BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 83 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.

More Comments on Paul’s Rather Astounding Christ Poem

My last couple of posts have been on the "Christ Poem" found in Philippians 2:6-10. Many years ago when I talked about the poem and argued that it was in fact a poem, a reader (who apparently knew Greek!) objected that the poetic lines I suggested don't actually work. I answered that question before moving on to showing just how amazing the poem is: it ends by giving the resurrected Jesus the authority of God Almighty himself. That may not seem surprising to Christians who already think it's true. But just imagine how it would resonate with someone living in the first century who knew that Jesus was publicly executed for crimes against the state. It might help if you imagine how you would feel if someone made a claim like this for someone who was condemned as an enemy of the of the state for insurrection against the United States who suffered the death penalty -- and someone claimed he had become God, the Lord of the universe. Uh, really? Yup, that's what Paul's [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:33-04:00February 10th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters|

One of the Most Important Passages of the NT: Paul’s Christ Poem

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BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:33-04:00February 9th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters|

An Alternative Christology: God Became Human

In my posts on Christology so far I have argued that different Christians in the early decades of the Christian movement maintained that Jesus had been exalted to a divine status at some point of his existence – at his resurrection, at his baptism, at his birth. I have called this a christology from below, or an “exaltation” christology; it is sometimes called a low christology because it understands Jesus to have started out as a human (down here with us) and to have been raised to a divine status. In this view he was not God from eternity past or a pre-existent being. He was a human being who was taken up to the level of divinity at some point (or, in the case of the Virgin Birth, that he came into existence at a point in time as a person who was partially human partially divine). But there was another kind of Christology which was also very early – earlier, in fact, than our earliest surviving Christian writer, Paul. This is the view [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:33-04:00February 7th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters|

Personal Post: My Work Habits

Blog members sometimes ask me about my work habits: I seem to get a lot of writing done in addition to the day job as a university professor and doing the blog and what not. How’s that happen exactly? I should say that it’s not happenin’ too well right now: start of classes – teaching 240 students remotely! – and lots of other things--I ain’t getting twit done on my research…. But normally I do try to pack it in. And how? My usual answer is that I don’t watch a lot of TV. And that’s certainly true. I do watch the news sometimes – I did a lot more, e.g., in election season; but I find televised news both problematic and inefficient, if what you really want is *news*. It’s problematic because most news shows these days do not demarcate between information and opinion (it’s impossible to do that completely, of course; but sometimes you really do just want to know facts); it’s inefficient because the amount of news you can get in an [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:17-04:00February 6th, 2021|Bart’s Biography|

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BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:34-04:00February 4th, 2021|Recent Comments|

The Oldest View of Christ: Found in Only One Greek Manuscript of Luke!
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The Oldest View of Christ: Found in Only One Greek Manuscript of Luke!

Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum

The Oldest View of Christ: Found in Only One Greek Manuscript of Luke!

The oldest view of Christ is found in one Greek Manuscript of Luke. I’d like to address the issue of early Christology from a slightly different angle in this post. So far I have talked about how an “exaltation” Christology, in which Jesus, the man, is made the Son of God. At some point of his existence he can be found in various parts of the New Testament (Rom 1:3-4; speeches in Acts), and how different early Christians located that exaltation to different moments in Jesus’ existence (resurrection, baptism, birth, pre-existence). As it turns out, this view of Christology relates to an important textual variant in the Gospel of Luke. Only One Greek Manuscript of Luke So, by way of background for anyone new to this kind of discussion. We don’t have the original copy of Luke’s Gospel (or of any other NT book or, actually, of any book at all from the ancient world!). What we have are copies made from copies made from copies that were made from copies. We have thousands of copies [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:17-04:00February 4th, 2021|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Ask Bart Anything! Live Zoom Chance for you to Pick My Brain and/or Stump Me

