BDEhrman, Author at The Bart Ehrman Blog - Page 95 of 203

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.

Heaven and Hell in a Nutshell: Getting into the Kernel

Here is the second and last part of my summary of the heart of my forthcoming book Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife. It's not an outline of the chapters, but a summing up of the key issues, flow, and the ultimate "point" of the book. As a tip, I've called this little essay (in my own mind): "There Is Nothing To Fear." ************************************************************************************************ The idea of rewards and punishments eventually found its way into Judaism as well, but not until the very end of the Old Testament period. The book of Daniel was the final writing of the Hebrew Bible. This fictitious account of a pious Hebrew young man, Daniel, presents an alternative Jewish understanding of the world, the nature of reality, and of life beyond, quite unlike the rest of the Hebrew Bible. Scholars have called Daniel’s view “apocalypticism,” from the Greek word “apocalypsis” – which means a “revealing.” Jewish apocalyptic thinkers began to believe that God had “revealed” to them the truth of ultimate reality hidden from all their predecessor, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:24-04:00December 16th, 2019|Book Discussions, Early Judaism, Historical Jesus|

Heaven and Hell in a Nutshell

Heaven and Hell. I’m excited about my next book, being published on March 31, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife. It’s already getting good reviews in the trade journals, the publications that announce which books are soon to come out and have experts review them in advance, so those booksellers, book stores, libraries, and so on know whether they want to buy them, and for booksellers and stores, in what quantities. So that’s all good. A while back I decided to try to encapsulate the essence of the book in a short essay, a kind of 2000-word summary of what it’s all about and why it matters. I will give it here, over the course of two posts. Here’s the first half. Ehrman Hell & Heaven The fear of death has been among us for as long as we have had human records, from history’s oldest surviving tale, the Epic of Gilgamesh, to the now final season of the Good Place, soon to enter its own eternal rest. The views of these two [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:24-04:00December 15th, 2019|Book Discussions, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Why Would an Agnostic-Atheist Be A Bible Scholar??

Five years ago I received this question. I still hear it! And I would still answer it the same way. A question that makes a lot of sense in one way actually doesn't make a lot of sense looked at in another way. I suppose a lot of our questions are like that.... Here is the question and response. QUESTION: The one thing that I do not understand about you is that you have stated you have lost your faith. That being said, how do you continue to work in your field? Have you ever wanted to redirect your academic career to study other subjects? RESPONSE: I get this question a lot. On one level I understand it: if I don’t believe in the Bible, why would I dedicate my life to studying it, researching about it, writing about it, and teaching about it? From the perspective of someone who has strong feelings about the Bible – for example, as a believer who holds that the Bible is the word of God or as [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:24-04:00December 13th, 2019|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Update on My Next Book: The Joys of Academic Writing

Last weekend I escaped from all the distractions of daily life in Durham to our mountain retreat in order to write. I’m here in solitude, Sarah is in London for the holidays. I’ll be joining her next week. I have all the amenities of modern life here: but no TV, no neighbors, no noise, no traffic. Writing is very hard under the best of circumstances. But oh boy is it easier in the best of circumstances. Most scholars find it literally impossible to write during the semester. Just can’t do it. You have classes. Class preparation. Students to meet. Departmental meetings. Committee meetings. University commitments. If you have a graduate program there is a constant flow of work: advising, scheduling, working with students on exams, directing master’s theses and PhD dissertations, helping students with pedagogy, counselling them about professionalization, reading their prospective conference papers and articles for publication, oral defenses, reading groups. It’s a lot. Then if you have an active speaking schedule or do other local service commitments… well not much writing gets done. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:24-04:00December 12th, 2019|Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Are Their Differences in the Gospels? Does it Affect Their Inspiration? Guest Post by Mike Licona

