BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 104 of 208

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.

Does Your Soul Go To Heaven?

In my previous post I discussed the beginnings of the Jewish idea of the “resurrection of the dead.” This view is a pretty much commonplace today: in every Christian church that recites a creed today, and in many conservative churches that do not use creeds, it is believed that at the end of time there will be some kind of judgment and people will be raised from the dead. At the same time, I have to be frank and say that it seems to me that most Christians – at least the ones I know (not just scholars, but most Christians) – don’t actually *believe* in a future resurrection. They think they die and go to heaven in their souls. Their souls may have some kind of physical attributes: they have all their sense of hearing, seeing, etc., and they can be recognized as who they were so you’ll be able to see your grandmother there. It’s true, even this has always caused problems for people who hold the idea. Which of my many bodies [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:59-04:00August 21st, 2019|Afterlife, Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

An Alternative View of Suffering and the Idea of Resurrection

In yesterday’s post I was explaining why I do not think we need to point to Zoroastrianism as the source or reason for the views of “the resurrection from the dead” emerged within Judaism. This view could have arisen within Judaism itself, because of some internal dynamics. Here in this post I explain how it may have happened. I begin where I ended yesterday: in ancient Israel, as up to today, there have been people who think that the reason they suffer is because they have sinned and God is punishing them for it. Suffering comes from God, to penalize his people for not living as they should. This is sometimes called the “prophetic” or the “classical” view of suffering, because it was the view wide advanced by the Hebrew prophets in the Bible. Most people today, of course, realize it is never that simple. Do we really want to say that birth defects, the death of a child, Alzheimer’s, or any of the other mind-numbing forms of suffering in extremis are punishments from God [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:59-04:00August 20th, 2019|Afterlife, Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Resurrection from the Dead: Were Jews Influenced by Zoroastrianism?

I often get asked if ancient Judaism was influenced by Zoroastrianism or other kinds of Persian thought – especially when it comes to the specific doctrine of the “resurrection of the dead” and, more generally, the whole category of “apocalyptic thought.” I used to think so! Now I’m not so sure. At all. I’ve talked about apocalypticism and resurrection on the blog before. Here I’ll discuss where these ideas came from, before, explaining more fully what they ended up looking like. This discussion is taken from an early draft of my forthcoming book Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife. ********************************************************* After the period of the classical prophets, Jewish thinkers came to imagine that in fact there would be life for the individual who had died. For them, there was a possibility of life beyond the grave – real, full, and abundant life. But in the original Jewish conception, unlike widespread Christian views today, the afterlife was not a glorious eternity lived in the soul in heaven or a tormented existence in hell, attained [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:59-04:00August 19th, 2019|Afterlife, Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Learning New Things

I am constantly awed by some fellow scholars,who have not just enormous range of knowledge about so many things but also an inordinate, almost insatiable curiosity. There aren’t many people like that, but I know some. At the same time I am regularly puzzled by people who simply have no curiosity about much of anything, who have strong opinions about lots and actual knowledge about little, who just don’t have any real curiosity or drive to find answers to anything. I’m not talking about the BIG questions of life (Why are we here? What is the purpose of it all? What should I be doing with my life? Etc. etc.) – although I do find it odd that so many people just don’t think about them. But here I’m talking about knowledge in general. People simply prefer to sludge through life without looking into anything beyond the headlines, without reading books, without finding anything worth looking into. I suppose I too was raised that way and was that way for the early part of my [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:59-04:00August 18th, 2019|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Blog Dinner for NYC Full!

I am pleased to say that the table for the blog dinner in NYC for August 27 is now full. At this point I will start a waiting list, in the event that someone backs out, as often happens. So let me know if you want to be on it. And as other opportunities come up, I'll be sure to post them.

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:59-04:00August 16th, 2019|Public Forum|

Join Me In Egypt? Tour in October 2020!

