BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 80 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 Can the Father and the Son Be the SAME? Can Your Father Also Be Your Son?

In my previous post I summarized the view that God the Father and God the Son and God the Spirit were actually one and the same – that they were three ways of God relating to the creation and the people who inhabit it – just as I am only one person but am both a father and a son and a brother, depending on whom I am relating to. That view has been given various names among historians of theology; here I am calling it “modalist” – God is one person who has three different modes of existence and ways of relating. Here I continue by discussing how the view came to be attacked by others. Again, this is based on the fuller discussion in my book How Jesus Became God. The attackers were fighting an uphill battle. As we have seen that the view was widely accepted at the end of the second and beginning of the third, even though it came to be rejected as a heresy. Two of the main opponents [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:18-04:00April 10th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy|

Are God and Christ the SAME Person?

In this thread on where the Trinity came from, I have been focusing on early Christology – the understandings of who Christ was. My reason for that is simple. The issue of the Trinity arose only because Christians said more than one being was God but that there was only one God. The “other” being at the outset, of course, was Christ. After his death his followers called him God. The Trinity doctrine, as I will now start to explain in greater detail, emerged by the problems that then arose: two beings who are God, but only one God. I will be getting to the Spirit later, but frankly there is not as much to say there. First I need to keep going on the idea of Jesus being God and God being God. The question that naturally arose among the Christians was how that could be the case: how could *BOTH* of them be God? In what sense? That’s an issue I dealt with in my book How Jesus Became God. Here I’ll provide some of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:18-04:00April 8th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Heresy and Orthodoxy|

Two Live Lectures This Sunday, On Hot Topics

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BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:34-04:00April 7th, 2021|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

The Importance of What Is Lost: Paul’s Letters

In a previous post I began to answer the question of which lost books of early Christianity I would most like to have discovered, and I started my answer with the earliest writings of which we are familiar, the letters of Paul, most of which (presumably) have been lost. I would love for us to find some of them. I doubt if we ever will, but who knows? Maybe someone will announce that one is to be published later this year! Seriously, we would all love to have more letters from Paul, and not merely for sentimental reasons (Oh, wouldn’t that be *nice*?). Paul is without a doubt the most important figure in the Christian tradition next to Jesus himself. His writings have served as a basis for Christian ethical and theological thought for centuries. And yet we know so little about what he thought and taught. When people read Paul’s letters, they frequently neglect to realize that these are all “occasional” writings. By that I do not mean that Paul occasionally wrote letters, but [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:18-04:00April 7th, 2021|Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

When Belief Dies Guest Post by Sam Devis!
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When Belief Dies Guest Post by Sam Devis!

Public Forum

When Belief Dies Guest Post by Sam Devis!

My previous post was an interview with Sam Devis for his podcast "When Belief Dies." Sam is an active volunteer on the blog and has an interesting background. I thought it would be interesting to have him write up an explanation of why he does this podcast, where it comes from, and how he personally relates to it. As you can no doubt guess, he is indeed one for whom belief has died. Here is what he has to say: Sam Devis: When Belief Dies Bart has asked me to share a bit of my story in the hope that it casts a useful light on what I post on my blog, and why I started my podcast ‘When Belief Dies’. Essentially, I want to have honest conversations on faith, religion, and life. It kind of seems ironic to me that I am going to do this, as I am not sure I know ‘who I am’ most of the time. I will do my best to tell my story well. I was raised in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:18-04:00April 6th, 2021|Public Forum|

Did the Disciples See Jesus Raised from the Dead?

On this Easter Sunday I would like to explain what I think led to the belief that Jesus was raised from the dead. A lot of readers over the years have not liked my answer (readers on wide ends of the spectrum): I think some (a few) of the disciples had visions of Jesus. That is, they saw him, or thought they saw him -- which for them would have been the same thing. I dealt with the matter in my book God's Problem, and responded to a question on the blog about it a long time ago. Here it is. QUESTION: I am reading How Jesus Became God and would like to comment on some of the content of Chapter 5. To that point in the book, it seems to me you have been very careful to avoid speculation, but it seems to me that the application of your usual standards may have lapsed somewhat in regard to the visions of Jesus after the crucifixion. Specifically, what evidence do we have, apart from [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:04-04:00April 4th, 2021|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

How The Afterlife Changed After Jesus’ Life

Easter celebrates the greatest irony of the Christian religion: those who worship Jesus do not believe what he taught but what his followers taught about him after his death. That is especially true about one key question the Christian faith addresses: what does it mean to be saved after we die? Around the world today, billions of Christians believe that Jesus died and then on Easter, was raised from the dead and taken up to heaven to live with God. As a corollary, they believe that when they die, they too will go to live with God. That is not at all what Jesus thought. Jesus did not believe a person’s soul would live on after death, either to experience bliss in the presence of God above, or to be tormented for sins in the fires of hell below. Jesus did not believe the soul would go anywhere after death. As a Jew of the first century he did not think the soul could exist outside the body. Christians two thousand years later do not [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:18-04:00April 3rd, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Historical Jesus|

A Probing Interview on “When Belief Dies Podcast”

One of the readers for the audio versions of my daily blog posts is Sam Devis, who also runs a podcast called "When Belief Dies," dealing with lots of intriguing issues connected with "faith, religion, and life." Check out the podcast site (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/when-belief-dies/id1516058806) ; he's had some terrific guests on, and is an extremely thoughtful interviewer. Sam asked me to do an interview, and I thought that the questions and issues were particularly penetrating. See what you think. Here it is.

