BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 78 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.

How Paul Started the Church in Corinth

I have begun to talk about Paul’s church in Corinth and the correspondence he had with it. For a bit more background I want to explain how he actually started it. Corinth was apparently a city he had not visited before, yet he went there and managed to convert a large group of people to his Christian message. How did that happen? Here is how I explain what we know in my textbook The New Testament (Oxford University Press). ************************ After leaving Thessalonica, Paul and his companions, Timothy and Silvanus, arrived in Corinth and began, again, to preach the gospel in an effort to win converts (2 Cor 1:19). Possibly they proceeded as they had in the capital of Macedonia, coming into town, renting out a shop in an insula, setting up a business, and using the workplace as a forum to speak to those who stopped by. In this instance, the book of Acts provides some corroborating evidence. Luke indicates that Paul did, in fact, work in a kind of leather goods shop in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:50-04:00May 20th, 2021|Paul and His Letters|

Paul and that Peculiar Church in Corinth

To explain why the Holy Spirit was so central to the earliest Christian communities we know about, we have to explore what we can know about earliest churches. The ones we know best about are those associated with Paul, since Paul is our earliest Christian author, and in his letters he refers to church activities. Nowhere is that more true than in the two-letter correspondence with the Corinthians. 1 and 2 Corinthians gives us a lot to go on when we want to know what this particular Christian community was like – that is, how it did as a distinct and coherent religious group in the midst of its wider society, what activities it engaged in as a group, how it was organized, how it worshiped, and so on. We know so much about such issues because the community was riddled with problems. Paul wrote his letters to address the problems, and so by looking carefully at what he wrote, we can understand not only what he thought was going wrong in the church but [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:50-04:00May 19th, 2021|Paul and His Letters|

Wanna Go To Northern Italy with Me in September?

Thank the gods, travel is becoming possible again. Stir crazy? How about an amazing culinary trip to North Italy to check out the wine, food, and scenery? It will be September 4-11 (2021!) and it looks like an amazing trip. Check out the brochure in the link below. I'll be giving lectures on early Christianity in the Roman Empire; it'll be a small, intimate group (19 people max!), and I'll be hanging out with any and all the whole time, both shooting the breeze and talking about anything that strikes anyone's fancy about the New Testament and early Christianity. Why not you and your fancy?! As you'll see, the trip is sponsored by the General Alumni Association at UNC, BUT you do not have to be a graduate of the school to come: it's for anyone. If you're NOT an alum, all you need do is pay $50 ($60 for a couple) to be considered a temporary Tar Heel. Last time I did one of these things, maybe half the people were in that category. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:04-04:00May 18th, 2021|Public Forum|

Gold Members Month of May Q&A

Dear Gold Members, 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. It's time to come up with some questions! I will be recording the next Q&A on Monday May 24, to be released Wednesday May 26. Do you have a question? Send it to our COO, Diane Pittman, at [email protected]. The deadline for your questions is midnight of Sunday, May 23. The best questions are only a sentence of two long at most. I hope to hear from you! Bart

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:50-04:00May 18th, 2021|Public Forum|

How the “Delay” of the End (Jesus’ Return) Affected Paul’s Communities

A key to understanding the central role of the Holy Spirit in the early Christian communities is to realize that the earliest Christians did not think there was going to be on ongoing Christian community. I discussed that a bit in my previous post and here I can continue the thought The apostle Paul is our earliest Christian author, and it appears that on this particular point he was in agreement with his predecessors, the very first followers of Jesus who came to believe he had been raised from the dead. They thought that the messiah’s resurrection demonstrated that the resurrection had already begun, and they expected, then, that it would be completed right away. It is clear this this is what Paul thought. Just consider the earliest of his letters that still survives, 1 Thessalonians. Scholars usually date the letter to 49-50 CE or so, just some 20 years after Jesus’ death. Paul had earlier brought his missionary zeal to Thessalonica, and while there he converted a number of people. Based on what he [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:50-04:00May 18th, 2021|Public Forum|