I am (very) happy to announce that I will be giving lectures on a tour to Egypt on October 16-29, 2020. It's not too early to start planning! On the contrary: the trip hasn't been seriously advertised yet, and already four people have signed up! The trip is sponsored by the University of North Carolina General Alumni Association, BUT -- big point here! -- you do not need to be an alumna/alumnus to come. It's going to be a terrific trip. The final brochure is not ready yet, but you can get the itinerary already from the company putting it on, Orbridge, at: https://orbridge.com/grp_departures/overview/partner_unc_egypt_2020 (Highlights below) It's spectacular. I've done a number of these sites before (Cairo, Pyramids, Luxor, Valley of the Kingd, Karnak Temple, and on and on), BUT, this time we're doing something I've never done before and always wanted to: a four-day cruise down the Nile. How good can it get??? If you want to get more info, call the UNC Alumni office at 877.962.3980, and/or check out their travel website. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:59-04:00August 16th, 2019|Public Forum|

How Views of the Afterlife Changed

I’ve been explaining how the tours to heaven and hell – both of them Near Death Experiences – in the Acts of Thomas are meant to show the Christian alternatives to Greek and Roman views of the afterlife. For early Christians it would not be a dull and boring, powerless and mindless existence for all eternity, as it is depicted in the oldest Greek sources, and it would not require hundreds of years of “purging” where the stains of wickedness are washed out through painful cleansing (e.g., through being thrust into fire or a violent whirlpool for centuries), as in Plato and Virgil. It would be eternal joy or eternal punishment, one or the other, depending on whether you believed in Christ or not. Christians thus provided the ultimate and rather simply answer for life to the ultimate question about death. But even here there was more than a simple binary (one or the other). The punishments in hell in the Acts of Thomas for example, appear to be graded in order to be commensurate [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:58-04:00August 14th, 2019|Afterlife, Christian Apocrypha|

Who Has The Answer For a Happy Afterlife?

A few days ago I gave the opening part of the paper I read at a conference of New Testament scholars a couple of weeks ago, on the accounts of the afterlife in the Christian apocryphal book called Acts of Thomas (an account of Thomas’s missionary adventures in India), one of them involving a near death experienced that revealed the glories of heaven and the other a near death experience of the horrors of hell. Most of the paper involved contrasting those two visions with comparable journeys to the underworld in earlier, more famous accounts, Homer’s description of Odysseus’s vision of the underworld in Odyssey book 11; Plato’s account of the near death experience of a soldier named Er in the Republic book 10; and Virgil’s discussion of Aeneas’s travels to the realms below in the Aeneid book 6. I don’t need to describe these other accounts in detail here, since I’ve talked about them already on the blog some months ago; if you want to refresh your memory, they are here: https://ehrmanblog.org/an-early-otherworldly-journey/ https://ehrmanblog.org/did-ancient-greeks-invent-heaven-and-hell/ [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:58-04:00August 13th, 2019|Afterlife, Book Discussions|

Last Minute (well, sort of): Another Blog Dinner Option. NYC, August 27

OK, this is a bit unexpected. But I'm going to be in New York (Midtown Manhattan) for a few days (that part was expected) and it turns out I'll have an evening free, August 27. And so if anyone's interested I can do a blog dinner. Given the location, it might be kind of pricey, but ... well, if you're interested, wanna come? As per my custom: the table will be limited to eight, of which I will be one. That means seven spots are available. First come first served: please do NOT response here on the blog, but send me a private email, at [email protected]. No agenda from my end, other than simply to have some of us to have a chance to meet and talk about matters of mutual interest. The only requirements for attendance to the dinner are that (a) you are a blog member; (b) you pay your own way – both getting to the event and your meal itself. Otherwise, there is no expense and no requirement. You don’t even [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:58-04:00August 12th, 2019|Public Forum|

An Ancient Author Trying to Justify His Deceit

Yesterday I talked about one Christian forger who got caught red handed who had to explain himself. Well, justify himself. Well, bend over backwards to make himself look innocent. We've been seeing a lot of that these days. It goes way back. Humans are humans. Here is my assessment of the situation, not in terms of our own front-page news but in terms of this obscure little controversy, which highlights my obscure little academic point: in the ancient world, readers simply did not *like* it when they found out someone had written a book claiming to a be a famous person. They condemned it. That should be borne in mine when thinking of other instances of the phenomenon, such as those found in far more familiar books from the early Christian tradition. (And this is the point the riles a number of my scholar friends, who just can't *believe* ancient authors would do something deceitful....) I'll start this post with a bit from the end of the previous one, to remind you about it. If [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:58-04:00August 12th, 2019|Bart's Critics, Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity|