A number of people have suggested that it might be interesting for me to hold a live “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) session. I’ve been told that the term “AMA” is copyrighted (?!) and not open for public use. So we are going to call this an ABA (“Ask Bart Anything”). It will be over Zoom and will be open to anyone on the planet who wants to come. The format: I will take live questions both orally and through chats. The questions can be on ANY topic that anyone is interested in. If it is something I don’t know anything about (quantum physics or the Ming Dynasty) or that I would rather not talk about (that little incident when I was 16….) I’ll just say so. I will get through as many questions as I can, answering easy ones briefly and taking as long as I need to deal with more complicated ones. My only request will be that questions are direct questions, not lectures, sermons, admonitions, condemnations, expositions of one’s favorite views, or statements [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:33-04:00February 3rd, 2021|Public Forum|

When Did Jesus Become Divine?

In this thread on the Trinity I am developing at some length the first major issue: how did someone besides God come to be considered God among people who thought God and this other God were different yet continued to claim they were monotheists? (Later I'll talk about the Spirit, as many have asked; but there frankly is not nearly as much to say there, as we'll see). What I've spelled out so far is not hugely controversial among critical scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity. When the disciples came to believe in the resurrection, they thought that God had exalted Jesus to a unique, divine status. This is the oldest Christology there was. It is attested in such places as the pre-Pauline fragment in Rom. 1:3-4 and in several places, pre-Lukan, incorporated in the speeches of Acts. And then what happened? The Rest of this post tries to show how Christ came to be exalted more and more until his followers claimed he had been God from the beginning. Want to see [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:17-04:00February 3rd, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Even Giants Have a Cross to Bear: Platinum Post by Marie Wiley

I am pleased to be able to provide a new post by Marie Wiley, the second she has submitted! Are you interested in submitting one? It can be on any topic related to the blog. And it's Platinums-only. So go for it. And many thanks Marie! ******************************** The vision I have of Jesus from The Gospel of Peter is one of my favorites. A gigantic Jesus with an equally gigantic cross illustrates so well my own personal idea of who this holy man is. He is bigger than the human beings I know or know of. When I hear the saying, “Never meet your heroes because you will be sorely disappointed,” I imagine our Jesus to be the exception. When his giant holy cross asks me if I have heard its message, I think, “Heaven, yes.” I know (in a gnostic sense) that its message to me is not one of salvation through Jesus’s death in atonement for my sins. I don’t believe in that. It’s nothing personal, but in all the arguments for this [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:33-04:00February 2nd, 2021|Reflections and Ruminations|

Another Two Lectures on the Gospels, Live on Sunday. Join Us!

On each of the past couple of Sunday afternoons I have given two Zoom lectures, recorded for my undergraduate course on the New Testament, and invited all of you to come. After the second lecture we had about 30 minutes of Q&A, all very lively. Both times went well and a good time was reportedly had by all. But what do reporters know? I'm going to do it again this Sunday, and you are welcome to come. There would be no charge per se, but I would like to ask for a (completely voluntary) donation to the blog. This will be Sunday, Feb. 7. I will again give two lectures), one at 1:00 and the other at 2:15. Each lecture will take about 40-45 minutes. The topics this time: "The Ending of the Gospel of Mark and Jesus the Unknown Savior" This lecture introduces students to the problem that we do not have the original copy of Mark’s Gospel. It appears that the final twelve verses were not originally in the account, so that it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:33-04:00February 2nd, 2021|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

Very Early Understandings of Christ in A Later Book of the NT

I have been trying to show that one of the oldest understandings of Christ in the early Christian movement -- in fact, *the* earliest in my view (and many other scholars), even though later it came to be declared a "heresy" -- is that Jesus started out as a human, nothing more, but came to be exalted by God to become his Son, the Lord. I have long called this particular understanding of Christ an "exaltation" Christology: God exalted Christ to become a divine being. It stands in contrast with a view that I have not dealt with yet, the one that became the dominant one eventually (but which arose later), and "incarnation" Christology, which stated that Christ was a divine being who became human (not a human who became divine), a view best known, in the NT, from the Gospel of John. (Exaltation Christologies are often understood to be "low" because they locate Christ originally here on earth among us mortals; incarnation christologies are correspondingly "high" because in them Christ originally came from heaven [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:17-04:00February 2nd, 2021|Acts of the Apostles, Early Christian Doctrine, Historical Jesus|

Jesus, Mary Magadalene, and … Sexual Innuendos?

