BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 77 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.

The Issue of “Tenure” for Professors

You probably have heard about the extraordinary case of Nikole Hannah-Jones at my university (UNC-Chapel Hill). Offered a prestigious chaired position in the Department of Journalism, a chair that has always brought with it “tenure,” the university Board of Trustees, comprised, of course, of people who are not academics with expertise in journalism, chose not to grant her tenure, even though the department itself strongly advocated for it. I have never heard of that happening before. Of course, given the fact that the Board has to give its approval before tenure is granted, it was completely within its legal right not to give its approval. But no one on the planet thinks it is an accident that Hannah-Jones – who is 20-year veteran journalist with the New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize winner for journalism (!), and winner of the (incredibly prestigious) MacArthur Genius grant – is famous for her work developing the “1619 Project” avidly promoting an alternative understanding of American history in light of the history of slavery and the contributions made by [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:19-04:00June 13th, 2021|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Gold Q&A for June!

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 Jun 19, to be released Tuesday June 22. Send your question(s) to our blog COO, Diane Pittman, at [email protected]. The deadline is midnight (in whatever time zone you're in) Friday June 18 . The best questions are only a sentence of two long at most. I hope to hear from you! Bart

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:19-04:00June 12th, 2021|Reader’s Questions|

What Kind of Ancient Christian Books Might Be Discovered?

On and off of the past few months I've posted on which books from early Christianity -- from the time of the New Testament! -- I'd love to get my grubby paws on. Here is a related question I received. What are the chances? QUESTION: What do you think are the odds that a really startling discovery like Q or an early Paul letter is still out there and likely to be discovered? RESPONSE: This is a really great question, and like many really great questions, there is no really great answer. It is, of course, impossible to come up with any actual “odds.” The best we can say is “pretty slim indeed." But let me put some flesh on the bare bones of that answer. The first thing to say is that there are indeed instances in which a modern discovery has been made of a book that we had reason to suspect at one time existed. But that very rarely happens. In virtually every case that it *has* happened, it is not a document [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:51-04:00June 12th, 2021|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Reader’s Questions|

Final Live Lecture on Jesus as The Christians Saw Him: SATURDAY!

This Saturday at 3:00 p.m. I will be giving a live lecture (via Zoom) on an intriguing topic that very few people I"ve ever met (including New Testament scholars) have ever delved into: What did early Christians think Jesus was doing between the time of his death and his resurrection. This is the third and last lecture in my series on Jesus according to the Christians. You do not have to have been at either of the others to come or to understand this one -- it is a stand alone lecture, with a good ole Aristotelian beginning, middle, and end. All the funds we bring in will go to help pay for blog expenses, so we can continue to give every dime of membership fees and regular donations to the charities we support. The fee for the lecture, if you have not already paid for it, is $10. We accept more than the requested fee of course! This week's event will last for about 75 minutes. I will lecture for 45-50 minutes and then [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:19-04:00June 11th, 2021|Public Forum|

The Trinity! A Final Summation
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The Trinity! A Final Summation

Early Christian Doctrine

The Trinity! A Final Summation

I would now like to wrap up this rather long thread on where the Trinity came from. When I started the thread, sometime back in the 19th century, I had imagined it would take three or four posts. But then I realized that it would give me an opportunity to talk about all sorts of important things: the early Christian idea of God, the divinity of Christ in relation to the Father, the Holy Spirit in the New Testament, and so on. But now I will try a one-post synopsis. The earliest Christians inherited a strict monotheism from Judaism. Not all Jews were monotheists. Over history, some worshiped other gods; others worshiped the one God of Israel but acknowledged other gods existed (making them henotheists or monolatrists) ; others said there was only one God and the other gods simply didn’t exist. Most Christians came to take that view – or at least to say that the other gods, if they existed, were demons. Jesus himself appears to have been a strict monotheist. As were [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:05-04:00June 10th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine|

