BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 157 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.

How the Bible Explains Suffering – Video

On September 8, 2008 I gave a lecture at the University of California Berkeley. The lecture was titled "God's Problem and Human Solutions: How the Bible Explains Suffering." It was part of the Foerster Lectures on the Immortality of the Soul. It is an interesting lecture series. Established in 1928 by Edith Zweybruck, The series is devoted to lectures that in the words of the founding document) are to be "on the immortality of the soul or other kindred subjects. Such lecture is not to form a part of the regular college course and shall be delivered by some person especially qualified therefore and especially appointed for the purpose." My lecture does not, obviously, deal with directly with the question of immortality, but with another question of deep importance, suffering. I was introduced on the occasion by a very fine scholar of Christianity in Late Antiquity, whom I have known for years, Susanna Elm, Professor in the Department of History, UC Berkeley. Please adjust gear icon for better definition.

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:13-04:00May 16th, 2015|Public Forum, Video Media|

Writing to Become Famous?

I’ve been referring to the reactions that I received from my former classmates at Moody Bible Institute about some of my posts about what my experience was like there. Some of them, as I indicated, warned me of future judgment. Others made some a rather belittling comment: that I have written my books simply because I have wanted to become famous. My sense is that nothing I say would ever change someone’s mind if that’s what they are already inclined to think, but I do want to say something about the matter from my own perspective. When I started out in my publishing career, I had no idea at all of becoming well known and that certainly was not a goal of mine. Very, very far from it. My goal was to be a widely respected scholar among New Testament scholars; I wanted to become a world-class expert on the Greek manuscript tradition of the New Testament. I had no idea at all of reaching out to the general public in anything I wrote. I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:13-04:00May 15th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Threat of Judgment

Since I’ve been making these posts about my experience at Moody Bible Institute, I’ve been getting some reactions from former classmates there. Some of these are in a public forum I’m on. Others have been private communications. A few of these have been kind and heartening. Others … not. Among the latter, some have told me that they pity me because of where I will end up on the day of judgment. Others have suggested that I changed my theological beliefs because that would help me become famous. Some have expressed both sadness and outrage that I have “led so many people astray.” So, dealing with these kinds of comments one-by-one, in one post at a time. First, the day of judgment. Well, none of us knows what will happen on the day of judgment, but I think I’m glad none of my classmates has been appointed to be the judge! That hasn’t stopped them from judging in the present, of course, and one would think they would be a bit wary of that, given [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:13-04:00May 14th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

Education at Moody

In thinking back on my days at Moody Bible Institute, part of my now-ambivalence has to do with not just what I learned (or more important, what I did not) but also about how the thinking process itself was handled. That has both a downside and an upside, and I would like to say something about both. I should start by reiterating that I am simply talking about my own personal experience. Everyone’s experience would have been, and was, different. Still, my strong sense is that my experience was not simply a result of my personality, although it certainly was in part that, but also as a result to how education itself was approached at Moody. How did one get good grades at a school like that? By mastering tons of material. Committing lots of things to memory. Knowing exactly what a teacher taught and being able to reformulate it, without changing its substance, in one’s own words. What was not taught, so much, was how to think for oneself. When one *did* get encouraged [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:13-04:00May 13th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Moody Experience

Here I continue with my reflections on my fundamentalist past. For me, as an inordinately gung-ho evangelical Christian teenager, passionate about learning about the Bible, Moody Bible Institute was the ideal learning environment. More than just about anyone I knew, even there, I thrived on the academic side of the school. Moody at that time did not give a bachelor’s degree. It was a three-year diploma. For a degree, one needed to transfer credits and go to another college. That’s what I did after my three years, when I could transfer two of those years to Wheaton and graduate from there with a degree in English literature. There was no English literature to speak of at Moody. In fact there was no liberal arts curriculum of any kind. It’s not because they rejected the liberal arts as … too liberal. (!) It’s that the school simply wasn’t interested in the humanities, the social sciences, or the hard sciences. Who cares about such things? What matters is the Bible. Hence the name of the school: Moody [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:13-04:00May 12th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Fundamentalist Beginning