Why the Spirit Mattered for the Earliest Christians

During the earlier parts of this thread on the Trinity, I kept thinking that by the time I got to the Holy Spirit there wouldn’t be much to say: it’s all about the Father and Son. And even as I started planning this final part on the Spirit, I thought I would do it in a post, maybe two. But now that I’m digging into it, I’m realizing that the one-or-two post thing doesn’t make sense without a lot of background. Now I’ve decided I need to take the long path to get there. Consider it the scenic route. I’ve been talking so far about the Spirit in the Hebrew Bible – from Genesis 1 up through the prophets. The Spirit is far more important for early Christianity, and hence for the New Testament, than for ancient Israelite religion (and hence the Old Testament), but I don’t believe I’ve ever articulated the reasons fully, either in writing or speaking. For a long time, I’ve thought it works like this, in a nutshell. (This may seem [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:35-04:00May 16th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters|

More Recent Scholarship on Who Wrote the Pentateuch

I am now nearly finished talking about the “Documentary Hypothesis” devised by scholars of the Hebrew Bible to account for the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. I have already discussed the traditional view developed in the nineteenth century, especially as it was laid out by Julius Wellhausen (the JEDP hypothesis). But that was a long time ago. What do scholars say today? As one might expect, the discussions have not gotten simpler but more complicated. Here is what I say, briefly, about that in my undergraduate textbook on the Bible. It’s about as much as most beginning students (and most people in general) need to know. ****************************** The Scholarly View Today It is impossible to speak about a single scholarly opinion about the Documentary Hypothesis today. Some scholars reject the idea that J and E were separate sources; some think that there were far more sources than the four; some propose radically different dates for the various sources (for example, one increasingly popular proposal is that the earliest sources [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:35-04:00May 15th, 2021|Public Forum|

Who Really Wrote the Pentateuch (if not Moses)? The JEDP Hypothesis
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Who Really Wrote the Pentateuch (if not Moses)? The JEDP Hypothesis

Public Forum

Who Really Wrote the Pentateuch (if not Moses)? The JEDP Hypothesis

I have been discussing the sources of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), sometimes also called the Torah or the Law of Moses. So far I have explained the kinds of literary problems that led scholars to realize that these books were not the writing of a single author, but represented a combination of earlier written accounts. The traditional “documentary hypothesis,” as it is called, was most famously formulated by the nineteenth-century German scholar, Julius Wellhausen, who, along with some of his predecessors, called the sources J E D and P. This was the standard view of the matter back when I was doing my PhD in biblical studies way back when. Here is how the hypothesis worked, in nuce. (Again, this is taken from my textbook on the Bible). ****************************** The J source was the first source to be written. From it comes a number of the stories in Genesis and Exodus, including, for example the second creation account and the story of Adam [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:35-04:00May 13th, 2021|Public Forum|

More Inconsistencies in the Pentateuch

A few posts ago I more or less backed into a new thread on literary discrepancies found in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament; these discrepancies are key to understanding why the books were almost certainly not written by a single person -- Moses, for example -- but are a combination of sources put together centuries after the stories were first placed in circulation. I talk about this in my textbook: The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction. Here is how I discuss the matter there: ****************************** The literary inconsistencies of Genesis are not unique to these two chapters. On the contrary, there are such problems scattered throughout the book. You can see this for yourself simply by reading the text very carefully. Read, for example, the story of the flood in Genesis 6-9, and you will find comparable differences. One of the most glaring is this: according to Gen. 6:19 God told Noah to take two animals “of every kind” with him into the ark; but according to Gen. 7:2 God [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:35-04:00May 12th, 2021|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Two (Contradictory?) Accounts of Creation in Genesis?

In my previous post I began to explain why scholars have thought that the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), were not written by Moses, but later, and that they represent not a single work by a single author, but a compilation of sources, each of them written at different times. The evidence for this view is quite overwhelming, but in the context of my textbook on the Bible, as in the context here, I didn’t really think it appropriate or useful to dig deeply into all the nuances and ins and outs. Instead, I gave some of the prominent data. Here is how I started to do that. ****************************** The internal tensions in the Pentateuch came to be seen as particularly significant. Nowhere were these tensions more evident than in the opening accounts of the very first book, in the creation stories of Genesis chapters 1 and 2. Scholars came to recognize that what is said in Genesis 1 cannot be easily (or at all) reconciled [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:35-04:00May 11th, 2021|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Who Wrote the Pentateuch Anyway?

