BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 51 of 206

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.

Can Christianity Be Seen as “Objective” Truth? Modern and Ancient Views.

In a previous post I pointed out that for over the past century modern evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity has been unusually focused on knowing the “objective” truths that can be “proved” about Christianity. In recent times, some have argued evangelical Christianity has become far more focused on social and cultural issues than theological doctrines (when someone says that this is not the evangelical Christianity your grandfather knew, they are apparently talking about me….). And I think that’s true. But even so, apologetics is still BIG in that tradition, and it is almost always based on objective evaluation of the truth. One could argue that this evangelical obsession with religious truth was matched by the commitment to truth in the earliest years of Christianity. Historically, this is one of the features of Christianity that made it distinctive among the religions of antiquity. Most people today don’t realize that ancient religions were almost never interested in “true beliefs.” Pagan religions – by which I mean the polytheistic religions of the vast majority of people in the ancient [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:18-04:00December 8th, 2022|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Greco-Roman Religions and Culture|

The Other Virgin Births in Antiquity

On December 14 I will be giving a one-off remote lecture, with Q&A, called "The Other Virgin Births in Antiquity." This will not be connected with the blog per se, but with my other venture in which I produce online courses and lectures (BEPS: Bart Ehrman Professional Services). You can learn about the lecture here: https://www.bartehrman.com/other-virgin-births-in-antiquity/ Jesus is decidedly conceived by a virgin in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. This is better called a "virginal conception" -- and in my course I'll explain the difference between the ideas of virginal conception; virgin birth; perpetual virginity; and immaculate conception. All very different ideas! BUT, for the sake of convenience, I'll simply refer to Jesus' conception and birth as "the virgin birth." Since, oh, I don't know, the 19th century I guess, there have been people who have claimed that virgin births were common in the ancient world. You find that claim widely today still among those who call themselves "mythicists" -- those who think Jesus didn't exist but was just a myth. One of the most common [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:19-04:00December 7th, 2022|Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, Historical Jesus|

Our Platinum Webinar: The Infancy Gospels!

Dear Platinum Members, Remember (or if you didn't hear about it the first time, then "member!"): We have our December webinar THIS THURSDAY, Dec. 8, at 8:00 pm ET. I've decided to do something related to Christmas but in an indirect way, a talk on the apocryphal Infancy Gospels. Or at least two of them: The Infancy Gospel of Thomas (not to be confused with the Coptic Gospel of Thomas), which tells tales of the mischievous Jesus from ages 5-12, allegedly written by his brother Thomas; and the Proto-Gospel of James, which tells stories about Jesus' *mother* and her miraculous birth and life, to explain why she was fit to bear the Son of God, allegedly written by his brother James. These are two impeccable authorities: Jesus' own brothers. What could go wrong? I hope you can come. I'll give the talk and then have Q&A. CAn't wait! Here’s the link: https://unc.zoom.us/j/97717226646?pwd=VG1rOFBDcnppV1FNQktJejZsVVZsZz09 Any questions or concerns, let me know!

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:35-04:00December 7th, 2022|Public Forum|

Is Judaism Legalistic? Misunderstanding the Law of Moses

In my upcoming course "Finding Moses" I'll be discussing the final four books of the Pentateuch (Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) (for more information, see: Finding Moses – Online Course Covering the Historicity of the Pentateuch - Bart D. Ehrman - New Testament Scholar, Speaker, and Consultant (bartehrman.com). Apart from the opening chapters of Exodus, these books are not well known to most Christians, even those on fairly good terms with the New Testament. I've known many a reader who was determined to read the entire Bible from beginning to end, but who quit early into Leviticus. In part that's because these books are both hard to understand and difficult to see as interesting when not explained. A huge chunk of them is made up of the laws given to Moses (almost the entire second half of Exodus, all of Leviticus, a good chunk of Numbers, and most of Deuteronomy). How can reading a bunch of antiquated laws be interesting? Of course, many (MANY!) Christians just love to cherry pick these laws in order to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:19-04:00December 6th, 2022|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Is The Exodus a Myth?

