BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 45 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.

Do Modern Mideastern Story Tellers Show How the Ancient Traditions of Jesus Were Circulated?

In my previous post I discussed a seemingly-plausible explanation for how modern ways of telling stories in small communities in the Middle East today can show that the Gospels may well represent literal word-for-word depictions of what Jesus said and did. Here I show why in fact the theory does not work, as laid out in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (Harper, 2016) ****************************** As we have seen, Bailey argued that modern tellers in the Middle East today work in a small community context, where the stories of a village's past (its key figures, its main events) are circulated in group meetings in the presence of others who observed the events as well and make sure to correct what a particular story teller says when he gets a detail awry. That, Baily argues, is what happened in the ancient world as well -- so stories about Jesus were preserved intact through the presence of others who knew them and could provide checks and balances for accuracy. The problem is that this claim (whether or [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:56-04:00May 27th, 2023|Historical Jesus, Memory Studies|

Do Modern Mideastern Customs of Story Telling Show that the Gospels Are Accurate?

I've been discussing modern explanations of how the traditions about Jesus found in the Gospels could in fact be historically accurate even if they were passed on by word of mouth over the years and decades before anyone wrote them down. The natural suspicion is that stories that get told and retold by different story tellers in different times and places year after year will change, somewhat significantly, and that some tales and sayings attributed to an important figure will be invented, with no historical basis at all. It happens all the time. It probably has happened to you. Someone says you did or said something and it’s just not true. Most of them time when you find out about it you are not amused – especially if it’s someone who actually knows you. At other times you might think it is indeed amusing. But isn’t it different with the ancient world, and especially with stories being told about Jesus? In my previous posts I talked about the theory of a New Testament scholar (Gerhaardson) [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:38-04:00May 25th, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Memory Studies|

More Problems with Thinking Jesus’ Followers Memorized the Stories about Him

In my previous post I began to explain the problems with the idea that Jesus' followers, like all good students of Rabbis in the Jewish tradition, were trained to memorize what he said and did, so that the Gospels provide us with reliable accounts of his life. This idea was most forcefully promoted by Swedish scholar Birger Gerhardsson and was popular for a while in scholarly circles. But it is widely seen today as problematic. Here is how I continue to explain some of the issues in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** An even bigger problem is that we have clear and certain evidence that Jesus’ followers were not passing along his teachings, or accounts of his deeds, as they were memorized verbatim. This is one of the complaints that other scholars generally lodge against Gerhardsson – he does not engage in a detailed examination of traditions that are preserved in the Gospels in order to see if his theory works. What is the evidence that Jesus’ teachings were preserved word-for-word [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:38-04:00May 24th, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship|

Didn’t the Disciples Memorize Jesus’ Teachings and Accounts of His Life?
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Didn’t the Disciples Memorize Jesus’ Teachings and Accounts of His Life?

Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship, Memory Studies, Public Forum

Didn’t the Disciples Memorize Jesus’ Teachings and Accounts of His Life?

I've been talking about how scholars began to realize in the early 20th century that the stories of Jesus in the Gospels were based on oral traditions that the Gospel writers inherited decades earlier. But is that really a problem? Here's how I discuss the issue in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** Many people, when they first consider the reality that the traditions in our Gospels must have circulated orally for decades before being written down, come up with a commonsensical response. Surely the sayings of Jesus, and the accounts of his life, were actually memorized by his followers, so that they would be preserved accurately. Aren’t oral cultures known for being able to preserve their traditions spotlessly? After all, since they didn’t have written records to keep their memories alive, people in such cultures must have worked with special diligence to remember what they learned and to pass their stories along seamlessly from one person and one generation to the next. Right? Unfortunately, decades of intense research have shown that this [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:38-04:00May 23rd, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship, Memory Studies, Public Forum|

Stories of Jesus Passed on By Word of Mouth. When Scholars First Took Oral Traditions Seriously.

I'm discussing how scholars came to realize that Mark our earliest Gospel is not simply a nuts-and-bolts, unembellished, accurate report of what Jesus said and did. This kind of scholarship reached a kind of climax about a century ago with a group of scholars called "form critics." To make sense of what they said and why they said it, I need to start where I left off yesterday -- and so I'll repeat the end of yesterday's post to get us a running start on today's, taken from my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne 2016). ****************************** Where did the stories found in the Gospels themselves come from? The "form critics" (a term I'll explain below) maintained that they did not come from authors who were themselves followers of Jesus or who acquired their information directly from eyewitnesses. The stories instead came from oral traditions in circulation in the years prior to the Gospels. The authors of the Gospels – all of them, not just Mark – wrote down stories that had been passed along by word [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:38-04:00May 21st, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship|

Does Mark Present the Bare-Bones Facts about Jesus’ Life?

