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December 2025 Gold Q&A Announcement

Can you believe it? Our final Gold Q&A of 2025 is upon us. Bart will be answering your questions live on Zoom on Saturday December 20th at 11am Eastern. (Note: A previous communication stated that this Q&A would take place on December 10th. It has been rescheduled to the 20th.) Let's try to really challenge him this month. Send any questions you have for him over to [email protected] by end of day Thursday December 18th. Jen will compile them and get them to Bart. As always, please keep your questions short and to the point. We always end up with more questions that Bart can feasibly answer in one hour, so he gives preference to those that are brief. You can join the Zoom on Dec. 20th here: Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82797581487?pwd=bQFYtyZqb6ijlZA2PFXOnbRPaz6Uq7.1 Meeting ID: 827 9758 1487 Passcode: 541355 See you there!

2025-12-05T14:20:17-05:00December 5th, 2025|Public Forum|

A Glimpse of Proto-orthodox Views in the Letters of Ignatius

Yesterday I introduced the letters of Ignatius of Antioch (from around 110 CE), a bishop of the largest church in Syria (and one of the largest in the world at the time), written while en route to his martyrdom in Rome, to several of the churches that he had met with during his journey.  The letters are addressed to churches in Asia Minor, in Ephesus, Magnesia, Tralles, Philadelphia, and Smyrna, along with a letter to the bishop of Smyrna, Polycarp (who also wrote a letter included among the Apostolic Fathers), and a letter to Rome -- seven surviving letters altogether. That has long struck me as interesting: we have seven authentic letters of Paul; seven letters dictated by Christ to churches of Asia Minor in the book of Revelation (including two of the churches addressed by Ignatius); and there are seven letters of Ignatius.  Seven is the perfect number.  How odd.  I've tried to figure out a rhyme or reason for it, but don't think there is one.  We just *happen* to have seven authentic [...]

2025-12-02T15:42:51-05:00December 4th, 2025|History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Uh, Duh. What I SHOULD Have Said. (Bethlehem)

Last week, in the lead up to Christmas, I had a remote, live event, a back and forth with Roman Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin on the question of whether Jesus was actually born in Bethlehem.  This was part of  Paths in Biblical Studies, my online courses and events venue that is not directly connected with the blog; you can learn more about it on my website http://www.bartehrman.com.  This particular event was one of our “Face to Face on the Bible series.  It was not set up as a formal debate but a conversation.  But we did have disagreements! Jimmy has a highly unusual way of reconciling the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke. I naturally responded to it -- I explained why I didn't think it was plausible -- but after it was over I realized that there was a killer argument that a forgot to mention.  Ever do that?  Come away from a disagreement and later say, “Ah, I should-a said that!!”? The issue concerns the home town of Joseph and Mary. [...]

2025-12-30T16:37:17-05:00December 3rd, 2025|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

Letters by A Christian About to Be Martyred: Ignatius of Antioch in a Nutshell

The letters of Ignatius of Antioch are among the most fascinating earliest Christian writings from outside the New Testament.  I’ve long been fascinated by them and would like to introduce you to them in a series of three posts in this thread presenting the “Apostolic Fathers” in a nutshell. The “Apostolic Fathers,” as I have indicated before, are a group of ten or eleven (depending how you count) books/authors who have long been understood to stand in the “orthodox” Christian camp before the major theological views later considered orthodox had become the overwhelmingly dominant form of Christian belief and practice some time in the third century or so – and so we call these write “proto-orthodox”; they were collected into a group of writings only in the modern period, and called “apostolic fathers” because they were each believed to have been acquainted with the apostles of Jesus themselves.  In almost all instances, as it turns out, that turns out to be wrong, but we still give them this name. They are (for the most part) [...]

2026-02-06T17:05:19-05:00December 3rd, 2025|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

Did Jesus Teach in Greek?

I had a number of very interesting conversations with friends and colleagues at the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting this last week.  There were about 8000 or so biblical scholars, most of them professors in one kind of institution or another, from around the world.  It’s an amazing range of people, some of them quite stunning in their knowledge and insight about Jewish and Christian antiquity in areas I know little or very little about, as well as areas I’ve worked on for many years. On the other hand, there were lots of other people I ran into who explained to me research they were doing that I thought was, well, really problematic. I won’t name names.   One friend of mine — a European scholar I’ve known for years — told me he was writing a book meant to show that Jesus taught in Greek.  Now that’s a topic I have thought about and researched for a very long time.  And I think he is completely wrong:  Scholars are virtually unified that [...]

2025-12-05T19:26:55-05:00December 2nd, 2025|Public Forum|
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