BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 142 of 207

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.

Rulers as Gods: The Context of Ancient Religion

Why did ancient people in the Greek and Roman worlds sometimes consider political leaders as gods? That’s the question I’m dealing with in this series of posts. And I think now, after a good bit of background, I’m able to begin to answer it. The gods in Greek and Roman thought were considered to be superhuman. Unlike, say, the (animal-shaped) gods of Egypt, the Greek and Roman gods were literally in human form. When they appeared here on earth to humans they were often “bigger than life,” but they could assume regular human form when they wanted to and they were human-shaped even when attending to their heavenly duties. In the Greek and Roman myths, they acted in human ways, they experienced the range of human emotions, they manifested human foibles, and so on. But they were different from humans in several ways. For one thing, they were far more powerful than mere mortals. They could accomplish things that no human could. None of them was infinitely powerful, but on the scale of power, they [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:45-04:00September 22nd, 2016|Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, Public Forum|

When Men Became Gods: My Lecture in Denmark

As I indicated earlier, I am in Denmark this week giving talks. I’m staying in Copenhagen, a fabulous city, but two of my talks are in Odense, an hour and a half (very pleasant) train ride from here. I am being sponsored by the University of Southern Denmark, which invited me almost a year ago now to give a lecture to students and faculty on the relationship between the Roman Imperial cult (the worship of the Roman emperor as a divine being) and the rise of Christology (the understanding of Christ as a divine being). The lecture was yesterday, and I thought it might be worthwhile here on the blog to explain the topic and the issues it raises. I called the talk “When Men Became Gods: Caesar and Christ.” The overarching idea that I tried to develop was that the Christian acclamation of the divinity of Jesus had a clear historical context within the broader Greco-Roman world. There were other humans in that context who were considered divine. And none more prominently than the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:31-04:00September 21st, 2016|Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, Public Forum|

Bart Ehrman vs. Michael Brown on Suffering

In my post on Saturday I discussed the issue of death and laid out briefly my view that this life is all there is. That does not mean, however, that I think we should just party-hard since there is no life to come. I have long been intrigued by the "problem of suffering," and I have never, in fact, taken it to be just an intellectual problem. I think as human beings we need to deal with suffering if we want to lead life to its fullest. But I'm still intrigued with the problem: how can there can be such massive suffering in the world if there is a God in control of it? I have had several debates on the subject, and here is one of the hardest, on video. The debate was with Dr. Michael L. Brown, a very smart Jewish believer in Jesus. We had the debate on April 15, 2010, at Ohio State University. The debate was inspired largely by my book, "God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:11-04:00September 19th, 2016|Bart's Debates, Video Media|

Fear of Dying etc.: Weekly Readers Mailbag, September 18, 2016

What is my personal feeling toward death? That's the first of two questions in this weeks' Readers' Mailbag! QUESTION: How do you feel about dying? Is that not in some part terrifying? And us losing our loved ones forever? How do you get over that? RESPONSE: Ah, how do I feel about dying? In general, I’m against it. :-) But do I find the prospect terrifying? I would say that over the years I have had different attitudes toward death. I suppose when I was very young, I hoped I was a good enough person to go to heaven. I was certainly terrified of going to hell. When I had a born again experience in high school, I became absolutely convinced I was going to heaven, as would anyone else who did what I did (accept Christ as their Lord and Savior) and believe what I did. Anyone else (i.e., most of the billions of people in the world): well, too bad for them. They are going to roast forever in hell. When, over [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:31-04:00September 18th, 2016|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Rise of the Roman Empire

I want to suspend for a time – not cancel altogether! – the thread I have been pursuing on how I came to be interested in the textual criticism of the New Testament, which itself is a spin-off (using roughly similar metaphors) of the bigger thread that I started, which at the time of inception I anticipated would be all of two posts long, of why I ended up being equipped to write trade books more than most of my colleagues who were doing research that, on the surface, seemed to be far more amenable to trade books. But I want to suspend the thread for now, to be resumed soon, because there is something else I’m particularly interested in and I want to strike it while the iron is hot. I’m flying off to Denmark on Sunday to give a lecture and a couple of academic discussions at the University of Southern Denmark. The topic: the relationship between the worship of the Roman emperor (the “imperial cult”) and the rise of Christology (the understanding [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00September 15th, 2016|Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, Public Forum|

