BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 149 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.

Readers’ Mailbag December 11, 2015

Time again for my weekly Readers’ Mailbag. I have three questions to deal with today, one that is substantive and about the New Testament, one about my personal life as an evangelical turned agnostic, and one about my views of the beginnings of life! Quite a mix. As questions occur to you, please feel free to ask, either in a comment on this post or in an email. If it’s something I can handle, I will add your question to the list. QUESTION: You have pointed out that Jesus was rejected by his family, and by his listeners in Nazareth and other towns & villages of Galilee. What do you think is the main reason for this widespread rejection? Is it because of his apocalyptic message? RESPONSE: This question gives me the opportunity to make an important distinction that I’m afraid I have not always been careful enough to make on the blog. It is the distinction between the literary reading of a text and the question of historical reality. When I have [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:32-04:00December 11th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Does Paul Know about Judas Iscariot?

In my previous post I indicated that Paul shows no evidence of knowing about the tradition that Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus. In fact, one passage may suggest that he actually did not know about it. I’ll get to that in a second. First I need to stress that we really don’t have any way of know most of what Paul knew, or thought he knew, about Jesus’ life. He tells us so very little. As I have mentioned on the blog before, scholars have had long and hard debates about why Paul says so little about Jesus’ life: Did incidents from Jesus’ life seem irrelevant to what really mattered to him (salvation through Jesus’ death and resurrection)? Did information of Jesus’ life not matter for the issues that he was addressing in his letters to his trouble congregations? Did he simply not know any more than he mentioned? Each of these options is attractive and each of them is seriously problematic. But the reality is that Paul doesn’t tell us much and we can’t actually [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:32-04:00December 9th, 2015|Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

The Reversal of the Disciples’ Decisive Disconfirmation

In my previous post I argued that the crucifixion of Jesus, rather than being the fulfilment of his own and his disciples’ hopes, was the utter and virtually irrefutable destruction of them. He, and they, had expected that God would intervene in the course of history to bring his good kingdom on earth, destroying the forces of evils – including the ruling powers of the present – and installing Jesus and his followers as rulers of the new order. Jesus would be the messiah and his followers would be his co-regents. Instead, Jesus was arrested, tried, humiliated, tortured, and crucified. This was not an end that ANYONE anticipated for a “messiah.” And this kind of fate showed conclusively to anyone paying attention that Jesus was not, after all, the messiah. He was just the opposite of the messiah. Instead of a figure of grandeur and power who had destroyed the enemies of God, Jesus was a weak and insignificant figure who had been crushed by his enemies. No greater disconfirmation of his expectations could be [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:32-04:00December 8th, 2015|Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

How the Crucifixion Destroyed Jesus’ Vision of the Future

I have been arguing that during his lifetime Jesus had come to think that he was the messiah of God, the one who would be king when God intervened in history to overthrow the forces of evil and establish a good kingdom here on earth. A number of readers have asked how or why he would come to that view about himself. I’m afraid the answer is that I don’t know, and either does anyone else. There are, of course, lots of theories, some of which are no doubt held by different people on this blog, for example, Christians often say that it was because he really is the coming messiah and that God had told him this. Others might say that he had some kind of visionary experience that led him to think this (at his baptism? During his 40 days in the wilderness? Some other time?). Others might think that this is a rather exalted view to have of oneself as a lower class peasant in the remote backwaters of Galilee – that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:32-04:00December 7th, 2015|Historical Jesus|

Free Year-Long Memberships to Those Who Can’t Afford One!!

Thanks to the incredible generosity of members of the blog, I am happy to announce that there are a limited number of free one-year memberships available. These have been donated for a single purpose: to allow those who cannot afford the annual membership fee to participate on the blog for a year. I will assign these memberships strictly on the honor system: if you truly cannot afford the membership fee, but very much want to have full access to the blog, then please contact me. Do NOT reply here, on the blog, as a comment. Send me a separate email, privately, at [email protected]. In your email, let me know your situation (i.e., why you would like to take advantage of this offer) and provide me with the following information: 1) Your first and last name. 2) Your preferred personal email. 3) Your preferred user name (no spaces). 4) Your preferred password (should be 8 or more characters, no spaces). The donors will remain anonymous, but here let me publicly extend my heartfelt thanks [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:32-04:00December 6th, 2015|Public Forum|

Many Thanks and One More Chance!

