BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 76 of 208

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.

Gold Q&A for July 2021!

Dear Gold Members, It is that time again! As you know, one of the perks of your elevated status as a gold member of the blog is that you are provided an audio Q&A once a month for gold members only. You provide written questions, I answer as many as I can, and I release the audio recording to gold members only. Have a question to ask? The sky's the limit. Go for it. I will be recording the next Q&A on Saturday July 24to be released Tuesday July 27. Send your question(s) to our blog COO, Diane Pittman, at [email protected]. The deadline is midnight (in whatever time zone you're in) Thursday July 22 . The best questions are only a sentence of two long at most. I hope to hear from you! Bart

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:36-04:00July 9th, 2021|Public Forum|

How I Take Notes When Doing Research for a Book

A couple of weeks ago when I first talking about my work on the next book dealing with Revelation, I was asked how I actually go about doing the research -- in particular, how I take notes on what I read. It's a big deal for any author: how does one keep track of the research? I discussed the issues a few years ago right after I had finished drafting my book Heaven and Hell, and thought it might be worth reposting now. Here 'tis: ****************************** Now that I have finished writing the draft of my book on the afterlife – which I’m tentatively titling “Heaven, Hell, and the Invention of the Afterlife (that will be the title until my publisher changes it!!) – I have received several questions from blog members about aspects of the writing itself. One reader wanted to know how I keep track of all the things that I read in preparation for writing a book like this (or like anything else). Here is how: When I decide what the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:20-04:00July 8th, 2021|Book Discussions, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Apocalypse (the genre) and Apocalypticism (the worldview)

I have started to give some background on the book of Revelation, to help set the stage for my new understanding of it as it has developed over the past year. Much of what I think now is what I've thought for 45 years. But the deeper I've dug, the more I've seen and the more I've come to realize that my older perspective (a widely held one among scholars) has some serious flaws (as others too have seen). But none of these new insights affects my basic view, that to understand this mysterious book we have to do what almost NO ONE in the modern world does (except scholars): understanding it in its own historical context in light of what we know of its historical and, especially, literary context. If you change the context, you change the meaning. And nowhere is that more obvious than in the book of Revelation. In the last post I summarized the narrative (urging you to read it for yourself) (if you prefer to listen to it, make sure [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:20-04:00July 7th, 2021|Early Judaism, Revelation of John|

The Book of Revelation and the END. Starting at the Beginning.

The Book of Revelation! I am ready now to start a new thread on my thoughts on the book, as I get serious about writing about it for a general audience. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago (see blog for June 20) that I had changed my mind rather radically about what my book was going to cover. I’ll explain the current plan (hopefully the *final* plan) in later posts. For now it would be important to start at the beginning so we are all on the same page. And so in this post I want to review – or introduce, in case you’re not familiar with it – the contents of the book of Revelation itself, more or less free of interpretation. It’s not a long book, and can be read in one sitting. (Twenty-one chapters, but most are very short.) If you’re interested, go ahead and read it (for the first time or again!). You’ll pick up something new every time. Or at least I do, now in my 50th year of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:20-04:00July 6th, 2021|Revelation of John|

Memories of Bruce Metzger: When I First Realized I Couldn’t Write

In my last post I started to resume my recollections of my mentor, the great textual scholar Bruce Metzger. In this post I recall when he first showed me I was a lousy writer. In graduate school different professors have different approaches to evaluating and grading term papers. Some professors are completely anal about it and insist on correcting every mistake, rewriting every sentence, and reformulating every idea. Not many are that way, thankfully, since doing all this takes an enormous chunk of time (and a very large ego). I never had a professor like that, but I have known some over the years. Others make extremely judicious and helpful comments, sometimes at great length. My teacher Paul Meyer was like that at Princeton Seminary. The comments he made on our papers were in depth, always on target, and superior in quality to any of the scholarship we read all semester in the class. Meyer never published much himself – he threw himself into his students instead; we used to threaten to extract his comments [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:20-04:00July 4th, 2021|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Mentor Bruce Metzger