A Christian Forger Caught in the Act

Next month I will be giving a keynote address at a conference dealing with ancient pseudepigrapha at the University of Laval, in Quebec City. I have recently been discussing the topic (of ancient authors falsely claiming to be a famous person) on the blog in relation to the letter of James, and as you know, it was the subject of my monography Forgery and Counterforgery ten years ago, and my spin-off popular account Forged. I haven't worked seriously on the problem since then. But now, because of this upcoming lecture, I'm having to think about it long and hard again, a decade later. Lots of scholars simply don't (or can't?) believe that ancient people -- especially Christians, but others as well -- would lie about their identities. It's not that these scholars doubt that there are lots and lots of pseudepigrapha out there, Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian. There are. But these scholars don't think that the authors were doing anything duplicitous. There are different ways scholars have made this argument, but the basic line [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:58-04:00August 11th, 2019|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity|

Blog Dinner in D.C.: Full!

I am pleased and regret (at the same time) to say that the table for the blog dinner in D.C. in September is now full. I have a waiting list that I have started, and have notified everyone who contacted me (both those at the table and those on the waiting list.) But I'll be doing others this coming year in a few other places! Hopefully others can come to these

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:58-04:00August 9th, 2019|Public Forum|

Who Is The Enemy?

This will be a very personal post, about being an enemy of the Christian faith. I’ve long been amazed, surprised, and perplexed about how, when it comes to religion, comments made in one context are completely non-problematic but when the (exact) same comments are made in another context, they are heinous and threatening. Some of it almost certainly has to do with tone and general attitude. But I wonder if it isn’t actually much broader than that. One of the ways I’ve seen this over the years is in the use of humor. When I was a conservative evangelical Christian at Moody Bible Institute there were all sorts of jokes we would tell about the faith or about our commitments or communities: just about Moody, we would call it Moody Instant Bibletute; or say we went to Moody, where Bible is our middle name. Or someone would say (with respect to the view that the “rapture” would occur prior to, not after, the millennium – something we were very big on indeed!) that he was [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:58-04:00August 9th, 2019|Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Some Very Strange Journeys to Heaven and Hell

This post is free for everyone, but most posts come only to blog members. Joining the blog is easy and it gives you access to tons of material for very little expense. All the money goes to charity. so why not join. Last week I was in Marburg, Germany for the annual conference for the Society of New Testament Studies. This is an international society at the top tier of NT scholars in the world, a closed society that no one can actually *join*. You have to be nominated and voted in, and there are strict academic guidelines (in terms of qualifications and numbers of books and articles published, etc.). I’m not saying I’m in favor of that system, but as we say these days (or at least were saying a year or so ago) it is what it is. I’ve been a member since the 1990s but actually haven’t been to one of the meetings since 1995. But I went to this one because I was asked to read a paper and I’m really [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:58-04:00August 7th, 2019|Afterlife, Christian Apocrypha|

Why Did the Author of James Claim to be James in Particular?

This will be my last post on the epistle of James in the New Testament as “counter”-forgery, that is, as a forgery (a book written by someone falsely claiming to be a famous person) that is written against another book that is itself a forgery (written by someone claiming to be some *other* famous person). In this case, the author is claiming to be James, the actual brother of Jesus, and he is writing to counter views of Paul – but not views Paul himself endorsed (exactly), but later developments of Paul’s views by an author (or authors) who wrote books, after Paul’s death, while *claiming* to be Paul. All a bit confusing! But here I finish by explaining why I think this author of the epistle of James claimed to be James in particular. Why did he choose that name? Why not some other? We will never know for sure, of course, but here are my thoughts about it. (This again is taken from my book Forgery and Counterforgery; I’ve added a couple of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:58-04:00August 6th, 2019|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity|

