BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 197 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.

More Responses to My Newsweek Article

When the editor at Newsweek ask me if I would be willing to write an article on the birth of Jesus, I was hesitant and wrote him back asking if he was sure he really wanted me to do it. I told him that I seem to be incapable of writing anything that doesn’t stir up controversy. It must be in my blood. Still, he said that they knew about my work and were not afraid of controversy, and they did indeed want an article from me. What’s interesting to me is that I’ve been getting it from all sides. I don’t know why that should surprise me. It seems to be the story of my life. For years my agnostic and atheist readers were cheering me on from the sidelines as I talked about the problems posed by a critical study of the New Testament: there are discrepancies and contradictions, the Gospels are not written by eyewitnesses, and the stories they contain were modified over time, and many of them were invented, in the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:52-04:00December 15th, 2012|Bart's Critics, Historical Jesus, Religion in the News|

Responses to my Newsweek Article

My Newsweek article this week has generated a lot of response. I have no idea what kind of comments they typically get for their stories, but so far, as of now, there have been 559 on mine; and most of them are negative – to no one’s surprise – written by people (conservative evangelicals and fundamenalists for the most part, from what I can tell) who think that the Gospels are perfectly accurate in what they have to say about Jesus – not just at his birth but for his entire life. A lot of these respondents think that anyone who thinks that the New Testament contains discrepancies is too smart for his or her own good and blind at the same time (not sure how it can go both ways, but there it is). I’ve also been getting a lot of email from incensed readers, including a sixteen-year old girl who tells me that she is a Pentecostal Christian who has read the Bible 160 times and is now starting her 161st; she was [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:39-04:00December 14th, 2012|Bart's Critics, Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Religion in the News|

The Infancy Narratives Compared

In two previous posts I’ve detailed what happens in Luke’s version of Jesus’ birth and then in Matthew’s. I will assume those two previous posts in the comments that I want to make in this one. The problem people have with reading these two accounts, usually, is the problem they have reading the Gospels (and the Bible as a whole) generally. Or at least this has been my experience. It’s the problem of assuming that one account is basically saying the same thing as some other account. People do that with the Bible all the time. With the New Testament, people tend to read Matthew as if he’s saying the same thing as Mark; John as if it’s the same thing as Luke; Paul’s letters as if, at heart, they’re the same thing as James; Revelation as if it’s the same thing as John. And on and on and on. One of the most important tasks I have as an undergraduate teacher of the New Testament is to get students to see that each of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:39-04:00December 13th, 2012|Canonical Gospels|

Cover Stories on Jesus

Apologies to all for being “off” the blog for a couple of days. I’ve been in D.C. getting ready and primed for a new course that I’ll be doing with the Great Courses; it will be an audio course (no video for this one) called “The Greatest Controversies in Early Christianity,” where I deal with some hot topics, including two that I’ve been hitting here on the blog lately (Was Jesus Born in Bethlehem? And Was Jesus’ Mother a Virgin?), and others I haven’t (Was Paul the Real Founder of Christianity? Did the Jews Kill Jesus? Did Constantine Decide Which Books Would Be in the New Testament? Etc.) – 24 lectures altogether. I’ll be taping in February. (Now that I’ve thought about it, I think every lecture could be given with one word: No!) And while I was in D.C. – just yesterday – I learned that a story I wrote for Newsweek on the birth of Jesus was made the cover story this week. It’s kind of a goofy cover, but hey, I had [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:39-04:00December 11th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Religion in the News|

Matthew’s Version of the Birth of Jesus

Yesterday’s blog was about the account of Jesus’ birth in Luke; today I talk about Matthew. Even a casual reading shows that these are two very different accounts. Matthew has nothing about the birth of John the Baptist, the Annunciation, the census, the trip to Bethlehem, the shepherds, the presentation in the Temple. Matthew’s version, as a result, is much shorter. Most of his stories are found only in his account. And some of the differences from Luke appear to involve downright discrepancies, as I will try to show in another post. For now: Matthew’s version. Matthew begins with a genealogy of Jesus. Luke also has a genealogy, but it is given after Jesus is baptized in ch. 3, instead of where you would expect it, at his birth in ch. 1. I’ll explain my view of that in a later post. After the genealogy of Matthew in which Jesus is traced to David, the greatest king of Israel, and to Abraham, the father of Israel, we move right to the birth story. Mary has [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:38-04:00December 8th, 2012|Canonical Gospels|