Lately I’ve been thinking a good deal about my completely ambivalent relationship to my past, in particular in relation to my education at Moody Bible Institute. In part my thinking has been set off by an email I received from my roommate and best friend at the time, and for years, who was the best man in my wedding and confidante and most closest male friend I had ever had. He has remained a committed evangelical Christian all these years and continues in ministry. We never have contact any more, but he reached out to me to say hey, and I’ve been flooded with memories and thoughts since. There is a very big part of me – probably the most noticeable part – that is deeply resentful toward my time at Moody. But there is another part that occasionally arises to the surface, which realizes that in many ways those three years were very good for me. Without them, I would not be who I have become and what I am. Sometimes I forget that. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:13-04:00May 11th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

Year Three on the Blog

QUESTION: If I remember right, you just passed the three year mark of the blog. How much have you raised total? RESPONSE: Right! This will be just a short post to provide an update on the blog. Yes indeed, we passed the three-year mark a month ago, on April 4. I was going to make a post summarizing the year, but other things got in the way and I ended up doing other threads and never got back to it. So I’ll do it now, a month late. The blog is still doing great and getting ever better, in my opinion. First, in direct answer to the question about the money that has been raised. That is the matter particularly near and dear to my heart. It’s my ultimate interest, as I’ve said numerous times, since the entire point of the blog, in one sense, is to raise money for charity. I am very happy indeed to say that we raised $78,000 in our third year of operation. That is significant money, obviously, and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:13-04:00May 9th, 2015|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

What Can We Know about the Life of Jesus?

QUESTION: You have stated in your various works that there are some things that we can accept as likely historically true concerning Jesus’ life; his origin in Galilee, his association with John the Baptizer, his crucifixion, etc. For the rest of the episodes in Jesus’ life do we have to content ourselves with contemplation of what this or that gospel tells us about its author and community? Should we just “get over” this desire to know what really happened two thousand years ago? RESPONSE: Yes, this is a very important question. Of paramount importance! Here is a sample of how I deal with it in my just-finished-and-ready-to-send-to-my-readers book. This is from Chapter 5, “False Memories and the Life of Jesus.” This is the chapter where I discuss what anthropologists have told us about oral cultures and the way they preserve their traditions; it’s a crucial chapter since so many people seem to think that in oral cultures people have better memories that we do, and that they make sure not to change traditions that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:13-04:00May 9th, 2015|Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Truth and History

In my recent post in which I made a paean to memory – which will be the way I end my current book dealing with memory and the historical Jesus -- I said the following. MY REMARK: “The comment that I sometimes get from readers that I find puzzling or disheartening is when they tell me that if there is something in the Gospels that is not historical, then it cannot be true, and if it is not true, then it is not worth reading. My sense is that many readers will find it puzzling or even disheartening that I find this view puzzling and disheartening. But I do. Please call me a prophet if you must, but I would like to point out that a number of readers on the blog did indeed find my view puzzling and disheartening. Mainly puzzling. The following was a very well reasoned response from a reader, to which I would like to reply: READER’S COMMENT: Indeed, stories that aren’t true are no less worthwhile to read. The Bible [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:13-04:00May 8th, 2015|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Another Jewish Miracle Worker

One more post dealing with my memory book before moving on to other things. I thought readers of the blog might be interested in the following passage, where I talk about a famous Jewish teacher who was known, on the basis of eyewitness reports, to heal the sick, cast out demons, and raise the dead. No, I’m not talking about Jesus. I’m talking about the an 18th century holy man, who founded Hasidic Judaism. Here is what I have to say, in the course of my chapter 3. (The following is a relatively unedited draft: it is not polished yet for style or typos, so don’t worry about those…. The discussion occurs in the middle of a chapter on the value of eyewitness testimony; I include the preceding paragraph to give some context) *************************************************************** To sum up the situation, consider the words of one of the world’s leading experts on distorted memory, Daniel Schacter, “Numerous experiments have demonstrated ways in which imagining events can lead to the development of false memories for those events.”[1] But [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:13-04:00May 6th, 2015|Book Discussions|