Many years ago on the blog I was asked about my relationship with my mentor Bruce Metzger, an internationally famous scholar of the New Testament who is generally acknowledged as the greatest expert on biblical manuscripts in America, ever. He was also a devout Christian, an ordained Presbyterian minister. I, obviously, am not. (Though I was very much a committed Christian when I first met him.) Here is the question and my initial response. QUESTION: Hey Bart, I know you studied under Bruce Metzger and my question is how did he feel about your skepticism toward the trustworthiness of the N.T? RESPONSE: Bruce Metzger and I had a long and very close relationship. I was his student for seven years and his research assistant for the New Revised Standard Version (he was the chair of the translation committee) for a couple of years. He directed my masters and PhD theses; he helped me break into publishing; he worked to get me into editorial positions for journals and monograph series; he guided my research [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:19-04:00July 3rd, 2021|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

Was Jesus Like One of the Pagan Fertility Gods?

Lots of people (esp. on the Internet!) say that the stories of Jesus' death and resurrection were modeled on widespread beliefs in the pagan world of "fertility" gods, whose life-cycle dictates the fertility of the earth. They are born (spring); they become productive as the earth becomes fertile (summer); they become ripe for harvest (autumn); and then they die (winter). But they "rise again" (spring) and the pattern then repeats itself. Wasn't Jesus like that? That is the question I was asked in this final segment in my interview with Ben Witherington, a prominent evangelical biblical scholar. Ben and I don't agree about a lot when it comes to religion, and have crossed academic swords in public contexts. But we have an amicable relationship and agree on some very basic things. For example: Jesus existed! Hey, it's a start. And we agree a lot on the relationship of Jesus to Judaism and the need to situate him in his own Jewish context (rather than some mythical pagan context). And so, here is the final question [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:19-04:00July 1st, 2021|Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, Historical Jesus|

Blog Dinner in London?

If you're a blog member and are either in or able to get to London just now: are you interested in getting together for a blog dinner? If we can get 3-4 (or more!) people together, I'd be happy to do it. It would need to be one of the evenings of Sunday July 11 to Thursday July 15. In either central London or Wimbledon (where I reside when over here). 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] If you're not around here just now, hey, our day may come!

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:36-04:00June 30th, 2021|Public Forum|

Other Gods Who Died and Rose from the Dead?

Here I continue with the Q&A I had years ago with evangelical New Testament scholar Ben Witherington, focused on my book Did Jesus Exist. I think I can say with relative confidence that this is the ONE book of mine that evangelicals on the whole were (mainly) pleased with. A nice change! And why do they like it? Because I argue there must have been a man Jesus. OK, then! Doesn't seem like a lot to be grateful for, but I'll take what I can get. Ben's questions were more astute than that, dealing with some of the key issues at a scholarly level. Here are two more of them, and my responses. Q. It appears that mythicists have not read Jonathan Z. Smith, and do not realize that there is no unambiguous evidence for the historical argument that ancients believed in dying and rising gods before the time of Jesus, and that therefore the story of Jesus is just a historicized version of that myth. Why do you think this theory of dying and rising [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:19-04:00June 30th, 2021|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

Some Intriguing Questions about Jesus’ Predictions and Mental Health

I've gotten a lot of terrific questions over the years on the blog, and looking through old posts, I came upon this one dealing with two of them, both on Jesus and his immediate followers. I thought they were worth addressing again. Both of these, as it turns out, deal with issues related to psychology and the early Christian movement: one has to do with why the followers of Jesus didn’t simply give up and disband when the end-of-the-world-apocalypse they had been anticipating didn’t happen (so that they were proven to be *wrong*) and the other about whether Jesus was, literally, crazy. Interesting questions! If you have one you would like me to address, just ask in a comment on any of my posts. QUESTION I get that when the Apocalypse didn’t happen as the apocalyptic Jesus had predicted that a kind of reinterpretation of events including the resurrection took place. But why? Why didn’t the fledgling fringe then Jesus-Jewish (my term) sect simply die out? RESPONSE Ah, this is a meaty question [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:51-04:00June 29th, 2021|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Fiction and Fact, Legend and History. Is it Either / Or?