Luke’s Version of Jesus’ Birth

Now that I’ve had several preliminary posts about the accounts of Jesus’ birth, I can get into some of the details from the surviving texts. As I’ve indicated, it is only Matthew and Luke that tell the tales of the infancy narrative, and the annual “Christmas Pageant” that so many of us grew up seeing is in fact a conflation of the two accounts, making one mega-account out of two that are so different up and down the line. And so, the Annunciation to Mary is in Luke, the dream of Joseph in Matthew; the shepherds are in Luke, the wise men in Matthew; the trip to Bethlehem is in Luke, the Flight to Egypt is in Matthew, and so forth and so on. You can compare them yourself, up and down the line, and see the differences. In this post I want to focus on Luke’s account. Then I will look at Matthew’s. And then I will compare the two in a couple of key points in order to show that the differences between [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:38-04:00December 8th, 2012|Canonical Gospels|

The Christmas Story: Some Basic Background

Now that I have posted a couple of my earlier published reflections on Christmas, I can make some comments in a series of posts, going into a bit more detail. This first post more or less states some of the basic information that most readers know, but that it’s worth while stressing as a kind of ground clearing exercise. To begin with, we are extremely limited in our sources when it comes to knowing anything at all about the birth of Jesus. In fact, at the end of the day, I think we can’t really know much at all. Just to cut to the chase, I think that it is most probable that he was born in Nazareth in the northern part of what we today think of as Israel (back then, in Galilee), where he was certainly raised from the time he was a child. His parents were Jewish by birth, religion, culture. I’d assume their names were really Joseph and Mary. We don’t know anything about them other than the fact that Joseph [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:38-04:00December 6th, 2012|Canonical Gospels, Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

The Myth of the First Christmas

Yesterday I started a little series of posts on the Christmas story, both in the NT and in later Gospels, by reproducing a little meditation from seven years ago. Here’s one that I wrote last year. Again, it was for some national media (a magazine, I think), but I don’t remember and I didn’t write it down. It deals with some of the things that I’ll be talking about at greater length in some of my forthcoming posts, but in a succinct way; still, be forewarned, there will necessarily be overlap. In this piece, though, I am dealing, ultimately, not so much with the discrepancies and historical problems with the story per se; those allow me to get to a bigger point at the end. In any event, here it is, as written last year at this time. ****************************************************************************************************************** The Myth of the First Christmas Once more the season is come upon us. At its heart stands a tale of two-thousand year vintage, the Christmas story. Or perhaps we should say the Christmas myth. When [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:45-04:00December 6th, 2012|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

An Agnostic Reflects on Christmas

I suppose a lot of people have the birth of Jesus on their minds these days. Hard not to. It occurred to me that it might be interesting to do a series of posts on what ancient Gospels – mainly the two of the New Testament, but also some of the others outside – say about it. When I indicate that there are two in the NT that talk about it, it is because Matthew and Luke are the only ones that say anything about the birth of Jesus. I think what I’ll do in these posts is talk about features of each one separately and then talk about the two of them together, with a few posts here at the beginning to provide different angles to introduce to the matter. But I’ll also talk about other Gospels, like the Proto-Gospel of James (which in the Middle Ages was in some places at least as popular as the NT Gospels) and the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. One of the reasons this is on my mind just [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:38-04:00December 5th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Feedback on Excursus

Warning. This is a long post. I am editing the first chapter of my Bible Introduction. At its end, I give an excursus that explains that we will be approaching the Bible from a literary and historical perspective, not a confessional perspective. It’s a very tricky and touchy topic, as this is meant for 19 and 20 year olds, most of whom know the Bible, if they do at all, only from church and Sunday school – believing perspectives. I give this kind of excursus in my New Testament textbook, and most teachers like it. But I’ve altered it for this book, to stress that the emphasis is both literary and historical. I would like some feedback: do you think this works, is sensitive to students, yet is clear about what the book will be doing and why? Let me know, if you feel so inclined. Excursus Most of the people who are deeply interested in the Bible in modern American culture are committed Jews or Christians who have been taught that this is a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:38-04:00December 3rd, 2012|Book Discussions, Teaching Christianity|

