BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 164 of 178

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.

Maintaining Your Moral Compass – Morally Agnostic

Agnostics with a moral compass. In this post I’ll be sticking with my theme of yesterday, related to the lecture I gave at NYU, two nights ago now, about how the Bible deals with the problem of suffering. At the end of the lecture I indicated that I have a view of suffering related to that set out in the book of Ecclesiastes. The author of Ecclesiastes, claiming to be king of Solomon (even though he was living many centuries later) stressed that life is short. It is here for a little while and then gone – and that our view of how to live should be controlled by that uncomfortable but very real fact. For this author there is no obvious justice in the here and now. Righteous people suffer and the wicked often prosper. And the injustice of this life will not be made up in the afterlife since, for this author, there is probably not going to *be* an afterlife. This life is all there is. Which is why, for him, “a [...]

BDEhrman2022-12-31T16:18:55-05:00March 9th, 2013|Afterlife, Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

Biblical Views of Suffering

On something different from Christology! I’m in New York City for a few days. Last night I gave a lecture at NYU; they had asked that I talk about “God, The Bible, and the Problem of Suffering.” That’s the topic of my book God’s Problem, and so I spun off a talk from there. Part of the point of the book is that the Bible has a large number of views about why people – especially the people of God – suffer, many of these views are at odds with one another, and most of them are different from what people, even highly religious people, even highly religious people who think they based their views on the Bible, tend to think. The lecture was only to be 50 minutes so I couldn’t spend much time on this that or the other view, and in fact could not deal with most of the biblical perspectives. I didn’t talk about Job, for example (which, in the judgment of most biblical scholars, is made up of the work [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-31T23:37:04-05:00March 8th, 2013|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

“Human” Appearances of God in the Old Testament

So far in my posts on Christology I have talked a bit about pagan views of the divine realm and its relationship to the human. I have a lot more to say about that – in particular with the various ways that humans could be thought of as in some sense divine in the pagan world. But more than a few people have asked me what any of this has to do with Christianity since obviously the original followers of Jesus were Jewish, not Gentile, and their views of divinity in relationship to humanity would have been guided by Jewish traditions, such as those of the Old Testament. Fair enough! So before going any further, I thought I should make some posts about divinity in relationship to humanity in the Christian Old Testament. FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click here for membership options. If you don't belong yet, NOW'S YOUR CHANCE TO JOIN!!! The first thing to stress is that even though parts of the Old Testament portray God [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:44:24-04:00March 5th, 2013|Book Discussions, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

The Divine Pyramid

In my previous posts I have been insisting that if one wants to say that “Jesus is God” according to an early Christian text, one has to ask “in what *sense*” is he God? Now is a good time for me to lay out how I understand ancient people understood the divine realm. It was very different from the way most people today – at least the people I run across – imagine the divine realm. As I pointed out earlier, people today think of God as completely Other than us humans. We are mortal and limited in every respect; he is immortal and unlimited. He is all-powerful, all-knowing, and everywhere-present. We are by comparison weak, ignorant, and in one place at a time. He is infinite and eternal; we are finite and temporal. There is an unbridgeable gap between us and God. (Although in Christian theology, it is Jesus who bridges that gap by being a divine being who becomes human; in traditional theology, he did that so that we humans could then become [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:44:31-04:00March 5th, 2013|Book Discussions, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture|

Jesus as Divine in the Synoptics

In yesterday’s post I pointed out that if one asks about an early Christain text: “Does it portray Jesus as God,” then almost always if the answer is Yes (which it usually is), it has to be qualified: “Yes, in *some sense*. “ And the question is always, in *what* sense? The reason I stress this point is that for many years – until about six months ago – I was quite vehement, in person and in print, that the Synoptic Gospels did not portray Jesus as divine, but only the Gospel of John did. It’s true – I still think and, I suspect, always will think – that in the Gospel of John there is little doubt about the divinity of Jesus. As we have seen, the Gospel opens with the amazing poem: “ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came into being through him, and apart from him nothing came into being that came into being. In him was life, [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:44:39-04:00March 3rd, 2013|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels|