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:05-04:00April 1st, 2021|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum|

Were Jesus and Christ Two Different Beings?

As we have seen, the New Testament in places seems to indicate that of Christ was a human being who, in some sense, had been adopted by God and so made into the Son of God, a divine being. There were groups of Christians who continued to believe that for centuries. (Some still do!) Others had an opposite view, that Christ was completely God, so much so that he was not actually ever a full flesh-and-blood human being. There were lots of variations within these views, and there were other views as well, including one I call “separationism.” A separationist view is especially prominent among certain groups of early Christian Gnostics. (For a basic introduction to what Gnostics were all about, check out the lecture in the previous post OR do a word search for “Gnosticism” on the blog). Here is what I say about separationist Christologies view in my book How Jesus Became God, using as an example one of the most fascinating Gnostic writings to come down to us from antiquity, The Coptic [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:05-04:00March 31st, 2021|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy|

What Is Gnosticism? A Video Introduction

I am in the midst of a thread describing different views of Christ found among early Christian groups of the second century: some Christians thought Jesus was human but not divine; others that he was divine but not human; others (the side that ended up winning the debates) that he was somehow both (that may seem common sense today, but it did not to many of Jesus' followers in the second century!). I haven't begun yet to describe how that final view came about, and before doing so I need to explain a view different from all of these, one that maintained that Jesus Christ was actually *two* beings: one human and the other divine -- distinct from one another, but temporarily united for Jesus' ministry. It's unusual, and not a view you find in a lot of pews these days. To make sense of how the view worked and why people held it, I have to put it in a broader context. There were a number of Christian groups who held the view, most [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:18-04:00March 30th, 2021|Heresy and Orthodoxy|

A Live Lecture, this SATURDAY (April 3): The Ethics of Paul

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BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:19-04:00March 30th, 2021|Public Forum|

Fantastic Story. But History? Some Doubts about the Triumphal Entry

In my previous post I provided an excerpt from Jesus Before the Gospels where I summarized the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ “Triumphal Entry.” Here is the second part of that two-part post, another excerpt, where I call this tradition into question, arguing that it cannot be right historically and that it must, therefore, represent a distorted memory. "Memory,” of course, is not simply a recollection of what we ourselves experienced (what you had for dinner last night; the name of your first-grade teacher; etc.). Memory involves anything that you “call back to mind” (the literal meaning of “remembering”). It can be factual information (what is the capital of France?), even of something you haven’t experienced (e.g., if you have never been to Paris); it can be a shared understanding of a person from the past (Einstein; Karl Marx), even if you never met them. And it can be a recollection of a past event even if you were not involved, such as the Triumphal Entry, to pick one example out of countless trillions. Christians [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:05-04:00March 28th, 2021|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Memory Studies|

Did Jesus Really Have a “Triumphal Entry” into Jerusalem?

Tomorrow is Palm Sunday, the day on which Christians commemorate Jesus' "triumphal entry" into Jerusalem. It is a terrific holiday in the Christian calendar, a celebration of victory and joy, prior to the dark events to occur at the end of the week on Good Friday. The historian would want to know: did it really happen? Did Jesus really ride into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey to the acclamation of the crowds proclaiming him to be the coming messiah, laying down their cloaks and palm branches before him in full celebration? It's a *terrific* story; a climax of Jesus' ministry, in a sense. Is it historical? I deal the question in my book Jesus Before the Gospels and will excerpt the discussion here. This will take two posts. This one sets the stage and the next one asks how we can figure out if it really happened. ****************************** The Triumphal Entry There seems to be no reason to doubt that Jesus spent the last week of his life in Jerusalem looking ahead to the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:04-04:00March 27th, 2021|Canonical Gospels, Early Judaism, Historical Jesus|

Modern Christians Who Follow Marcion (Unawares)