The Coming of the Holy Spirit in John: A Key to the Trinity

I’ve been talking about Jesus’ “Farewell Discourse,” the long five-chapter discourse that is Jesus’ last speech (virtually a monologue) in the Gospel of John. In the previous post we saw that in the speech Jesus discusses how he relates to the Father: he is in the Father and the Father is in him, so that even though the Father “is greater” than he, when someone sees him he sees the Father. They are “one.” That doesn’t mean they are the same person/thing; it’s more like when you tell a colleague or friend “you and I are completely unified in this” or “you and I are at one on this.” There is no distance between you. For Jesus it means that he has been given the authority of the Father and that his words are the ones the Father has given him to speak so that whatever he does and says has the full authority of the Father behind it. There is no distance between him and the Father. Not because they are the same but [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:05-04:00June 9th, 2021|Public Forum|

Confusing Messages about Jesus and the Father: John 14

The Gospel of John is extremely important for understanding where the doctrine of the Trinity came from. I should stress: the Trinity does not appear in the Gospel – nowhere does the Gospel say that there are three persons, all distinct from one another, all of them equally God, and yet there is only one God. That, in a nutshell is the doctrine of the Trinity. But even though the Gospel does not express the doctrine (either does any other book of the NT), the book could later be mined by those who wanted to find support for it. To that end, no passage could be more important than John 14. In my previous post I explained a bit about the “Farewell Discourse,” the long five-chapter speech and then prayer of Jesus on his last evening, before his arrest. In chapter 14 Jesus hits on many of the key themes of the entire address (chs. 13-17; the longest speech of Jesus in the Gospels). He prepares his disciples by telling them that he will now [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:05-04:00June 8th, 2021|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine|

Jesus’ Final Speech in John: A Lead-up to the Coming of the Spirit

I have very much enjoyed doing this mini-thread on the Holy Spirit in the biblical tradition as part of the larger thread on the question of where the Trinity came from. I’ve never written on this before (the biblical views of the Spirit) or even thought about it systematically, though I have, of course, thought about the individual pieces of the puzzle for many years. But putting it all together has been instructive and interesting. I have been talking about the role of the Spirit in Paul, Acts, and the Synoptics (esp. Luke), but all along I’ve thought that a passage in the Gospel of John is in many ways the most significant for understanding how the Spirit became part of the Trinity in later years. The passage occurs in the longest speech of Jesus in the New Testament, the “Farewell Discourse” of John 13-17. This is a flat-out amazing speech that most people do not realize is so remarkable, simply as a speech. As you may know, in the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:04-04:00June 6th, 2021|Canonical Gospels|

You Don’t Want To Blaspheme the Spirit! But What’s It Mean?

Since I've been posting now on the role of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament, I've been getting a number of questions about what it means to "blaspheme the Holy Spirit." In some cases the question is urgent, from someone who fears she or he has committed the sin. That would be a problem. Jesus says that THAT sin is the only one that is unforgivable. Forever. Serious stuff. My view is that anyone who is concerned they've committed it almost by definition has not committed it. But that will take a bit of explaining. I looked it up and I have posted on this a couple of times over the years, including just a year ago -- but since it keeps reappearing as a question, I thought I should go over the topic again. So here's the deal. The earliest reference to the idea of the “unforgiveable sin” comes to us in the Gospel of Matthew (it is taken from the so-called Q source): “Therefore I tell you every sin and blasphemy will [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:04-04:00June 3rd, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Reader’s Questions|

Blog Zoom Lecture This Saturday: Jesus as a Young Boy!

This Saturday at 3:00 I will be giving a fund-raising lecture for the blog on Gospel stories about Jesus as a boy, both as found in the New Testament (there's not much said about it there) and from outside in the terrifically interesting "Infancy Gospels." Now here are accounts you didn't hear in Sunday School. This is the second in a three-part series on Jesus according to the Christians. You do not have to have been at the first one either to come or to understand this one -- it is a stand alone lecture, with a good ole Aristotelian beginning, middle, and end. All the funds we bring in will go to help pay for blog expenses, so we can continue to give every dime of membership fees and regular donations to the charities we support. The fee for the lecture, if you have not already paid for it, is $10; or if you are paying for both this one and the one the following week, the fee is $19 total. We accept more [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:05-04:00June 2nd, 2021|Canonical Gospels, Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus|