Arguments, Evidence, and Changing Your Mind

In this series of posts on how I got interested in textual criticism, I’ve had a number of people indicate that they don’t see how the problems posed by our manuscripts did not absolutely destroy my evangelical faith. By implication, I think, they are wondering why evangelicals broadly, to a person, don’t see these problems and realize that they don’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to their belief in the Bible. The logic these commenters are applying is one that I discuss in my book Misquoting Jesus. If the evangelical belief is rooted in the sense that the Bible contains the very words that God inspired, and if a study of our manuscripts reveals that there are thousands – hundreds of thousands – of places where these words were changed, so that there are some places where we cannot know what the authors actually wrote, then isn’t that an insurmountable problem? Why would God inspire the words of Scripture (that would take a mighty miracle!) if he did not make sure [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00September 14th, 2016|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Bruce Metzger Beliefs, My Loss of Faith: A Blast from the Past
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Bruce Metzger Beliefs, My Loss of Faith: A Blast from the Past

Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations

Bruce Metzger Beliefs, My Loss of Faith: A Blast from the Past

I mentioned my mentor, Bruce Metzger, in a recent post. In this blast from the past, I reprint a post I did almost exactly four years ago, in response to a question that I was then asked about how Metzger, a devoted Christian and minister of the church, responded to the fact that I (one of his closest students) lost my faith. The question generated a series of posts on related topics, but here is the one where I actually answer the question: Bruce Metzger Beliefs I have come now, by an unusually circuitous route, to answer the question that got me started in talking about my relationship with Bruce Metzger, my work for the NRSV Bible translation committee, my view of the NRSV as a translation, the textual problems of Luke 22:19-20 and 22:43-44 and, well sundry other things. The reader’s question was how Metzger responded to my loss of faith. When I first got to know him, I was a strong evangelical Christian. In the years before he died, I had become [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00September 12th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Textual Criticism is “Safe” for Conservative Christians

It is probably not an accident that when I was a very conservative evangelical Christian who wanted to get a PhD in New Testament studies, I chose to focus, in particular, on textual criticism, the study of manuscripts in order to establish the wording of the original text. That was, and is, a fairly common “track” for evangelicals who want to be biblical scholars. Maybe it’s not as common now as it used to be. But it used to be common. As it turns out, most of the scholars who work in the field of New Testament textual criticism in North America either are or used to be committed evangelical Christians. You might think that the findings of textual criticism would drive evangelicals away from their faith. But just the opposite is the case. I know very few people who have found their faith challenged by their knowledge of the textual problems of the New Testament. Very few indeed. I was a bit of an oddball that way. (I’ll say more about that in a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00September 11th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Charities We Support

This week’s Reader’s Mailbag is not about a specific question I have been asked once but about a general question I get asked a lot. People have indicated several times they would like to have more information about the charities we support on the blog, and so I thought it was time to explain that again (I’ve done it only a couple of times over the years.) So when I started the blog in 2012, I set up a non-profit foundation, The Bart Ehrman Foundation, whose sole purpose is to collect the moneys raised by the blog and distribute the moneys to charity. Any donations to the blog are fully tax deductible. When I set the Foundation up, I expected we would raise something like $20,000 a year. Woops. Bad estimate. To date we have distributed $339,000 in funds to charities. Each year (until, alas, this one it appears! L) we have raised significantly more than the year previous. Last year (my fiscal year runs April 1-March 31, because of when I started the blog) [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00September 9th, 2016|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Do Most Manuscripts Have the Original Text?