Many, many thanks to everyone who has so generously donated blog memberships to people who otherwise cannot afford them. The outpouring of support has been gratifying, as in the past two years. You donors will be making some people very happy. Last year (2014) we gathered in just over 70 free memberships, which, when I put them on offer, got snapped up quickly. In each case I asked the person to explain their situation, and many of them were heart-rending. (Those who simply wanted a freebie I turned down, obviously.) This year, thanks to many generous members of the blog, we have had just over 50 memberships donated. If anyone wants still to make a donation to get us up to our levels in past years, I am more than happy to accept them. Just send me an email to that effect, indicating how many you would want to donate (anywhere from one to 100,000 would be gratefully accepted), at $25 per donation, and then click the DONATE link on the home page. Again, many thanks [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:32-04:00December 6th, 2015|Public Forum|

Readers’ Mailbag December 4, 2015

It is time for my weekly Readers’ Mailbag. I can’t answer these questions by devoting long threads to them – even though they each deserve a thread; but I can give quick responses, and hope that will be enough for now. If you have a question you would like me to address in the future, please attach it as a comment to this post. QUESTION: It is not surprising that Jesus was an apocalyptic end-of-times messiah figure, because we have such people at least once each generation (often leading their people to disappointment if not disaster). Any thoughts on why this is such a persistent theme, even though every previous apocalypticist has been wrong? RESPONSE: Yes, a lot of my students think that the end of the world will happen sometime in their own lifetimes, that we are living at the end of time, that things taking place in our world are happening in fulfillment of Scripture, that these are the last days proclaimed by the prophets. And why wouldn’t they [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:31-04:00December 4th, 2015|Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Jesus Death as King of the Jews

I now can mount a second argument for why Jesus almost certainly called himself the messiah during his lifetime. Remember: by that I do not mean that Jesus wanted to lead a military rebellion against the Romans to establish himself as king. On the contrary, I think Jesus was not a supporter of a “military solution.” Jesus was an apocalypticist who believed that God himself would take action and do what was needed – overthrow the evil ruling authorities in a cataclysmic show of power and destroy all that was opposed to himself, and so bring in a good, utopian kingdom on earth. And Jesus would be made the king. I don’t need here to give the extensive reasons for thinking that Jesus held to this kind of apocalyptic view in general – I’ve talked about it at length both in a number of my books and on the blog. The question here is the more narrow one: did Jesus think he would be the king of the coming kingdom? I have given one strong [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:31-04:00December 2nd, 2015|Historical Jesus|

Judas and the Messianic Secret

Yesterday I gave one reason for thinking that Jesus considered himself the future messiah: he almost certainly told his twelve disciples that they would be future rulers in the coming kingdom. It is hard to imagine how they could be twelve rulers in a kingdom if he himself was not the one over them, as the ultimate ruler, the king. Jesus understood the coming kingdom in an apocalyptic sense: it would be brought in by a cataclysmic act of God in which the forces of evil were destroyed prior to the utopian rulership appeared. And Jesus would be the king. In *that* sense, he was to be the future messiah. I’ll give a second reason for thinking this in my next post. For now I want to show how this understanding of Jesus’ view of himself makes sense of one other very puzzling datum, the betrayal of Judas. I don’t think there can be much doubt that Jesus really was handed over to the authorities by one of his own followers, Judas Iscariot. Some people [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:31-04:00December 1st, 2015|Historical Jesus|

Jesus’ Claim to Be the Messiah

I’m afraid I have been sidetracked from my thread within a thread within a thread, but now want to get back to it. This particular sub-sub-thread is about whether Jesus considered himself to be the Jewish messiah. My view is that Yes he did. But he meant something very specific by that, and it is not what most people (Christians and non-Christians) today mean by it. Recall what I have tried to show thus far. There were various expectations of what the messiah would be like among Jews of Jesus’ day – a political ruler over Israel, a great priest who ruled God’s people through God’s law, a cosmic judge of the earth who would destroy God’s enemies in a cataclysmic act of judgment. All these views had one thing in common: the future messiah would be a figure of grandeur and might who would come with the authority and power of God. And who was Jesus? For most people of his day, Jesus was just the opposite – an itinerant Jewish preacher from [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:31-04:00November 30th, 2015|Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