I was browsing through old posts and ran across this one from almost exactly seven years ago, a question about whether one of the non-canonical Gospels (the Gospel of Philip) really could be right that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a sexual relationship. I get asked about this still on occasion, and it's on one of the more titillating topics of early Christian studies, so I thought I would repost it today. QUESTION: I know that the “Gospel of Philip does not have much if any real historical veracity to it about Jesus’ life, but do the references about Jesus and Mary Magdalene being lovers and the holes in the papyrus ‘kissing’ verse (verses 32 and 55 in your “Lost Scriptures” book), help support the view that this most likely Gnostic Christian sect truly believed and taught that Jesus and Mary M were married? RESPONSE: Yes, this is one of those questions I get asked about on occasion. I have a reasonably full discussion of the relevant issues in my book Peter, Paul, and Mary [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:17-04:00January 31st, 2021|Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus|

Do You Want to Hear Two More Lectures on the Gospels?

Last week I gave two Zoom lectures, recorded for my undergraduate course on the New Testament, and invited all of you to come. It went extremely well and a good time was had by all. Well, OK, a good time was had by *me*! After the second lecture we had about 30 minutes of Q&A, all very lively. I'm going to do it again *this* Sunday. Wanna to hear them? Then come! There would be no charge per se, but I would like to ask for a (completely voluntary) donation to the blog. This will be Sunday, Jan. 31.. I will give two lectures (different times this week!), one at 1:00 and the other at 2:15. Each lecture will take about 40-45 minutes. The topics this time: "The Oral Traditions about Jesus Before the Gospels." This is the most controversial talk my students have ever heard about Jesus. I explain how the stories about Jesus were circulated and came to be changed, and even invented, in the years before the Gospel writers heard them and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:33-04:00January 29th, 2021|Public Forum|

How Do We Know What Christians Thought about Jesus BEFORE the New Testament?

Yesterday I posted the first in what will be a series of reflections on the earliest Christian Christologies (understandings of Christ). I began to outline what I take to be the earliest Christology of all. Jesus and his followers, I maintained, saw him(self) as a man and nothing more than a man (who was a great teacher, a prophet, and the future messiah of the coming kingdom – but human through and through, nothing else). But once these followers came to believe that he had been raised from the dead, they altered their view to begin to think that God had exalted him to heaven and made him his specially anointed one, his Son, who would indeed be the future messiah and who would bring in that Kingdom himself when he returned from heaven as the Son of Man. And so, why do I think that this Christological view – that God made Jesus his Son at the resurrection, the one who reigns *now* (and so is already the “ruler” or the “anointed one” or [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:16-04:00January 28th, 2021|Bart’s Biography, History of Biblical Scholarship|

Platinum Guest Post by Douglas Wadeson: A Christian Is Not Necessarily a Disciple, and Vice Versa. Part 2

This now is the second of Douglas Wadeson's two-part post, presenting the flip side of his earlier one. These Platinum guest posts have been terrific so far. I hope you too have enjoyed them. Soon we'll vote on which of the four we've seen goes on the main blog site! But for now, here is Doug again. In my previous post I argued that it may be possible to be a “Christian” but not necessarily a “disciple.” Now I will discuss the flip side: is it possible to be a disciple of Jesus but not a Christian? As a reminder from the previous post, I defined a Christian as one who believes in the Christ (Messiah), that died for the sins of the world and then was raised back to life by God; this is Jesus, of course. Salvation comes by believing in Him, not through your actions. In fact, trying to be saved by your “works” is futile and even heresy. A “disciple” is by definition a student or pupil or follower. Such a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:32-04:00January 28th, 2021|Reflections and Ruminations|