This now is the 7th of 10 parts of my interview with Ben Witherington on my book Did Jesus Exist. Here there are two interesting questions, both focusing on the relationship of legend and history in ancient stories about Jesus. Part of the question is whether the Gospel writers were simply riffing on (or, more cynically, ripping off) earlier stories of other amazing figures when talking about Jesus; the other is whether that has a significant bearing on how we understand what he said and and did -- or on whether we think he even existed. Q. Robert Price's argument that the stories of Jesus are a giant midrash on OT stories about Moses and others, and so are completely fiction seems to ignore the fact that midrash is a hermeneutical technique used for contemporizing pre-existing stories. Talk briefly about the difference between how stories are shaped in the Gospels and whether they have any historical substance or core or not. (N.B. It appears that Crossan has recently made the same kind of category mistake arguing [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:19-04:00June 26th, 2021|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

Texts and Towns that Allegedly Didn’t Exist (So Did Jesus?)

Here I continue to answer questions from my evangelical colleague in the field, Ben Witherington, as addressed some years ago, These again deal with the claims of "Mythicists," who insist that there never actually was a man Jesus, but that he is simply made up, a complete myth. One way they support their point is by saying that some passages in the ancient world that mention him in fact are later "interpolations" into the original writings (that is, some nefarious editor stuck references to Jesus into a text that originally didn't mention him) and that his hometown, Nazareth, actually did not exist at the time. Is either claim credible or, well, supported by any actual *evidence*? Here are Ben's queries and my responses. Q. Mythicists seems to often uses the interpolation theory to explain away NT texts that are inconvenient to their agendas. Yet it is also true that some NT scholars use interpolation theories to the very same end, even when there is apparently no textual basis for the interpolation theory. Explain how [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:05-04:00June 24th, 2021|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, New Testament Manuscripts|

How Do We Know If Jesus Did Something?

This post continues my 10-part interview with Ben Witherington dealing with "mythicists," those who claim that there never actually *was* a man Jesus, but that he is a complete fabrication, a myth. In Did Jesus Exist, I try to show why that is simply not true. But if he did exist, and the Gospels say things about him that probably didn't happen, how do you separate the fact from the fiction? Here Ben asks me questions related to that idea, and I give some responses. Q. Various mythicists have tried to argue that in fact there is only one source, namely Mark, that provides evidence that Jesus existed and presumably he made up the idea? Why is this not a fair representation of the evidence, and why do you think it is that various of them hardly even deal with the evidence from Paul? A. Most mythicists claim that Paul never mentions the historical Jesus or says anything about him, but that he only speaks of a “mythical Christ” who was not a real human [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:05-04:00June 23rd, 2021|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

Some Key Evidence for Jesus

I continue here with the conversation I had some years ago with evangelical New Testament scholar Ben Witherington, based on my book Did Jesus Exist. In this post, we start getting into some of the key evidence we have for Jesus, not only to show that he actually existed (uh, yes he did...) but also to help us know what we can say about him, about what he really said and did. Q (Witherington). In the middle portion of your book, you place a great deal of emphasis on what is usually called the criteria of multiple attestation to demonstrate that Jesus surely existed. Would you explain briefly why historians place so much stock in this criteria, and why it is especially important when dealing with the question of the existence of Jesus. A. Multiple attestation is one of the most important historical criteria for establishing what happened in the past – not just for historical Jesus research, but for any serious historical research. If the sources to a historical person or event are [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:05-04:00June 22nd, 2021|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

Why My Book on Revelation Has Been Different To Write

As many of you know, my next book is on the Revelation of John, to be written not for scholars but for a general audience. I decided I wanted to write the book maybe four years ago, and my ideas about it have changed significantly since I began to think about it. Part of that is because the book is, as Bob Dylan says, “a slow train coming.” My original plan was to have the book finished by now. In fact, that was the publisher’s plan too. This is the first time in my mortal existence that I’ve been seriously behind on a book deadline. Usually, I finish way ahead of time. Not with this one. There are several reasons for that and I won’t bore you with them since virtually everyone I know has had the same problems: Covid burnout, too much work, and too little time. BUT the positive side of it all is that with this book I’m allowing myself time to think and reflect without a definite plan. It’s a new [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:05-04:00June 20th, 2021|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Reconstruction of Q: Platinum Guest Post by Steve Sutter