Melito and arly Christian Anti-Judaism

I AM IN THE PROCESS OF MAKING THE PENULTIMATE EDITS ON MY MY BIBLE INTRODUCTION. TODAY I HAD TO REVIEW AN EXCURSUS ON EARLY JEWISH-CHRISTIAN RELATIONS IN WHICH I DISCUSS THE RISE OF ANTI-JUDAISM IN THE EARLY CHURCH, IN CLUDING THIS BIT ON MELITO OF SARDIS. I THOUGHT IT MIGHT BE WORTH POSTING HERE. ******************************************************************************************************************** Melito was a bishop of the city of Sardis in Asia Mino in the mid to late second century. Today he is best known for a sermon he wrote that lambasts the Jews for the role they played in the death of Jesus. In it we find the first instance of a Christian author claiming that since the Jews killed Jesus, and since Jesus was God, the Jews are guilty of deicide – the murder of God. This charge was used, of course, to justify all sorts of hateful acts of violence against Jews over the centuries. In part, the rhetorical eloquence with which the charge was sometimes leveled has contributed ot the emotional reaction that it produced. Consider Melito’s [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:38-04:00December 2nd, 2012|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers, Public Forum|

Apostles as Guarantors of the Truth

Question: I was making my case against the resurrection and Jesus’ divinity tonight to a Christian and we ended up discussing oral tradition. His assertion was that there was enough of a check on what was being transmitted orally that we can be assured the information is reliable. For example, in the context of the story in Mark of the two women discovering the empty tomb, he said that this is probably true because, if it wasn’t, people that knew the disciples, who knew the two women, would have heard about it and put a stop to the story. I thought this was naive to the extreme but I’m not expert on oral traditions so I wanted to take it to you and see what you’d say about it. Response: I suppose I made your friend’s argument back when I was an evangelical Christian, but for the life of me I can’t see how any intelligent person with any experience of the world at all can make it. (I think I was intelligent at the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:38-04:00December 1st, 2012|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

Rene Salm at the SBL (2)

In my post yesterday I began to explain why René Salm’s claim that Nazareth did not exist in the days of Jesus is dead wrong and is rejected by every recognized authority – whether archaeologist, textual scholar, or historian; whether Jewish, Christian, agnostic, or other . Here is my second and final post on the subject, again, with apologies to those who have read it already, lifted from my treatment in Did Jesus Exist? ***************************************************************************************************************** Salm also claims that the pottery found on the site that is dated to the time of Jesus is not really from this period, even though he is not an expert on pottery. Two archaeologists who reply to Salm’s protestations say the following: “Salm’s personal evaluation of the pottery … reveals his lack of expertise in the area as well as his lack of serious research in the sources.” They go on to state: “By ignoring or dismissing solid ceramic, numismatic [that is, coins], and literary evidence for Nazareth’s existence during the Late Hellenisitic and Early Roman period, it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:38-04:00November 29th, 2012|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Mythicism|

Rene Salm at the Society of Biblical Literature Meeting

Several people have sent me private emails asking why René Salm was put on the program at the Society of Biblical Literature meeting, given the fact that he is not a scholar and has no credentials in the field. For those of you who don’t know, Salm has written a book claiming that Nazareth did not exist in the first century, so that Jesus couldn’t be there. He argues this in part because he doesn’t think Jesus existed and so wants to discredit the Gospel stories by saying the Christian authors made the whole thing up. Several scholars (well, everyone who mentioned it to me) were outraged that Salm was allowed to be on the program. This meeting is of a learned society and is to be for scholars with established expertise. It is not to be a venue for people without qualifications to spout their wild theories. Salm claims that those who oppose him have a theological or religious bias against his views, but this simply is not true. EVERYONE who is an expert [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:38-04:00November 29th, 2012|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Mythicism|

The Pope’s New Book

So, I read the Pope’s new book last night, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives. It wasn’t what I expected. I don’t know why it wasn’t what I expected: about thirty seconds solemn reflection should have told me what it would be. But I believed the media reports and was led astray. The press coverage stressed the things I pointed out in my post yesterday: we don’t know what year exactly Jesus was born, since the calendar devised by the sixth-century Dionysius Exiguus was off; we don’t know if Jesus was born on December 25; there is no NT record of an ox and an ass at the manger scene; etc. etc. But as it turns out, these are very, very minor points in the book, and not what the Pope is interested in at all. As it often does, the media cherry picked the parts of the book, minor as they are, in order to stress what seems (to the media) as sensational and newsworthy. But these things are not what the book is [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:38-04:00November 27th, 2012|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Religion in the News|

