BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 14 of 203

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.

The Letter to Philemon in a Nutshell

I come now to the final Pauline letter of the New Testament, Philemon. If you recall, Paul’s letters are ordered by length; this is by far the shortest, a real one-pager. Given it’s brevity, I’ll be dealing with its major themes and emphases and the questions of Who, When and Why in just this one post. First, a 50-word summary: Paul’s letter to his former convert Philemon concerns Philemon’s slave Onesimus, who has fled from his master, possibly with stolen goods, found Paul in prison, converted, and begged him to intervene on his behalf-- which Paul does by urging Philemon to receive his slave as a fellow believer, without punishment. Here is how I discuss the letter in my book The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Oxford University Press), edited a bit. ************* The letter to Philemon is a little gem hidden away in the inner recesses of the New Testament. Merely a single page in length, the size of an average Greco-Roman letter, it is the only [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:12:33-04:00July 2nd, 2025|Public Forum|

Another Puzzling Figure in the Hebrew Bible: Woman Wisdom?

Here is another tidbit from the Hebrew Bible section of first edition of my textbook that covered Genesis to Revelation, book-by-book, now being edited for a third edition with Joel Baden. ****************************** Box 1.2: Woman Wisdom as God’s Consort? We have seen that in ancient Israel Yahweh was sometimes thought to have a divine consort, his “Asherah” (Note: if you're interested in this topic, we have just published a one-lecture course on it by Dan McClellan: The Israelite Goddess Asherah.) This was never accepted by the strict henotheists who wrote the historical and prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible, but in Proverbs, a book of Wisdom, there is a passage that some interpreters have thought represents a kind of modified or “tamed” view of Yahweh and his divine female companion from eternity past. Here she is not Asherah, but Wisdom herself, shown to be speaking in Proverbs 8: The LORD created me at the beginning [or “as the beginning”] of his work, the first of his acts of long ago Ages ago [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:12:33-04:00June 29th, 2025|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Who Was the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53?

Here is another post on the Hebrew Bible from the blog in 2012, written while I was working on the first edition of my Bible Introduction. It is an excerpt from my first rough draft of a discussion of an unusually important passage in the book of Isaiah. Brief context: at this point I was discussing Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55), almost universally thought by scholars to be written by a different author from chapters 1-39 (themselves written by Isaiah of Jerusalem in the 8th c. BCE). Second Isaiah was writing after the destruction of Judah and Jerusalem (including the temple) in 586 BCE, while the leaders of the people and many of the elite had been taken into exile in Babylon, in what is known as the Babylonian Captivity. ****************************** No passage of Second Isaiah has intrigued readers and interpreters – especially among Christians – more than the four passages that are dedicated to describing a figure known as the “Suffering Servant.” Some scholars have called these passages “songs,” or “songs of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:12:19-04:00June 28th, 2025|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

One of the Stranger Stories of Scripture

Here is another tidbit from the original version of my Bible Introduction. It may be old news for a lot of you, but it's fun to write this kind of thing up for college students, who have never heard of such a thing! ****************************** One of the most mysterious and even bizarre stories in Genesis happens right at the beginning of the flood narrative, where we are told that the “sons of God” looked down among the human “daughters,” saw that they were beautiful, and came down and had sex with them leading, to the Nephilim. The word Nephilim means “fallen ones.” According to Numbers 13:33, the Nephilim were giants. So what is going on here in Genesis? Apparently there were angelic beings (the “sons of God”) who lusted after human women, cohabited with them, and their offspring were giants. It is at that point that God decides to destroy the world. The situation was too weird even for him. This brief episode has parallels in other ancient mythologies. It is common [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:12:19-04:00June 26th, 2025|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