In my previous post I showed how scholars in the 19th century came to think that our shortest and evidently-least-embelished Gospel Mark gave the accurate account of Jesus ' life, so that any reconstruction of what Jesus really said and did simply could simply assume that Mark provides the essential information. But is that right? It eventually came to be seen as wrong. Here's how I discuss the matter in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** The problem with Mark is that it is so terse that there are huge gaps in the narrative. It is hard to determine what is driving Jesus’ action and what his ultimate objective is. To solve that problem 19th-century scholars writing about Jesus filled in the gaps either with inventive narratives they spun out of their own imagination or with psychological analyses about what must have been motivating Jesus at one point of his life or another.[1] All of these efforts were rooted in the sense that Mark is the earliest and most historical account without any [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:38-04:00May 20th, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship|

How Can We Get Behind “False Memories” of Jesus to the Historical Facts?

I'm discussing how in both the ancient and modern worlds people have constructed "false memories" of who Jesus really was. In this post I give a brief explanation of how scholars became increasingly aware of the problem and, for a time, thought they had found a solution: Mark's Gospel is the unembellished version and so we need to stick mainly with that! How'd they come up with *that* one? And is it true? This is taken from my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** Throughout the history of scholarship, especially since the nineteenth century, scholars have realized that Christians in the early years after Jesus’ death were not only altering traditions about Jesus’ life and teaching that they inherited, they were also inventing them. We do not need to wait for non-canonical Gospels such as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, or the Gospel of Nicodemus for “distorted” memories of Jesus to surface among authors and their readers. (Recall: by “distorted memory” I simply mean any recollection of the past that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:38-04:00May 18th, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship|

Did Early Christians “Invent” Memories of Jesus?

I've been talking about how we remember things -- or misremember things, or make up memories of things -- as a way of getting to the question of how, in our heads, we think about what Jesus said and did. This is all part of my larger project that came incarnated (inletterated?) in my book Jesus Before the Gospels. As I point out early in the book, we remember most things just fine, but we also often get things either partially or completely wrong. Memories can be frail, faulty, and false. And not just our individual memories, but also the “memories” we have as a society. In previous posts I illustrated the point by talking about social memories of Abraham Lincoln and Christopher Columbus. But what about faulty memories of Jesus (see my last post if it doesn't make sense to talk about "remembering" someone we never knew!). To get to this question, in my book, I talk about some of the modern representations of Jesus by current-day scholars and popular authors – for example, Jesus [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:37-04:00May 17th, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum|

How Can We “Remember” Someone (say, Jesus) We Never Knew?

A number of readers on the blog have objected to my understanding of memory, specifically to what a memory is, that is, to what constitutes a memory. As a rule, these readers have argued – some with considerable force and conviction! – that a “memory” is a mental recollection of something that one has personally experienced. Let me cite one of the more closely reasoned expressions of this alternative view by one of my respondents, before explaining my view and why I have it. COMMENT: Bart, I think people might be confused by your definition of false memories. In the medical, psychological and legal literature, false memories are defined as BELIEVED-IN MEMORIES OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCES that are false or are falsely remembered by specific persons. Beliefs ,stories, narratives, myths, folklore and conspiracies that are false but are circulating in a community or culture are not considered false memories by memory experts since these are not claimed to be first-hand memories of personal experiences. For example, a false memory can be created in the mind of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:24-04:00May 14th, 2023|Memory Studies|

In What Sense is a Made-Up Story about Jesus a False Memory??

In the past, when I've said that the Gospels sometimes contain “false memories” of Jesus people have objected: these may not be memories at all, but simply stories the Gospel writers made up for their own reasons. In that case Jesus isn’t being “remembered” in these ways. Someone’s just making up stuff. In response to that view, let me make two points. The second will be the most important, but first things first: in most cases I don’t think there is any way to know whether a non-historical tradition in the Gospels is something that the Gospel writer inherited from others before him or invented himself. Take Luke’s story of how Jesus came to be born in Bethlehem. In Luke, and only in Luke we have a specific explanation of how it is that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, if – as evidently everyone knew – he actually came from Nazareth. It is that when Mary was full-term pregnant, she took a trip to Bethlehem with her espoused Joseph in order to register for a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:24-04:00May 13th, 2023|Historical Jesus, Memory Studies|

Blog Announcement: Comments!