Blog Dinner, Washington DC. September 6, 2019

On Friday, September 6, 2019, at 7:00 pm, I will be hosting a Blog Dinner for blog members (members only, I'm afraid) at the Bistro Bis at the George Hotel in Washington D.C. The table is limited to eight. I'm one of them. That means that seven spots are available. First come first served: please do NOT response here on the blog, but send me a private email, at [email protected]. The occasion is the Smithsonian Associates Seminar I'm doing the next day, four lectures on "More Controversies in Early Christianity": Here's the website. https://smithsonianassociates.org/ticketing/tickets/more-great-controversies-in-early-christianity-bart-ehrman-ponders-four-new-questions?utm_source=RAad&utm_medium=OAtsa&utm_content=mwX&utm_campaign=MayWe Please note: you do NOT need to be attending the seminar to attend the dinner. The dinner is designed simply to allow us to have a chance to get to know each other and talk about matters of mutual interest. The only requirements for attendance to the dinner would be that (a) you be a blog member; (b) you pay your own way – both getting to the event and your meal itself. Otherwise, there is no expense and no requirement. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:58-04:00August 5th, 2019|Public Forum|

Is the Author of James Rejecting Paul Himself?

I have been talking about how the letter of James appears to refer to Paul's letters in order to contradict them (as has long been thought by scholars -- going back at least to Martin Luther). But as it turns out, I don't think it's actually that simple. I briefly mentioned this in an earlier post, but here is the fuller scoop. This again is taken from my book Forgery and Counterforgery. I should remind you what I mean by those terms, "forgery" and "counterforgery." The term "forgery" is a technical term for a book that claims to be written by a famous person who in fact did not write it. (So "forgery" does NOT mean, in this context, something like "a made-up story." It refers specifically to the claim by an author -- either explicit or implicit -- to be someone other than he is.) A "counter-forgery" is a kind of forgery -- it refers to a forgery written in order to contradict the views found precisely in someone else's forgery (whether or not [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:58-04:00August 5th, 2019|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters|

Scribes Who Changed Their Texts on Purpose

I've been browsing through some old posts and came upon this one from years ago, about this time. It's an interesting topic that people on the blog frequently ask me about: did scribes really change the texts of the NT on purpose, and how can we know? The answers are simply: almost certainly yes and it's difficult! Here's an example I talked about back then, one of the most intriguing instances in the Gospel of Mark, where the scribes who changed the text ended up having almost NO effect on Bible translations today; most translators agree on the "original" form of the text. But the change is really interesting, and can show the sorts of reasons scribes were doing this kind of thing. Here's the original post, slightly edited. ************************************************************* I have started giving some instances of what appear to be “intentional” changes made by scribes, as opposed to simple, accidental, slips of the pen. Here's another instance of the phenomenon I stress that these alterations “appear” to be intentional since, technically speaking, we [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:57-04:00August 4th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts|

The Close Connections of James and Paul

I continue here my comparison of the wording of the book of James to the writing of Paul, in order to establish the point that whoever wrote James, it was someone who was directly responding to the letters of Paul (because he imitates Paul’s wording while refuting his views.) This will lead then to my argument – not yet made – that the author of James is in fact writing a “counter-forgery” – that is he is writing a forgery in order to counter later writings forged in the name of Paul. (I know this can be confusing: but I’m not saying he’s writing directly against Paul. He may *think* he is, but my argument is that he will be opposed to later writings claiming to be Paul; that argument will start in my next post.) Here now is the second example of the borrowing of Pauline writings: ************************************************** James 2:24 and Gal. 2:16 and Rohhhm. 3:28 James 2:24: You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone Gal. 2:16: [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:57-04:00August 2nd, 2019|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters|

Is James Responding to Paul?

I now begin to explain why someone might have wanted to (falsely) claim to be James the brother of Jesus when writing the letter attributed to him in the NT. My basic argument is that the letter is being written to oppose the writings of Paul (at least as they were being *interpreted*: whether Paul himself would have agreed with the interpretation of his views that they oppose is a completely different question), and the author needed someone of the stature of James in order to make the refutation convincing, both because James was the head of the Jerusalem church and because it was widely thought that he was at loggerheads with Paul. I have taken this again from my book Forgery and Counterforgery. It’s written for scholars, but I’ve tried to make it accessible by explaining the terms I use and translating the Greek. This will take a few posts, so here’s the start, where I lay the groundwork: the letter of James does seem to be responding to the writings of Paul. ************************************************************** [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:40-04:00July 31st, 2019|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters|

Previous 1···103104105···208 Next