Here is an interesting and informative post on the Q source, provided for us by Steve Sutter. I have been spacing out these Platinum posts, in part because the supply is limited (and the queue almost gone!). If you have one to submit: go for it! You can get your ideas out there, people can respond, you can respond back, and it's all good. *************************** The Earliest Gospel “Q” was Lost -- But Reconstructed By: Steve Sutter, M.S. Presque Isle, Maine The idea of a collection of sayings of Jesus lying behind the Gospels of Matthew and Luke is not a new idea. In 1908, Dr. Adolf von Harnack, a Lutheran theologian and Professor of Church History at the University of Berlin, authored a book entitled The Sayings of Jesus -- The Second Source of St. Matthew and St. Luke. It’s intriguing that in Harnack’s day, at least some historical investigators hypothesized that Jesus was “a genuine Buddhist, who had, however, come under the influence of ideas originating in ancient Babylon, Persia, Egypt, and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:20-04:00June 19th, 2021|Canonical Gospels, History of Biblical Scholarship|

What About Other References to Jesus Outside the New Testament?

I continue here with the re-post of an interview from years ago but of ongoing relevance, about how we can know what we know about Jesus. The interview was with Ben Witherington, a conservative evangelical Christian New Testament scholar, who asked me to respond to a number of questions about my book Did Jesus Exist in light of criticism I received for it (not, for the most part, from committed Christians!). Some of Ben Witherington’s most popular books are The Jesus Quest, and The Problem with Evangelical Theology, among others. - Q. Sometimes you make a distinction between literary evidence and other sorts of written evidence (e.g. records of trials or tax records), and you place especial stress on the former as a way of answering the question of whether or not Jesus existed. Can you explain why you do this? A. Yes, there is a clear distinction to be made between literary and documentary evidence. The only reason I place special evidence on the former, when talking about the historical Jesus, is that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:05-04:00June 19th, 2021|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

Evidence for Jesus Outside the New Testament: Part 2 of My Exchange with Ben Witherington

Nine years ago, Ben Witherington, a conservative evangelical Christian New Testament scholar, asked me to respond to a number of questions about my book Did Jesus Exist, especially in light of criticism I have received for it (not, for the most part, from committed Christians!). I am reposting the interview, since it's on such an important topic. Ben's blog is widely read by conservative evangelicals, and he has agreed to post the questions and my answers without editing, to give his readers a sense of why I wrote the book, what I hoped to accomplish by it, and what I would like them to know about it. He has graciously agreed to allow me to post my responses here on my blog, which, if I’m not mistaken, has a very different readership (although there is undoubtedly some overlap). It’s a rather long set of questions and answers – over 10,000 words. So I will post them in bits and pieces so as not to overwhelm anyone. The Q’s are obviously his, the A’s mine. Some [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:05-04:00June 17th, 2021|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

Why I Wrote my book Did Jesus Exist? Interview with Evangelical Scholar Ben Witherington

Ever since I started publishing books for non-scholars, I've been attacked by evangelical Christians for my views of the Bible. Then, somewhat ironically, about nine years ago I came under attack by the nemeses of evangelical Christians, the "mythicists," who claim that Jesus never existed. And why did they attack me? For my views of the Bible. Isn't life marvelous? In 2012 published a book arguing that whatever else you say about him, Jesus certainly existed. It drove some of the mythicists to distraction. What was I thinking? I didn't agree with them! Traitor! Oh boy I didn't agree with them. And on this point, at least, some evangelicals came to love me. One of the leading New Testament scholars in the evangelical community is Ben Witherington, with whom I've been on friendly terms for a very long time. Ben also has a blog, quite different from mine. Soon after the book was published, Ben asked if he could do a multi-part series with me on the book that both of us could post on [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:04-04:00June 16th, 2021|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

How Then Do Most Ancient Manuscripts Get Discovered?

I have been discussing documents from early Christianity that I would very much like to have see with my own eyes. In my last post I mentioned the fact that documents that *do* tend to be discovered are either copies of books we already have (the Gospel of John, the book of Revelation, etc.) or of books that we did not previously know existed (the Letter of Diognetus, or most of the writings in the Nag Hammadi library). Here is a related question from a reader of the blog. QUESTION: Are there researchers who systematically attempt to find these ancient documents or when documents come to light is it pretty much by chance? ANSWER: Well, not so much, not these days. For a simple reason: how does one go about trying to discover a manuscript? Do you fly to Egypt, hire a taxi to take you out to the desert, and start digging? There were basically two ways that past researchers tried to discover manuscripts. Sometimes they were spectacularly successful. But one of these ways [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:51-04:00June 15th, 2021|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts|

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