BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 58 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.

Gospel Contradictions: My Debate with Rev. Matthew Firth

To celebrate our 10th year anniversary from April 18, I'm reposting all my previous (ten) April 18 blog posts. Now I'm up to 2019. In that year I agreed to do a blog debate with a fellow named Matthew Firth, an Anglican rector who studied theology at Oxford University. Firth had challenged me to a debate on whether the Gospels contain contradictions, and offered to donate $1000 to the blog if I managed to convince him. That, of course, was a bit of a joke, since there's no way on God's green earth that someone with his mind made up (so much that he wants to debate) is going to change his mind. But it was an interesting ploy and so I said, Why not? The debate involved a back and forth that spanned part of April including our celebratory anniversary. Here was my opening gambit; I will go ahead and post his response to it and my reply to his response, in the two posts that follow (to which he replied and then I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:58:35-04:00June 23rd, 2022|Bart's Debates, Canonical Gospels|

Check Out this Play in NYC!!

Are you in NYC or at least planning to be in October or November? There is a new play called “The Unbelieving” that you should check out! It is a dramatization of a real-life phenomenon that most people don’t know about: pastors who have left the faith but are still active in ministry. There’s more of these religious professionals than you might imagine. Here is the brief description of the play on the show’s website (here: http://Shows | www.59e59.org) Show Info By Marin Gazzaniga Directed by Steve Cosson In the classic tale of religious conversion, finding God holds the promise of a life filled with purpose and meaning. But what happens when this transformation occurs in reverse, and a faith you have built your life around begins to fall away? The Unbelieving takes a penetrating look into the lives of practicing clergy members— Catholics, Episcopalians, Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, Jews, Mormons, Muslims—who have stopped believing in God. Staged by NYC’s acclaimed downtown theater company The Civilians in the brilliant investigative-theater style they pioneered, THE UNBELIEVING tells the intimate stories of these [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:58:35-04:00June 22nd, 2022|Public Forum|

The Invention of Charity: My Prospectus for the Book

I have started drafting a prospectus for my next book on Christian charity, as I have discussed recently on the blog. At this early stage, I am giving it (at least in my head) the tentative title: The Invention of Charity: How Christianity Transformed the Western World. In this post I’ll show how I’m *thinking* about starting the prospectus (which will have no bearing on how I, later, start the book). Before I do so, I should explain how the process works. My last three trade books have been with Simon & Schuster, and as a (standard) part of my contract with them, I’m obliged (and willing and eager) to to discuss with them what I’d like to do for the next book, to give them the opportunity to sign a contract with me for it, before, say, I propose the book to other publishers. The first part of process is that I draft a prospectus that explains what the book is, why it is needed, and how I will approach the task . For [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:58:21-04:00June 21st, 2022|Book Discussions, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

My book: Literary Forgery and Counterforgery in Early Christianity!

I have been posting all ten of my April 18 posts from previous years in celebration of the ten-year anniversary of the blog on April 18 of *this* year. Here now is a post from 2018 that focused on a book I had written years before that! The book I've always thought was my best piece of scholarship. Enjoy! ****************************** I am in Houston for a few days, giving talks at Rice University on the use of literary forgery in early Christianity. To prepare for the talks I decided to read through my 2013 book Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics. Of all the books I’ve written, I am proudest of this one. It is the very best I can do in terms of real scholarship. I don’t believe I’ve talked about it much on the blog, since it’s not a book for general audiences. But I thought it might be worthwhile to say something about it in a post or two, and there’s no better way to do [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:58:21-04:00June 18th, 2022|Book Discussions, Forgery in Antiquity|

Are Christian Apologists Just Being Dishonest? What Do YOU Think?

A number of people have recently asked me virtually the same question about about my debates with conservative Christian apologists: In my opinion, when these people say things that don’t seem to make any sense, are they being dishonest, or do they genuinely believe what they say? (I'll give my opinion and then ask yours.) I’ll give an example from an event that some people have asked about. It was an “apologetics conference” hosted by an evangelical group; the attendees were almost entirely committed evangelical Christians. Normally at this kind of event, the organizers only have representatives of their own views, who give their talks to prove and affirm that their religious views are right. But for this conference they decided to have another voice represented, and that voice was me. I had a great time. Two of the others speakers – Mike Licona and Craig Keener -- were already friends of mine (a third I had never met before). We disagree up and down the line on most everything connected with religion in general [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:58:21-04:00June 16th, 2022|Bart's Debates, Reflections and Ruminations|

Blog Dinner in London? Interested?