How We Know the World Was Created in 4004 BCE…

In my Bible Intro, I included a number of "boxes" that deal with issues that are somewhat tangential to the main discussion, but of related interest or importance. Here's one of the ones in my chapter on Genesis, in connection with interpretations that want to take the book as science or history. For a lot of you, this will be old news. But then again, so is Genesis. ****************************** In 1650 CE, an Irish archbishop and scholar, James Ussher, engaged in a detailed study of when the world began. Ussher based his calculations on the genealogies of the Bible, starting with those in the book of Genesis (which state not only who begat whom, but also indicate, in many instances, how long each of the people thus begotten lived) and a detailed study of other ancient sources, such as Babylonian and Roman history. On these grounds, he argued that the world was created in 4004 BCE — in fact, at noon on October 23. This chronology became dominant throughout Western Christendom. It [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:12:19-04:00June 25th, 2025|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

Understanding the Hebrew Bible: The “Old” Testament in Modern Scholarship
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Understanding the Hebrew Bible: The “Old” Testament in Modern Scholarship

Hebrew Bible/Old Testament

Understanding the Hebrew Bible: The “Old” Testament in Modern Scholarship

Would you like some help in understanding the Hebrew Bible? I have two unofficial announcements to make (official ones are yet to come). The first is that we are producing a third edition of my texbook: The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction (Oxford University Press) which provides up-to-date scholarship on the entire Bible from Genesis to Revelation, book-by-book. I say "we" because I've been fortunate to acquire a co-author to edit the portion on the Hebrew Bible, Joel Baden (PhD Harvard, 2007), Professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale University. I love teaching Hebrew Bible (I've taught it at both Rutgers and UNC), but it's obviously not my main area of expertise. Joel is one of the top scholars in the world. He has produced already an incredibly well-received course for us for Biblical Paths in Religion: "The Rise and Fall of Biblical Israel" (also available to anyone in the Biblical Studies Academy. AND (second unofficial announcement), in the fall he will be doing a full semester-long course on Hebrew Bible, in the same venue. To [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:12:19-04:00June 24th, 2025|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

My Least Favorite Passage of the Pastorals: Those Silent and Submissive Women….

I'd like to conclude this thread on the Pastoral epistles by discussing at greater length the one passage that I think has done more damage than nearly any other. It involves women in the church. The story of women in the entire Bible is long and complex, but it starts in the beginning (Genesis 1-2) and continues all the way through. The traditional Christian views ultimately derive from the New Testament. In an earlier set of posts I explained why women were actually prominent, important, and authoritative leaders of the Christian church in its earliest days – they were unusually present and active in the Jesus movement while he was living, as well as in the earliest churches we know about, those connected with Paul (who has received a rather unfair rap as one of the world’s great misogynists). But it was not long before men took over the movement and suppressed women’s voices and roles. We are obviously still living with that today, in a world where the largest Christian body, the Catholic Church, still [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:12:33-04:00June 22nd, 2025|Paul and His Letters, Women in Early Christianity|

The Pastoral Epistles. For Further Reading

Here is an annotated list of books on the Pastoral Epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, most of them relevant to all the Deutero-Pauline epistles with a couple of commentaries that deal with 2 Thessalonians. One benefit of serious commentaries is that they always begin by discussing major critical issues in understanding a book: authorship, date, historical context, major themes, disputed issues, and so on. ****************************** Beker, J. Christiaan. The Heirs of Paul: Paul’s Legacy in the New Testament and in the Church Today. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1991. A clear assessment of the theology of the Deutero-Pauline, especially in light of the views embodied in the undisputed Paulines. Ehrman, Bart D. Forged: Writing in the Name of God—Why the Biblical Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are. San Francisco: Harper One, 2010. An account of the phenomenon of literary forgery (pseudepigraphy) throughout the early Christian tradition that asks how and why a Christian author would try to deceive his readers about his own identity, written for a popular audience; it it I deal [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:12:33-04:00June 21st, 2025|Paul and His Letters|

