BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 170 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.

On Changing One’s Mind

I thought today I would break up the monotony of the current thread by posting on something completely different. It will take me a couple of posts to finish up my reflections on what kind of training is necessary to make a good textual critic – which is really a sub-thread (OK, call it a tangent) within my larger thread about how I went about writing my textbook and what changes I made in it. And I’ll get back to both the sub-thread and the larger thread. But this post is on something else. Changing one’s mind. The reason this has become a topic of interest for me – today, for instance – is that I just finished reading something that I wrote ten years ago and something that I wrote on the same topic seven years later, just three years ago, and noted that, well, I had changed my mind! Reversed directions. Completely altered not only what I thought but what I said. And that has led me to reflect on the phenomenon of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:55-04:00October 12th, 2014|Reflections and Ruminations|

A Text-Critical Dissertation

The point of this short thread dealing with my graduate training is to explain why it is that lots – probably most – New Testament scholars do not consider textual critics to be competent in a wide range of fields normally associated with New Testament scholarship. I know that must seem very strange to outsiders, but it’s the case. Textual critics are often thought of as a rather strange group of technicians without broad competency in the areas that other New Testament scholars are interested in – for example, the Jewish environment or the Greco-Roman worlds from which the New Testament emerged, the historical Jesus, the interpretation of and historical problems associated with the Gospels, the life and letters of the apostle Paul, the theology of the different NT writers, and on and on. The reason for this is that to be competently trained in textual criticism is a long and hard process and it’s very difficult to do that *and* to learn all the other things that most other NT scholars are competent and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:55-04:00October 11th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts|

My Graduate Training (Textual Criticism??)

I saw my master’s thesis as the perfect assignment to get me grounded in the entire, complicated field of New Testament textual criticism. Ever since then I’ve been in favor of students writing master's theses, even if it is not required for a master’s program. For one thing, doing so gets you into the frame of mind that you need to be in when you get to the point of writing a dissertation at the PhD level – which for most students is the first time they write a book. The masters thesis is usually much shorter – say 100-120 pages. But the layout tends to be similar. Most theses I’ve been involved with, including my own, have entailed an introduction, three chapters, and a conclusion. So the student learns to think in terms of writing chapters, each of which has its own thesis and point; but all of them work together in order systematically to set forth the overarching thesis of the work. This is a hard transition for some students, who for their [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:55-04:00October 10th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Training as a Textual Critic

In some of my previous posts I’ve indicated that since I was known as a textual critic (one who worked with Greek manuscripts of the New Testament in order to determine both what the authors originally wrote and how the text came to be changed over the centuries) I was not widely seen as a candidate for writing a New Testament textbook for undergraduates. Several readers have expressed some perplexity over this. Aren’t textual critics, by their very nature, background, and training, proficient in the wider field of New Testament studies? The answer may surprise you: it may be that they should be, but many (at one time, most) are not. It’s a little hard to explain why, but I’ll try. As is my wont, I’ll start autobiographically. In my case, the great bulk of my graduate training actually had very little to do with textual criticism. When I came to Princeton Theological Seminary as a master’s student ) in 1978 (after I had finished my BA in English at Wheaton college), I was required [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:55-04:00October 9th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

Where Does One Deal with Textual Criticism?

There were other organizational dilemmas that I faced in doing my textbook. As I indicated, I decided to begin with chapters on the Greco-Roman world and the Jewish world of the New Testament, and – before getting to the Gospels themselves – a chapter on the controversies in early Christianity that led to the formation of the 27-book NT canon. But there was one other rather fundamental issue. If I was talking about the canon of the NT before getting into a discussion of the NT books – shouldn’t I also talk about the text of the NT, that is, the surviving manuscripts of the NT, before discussing individual books? Many readers on the blog will be familiar with the textual problems posed by the New Testament. In broad outline, the problems are no different from those posed by every book, or sets of books, from the ancient world, whether the Hebrew Bible, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the plays of Euripides, the writings of Plato on down to the plays and essays of Seneca to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:55-04:00October 7th, 2014|Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