In my upcoming course on Finding Moses I will be discussing some of the most important features of the foundation of Judaism -- in particular, the Exodus and the giving of the Jewish Law, both connected directly in the Hebrew Bible with Moses (8 lectures, given live with Q&A on Dec. 10 and 11: Finding Moses – Online Course Covering the Historicity of the Pentateuch - Bart D. Ehrman - New Testament Scholar, Speaker, and Consultant (bartehrman.com) These are hugely important events for all of world history (without them, we wouldn't have Judaism, Christianity, or Islam: so imagine what the world would be like otherwise!). And it is very much worth studying what we know about them, both as literary narratives of the Hebrew Bible and in relation to what actually happened historically. I'm giving here just a taste of the sorts of things I'll be covering in the course. One key question for historians, of course, is "what really happened"? (There are lots of other questions and issues too -- we'll be covering a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:19-04:00December 4th, 2022|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Are There Contradictions in the Pentateuch?

Yesterday I began a short thread dealing with problems in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament, as a kind of foreshadowing of the sorts of things I'll be covering in my online course of eight lectures, that I'll be giving live, with Q&A, on December 10-11; again, if you're interested, you can find out about the course here: Finding Moses – Online Course Covering the Historicity of the Pentateuch - Bart D. Ehrman - New Testament Scholar, Speaker, and Consultant (bartehrman.com) The course will be a followup to my earlier one on Genesis (called "In the Beginning"). Many of the same problems that I have discussed on the blog and in my course about Genesis apply to the other books of the Pentateuch as well. For many of us, some of the most interesting ones involve contradictions among the various narratives. I talk about that a bit in my book The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction. Here's some of what I deal with there, edited here and there [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:19-04:00December 3rd, 2022|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Other Virgin Births In Antiquity! A New Online Lecture, with Q&A

I am happy to announce that I will be presenting and recording a Chrismas-season lecture "Other Virgin Births in Antiquity," on December 14, 8:00-9:30 ET. The lecture is not connected with the blog per se, except in sofar as y'all as blog members may well be particularly interested. You can find out about it, along with other lectures and courses that are available here: Online Courses by Dr. Bart Ehrman (10% Off First Order): This is how I'm describing the lecture in my announcement of the course in other venues. *************** Other Virgin Births in Antiquity Bart D. Ehrman Jesus of Nazareth was not the only miracle-working Son of God known to the ancient world. Others were also said to heal the sick, cast out demons, control the weather, raise the dead, and ascend to heaven. But were any of these others born of a virgin? Search the Internet and you’ll find a definitive answer: Yes. But ask an expert who has actually studied the ancient sources and … and what will you learn? That [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:34-04:00December 2nd, 2022|Public Forum|

Do We Have the Original Hebrew Bible (Old Testament)?

On December 10 and 11 I will be giving my eight-lecture remote course on "Finding Moses: What Scholars Know about the Exodus and the Jewish Law." This was supposed to happen a month earlier, but life got in the way and we had to postpone it. The course is not connected to the blog per se, it is part of my other outreach program the Bart Ehrman Professional Services (BEPS), which hosts public courses and lectures. To find out about the course and others like it, here's the address: Online Courses by Dr. Bart Ehrman (10% Off First Order) The course is one of a long series that I've started on the entire Bible, both Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) and NT. My expertise, of course, is mainly NT and early Christianity; but all the way back in graduate school (about the time the book of Isaiah was written) my secondary field of training was Hebrew Bible, and I taught Introduction to Hebrew Bible at both Rutgers and UNC. Some years ago when I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:19-04:00December 1st, 2022|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

So Which Text is Original?? My View of 1 Thessalonians 2:7

I am about ready to wrap up my discussion of the textual problem of 1 Thessalonians 2:7. When recalling his time with the Thessalonians, when he had worked hard not to be a burden with any of them, did Paul indicate that he and his missionary companions had become "as infants, as a nurse tending her children" or that they had become "gentle, as a nurse tending her children." It is not an obvious decision, whether you think the change was made accidentally or on purpose. (If you think it *is* obvious, look at the preceding two posts). It seems like it might go either way. I myself have an opinion on the matter (textual scholars tend to have opinions); but I"ll hold off on that for a minute. First: some of you might be wondering--which of these readings do the best surviving manuscripts actually suggest? Is one of the readings ("infants" or "gentle") better attested than the other? Which reading do our oldest and best manuscripts have? Here, as it turns out, the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:18-04:00November 30th, 2022|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters|

Do We KNOW What Paul Wrote? If You Think So, Answer This….