The Spirit in the Life of Jesus

I have pointed out that the earliest Christians believed they were living at the end of time and that in fulfillment of the promises of Scripture, especially in the Old Testament prophet Joel, they (or at least many of them) believed God had sent his Spirit to guide and direct them in these final days before the Kingdom of God arrived. We find this idea in the letters of Paul (our first Christian author), in the book of Acts (e.g., on the Day of Pentecost in ch. 2), and elsewhere in the New Testament. In this post I want to point out that when later Christians told their stories about Jesus they took this belief that the Spirit had come upon them and applied it to the (earlier) life of Jesus, saying that the Spirit was particularly manifest in his life, since he was the one who inaugurated the end of time. You get some a whiff of that view already in the Gospel of Mark. When Jesus is baptized in the opening chapter, the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:04-04:00June 2nd, 2021|Acts of the Apostles, Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine|

The Holy Spirit in Charge of the Church (?)

In my earlier posts I started to show the early Christians believed that because they were living at the very end of time. This was an interim period between the time when the resurrection of the dead began with Jesus being raised and was soon to culminate with the general resurrection, in which all who had ever died would be brought back to life to face judgment. Most important for our purposes here, these Christians thought God had sent the Spirit upon them in fulfillment of the prophecies of Scripture, especially Joel 2. The Spirit was both the sign of the end of time and a helper for those living in it. Since now God was closer to his people than ever, arguably since the Garden of Eden (as the End was beginning to be more like the Beginning), he communicated with them directly, as he had once upon a time. Now was the time that he gave dreams, visions, and prophesies directly to people, not just isolated prophets, in order to convey to them [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:51-04:00June 1st, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters|

What About Authors Who “Just Want to Sell Books”?

I was looking through some old posts from years ago, and came across this one, which continues to be an issue for me. It's the kind of thing I continue to hear on occasion, and so I thought maybe it was worth approaching again. Sometimes I hear someone criticize me, or another author, by saying “he just wants to sell books.” That has always struck me as a very strange thing to say. Of course I want to sell books. Why else would I write books? Would I want to write books so no one would read them? What people actually *mean*by that comment, of course, is more snide and offensive. What they mean is: “he will say anything in a book in order to get people to buy it.” There may indeed be authors for whom this is true. I can’t speak for them, only for myself. This is a charge I really bristle at. Almost no one of course comes out and actually makes the charge directly. But it must be what they [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:50-04:00May 30th, 2021|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Coming of the Spirit on the Day of Pentecost

In a previous post I discussed the prophet Joel, who used a disaster that had struck as the occasion to make his proclamation about the will of God. A horrible plague of locusts had hit the land of Judah that had decimated the crops and food supply; Joel proclaimed that it was a warning from God that if his people did not return to him, matters would get worse – they would be invaded by a foreign army from the north (the Assyrians) and face massive destruction. This would be the “day of the LORD,” which was not to be seen as a happy prospect. But as with many prophets of coming destruction, Joel also indicated that God would have pity on his people if they would turn to him in repentance. After the horrible events to come, God would bring salvation to Judah, removing the foreign threat and restoring the earth; there would be abundant rain, plentiful crops, productive livestock. The years of drought, famine, and military invasion would end, and all would be [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:50-04:00May 29th, 2021|Acts of the Apostles, Early Christian Doctrine|

Are There Actually Five Letters in 2 Corinthians (so that it is 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 Corinthians?)

In my previous post I tried to show why most critical scholars think that the letter of 2 Corinthians is actually two different letters that have been spliced together. When I was back in graduate school, I learned – to my surprise – that there were scholars who thought that in fact 2 Corinthians was made up of five different letters, all spliced together. At first that struck me as a bit crazy, but as I looked at the evidence I began to see that it made a good bit of sense. I’m not completely committed to that idea, but I’m inclined toward it. My sense is that this is the view of a sizeable minority of critical scholars, but I have no data, only anecdotal evidence, to back that up. In any case, what matters more is what you yourself might think of it. I won’t be giving the evidence in full, but here is how I lay it out for students to consider in my textbook on the New Testament for undergraduates. To [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:50-04:00May 27th, 2021|Paul and His Letters|

Several Letters in One? What about Second Corinthians?