More Evidence That the Pastoral Epistles Were Written After the Days of Paul

I now conclude this short thread and who wrote the Pastoral epistles, when, and why by picking up on my previous argument: that aspects of these letters reveal a church situation after Paul’s day when proto-orthodox Christians were appealing to the authorities of the clergy, the creed, and the canon of Scripture to support their views, in contrast to those of “false teachers. The Creed Proto-orthodox Christians of the second and third centuries felt a need to develop a set of doctrines that were to be subscribed to by all true believers. As was the case with the proto-orthodox clergy, the proto-orthodox creed was acclaimed as a creation of the apostles themselves: hence the name of the most famous of these statements of faith, devised in the fourth century and known today as the Apostles’ Creed. The proto-orthodox creeds affirmed beliefs that were denied by other groups who claimed to be Christian, and they repudiated beliefs that these other groups affirmed. For example, Gnostic Christians claimed that there were many gods, not just one; and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:12:19-04:00June 19th, 2025|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters|

The Later (post-Pauline) Context of the Pastoral Epistles

In my previous post I showed why the vocabulary of the Pastoral epistles and the kinds of problems they address suggest that they were written after Paul’s time, by a follower who was using his name. As I indicated there, of particular importance for establishing they do not come directly from Paul is the way in which “false teachings” are attacked in the Pastorals, for the author’s basic orientation appears to be very much like what we find developing in second-century proto-orthodox circles. In some ways, to understand this different orientation we have to think about how it is that one kind of Christianity came to be dominant within the rising religion. Christianity of the second and third centuries (long after Paul) was widely diversified, with all sorts of teachers teaching all sorts of things (with numerous questions unresolved: how many gods are there? Was Christ human? Divine? Both somehow? How? What books are Scriptural authority? How should the church be organized? Etc. etc.). But out of that wild diversity one Christian movement of the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:12:19-04:00June 18th, 2025|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters|

Who Wrote the Pastoral Epistles? When? And Why?
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Who Wrote the Pastoral Epistles? When? And Why?

Paul and His Letters

Who Wrote the Pastoral Epistles? When? And Why?

Now that I have given an overview of each of the Pastoral epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, I can turn to the key question of whether Paul actually wrote them, when they were written, and why. This will take several posts. I have taken the information with some revision by book, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. To begin with, when discussing the question of the authorship of these letters, we should constantly remember that we are not asking whether Christians in the first or second century would have forged documents in Paul’s name. We know for a fact that some did: 2 Thessalonians alludes to a forged letter (2:2). Moreover, everyone agrees that some of the writings that survive in Paul’s name are Christian forgeries (e.g., the correspondence between “Paul” and the philosopher Seneca, and the apocalypse written by “Paul”). What we are asking, then, is whether any given document that claims to be written by Paul can sustain its claim. Most scholars are reasonably convinced [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:12:18-04:00June 17th, 2025|Paul and His Letters|

The Pastoral Epistles of 2 Timothy and Titus in a Nutshell

I continue now with my nutshell overviews of the Pastorals by summarizing 2 Timothy and Titus. I begin with a 50-word overview of the book Timothy. 2 Timothy, a more intimate letter (allegedly) by Paul to Timothy, recounts their past relationship, expresses hope that his disciple will come to visit him in prison in Rome, and urges him to fulfil his duties as leader of the church by quashing false teaching and maintaining his upright character. Here is a longer sketch of the book from my New Testament Introduction. 2 Timothy The second Pastoral epistle presupposes a somewhat different situation from th efirst. It too is written by “Paul” to Timothy (2 Tim 1:1). Now, however, “Paul” is in prison in Rome (2 Tim 1:16–17; his location in 1 Timothy was not specified), and he is clearly expecting to be put to death soon (4:6–8) after a second judicial proceeding (the first one evidently did not go well; 4:17). He writes to Timothy not only to encourage him to continue his pastoral ministry [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:12:18-04:00June 15th, 2025|Paul and His Letters|