Do we really KNOW what the authors of the New Testament wrote? Sometimes we just can't decide -- despite what apologists almost always say (Most apologists, btw, have never actually studied the problem; I'm not trying to be snide or rude when I say that -- it's an empirical fact; even most PhD's in New Testament Studies have not been trained to determine which actual words of the surviving manuscripts probably go back to the authors). I am now looking at a case in point, a single word in a single passage of Paul's first epistle to the Thessalonians (see the previous post). The decision of what he wrote comes down to a single letter in the word. Scholars (especially, as it turns out, those few who ARE deeply trained to figure these things out) can't agree about the single letter. And the decision determines the meaning of the passage. Did Paul remind the Thessalonians that when he and his missionary colleagues were with them they became like “infants” among them rather than great, powerful, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:18-04:00November 29th, 2022|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters|

December Platinum Webinar!

Hey Platinum members! I'm pleased to announce that our next Platinum Webinar for the blog will be on Thursday, December 8, at 8:00 pm ET. Topic TBA. But I'll do my best to choose something interesting, and will let you know what it is anon. Here's the link: https://unc.zoom.us/j/97717226646?pwd=VG1rOFBDcnppV1FNQktJejZsVVZsZz09 Any questions or concerns, let us know. And thanks for being Platinum members: if we can improve your experience, let us be the first to hear you shout!

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:19-04:00November 28th, 2022|Public Forum|

How Changing a Single Letter of a Single Word Can Change the Meaning of a Passage

Now that I have discussed the purpose of 1 Thessalonians I would like to discuss a scribal change of the text - a change that involves just a single letter of a single word. Which did Paul originally write? The word *with* the letter or the word *without* it? How you decide the question changes the meaning of the passage. Yikes. A single letter? The passage occurs in an earlier part of the book where Paul is reminding the Thessalonians of the time that he had spent with them when he converted them to their new faith. This is a very joyful part of the letter, one of the most sentimental passages of all of Paul’s letters, where he speaks of the relationship he had with his converts when he was there. But the description is a bit hard to pin down, in part because of the presence or non-presence of just one letter of the alphabet. Some manuscripts have it, and others don’t. And it is very hard to decide which reading is [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:18-04:00November 27th, 2022|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters|

A Challenge Grant to the Blog! Can You Help Match It?

Holiday Season Donation Challenge! I am very pleased to announce that we have received a $20,000 challenge grant from an anonymous donor on the blog. For the challenge to be met, we need to raise another $20,000 among us. C’est possible? One can always hope! I am posting this request for gifts to meet the challenge to the Platinum members of the blog, hoping that we can find some generous assistance with us to meet the goal. It’s obviously a good time of year for generosity; given the state of the world, no time has ever been better. Every penny we bring in will go directly to our charities to support both disaster relief and the ongoing problems of hunger. Can you help us out? We will appreciate anything you can donate, from a buck or two to, well, 20,000. If you choose to make a donation, please do not respond here as a comment on the blog but write us to indicate the amount, and then simply go to the Blog site, scroll down [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:19-04:00November 26th, 2022|Public Forum|

What Is Paul’s First Surviving Letter All About? 1 Thessalonians

In my two previous posts I discussed a textual variant that could be explained either as a scribal accident or as an intentional change. I thought it might be interesting to point out a few other variants that also could go either way. These are all intriguing problems in and of themselves, and by talking about them I can illustrate a bit further the kinds of quandaries textual critics find themselves in when trying to decide what an author wrote when we have different versions of his words in different manuscripts. My plan right now is to look at three variants in three different mini-threads (all of them subsumed under the larger thread of why I wrote The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture). Today is one of my favorites, a particularly thorny issue found in 1 Thessalonians 2:7. I can’t get to a discussion of that issue without providing some important background; just the very basics of the background will take me two posts, before I can even start to explain the textual problem. First Thessalonians [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:18-04:00November 25th, 2022|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters|

How To Leave the Faith and Not Destroy the Family: Thanksgiving Reflection 2022

My beloved mom died last week. She lived a long and good life; she brought a lot of good into the world and made many people very happy; and she died a good death – peaceful, in comfort, in the presence of family. How good can it get? There are many things I have long been thankful for about my mom. I would like to reflect on one of them here. Many years ago, when I left the Christian faith that my mom held so dear – a faith that meant almost everything to her – it caused her a great deal of pain. But she did not allow our stark differences to destroy our relationship. We continued to love and honor each other even though we were deeply at odds on issues that both of us considered among the most important in our lives. My mom was not raised in a religious household. She grew up in the small town of Burlington Kansas and her parents were not church people. When she was in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:18-04:00November 23rd, 2022|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