Getting the Facts of My Life Straight

I have to admit, I sometimes get a bit tired of being the whipping boy for fundamentalist and conservative evangelical Christian apologists. If they would deal with my views head on and actually get the facts of my life right, it would be one thing. But when they publicly accuse me of holding, or having held, positions that I never did – when they are flat our wrong in what they say about me -- it gets under my skin. The first time I noticed this in a big way was when Craig Evans – a long time colleague and friend – indicated, in writing!, that the reason I had become an agnostic was that I came to realize that there were differences in our manuscripts of the New Testament. Good grief. I had known about differences in our manuscripts from the time I was sixteen years old!! I had studied them and known all about them in all the years I was a fundamentalist. These differences had nothing – Zero, Nada, Not a Thing [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:55-04:00October 6th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum|

Where Do You Start an Introduction to the NT?

One of the hardest parts of writing an Introduction to the New Testament is figuring out where to begin. If someone were writing a literary introduction, or even a theological one, it might make best sense to begin at the beginning, with the Gospel of Matthew, and then continue through the New Testament all the way to the book of Revelation. But what if one is writing an Introduction from a *historical* perspective? Matthew wasn’t the first Gospel to be written; Mark was. So doesn’t it make better sense (after discussing the Greco-Roman and Jewish milieu out of which these books arose) to start with Mark? But the problems go even deeper. The Gospels were not the first books written: Paul’s letters were written earlier. Students almost never know this; they simply assume that since the Gospels occur first in the NT, and since they talk about Jesus, who lived before Paul, that they were written before Paul. So if one wants to deal with the NT historically, doesn’t it make best sense to begin [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:55-04:00October 6th, 2014|Book Discussions, Teaching Christianity|

Getting Started on My NT Introduction

So far I have been talking about how I conceived of my textbook when I first started working on it in the mid 1990s, stressing in particular that I wanted to approach the task from a rigorously historical perspective. I should say again, I really was not sure that anyone would be interested in a textbook like that. The only think comparable that I knew about at the time was a textbook by Joseph Tyson, a fine scholar at SMU, whose book, though, was not widely used. In addition, I heard, while I was doing the research for my book, that an Introduction was being written by none other than Raymond Brown. I thought that this was *certain* to make my book a non-entity. Many of you may not know who Raymond Brown was. At the time, he was arguably the premier scholar of the New Testament in North America. He was extremely learned; incredibly deep; unusually insightful. He had read everything. He was tremendously energetic. He trained some of the finest scholars of my [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:55-04:00October 3rd, 2014|Book Discussions, Teaching Christianity|

On Boring Textbooks

There is one other general principle that I tried to follow when writing my NT textbook in the 1990s. In my experience, most textbooks – not just in biblical studies, but in all fields – suffer from one ubiquitous problem. They are BORING. A guiding principle for me was to try my best to keep from boring readers to death. I’ve always been amazed over the years how otherwise intelligent human beings can take really fascinating material and make it dull, uninteresting, soporific, and general snooze-worthy. Take the Hebrew Bible – the Christian Old Testament – for example. It’s an amazing book, filled with incredibly interesting stories, and beautiful poetry, and gut-wrenching reflections on life and the disasters that happen within it. How can you make the boring? Simple! Ask someone to write a textbook on it. The New Testament too is a really interesting book – even apart from being the most important book in the history of Western civilization. Any textbook written for undergraduates will be, for many of them, their first (and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:54-04:00October 2nd, 2014|Book Discussions, Teaching Christianity|

The Importance of a Comparative Approach to the NT

I started this thread thinking that I would devote it to discussing the changes that I am making in the sixth edition of my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. But I realized, once I started, that I needed to explain more fully what the textbook was at its inception back in the mid 1990s before talking about changes that I’m making now. And so my past few posts have been about how I imagined the book to be a distinctively *historical* introduction to the New Testament and about what that actually meant in terms of how I approached the task. One other aspect of this being a historical introduction (as opposed to a theological or principally interpretive or mainly literary introduction) is that I wanted the book to be rigorously comparative in its orientation. What I mean is this. When people read the New Testament, they naturally assume that it is *one* book. After all, you buy it as one book. It has covers. It has a table [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:39-04:00September 30th, 2014|Book Discussions, Teaching Christianity|

Gift Subscriptions!!!

