BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 134 of 179

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.

Can A Made-Up Story Be A False Memory?

It has become clear to me, in seeing a number of responses to my posts on memory, that I’m not quite explaining myself clearly enough to get my point across to everyone. So, well, what else is new? When I have mentioned “false memories” in the Gospels – that is, recollections of Jesus that are not true to what really happened – some readers have pointed out that these may not be memories at all, but they may simply be what the Gospel writers made up for their own reasons. In that case Jesus isn’t being “remembered” in these ways. Someone’s just making up stuff. In response to that view, let me make two points, the second one of which is the the most relevant and important. The first, though, is that in most cases I don’t think there is any way to know whether a non-historical tradition in the Gospels is something that the Gospel writer inherited from others before him or invented himself. Take Luke’s story of how Jesus came to be born [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:51:35-04:00April 10th, 2015|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Memory Studies|

My Memory Book, Ch. 4a

Chapter four of my book, tentatively entitled “False Memories and the Death of Jesus,” is where I address head-on the psychology of memory. My principal interest, at the end of the day, involves the problems of memory, of how memories for things we experience or hear about can be frail, faulty, and even false. That’s not to deny that most of the time our memories are pretty decent. If they weren’t we wouldn’t be able to function, either as individuals or a society. And so of course most of what we remember is what really happened. At the same time, we often (more than we usually admit -- even to ourselves) forget things and, more interesting and important, misremember things. That obviously creates a big problem for historians. If our access to the past is mainly through sources that have themselves remembered what happened – either because they were there or because they heard it from others (who possibly heard it from others who heard it from others, and so on) – and memories can [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:51:22-04:00April 10th, 2015|Book Discussions, Memory Studies|

My Memory Book, ch. 3

In my previous post I started to summarize what I will be covering in my new book, which hopefully will be published next spring, possibly under the title Jesus Before the Gospels. After devoting the first chapter to a demonstration that everyone agrees that some early Christians were inventing stories about Jesus (as seen in the apocryphal Gospels; it should be stressed – those who read and thought about these Gospels “remembered” Jesus in light of the stories they told),and a second chapter to showing how critical scholars, for as long as there have been critical scholars (late 18th century) have argued that also in the NT there are “invented” traditions that also affected how Jesus was remembered, I move on in the next chapter as follows. (My original plan for this thread was to summarize all six major chapters of my book in one post; then it was to summarize two chapters per post; but I want to devote an entire post to this chapter! And so it goes….) Chapter three is tentatively entitled, [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:51:15-04:00April 8th, 2015|Book Discussions, History of Biblical Scholarship, Memory Studies|

My Memory Book, chs. 1-2

So, as I mentioned in the previous post, I did not start writing my current book until I had a very full outline already in place. With a massive outline that covers everything you want to say, the book pretty much writes itself. Well, that’s what I tell people. It’s not true, of course; but I have found that once all the hard work of research and outlining is finished, the writing – just for me, of course – is the very, very different chore of putting into clear and compelling words the ideas that I already know that I want to express. It’s a completely different kind of task. I won’t reproduce here the outline of my book (for which you should be glad since, as I mentioned, it’s 42 pages long….). But I will say something about the six main chapters to give you an idea of how it will flow. Here I’ll summarize the first two chapters. In the following posts I’ll cover the other four. Chapter One is tentatively entitled “Oral [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:51:04-04:00April 7th, 2015|Book Discussions, History of Biblical Scholarship, Memory Studies|

How I’m Writing This Book

I have been asked about how I am actually writing my book just now. Here are some reflections. One of the things you figure out pretty quickly when writing a book is that it never goes as planned. Things (usually) take longer than you thought they would; or they (rarely) go faster. For most authors, the structure of the book changes as they start writing it, and they realize that they really have to say more about this and they really probably should say less about that. They realize that, contrary to what they thought, they need to devote an entire chapter to something that they had planned to cover in a few paragraphs. Key (verbal) illustrations that they planned to use don’t actually work that well. And they come up with new ideas in the process of writing. Different authors have remarkably different approaches to writing. My wife Sarah and I are about as different as they come. In large measure, I think, that’s because our brains work so differently. Sarah is drop-dead brilliant. [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:50:52-04:00April 6th, 2015|Book Discussions, Memory Studies, Reflections and Ruminations|

