BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog

About BDEhrman

Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he has served as the director of graduate studies and chair of the Department of Religious Studies.

Finishing and Publishing My Dissertation

This is the third and final post I'll do on my dissertation on the Gospel quotations in the writings of Didymus the Blind, advised by the great New Testament scholar Bruce Metzger. Different dissertation advisors have different approaches to supervising a dissertation. Some are extremely hands on, to the point of working over every thought and every sentence. Not too many are like that, because if they were, they would never do anything else with their life. Plus, the idea is for the student to figure it out and get good at it. That takes some trial and error. Other advisors go for the big picture and like to talk over the big ideas. Others basically don’t give a rip how the dissertation is coming along – they want to see it at the end, and when it’s done, they’ll tell the student whether it’s good enough or not. Others … well, there are lots of other approaches. Metzger took an approach that other students may have found frustrating, but that was absolutely [...]

BDEhrman2024-06-24T09:47:55-04:00July 2nd, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

How I View the Bible as Both a Critical Scholar and a Christian: Guest Post by Judy Siker

This is the second guest post by Judy Siker, who explained in her previous post about her upbringing as a Christian in the South and then her move into the academic study of the Bible from a critical perspective. If you recall, Judy was my student in the (very secular!) graduate program in New Testament/Early Christianity here at UNC, where she did both a Masters and PhD in the field, focusing, in her dissertation, on the socio-historical background to the Gospel of Matthew, in particular as that involved the relations of Jews and Christians in the author's community. She then had a rich and varied teaching career in a range of schools -- private liberal arts, Catholic university, and Baptist seminary, among them! In this follow up post Judy lays out her understanding of what the Bible is (among other things, a book that asks compelling questions about matters of faith) and is not (a book that gives us all the incontrovertible answers), partly in response to comments and questions she received. She is willing [...]

BDEhrman2024-06-24T09:50:50-04:00June 30th, 2024|Reflections and Ruminations|

Is It Possible To Continue Believing? Guest Post by New Testament Scholar Judy Siker

Aren't critical scholars of the NT more or less bound or driven to stop believing? I've decided to provide two reposts on the question, since I continually get asked about it. First: my introduction to the issue and the guest poster. ****************************** One of the questions I get asked the most frequently from blog members is how someone can possibly continue to be a believing Christian if they understand the enormous problems presented by the critical study of the New Testament. I always tell them that in fact it’s not only possible – it happens all the time. Sometimes they are incredulous, but it’s not only true, it’s so true that my friends who know everything I know about the Bible and are still believers often find the question / issue completely puzzling. They have trouble understanding why anyone thinks it’s a problem. As we learned from "Cool Hand Luke" (a great movie, btw, with tons of Christ-images), “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” I have asked my former student and long-time [...]

BDEhrman2024-06-24T09:57:10-04:00June 29th, 2024|Reflections and Ruminations|

The Reason for Detailed Work on Textual Criticism

Here is the second of three posts on my first book-length study -- my dissertation on a particular aspect of how we can determine what the original words of the New Testament were and how they came to be changed over time. The dissertation was directed by Bruce Metzger, and it dealt more directly with the rather technical issue of the Gospel quotations of the fourth-century church father Didymus the Blind. When I first started thinking about how to write up this second post, I remembered one of my clearest pieces of advice that I ever gave to myself, many years ago now, based, already then, on substantial experience. Never , ever, EVER ask a graduate student what s/he is writing the dissertation on. They invariably will tell you, and it will take a half hour, and your eyes will glaze over in 30 seconds. So just don’t do it. With that principle in mind, I think I had better not go into all the ins and outs of the dissertation. I’ll just go into some [...]

BDEhrman2024-06-24T10:03:37-04:00June 27th, 2024|Public Forum|

My First Book! A Dissertation on Textual Criticism of the New Testament

Last night someone asked me about my very first book. My answer wasn't what they were hoping for; the book was not an insightful discussion of Jesus or the Gospels or how we got the Bible for a general audience. It was my published dissertation, a work of scholarship on the Greek manuscript tradition of the NT written for the six people in the world who would care. But it's kind of an interesting story anyway, in part because it deals with the fundamental issue of how scholars try to decide what the authors of the NT originally wrote. It went at the issue in a highly specific and detailed way, that one probably would not think of off the bat. I talked about it on the blog many years ago, and will devote to it three posts again. ****************************** I have talked about Bruce Metzger, my mentor in graduate school, for both my Master's degree and my PhD, a number of times on the blog. When I entered my PhD program at Princeton Theological [...]

