June 2026 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Did Jesus Have Wealthy Donors?
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Did Jesus Have Wealthy Donors?

Historical Jesus

Did Jesus Have Wealthy Donors?

In my previous post I raised the question of how Jesus and his disciples supported themselves for a year or three (depending on which Gospel you read) when they were unemployed itinerates? One of the options (I'll get to two others in the posts that follow, so stay tuned) would be that they had wealthy donors, as explicitly indicated in one passage of the Gospels (that I'll discuss below), and intimated in other ways. But is it likely? To begin with, Jesus does seem to get invited to a lot of homes for dinner in the Gospels. It is difficult to know if the Gospel writers are simply telling good stories – for example, setting up a plausible situation for Jesus to have a discussion or controversy with other Jewish teachers -- or if it actually happened regularly. If it did – how often? From a social and historical perspective, it’s a little bit difficult to think that sort of thing was happening a lot during Jesus’ ministry. Wealth – and therefore wealthy people with [...]

BDEhrman2026-06-23T16:31:31-04:00June 30th, 2026|Historical Jesus|

How Did Jesus and His Disciples Get Enough to Eat?

How did Jesus and his disciples support themselves? They left their families, homes, and jobs, to engage in a life of itineracy, preaching about the coming kingdom. But until it came, how did they survive? Specifically, how did they eat? I don’t recall ever seeing any extended discussion of the question in a scholarly (or a popular) book or article. If one of you has, let me know. It seems like an obvious question, and I suppose most people think there is an obvious answer. There may be (I can think of three), but it’s worth thinking about in greater depth. One very BIG problem about understanding the historical Jesus (I confront this all the time) is that nearly everyone (including lots of scholars) seems to assume that modern common sense – both in our minds and our actions – would have been common sense in the time and place of Jesus. And so scholars (and people who read them) talk about Jesus being middle class, or having a summer home around Bethlehem, [...]

BDEhrman2026-06-22T11:05:55-04:00June 28th, 2026|Historical Jesus|

The Execution of Pontius Pilate for Killing Jesus (!)

In my previous post I explained and provided a translation of the intriguing apocryphal letter that Pontius Pilate (allegedly) wrote to the Emperor Tiberius to explain why he had crucified the Son of God. Later, another Christian author wrote a fictional account of what happened next. Tiberius did not take kindly to Pilate's horrible crime and ... well, it ends up not going well for the governor of Judea. But on the upside ... he converts! Here is my introduction to the text and a fresh translation of it from the Greek, as found in the collection of apocryphal Gospels I did with my colleague Zlatko Plese, The Other Gospels (Oxford University Press). ****************************** Introduction The Handing Over of Pilate (Paradosis Pilati) The “Handing Over of Pilate” is a fictitious account of Pilate being recalled to Rome and censured by the Emperor Tiberius for his role in having the divine man, Jesus, crucified. Pilate pays the ultimate price for his heinous behavior by being beheaded--but only after he has repented of his [...]

BDEhrman2026-06-20T20:48:35-04:00June 27th, 2026|Christian Apocrypha, Public Forum|

July 2026 Gold Q&A Announcement

Gold and Platinum Members, your next monthly Q&A is on the calendar. Bart will be answering your questions live on Saturday July 11th at 12pm Eastern. For July, we are continuing with the split format. Bart will spend the first half of our Zoom session answering your pre-submitted questions. Please email your questions to [email protected] no later than Thursday July 9th. For the second half of the hour, we’ll be opening things up to live attendee participation, giving you the opportunity to ask Bart questions in real time on a specific topic. For July, Bart has chosen: The Acts of the Apostles If you’d like to participate in the live Q&A: Prepare your question in advance Make sure your question is specifically focused on the Gospels Keep your question to roughly 20 seconds or less Be ready to ask it live during the session Meeting Details: Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81209150304?pwd=9Y5Dett5sOHbvefD9Oc7xcSzjbfibo.1 Meeting ID: 812 0915 0304 Passcode: 372721 And if you're unable to make it live, I always send the recording of the event to all Gold and [...]

jennao2026-06-26T10:59:24-04:00June 26th, 2026|Public Forum|

A Blog Dinner In Central London July 15. Wanna Come?