This is Mike's third and final guest post. In the earlier post he explained his views about whether the Bible is inspired by God and is inerrant. He thinks the answers to both are "yes," though his actual views are not what most people would probably expect. Here now is the third, and critical post, based on the research he did for his 2017 Oxford University Press book, with the same title: Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? I agree with a lot of what Mike writes here. In reading it, I'd suggest you bear in mind his earlier two posts, that he sees the Gospels as inspired and inerrant. Mike has graciously agreed to answer questions you have for him, but only for the next four days! Otherwise this would go on forever. And please, in your questions, do your best to keep them concise and direct, without asking multiple questions at once. Pick the most pressing. And I scarcely need to remind you of that verse in the Ehrman Revised Standard Version: "The [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:24-04:00December 10th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture|

Do You Want (and Need) a Free Membership to the Blog? Gift Memberships 2019

Thanks to the incredible ongoing generosity of members of the blog, I am happy to announce that there are a limited number of free one-year memberships available. These have been donated for a single purpose: to allow those who cannot afford the annual membership fee to participate on the blog for a year. I will assign these memberships strictly on the honor system: if you truly cannot afford the membership fee, but very much want to have full access to the blog, then please contact me. Do NOT reply here, on the blog, as a comment. Send me a separate email, privately, at [email protected]. In your email, please provide me with the following information: Your first and last name. Why you would like to take advantage of this offer. I don't need or want a full account of your history or financial affairs, only an idea of why you are not able just now to purchase a membership. Country of citizenship (we're required, as a non-profit, to ask) Your preferred personal email. Your preferred user [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:24-04:00December 9th, 2019|Public Forum|

Does the New Testament Condemn “Homosexuals”?

It is commonly argued that the Bible condemns sexual “perversion” such as gay or lesbian sex. In earlier posts I discussed the relevant passages of the Old Testament, to show that they simply cannot be used in these modern debates, since their very understandings of the phenomena are completely at odds with what people think today (including, most emphatically, the people who appeal to those passages in support of their views). See, for example: https://ehrmanblog.org/are-same-sex-relations-condemned-in-the-old-testament/?highlight=homosexual I should stress there are lots of other activities that are condemned in the Bible all over the map, and these are never a particular emphasis of modern ethical discussion, whether in Christian circles or in society at large. You may be able to deprive gays and lesbians of their civil rights or deny them the ability to serve in the church, based on a couple of passages (almost always misinterpreted) scattered here and there throughout the very large Bible; but what about doing the same for people who are greedy, who get angry, who disobey their parents, who eat [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:24-04:00December 8th, 2019|Paul and His Letters, Reflections and Ruminations, Sex and Sexuality in the Bible|

One of the Blog’s Main Charities: Urban Ministries of Durham

As you know, the overarching purposes of the blog are (1) to communicate broadly, to a reading public, scholarship on the New Testament and Early Christianity (as opposed to most of the material you find on the Internet, which is almost entirely devotional and not based on historical scholarship) and (2) in doing so, to raise money for charity. The latter is what keeps me going. I absolutely love communicating with non-scholars what the scholars are finding about these fundamentally important topics. But my ultimate passion for the blog is to help people in need. Hence the charity aspect. As you know, every penny that comes into the blog from membership fees and from direct donations goes to the charities we support. There are no overhead costs because I pay for the blog myself, as my own contribution. Blog members sometimes indicate they would like to have more information about what those charities are and what they actually do. There are five that receive our support. Three of them are local to me: Urban Ministries [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:24-04:00December 6th, 2019|Public Forum|

An Older Manuscript Controversy about the Dead Sea Scrolls

I've been thinking about controversies over ancient Christian and Jewish manuscripts lately, in connection with the (false) claim that a First Century copy of Mark had been discovered. Browsing around on the blog I saw that I dealt with a completely different manuscript controversy on the blog many years ago, involving the Dead Sea Scrolls. I had forgotten all about it. This one involved a court case and jail time! Here's what I said: ************************************************************** A few years ago I was asked to give a speech at a museum in Raleigh NC in connection with an exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls that had been long in the works and had finally become a reality. I will be the first to admit, I'm not the first person you should think of to give a lecture on the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s not my field of scholarship. But the lecture was to be one of a series of lectures, and the other lecturers actually were experts, including my colleague Jodi Magness, a world-class archaeologist who [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:23-04:00December 4th, 2019|Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Final Tribute To Larry Hurtado