I'm heading over the pond today and would like to do a blog dinner if anyone's interested. Possibly a pint in advance. Are you over there? Interested? If we can get 3-4 (and no more than 7) people together, I'd be happy to do it. It would be next Thursday, June 23 (2022!), somewhere in central London. No obligations other than: Being a blog member Showing up Talking Paying for your meal. If you're interested, do NOT reply here as a comment. Send me an email at [email protected] Hope it happens! I may be able to do another one in a few weeks, depending on ... life.

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:58:35-04:00June 15th, 2022|Public Forum|

Why Not Just Believe in a Different Kind of God?

Several people have asked me recently about why, when I left the faith, I didn't simply start to believe in a different kind of God. I had come to think there was not an all-powerful, loving, and active God in the world simply because, after lots of reading, arguing, and thinking, I could no longer explain all the pain and misery in the world. But why would God have to be all-loving, all-powerful, and active? Why not believe in a different kind of God? I dealt with this question on the blog some years ago, and would like to revisit it now. Certainly in the realm of my expertise, the ancient world, there were very different views of the divine that could indeed explain why there is suffering. In antiquity everyone except Jews acknowledged that there were *lots* of other deities, at all kinds of level and of all sorts of temperament. Some divine beings could be hateful, malicious, and antagonistic. Can’t do much about that. Even with the good ones – if you got [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:58:21-04:00June 15th, 2022|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Time Again: Vote on your favorite Platinum Post

Dear Platinum members, That time again — an opportunity for you to vote on one of our Platinum guest posts, to see which one will be posted on the blog at large. Take a look — they’re all terrific. To vote, just send a quick note to Diane at [email protected] Your deadline: this Saturday, June 18, midnight your time. And remember — you’re always welcome to submit a post yourself. Anything connected to the blog that strikes your fancy that you’d like others to read about? Any ideas/thoughts you’d like to have disseminated and discussed? Here’s your chance. Just zap me a note. March 14, 2022 How Luke Rewrote Matthew’s Nativity Story Platinum Dennis J. Folds April 29, 2022 The Plausibility of the Fourth Gospel: The Chronology of Jesus’s Ministry. Dennis J. Folds May 20, 2022 Early Christianity and War. Dan Kohanski May 31, 2022 Who Buried Moses? Lou Suarez

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:58:35-04:00June 14th, 2022|Public Forum|

Another Historical Scholar’s Understanding of the Resurrection

I am reposting the ten blog posts made on April 18 (or thereabouts) in celebration of our tenth anniversary of the blog. Here now is a particularly important one from 2017; at the time I was working on my book How Jesus Became God and thinking hard about how to understand the early Christian claims that Jesus had been raised from the dead. ****************************** One of the first books that I have re-read in thinking about how it is the man Jesus came to be thought of as God is Gerd Lüdemann’s, The Resurrection of Christ: A Historical Inquiry (2004). Lüdemann is an important and interesting scholar. He was professor of New Testament at Göttingen in Germany, and for a number of years split his time between there and Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville. He is a major figure in scholarship, and is noteworthy for not being a Christian. He does not believe Jesus was literally, physically, raised from the dead, and he thinks that apart from belief in Jesus’ physical resurrection, it is not [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:58:21-04:00June 14th, 2022|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

Interested in Joining Me on a Tour To Tuscany?
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Interested in Joining Me on a Tour To Tuscany?

Public Forum

Interested in Joining Me on a Tour To Tuscany?

Now HERE is a happy announcement. I will be giving lectures on a tour to my favorite place in the known universe, Tuscany, on October 21-29, 2022. That is, in less than five months. WHOA! Wanna come? It will be a small group (no more than 18 folk, I should think), we will be spending time in Florence (which has more culture per square foot than anywhere in the cosmos); Siena (which I like even better); and surrounding towns/villages (that take your breath away). In addition to the lectures, I'll be hanging out with the people who come, day and night. A good bit of that time will involve pizza, pasta, gelato, and, for those inclined, some of the best wines in the history of the planet. This is with Thalassa tours. Interested? Here is the brochure. Check it out: just click on it and you'll get the full scoop. And any questions, let me know.