I’m in London for a bit just now, as is my summer wont, currently enjoying the heatwave (96 degrees without air conditioning!), as all you other London and thereabouts residents are! But this too shall pass. And so.... I would love to have a blog dinner in central London with anyone who can make it, hopefully in cooler conditions, on the evening of Wednesday July 15. Would you be interested? I’ll probably start around 6:00 or so for a pint with whomever is interested in quenching thirst before satisfying hunger, and then head over to dinner at 7:00 or so. Location TBD -- but somewhere relatively interesting and easy to get to. You interested? My plan is to limit the table to 10. For those who come there are no obligations other than: Being a blog member Showing up Talking Paying for whatever you ingest. (Whatever you exgest is free.) If you’d like to join me and a group of other blog members for an evening of interesting discussion of areas of mutual [...]

BDEhrman2026-06-26T07:05:55-04:00June 26th, 2026|Public Forum|

Did Pontius Pilate Write a Letter Explaining Why He Crucified Jesus?

I was recently asked about a letter allegedly written by Pontius Pilate to the Emperor Tiberius, explaining why he crucified the Son of God. Outside of academic circles, this apocryphal letter is not well known. For that matter, it's not well known even within academic circles. Most New Testament scholars don't know it exists. But it does! It is part of a group of texts that scholars (the ones who study these things) sometimes call the "Pilate Gospels." There are a number of these writings -- all of them legendary/apocryphal, of course. This particular letter is called the Anaphora Pilati (= The Report of Pilate) . I made a new translation of the text from the Greek, along with a brief explanation of what it is all about, in the the book I co-edited with my colleague Zlatko Pleše, The Other Gospels. Here is the introduction (edited a bit) and translation. If you're interested in this kind of thing, check out the book itself! (in my next post I'll give Tiberius's [alleged] reply!) ****************************** Introduction The “Report” [...]

BDEhrman2026-06-20T20:37:20-04:00June 25th, 2026|Christian Apocrypha, Public Forum|

Jesus and the Gospel of John: Some Readers’ Good Questions

I've received some interesting and important questions involving the Gospel of John -- who actually wrote it and whether it's record of Jesus' claims to be divine are likely historical. Here are the questions an my attempts to answer QUESTION: I heard Mike Licona say the other day, that he seems to think Tertius wrote Romans in the same way a literate Greek-speaking secretary wrote the Gospel of John on behalf of John, the son of Zebedee. So strictly speaking, these are his words and the letter ought to be called, the Letter to the Romans according to Paul. What is your understanding of Rom 16:22 – ‘I Tertius, the writer of this letter, greet you in the Lord”? Was Tertius simply taking dictation or did he put his interpretation of Paul’s thoughts into words? RESPONSE: I’m afraid I don’t think Mike is right about this at all. Romans 16:22 certainly does come as a surprise to many modern readers of Romans. What?? Someone named Tertius wrote this letter? I thought [...]

BDEhrman2026-06-24T09:06:33-04:00June 24th, 2026|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

How Do You Publish a Book for a General Audience?
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How Do You Publish a Book for a General Audience?

Public Forum

How Do You Publish a Book for a General Audience?

In my previous post I talked about what it takes to write and publish a scholarly book. Most people who aren't scholars aren't thinking that way. They want to publish a book for a broader audience to get their ideas out there. How do you do that? These days it can be done relatively simply by self-publishing. I know almost nothing about how that works, other than that people do it all the time (more books get published that way than with trade-book publishers, I believe). But I can say something about what it takes to get a book published with a professional publisher. That, as it turns out, is really tricky, for reasons some people may not expect. It involves a weird Catch-22. In most academic fields -- whether astronomy or biblical studies -- trade books (that is, books for a broader readership) have normally been published by scholars who want to communicate with non-scholars. The problem is that most scholars are not particularly adept at doing that -- they have difficulty explaining their [...]