A couple of posts ago I talked about the account of creation in Genesis 1 (with respect to the first two verses, the creation of the "heavens and the earth" and the "Spirit of God" hovering over the water). One question I repeatedly get asked by blog readers is what we can say about the author of that creation account and of the Pentateuch (or the "Torah"; the first five books of the Old Testament -- Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy). It's been years since I've talked about it on the blog. Historically, it was always said (as it is still often said by avid Bible readers today) that these books were written by Moses, the great leader of the Israelites in the 13th century BCE, and main figure of all the books of the Pentateuch, except Genesis (the story of his birth is given at the opening of Exodus, and much of the rest of the Pentateuch is about him). But scholars came to doubt it. That’s what these posts will be about. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:35-04:00May 9th, 2021|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Women and their Demons in the Life of Jesus: Guest Post by James McGrath

This now is the final guest post by blogger and New Testament scholar, James McGrath, based on his book What Jesus Learned from Women. Are you interested in more? Buy the book! As you’ll see here, it gets onto important ground, with intriguing hypotheses that you probably have never heard before! Many thanks to James for making these posts for us. - James McGrath is also the author of Theology and Science Fiction and The Burial of Jesus, among other books. ************************* It is almost impossible for modern readers of the New Testament to come across the word "demon" and to not think of The Exorcist and other depictions of the phenomenon of "demon possession." Ancient people certainly attributed what we today would categorize as psychiatric conditions or mental illnesses to demons. However, these are but a small subset of the ailments that they thought of in these terms. We see this in the stories about women in the Gospels. In no instance are we presented with a woman whose symptoms are specified to have [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:34-04:00May 8th, 2021|Historical Jesus, Women in Early Christianity|

The Spirit of God in the Old Testament

I will not be giving a full account of the presence of the Spirit of God throughout the Old Testament (or the New) – just enough to give a sense of how the Spirit seems to have been widely understood in a range of authors. The short story: biblical authors seemed to understand that one way God manifested himself and provided his power to specially chosen people was to send his Spirit upon them. In this understanding, the spirit is simply the divine force that God sends. It is not seen as a separate “person” from God. In an undefined sense (that probably the authors didn’t think about much), the spirit is both part of God (as your breath is part of you) and yet is separate from God (remember: spirit and breath and wind are all the same word in Hebrew). As an analogy: when you blow out a candle it is your breath doing it, and that act, the tool used to achieve it (the breath itself), and that which is actually achieved [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:35-04:00May 6th, 2021|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

How Did the Holy Spirit Get Into the Trinity? In the Beginning….

Since I started this thread on the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, I have received the same question over and over again: What about the Holy Spirit? As I’ve repeatedly answered, I can’t really deal with that question until I finish explaining how the “orthodox” view of the relationship of the Father and Son came to be settled. In fact, that view never was really settled. There were debates for a very long time. But I’ve taken us up through the major issues, up to the council of Nicea, where it was decided that Christ was not a subordinate divine being from eternity past who at some point long, long before the creation of the universe had been brought into being by God, but that he had always existed, along with the Father and was not subordinate to him but was equal to him in every way, “of the very same substance” as the Father. And so, we have two persons, completely equal, both fully God, distinct from one another, but in some [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:35-04:00May 5th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Was Paul Peter’s Enemy?

In a lecture I gave recently, I was talking about "forgeries" in the name of Peter, Jesus' disciple -- that is, books that *claimed* to be written by Peter but certainly were not. They were written by Christians living later who *said* they were Peter -- possibly in order to get more readers for their books! There is a big question about the canonical books of 1 and 2 Peter. The vast majority of critical scholars (i.e. those who make their historical judgments apart from questions of what they would personally like to believe about the Bible religiously) agree that 2 Peter was not written by Peter; whoever wrote it, it certainly was not the author of 1 Peter. A lot of scholars, including me, somewhat forcefully, also argue that Peter could not have written 1 Peter either. But that's a topic for other posts (which I've made in the past). In my lecture I mentioned three others, that no one disagrees about: the Gospel of Peter, the Apocalypse of Peter, and the Letter of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:34-04:00May 4th, 2021|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Paul and His Letters|

The Council of Nicaea and The Resulting View of Christ

I have been discussing the Arian controversy over how to understand the relationship of the Father and the Son – the crucial element in establishing the doctrine of the Trinity. It led to the Council of Nicea. A lot could be, and has been, said about the Council. It is NOT when church Fathers decided which books would be in the New Testament and is NOT when they decided that Jesus was divine (even though that’s what you read in the Da Vinci Code !!). They did not discuss the first issue and everyone at the council already fully believed Christ was God. The question was: in what sense? Here is what I say about the Council in my book The Triumph of Christianity, in a chapter in which I deal with the emperor Constantine and his involvement with the church after his conversion. I begin by summarizing the two main positions in question – Arius’s view of Christ and his bishop Alexander’s view. ********************* Arius maintained that Christ, the Logos, could not be equal [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:34-04:00May 2nd, 2021|Constantine, Early Christian Doctrine, Fourth-Century Christianity|

YHWH and Jehovah: Same? Different? Where’s Jehovah Come From?

