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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.

Would the Resurrection Make Anyone Believe Jesus Was the Messiah?

I have been talking about the early Christian understandings of Jesus as the messiah.  Not just the messiah, but the “crucified messiah,” a concept that would have seemed not just unusual or bizarre to most Jewish ears in the first century, but absolutely mind-boggling and self-contradictory.  I’ve been arguing that it was precisely the contradictory nature of the claim that led almost all Jews to reject the Christian claims about Jesus. Several readers have asked me whether I think Jesus understood himself to be the messiah.  Probably those who know a little bit about my work and my general views of things would think that my answer would be Absolutely Not.  But, well.... I think Jesus did consider himself the messiah.  But not the to-be-crucified-messiah.  The key to understanding Jesus’ view of himself is to recognize what he *meant* by considering himself the messiah.  I will get to that in a later post.  For now I want to give the evidence that Jesus thought that in *some* sense (a sense distinctive to Jesus) [...]

2024-10-25T11:01:09-04:00November 2nd, 2024|Historical Jesus|

A Particular Problem with a Crucified Messiah

In my previous post I started to show that most Jews rejected Christian claims about Jesus because Jesus was just the *opposite* of what the messiah was expected to be.  The messiah was to be a figure of grandeur and power who would overthrow God’s enemies and set up a new kingdom on earth in which God’s will would prevail.  Jesus was and did none of that.  He was a lower-class peasant who was arrested, humiliated, tortured, and executed.  He didn’t destroy God’s enemies.  He was crushed by them. Paul is the first Jewish persecutor of the Christians that we know by name; there is really no doubt that he was bent on wiping out the followers of Jesus – since he himself says so (and says so to his own shame [Gal 1:13); he did not gain any glory for this rather despicable past--despicable in both his eyes and the eyes of the Christians).  Presumably his reasons for hating and opposing the followers of Jesus were comparable to those of other Jewish persecutors. But [...]

2024-10-25T11:09:19-04:00October 31st, 2024|Paul and His Letters|

Paul and the Crucified Messiah in 1 Corinthians

Historians usually have reasons for what they say; that is, when they make a historical claim, it is almost always based on a close reading of the surviving sources.  When it’s not, they’re just blowin’ smoke.  But if they’re reputable scholars AND are blowin’ smoke – that is, taking a guess –they’ll usually tell you.  I suppose that’s one difference between an expert (in any field) and an amateur: the expert actually has a deep and nuanced reading of the sources that informs his/her views. I have to say, as you probably have noticed in your own areas of expertise, it is pretty easy if you are an expert to know who else is an expert and who is not.  I say that as someone who is an expert in one or two areas, but an amateur in thousands.  When I have an interpretation of Hamlet or Lear that I bounce off my wife – who really is a recognized expert on Shakespeare – I realize that, for the most part, I’m just taking a [...]

2024-10-25T11:14:07-04:00October 30th, 2024|Paul and His Letters|

Why Would A Christian Author Lie About Who He Was?

In my previous post I said a bit about “forgeries” in the NT, that is, books whose authors claimed to be a famous person (Peter, Paul, James, Jude), knowing full well they were someone else.  In the ancient world, these books were called “lies” (pseudoi) or “books inscribed with a lie” (pseudepigrapha).  But why would a Christian author lie about who he was?  How could he live with himself? I discuss the matter at length in my books Forged and even more in Forgery and Counterforgery.  In my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Oxford University Press) I can discuss the matter only briefly in a sidebar box, to give my students a sense of the situation in antiquity.  With this post I'll be concluding for now my thread giving some of these kinds of boxes, but since this is such an intriguing subject, I'd like to set it up by first quoting  a paragraph from my book Forged, about the author of Ephesians, who claimed to be Paul (lying [...]

2024-10-30T10:15:51-04:00October 29th, 2024|Forgery in Antiquity|

Blog Etiquette in These Troubling Times!

In these massively troubling times (no need for me to itemize the issues) and the incredibly disturbing bifurcation of opinions, views, and perspectives, where very few people have even the slightest interest in listening to someone on "the other side," there is at least one thing that virtually everyone agrees on:  these are massively troubling times with incredibly disturbing bifurcation of ....   Well. right.  We can at least agree it's a mess. And what, I ask you, does that have to do with the blog?  Well, in short, nothing and everything. Over lo these many years, I have tried very hard to allow everyone to express their opinions on matters connected with the blog -- principally, the study of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, the origins of Christianity, the first several centuries of Christian literature and history, and cognate fields such as Hebrew Bible, early Judaism, Greek and Roman religion, with a touch of personal religious views and modern religion, etc. I have also tried very hard not to take sides on the social [...]