I am very pleased to announce that we have a new addition to the Blog. This could help you, me, and a person you love. Or like. Or would like to like. A friend, a colleague, a family member. The new addition: the possibility of a GIFT SUBSCRIPTION. Many, many of you know of someone who would benefit from the blog. By giving a gift subscription, you would make it possible. It’s obvious why that would be a benefit to the person to whom you give the gift. They would have full access to these virtually daily discussions of all things having to do with the New Testament and Christianity in Antiquity. The gift It benefits you because you feel oh so good about yourself. And it benefits me because it contributes to my ultimate objective in running the blog in the first place – raising revenues for charities that deal with hunger and homelessness. And so I would like to challenge all of you to think of someone who would enjoy being on the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:39-04:00September 29th, 2014|Public Forum|

New Discussion Forum: Suggestions?

Thanks to the hard work of my computer assistant, Steven Ray –if you have any website or related needs, he’s the guy to hire! – we are nearly ready to make a major change in the Bart Ehrman Blog, a.k.a. the CIA. Because of regular and repeated requests, we are going to add a Discussion Forum, open to all paid members. At present, as you know, the only way to “discuss” anything on the blog is by asking me a question, or by making a comment, on one of my posts. Occasionally one person will respond to another person’s question or comment, but that’s about the extent of conversation among participants. Everything, more or less, begins with my post and all comments pretty much pass through me. With a discussion forum, on the other hand, anyone can start a thread of their own and people can interact on the question/topic, talking with one another directly instead of through me. When I’ve mentioned the possibility of setting up such a thing for the blog, I have [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:39-04:00September 28th, 2014|Public Forum|

The (Ancient) Genre of the Gospels

In this thread I’ve been talking about how I conceived of my New Testament textbook, some 20 years ago now, as a rigorously historical introduction. I’ve been stressing that one of the ways it is historical is that it takes seriously the Greco-Roman milieu out of which it arose, and that one of the key implications is that one needs to read the NT books in light of the ancient genres which they employ. My argument in the book (and in general!) is that if you misunderstand how the ancient genre works, you will misunderstand the book. The Gospels, I argue, are written as Greco-Roman biographies. Here is an excerpt where I describe what that means and why it matters, again from the first edition of my textbook. ********************************************************* We have numerous examples of Greco-Roman biographies, many of them written by some of the most famous authors of Roman antiquity, for instance, Plutarch, Suetonius, and Tacitus. One of the ways to understand how this genre "worked" is to contrast it with the way modern biographies [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:39-04:00September 26th, 2014|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Teaching Christianity|

Placing the New Testament in Its Own Historical Context

In my previous post I began to discuss how I chose, back in the mid 1990s, to conceptualize my New Testament textbook, not as a theological/interpretive introduction to the NT, or as a literary introduction, but as a rigorously historical introduction. Among other things, that meant treating the books of the New Testament as *some* of the early Christian wriitngs, which needed to be discussed in relation to other early Christian writings produced at about the same time. In this post I’ll talk about one other feature of a more historical approach to the New Testament. Almost all the other introductory textbooks available at the time, as I indicated yesterday, began with a kind of obligatory appendix on the “background” to the New Testament – information on the historical, political, social, and religious matrix out of which the New Testament sprang (first the Greco-Roman context and then Jewish). Once all *that* was over with, these textbooks typically moved to talk about the writings of the New Tesatment without incorporating any insights from the world in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:39-04:00September 26th, 2014|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Teaching Christianity|

A Historical Approach to the New Testament

In my previous posts I talked about how I came to be convinced to write my textbook on the New Testament, back in the early to mid 1990s. Once I agreed to do it, the first step was to decide exactly what *kind* of Introduction to the New Testament I wanted it to be. This was a problem, because I was pretty sure that the kind of introduction that I would like to write would not be the kind of introduction that college professors would like to use. There were already lots of textbooks on the New Testament available at the time. I myself had used two different ones over the years, one that was filled with all sorts of jargon and assumptions that made it way over my students heads (that one didn’t last! but for years it was one of the most widely used on the market); the other one was very sensitive to the theological interests of the authors and, presumably, of the students, and that was very heavy on using each [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:39-04:00September 25th, 2014|Book Discussions, Teaching Christianity|