BDEhrman2026-06-20T20:40:21-04:00June 23rd, 2026|Public Forum|

The Realities of Publishing a Scholarly Book

One of the emails I get *all* the time is from authors who have written a book, or hope to write a book, who want to know how they can get a publisher to take a look at it. The short answer: it ain’t easy. Often the inquiry comes from someone who wants to publish a book for scholars to convince them to take a different view on a matter of scholarly importance. How does a someone get a publisher to publish a book like that? People don't like to hear this, but if you don't already have scholarly credentials an academic publisher will almost certainly (or at least extremely rarely) even consider your manuscript. And having the credentials, for a first-time author, almost always means having done advanced graduate level education in the field. I know a lot of authors who think that it’s not fair that they can’t get their books published “just because I don’t have a PhD.” It get that -- it must be hugely frustrating. But the problem is that [...]

BDEhrman2026-06-16T07:20:22-04:00June 21st, 2026|Public Forum|

Memory of My Past: My First Girlfriend and Jesus

Some of you have probably had this same experience. Now that I'm 70, I'm thinking about my past a lot more than ... in the past. The other day I was thinking about my life in high school soon after I had become a born-again Christian (an incredibly ignorant born-again Christian). One incident quickly came to mind. Before I became a gung-ho Christian, my first serious girlfriend was Linda, whom I met when we were starting our sophomore year in high school. She was funny, personable, attractive, intelligent, and Jewish. I’m not sure I had ever known a Jewish person before her. Now I don’t recall that we ever talked about religion, and looking back I suppose it’s not particularly surprising. She and her family certainly weren’t observant Jews and my uninformed sense is that they were completely secular. I don’t know if they went to synagogue or kept any of the holidays, but I kind-a doubt it. In any event, at that point in my life religion wasn’t really my main concern [...]

BDEhrman2026-06-16T07:12:09-04:00June 20th, 2026|Public Forum|

Did Paul Have an Exalted View of Himself?

Yesterday one of my fellow-travelers on a trip I'm taking wanted to talk about Paul and his self-image, and whether Paul had a rather (or extremely) exalted view of his own importance. I gave him one of my standard answers, that I think it's impossible to engage in a psychological analysis of a person's self-image when they lived millennia ago (it's certainly hard enough when they share our time and culture and we've known them for years). But it is possible to know, sometimes, what a person actually thought about themselves on some level. And however we evaluate the psychological elements involved, I do think it's safe to say that Paul saw himself as an important and inspired person in the history of the salvation of the world. Make of it what you will! Here's how I have explained it before, based on my book Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene (Oxford University Press), edited here for the occasion. ****************************** To make sense of how Paul’s conversion affected his actual life, not just his theology, [...]

BDEhrman2026-06-20T16:09:53-04:00June 18th, 2026|Paul and His Letters|

The Most Likely Capitalist Parable of Jesus?

Of all the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament, the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30; the same parable, with important differences, is the Parable of the Pounds in Luke 19:11-27), in my view, is the one most amenable to a capitalist interpretation – easily and often seen as an exhortation to invest one’s money to make money, at the highest possible rate. Even so, this, in my calculation (!), would be a serious misreading of the parable. It is indeed a parable that discusses money and investment at interest. But it is not about that at all. I’ll explain. But first, by way of summary (recall: a talent not a personal ability but a large unit of money): A man goes on a long journey and entrusts money to three of his slaves: five talents to one, two to another, one to the third. The first two invest the money at interest and double what they received. When the man returns, he showers them with praise for their stewardship. The third slave, however, [...]