I received a number of comments on my recent posts about whether Jesus was Yahweh (Hebrew: YHWH) in traditional Christian thinking/theology. And a number of people have wanted further explanation of the name. In particular: how does it relate to "Jehovah"? In fact, where does the name "Jehovah" come from? And is it in the New Testament? I was asked this question directly years ago on the blog, and posted on it. Here is the question and what I said in response. QUESTION: How firmly grounded in reality is the claim of Jehovah’s Witnesses that the ‘divine name’ (Jehovah) belongs in the New Testament? RESPONSE So this is an interesting question, with several possible ramifications. At first I should explain that the divine name “Jehovah” doesn’t belong in *either* Testament, old or new, in the opinion of most critical scholars, outside the ranks of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. That’s because Jehovah was not the divine name. So here’s the deal. In the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) God is given a number [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:34-04:00May 1st, 2021|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reader’s Questions|

Jesus Under the Influence (of Women): Guest Post by James McGrath

New Testament scholar, blog member, and blogger with his own blog on topics you may be interested in, James McGrath, has given us one post already about a woman whom the apostle knows, Junia – who he calls his own “relative” -- who may well have been involved with Jesus in his ministry. This comes from his most recent book. James has agree to provide us with a couple more guest posts, based on the book. This is interesting stuff! It should make you think. Here’s the next one. - James McGrath is the author of What Jesus Learned from Women, and Theology and Science Fiction among other books. ****************************** There are two individuals that are the go-to examples for those who entertain the possibility that Jesus was a real human person influenced by other people. They are included in my book What Jesus Learned from Women, and in many ways served as the stepping stone and gateway to discovering that the same may be said of other people and stories in the Gospels. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:34-04:00April 29th, 2021|Historical Jesus, Women in Early Christianity|

The Letter Jesus Wrote from the Cross (!)

Here is some more of the intriguing (later) Gospel, allegedly written by none other than Joseph of Arimathea, the figure who, in the New Testament Gospels, buried Jesus. It is entirely apocryphal, of course, based on some information from the Gospels, later legends, and an extremely vivid imagination. The point of these posts has been to talk about whether Jesus ever wrote anything. Here he does, kind of. While hanging on the cross. You don’t find stories like *this* every day... This is my own translation, taken from the book The Other Gospels, co-edited/translated with my colleague Zlatko Plese. *********************************************************** Jesus Put on Trial (1) At three o’clock on the next day, the fourth day of the week, they brought him into the courtyard of Caiaphas. Annas and Caiaphas said to him, “Tell us, why did you carry off our law? And why have you preached against the promises of Moses and the prophets?” But Jesus made no answer. Again a second time, when the multitude was also present, they said to him, “Why do [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:34-04:00April 28th, 2021|Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus|

My Smithsonian Seminar: This Saturday!!

Do you know about the Smithsonian Associates? It's a great organization that, among other things, puts on lectures and day-long seminars by scholars and experts in all sorts of areas, including religion. For years and years they were live events in Washington D.C. as part of the Smithsonian (on the Mall); for the past year or so they have been remote Zoom events. In some ways, these Zoom events are even better: you can come without flying to D.C.! I will be doing an event this Saturday, May 1. It's an all-day affair with four hour-long lectures and Q&A after each. The topic is "Four Controversies in Early Christianity." Are you interested in getting a ticket? Check it out. Below is a description of my talks -- three of which I've never given before and a fourth that I've never given publicly before! And here is the link to the registration page, to purchase tickets and register: https://smithsonianassociates.org/ticketing/tickets/more-great-controversies-in-early-christianity-bart-ehrman-ponders-four-new-questions Another Four Controversies in Early Christianity Bart D. Ehrman Numerous significant issues were debated by [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:49-04:00April 27th, 2021|Public Forum|

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