Agreeing to Do the Textbook

In my previous post I indicated that I was not at all inclined to write a textbook on the New Testament. In fact, before the editor at Oxford University Press asked me to do it, I had never given it a moment’s thought – except for that moment when I thought (some years before), that whatever I did with my publishing career, I did *not* want to write such a thing. Looking back on it, I’m not sure why I was so dead set against it. I suppose it was because my plan was to write scholarship for scholars and nothing but scholarship for scholars. About a week after I turned down the offer to do the textbook, she called me again to see if I had changed my mind. No, I hadn’t. But I had started thinking about it. When she called me the third time I had begun to think that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all. There were several reasons I had begun to change my mind. For [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:39-04:00September 23rd, 2014|Book Discussions, Teaching Christianity|

My New Testament Textbook

I thought I would take a few posts to talk about what I’m working on these days – for the past month or so, with another month or so to go. As many of you know, I spent almost the entire summer doing nothing but reading books and articles about “memory” and related topics (such as the telling of stories in oral cultures) from a variety of perspectives: cognitive psychology, neurology (very low level!), anthropology (oral cultures and how they pass along their traditions), sociology (communal memory), folklore (urban legends, rumors, gossip), and so on. All of this was in preparation for my next trade book dealing with what we can say about the oral traditions of Jesus as they were passed along in the years before the Gospels were written. I am still leaving open the possibility of writing a scholarly monograph on a similar topic. But I have had to take a break from all that. And with huge reluctance. There are dozens and dozens of books and articles that I’m still desperate [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:39-04:00September 22nd, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Teaching Christianity|

Yale Shaffer Lectures 3 of 3 – Christ Against the Jews

Here is the third of my Shaffer Lectures delivered almost exactly ten years ago. This final one has to do with textual variants and apocryphal texts that show evidence of Christian anti-Judaism. I call this one: Christ Against the Jews. It is a topic that I continue to be interested in, and on which I plan to write a book for a general audience, at some time in the next few years (not about textual variants, but about the rise of Christian opposition to Jews and Judaism.) Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition. Quality is lacking since this is a VHS to 720p uprez:

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:25-04:00September 22nd, 2014|Christian Apocrypha, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Video Media|

Letter from Urban Ministries of Durham
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Letter from Urban Ministries of Durham

Public Forum

Letter from Urban Ministries of Durham

As most of you know, there are four charities that the Bart Ehrman Blog supports. Two of them are international: CARE and Doctors Without Borders. Two of them are local to me: The Food Bank of North Carolina and the Urban Ministries of Durham. I very much wish we could support all of them more and more -- they are all superb organizations. Click to Enlarge and Expand Browser But I have a special soft spot for the Urban Ministries of Durham. Despite its name, it is not a religious organization. It is the principal organization that deals with hunger and homelessness in my community. It's a huge task. But what is really amazing about UMD is that they are not interested in simply putting a band-aid on the problem, for example by having a soup kitchen and an emergency shelter. They do have those, and a clothes pantry and a food pantry and much more. BUT what is really impressive is that they work very hard at *eliminating* homelessness (and hunger), [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:39-04:00September 19th, 2014|Public Forum|

Why We Need Tenure

I’ve been discussing what a university professor does with his or her time, and have devoted a couple of posts to the question of what it takes to receive tenure. In doing so I have indicated that tenure is a guarantee of life-long employment by the academic institution, barring such extraordinary circumstances as moral turpitude on the part of the professor (it happens!) and financial exigency of the institution (it too, alas, happens). I should say as well, though, that once one receives tenure it is no pure boondoggle for the rest of one’s life. At UNC, at least, we have a mandatory “Post-tenure Review” process every five years, where we who have tenure have to explain in writing what we have been doing in our teaching, research, and service since the previous review. If performance is not satisfactory, a plan of remedial action is implemented, and if things go from bad to worse, disciplinary actions can be implemented. But for most of us, we’re working our tails off all the time anyway, so there’s [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:39-04:00September 18th, 2014|Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

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