As you know, the overarching purposes of the blog are (1) to communicate broadly, to a reading public, scholarship on the New Testament and Early Christianity (as opposed to most of the material you find on the Internet, which is almost entirely devotional and not based on historical scholarship) and (2) in doing so, to raise money for charity.   The latter is what keeps me going.  I absolutely love communicating with non-scholars what the scholars are finding about these fundamentally important topics.  But my ultimate passion for the blog is to help people in need.  Hence the charity aspect. As you know, every penny that comes into the blog from membership fees and from direct donations goes to the charities we support.  There are no overhead costs because I pay for the blog myself, as my own contribution. Blog members sometimes indicate they would like to have more information about what those charities are and what they actually do.   There are five that receive our support.  Three of them are local to me:  Urban Ministries [...]

Blogging friends!   I have learned that two of the participants for the fund-raising blog dinner on December 3 will not be able to come after all.   So there are two seats available.  Here is the original announcement.  If you're interested, please let me know!  Tempus is fugiting. ******************************************************************************** On December 3, at 7:00 pm., I will be holding a new kind of blog event in Durham NC: a fund-raising dinner.  It will be at a nice restaurant to be named later.  We will have a maximum of seven places at the table (along with me, making eight). For the fund-raising:  the event is $100 per plate, the money to be donated directly to the blog.    Each person will also pay for his or her own meal. There will be no set agenda for the dinner.  It will be a chance to get to meet each other and talk about matters of mutual interest and importance, especially as they relate to the blog –anything connected, even remotely, with the New Testament and early Christianity.  The basic [...]

The following post is free for anyone who wants to look.  Most posts on the blog are only for members.  The good news is that it's easy and inexpensive to join.  You get five posts a week, for less than 50 cents.   And every cent goes to charity helping those in need.  So why not join???   In my previous post I indicated that I will be doing a short thread that introduces the New Testament very broadly, with the goal of then combining all the posts into one long (4000-5000 word) post that can then be accessed by anyone doing an Internet search for a basic overview.  If you don’t recall: see https://ehrmanblog.org/what-is-the-new-testament-a-broad-overview/ This is my second post of the series.  In it, I give a very, very brief description of each book of the New Testament, the kind of thing you can say without taking another breath.  It seems like this might be useful for anyone who just wants to know what each book is and, very roughy, what it is about. The [...]