Early Christology: How I Have Changed My Mind

I’m ready now to get back to the issues involved with early Christology and the question of How Jesus Became God. In this post I’ll quickly review what I’ve covered up till now and indicate a major change in my thinking that has happened over the past six months. In these posts I have been arguing that there were two separate streams of early Christology (this too has been a major shift in my thinking, and is closely related to the one I will be discussing momentarily). The first Christologies were almost certainly based on the idea of “exaltation.” Christ, as a human being, came to be exalted to the right hand of God, where he was made to share in God’s status as a reward for his faithfulness. The earliest Christians – the earthly disciples themselves (or at least some of them: we have no way of knowing if they all “converted” to believe this about Jesus) --thought that this happened at Jesus’ resurrection, where God “made him” the Son of God (and thus [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:44:46-04:00March 3rd, 2013|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine|

The Greatest Controversies

So I am now back from D.C. and from recording my 24 lectures for the Great Courses, on “The Greatest Controversies in Early Christian History. “ It was a rugged week! In theory it shouldn’t be that hard to deliver six lectures a day on topics you’re familiar with; but these lectures for the Teaching Company are *so* intense that the energy required is extraordinarily high. I started each day around 9, finished around 4, got a work out in, worked for two or three hours on the next day’s lectures, ate and went to bed and did it again! I’m reasonably zoned now, at the end of it, and am planning to spend the evening in front of a fire, with a martini and a very nice cigar, thinking deep thoughts. But on the course. One of the biggest problems I had involved deciding *which* controversies to pick – which millennia-old ones, which modern ones, which … ones! There were so many to choose from . I ended up with the following list, and [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:44:53-04:00March 2nd, 2013|Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Futuristic Interpretations of the Book of Revelation

My apologies for being “absent” from the blog for a few days. As I pointed out in my last posting, I’m in lovely Chantilly VA just now, doing a series of lectures for the Teaching Company. The schedule is a real killer and I have virtually no time on my hands. In any event, right before I came, my textbook on the Bible was finally completed and sent off to the publisher to be entered into production. As it turns out, one of the passages from the Intro coincides with one of the lectures I gave yesterday on the book of Revelation. For the undergraduate reader of the text, I try to show, as succinctly as I can, why Revelation is best not interpreted as referring to future events to transpire in our own day. Here’s what I say in the textbook. *************************************************************** One of the most popular ways to interpret the book of Revelation today is to read its symbolic visions as literal descriptions of what is going to transpire in our own day [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:45:00-04:00February 28th, 2013|Book Discussions, Revelation of John|

A Hiatus

This week I need to take a break from my current thread on the development of early Christology. It’s not because I’ve run out of things to say, although that will happen eventually. It’s because I’m completely tied up with something else this week that will be sucking up most of my time and virtually all of my energy. This week I’m recording a new course for the Teaching Company (now called The Great Courses). If you don’t know about the Great Courses, you should! It’s an amazing outfit. The provide courses on CD or DVD on an enormous number of academic subjects, from astronomy to philosophy to history to classics to music to physics to … well, to you name it. And they do a lot of courses in religion/religious studies. I buy courses myself to watch. Probably their bestselling professor is Robert Greenberg, a brilliant lecturer and master of all things musical. His course “How to Listen to and Appreciate Great Music” is absolutely fabulous – 48 lectures on the history of Western [...]

BDEhrman2013-02-26T03:05:31-05:00February 26th, 2013|Reader’s Questions|

What Kind of a Text is the King James Bible?

Introduction: On January 24, 2013, the traveling exhibition Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible opened at the William H. Hannon Library at Loyola Marymount University. The keynote talk for the opening: "What Kind of a Text is the King James Bible? Manuscripts, Translation, and the Legacy of the KJV" was presented by Dr. Bart Ehrman, James A. Grey Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at UNC Chapel Hill and New York Times bestselling author. In this lecture by Dr. Bart Ehrman, a leading authority on the New Testament and New York Times bestselling author, you will hear why the KJV has received such praise and adoration over the centuries, and then turn to consider aspects of the translation that also need to be considered when assessing its greatness and value: the archaic language that at times can confuse modern readers; the inferior ancient manuscripts on which the translation was based; and the theological biases that occasionally led the translators to make the biblical text say something other than it originally meant. [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-31T23:42:48-05:00February 26th, 2013|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Video Media|