The Earliest Understandings of Christ

Just about everyone agrees that the understanding of who Christ was developed significantly over the years (and if they don't, they should!). The views Jesus' own disciples had right after his death around 30 CE were not the same as those that had been developed by very sophisticated thinkers around the time of the Council of Nicea in 325 CE; and two centuries later these Nicean views had been refined and deepened. Views of Christ developed over time. But how, and why? I used to think that the changes were fairly "linear," that is, that followers of Jesus at one time thought "A" and then later came to realize that instead it was "B" and eventually came to think "C" etc, -- one view leading to another, as everyone changed their minds. This scenario, I now realize, is far too simplistic: different people believe different things at the same time, some people hold on to older views when others move to newer ones, and some people who come to believe newer views later change their [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:16-04:00January 27th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Historical Jesus|

My Materialist View of the World

This is a brief hiatus in my thread on the Trinity, for a personal reflection. As most members of the blog know, I have definite religious views, but I do not try to impose them on other people – unlike in my conservative evangelical days, when I knew I was right and everyone who disagreed was wrong and therefore better change their mind or they would go to hell forever. Sigh… As a side note, I have to say I really wish more people had my current attitude, to live and let live. My view is that whatever your view is, so long as you’re not actually hurting yourself or others, you’re welcome to it. Or, in basketball parlance, “no harm, no foul.” It’s when views get hurtful that we should try to do something about it…. Anyway, as probably fewer members know, I have been more-or-less a complete materialist for about twenty years. I do not believe there is such a thing as a non-material, supernatural realm. There’s the material realm, and that’s it, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:16-04:00January 26th, 2021|Reflections and Ruminations|

Was the King of Israel Called God??

Yesterday I showed that beings other than God could be called God in the Old Testament and other ancient Jewish literature. It seems strange, but there it is. I continue now with an especially important case in point: the king of Israel. In this case there doesn't seem to be much ambiguity about the matter. Again, this is from my book How Jesus Became God. ****************************** Hebrew Bible scholar John Collins points out that the Israelite notion that the human king could be considered in some sense divine ultimately appears to derive from Egyptian ways of thinking about their king, the Pharaoh.[1] Even in Egypt, where the king was God, it did not mean that the king was on a par with the great gods, any more than the Roman emperor was thought to be on a par with Jupiter or Mars. But he was a God. In Egyptian and Roman circles, there were levels of divinity. So too, as we have seen, in Jewish circles. Thus we find highly exalted terms used of the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:16-04:00January 23rd, 2021|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Want to Hear Me Give a Live Lecture?

Because of the crisis, I will be teaching my course, Introduction to the New Testament, remotely this semester, by recording two lectures a week, starting Sunday, for my students to listen to during the week at their convenience. Last week for the heck of it I tried recording a lecture by myself in an empty room. It, uh, did not go well, to say the least. I need *someone* to talk to if I’m going to talk. Otherwise I just stumble over my words and forget everything I’m supposed to say. I would like an audience. Which gave me an idea. Would any of you like to hear one or more of my lectures as I record them? There would be no charge per se, but I would like to ask for a (completely voluntary) donation to the blog. Here is what I have in mind. We will try it out this Sunday (Jan 24) on Zoom. I will give two lectures, one at 2:00 and the other at 3:15. Each lecture will take about [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:17-04:00January 21st, 2021|Public Forum|

Could Jews Consider Someone Other than God To Be God?

In order to explain how Jesus came to be seen as his followers as God – the first step to understanding where the doctrine of the Trinity came from – I have been discussing a widespread view in the Greek and Roman worlds, that other very special human beings were thought to have become divine, considered and worshiped as immortal gods, for example by being taken up to heaven at the end of their lives. You might well wonder, though, what “pagan” beliefs have to do with early Christian beliefs. Jesus and his followers were Jews, so why would it be relevant what polytheists believed? It’s a good question, but there’s also a good answer. The belief that humans could be divine is found not only in ancient Greek and Roman circles (and Egyptian circles and others!), but also in Jewish. That may come as a surprise. Jews who were monotheists thought that others could be God, along with the one God? Uh, how does *that* work? As it turns out, you can find it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:16-04:00January 21st, 2021|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

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