In recent posts I've been talking about 1 Corinthians and its understanding of the Christian community in the important city of Corinth. We know about the community because of Paul's letters written to it. In the New Testament of course, we have 1 and 2 Corinthians. (OUTSIDE the New Testament we have 3 Corinthians! It also claims to be written by Paul, but is a forgery; I'll talk about it in a later blog post). They are both pretty long letters, and give us a lot of information. That's especially true for a reason most Bible readers don't know, and would have no way of knowing. Scholars have long argued that 2 Corinthians is not just a single letter. Almost all critical scholars think it is two letters that have been cut and pasted together; and some scholars (including me) think it is actually five letters combined -- all written at different times for different occasions. That may really matter, because it means we can trace a bit of the *history* of the community's relationship with [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:50-04:00May 26th, 2021|Paul and His Letters|

The Coming of the Spirit at the End of Time

Even though the Spirit of God shows up here and there throughout the Old Testament, starting of course already in Genesis 1:2, continuing on occasion through the narratives and in the prophets, it is not really a central narrational or theological theme. That contrasts with the New Testament. Here the Spirit of God is enormously important, on every level. The historical reason for that is that the earliest Christians believed that with the death and resurrection of Jesus they had entered into the End of the Ages. They were living at the end times. As we have seen, the resurrection of the dead – when God raised bodies back to live, some to face judgment and others to be given an eternal reward – was to transpire at the end of this age; in the Bible this future resurrection was first spoken of explicitly in Daniel 12:1-3, the last chapter of the final book of the Hebrew Bible to be written. But the idea of a future resurrection became a widely accepted theological notion in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:50-04:00May 25th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Jesus according to the Christians: A Three-Part Blog Lecture Series

I have decided to do a three-part lecture series as a fundraiser to help defray the expenses of the blog. As the blog continues to grow, it becomes more expensive and I simply refuse to take any money from Membership Fees or Regular Donations to pay for any of the expenses. Every penny you pay to join goes directly to the charities the blog supports (see https://ehrmanblog.org/charities-we-support/). This lecture series will help pay some of the overhead costs so that we don't have to take a dime out of the fees for overhead. (BTW, in terms of overhead, for what it's worth: I don't take a penny from the blog myself.) (But if you want to mail me a number of small unmarked bills, that would be fine.) The lectures will occur over three consecutive Saturdays, starting this week, May 29, and continuing then on June 5 and 12. They will all be at 3:00 pm. On each occasion I will lecture for 45-50 minutes and then take questions for 15 -20 minutes. There will [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:04-04:00May 25th, 2021|Public Forum|

On Being an Agnostic Atheist

Bart Ehrman on Being an Agnostic. One question I regularly get asked is about where I stand on the agnostic-atheist divide -- that is, which am I. I usually confuse people when I tell them I'm both. I've posted about this on the blog before, but it's been a while, so I thought I should give it another airing here. When I became an agnostic – 25 years ago? I’m not even sure anymore – I thought that “agnosticism” and “atheism” were two *degrees* of basically the same thing. My sense is that this is what most people think. According to this idea, an agnostic is someone who says that s/he does not *know* whether God exists, and an atheist is someone who makes a definitive statement that God does *not* exist. Agnostics don’t know and atheists are sure. At the time I was rather surprised that so many agnostics and atheists (most of whom had this view I’ve just described) were so militaristic about their own positions. As I found, to my chagrin (having [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:50-04:00May 23rd, 2021|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Paul’s (Misunderstood) Message to His Corinthian Converts

I have been discussing how Paul established the church in Corinth; this is important information for anyone interested in knowing what kinds of problems arose in the church -- some of them rather amazing, for a group Paul calls "the saints"! Here is how I discuss Paul's message in my textbook on the New Testament: ****************************** During their stay in Corinth, Paul and his companions appear to have converted a sizable number (dozens?) of pagans to the faith. The book of Acts indicates that they spent a year and a half there. Paul himself makes no clear statement concerning the length of his stay, but there are indications throughout his letter that the Christians in Corinth, or at least some of them, had an unusually sophisticated understanding of the faith. Indeed, some of the Corinthians had so much knowledge of their faith that they took Paul’s gospel simply as a starting point and developed their views in vastly different directions. What can we say about the message that Paul originally preached to these people? [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:50-04:00May 22nd, 2021|Paul and His Letters|

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