Just so you know! Tomorrow I'm heading to the Galapagos and will not have reliable wifi for about a week. That WON'T affect the blog posts -- I've got them all lined up and ready to roll. BUT, I won't be able to respond to comments. But feel free to make them at will. I will get to them when I return from the land of Darwin to the land of AI. And maybe I should start using AI to respond to comments, for the sake of all involved! (But never fear: it ain't gonna happen.)

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:56-04:00May 12th, 2023|Public Forum|

Creation Stories of the Ancient World (Part 2): An Ancient Egyptian Account

Was the account of creation found in Genesis comparable to (or even borrowed from?) other ancient accounts in scattered throughout the world at the time? Last month my colleague Joseph Lam, an expert in the Hebrew Bible and the languages and literature of the Ancient Near East provided us with a guest post about some of the creation stories found outside Scripture in non-Israelite cultures -- stories in circulation before the ones written in Genesis (https://ehrmanblog.org/creation-stories-of-the-ancient-world-part-1-on-enuma-elish-and-genesis-1-guest-post-by-joseph-lam/) Here now is a second and equally interesting post dealing with stories from ancient Memphis Egypt (not Tennessee!)! This is the topic of his lecture course for the Great Courses/Wondrium, "Creation Stories of the Ancient World" (links at bottom) **************************** In my last blog entry, I offered a brief description of the Babylonian Creation Epic, Enuma Elish, and reflected on how one might imagine its relationship to the seven-day creation story of Genesis 1. In this post, I turn to an enigmatic but fascinating text from ancient Egypt known as the Memphite Theology that has also been compared with Genesis [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:37-04:00May 11th, 2023|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Does Understanding “Memory” Have Any Bearing on the Study of the Historical Jesus?

In my earlier posts I began to discuss my book, Jesus Before the Gospels, which deals with how understanding how "memory" works can contribute to our assessment of the Gospels stories about Jesus. Long before starting the book I had been intrigued the question of how eyewitnesses would have remembered the Jesus' life, and how the stories about Jesus may have been shifted and altered and invented in later times based on faulty or even false memories. Those questions led me to be interested in memory more broadly. Memory is an enormous field of research, just within cognitive psychology. I spent many months doing nothing but reading important studies, dozens and dozens of books and articles. It is really interesting stuff. Memory is not at all what I started out thinking it was. Like most people I had this vague notion in my head that memory worked kind of like a camera. You see or experience something and take a photo of it and store it in your head. Sometimes the photo might fade, or [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:23-04:00May 10th, 2023|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

Was Matthew Attacking Paul?

On my podcast this past week (Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman) someone asked me if I thought any of the Gospels of the NT were influenced by Paul. It's an interesting question that I should post on (my view: Mark, maybe; Luke, unexpectedly and oddly not; John, I doubt it; Matthew?) Ah, Matthew. As it turns out, I think Matthew shows a rather obvious and ironic connection with Paul. Did he know Paul's writings? I have no idea. Did he know about Paul? Same, no idea. Did he oppose a major feature of Paul's gospel message? Sure looks like it!! (I'm trying to say that he could be opposed to Paul's views without necessarily knowing Paul's writings; the views may have been more widely spread than just by Paul. In fact, they almost certainly were. Here's how I've discussed the matter once when I was reflecting at greater length in the issue: Paul certainly had opponents in his lifetime: "Judaizers," as scholars call them -- that is, Christian teachers who maintained that followers of Jesus [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:23-04:00May 9th, 2023|Canonical Gospels, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Remembering Columbus, Remembering Christ

In my previous post on Abraham Lincoln I discussed how the collective "memory" of important persons from the past can be distorted. We as a society "remember" things in certain ways -- e.g., Vietnam; Civil Rights Movement; Elvis; 9/11), -- different groups differently and not always accurately . Here I give another example, not to be a definitive demonstration of my point so much as to help us think about the issue. What about our memories of Christopher Columbus? And, well, how about the early Christians' memory of Jesus? Again, this comes from the early part of my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** Remembering Columbus Much the same can be said about most of the historical figures that we revere, from Caesar Augustus to Joan of Arc to Christopher Columbus. Columbus is an interesting example. He is not always remembered today in the same glowing terms that we remembered him when I was a child growing up in the 50s and 60s. In those days, we remembered Columbus as one of the great [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:23-04:00May 7th, 2023|Memory Studies, Public Forum|

How Do We “Remember” Lincoln?

