May 2012 - Page 2 of 2 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Did Jesus Exist as Part One

Writing Did Jesus Exist was an interesting task. For one thing, before writing the book, like most New Testament scholars, I knew almost nothing about the mythicist movement. I think mythicists themselves find this very frustrating, that their work is not taken seriously – in fact is not really even known – by precisely the scholars they would most like to convince. But that’s just the way it is. Many scholars have heard of G. A. Wells, who for years has propounded a mythicist view (of sorts: he actually thinks there was a man Jesus, but he is essentially unrelated to the Christ of Christian tradition). And Robert Price has a PhD in the field and wrote a bona fide scholarly book The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man. But scholars who know about the mythicists – e.g. by reading the second edition of Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus, where he effectively disposes of the mythicists of his day – whether for good reason or not, simply do not take them seriously. And many scholars [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:43:57-04:00May 5th, 2012|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Mythicism|

The Work of a Professional Scholar 4: Undergraduate Courses

The principal work of a professor, of course, is to teach! Different colleges and universities have different requirements and expectations for their faculty. At many small colleges, professors teach four or even five courses a semester. Rarely can a person teach that much and still produce substantial (or much of any!) research, so that professors in those contexts are usually handicapped when it comes to publishing scholarship in the form of books and articles. Research universities, on the other hand, expect their professors to be at the cutting edge of scholarship, and so the teaching requirements are lighter (since the research demands are so much heavier). Faculty in research schools can never get tenure or promotion (or raises!) if they do not regularly and extensively publish in their fields of expertise. (That is becoming increasingly true in all colleges and universities, even ones with heavier teaching requirements, which scarcely seems fair, and is probably not good for scholarship or teaching). The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a “Research 1” university, which [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:44:05-04:00May 5th, 2012|Bart's Critics, Teaching Christianity|

The Work of a Professional Scholar 3: Undergraduate Theses

In addition to my regular teaching, I often get asked to direct Independent studies – where an undergraduate student will pursue a research project of his or her own choosing, something that normally is not taught in a regular class that we offer – and senior honors theses. I rarely am able to do an Independent Study, I’m sorry to say, as I have so many other demands on my time. But some of my colleagues are able to do several a year. I do occasionally direct honors theses, though, especially when a student looks especially promising as someone who may be able to go on and do graduate work in the field. The honors thesis is done by a graduating senior who has a certain (rather high) GPA who wants to have some experience doing original research on any topic of his or her choosing. I direct ones, of course, that have to do with the New Testament or the history of Christianity during the first three centuries. The thesis takes two semesters to [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:45:00-04:00May 3rd, 2012|Bart's Critics, Teaching Christianity|

The Work of a Professional Scholar 2: Supervising PhD Dissertations

In describing what professional scholars in the academy do – at least those who teach in the Humanities, the one area I know something about – the first thing that comes to my mind is probably not what would come to yours. It comes to mind because I have just now been traveling across country (I’m now in an airline lounge in Chicago) and in the plane I have been reading a (very fine) doctoral dissertation, whose author will be “defending” (that is, being subject to interrogation by the five faculty members on her committee) tomorrow. It’s a very good dissertation, I think. Like all dissertations it is book-length (will be turned into a published monograph, I should think), highly technical in places, very learned, the result of something like three years of full time labor. This particular student is not one that I am directing (each student has one faculty member directly responsible for supervision of the dissertation); I am just one of the other committee members. One of the things I like best [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:45:08-04:00May 3rd, 2012|Bart's Critics, Teaching Christianity|

The Work of the Professional Scholar 1: Introduction

In some of the back and forth that I have been involved with over the past few weeks there have been questions raised about whether “experts” in a field have any privileged standing when it comes to making judgments about the acceptability or force of evidence that is adduced for one position or another. I am not going to go into that question here, but a related topic did occur to me as I was thinking about it: My hunch is that there are a lot of people outside the academy who do not know what it is professional scholars actually do. That’s not surprising. I, frankly, don’t really know (or understand) what a hedge fund manager does, or a state lieutenant governor, or an industrial chemist. And so, with that in mind, I thought maybe I should describe what it is that someone like me – a senior professor at a major research university – what a person like me actually does with his time (one quick answer: NOT watch a lot [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-14T23:35:27-05:00May 3rd, 2012|Bart's Critics, Public Forum|

A Recent Interview

Here, for anyone interested, is a link to a recent interview I did (2012). It is relatively short (Q&A via email), but it covers a range of topics, with some really terrific questions, I thought. http://www.theporpoisedivinglife.com/porpoise-diving-life.asp?pageID=657 Post Update 10/2014: The original post resided on now an expired blog "The Porpoise Diving Life: Reality for the Rest of Us or Picking Up Where Purpose-Driven Peters Out" moderated by Bill Dahl, who interviewed me after the printed release of "DID JESUS EXIST?". The following interview was fully restored from the Internet Archive Way Back Machine by my blog support. ______________________________________________________________________________ First, allow me to express our sincere thanks to Dr. Bart D. Ehrman of UNC - Chapel Hill for agreeing to this interview. Thanks also to Julie Burton, Publicity Director at HarperOne in San Francisco. His most recent book is "Did Jesus Exist?" (HarperOne 2012). First, my review of the book: This, I believe, is one of the MOST IMPORTANT books the vast majority of purported Christians will never read. Why? Because most have a self-confessed understanding of Jesus wrapped up in a tidy [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-14T23:36:25-05:00May 2nd, 2012|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Public Forum|

The Irony of our Earliest Manuscripts

It’s a little hard to get one’s mind around the irony of our early manuscripts, as I was alluding to in my earlier post. To reconstruct the “original” text of the New Testament – by which, for my purposes here, I mean the text that the author himself produced and put into the public sphere by “publishing” (or sending) it – we would love to have lots of early manuscripts to look at. Unfortunately, we don’t have lots of early manuscripts. 94% of our manuscripts are 800 years after the fact. We have only a handful of manuscripts, at best, that can plausibly be dated to the second century. These are all *highly* fragmentary (the oldest is just a scrap with a few verses on it). And even these are decades after the authors were all dead and buried. The problem is that every time a manuscript gets copied, mistakes – either intentional or accidental – are introduced. And then when that manuscript serves as an exemplar for the next scribe, its mistakes are [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:45:17-04:00May 2nd, 2012|Bart's Debates, New Testament Manuscripts|

For the “Original” Text: What Kinds of Manuscripts Would We Need?

As I pointed out in my previous post, in my debates with Dan Wallace I have stressed that we simply don’t have the kinds of manuscripts we need in order to know with certainty (let alone complete certainty!) what the authors of the New Testament originally wrote. Dan will typically argue that we have so many more manuscripts of the New Testament than for any other ancient author, that of course we can know the originals. My reply is that what we have – even though we have 5560 or so Greek manuscripts – is not enough. Out of some frustration, Dan or a member of the audience during the question –answer period sometimes asks, “Look! What exactly do you want?!? ” It’s a fair question. What do I want? Of course, what I really want are the originals. But it seems unlikely that I’ll ever be getting them. They disappeared long ago, probably within a couple of centuries of their being written, at the latest (the great textual scholar of the early third [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:45:26-04:00May 1st, 2012|Bart's Debates, New Testament Manuscripts|

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