BDEhrman2026-06-19T09:38:01-04:00June 17th, 2026|Historical Jesus|

The Parable of the Sower as Advice for Capitalists
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The Parable of the Sower as Advice for Capitalists

Canonical Gospels, Public Forum

The Parable of the Sower as Advice for Capitalists

Is Jesus’ parable of the sower (Mark 4:1-9) best understood as providing (pre-)capitalist advice about how to think about monetary investments? Is it a divine guide for growing your portfolio? Is it instructing us to consider the market and plant our wealth where it is most likely to grow – thirty-fold, sixty-fold, one hundred-fold? There are certainly people today who have read it that way. If you’re a hard-core capitalist who sees everything in economic terms then it would make sense that this is how you think about the parable. (Understanding Jesus as the “greatest businessman who ever lived” has been around for a century now; see Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows, 1925 – one of the best selling non-fiction books of the 20th century!). But what if you want to understand the parable in Jesus’ own context? In that case, yeah, not so much. This is not a guide to how to run your business or choose your investments. When you look at the details, it is actually quite the opposite. The parable, [...]

BDEhrman2026-06-12T09:33:45-04:00June 16th, 2026|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

The Capitalist Parables of Jesus

Capitalist Parables of Jesus There is a lot of truth in Albert Schweitzer’s observation in his book The Quest of the Historical Jesus (German original 1906), that scholars of every generation since the Enlightenment have portrayed Jesus “in their own image.” Thus Enlightenment-era “rationalists” who realized we do not need supernatural interventions to explain what happens in our world -- from lightening strikes and earthquakes to the healing of physical ailments or mental illnesses -- explained the amazing records of Jesus’ “miracles” as misunderstood natural events. And hopeful, positive, progressive liberals who thought Jesus, like modern folk, just wanted all of us to get along emphasized that Jesus was mainly interested in the “brotherhood of man” (as they said it back then) and the “Fatherhood of God.” Moreover, is it an accident the “apocalyptic” understanding of Jesus -- expecting the imminent of the world -- became increasingly popular during the 20th century World Wars and then the Cold war when we (people of my generation) were all being taught to hide under our [...]

BDEhrman2026-06-08T19:01:49-04:00June 14th, 2026|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

Why Not Believe in a God Who is Not Active in the World?

Isn’t atheism an extreme position to take? If you (or, well, I) give up believe in the Christian God we were (I was) raised on, why give up on the idea of any god entirely? I’m on a trip giving lectures to a group of folks who, well, want to see Norway (!) but also want to discuss issues closely related to what we do on the Blog – questions about the New Testament, the historical Jesus, early Christianity, related topics in religion, and questions about religion in general. It’s a great group with people of a wide range of backgrounds and lots of interesting stories. Already we have discussed lots of interesting things, and one of my fellow travelers has pushed me on why I became an atheist. They agree that there are real problems with believing in an all-loving and all-powerful God who wants humans to thrive, be happy, be content with life, and who is certainly able to make that happen for everyone if he chooses (even if there does [...]

BDEhrman2026-06-08T08:55:19-04:00June 13th, 2026|Public Forum|

How To Figure Out If a Miracle Happened… Questions from Readers

More interesting questions for readers -- including issues connected with miracles... QUESTION: I have a question about the epistemological limits of historical inquiry—one that I have long wondered about without finding a clear answer. My understanding is that historians work with surviving evidence and attempt to reconstruct what most probably happened. Because historical method generally operates with methodological naturalism, events such as miracles—for example, the resurrection—appear either extremely improbable or methodologically excluded within historical analysis, at least methodologically speaking. If this is the case, theology (or faith) seems to operate on a different explanatory level, allowing for the possibility that events beyond currently known natural laws may occur. This raises a question for me: if historical method assumes methodological naturalism in advance, how can it fairly evaluate historical claims whose very content is supernatural without narrowing the range of possible conclusions beforehand? Related to this, I wonder whether historical reasoning itself—because it relies heavily on probability and patterns derived from repeated experience—may face limits when addressing singular events in the past. [...]