In my last post, I mentioned a phenomenon known as “collective” memory. It's how groups of people "remember" something in the past. This isn't quite the same as how you remember what you did on your last vacation. It's more like how past events or figures are constructed in the broader "memory" of a society. Sociologists have long studied this problem, and their findings can help us think differently about how later Christian societies (groups of people) "remembered" Jesus. Here's an example I cite in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** Remembering Lincoln In 2014 a poll was taken of 162 members of the American Political Science Association, asking them to rank all the past presidents of the United States, from best to worst.[1] Probably to no one’s great surprise, the top-ranked president was Abraham Lincoln. Most of us – though certainly not all of us – remember Lincoln as a truly great and noble man who did remarkable things for his country. But he was not always thought of in that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:23-04:00May 6th, 2023|Memory Studies, Public Forum|

When I Got Seriously Interested in Memory (at least insofar as I remember)

(Recall: this post came from the past, when I was working on my book about Jesus and Memory, badly titled Jesus Before the Gospels. I had forgotten about the post till just now!) As I indicated in my previous post, I have long been interested in memory for both personal and professional reasons. On the personal level, I have known people very close to me who have experienced serious memory problems, for example through strokes. Depending on what part of the brain is affected, different memory functions are damaged. For example, someone may remember perfectly well what happened in an event 20 years ago, but forget a conversation they just had. I have often wondered why and how that is.. And then there was my own memory. For some things I have a terrific memory. And for lots of things I have an absolutely terrible memory. I especially have a terrible “episodic” memory (as psychologists call it), a memory for things that happen in your life and you experience. Let me give an example. About [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:23-04:00May 4th, 2023|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Memory Studies|

My Forgotten Book on Memory

Of all the books I've written for a general audience, the one that I think got (by far) less attention than it deserved -- well, OK, less attention that I wanted and hoped (!) -- was Jesus Before the Gospels. I've long thought I gave it a very bad title. The book is really about memory -- what we know about how memory works and doesn't work, and how that affects our understanding of the Gospel stories about Jesus, which are based on memories of Jesus and usually among people who were remembering stories about him rather than things they observed themselves. I did some posts on the book many years ago, and thought it would be worthwhile to revisit them, and the book, since it really is crucially important for understanding the Gospels themselves and the problems with knowing about the historical Jesus. The book discusses psychological understandings of memories and false memories, the value of eyewitness testimony, anthropological studies of oral cultures, and other things of relevance to New Testament scholars even though the vast [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:23-04:00May 3rd, 2023|Memory Studies|

And Here’s My Final Exam on The Birth of Christianity

Yesterday I posted an old final exam for my course Introduction to the New Testament. And for your amusement, here is an exam for my course that I taught this semester, called the Birth of Christianity, which covered the developments within Christianity after the New Testament up through the conversion of Constantine. See how you do! And again, I wish I could grade your answers, but, alas.... The Birth of Christianity, Reli 208 Final Exam This is exam is in three sections; you have three hours to complete it. We suggest you spend no more than an hour on each section. Section One: Short Identification. Write short answers up to 50 words on ten (and no more than ten) of the following. Make your answers as detailed and informative as you can. Ebionites The Gospel of Peter Arius Apologists Theodosius I Tertullian The Great Persecution Thecla Donatism Asceticism Incarnation Christology Infancy Gospel of Thomas Section Two: First Essay. Write an essay on the following topic. Make it as detailed [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:23-04:00May 2nd, 2023|Public Forum|

Was Jesus a False Prophet?

As many of you know, I started a podcast awhile back, called Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. It's not connected with the blog, but it deals with stuff most blog members would be interested in. (And hey, it's free! Available both as a podcast on all the main podcast servers and on Youtube.) A new episode comes out every Tuesday, and it occurred to me that you might be interested in knowing what's happening on it. So, I've decided to make weekly announcements here, in case you're interested in going there! This past Tuesday, the topic I discussed with my host Megan Lewis, was "Was Jesus a False Prophet." Here's the description, in case you'd like to check it out. Historical scholars for over a century have maintained that Jesus predicted that the end of history as we know it was to come in his own generation. Conservative Christians -- laypeople and scholars alike -- have insisted that this is a complete misportrayal of Jesus. And many people -- possibly most? -- believe that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:02:24-04:00May 1st, 2023|Public Forum|

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