We have just passed a major milestone on the blog in its efforts to raise money for charity, and I’d like us all to celebrate it!  (See the Press Release we have just sent out, at the end of this post)  As of this week, for the life of the blog, we have distributed over $3,000,000 (that would be three million dollars!) to our charities helping those I need..  Whoa.  Who woulda thought?

I certainly never did.  For those of you who don’t know or at least remember, I started this little venture in April 2012.  At the time, I had no interest in a blog, no desire to do one, and, actually, little idea about what a blog was.  Sounded like an ink stain or swamp or … who knows.  OK, I did know it was something tech-savvy people did, but that was about it.  I had other things to keep me busy.

Then out of the blue, a friend, over late night drinks, suggested I do one.  I had an immediate response:  no way!  Why would I do that??  He said, To make money.  I said, blogs don’t make money.  (I knew that much.)  He said they CAN.  I said, I don’t need more money – I’m doing fine; what I really need is more time.  And doing a blog ain’t gonna help.  He said well, if you put in the time you could make money and give it all charity.  I said … Oh.  Hmm…

About two years later I decided to bite the bullet to see what would happen.  I wrote down my thoughts going into it.  I guessed that over the course of three years we would probably raise a total of $20,000, and then I would decide whether it was worth all the effort or not.

I rather badly miscalculated.  Rather than $7000, this past year we raised $580,000.  Whoa.  That’s some serious change.  And every penny went to our charities.

I couldn’t quit now if I wanted to.  And I definitely don’t want to.  For the past thirteen years I have posted 5-6 times a week without missing a week, and answered every question I’ve received (except for the ones I’ve missed and been, often rather forcefully, reminded of!)  The idea, of course, is to spread knowledge of scholarship on the NT and early Xty to non-scholars (one of my passions) and to raise funds to help those in need (one of my other passions).

In terms of charity, the blog started seriously taking off about four years ago, and it is going great guns; we are expecting significantly more growth in the near future, with the development of a new blog platform that will be way better than the already very good one we are using now.  No longer is the operation staffed with just me providing the content and a tech person doing everything else (including customer support).  We have a terrific and dedicated CEO, Jen Olmos, and a corp of volunteers who thanklessly do everything that needs to be done except write the blogs and answer the questions.

I’d like to thank all of them, past and present (OK, I realize that’s ironic).  And I want to re-iterate that none of the membership fees you pay, at any of the tiers from Bronze to Platinum, goes to overhead.  Zero.  Every penny we get, including as well the regular donations some of you so generously make, goes straight to the charities.

For more about the charities themselves, if you don’t know/remember: go here:  https://ehrmanblog.org/charities-we-support/  You’ll see, they are all top notch and doing incredibly important work to alleviate suffering and hardship in the world.   (You’ll also see, as I just did that the page is terribly out of date with respect to the amount we’ve donated! We need to change that!)

I’d like to thank all of you for being blog members. You are the ones who make this whole thing happen.  If you want to help us even more, tell your friends, family, acquaintances, and complete strangers you meet on the street about the blog.  We very much want to grow, and you can help.

Here now is the link to the Press Release.

Press Release – $3 million Raised