I’ve got some exciting news about how we’re doing on the blog this year – with respect to funds raised, and in connection with a series of posts I did last year.  The funds, as you’ll see below, are significant.  To this point, in terms of the  monies we’ve given to our charities, this is our best year yet of the fourteen we’ve had running this show.

First let me explain a long-term project that ended up making a big difference.

As (lots of you) know/remember, I did that “New Testament in a Nutshell” series in 2025, producing usually 3 or 4 posts on each book of the NT in canonical sequence, from Matthew to Revelation.  You can still see them all, easily enough.  Just do a word search for “nutshell” and you’ll see them.

The first post gave a 50-word (exactly!) summary of the book, and then a longer exposition of its major themes and emphases.  A second post discussed Who wrote it, When, and Why.  A third post discussed one of the more interesting features of the book at greater length.  Sometimes I added another post (or two) for good measure; occasionally I could basically do what I needed to do in just two posts.

When it was all over and done, Jen suggested we package the whole thing together as an e-book for fundraising purposes.  Maybe we could sell some to blog members and even outsiders?  Great idea.

She then created the ebook and showed it to me, and I was a bit flabbergasted – it was the size of an actual BOOK.  I had no idea!  I was just writing blog posts.  And it cohered as a book.  And I thought – I wonder if we could raise even more funds with this thing by selling it as a book.

This was happening at the time when I was considering taking my next book to a new publisher.  I have absolutely LOVED working with Simon & Schuster.  Their team is phenomenal and it’s one of the truly great publishing houses in the solar system.  But I had an idea for a (different) book that I thought might work better at a different publisher, and when talking to my agent I/we decided we could try to work out a two-book deal.  One would be the NUTSHELL book, heavily edited and made into a real book instead of a set of blog posts – basically that will mean editing, not re-writing; the other would be my book on the formation of the NT canon.

We took the idea to Norton publishers, and they became very excited about it.  And so that’s what’s happening!  After I’m done with the current book (on Jesus and economics) (I’m thinking right now – this will change 29 times no doubt – of calling it Banking on Jesus [!]) I will move into editing the Nutshell book.  At this point we are calling it “Field Guide to the New Testament.”

For books like this with a trade publisher (as opposed to an academic book), there is normally as part of the contract an “advance against royalties” – meaning they pay the author a negotiated amount in advance of producing the book, on the assumption (right or wrong) that the book will earn at least that much once it is written, produced, and sold.

We arranged with Norton that the Field Guide book would have the advance paid not to me directly, but to the Bart Ehrman Foundation.  The Foundation is the venue through which we make our donations to our charities that come from membership fees for the blog and private donations (to the blog).

 

So, we are at the stage now where the advance has been paid and we are making our distributions to the charities as we speak.  And I am EXTREMELY happy to let you know that all this has contributed to help make this the best years so far on the blog, in terms of funds raised.  We have a lot more that we want to raise this year, but as of the end of September, we have distributed $429,000 to our charities.  That is significantly more than our best year so far, 2024, when we raised $375,000 up to this point.  (We raised a total of $580,000 by the end of that year, and we are oh-so-eager to top that final amount here in 2026).

The vast bulk of that, of course, comes from you and your membership fees.  Thanks so much for joining the blog.  It is making a big difference in our world.  Over the course of our existence as a blog, we have raised over $3.8 million for our charities.

Three final things to be said about that, in addition to our never-ending gratitude for your participation:

1. If you find it in your heart and will to make a separate donation to the blog, please feel free to do so! Every penny will go to our charities.  We take out precisely zero overhead for expenses.  Just go to the blog homepage, navigate to the bottom, and hit “Donate.”
2. If you would like to be reminded what our charities are, you can find out more about them here: Charities We Support
3. One of the truly significant things you can do to help us succeed in our charitable work is to help us spread the word about the blog. As you know, you get five substantial posts a week on issues of real interest and importance for anyone wondering about most anything connected with the New Testament, the historical Jesus, the rise of Christianity, the Hebrew Bible, and lots of other related topics.  And that for what is still a small membership fee (starting at 58 cents a week!!)  Tell your family, your friends, your neighbors, your teachers, your dentists, your rabbis!