Gift Memberships to the Blog, 2015

We have already moved passed Thanksgiving again. Hard to believe. For the occasion, I want to open up a holiday giving option that can help out people who really want to be on the blog but cannot afford the membership fees. As many of you know, for the past couple of years, thanks to a number of generous donors, we pulled this off in a big way. It has happened in two stages. It started off when two anonymous donors proposed that they provide some funds to pay for memberships for a few people who wanted to be on the blog but because of personal circumstances, could not afford the membership fees. I put out the offer on my Facebook page, asking if anyone was in that boat, and within twenty minutes I had thirty requests –all from people who were eager to join but simply did not have the means to do so otherwise. I had to shut down the offer nearly as soon as I made it. This made me suspect that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:31-04:00November 29th, 2015|Public Forum|

Readers’ Mailbag November 27, 2015

I hope everyone had a fulfilling (and fillingful) Thanksgiving! Now it is time to answer some questions I have received over the past couple of weeks, in short rapid-fire order. If you have a question you would like me to address, please ask it in a comment to this post. I am keeping a list and deal with the questions, weekly, more or less in the order in which I receive them. And I’m running low on questions! So ask away! QUESTION: Why do you think Jesus remained single his whole life? Could that have been part of the reason he was seen as a divine being? Ordinary people marry, not highly esteemed divine beings? RESPONSE: That’s an interesting hypothesis, but I don’t think it is “it.” Let me start with the necessary preliminary: I do indeed think that Jesus was, in fact, unmarried. People have disputed that (most notably that inestimable authority on ancient Christianity, Dan Brown, in the Da Vinci Code!) but the evidence is very strong. I have dealt [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:31-04:00November 28th, 2015|Historical Jesus, New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Thanksgiving Reflections 2015

I would like to pause in my other blogging pursuits to reflect a bit on the holiday that is now upon us. Like, I suppose, a lot of people, there are a number of holidays that I one time enjoyed very much but am now almost completely indifferent to. For me those would include Halloween (it’s just not that much fun for me without having kids or any real connection with kids), Fourth of July (I’m always in England on the occasion, and giving the nature of the holiday and what it remembers, well, that kind of puts a damper on it) (I don’t want this to be misconstrued: I love being an American – with all the enormous problems experienced by and caused by Americans – but the business with firecrackers and fireworks and so on just has nothing much for me these days), and Easter (which I do not observe, as an agnostic; although it can be a time of reflection for me on the awesome claims of the Christian message). There are [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:31-04:00November 25th, 2015|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The SBL and the Blog

I just finished spending five days at my annual professional meeting, the Society of Biblical Literature, this year in Atlanta. This is a very large conference, probably about 6,000 people here for it – not to mention another 6,000 here for the American Academy of Religion conference that is held jointly with it. For both conferences this is a chance for professional academics in their various fields of religious studies (New Testament, Hebrew Bible, early Christianity, early Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Religion and Culture, Religion in the Americas and so forth and so on – lots and lots of fields) to come together, attend academic papers on various topics (dozens of papers read by scholars all at the same time throughout the convention center), have meetings for various organizations, talk to editors, browse through the enormous book display hall where publishers in the field display all the recent books, and so on. This is not a conference for lay-people interested in the topics: it is heavy duty scholarship. But for experts in biblical studies, it is [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:31-04:00November 24th, 2015|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Teaching of Jesus

I have been providing necessary background to the question of whether Jesus could have considered himself the messiah, and have done so by trying to situate him in the world of first century Jewish apocalyptic thinking. We now need to move to a summary of Jesus’ teaching given that apocalyptic framework. We could obviously have a year-long thread on the topic of what it was Jesus taught during his itinerant preaching ministry. Many people have written very long books on the subject – and the books just keep comin’ out. If you want a more extended discussion of my views on the matter, you can see my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. I include bibliography of other works to consult. For my money, among the best and most influential have been John Meier, E. P. Sanders, Dale Allison, and Paula Fredriksen – all of whom agree that Jesus is best understood as an apocalyptic preacher. Here let me summarize under several rubrics what I think we can say with reasonable reliability about [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:30-04:00November 24th, 2015|Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