Sketch of My Memory Book

Please read to the end of this post if you want to learn about a highly unusual opportunity. I started writing my book on memory and the oral traditions about Jesus this week. My plan was to have an intense week at it. I’m teaching my regular two classes this term: a three-hour PhD seminar on the use of literary forgery in the early Christian tradition, and an undergraduate lecture course, Introduction to the New Testament. So I had to do those this week as well, in addition to departmental meetings and meetings with grad students, and so on. But even so, I planned to write the book every free minute I had, and I did. I started Tuesday morning and by yesterday afternoon I had three of the six major chapters written. I celebrated with a very big cigar, and am taking today more or less off! Here I would like to say a few words about what the book is and what it will cover. The tentative title I have for it is [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-09T08:40:20-05:00April 4th, 2015|Book Discussions, Memory Studies|

Different Kinds of Memory

I indicated in the last post that I got interested in the study of memory for both personal and professional reasons. Professionally, I had long been interested in the question of how eyewitnesses would have remembered the life of Jesus, and how the stories about Jesus may have been shifted and altered and invented in later times based on faulty or even false memories. That led me to be interested in memory more broadly. Memory is an enormous field of research, just within cognitive psychology. I spent months doing nothing but reading important studies, dozens and dozens of books and articles. It is really interesting stuff. Memory is not at all what I started out thinking it was. Like most people I had this vague notion in my head that memory worked kind of like a camera. You see or experience something and take a photo of it and store it in your head. Sometimes the photo might fade, or you might mistake one photo for another, but basically it is all in there in [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:53:10-04:00April 1st, 2015|Book Discussions, Memory Studies, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Original Interest in Memory

When I decided no longer to do a commentary on the Gospel of Peter and other early Greek Gospel fragments it was not only because I realized that I was not up for two or three years of that particular kind of laborious detailed work. It was also because there was another area of research that I was really, really interested in but that I knew very little about. That was the study of memory. I was interested in memory for both personal and professional reasons. On the personal level, I have known people very close to me who have experienced serious memory problems, for example through strokes. Depending on what part of the brain is affected, different memory functions are damaged. For example, someone may remember perfectly well what happened in an event 20 years ago, but forget a conversation they just had. I have often wondered why and how that is.. And then there was my own memory. For some things I have a terrific memory. And for lots of things I have [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:53:20-04:00March 31st, 2015|Book Discussions, Memory Studies|

Why I Shifted My Research Plans

In my last post I started explaining how I came to work on issues of memory. My plan had been something else, to write a detailed commentary on the Gospel of Peter and other early Greek Gospel fragments. I had been committed to do this for years, with a book contract with Fortress Press for their commentary series that is called Hermeneia. Just by way of background: when I was just out of graduate school, I vowed to myself that there were three kinds of books I would never, ever write. I would never write a textbook. I would never write a book on the historical Jesus. And I would never write a commentary. The reason for each was that there simply were too many of each kind of book out there already, and I simply didn’t want to tread where so many others had trod. So much for my vows. I did end up writing a textbook on the NT. That wasn’t my idea; my publisher twisted my arm and I agreed, and I [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:53:28-04:00March 30th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

My New Project on Memory

I am going to take a break from my thread that has been dealing with which books from Christian antiquity I would most like to have discovered. I haven’t gotten very deep into the thread: basically my answers so far have been: the lost letters of Paul, the letters of Paul’s opponents, and Q. There are a lot more that I’d like to discuss, and will discuss relatively soon. But for now I’m going to break off into something else, because I am at a crucial point of my research/writing and I want to deal with that for a while. As many of you know, I have spent almost all my research time for more than a year now working on issues of memory. I have now read all that I need to read for my next book, a trade book for a general audience, on how Jesus was “remembered” by early Christians in the decades before any of the Gospels were written. My plan is to start writing on Tuesday. Gods willing, I’ll have [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-09T08:41:20-05:00March 29th, 2015|Book Discussions, Memory Studies, Public Forum|

Jesus, Matthew, and the Law

In my previous post I discussed the differences – what strike me, at least, as the differences – between the Gospel of Matthew and Paul’s letter to the Galatians and with respect to whether the followers of Jesus are to follow the law or not. Matthew’s Gospel indicates that the law will not cease to be in force until the heavens and earth pass away, and that Jesus’ followers need to follow the law to the limit, to follow it even better than the scribes and Pharisees do. Paul, on the other hand, insists that the followers of Jesus must not think that they have to follow the law. Any gentile who thinks he has to be circumcised, or to follow other aspects of the Jewish law, is in danger of losing salvation. I would like to clarify one point about my view and explain one of its complications. Clarification: in my post I was not discussing whether Paul saw eye-to-eye with Jesus about this issue. My post was about the Gospel of Matthew. I [...]