The Pastoral Epistle of 1 Timothy in a Nutshell

In this series providing summaries of each book of the New Testament “in a nutshell” I have dealt with three of the letters that claim to be written by Paul but probably were not: Colossians, Ephesians, and 2 Thessalonians. We now come to the three letters that are grouped together and called the “Pastoral Epistles,” 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. For reasons we will see, there is a wide scholarly consensus that these books were not actually written by Paul. Before addressing the issue of authorship, I’d like to note the ostensible distinctive themes and emphases of these books, both as a group (since most scholars are reasonably certain that they all came from the same pen) and individually. The three letters are grouped together as Pastoral epistles because each claims to be written by Paul to a person he has appointed to lead one of his churches: Timothy, his young companion left to minister among the Christians in Ephesus, and Titus, his companion left on the island of Crete. Moreover, these epistles contain [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:12:18-04:00June 14th, 2025|Paul and His Letters|

In the Weeds with the Author of 2 Thessalonians

I thought it migh be interesting for readers who like on occasion to get down into the weeds of scholarship to see a more detailed argument for how the *similarity* of 2 Thessalonians to 1 Thessalonians suggests not that Paul wrote both of them but that a later author (of 2 Thessalonians) was imitating Paul's authentic letter (1 Thessalonians). Here's how I express the case in my book Forgery and Counterforgery (Oxford University Press). [Don't worry about the Greek: you can either just see the similar letters or look up the verses in your English translation]: 2 Thessalonians as a Forgery One reason the case for the inauthenticity of 2 Thessalonians has occasionally seemed wanting, even to some very fine scholars, is that critics have often resorted to a shotgun approach, citing every possible argument, good or bad, in support of their position. It is all too easy to dismiss bad arguments, leaving an appearance of evidence in balance, pro and con. And so, for example, the letter is often said to lack Paul’s customary [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:12:18-04:00June 12th, 2025|Paul and His Letters|

2 Thessalonians, The Modern State of Israel, World War III, and the Return of Jesus
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2 Thessalonians, The Modern State of Israel, World War III, and the Return of Jesus

Paul and His Letters

2 Thessalonians, The Modern State of Israel, World War III, and the Return of Jesus

An obscure verse in 2 Thessalonians may conceivably lead to World War III. OK, it sounds sensational and implausible, but hear me out. The following is taken from my book Armageddon (Simon & Schuster, 2023), edited for this occasion. ****************************** Evangelical Christians historically have believed that the Bible predicts the future, that many prophecies are being fulfilled in our day, and that they will continue to be fulfilled until the end comes when Jesus returns from heaven in judgment on the living and the dead. One thing that needs to happen is that the Temple in Jerusalem needs to be rebuilt. The end cannot come before then. And so they can appeal to the prophecy of Ezekiel: They shall live in the land that I gave to my servant Jacob, in which your ancestors lived; they and their children and their children’s children shall live there forever; and my servant David shall be their prince forever. I will make a covenant of peace with them; it shall be an everlasting covenant with them and I will bless [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:12:17-04:00June 11th, 2025|Paul and His Letters|

2 Thessalonians: For Further Reading

Here is an annotated list of books on 2 Thessalonians, most of them relevant to all the Deutero-Pauline epistles (that is, the letters that are assigned a “secondary” standing in the New Testament collection of Paul’s letters because scholars doubt they were actually composed by Paul himself) with a couple of commentaries that deal with 2 Thessalonians. One benefit of serious commentaries is that they always begin by discussing major critical issues in understanding a book: authorship, date, historical context, major themes, disputed issues, and so on. ****************************** Beker, J. Christiaan. The Heirs of Paul: Paul’s Legacy in the New Testament and in the Church Today. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1991. A clear assessment of the theology of the Deutero-Pauline, especially in light of the views embodied in the undisputed Paulines. Ehrman, Bart D. Forged: Writing in the Name of God—Why the Biblical Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are. San Francisco: Harper One, 2010. An account of the phenomenon of literary forgery (pseudepigraphy) throughout the early Christian tradition that asks how and why a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:12:17-04:00June 10th, 2025|Public Forum|

