized “Christ,” or “Annointed One,” a troubling distinction that today’s Christians manage to melt together just by not thinking too much about it, but which has been problematical for Christianity all the way back to Jesus himself, who sometimes seems to have been of two or more minds about it.One could call Paul, as he called himself, an “apostle,” of course… but an apostle of what? Actually, of his own ideas and doctrines, a huge problem for Christianity all the way down to Martin Luther and on into our own time, and perhaps the biggest cause of Christianity’s central problem of epistemological incoherency, leaving Christendom perpetually stranded at the crossing-points of who Paul was versus who people have thought he was.In getting round to Mary Magdalen, Ehrmann seems to take a lot of pleasure in shifting gears and having some fun. He points out the irony of Mary being, today certainly, the biggest rock star of all the players despite, or perhaps even because of, receiving the least notice in scripture. Since the gospels say so little about her that we can’t be absolutely sure about such issues as whether she was a prostitute or even knew Jesus all that well, it’s intriguing to see her toil on down through Christian history to become not just the intimate and confidante of Jesus, but even his mistress or wife and, ultimately, the mother, by Jesus, of the founder of a line of French kings. Obviously what is at work here is the spontaneous evolution of a compelling corpus of post-biblical modern mythology, with its own informal sub-religion of zealous believers. Ehrmann gets an excuse here to discuss in some depth not only such rather deplorable pop fables as Jesus Christ Superstar, The Last Temptation, The DaVinci Code et al., but traces the genre back through mediaeval legendry, some of it spawned by clergy, to roots in early Gnostic and apochrypal writings such as found in the Nag Hamadi trove, and classical era gender lore. To my mind, it’s an ideal wrap-up for a thoroughly engaging book.

⭐I thought the book was well thought out and covered every angle of these three early leaders of Christianity. The author covers both the traditional aspects of Peter, Paul, and Mary that we see in the Bible but on the non-traditional side as seen through the Gnostic gospels.Highly recommended for those with open minds and a desire to learn about early Christianity.

⭐Highly recommended for those who wish to dig deeper into the persons of Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene

⭐An excellent study of the backgrounds of these three NT characters showing the contradictions within the texts themselves and Mr Ehrman logically shows what textual information can probably be trusted by his methodical analysis throughout the book. Many discrepancies which I knew (at some level were there) but could not unravel as a layman and never would have unless the author had laid it out so comprehensivley. In the same vein the serious student might also want to read James Tabor’s Jesus Dynasty which, although I have not finished reading yet,uses archeology and the bible to convince us of the political uses of these so called Word of God texts!

⭐Mi corre l’obbligo di precisare che per il momento ho letto del libro solo i capitoli dedicati alla figura di Maria Maddalena. Ed è a questa parte del volume che limito la mia recensione. Alla luce della vera e propria paccottiglia bibliografica che circola su Maria Maddalena, opera di scrittori dalle dubbie competenze storiche ed esegetiche, trascinati non di rado dal desiderio di proporre letture sensazionalistiche quando non scandalistiche sulle origini della principale religione monoteistica dell’Occidente, è con non poca soddisfazione che si legge una trattazione finalmente seria e rigorosa sull’argomento, scritta per altro in modo godibile e brillante. L’autore, infatti, oltre ad essere una penna particolarmente felice, è un affermato storico del cristianesimo dei primi secoli, non sospettabile inoltre di inclinazioni apologetiche, essendo di tendenze agnostiche. Egli offre una ricostruzione della figura di Maria Maddalena molto equilibrata, che pur riconoscendo a questo personaggio il ruolo fondamentale di aver dato in un certo senso avvio al cristianesimo in qualità di prima annunciatrice della risurrezione di Gesù, respinge di fatto la sua immagine come sposa o discepola privilegiata di Gesù, quale emerge da taluni testi apocrifi. Egli non cede infatti alla tentazione, oggi molto diffusa, di prediligere, come fonti storiche, i testi apocrifi a quelli neotestamentari; e questo non già sulla base di un criterio di scelta teologico che antepone il canonico all’apocrifo, ma sulla base del diverso valore storico riconoscibile ai due gruppi di testi, essendo i primi più antichi e più vicini dei secondi alla realtà storica della Maddalena e di Gesù, pur non essendo neanche questi esenti da deformazioni di tipo teologico che ne rendono problematico l’uso in sede storica. Ehrman nota giustamente come, collocando sull’asse diacronico le diverse testimonianze antiche, si osservi una crescita progressiva dell’importanza della Maddalena, che trova il suo apice sopratutto nei testi gnostici, che dunque rappresentano probabilmente sviluppi successivi della tradizione. Quella della Maddalena è dunque per Ehrman una figura molto importante delle origini cristiane, in quanto prima “apostola” del Vangelo della risurrezione, ma verosimilmente essa non ebbe quel ruolo che certe interpretazioni antiche e moderne di orientamento gnostico, neognostico o new age le assegnano.

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⭐Present for my niece who is going through a religious crisis

⭐Bart Ehrman est un excellent vulgarisateur de l’histoire des premiers temps du christianisme. Ici il s’intéresse à trois figures centrales du mouvement en voie de devenir le christianisme. Il les étudie sous deux aspects : premièrement historique en tachant de retrouver les éléments les plus probables de leur biographie, pesant ce qui semble historiquement attesté et ce qui tient manifestement de la légende et deuxièmement il rend compte des usages légendaires et théologiques fait de leur rapport à Jésus. Intelligent, simple, abordable mais pas simpliste!

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