Steps Toward Publishing the (a) Book

I am now nearly done with the draft of my book Jesus Before the Gospels (whatever it will eventually will be called), and want to say sundry things about the actual writing of the book here near the end. (Before I do: if any of you has any questions about the topic I’m covering or anything relevant you would like me to post on, let me know: if I don’t have issues to address involving memory, the historical Jesus, oral tradition, and so on, I’ll move on to other things on the blog.) First, in an earlier post I gave members of the blog an option of reading the book in manuscript form in advance. In case you missed it, here is the offer, which is still open and will be for another three days only. I am using this opportunity as a way of raising money for the blog (well, for the Bart Ehrman Foundation, which, as you know, gives all the money raised by the blog to charities dealing with hunger and homelessness). [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:12-04:00May 5th, 2015|Book Discussions|

Misquoting Jesus Interview on WPSU

On March 15, 2007, I had an interview with Patty Satalia for a Pennsylvania State University on Demand Program called "Pennsylvania Inside Out," on my book "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why" . In the interview I discuss how the modern Bible was shaped by mistakes and intentional alterations that were made by early scribes who copied the texts. I also explain how realizing this led me to shift my way of thinking about the Bible. We also get into the question -- then very pressing still -- about Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. It seems so long ago now that everyone was talking about it! Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition:

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:56-04:00May 2nd, 2015|History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Video Media|

York Symposium on Early Christian Apocrypha

I thought some of you might be interested to know about a symposium focusing on early Christian apocrypha that will be taking place in the fall. The schedule for the event has just been sent. If any of you is near there, you should think about going! It looks terrific. It is being organized principally by Tony Burke, along with Brent Landau; they are two very active scholars in the field of apocrypha studies. Here’s what the lineup looks like. *************************************************************** Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictions: Writing Ancient and Modern Christian Apocrypha The 2015 York University Christian Apocrypha Symposium will take place September 24-26 at Vanier College, York University. The specific objectives for the 2015 Symposium are: 1. to examine the possible motivations behind the production of Christian Apocrypha from antiquity until the present day, 2. to integrate medieval and modern apocrypha (composed in the 19th to 21st centuries) into the wider study of apocryphal literature, and 3. to reflect on what the reactions to the recently-publishedGospel of Jesus’ Wife can tell us about [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:12-04:00May 2nd, 2015|Christian Apocrypha, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum|

My Final Exam for NT

So, classes are officially over here at UNC, and we are in the Final Exam period. Today I gave my final for the Introduction to the New Testament class. As some of you may recall, back in January 2014 I posted on the blog the pop quiz I give the first day of class for this course. It is here, in case you're interested: https://ehrmanblog.org/new-testament-pop-quiz/ When I give this quiz on the first day, I tell the students that even if they bomb it (which most of them do), it's nothing compared to what they're going to be learning in the class over the course of the semester. Looking at the Final Exam in comparison with this introductory pop quiz pretty much shows it. Anyway, comparisons or not, I thought you might be interested in the exam, to see how you would do. And so I give it below in its entirety For the i.d.s, anything they've read or heard during the semester is fair game. I don't give them [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:12-04:00May 1st, 2015|Teaching Christianity|

Help! My Views of Memory

I am thinking about ending my book with a kind of Paean to Memory. I expect that some people will find it a bit controversial or even off-putting. Or maybe not! Here is what a draft of the kind of thing I'm thinking about saying. Let me know what you think. (It's longer than my typical post.) ******************************************************************************* Like most authors, I get a lot of email from people who have read my books. I find one of the comments I repeatedly receive somewhat puzzling and even disheartening. To explain it, I need to provide a bit of background. When I discuss historical understandings of the New Testament and of the historical Jesus, I frequently refer to the problems of our sources. The Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ death by people who were not eyewitnesses and had probably never laid eyes on an eyewitness. They are filled with discrepancies and contradictions. They represent different perspectives on what Jesus said and did. For that reason, to know what actually happened in the life [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:12-04:00April 29th, 2015|Book Discussions, Memory Studies|