Early on in my study of textual criticism I came to realize one of the major issues confronting scholars in the field – an issue that scholars have been contending with since the eighteenth century. For the past hundred years or so the vast majority of experts have been convinced by a solution to the problem, but the solution was slow in coming, for all sorts of reasons. But when I was first introduced to the problem I learned there were two sides that were being taken, and I wrote a paper about it (my first year in college). I continued to be interested in the problem for a long time, and it ended up being the subject of the Masters’ thesis I wrote under the direction of Bruce Metzger. The problem is this. We have thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament – at last count, somewhere around 5600 manuscripts in Greek alone (that includes everything from small fragments the size of a credit card with just a few letters written on them to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00September 8th, 2016|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

My Original Interest in Textual Criticism

As I have indicated, my interest in textual criticism – the scholarly attempt to reconstruct what the authors of the New Testament actually wrote, given the fact we don’t have the originals but only altered copies – did not originate with my going to Princeton Theological Seminary to study with Bruce Metzger. On the contrary, I went to study with him precisely because that had been an area of fascination for me starting in my first year of college, as an eighteen year old. I mentioned already that I had a course at Moody Bible Institute that dealt with the questions of biblical inspiration (how God had inspired the biblical writers to say what they did), the formation of the canon (how God had ensured that we got the right twenty-seven books), and the problem of the text (the fact we don’t have the copies produced by the authors themselves). I was deeply interested in all three areas, but was especially intrigued by the third, for a couple of reasons. One reason was theological. I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00September 7th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Becoming a Textual Critic

Back to my narrative of how I got interested in biblical studies, and specifically textual criticism. I was just thinking last night about how people (on the blog or elsewhere) sometimes report to me that they have heard my conservative evangelical critics say that I’m not a biblical interpreter (exegete) or a historian, but I’m a textual critic (someone who studies the manuscripts of the New Testament). And I started thinking about all my training in the Bible and the history of early Christianity. I did three years at Moody studying mainly Bible and theology; I did a two year completion degree at Wheaton majoring in English; I then did a three-year Master’s of Divinity degree at Princeton Theological Seminary; and finally a four-year PhD in New Testament also at Princeton Seminary. Over the course of all those years I must have taken, what? 70 or 75 courses? How many of those courses were on textual criticism? I had one class at Moody that was maybe ¼ devoted to the topic. And one class in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00September 6th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

Does James Contradict Paul?

I have a number of questions that I want to address in my Readers’ Mailbag, but one particularly important one requires a rather long response, and so I dedicate this entire week’s mailbag to answering it. Here it is: QUESTION: Bart, what is your view with regard to Paul and James teaching on the doctrine of justification by faith – are they contradictory? RESPONSE: Ah, this is a perennial question among readers of the New Testament. I deal with it at some length in my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, in a chapter called “Does the Tradition Miscarry,” where I talk about whether Paul saw eye to eye with Jesus, with James, and with later traditions about Paul (e.g. in the Acts of Paul and Thecla). My answer about the letter of James may surprise some readers, who would expect me to find it completely at odds with Paul. Here is what I say in the book: ****************************************************** The most famous passage of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00September 4th, 2016|Catholic Epistles, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

How You Can Help!

Last week I asked you what you really liked about the blog and what you would recommend we change. I was gratified to hear lots of things people like and even more gratified to hear relatively few things that people don’t! I have taken all of your comments to heart and will keep doing things that seem to be working and try to change things that are not. My big concern in sending out my request for feedback was that our fundraising is not keeping pace with last year, at a time when I want to be doing *better* than last year! I did get a number of suggestions that were very helpful, and I thank you all for them. On my part, one of the things I will start doing (in addition to incorporating other changes that have been suggested) is saying more about the charities the blog supports. I think there is just a general, vague sense that “all the money goes to charity.” It would be useful, as readers have pointed out, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00September 3rd, 2016|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Where Did the Trinity Come From? Video Lecture.

Here is the third of my three talks that I gave last year at Coral Gables Congregational Church in (suprise) Coral Gables, Florida, on my book, "How Jesus Became God." This lecture deals with one of the most important questions in Christian thinking: where did the idea and doctrine of the Trinity come from? Good question! I try to answer it in this video. Enjoy! Please adjust gear icon for 1080p High-Definition. How Jesus Became God -UCC Part 3 of 3: If you don't belong to the blog yet, JOIN!! You get good stuff like this ALL THE TIME, for very little cost. And all proceeds go to fight hunger and homelessness. So join!