BDEhrman2024-06-24T10:11:38-04:00June 26th, 2024|Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

NEW COURSE! “The Parables of Jesus” with Amy-Jill Levine

I'm really excited about this one. Next month we will be presenting a new remote course on the Parables of Jesus, consisting of four lectures by Amy-Jill Levine. Amy-Jill is one of the top scholars on the historical Jesus and the Gospels on the planet, and is an unusually interesting and dynamic lecturer. If you heard her at the New Insights into the New Testament last year, or taken a Great Courses/Wondrium course with her, you'll know what I mean. She is unusually sharp, witty, clear, engaged, challenging, and funny. Really, they don't get any better. The Parables course will consist of four lectures over the course of two days, July 20-21, with Q&A's on each day. They will be given before a live/remote audience (who get to ask the questions) and you can be there yourself. If you register, you will get the video of the course itself, with additional written materials, whether you attend live or not. Below is the description of the course and information about Amy-Jill herself, as found on the [...]

BDEhrman2024-06-24T16:08:10-04:00June 24th, 2024|Public Forum|

Does Altruism Even Exist? Some Personal Reflections Based on a Crazy Anecdote

In my book on altruism (yet to be finished!), I'm thinking about including the following as a way to begin reflecting on the question of whether anything like "pure" altruism exists (where someone acts entirely for the sake of another with no benefit at all for the self). Let me know your thoughts. ****************************** One might think that “altruism” is a non-problematic term. It comes from the Latin word “alter” which means “other," and so refers broadly to actions that benefit someone other than oneself. It stands in contrast with “egoism,” based on the Greek word “ego,” meaning “I” or “myself,” and therefore referring to actions that benefit oneself. That all seems simple enough: the terms differentiate between doing things for others and doing things for ourselves. But it turns out that in practice it is difficult – possibly impossible – to establish clear boundaries between altruism and egoism. As a result, philosophers, psychologists, and evolutionary biologists perennially debate how to understand the terms. I’ll illustrate the problem by telling a strange personal anecdote. Did [...]

BDEhrman2024-06-17T11:30:36-04:00June 23rd, 2024|Reflections and Ruminations|

The New Book I’m Writing About Altruism: Putting It In a Nutshell

As I've been writing my new book, tentatively called "The Invention of Altruism: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Conscience of the West," I've been thinking about how I might summarize the basic argument. Here's what I've got to this point. I'd be happy to hear your reactions. ****************************** Most people I know are moved by news of tragedy. A terrible earthquake, a drought, a famine, a flood, displaced people, innocent victims of military aggression, -- we feel pity for those who pointlessly suffer and sense a desire, even an obligation, to help, for example by donating to disaster relief. Almost never do we know the people in need; they are complete strangers, often in far-off lands, whom we will never meet and possibly wouldn’t like if we did. Yet we – at least multitudes of us – want to help. This sense of moral obligation to strangers in need is unnatural. It is not written into the human DNA nor did it exist in the ancient roots of our Western cultural [...]

BDEhrman2024-06-17T11:55:48-04:00June 22nd, 2024|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Can You Disprove the Existence of God?

Is there a way to “disprove” the existence of God? I’m not asking what the best arguments are; I’m asking whether an argument is possible. Just now I’m on a tour of some of the Greek Islands (Andros, Naxos. Amorgas, Santorini, and Crete) giving lectures for a group of unusually interesting people from a striking range of backgrounds – doctors, psychologists, scientists, financial advisers, business owners of various kinds, and so on, most of them one-time religious, some still committed to a religious tradition, some for whom religion never has made sense. Most of the conversations we’ve been having so far are Q&A: someone asks me me about some historical/literary issue connected with the NT or early Christianity and I tell them what I know (or at least think). But some discussion topics don’t have historical answers. Including whether it is possibly to prove God does not exist. That particular conversation has involved how we know what we know, as opposed to how people before the modern period thought they could know what [...]

BDEhrman2024-06-17T12:11:12-04:00June 20th, 2024|Public Forum|

Toe-to-Toe with Evangelical New Testament Scholar Peter Williams: Can We Trust the Gospels?

I recently reposted a debate I did with Peter Williams about the signficance of textual variants for the New Testament. It reminded me of another debate we did some five years ago, on an even more pressing question, whether the Gospels can be seen as completely trustworthy. This one was televised. I thought it was particularly interesting because Peter is not a simply a Christian apologist who uses other peoples' scholarship to promote his religious beliefs; he himself is a bona fide scholar with a PhD from Cambridge, and one of the leading experts on the ancient Syriac version of the New Testament. Peter has been a friend for a long time, and is also a committed evangelical Christian who does not believe there are mistakes in the Gospels. I *so* disagree with that. Our debate was on the Christian Radio program "Unbelievable" under their new series "The Big Conversation" Season 2-Episode 3, hosted by Justin Brierley. It was a long and interesting debate. Peter has written Can We Trust the Gospels? and C S [...]