Religion and the Wrecking Ball of Truth

In my last post I began to discuss the importance of "truth" to conservative evangelical Christianity, through a bit of autobiography. You don't need to have read that post for this one, so I begin here with the final paragraph that I left off with there. This is from my book Forged. ****************************** One of the ironies of modern religion is that the absolute commitment to truth in some forms of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity, and the concomitant view that truth is objective and can be verified by any impartial observer, has led many faithful souls to follow the truth wherever it leads, but where it leads is often away from evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity. That is to say, if you can, in theory, verify the “objective” truth of religion, and then it turns out that the religion being examined is verifiably wrong, where does that leave you? For many one-time evangelical Christians it leaves them in the wilderness outside the evangelical camp, but with an unrepentant view of truth. Objective truth, to paraphrase the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:18-04:00November 22nd, 2022|Bart’s Biography, Catholic Epistles|

Me and the “Truth”: A Bit of Autobiography

I decided recently to reread my book Forged: Writing in the Name of God; How the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (which, in my view, has one too many titles....). It was a surprise: I really didn't remember a good bit of the opening part. And oh boy, I liked it better than I expected (usually when you read your old stuff you just roll your eyes). One of the theses of the book is that even in the ancient world, people thought that if someone wrote a book claiming to be a famous author (when they were someone else) was seen as a form of lying. I start the book with my own relation to lying and truth. I'm sure you have your own stories to tell. Here's part of mine: ****************************** On a bright sunny day in June, when I was fourteen years old, my mom told me that she and my dad were going out to play a round of golf. I did a quick calculation in my head. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:18-04:00November 20th, 2022|Bart’s Biography|

Why Would Scribes Mess with Mark’s Very First Verse?

In yesterday’s post I discussed a textual variant in Mark 1:1 that could be explained either as an accidental slip of the pen or an intentional alteration of the text. We’re plowing into some heavy waters here, but it involves some intriguing stuff that I can say with assurance you didn't ever learn in Sunday School... Just by way of basic review (basics not involving heavy waters, but that you *also* didn't hear in Sunday School), there are thousands of textual witnesses to the NT (Greek manuscripts, manuscripts of the versions, writings of the church fathers who quote the text); these witnesses attests hundreds of thousands of variants among themselves; the vast majority of those differences are immaterial and insignificant and don’t matter for much of anything; some of them are highly significant indeed. Most of the changes were made by accident. Some were consciously made by scribes who wanted to change the text. And in Mark 1:1 we have a variant where it is hard to tell which it is. At issue are the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:17-04:00November 19th, 2022|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts|

Do We Know How Mark Began His Gospel? Another Scribal Change

I have been talking about different kinds of changes made in our surviving New Testament manuscripts, some of them accidental slips of the pen (that’s probably the vast majority of our textual variants) and others of them intentional alterations. One of the points that I’ve been trying to stress is that at the end of the day it is, technically speaking, impossible to know what a scribe’s “intentions” were (or if he had any, other than the intention of copying a text). None of the scribes is around to be interviewed, and so – as with a lot of history – there is a good bit of scholarly guess-work that has to be done. This guess work is not simply shooting in the dark, however. And it is dead easy for a highly trained expert to tell the difference between informed guesswork and just plain guesswork. But at the end of the day we are always talking about historical probabilities, not historical certainties, when it comes to figuring out why a scribed decided to change [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:17-04:00November 17th, 2022|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, New Testament Manuscripts|

Did God Mock Jesus on the Cross? A Scribal Change?

I've started to show that scribes sometimes changed the New Testament texts they were copying in ways that certainly seem “intentional” (in addition to making many more simple, accidental, slips of the pen). I last gave an example from the beginning of Mark's Gospel that appears to be a case where scribes altered a text because it seems to make a mistake. Here I’ll give a second instance, this time from near the ending of Mark, a passage that is exceedingly interesting but for a comletley different reason. One of the most intriguing variations in Mark’s Gospel comes in the Passion narrative, in the final words attributed to Jesus in the Gospel. Jesus is being crucified, and he says nothing on the cross until he cries out his final words, which Mark records in Aramaic: “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” Mark then translates the words into Greek: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus then utters a loud cry and dies. What is striking is that in one early Greek manuscript BREAK (the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T13:00:05-04:00November 16th, 2022|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts|

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