Before I move on from Marcion to talk about "Gnostic" understandings of Christ -- all in this long thread on where the Trinity came from -- I'd like to return to an issue I mentioned briefly in my first post on Marcion, that in many ways his views are alive and well among us. As I have said on the blog before, I have known Christians over the years who in fact have views in many ways close to what Marcion taught. These people would, of course, deny they have anything like the touch of the heretic about them. But at the end of the day, their views are not so different. Maybe they are not as extreme as he was, but they do seem to be dwelling on the fringes of his camp. First, I have known a lot of Christians who think that the Old Testament has a God of wrath and condemnation and the New Testament has a God of love and mercy. Students say this to me with some regularity. The [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:04-04:00March 25th, 2021|Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Quotations of Non-Canonical Writings in the New Testament: Platinum Post by Douglas Wadeson

Platinum member Douglas Wadeson has provided us with another thoughtful, provocative, and informed post, this one about how authors of the New Testament sometimes quote writings *other* than those of the Old Testament. Feel free to make comments! ************************* If you read the New Testament you will find many references to the Old Testament, i.e., the Hebrew Bible, the Scriptures that Jesus and His disciples knew. The early Christians thought of Jesus as being the sequel to and fulfillment of those Scriptures. If Hollywood had developed the New Testament perhaps they would have called it, “God the Father II: This Time Its Personal!” Dr. Ehrman has written and posted on the reasons the early church retained its connection to the Jewish Scriptures even as the church became predominantly Gentile. However, there are also allusions to writings outside of the Old Testament.[1] I suspect many people miss such references because they assume they are referring to some OT story, or they are subtle enough that one doesn’t catch that an allusion is being made. I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:19-04:00March 24th, 2021|Early Judaism, Reflections and Ruminations|

Did Marcion Know the Gospels or Not??

I've said something about Marcion's canon of Scripture in the past couple of posts, and last time I did that -- many years ago -- some people got confused. The issue has to do with what at first seems a different issue. Did the apostle Paul (during his ministry) know about the Gospels? My answer to that is no, he probably did not. Especially since, well, he was writing before they were written! And he shows no knowledge of any written Gospel (even of ones we don't have.) But then when I say elsewhere that Marcion promoted only Paul's "gospel." Uh...? Here's the original question and my response. Question: You wrote: “The apostle Paul – well-connected and well-traveled and familiar with lots of churches – shows no knowledge that such a thing as Gospels exist.” I should have asked you about this earlier. I was surprised when, back in a post on Marcion, you said the other “gospel” Paul talked about was “a version of our Gospel of Luke.” Would you explain? RESPONSE: OK, so [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:04-04:00March 24th, 2021|Public Forum|

Gold Members: Audio Q&A! This week!

Dear Gold Members, As you know! Gold-level members will receive a special 45-50 minute audio post every month, in which I respond to questions gold-level members have asked me. Have a question? It can be on anything connected to the Bible, early Christianity, or anything else related even remotely to the blog. Ask away! We can take questions until this Saturday March 27, noon, EST. To send in a question, simply zap an email to my assistant Diane Pittman [email protected]. She will collect the questions and I will record the session Saturday afternoon; it will be posted as an audio file by Tuesday – and only to you, those with Gold privileges! I’m looking forward to talking about anything you want me to talk about. And I hope you are enjoying the blog experience otherwise. If there is anything we can do to make it better, please let me know. Bart

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:33-04:00March 23rd, 2021|Reader’s Questions|

Live Lectures This Sunday, March 28! Teachings of Paul That Are Widely Unknown.

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BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:18-04:00March 23rd, 2021|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

More on Marcion’s Theology

Yesterday I mentioned Marcion as one of the prime early Christian thinkers who argued that Jesus was so much divine he was not at all human. I have decided that I need to provide more background to make sense of the particular way he appears to have come to that conclusion, by discussing in a bit greater depth his overall theological views, so far as we can know them. I did that before on the blog many years ago. Here I do it again! Marcion was active in the 130s and 140s; he came to Rome to become part of the Christian community there in 139; he apparently was booted out about five years later when the church leaders found his forcefully-proclaimed views unacceptable. He then went around Asia Minor (whence he originally came, from Sinope on the southern coast of the Black Sea) establishing churches. He held popular views that attracted lots of followers. Marcion and his followers believed that Jesus -- whom they considered their Lord and Savior -- was not connected with [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:04-04:00March 23rd, 2021|Public Forum|

Lost Christian Writings I’d Love to Get My Hands On!

I thought it might be fun to intersperse some posts from years ago to break up here and there the thread on the Trinity, for those who have, well, lots of other interests too! So here's a good option. I did a short thread before the vast majority of you were on the blog (and maybe before you were born. :-) ) based on a question: among all the ancient Christian writings that have been lost, which ones would I especially love to get my grubby paws on? Here's the original question and my first response to it. QUESTION: What lost early Christian books would you most like to have discovered? RESPONSE: Ah, this is a tough one. There are lots of Christian writing that I would love to have discovered – all of the ones that have been lost, for example! But suppose I had to name some in particular. Well, this will take several posts. To begin with, I wish we had the other letters of Paul. Let me explain. In [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:53:04-04:00March 21st, 2021|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

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