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:58:21-04:00June 12th, 2022|Public Forum|

And Did Paul Write 2 Thessalonians?

In my last post I discussed whether Paul wrote the letter of Ephesians, whose author claims to be Paul, and explained why scholars widely think that in fact it was someone else. I discuss all the Pauline "forgeries" of early Christianity (including the six in the New Testament) in my book Forged. Here I thought it might be useful to consider a second example that involves a different set of problems: the "Second letter to the Thessalonians." Again, this is taken from my book Forged (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2012). ****************************** As a conservative evangelical Christian in my late teens and early twenties, there were few things I was more certain of, religiously, than the fact that Jesus was soon to return from heaven to take me and my fellow believers out of the world, at the “rapture” before the final tribulation came. We read all sorts of books that supported our view. Few people today realize that the best-selling book in English in the 1970s, apart from the Bible, was The Late Great Planet Earth written [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:58:21-04:00June 11th, 2022|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters|

Controversial Me….

I am having a ten-week long celebration of our ten-year anniversary, from this past April 18, by reposting all the previous April 18 posts, one a week. Many of them I'd forgotten about. This one is about how weird it is to me that people think I'm controversial.... (As usual, I'm a bit tetchy about it!) ****************************** In this post I am going to take a bit of time out to do some self-reflection. An issue I’ve been puzzling over for some time is the fact that people keep referring to my work as “controversial.” I hear this all the time. And truth be told, I’ve always found it bit odd and a disconcerting. This past week I’ve had two people tell me that they know that I “like to be controversial.” That’s actually not the case at all. One person told me that she had seen a TV show where someone had said that they didn’t believe that Jesus existed, and she thought that was right up my alley. I didn’t bother to tell [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:58:07-04:00June 9th, 2022|Bart’s Biography|

Did Paul Write “Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians”?

Here's an important question I received recently from a blog member: Someone told me that “I should never listen to you” because you say Paul did not write six letters of the New Testament, even though the letters start with the claim he did: "Paul, an Apostle of Christ to the Church at ….." This person's main issue was: what is the evidence Paul did not write Ephesians? Your thoughts. Response This is an issue I dealt with directly in my book Forged: Why The Biblical Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2012). Here's what I say there. (If you are interested in the hard-core academic and detailed discussion of the evidence, I have a much fuller discussion in my book Forgery and Counterforgery) ****************************** When I was teaching at Rutgers in the mid 1980s, I regularly offered a course on the life and teachings of Paul. One of the textbooks for the course was a book on Paul by a conservative British scholar named F. F. Bruce.[1] I used the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:58:21-04:00June 8th, 2022|Bart's Critics, Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters|

An Even More Unusual Story of What Happens to the Rich…

In my last post I began to discuss Jesus’ parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus from Luke 16) and I mentioned there is a very similar tale in ancient Egyptian lore, about a man named Setne and his adult son Si-Osire. In the story the two of them are looking out the window of their house and see the coffin of a rich man being carried out to the cemetery with great honors. They then see the corpse of a poor beggar carried out on a mat, with no one attending his funeral. Setne says to his son: “By Ptah, the great god, how much happier is the rich man who is honored with the sound of wailing than the poor man who is carried to the cemetery.” Si-Osire surprises his father by telling him that the poor man will be much better off in the afterlife than the rich one. He surprises him even more by proving it. He takes Setne down to the underworld, where they see how the unrighteous are punished, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:58:20-04:00June 7th, 2022|Afterlife, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture|

Lazarus and the Rich Man: What To Do with Wealth

I’ve been thinking a good bit about the problem of wealth in the teachings of Jesus. Among the passages that are obviously relevant is the famous parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man. I talked about the story in my book Heaven and Hell (Simon and Schuster, 2020). The following is a revised version of what I say there. The story appears in Luke 16:19-31 in the context of a number of parables and other sayings of Jesus. In the parable Jesus contrasts the life and afterlife of an anonymous rich man and a destitute beggar named Lazarus. The wealthy many is dressed in fine clothes and enjoys sumptuous meals every day. Lazarus lies outside his gate, starving, desperate even to get the scraps off the rich man’s table. The scene is pathetic: dogs come up and lick Lazarus’s wounds. Both men die at about the same time. Lazarus is Members of the blog get five posts a week in exchange for a small membership fee -- every penny of which goes to charity. So [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:58:20-04:00June 5th, 2022|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

Free Webinar on June 12! Did Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John Actually Write Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?