BDEhrman2024-06-08T16:17:45-04:00June 19th, 2024|Bart's Debates, Canonical Gospels|

A Debate with Peter Williams on Textual Variants

To put an end to this thread on the textual variants of the New Testament, and whether they matter, and thought that it might be good to give an alternative perspective that I first posted, well, ten years ago. Earlier than that, on January 3rd, 2009, Peter J. Williams and I appeared as guests on "Unbelievable," a weekly program on UK Premier Christian Radio, moderated by Justin Brierley. For this show we discussed my book "Misquoting Jesus" (In the UK the book, for some reason, is titled is "Whose Word Is It?"). Peter Williams is a British evangelical Christian scholar -- a very smart one, who knows a *lot* about the manuscripts of the NT -- who believes in the reliability of the New Testament and that thinks that my position is too pessimistic and extreme. He did his PhD at Cambridge. Peter is the author of Can We Trust the Gospels? and C S Lewis vs the New Atheists. Here's our back and forth. See what you think! Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition: [...]

BDEhrman2024-06-13T00:34:09-04:00June 16th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Video Media|

Why Textual Variants Matter Even for Those Who Do NOT Think the Bible is Infallible

In this thread I am discussing why it matters that there are so many variants in our surviving manuscripts of the New Testament. It does not matter because there are any “fundamental Christian doctrines” at stake, per se, but for other reasons. As I sketched in my previous post, it should matter for anyone who believes that God gave the very words of the Bible, since the facts that we don’t *have* the original words in some cases and that in many other cases the words themselves are in doubt, should call that belief into question. (I should point out that with the Hebrew Bible we are in MUCH worse shape in knowing what anything like the “original” -- whatever that might be – was. The textual situation there is really quite dire.) The second group that the variants should interest would include just about anyone -- whether scholar, student, or general reader – who is interested in knowing what the various authors of the Bible had to say about this, that, or the other [...]

BDEhrman2024-06-13T00:34:03-04:00June 15th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts|

Why Bible-Believing Christians Care About Textual Variants

In my previous post I began a discussion of why textual variants (that is, different wordings of the verses of the NT) found in the manuscripts might matter to someone other than a specialist who spends his or her life studying such things. Most of the hundreds of thousands of variations are of very little importance for anything, as most people – even specialists – would admit. Only a minority really matter. And none of these seriously threatens any significant, traditional, Christian doctrine. But I’ve argued that this should not be the criterion used to establish their importance. Lots of things in life are important that have nothing to do with traditional Christian doctrines! I would say that the variations in the manuscripts of the New Testament should seem important to three groups of people. If you’re not in one of these groups, then they probably are not all that important to you! (1) Fundamentalist and conservative evangelical Christians who believe that the Bible is an inerrant or infallible revelation from God, with no mistakes [...]

BDEhrman2024-06-13T00:24:42-04:00June 13th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts|

If Textual Variants Don’t Change Any Key Doctrines — Then Who Cares?

I've been providing a thread on the issue of why it's so hard to know if we have an "original" text of any of the writings of the New Testament, both because some of the books are cut-and-pasted versions of earlier texts and because we don't have any of the originals of the texts but only later copies with lots of differences among them. I'll end the thread with three posts that asking why it might matter to anyone if we don't know the exact words of the New Testament. Here's a succinct question I received on the matter a good while ago. QUESTION: How significant are these variants? I know they vary but is there anything fundamental to Christendom that would be fundamentally flawed like the virgin birth or the resurrection that does not take place in these variants that are of material value? RESPONSE: It’s a really good question. I don’t know if this reader is a conservative Christian or has read what my conservative evangelical critics have said about this – as [...]

BDEhrman2024-06-08T15:50:59-04:00June 12th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts|

Serious Hypothetical (And Realistically Possible) Problems With Copies of Paul’s Letters

In trying to figure out what it even means to talk about the “original” text of Philippians (was it what Paul meant to dictate? Was it what he did dictate, if it was different from what he intended? Was it what the scribe wrote even if it was different from what Paul dictated? Was it what Paul corrected after he saw what the scribe incorrectly wrote? Was it the fresh copy that the scribe made even if it was different from the corrected version Paul gave him? What happens if in fact Philippians is two letters that have been spliced together by a later editor, as many scholars believe, rather than just one letter – is the “original” the two different letters originally sent or the spliced together version that Paul did not create but someone else did? Etc. etc.), in trying to figure all this out, several readers have suggested that the easiest way to look at it is that the “original” of Philippians is the letter Paul sent to Philippi, whatever [...]