John’s Logos and Jewish Wisdom

In yesterday’s post I began to discuss the Prologue of the Gospel of John, which contains a poem that celebrates Christ as the Word of God that became human. This Word of God was with God in the beginning of all things, and was himself God; through him the universe was created and in him is life. This word took on flesh to dwell with humans, and that human – the divine word made flesh – was Jesus. Some readers over the years have wondered if this celebration of the Logos of God that becomes flesh owes more to Greek philosophy than to biblical Judaism. It’s a good question, and hard to answer. One thing that can be said is that this Logos idea does find very close parallels with other biblical texts – in particular with texts that speak of the Wisdom (Greek: Sophia) of God. Sophia and Logos are related ideas; both have to do in some respect with “reason.” Sophia is reason that is internal to a person; Logos is that reason [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:47:30-04:00February 23rd, 2013|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

The Christ-Poem in John

Arguably the best known and most influential passage dealing with Christology in the New Testament is the Prologue of the Gospel of John, 1:1-18. It is also probably the most studied and discussed passage – even more than the Christ poem in Philippians 2:6-11. The first eighteen verses of John are typically called the “Prologue” because they are clearly set apart from the rest of the Gospel as a kind of celebration of the main character of the book; these verses are written in a different writing style from the rest of the Gospel (lofty poetry), they contain key concepts not found in the rest of the Gospel (Christ as “the Word” made flesh), and yet they introduce well some of the most important views of the Gospel (the high view of Christ generally). And so it is widely thought that the author of the Fourth Gospel appended these verses as a Prologue, possibly after the rest of the book was written. It is widely thought, in fact, that the Gospel went through multiple editions, [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:47:39-04:00February 22nd, 2013|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine|

Final Thoughts on the Philippians Christ-Poem

There is a whole lot more that could be said about the Christ-poem in Philippians 2. You could literally write an entire book on just this passage. In fact, people *have* written books on just this passage. The most important one, a classic in the field, is by Ralph Martin, A Hymn of Christ (which in earlier editions was called Carmen Christi) (which is a Latin phrase that, unsurprisingly, means A Hymn of Christ :-) ). This passage has had more ink spilled over it by scholars over the last century than almost any other in the entire Bible (with the exception of John 1:1-18). In any event, to make sense of what I want to say here, it would help, if you haven’t done so, to read the other posts I’ve made on it. Here I just want to mention briefly an interpretation that is sometimes floated for the passage which takes it in a very different way indeed, as not being about incarnation at all. In this alternative interpretation, the passage is not [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:47:46-04:00February 21st, 2013|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters|

An Ancient Accusation of Textual Tampering

I will get back to my discussion of Christology soon (tomorrow?) but wanted to take a break and talk about something else that came up in my reading today. I’m working diligently on finishing the research for my next book How Jesus Became God. My goal is to finish all the research in about three weeks. Unfortunately, I can’t be devoting my entire attention to the research just now because I have other things hanging fire. I’m putting the final touches on The Other Gospels manuscript, which I hope to have finished this week; and next week I will be in Washington D.C. recording a 24-lecture course for the Teaching Company on “The Greatest Controversies in Early Christianity.” That will take the entire week, and when I won’t be giving a lecture (six a day), I’ll be too exhausted and brain dead to think about much anything else. But after that I have a few weeks to work, with only weekends away for giving lectures in various spots. And I hope to start writing about [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:47:54-04:00February 20th, 2013|Book Discussions, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts|

More on the Philippians Christ-Poem

COMMENT: This ‘rhythmic structure’ just does not work in Greek. The first ‘stanza’ with three ‘lines’: Who, although he was in the form of God Did not regard equality with God Something to be grasped after; In Greek the ‘third line’ is only one word and it appears in the middle of the ‘second line’, after only the first word of the so-called second line. There are a few different views of the structure, but they all must be based on the Greek text. RESPONSE AND FURTHER COMMENT: That’s exactly right – you make a good point. For my translation I arranged the poem in three stanzas of three lines each; but in Greek it’s different. But even there there are still three stanzas of three lines each, but because of the grammatical difference, it works differently. In Greek it’s like this for the first part of the poem: FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click here for membership options. If you don't belong yet, JOIN!!! ὃς [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:48:03-04:00February 19th, 2013|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters|