2 Thessalonians: Who Wrote It, When, and Why?

In my previous post I explained the major theses and emphases of 2 Thessalonians, and pointed out that in many ways it is very similar in its concerns and themes to 1 Thesssalonians. But I also said that it is commonly considered by scholars to be "Deutero-Pauline," that is, written by a later author only *claiming* to be Paul. How can we know? As I said there, the problem from a historian’s point of view is that someone who had decided to imitate Paul would no doubt try to sound like Paul. If both Paul and an imitator of Paul could sound like Paul, how could we possibly know whether we are dealing with the apostle himself or one of his later followers? Here's how I deal with the matter in my textbook on the New Testament (Oxford University Press, ch. 23). ****************************** There is, in fact, a way to resolve this kind of historical whodunit, and it involves looking at the other side of the coin, that is, at the parts of 2 Thessalonians [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:12:17-04:00June 8th, 2025|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters|

2 Thessalonians in a Nutshell

In this series of “nutshell” overviews of each of the books of the New Testament, we move now to one of the most intriguing instances of a book that claims to be written by Paul, but was apparently, instead, written by someone else who wanted his readers to think he was the apostle. 2 Thessalonians is an intriguing case because the book certainly sounds a lot like Paul’s other letters and does indeed appear to be a kind of follow-up letter to 1 Thessalonians. It also has numerous word-for-word similarities to 1 Thessalonians. It too, for example, is written by “Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy” (1:1) and is addressed “to the church of the Thessalonians in in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ" (2 Thessalonians 1:2) – both verses being virtually identically to 1 Thessalonians. Moreover, its contents are closely related to the other letter: both are concerned about the suffering the Thessalonian Christians are experiencing through persecution and especially about their misunderstanding about when Jesus is to return on the Day of Judgment. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:12:17-04:00June 7th, 2025|Paul and His Letters|

Interesting Questions from Readers (5/27/2025)
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Interesting Questions from Readers (5/27/2025)

Reader’s Questions

Interesting Questions from Readers (5/27/2025)

Here are some particularly sticky questions I've gotten recently, with expanded answers to share with all of you: QUESTION: Bart, what should we understand by “exousia” in I Cor 11.10? RESPONSE: Ah, right. A woman is to have an "authority" (exousia) on her head. It’s a confusing verse in a confusing passage. The verse: For this reason a woman ought to have authority over her head, because of the angels. It's sometimes translated "veil" though it clearly does not mean veil, per se. But in the context Paul is talking about why women should wear head coverings in church and so in some sense apparently the veil is seen as an “exousia” or “authority.” His opening explanation is that since God is the “head” of Christ and Christ is the head of a man then the man is the head of a woman. Does “head” here not refer to the thing sitting on your shoulders but something like “chief authority” (as in “the head of the department”)? Exousia itself means [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:12:16-04:00June 5th, 2025|Reader’s Questions|

1 Thessalonians and the Coming Rapture
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1 Thessalonians and the Coming Rapture

Paul and His Letters

1 Thessalonians and the Coming Rapture

One of the most intriguing passages of 1 Thessalonians is also both the most widely referred to (these days) and the most universally misread. It is the passage that conservative Christians cite to support the idea of the coming “rapture,” when Jesus will allegedly arrive from heaven to take his followers out of the world before the appearance of the Anti-Christ and the horrendous period of disaster and “tribulation” that must take place for seven years before the Final Day of Judgement. The “rapture” is one of the firmest beliefs of conservative evangelicals. And it is not found in the Bible. Here is what I say about it, in relation to 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 in particular, in my book Armageddon. ********************************* Here is an interesting factoid that, in my experience, almost no one knows: No one had even thought of the idea of a “rapture” until the 1830s. Of the many, many thousands of serious students of the Bible throughout Christian history, who pored over every word – from leading early Christian [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:12:16-04:00June 4th, 2025|Paul and His Letters|

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