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:57-04:00September 2nd, 2016|Book Discussions, Constantine, Fourth-Century Christianity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Video Media|

How I Discovered Textual Criticism

It was at Moody Bible Institute that I first became interested in the textual criticism of the New Testament. Let me stress a definitional point that some readers on the blog have not gotten or understood (I’ve said it a lot, so apologies for those who have gotten it! But even though I keep saying this, some people still don’t get it). Textual criticism is NOT the study of texts to see what they mean. For the last time (well, probably not): it is not the interpretation of texts. Textual criticism, instead, is the attempt to determine what an author actually wrote if we do not have his one and only original copy. It is independent of the question of what the author might have actually *meant* by what he wrote. Textual criticism is done on all texts – even modern ones. There are textual critics who work on Wordsworth. They try to determine if it’s possible to know the actual words of his original poems (given the fact that we have different editions and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00August 31st, 2016|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Learning to Teach at Moody

I will not be continuing this autobiographical thread (thread within a thread) for much longer (you may be glad to know), but I do want to get to the ultimate point (for the thread outside the thread), which is why by a couple of quirks/flukes I ended up better equipped to write books for general audiences than most of my colleagues in my PhD program. The first has to do with what happened with me back in my days at Moody when I was learning tons about what was actually in the Bible (and the fundamentalist way of interpreting it all) (which, at the time, of course, I thought was the *only* correct way to interpret it). At Moody, every semester we were required to engage in some kind of formal ministry (“Practical Christian Experience”). Everyone at Moody had to do one semester of “door-to-door evangelism,” where we were taken to one neighborhood or another somewhere in a suburb of Chicago, and literally knocked on doors to talk to people to try to convert them. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:29-04:00August 30th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Moody Bible Boot Camp

Back to my narrative about becoming trained in the Bible (as a prelude to what I started talking about -- why my later technical training actually made me better prepared for writing books for general audiences than my peers who were not at all interested in the technical side of things). So, I went to Moody Bible Institute – and took that entrance Bible exam – when I was all of seventeen years old. And it was during my first semester that I decided what I wanted to do with my life. I really, really, really do not advise doing that. For 99.999% of the human race, it would be a very bad idea indeed to decide how to spend the rest of your life when you’re all of seventeen and can’t even yet order a beer (drinking age back then, in the Pleistocene age, was eighteen) (and anyway, we weren’t allowed to drink beer at Moody) (or smoke, play cards, dance, or go to movies) (really) (and there was a dress code). But I’m [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:29-04:00August 29th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Am I A Better Person as an Agnostic? A Blast from the Past

I have started re-posting some of my posts from three or four years ago on occasion, at the suggestion of several people on the blog. Frankly, I don't remember even writing most of them! Here is one from four years ago, a response to the question of how losing my faith affected me -- did it make me a better (or worse) person? ***************************************************************************** QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman, I am still reading your book (God's problem) which seems to be very interesting since you are not interesting to gain any approval from anybody but only to communicate what you believe and where you are today. Congratulations for that…. Did you became a better human being after losing your faith? RESPONSE: Great question! Most people have assumed the opposite, that anyone who loses his or her faith must become a worse person. The logic seems to be that without a belief in God, there would be no grounds for morals and that people left to their own unconstrained devices would have no reason to avoid living [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:29-04:00August 28th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Were Jesus and His Followers Armed?

Were Jesus and his followers armed? That’s the question for this week’s Readers’ Mailbag. I had started to address the question when I realized that I had already said what I have to say as well as I could say it in my recent book Jesus Before the Gospels. And so I will give that discussion here. So, here’s the question and my response QUESTION: What is the scholarly view on this subject: did Jesus himself, his movement and then early Christians walk around with weapons (swords, e.g.) to protect themselves, despite preaching the love for enemies? Do we have any historical evidence of how things looked like in this matter? RESPONSE: (Taken from Jesus Before the Gospels) In all four Gospels, at least one of Jesus’ followers is armed when he is arrested. In the Synoptics, this unnamed follower draws his sword and strikes the slave of the high priest, cutting off his ear (see Mark 14:47). In John’s Gospel we learn that the sword-bearing disciple was Peter (John 18: 10). Jesus [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:29-04:00August 26th, 2016|Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

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