February 2024 - Page 2 of 2 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Gospel Thrillers Part II by Andrew Jacobs

Gospel Thrillers! Who woulda thought? Many of us knew of books like this, but never realized they were a coherent (sub-)genre, and certainly never thought much about how to understand them. Here now is Andrew Jacobs second post on his new book Gospel Thrillers: Conspiracy, Fiction and the Vulnerable Bible, which you can get at your favorite book-buying spot, including here: Gospel Thrillers: Conspiracy, Fiction, and the Vulnerable Bible: Jacobs, Andrew S.: 9781009384612: Amazon.com: Books ****************************** II. Inside the Gospel Thrillers In my first post I described what Gospel Thrillers are and their role in US culture: they magnify, probe, and contain popular fears and desires about the vulnerability of the Bible by imagining a conspiracy surrounding a newly discovered first-century gospel. In this second post, I describe in more detail some of the “bombshell” secrets these novels invent and the specific fantasies and anxieties about the Bible they illuminate. Desert Fantasies Many of the books imagine new discoveries emerging from the Middle East. Some of these are supposedly part of the [...]

Diane2024-02-02T13:22:43-05:00February 8th, 2024|Book Discussions, Public Forum|

January Gold Q&A Video

https://vimeo.com/910929644?share=copy

Diane2024-02-07T14:14:23-05:00February 7th, 2024|Public Forum|

Gospel Thrillers Part I by Andrew Jacobs

Probably all (nearly all?) of us have read thrillers, and all of us (certainly!) have heard of Gospels. And some of us have read "Gospel Thrillers." But do you know what a Gospel Thriller is? You've probably never heard the term because it was recently coined by scholar of late antiquity Andrew Jacobs, in his intriguing analysis of them (the first analysis ever done), accessible to lay people (hey, we're talkin' thrillers here) just now being published: Gospel Thrillers: Conspiracy, Fiction, and the Vulnerable Bible (Cambridge University Press). Check it out! Gospel Thrillers: Conspiracy, Fiction, and the Vulnerable Bible: Jacobs, Andrew S.: 9781009384612: Amazon.com: Books I've known Andrew since he was a graduate student at Duke many-a-year ago. He is now a Senior Research Fellow at the Center of World Religions at Harvard. He is one of the leading figures in the study of Christianity of Late Antiquity (currently the President of the main professional society, North American Patristics Society). The book is terrific, and so I've asked Andrew to write a few blog posts [...]

Diane2024-02-07T15:28:55-05:00February 7th, 2024|Book Discussions, Public Forum|

How Do Scholars Make the Apocalyptic Jesus Non-Apocalyptic?
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How Do Scholars Make the Apocalyptic Jesus Non-Apocalyptic?

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How Do Scholars Make the Apocalyptic Jesus Non-Apocalyptic?

In my previous posts I’ve given some of the evidence that is generally seen among most New Testament scholars today as a clear indication that Jesus delivered an apocalyptic message: the end of the age was coming soon, God was to intervene in the horrible state of affairs here on earth, destroy (through a figure called the Son of Man) the powers of evil aligned against him, and bring in a good kingdom, a utopian world ruled by his own chosen one. This was to happen very soon. This evidence that Jesus was an apocalypticist is old hat to historians of the New Testament. But how then can some scholars contend that Jesus was not an apocalypticist? There are several strategies that have been used, some of them marvels of ingenuity. Two of these strategies are widely enough known among the reading public that I should say something about them. Both involve ways of reconceptualizing our sources so that, strikingly, it is the earlier ones that are non-apocalyptic. Here's how I describe them in my [...]

BDEhrman2024-02-05T08:58:10-05:00February 6th, 2024|Public Forum|

A Less-Expected Argument that Jesus Preached the End of All Things

In my previous posts I've given some of the arguments for thinking Jesus delivered an apocalyptic message that the end was coming soon with a divine intervention in which all the forces of evil would be destroyed and all people judged. I’ve actually saved what I consider to be the strongest argument for last, a final coup d’grâce. The argument is both simple and compelling. I wish I had thought of it myself. In a nutshell, the argument is that we know beyond any reasonable doubt what happened at the very beginning of Jesus’ public ministry and we know what happened in its aftermath. The continuity between the two is Jesus’ public ministry itself. This ministry began on a decidedly apocalyptic note; its aftermath continued apocalyptically. Since Jesus is the link between the two, his message and mission, his words and deeds, must also have been apocalyptic. That is to say, the beginning and end are the keys to the middle. Here is how I explain it in chapter 8 of my book Jesus: Apocalyptic [...]

BDEhrman2024-02-07T15:25:09-05:00February 4th, 2024|Historical Jesus|

How the Gospels Transformed the Apocalyptic Jesus

Contrary to the claims of the “Jesus Seminar,” Jesus is best understood as delivering an apocalyptic message – or so I began to argue in my previous post, where I explained that all the earliest Gospel sources independently record Jesus delivering apocalyptic teachings. Equally interesting, some of the most clearly apocalyptic traditions come to be “toned down” as we move further away from Jesus’ life in the 20s to Gospel materials produced near the end of the first century. Sources closest to Jesus: apocalyptic; sources further removed in time (as the end doesn’t come) less apocalyptic. And then non-apocalyptic. Eventually anti-apocalyptic. I resume here with another extract from my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (1999). ****************************** Let me give one example. I’ve already pointed out that Mark was our earliest Gospel and was used as a source for the Gospel of Luke (along with Q and L). It’s a relatively simple business, then, to see how the earlier traditions of Mark fared later in the hands of Luke. Interestingly, some [...]

BDEhrman2024-02-07T15:22:17-05:00February 3rd, 2024|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

The Jesus Seminar and the Non-Apocalyptic Jesus. Hey, Why Not?

I have recently received several questions more or less out of the blue about what I think about the “Jesus Seminar” and its views of Jesus. I looked and it appears I’ve only had one brief posting on this issue, so I thought I should say a few things, first by explaining what the question means. The Seminar was made up of a group of about fifty New Testament scholars who, in the 1980s and 1990s, met twice a year to discuss the ancient Gospels (mainly the canonical Gospels and the Gospel of Thomas) to determine which traditions about Jesus were likely to be authentic, and which, as a corollary, were likely to have been later creations of the early church as they told stories about Jesus. The members of the seminar would then vote on each tradition – after extensive, learned discussion -- and publish the results of their votes. The voting procedure proved to be controversial. The Seminar’s original raison d’être was to establish what Jesus actually said, and so they [...]

BDEhrman2024-01-28T12:17:26-05:00February 1st, 2024|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship|

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