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

The Women and the Empty Tomb

QUESTION: So, on Ludemann's account, how do the stories of the women at the tomb found in the canonical gospels come to be told? As many scholars I've read have pointed out, having women, who were considered untrustworthy witnesses, as the first to see the risen Christ, was not exactly a way to get people to believe the stories. So why would the gospel writers tell the stories with the women in such a prominent place? RESPONSE: I’m not sure how Lüdemann would answer your question (I.e., I don’t recall off hand how he deals with it). But I thought that maybe I should give it a shot. I am not responding here with a long-held position that I have carefully thought through and worked out. I’m really just “thinking out loud” (well, thinking silently, at my keyboard, in any event). I have indeed heard this argument for many years. In fact, I used to make it myself. The argument is that since women were not considered reliable witnesses (since their testimony was not acceptable [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-30T11:52:25-04:00October 8th, 2012|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions, Women in Early Christianity|

Christians Charged as Perverts and Criminals

I have some more posts dealing with resurrection matters; but I thought maybe I should give it a break for a day or two, since the resurrection isn't the most interesting thing for absolutely everyone. So here's something else for today: At one point in my bible introduction I talk about the persecution of the early Christians (specifically as mentioned in 1 Thessalonians) and point out that deep into the second century Christians had a very bad reputation. Here, without much comment, I indicate some of the charges sometimes leveled against them. It’s a pretty amazing text, taken from the apology of Minucius Felix, called Octavius. There is no solid evidence to suggest that specific allegations of wrongdoing were being made against the church in Thessalonica at the time of Paul’s writing, but we do know that other secret societies were widely viewed with suspicion and that certain standard kinds of slander were leveled against them. The logic of these slanders is plain: if people meet together in secret or under the cloak of darkness, [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:20:10-04:00October 7th, 2012|Book Discussions, Paul and His Letters, Proto-Orthodox Writers|

Paul’s View of Resurrection

QUESTIONS: So if, as you say, Paul believed in a 'physical resurrection of the body ( = of the corpse, right?) of Jesus' then why did he never refer to an empty tomb or to the discovery of such an empty tomb by the apostles in his letters although that would have fitted well at occasions? Also, and I know we have discussed these matters briefly here before, why did Paul describe the 'risen Christ' as a light etc in his visions? And not as a humanoid? And if that 'transformed' body was so different from the normal, natural body humans have then why assume the corpse was actually needed in the first place to get 'resurrected' in this new one (and if a corpse is needed then what about corpses that have been totally decomposed?)? Why is it Paul's aim to get away from the physical body that he himself is currently living in (as he mentions in some of his letters)? Why does Paul then contrast the 'natural' body to the 'spiritual' body? [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:20:17-04:00October 6th, 2012|Afterlife, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Gerd Lüdemann on the Resurrection of Jesus

Gerd Ludemann the Resurrection of Jesus. One of the first books that I have re-read in thinking about how it is the man Jesus came to be thought of as God is Gerd Lüdemann’s, The Resurrection of Christ: A Historical Inquiry (2004). Lüdemann is an important and interesting scholar. He was a professor of New Testament at Göttingen in Germany, and for a number of years split his time between there and Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville. He is a major figure in scholarship and is noteworthy for not being a Christian. He does not believe Jesus was literally, physically, raised from the dead, and he thinks that apart from belief in Jesus’ physical resurrection, it is not possible for a person to be Christian. This book is written for people with a lot of background in New Testament studies. It is exegetically based, meaning that he goes into a detailed examination of key passages to uncover their literary meaning, but he is ultimately interested in historical questions of what really happened. To follow his [...]

BDEhrman2022-06-07T13:46:16-04:00October 5th, 2012|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Paul and His Letters|

The Resurrection as a Key to Early Understandings of Jesus

A key part of my book on "How Jesus Became God" will involve a discussion of Jesus’ resurrection. One can make the case, rather easily, that apart from the Christian belief that God raised Jesus from the dead not only would no one ever have thought of him as God (since, as I will be arguing, no one thought of him as God while he was living – he himself almost certainly did not!) but that Christianity itself would not exist apart from the belief in the resurrection. One can’t argue that Christianity started with the life and teachings of Jesus, per se, since what he taught (I’m speaking about the historical man Jesus, not the Jesus who is portrayed in the Gospels – especially the Gospel of John) is not what Christians teach. That sounds weird, but it’s true. In a nut shell, Jesus taught that the end of the age was imminent, that God was soon to send from heaven the son of man in judgment to destroy the forces of evil and [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:20:33-04:00October 3rd, 2012|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

The Next Project: How Jesus Became God

Now that I have finished my Bible Introduction (a dozen or so scholar-teachers are reading it now to tell me what they think; so I have a month to move on to do other things), I am starting in on the next big project, my long-ago promised book "How Jesus Became God". People have known about this book for years, and keep asking me when I’m going to write the thing. The answer is: Now! So the deal is this. I was two weeks away from starting to write the book back in 2005. I had done all the research for it and was literally ready to begin. I had a contract with Oxford University Press, I had the book completely outlined, I was ready to roll. As fate would have it, I had to make a trip up to New York City in order to … I don’t know what I was doing. Probably just going up for pleasure. Sarah and I try to get to NYC at least once a semester, and for [...]

BDEhrman2020-06-04T16:19:40-04:00October 2nd, 2012|Book Discussions|

More on the Criterion of Independent Attestation

QUESTION: Re. multiple attestation: would you elaborate on how these sources are truly independent. I've read comments by mythicists and others that state that all the sources actually go back to one source and that any differences in the gospel accounts can be accounted for by the theological views or the 'agenda' of the particular author, e.g. Matt 5:17 or Mark 3:21 (and, of course, accounted for by simple miscommunications thru' generations). Also, please forgive me for asking a stupid question....are there any accounts found in the gospels that pass all three criteria but which you don’t think actually happened? RESPONSE: Yes, once you dig deeper into the question of “independent attestation,” the trickier it gets. Technically, the term refers to sources that have not used one another for their accounts. And so, for example, whoever wrote Mark did not have access to Q, and Q did not have access to Mark; M did not have access to John’s Signs Source, and vice versa; Paul did not know Matthew and vice versa; etc. The matter [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:20:47-04:00October 1st, 2012|Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship, Mythicism, Reader’s Questions|

Blog Preferences

To: Members of the CIA. And potential members of the CIA. And anyone else who wants to be involved. From: The Director of the CIA Re: Overt operations OK, so here’s the deal. A couple of weeks ago I published a post indicating how we were doing now just over five months into this blog. A number of you commented about the number of posts that I’m doing, many of you (not all) indicating that it seemed like a lot, and some (not all) suggesting that fewer might be better. That got me thinking. I wonder if some people are turned off by the blog because there is simply too much information on it, and it’s a drag feeling like one has to plow through it all. That, obviously, would be counterproductive for what I want to achieve (which is maximum subscribers, to raise as much money for charity as I can). And so it occurred to me: maybe I should simply ask you, the readers, what you would prefer. So this is a kind [...]

BDEhrman2012-10-01T03:31:17-04:00October 1st, 2012|Public Forum|

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