2024-10-28T19:27:26-04:00October 28th, 2024|Public Forum|

Forged Books, Anonymous Books, and The Use of Secretaries as Authors in the NT

My books Forged, for normal human beings, and Forgery and Counterforgery, for abnormal scholars, both deal with issues of the authorship of the writings of the New Testament (and other books in early Christianity) and with why there are good reasons for thinking that some of them were forgeries (written in the name of famous people like Paul or Peter by people who knew full well they were not Paul or Peter), others are anonymous though later attributed to famous people who didn't write them (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).  It also deals with why I don't think we can explain any of these writings on the popular but, based on my research, totally unfounded idea that "secretaries" wrote them for these famous people. In my book The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 8th ed, with Hugo Mendez I address such issues only briefly, on side-bar boxes, to give students a brief sense of the issues.   Here they are! ****************************** Box 25.3  Another Glimpse Into the Past Authors and Their [...]

2024-10-23T12:46:25-04:00October 27th, 2024|Forgery in Antiquity|

Unexpected Social Agendas in the New Testament. Who Woulda Thought?

Most Christians turn to the Bible to some degree or another for guidance on their ethical views and perspectives on social agendas.  For those who read it closely, the Bible can be problematic ethically.  Most people realize there is a problem with the endorsement of slavery in the Bible (both Old and New Testaments); few have ever seen that there is also a problem with what today we think of a "family values." In my book The New Testament: A Historical Introduction, now in its eight edition with Hugo Mendez (Oxford University Press, 2024), I address these issues very briefly in a couple of those side-bar boxes I've mentioned in the two previous posts.  Here they are! ******************************  Box 22.12  What Do You Think? The New Testament and Slavery Many people who read the book of Philemon simply assume that Paul writes the letter in order to urge Philemon to set his slave Onesimus free.  After all, slavery is, and was, a horrible institution, and surely the apostle would have done everything [...]

2024-10-23T12:41:37-04:00October 26th, 2024|Public Forum|

Jesus as God in the New Testament

One of my personal favorite books (of mine!) is How Jesus Became God.  In my New Testament textbook, The New Testament: A Historical  Introduction, now in its eighth edition with Hugo Mendez, we include a couple of brief discussions of the topic in two of the sidebars.  One of the tricks in writing a textbook is figuring out how to say something in a way that is succinct and interesting, when there is not much space to cover a topic fully  (so, my first box here covers in 326 words what I take an entire chapter to develop in my book!)   But how to make something succinct but also accurate and / or interesting?  It’s always a balancing act. In any event, here are the two boxes. ******************************  Box 19.2  What Do You Think? Humans Exalted to Heaven at the End of Their Lives  What do you imagine the early Christians would think had happened to Jesus once they came to believe that he had not only been raised from the dead but [...]

2024-10-23T15:47:36-04:00October 24th, 2024|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine|

Oral Traditions and the Dates of Our Gospels

As many of you know, this past year I published the 8th edition of my textbook The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the New Testament (Oxford University Press, 2024), but this time, rather than doing it myself, I asked my colleague Hugo Mendez to join me in editing / updating it, and truth be told, since hey, I believe in telling the truth, he did the vast bulk of the work on this one.  Most of the changes came in his rewriting sections that needed to be brought up to snuff with current scholarship, including the one dealing with the sources of Synoptics, since a lot of scholars (though not the majority, so far as I can tell) are inclined to think the Q source never existed (including Hugo!) and the entire chapter on the Gospel of John, on which Hugo is a major expert and the paradigm of how to understand it has changed significantly over the past five years or so. In ANY event, one of the features I've always liked [...]

2024-10-14T16:07:25-04:00October 23rd, 2024|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels|

Why CAN’T the Hard Problems Have Simple Answers?

The Bible is not an answer machine to all your questions (despite what billboards on US I-40 tell me); many of our modern questions are not addressed in the Bible (most of them, in fact: think of the issues people are each others' throats about half the time in our country); the Bible often gives a range of answers to various issues; sometimes these contradict one another; and sometimes they simply don't make any sense in our modern context (if you think they do, then look through your closet to see if you have any clothing made out of more then one fabric). These are some of the issues I address toward the tail end of my Introduction in my book God's Problem (HarperOne, 2008), excerpted here. ****************************** It is important, I think, to realize that the Bible has a wide range of answers to the problem of suffering because this realization reveals the problem of thinking that the Bible has one simple answer to every issue. Many people in our world take a smorgasbord approach [...]

