May 2020 - Page 2 of 2 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

WAS there a Community behind the Gospel and Letters of John? Guest Post by Hugo Mendez

Here we begin a series of posts written by my colleague at UNC, Hugo Mendez. Hugo has had an intriguing and impressive career. He did an MA in Religion at University of Georgia, but then his PhD was in Linguistics, also at Georgia. He went from there onto a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Yale and “retooled” to become a New Testament scholar through some, well, incredibly intense study. He came to UNC as a postdoctoral fellow in 2016 for two years, after which we were fortunate to hire him as an assistant professor on tenure track. Hugo’s skills are remarkably wide-ranging. He knows far more ancient languages than I do (on his CV he lists: Indo-European: Ancient Greek, Latin, Classical Armenian, Gothic, Old Church Slavic, Sanskrit (Classical, Vedic). Aramaic (Biblical Aramaic, Classical Syriac), Classical Hebrew, and Akkadian. Really. OK then. If you’re interested in checking out his C.V. (hey, is this guy qualified? J ), it is here: https://religion.unc.edu/files/2020/05/CV_2020_Mendez_abbr.pdf Hugo has just started his publishing career, and is doing so with a bang. One of [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-05T13:04:17-04:00May 5th, 2020|Canonical Gospels, Catholic Epistles, History of Biblical Scholarship|

Take A Final Exam on the New Testament!

The semester is over at my university, but since I'm on leave, it hasn't affected me much. But I was thinking about it this morning -- final exams, grading, wrapping up the term -- and I remembered that some years ago on the blog I posted the final exam I gave to my Introduction to the New Testament course, to see how you'd do! I thought it would be fun and interesting to repost it. Check it out. Can you nail it? So, classes are officially over here at UNC, and we are in the Final Exam period. Today I gave my final for the Introduction to the New Testament class. As some of you may recall, back in January 2014 I posted on the blog the pop quiz I give the first day of class for this course. It is here, in case you're interested: https://ehrmanblog.org/new-testament-pop-quiz/ When I give this quiz on the first day, I tell the students that even if they bomb it (which most of them do), it's nothing [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-04T09:09:57-04:00May 4th, 2020|Public Forum, Teaching Christianity|

Life after Death in the Bible and Beyond: Webinar with Oxford Press

On April 20, 2020, I did a webinar for Oxford University Press. I have published three textbooks with Oxford and the textbook division has started hosting these events, principally for college and university professors and their students, but anyone is welcome to sign up and join in. When they asked me if I'd be interested, I thought it sounded like a great idea; and when they asked what I'd like to do it on, I told them the afterlife. Of course! It's what I've been thinking about and doing all my research on for the last four years or so -- not what *really* happens in the afterlife (for that I would need more experience, and I'm not eager to have it at this stage of existence, since, well, it will be my last experience and I won't be able to write about it -- but about where the ideas of the afterlife came from, especially those that have been prevalent for most of the past 2000 years. They entitled the event "Life after Death [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-03T10:02:19-04:00May 3rd, 2020|Book Discussions, Public Forum, Video Media|

The Johannine Letters in Sum

This will be the final post in my thread on the Gospel and Letters of John. Here I will reflect further on what we can about the epistles and the context out of which they emerged. If you want to read more, check out my chapter in The New Testament: A Historical Introduction.... In that chapter I explain how views similar to those found in these Johannine writings eventually contributed to what we now call Gnosticism. (That, of course, is a whole *other* story.) As always, at the end of the chapter in my book, I give suggestions for further reading. ******************************************************** At this stage you may have recognized one of the difficulties of this kind of contextual analysis [i.e. that I explained in the previous chapter] It is very hard for the historian to know for a fact that the Johannine secessionists actually taught that it was unimportant to love one another and to keep God’s commandments. The problem is that the only source we have for the secessionists’ views is the author of [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-01T07:51:58-04:00May 1st, 2020|Catholic Epistles|

Sorting by

WAS there a Community behind the Gospel and Letters of John? Guest Post by Hugo Mendez

Take A Final Exam on the New Testament!

Life after Death in the Bible and Beyond: Webinar with Oxford Press

The Johannine Letters in Sum