BDEhrman2022-07-03T16:27:08-04:00March 27th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Paul and His Letters|

Is Paul at Odds with Matthew?

In yesterday’s post I indicated that I really very much wish that we could have some of the writings produced by Paul’s opponents in Galatia. They believed that in order to be a follower of Jesus, a person had to accept and follow the Law of Moses as laid out in the Jewish Scriptures. Men were to be circumcised to join the people of God; men and women were, evidently, to adopt a Jewish lifestyle. Presumably that meant keeping kosher, observing the Sabbath, and so on. Anyone who didn’t do this was not really a member of the people of God, since to be one of God’s people meant following the law that God had given. Paul was incensed at this interpretation of the faith and insisted with extraordinary vehemence that it was completely wrong. The gentile followers of Jesus were not, absolutely not, supposed to become Jewish. Anyone who thought so rendered the death of Jesus worthless. It was only that death, and the resurrection, that made a person right with God. Nothing else. [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:53:57-04:00March 25th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Paul and His Letters|

Paul’s Christian Enemies: Galatians

In my previous post I indicated that among the lost writings of early Christianity, one batch that I would especially like to see discovered would be those produced by Paul’s enemies among the Christians. I don’t know how many of his opponents were writing-literate, but possibly some of them were, and their own attacks on him and defenses of their own positions would be fascinating and eye-opening. Among these, I would especially love to see what his opponents in Galatia had to say for themselves. My hunch is that they were every bit as aggressive and confident in their views as Paul was in his. I’ve always found the letter to the Galatians to be one of the most forceful, intriguing, and difficult letters of Paul. I’ve studied it for over forty years, and there are still verses that I don’t understand. My view is that most scholars don’t understand them either -- even the scholars who think they do! It is a packed and theologically dense letter in places. But the basic point is [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:54:04-04:00March 24th, 2015|Paul and His Letters|

Trip to Turkey?

This coming June I will be going on a tour sponsored by the UNC Alumni Association to Turkey for two weeks, giving lectures on the apostle Paul (who established churches there). (Actually I'll be there three weeks, since there is an "extension" of the tour that some folks are going on to Cappadocia, a truly amazing place.) It is a very small tour -- only 26 people, and a fantastic itinerary. Someone has cancelled out from going, and so there is a spot for a couple (two people of any sort who want to share a bed). You would not need to be a UNC alum (they charge some token amount to "count" you as an alum). Is anyone interested? If so, send me a direct email at [email protected] Information about the trip -- costs, itinerary, etc. -- can be found here: http://bit.ly/1N7OU1D

BDEhrman2015-03-23T21:23:27-04:00March 23rd, 2015|Public Forum|

Lost Letters of Paul’s Opponents

I’m back now to my thread on the lost writings of the early Christians that I would love to have discovered. Onr bunch that would be absolutely fantastic to have would be the letters of Paul’s *opponents.* I get asked all the time if I think that Paul is the true founder of Christianity and whether we should call it Paulinanity instead of Christianity (and related questions). My answer is decidedly NO. For two main reasons. The first is the most obvious: Paul did not himself invent Christianity. He inherited it. It is difficult to establish a firm chronology of Paul’s life. There are scholars who have devoted many years just to this topic. It’s messy and complicated. My colleague from Duke, Douglas Campbell, has just written an-over-400-page book dealing just with the chronology of Paul’s *letters*, Framing Paul: An Epistolary Biography. It is about how to situate the surviving letters of Paul (Douglas accepts ten of the thirteen as authentic – all but 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) chronologically in relation to one [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:54:13-04:00March 23rd, 2015|Paul and His Letters|