The Community Behind the Gospel of John: Part 2

In the last post I began to discuss what we can know about the history of the community that produced (or that produced someone who produced) the Gospel of John. The reason for dealing with this question is this: one of the overarching theses of my book on memory and the historical Jesus is that the things we experience in the present affect how we remember the past. They affect which parts of the past we remember (if they something in the past isn’t relevant for something in the present, we don’t bother to recall it; that’s just how memory works) and they radically affect how we remember. The past is always shaped, in our minds (unconsciously), by the present. My argument in the book is that this is true not only of us as individuals but also for us as social groups. Collective memory reflects the present as well as the past, or rather it reflects the past as it is molded by the present. To illustrate the point here on the blog, I’m [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:12-04:00April 28th, 2015|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels|

The Community Behind the Gospel of John

In chapter 6 of my proposed book Jesus Before the Gospels, after I deal with collective memory in theory, I move on to talk about how Jesus was remembered in three different early Christian communities, those behind the Gospels of Mark (our earliest canonical Gospel), John (our latest canonical Gospel), and Thomas (our best known non-canonical Gospel). One thing we have learned from memory studies is that the present affects not only what is remembered about the past, but also how it is remembered. That is true for communities as well as individuals. And so in my treatment of how Jesus was remembered in such different ways in these three communities, I discuss as well what can be established or at least surmised about the historical circumstances that would have made such memories plausible. I don’t want to spill the beans here about what I say for each of these communities, but I do want to show how scholars have tried to establish the historical context for one of them, the one behind the Gospel [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:12-04:00April 25th, 2015|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels|

More on Collective Memory

As I discussed in my previous post, the sixth chapter of my proposed book Jesus Before the Gospels will cover the area of “collective memory.” This is a kind of memory that a lot of people don’t seem to be aware of, but it has long been discussed by sociologists. Here is how I summarize the views of the famous scholar who first articulated an understanding of collective memory, Maurice Halbwachs. *************************************************************** The term “collective memory” was coined by French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945). His most important and influential book appeared (in French) in 1925 and was called, simply, On Collective Memory. Halbwachs acknowledges the rather obvious point that it is individuals, not social groups, who remember the past (society does not have some kind of enormous hippocampus!). But in his view, individual memories have all be reconstructed based on our relation to society around us, especially our various social groups – for example, our families, friends, towns or cities, nations. It is impossible, in fact, for us to remember without having a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:12-04:00April 24th, 2015|Book Discussions, Memory Studies|

My Memory Book, Chapter 6 on “Collective Memory”

The sixth chapter of my book Jesus Before the Gospels is tentatively entitled “Collective Memory and Early Recollections of Jesus.” In it I deal with the phenomenon that sociologists call collective memory. This phenomenon is different from the one we normally think of when we think of memory; most of the time we think of the psychological phenomenon of individual memories – either of things we’ve experienced (“episodic” memories, as they are called, as I have pointed out), or or things we have learned about the world (“semantic” memories), or of things we know how to do, such as hit a backhand in tennis or ride a bike (“procedural “ memories). Sociologists for the past 90 years, though, have talked about how social groups reconstruct and imagine and preserve the past. Here is how I introduce the matter in my chapter, before beginning to talk about the sociologists who pioneered the field (Maurice Halbwachs) and developed it (Jan Assmann and Barry Schwartz, for example) ******************************************************************* I first began to see that memory is radically affected by [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:57-04:00April 22nd, 2015|Book Discussions, Memory Studies|

My Memory Book: False Memories and the Life of Jesus

As I indicated in my previous two posts, the fifth chapter of the book I’m now writing, Jesus Before The Gospels, deals with “False Memories and the Life of Jesus.” The first part of the chapter shows what we know about how traditions are kept alive in oral cultures, as they are told and retold, either by professionals who are experts or by regular ole folk who are not. And so this part of the chapter summarizes the research into oral cultures undertaken by anthropologists. Of course there are no anthropologists who can study ancient cultures, at least in the way they can study modern cultures, when they can go in to observe how the culture “works,” interview people, and get to know the cultural world first-hand. But it is possible to apply the findings of modern anthropology to long-deceased cultures, such as the Christian communities of the first century. And that’s what I try to do in this chapter. My specific interest is in how Jesus was remembered in these cultures that passed along [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:57-04:00April 20th, 2015|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Memory Studies|

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