2024-10-15T16:43:56-04:00October 22nd, 2024|Reflections and Ruminations|

Suffering. Is It Really Worth Talking About? Doesn’t the Bible Give the Right Answer?

People react lots of different ways when trying to deal with the problem of how there can be so much suffering in a world that is said to be controlled by the almighty God who loves people and wants the best for them.  I decided to write my book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Address our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer (HarperOne, 2008) both because many people don’t realize how many different answers the Bible itself gives (some of them at odds about it) and also because in my judgment lots and lots of people (most?) simply don’t take it seriously enough. Here's how I talk about why I think it matters and my approach to it, another excerpt from the book itself.  (Recall: the book was published in 2008, so 16 years ago now). ****************************** Based on my experience with the class, I decided at the end of the term that I wanted to write a book about it, a study of suffering and biblical responses to it. [...]

2024-10-14T16:00:05-04:00October 20th, 2024|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Doesn’t “Free Will” Explain Suffering?

When teaching undergraduate students about the problem of suffering, I have sometimes found it hard to explain to them why it is a “problem” for those who believe in God.  Many people do not find it an insurmountable problem; many others do.  My concern is far less where someone lines up on that issue than on that they realize it is indeed a huge issue that should not be ignored or swept under a rug. It took a while for some of my students at Rutgers to see the problem years ago when I was teaching about it, as I mentioned in my last post.  I continue my reflections here.  Again, this is excerpted from my book God’s Problem (HarperOne, 2008), edited a bit. ****************************** Before the semester was over, I think my students got the point. Most of them did learn to grapple with the problem. At the beginning of the course, many of them had thought that whatever problem there was with suffering could be fairly easily solved. The most popular [...]

2024-10-14T15:55:33-04:00October 19th, 2024|Reflections and Ruminations|

The Problem of Suffering? So What’s the Problem?

The “problem of suffering” is especially a problem in the monotheistic religions.   In ancient Greek and Roman religions, with their many, many gods, it wasn’t an intellectual puzzle.  If there’s suffering, it’s because some or all of the gods are ticked off and out to get you.  There are some bad ones up there as well as good ones. Just the way it is. But if there’s only one God, why is there suffering?  Many people have very simply solutions and they don’t see a problem.  But there is a problem.  It just has to be explained.  Here I continue by showing why it’s a problem and to motivate some thinking by trying to explain how deep thinkers have expressed the problem and tried to address it. Again, this is excerpted from my book God’s Problem (HarperOne, 2008).  Just before this excerpt I was explaining my first time teaching about the issue in a class I did at Rutgers in the mid 1980s. ****************************** For the class I had students do a lot [...]

2024-10-11T12:29:51-04:00October 17th, 2024|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

How Can We Imagine That God is Active in Our World? (A genuine, not rhetorical, question)

Are there moments when you wonder not just why things are going badly for you, or why they are very badly for others, but more comprehensively about why there needs to be suffering at all?  I certainly have, and I am now doing a thread of posts that explain some of my reflections through excerpts of the opening sections of my book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Explain our Most Important Problem – Why We Suffer  (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008). In my previous post I explained how these issues eventually led me to leave the faith.  Now I continue by reflecting on a subsequent moment, long after I was no longer a believer, when I was particularly floored by the problem of suffering. ****************************** Only on rare occasions do I go to church now, usually when my wife, Sarah, very much wants me to go. Sarah is a brilliant intellectual-a distinguished professor of medieval English literature at Duke University—and a committed Christian, actively involved in the Episcopal church. For her the [...]

2024-10-11T12:46:31-04:00October 16th, 2024|Book Discussions|

Hurricanes, Suffering, And My Loss of Faith

Two weeks ago I gave a fundraising webinar for the victims of Hurricane Helene, on the topic:  Why Do Disasters Strike: The Bible’s Views.  In preparing for the talk I decided to re-read the opening section of my book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer our Most Important Question: Why We Suffer (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008).  I hadn’t read it for years, and while I was reading it I realized anew just how important the topic is and how glad I am that I addressed it. I’ve decided to excerpt the opening bit from the first chapter and the beginning of the second  to give you a sense of the book.  If you’re interested in more, check it out. It is definitely different from all the others I’ve written, and now that I’ve re-read it, I think it’s the one I’m most proud of personally, not because of the author but because of the topic and its perennial importance. ALSO, if you would like to listen to the webinar (with Q&A) and [...]

2024-10-15T16:47:13-04:00October 15th, 2024|Book Discussions, Public Forum|

And Yet Other Apocrypha: 2 Maccabees and Others, Including Psalm 151!