Readers’ Mailbag November 20, 2015

It is time for my weekly Readers’ Mailbag. I will be dealing with two questions this time. If you have questions, about anything at all related to the historical Jesus, the New Testament, the history of early Christianity, or anything else that I may have a remote chance of knowing something about, please ask! You can either respond with a comment/question to this post, or send me an email, or comment on any other post! QUESTION: An off-topic request: what are the five most puzzling questions about the historical Jesus you would love to see resolved in your lifetime? RESPONSE: Ah, this is a tough one. It is made particularly difficult by two competing phenomena. The first is that most scholars of the historical Jesus are pretty convinced that their views about what he said and did are on the money. So in that sense, what is there that can be answered that hasn’t been? The other is the unpleasant reality that in fact we know very few things for certain about Jesus – [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:30-04:00November 20th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

The Beginning and End as Keys to the Middle

In my last post I showed why it is so widely acknowledged that Jesus began his ministry by associating with John the Baptist, an apocalyptic preacher of coming doom. The reason that matters for our purposes in this thread is that it shows that Jesus chose, of his own free will, to join an apocalyptic movement at the very beginning of his public ministry. That certainly demonstrates that Jesus started out his public life as a fervent advocate of a Jewish apocalyptic message. He too must have been expecting the judgment of God soon to appear in which those aligned against God would be destroyed and those who sided with God would be rewarded. That in itself does not show, however, that Jesus’ own proclamation, after he got started, was apocalyptic. Maybe he changed his mind! Maybe he decided John was wrong! Maybe he went his own direction! There are two arguments against the idea that he changed. The first is one I have already recounted several posts ago: apocalyptic sayings are significantly attributed to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:30-04:00November 19th, 2015|Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

The Baptism of Jesus as an Apocalyptic Event

Over the years scholars have adduced lots of reasons for thinking that Jesus – like many others in his day – was a Jewish apocalypticist, one who thought that the world was controlled by forces of evil but that God was very soon going to intervene to overthrow everything and everyone opposed to him in order to set up a good kingdom here on earth. As I pointed out in my previous post, this is the view found in Jesus’ teachings in Mark (e.g., ch. 13), in Q (the source used by Matthew and Luke for many of their sayings), in M (Matthew’s special source[s]), and in L (Luke’s special source[s]). There is another very good argument for thinking that Jesus must have subscribed to some kind of apocalyptic view (I’ll lay out what his exact views apparently were in a future post). In fact, this argument is so good that I wish I had thought of it myself! But alas, credit goes to others. The argument, as I usually phrase it, is that “the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:14-04:00November 18th, 2015|Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

Albert Schweitzer and the Apocalyptic Jesus

In the current thread I’m trying to establish that Jesus believed he was the messiah. I have pointed out that his followers would not have considered him the messiah because they believed he had been raised from the dead (since the messiah was not supposed to die and rise again) unless they had already considered him the messiah prior to his death. But that, of course, does not mean that Jesus *himself* thought he was the messiah. And so we have to look for evidence from Jesus’ life that indicates that this is what he thought about himself, and my argument is going to be that there are several pieces of evidence that strongly suggest it is, of which my plan is to stress two. As background, in my previous post, I laid out the world view that Jesus himself almost certainly subscribed to, a view that scholars have called Jewish apocalypticism. I need to develop these thoughts a bit in this post; and the next; after that I’ll lay out in (very) summary fashion [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:09:39-04:00November 16th, 2015|Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

The Apocalyptic Context for Jesus’ View of the Messiah

In this thread I am trying to argue that Jesus understood himself to be the messiah. So far I have made one of my two main arguments, with the understanding that *both* arguments have to be considered in order to have a compelling case. So the first prong doesn’t prove much on its own. But in combination with the second argument, it makes a strong case. The first argument is that Jesus’ followers would not have understood him as the messiah after his death (as they did) unless they believed him to be the messiah before his death – even if they came to believe he had been raised from the dead, that would not have made them think he was the messiah. I’ve explained why in my previous post. The second second involves showing that it was not only the disciples who understood Jesus to be the messiah before his death, but that Jesus himself did. This is even harder to show, but I think there is really compelling evidence. There are two major [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:14-04:00November 15th, 2015|Early Judaism, Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

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