The Other Gospels and the Birth of Jesus

Right now I have the “other” Gospels on my mind. It’s true, I often have them on my mind, since they have been a focus for a good deal of my research over the past few years, and will continue to be for some years to come. But just now, they are particularly on my mind even though the book I’m currently writing (How Jesus Became God) is about something else. They’re on my mind for three reasons. First, I’ve agreed with Oxford Press, to produce, along with my colleague Zlatko Plese, an English-only edition of The Apocryphal Gospels, which came out in a Greek/Latin/Coptic-English edition last year; this new edition will include only the English translations with new introductions geared for a general audience. So I have to rewrite all the introductions, and the am bound by contract to do it by the end of January. Second, I have agreed to write a brief (2000-word) article for Newsweek this week, to be published in a couple of weeks, about the birth of Jesus, and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:37-04:00November 27th, 2012|Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus|

Thanksgiving

Hearty apologies to anyone (if there is anyone! :-) ) who has come to expect daily posts from me. As with so many other people on the planet (well, in America) this has been an inordinately busy time for me, and I just haven’t had the spare 45 minutes that I daily try to devote to the blog. Right on the heels of the packed Society of Biblical Literature meeting in Chicago (starting the next day) was the Thanksgiving preparations and with family coming in from literally all over the country, it’s been hectic. The frenetic pace is starting to die down now, and tomorrow I return to my normal ways and go on a very serious diet…. On Thanksgiving. It’s my favorite holiday. Christmas I love as well, even though, obviously, I do not celebrate it as a Christian. But I celebrate it and love Christmas trees and Christmas music, of all sorts, and giving presents (not buying them; that’s a pain. But I love giving them!), and being with family and eating and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:37-04:00November 26th, 2012|Reflections and Ruminations|

The SBL Meeting

I’m just back from the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting, which took place, this year, in Chicago. This is a professional meeting that always occurs the week before Thanksgiving, where professors of biblical studies from around the country (and less-so, around the world) come together for about four days to give and hear academic papers on an enormous range of topics related to biblical studies. Maybe 5000 or 6000 of them/us? The vast majority of people in that camp are themselves religiously committed in one way or the other (mainly Christian, fewer Jews); some of us are not believers but are simply interested in the Bible for historical, cultural, or literary reasons – although even most of us in that boat started out in our academic lives as believers. I read two papers at the conference. One was actually at a meeting going on in conjunction with it, rather than part of it, the Biblical Archaeology Society Fest – where they bring in twenty scholars, most of the archaeologists, to discuss with the lay [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:37-04:00November 21st, 2012|History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

How Do I Read Books?

QUESTION: How do you go about reading books? Which methods do you use in order to read as much as possibile? How do make plans how much to read? Do you highlight things in books? Do you you’re your own comments? Summaries? Any other tips? RESPONSE: Ah, this is an interesting question. As it turns out, there’s not an easy answer. That’s because there are many different ways I read books, depending on what kind of book it is. I realize we’re talking about books dealing with scholarship – not Victorian novels! But I read different books differently depending on what it is, what it’s about, and what I want/need to get out of it. When I was in graduate school I had a friend who insisted that anyone should be able to read an entire book of scholarship every day. I had trouble believing him, but in fact it’s true. In fact, when you get good at it, you can read much more than that. It all depends on what you are reading it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:37-04:00November 19th, 2012|Book Discussions, Reader’s Questions|

Modern Interest in the Apostolic Fathers

An interest in the "church Fathers" emerged in Western Europe among humanists of the Renaissance, many of whom saw in the golden age of patristics their own forebears -- cultured scholars imbued with the classics of Western Civilization, concerned with deep religious and philosophical problems. No wonder, then, that the humanists focused their attention on the writings of the "great" Fathers of the church such as Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, the Cappadocians, and the like, while showing virtually no interest in their comparatively "primitive" and "uncultured" predecessors, such as Ignatius of Antioch, Clement of Rome, Barnabas, and Hermas, who on no reckoning were cultured scholars or brilliant thinkers. When a “most ancient” church Father like Irenaeus was mentioned, it was usually in order to show the unrefined nature of his theology and to censure his aberrant doctrinal views, which failed to reflect the more mature and nuanced statements of later times. The Reformation provided some impetus for the study of Christian writings immediately after the New Testament period, but even then few scholars evinced an [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:37-04:00November 18th, 2012|Book Discussions, History of Biblical Scholarship, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers|

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