BDEhrman2026-06-11T11:30:54-04:00June 11th, 2026|Reader’s Questions|

More Criticisms of the Criticisms of the Gospel of John (by John! Spong)

Yesterday I wrote a post in which I began to discuss the recent Huffington Post article from 2103 by John Shelby Spong in which he discusses his then new book on John; the book is called The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic. Today I will finish out what I started to say yesterday. Let me say again that I long appreciated Spong’s work and was sympathetic to his mission. He was trying to do from inside the church something very similar to what I've long tried to do outside of it: help educated lay people outside the field of biblical scholarship see what scholars – believers and non-believers alike – are saying about the New Testament. Since Spong was operating within the church, however, and saw himself as a Christian, some of his perspectives and goals were different from mine. At the end of the day, he was interested in reforming Christianity in order to make it sensible for the twenty-first century. That is not my goal, since I am not [...]

BDEhrman2026-06-06T22:04:11-04:00June 10th, 2026|Canonical Gospels|

Controversies About the Gospel of John: The Views of John Spong
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Controversies About the Gospel of John: The Views of John Spong

Canonical Gospels, Public Forum

Controversies About the Gospel of John: The Views of John Spong

Just how reliable is the Gospel of John? Is there *anything* in it that is historical? A radical view of John was presented by John Shelby Spong in one of his last books (he published some nineteen or so over the course of his long career.) In my previous post I gave a brief biographical notice about John Shelby Spong, in commemoration of his death in 2021 -- in case you don't know who he was. There aren't too many Christian scholars who are more skeptical of its historical value than I am: but he is one! Here is how I discussed and engaged with the book when it came out. This will take two posts. ****************************** John Shelby Spong, former Episcopal bishop of New Jersey and highly controversial author (because of his skeptical views about the New Testament and traditional Christian doctrine) has just published a new book on the Gospel of John, called The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic. He also wrote an interesting article on it that appeared [...]

BDEhrman2026-06-04T08:52:07-04:00June 9th, 2026|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

Radical Skeptic (about the Bible) and Episcopal Bishop: John Spong

I'm with a group of travelers just now who are interested in critical approaches to the Bible (not views that are criticizing per se, but views that approach the Bible using historical methods -- "Biblical Criticism"). One of them - as usually happens - has asked me about the very popular writings of John Shelby Spong, who was an unusual figure in numerous ways, most famously because he was both highly skeptical about the reliability of the New Testament AND a long-time bishop in the Episcopal church. How does that work? Well, work it did. He had a deservedly huge following. Years ago I posted comments on a book he wrote near the end of his career on the Gospel of John, which takes an even more skeptical view of its reliability than I do. But I realized I should first set the context for those of you who don't know who he was by re-posting my "Memorium" for him written soon after he died. So here is that first, then my summary/discussion of his [...]

BDEhrman2026-06-04T08:37:10-04:00June 7th, 2026|Public Forum|

Questions on Proving the Resurrection and Sundry Other Things

Readers have given me some tough nuts to crack: Problems with proving the resurrection and with knowing if books of the New Testament may have been scissored and pasted together. Here are intriguing and important questions I've received, with my attempts to answer them. QUESTION: When I first began to read Bart’s Blog, he was just pointing out textual errors. Now it seems he is trying to destroy Christianity. Christianity lives or dies by the resurrection. That is our hope. Without the resurrection of Jesus Christ we have no hope. In those days, history and events were passed down verbally and by the written word. What was the incentive to pass down a bunch of hoaxes? I can’t think of any, maybe some of the readers can. RESPONSE: I'm afraid you misunderstand me. I am not saying Jesus was or was not raised from the dead. I'm saying the Christian claim that he was raised from the dead is a matter of faith, not historical demonstration. That's very different from trying [...]

BDEhrman2026-06-04T11:05:13-04:00June 6th, 2026|Reader’s Questions|