This will be my final post for now on the Old Testament apocrypha.  In it I discuss the final (and particularly intriguing) book accepted in the Roman Catholic church, and a few others accepted in Orthodox Christian circles. Again this all comes from my textbook, The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction (Oxford, 2018).   2 Maccabees The book known as 2 Maccabees is another account of the history of the Maccabean Revolt. Its author did not have 1 Maccabees as a source but was writing independently of it. His interest is principally with the events that transpired under the leadership of Judas Maccabeus, so that the book overlaps mainly with 1 Maccabees chapters 1–7. The author indicates that his work is in fact an abridgment of a much longer five-volume description of the revolt by someone named Jason of Cyrene. He has condensed Jason’s work into a single volume. Unlike 1 Maccabees, this account was originally composed in Greek. Whereas 1 Maccabees is a rather straightforward chronicle of what happened leading up to [...]

2024-10-04T14:07:58-04:00October 13th, 2024|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Still More Books of the Apocrypha: Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, and Baruch

In this post I continue discussing the books of the Apocrypha, accepted as part of Scripture by Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches.  These are important books, historically and culturally – but hardly known among Protestant readers.   Here are three more!  Descriptions are taken from my book The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction.   The Wisdom of Solomon The Wisdom of Solomon is a book of positive wisdom (recall Proverbs), which claims to be written by the great king of the United Monarchy. In fact it was written many centuries later, by a Jew in the Diaspora, possibly in the first century b.c.e. or the first century c.e. The book celebrates Wisdom as the greatest gift to humans and insists that it involves proper fear and adoration of God, which will lead to eternal reward. Those who lead ungodly lives, on the other hand “will be punished as their reasoning deserves” (5:10). The exaltation of wisdom recalls Proverbs 8, where Wisdom appears as a female consort with God at the beginning of all [...]

2024-10-04T14:07:00-04:00October 12th, 2024|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Some More of the OT Apocrypha: the Letter of Jeremiah, Additions to Daniel, and 1 Maccabees

The OT Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical books are truly fascinating, even if not widely read.  Few people outside of the Catholic and Orthodox traditions knows about the first one; the other two here though are better known and, in fact, historically significant. Some descriptions from my book The New Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction. ****************************** The Letter of Jeremiah This is one of the shortest books of Apocrypha—it is only one chapter long, and in the Latin tradition of the Roman Catholic Church it is included as the final chapter of the book of Baruch. The book is allegedly written by the prophet Jeremiah, sent to the Judeans bound for Babylonian exile. In exile they will be among people who worship other gods through idols. This book is nothing but an attack on pagan idolatry. The real historical context of the writing is a situation in which Jews around the world were surrounded by idol worship. It may have been produced in the aftermath of the Maccabean Revolt; it appears to have been composed in [...]

2024-10-04T14:05:38-04:00October 10th, 2024|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Some of the Old Testament Apocrypha: Tobit, Judith, and Additions to Esther

In my previous post I began to describe the Old Testament Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical books.  In the several posts that follow I will describe the ones commonly accepted by Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches.   These are very interesting books, well worth reading, and, as I've said, canonical Scripture for some parts of the Christian church. My summaries here are taken from my book, The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction (Oxford, 2018) ****************************** Tobit Tobit is a work of historical fiction —by which I mean it is a fictional tale set within a real historical context. Originally the book was written in Aramaic, either in the late third century b.c.e. or the early second. The narrative is set in the eighth century b.c.e. in the city of Nineveh, where the hero of the story, Tobit, has been exiled from his town in Galilee during the conquests of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser. In other words, the account is allegedly taking place after the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel. The story involves two subplots that eventually [...]

2024-10-04T14:04:19-04:00October 9th, 2024|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

Introducing the Old Testament Apocrypha

Lots of people on the blog seem to be really interested in early Christian apocrypha -- other Gospels, Acts, epistles, apocalypses that did not make it into the New Testament.  It's a major area of fascination for me as well.  But many folk talk about them as "the Apocrypha" and probably that's not quite right -- that is a designation usually reserved for the "Old Testament Apocrypha," which are not Christian books but Jewish. Many years ago I explained what these books are on the blog, and since I still get asked about them by  members, I thought it would be helpful to over that ground again. I begin with a basic overview taken from my textbook on the entire Bible, Genesis to Revelation, The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction, 2nd. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).   ****************************** In addition to the canonical books in the Hebrew Bible, there was other literature written by other Jewish authors that cannot be found there, but that is of great importance for anyone interested in it. [...]

2024-10-05T09:48:18-04:00October 8th, 2024|Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|
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