Interested in a free lecture on who wrote the Gospels? As you may know, I’ve started doing some online courses on the Bible (and related topics) as part of my new venture, Bart Ehrman Professional Services (= BEPS). This venture is not connected with the blog, but I do like to announce what is going on over there since a number of blog members have been interested. If you want to see what it all involves – and to see which courses are already available – you can find them on my personal website, www.bartehrman.com. The courses are for purchase, but I’ve decided to do a freebie for anyone interested. It will be a live event on Sunday June 12, 2:00 pm ET; a recording of it will also be made available. The title of my talk: “Did Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John Actually Write Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John”? Here's the link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81200470127?pwd=bU82SGFTT3lLdlhSbkEwdnNrcWFQdz09 If you'd like to officially register for the event (this is not necessary but if you do so, we will [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:58:21-04:00June 4th, 2022|Public Forum|

How Do You Get a Book Published??

I am celebrating the tenth year anniversary of the blog, this past April 18, with previous year's April 18 blog posts. Here's the one from 2016 -- highly relevant to prospective authors. How can you publish a book you've written? ****************************** I regularly get emails from people who want to break into publishing for the first time, who ask me “How can I get my book published?” As I indicated in my previous posts, almost always what they have in mind is not a work of scholarship for scholars but a trade book for a general audience. And so here is a weird fact about me: even though I have been publishing trade books for eighteen years, I’m not completely sure of the answer. But I know some things, and in this post I’ll indicate what those things are. I absolutely know how one gets his or her first scholarly book published. I help my graduate students, and other scholars just starting their careers, do that all the time. There I’m an expert. But a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:58:20-04:00June 4th, 2022|Book Discussions, Public Forum|

Who Buried Moses? Platinum Guest Post by Lou Suarez

Now *this* is a topic you probably haven't thought much about -- but it's really interesting. And puzzling! Platinum member Lou Suarez has written an intriguing assessment of a real conundrum in the Hebrew Bible that, as it turns out, proved significant in the Jewish tradition. It has to do with the death and burial of Moses. Read on! (And remember: you too can post for your fellow Platinums. Your post does not have to be high-level scholarship: if you've got something you'd like to talk about, draft something up and get your thoughts out there to a very generous reading public!) ****************************** In Deuteronomy 34, YHVH tells Moses that, even though he has led YHVH's people out of enslavement in Egypt and through the wilderness to the edge of the Promised Land, he will not be allowed to cross over the Jordan River and take part in the Israelite conquest of Canaan. YHVH permits Moses to see, from the top of Mount Nebo, "the land of which [he] swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:58:21-04:00May 31st, 2022|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Apologies to Gold/Platinum Members!

I need to apologize for being late on the Gold Q&A this month. I've been in Italy the past two weeks giving lectures for a tour group; I had hoped to be able to squeeze in a recording of the Q&A while there, but the trip had me running from dawn to dark. I've just arrived back stateside now and, as we speak, am in catch-up mode. I have the Questions for the Q&A, and now just need to record Answers. But given re-entry obligations, it probably will not be till next week (May Q&A in June!). And about then we'll be soliciting new questions for June. So sorry 'bout this! On the upside, at least with the blog, a day is not as a thousand years.... Bart

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:58:21-04:00May 30th, 2022|Public Forum|

A Lively Interview on my New Book “Journeys”

I've done a number of interviews over the years for my trade books (for general audiences), but almost NEVER for one of my academic books. But here is one, on my recent book Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition. The book is geared to academics (as you'd see from the very opening), but some is accessible to general readers (including the bits on wealth I've been summarizing here). This interview is *completely* accessible, and it's done by a very good interviewer, Mitch Jeserich for the podcast Letters and Politics. He knows a lot about the history of early Christianity and the broader ancient world, and he asks well-targeted questions. Some interviews are a bit of a pain; this one was all pleasure. See what you think.

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:58:07-04:00May 29th, 2022|Afterlife, Book Discussions|

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