The Pre-pauline “Poem” in Philippians 2

In my most recent post on Christology I began to speak about the “incarnation” Christology found famously in Paul’s letter to the Philippians, 2:6-11. There are a lot of other things I want to say about this passage, all of them relevant to the issues I’ve been discussing. The first and most important thing is that it has been widely recognized by scholars for a very long time that this passage is something that Paul appears to be quoting, that it is not simply part of the prose letter. Moreover, it is frequently called (probably wrongly) a “hymn” (that’s probably wrong because – as I’ve been told by an expert in the field of ancient music, it doesn’t actually scan as music). But in any event, it is highly structured in a balanced fashion and thus seems to be more like a poem than like prose. The reasons for thinking that Paul is quoting rather than composing it are pretty compelling, and I will get to them eventually. For now I want to point out [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:48:13-04:00February 18th, 2013|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters|

Dead Sea Scrolls Scandal

A few years ago I was asked to give a speech at a museum in Raleigh NC in connection with an exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls that had been long in the works and had finally become a reality. I will be the first to admit, I'm not the first person you should think of to give a lecture on the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s not my field of scholarship. But the lecture was to be one of a series of lectures, and the other lecturers actually were experts, including my colleague Jodi Magness, a world-class archaeologist who happens to teach in my department (well, she doesn’t “happen” to teach there; I hired her when I was chair of the department) and who has written the best popular discussion of the archaeology of Qumran, the place where the scrolls were found, and my colleague at cross-town rival Duke, Eric Meyers, another archaeologist famous for his work in ancient Israel. The organizers of the exhibit wanted me to give a talk because they wanted a [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:48:21-04:00February 16th, 2013|Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Religion in the News|

A Brief Break from Christology

With this post I want to take a brief break from what I’ve been doing on the blog to assess how it’s going. A couple of weeks ago now I decided to start posting on my current book project, How Jesus Became God. My idea was that this would allow me to “think through” some issues out loud, as it were, as I put thoughts on screen, and it would allow people on the blog to see where I’m going with the book. And so I’ve posted about a dozen or so posts on the topic, virtually without stop (well, there have one or two other things). On the whole I would characterize these posts as relatively heavy-hitting as far as posts go: I’ve been trying to write for the blog members, (you!), who as a rule are not scholars but are highly intelligent lay people who may not have all the jargon and background of professional biblical folk, but who are interested in topics related to NT and early Christianity, and don’t mind seeing [...]

BDEhrman2013-02-15T22:47:43-05:00February 15th, 2013|Public Forum|

Incarnation Christology, Angels, and Paul

In my posts on Christology so far I have argued that different Christians in the early decades of the Christian movement maintained that Jesus had been exalted to a divine status at some point of his existence – at his resurrection, at his baptism, at his birth. I have called this a christology from below, or an “exaltation” christology; it is sometimes called a low christology because it understands Jesus to have started out as a human (down here with us) and to have been raised to a divine status. In this view he was not God from eternity past or a pre-existent being. He was a human being who was taken up to the level of divinity at some point (or, in the case of the Virgin Birth, that he came into existence at a point in time as a person who was partially human partially divine). But there was another kind of Christology which was also very early – earlier, in fact, than our earliest surviving Christian writer, Paul. This is the view [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:48:28-04:00February 14th, 2013|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters|

An Important and Relevant Textual Variant in Luke 2

I’d like to address the issue of early Christology from a slightly different angle in this post. So far I have talked about how an “exaltation” Christology, in which Jesus, the man, is made the Son of God at some point of his existence can be found in various parts of the New Testament (Rom 1:3-4; speeches in Acts), and how different early Christians located that exaltation to different moments in Jesus’ existence (resurrection, baptism, birth, pre-existence). As it turns out, this view of Christology relates to an important textual variant in the Gospel of Luke. So, by way of background for anyone new to this kind of discussion. We don’t have the original copy of Luke’s Gospel (or of any other NT book) (or, actually, of any book at all from the ancient world!). What we have are copies made from copies made from copies that were made from copies. We have thousands of copies of the NT from the centuries before the invention of printing. And these thousands of copies have hundreds of [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:48:36-04:00February 13th, 2013|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, New Testament Manuscripts|

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