BDEhrman2024-06-04T10:35:27-04:00June 9th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters|

Even More Snarly Problems If Paul Dictated His Letters

I have been talking about the problems in knowing what the “original” text of Philippians is. Even with the following brief review, the comments I will be making in this post will, frankly, probably not make much sense if you do not refresh your memory from my previous two posts. Here I will be picking up where I left off there. We have seen that knowing what the original of Philippians is complicated by the facts that: 1) The letter appears originally to have been two letters, so that it’s hard to know whether the original of each separate letter is to be the original or if the final edited version, which Paul himself did not produce, is the original; 2) Paul dictated his letters, and the scribe who wrote down his dictation would typically have made a fresh copy of the letter after Paul had made a few corrections – so which is the original: what the scribe originally wrote or the fresh copy he made after the corrections? 3) And [...]

BDEhrman2024-06-04T10:30:04-04:00June 8th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters|

If Paul Dictated His Letters, How Can We Know What He Said?

I have been asked to comment on whether we can get back to the “original” text of Paul’s letter to the Philippians, and I have begun to discuss the problems not just of getting *back* to the original, but also of knowing even what the original *was*. In my previous post I pointed out the problems posed by the fact that Philippians appears to be two letters later spliced together into one. And so the first problem is this: is the “original” copy the spliced together copy that Paul himself did not create? Or is the “original” the product that Paul himself produced – the two letters that are not transmitted to us in manuscript form any longer, to which, therefore, we have no access (except through the version edited by someone else)? But there are more problems. Here I’ll detail them, in sequence as they occur to me. In what I am going to be saying now, I will simplify things by assuming that – contrary to what I’ve been arguing [...]

BDEhrman2024-06-04T10:25:06-04:00June 6th, 2024|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters|

Did Paul Have a Brain Disorder? (And did it help him?!) Platinum post by Douglas Wadeson MD

Have you been waiting for a controversial Platinum post? Wait no longer. Here is another intriguing contribution by Doug Wadeson, who applies his medical expertise to a historical question about the Apostle Paul. What do you think? REMEMBER: If you are a Platinum member you too can send in a guest post on a topic of interest -- whatever you like connected with the Blog? Wanna put an idea out there? Go for it!! ********************* The apostle Paul is the most influential figure in Christianity after Jesus, and some would even argue that because Paul was so effective in fleshing out Christian doctrine about Jesus and then spreading it into the pagan world that he was even more influential than Jesus himself. But is it possible that Paul had a brain disorder which actually facilitated his singular position in the history of Christianity? Let’s look at certain aspects of Paul’s life. Paul did a lot of writing, particularly to friends and churches, so that we have a number of his letters preserved for us. [...]

BDEhrman2024-05-29T11:10:04-04:00June 3rd, 2024|Paul and His Letters|

REMINDER: My Webinar — When Does Life Begin? The Status of the Unborn in the Biblical Tradition

In case you missed it last time, here's my announcement of the course I'll be doing on this coming Sunday. It's a difficult, very complicated, and often incredibly important topic. I hope you can come! ************************ I'm pleased to announce that I will be doing a new two-lecture course on a rather timely topic, When Does Life Begin: The Status of the Unborn in the Biblical Tradition. The course is not connected with the Blog per se, except insofar as I'm doing it and many of you might be interested. For more information and registration, go to http://www.bartehrman.com/life Even if you can't come to the live lectures, you will be able to get a recording of the course to watch at your leisure. Here's a description of the course: ********************** The issue of abortion is one of the most divisive controversies in our country. In many ways it comes down to a very basic question: When Does Life Begin? At conception? Later in gestation? When the fetus is viable? At birth? For many people the question is [...]

BDEhrman2024-05-29T10:05:02-04:00May 30th, 2024|Public Forum|

Is Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians Actually FIVE Letters?

In my previous post I tried to show why most critical scholars think that the letter of 2 Corinthians is actually two different letters that have been spliced together. When I was back in graduate school, I learned – to my surprise – that there were scholars who thought that in fact 2 Corinthians was made up of five different letters, all spliced together. At first that struck me as a bit crazy, but as I looked at the evidence I began to see that it made a good bit of sense. I’m not completely committed to that idea, but I’m inclined toward it. My sense is that this is the view of a sizeable minority of critical scholars, but I have no data, only anecdotal evidence, to back that up. In any case, what matters more is what you yourself might think of it. I won’t be giving the evidence in full, but here is how I lay it out for students to consider in my textbook on the New Testament for undergraduates. To [...]

BDEhrman2024-05-16T11:41:41-04:00May 26th, 2024|Paul and His Letters|

12···180 Next