About the Blog: Charities and Improvements

This post is about the blog itself, dealing with the question of which charities it supports (in reply to numerous requests) mentioning several of improvements we have made in response to requests that I have received. First, philanthropy. As I think everyone on the blog knows, all the member fees and all the donations (which you should feel free to begin or continue to make!) go to charity. I don’t keep a dime for myself and I pay for the upkeep, maintenance, and support for the blog (it’s not as cheap as one might imagine….) (or at least as I did) out of my own pocket. But I’m happy to do it – it’s a fantastic cause. Several people have pointed out to me that my *explanation* about the charity aspect of the blog on the Philanthropy page on is fairly pathetic. It doesn’t even indicate which charities the blog supports. That’s a problem. And so it’s time to rectify it. All the moneys collected by the blog go into the Bart Ehrman Foundation, and [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-09T11:00:50-05:00March 22nd, 2015|Public Forum|

Q and the Passion Narrative

This, I think (!), will be my last post for now on the Q source apparently used by Matthew and Luke for many of their sayings materials, a source that must at one time have existed (since Matthew and Luke appear both to have had access to it), that was written in Greek (otherwise Matthew and Luke could not agree word-for-word in places – in Greek -- in their non-Markan sayings material), and that contained almost exclusively (or exclusively) sayings of Jesus. There are many other issues that we could discuss about Q, but for now I would like to end by mentioning just one. It is regularly and routinely maintained by New Testament scholars that one of the striking features of Q is that it contains a list of Jesus’ sayings and no passion narrative – no account of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Scholars then draw a conclusion: the death of Jesus was not important to the community that produced the Q document. I have to admit, I’m not completely convinced of this claim, [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:54:23-04:00March 20th, 2015|Canonical Gospels|

Did Matthew Copy Luke or Luke Matthew?

In this thread, which is supposed to be on the lost writings of early Christianity that I would most like to have discovered, I can’t seem to get away from Q, Several readers have asked a pointed question about Q. If you recall, Q is the hypothetical document that contained principally sayings of Jesus, that was evidently used by Matthew and Luke (but not by Mark) in constructing their Gospels. The logic is that if Matthew and Luke both used Mark (which the vast majority of scholars agree about), then one has to explain why they have so many other materials (mainly sayings) in common not *found* in Mark. I have pointed out that Matthew does not seem to have gotten those sayings from Luke or Luke from Matthew, and so they both most have gotten them from some other one-time-existing source. That is what we call Q (for the German word Quelle: Source). But some readers have asked WHY it is unlikely that Matthew got these sayings from Luke or Luke from Matthew. It’s [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:54:33-04:00March 19th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

Q and The Gospel of Thomas

Before I move on to discuss other lost books from early Christianity that I would love to have discovered (I know, this thread could go on forever, since I would like *every* early Christian writing to be discovered) I need to answer a couple of queries that I have received about the Q source. First, several people have asked me whether it is possible that the Q source is actually what we now call the Gospel of Thomas, one of the books discovered among the so-called Nag Hammadi Library in 1945. I don’t want to go into great depth about the Gospel of Thomas here since, well, it has been discovered and this thread is about book s that have *not* been discovered. But I do need to say some basics about Thomas and its relation to Q. By way of background, let me say something a bit more about the Q-hypothesis. When 19th century German scholars established with a reasonable level of certainty that Mark was the first Gospel written and that Matthew and [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:54:42-04:00March 18th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Christian Apocrypha|

Evidence that the Synoptics Are Copying (one another? other sources?)

In yesterday’s post, when talking about the one-time existence of Q, I indicated that scholars have long recognized that there must be some kind of literary relationship among Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the Synoptic Gospels, since they have so many similarities: they tell many of the same stories, often in the same sequence, and sometimes – lots of times – in the very same words. That is to say, someone must be copying someone else, or they are all using the same written sources. Some of my students have trouble seeing that if two documents are word-for-word the same, one must be copying the other (or they both are copying a third source). Older adults don’t seem to have any problem seeing that, right off the bat. But younger adults need to be convinced. And so I do a little experiment with them that more or less proves it. I do this every year in my New Testament class, which normally has 200-300 students in it. I come to class a minute or two late [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:54:50-04:00March 17th, 2015|Canonical Gospels|

Previous 1···133134135···179 Next