I am sorry to report that my colleague Larry Hurtado, a well-known scholar of the New Testament, author of several influential books, and prominent blogger, has died. Back in July I indicated on the blog that he had become very ill. At the time we thought he had only a few weeks to live. But he soldiered on, and passed away last Monday, November 25. There is a very nice tribute to him by one of his former students at: https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2019/november/died-larry-hurtado-new-testament-early-christian-worship.html I decided to repost here what I said in July, both as a tribute to him and to suggest several of his books that you might be interested in reading. Larry was about ten years ahead of me in the field, and had very similar interests to mine, from textual criticism (studying ancient Greek manuscripts) to Christology (understanding how Jesus came to be worshiped as God). A couple of his books are highly technical (as I indicate below); others are completely accessible to the non-academic. You may want to check them out. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:23-04:00December 3rd, 2019|History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Is the Bible Inerrant? Guest Post by Mike Licona

This now is the second of three posts by Mike Licona, Associate Professor of Theology at Houston Baptist University. Mike has a PhD in New Testament studies and is a committed evangelical apologist, who has written a recent book, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels (Oxford University Press, 2016). He does indeed admit there are differences in the Gospels, which some people would claim are actually contradictions; but he continues to believe the Bible is "inerrant." What does he mean then? In this clear and lucid post, he explains his views. NOTE: Mike's first post generated lots of comments, and it was a bit overwhelming. He will be willing to answer questions/comments over the next four days, but not afterward. That in itself is amazingly generous. Please don't ask tons of questions in one comment -- that (I can say from experience) is hard to deal with! Moreover, he and I both know that many people on the blog have a different perspective from his. But please be respectful and courteous, even in your [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:07-04:00December 2nd, 2019|Canonical Gospels, History of Biblical Scholarship|

Why Don’t You Just Believe?

The following post is for anyone interested. You interested? Join the blog. You get five posts a week, each and every week of the year, on all sorts of intriguing topics connected with the New Testament and Early Christianity. QUESTION: What do you have to lose by having faith and believing that Christ was born supernaturally as a result of a virgin birth to Mary, that Christ performed miracles, that Christ died by crucifixion and came back to life from the dead, and that Christ went back into heaven in a supernatural ascension into heaven? I don't see any downside. RESPONSE: I get this kind of question on occasion. Usually when someone asks it they tie it to “Pascal’s Wager.” In case you’re not familiar with it, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662 CE), mathematician that he was, thought in terms of percentages and odds. And he applied it in a famous way to the question of belief – in an age when lots of intellectuals in Europe, and people they influenced, were having doubts about [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:07-04:00December 1st, 2019|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Who Was Jesus?

This is a continuation of a soon-to-be-compiled longer post for broader consumption on the New Testament. Now that I have described what the NT is, how it is structured and organized, and how it has come down to us, I get to one of the key issues: what does the New Testament tell us about the historical figure of Jesus himself? ********************************************** There can be no doubt that Jesus of Nazareth has been the most influential person in the history of the world. The church founded on his name shaped the history of Western Civilization, and over two billion people worship him today. And yet, because of the nature of our sources, it is surprisingly difficult to know what he actually said and did. Jesus is thought to have died around 30 CE. He is not referred to in any Greek or Roman sources of the first century, and only briefly in our major Jewish source of the period, the historian Josephus. The earliest Christian references are from the New Testament, but most of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:07-04:00November 29th, 2019|Historical Jesus|

Thanksgiving 2019

Some Thanksgiving ruminations, from where I am here and now. I love holidays. Not everyone does. When I was younger that was always a mystery to me – what’s not to like? But as I get older (and older and older), I get it. Or at least part of it. So many people hate the holidays and the suffering they bring. Bitter and wrenching loneliness when all those around them are enjoying good times with family and friends and they … are not. Or awful memories of holidays past – ugly family blow-ups or ill-timed tragedies. Some of us are among the lucky ones: these are not problems. But that itself is a problem. Why should we have such a self-congratulatory happy, restful, fulfilling time when others….? Also, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized just how fraught just about all our holidays actually are, how, often invisibly, they are so closely connected not with things to celebrate but with real human trauma and tragedy. The Fourth of July. The fireworks are supposed to remind us [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:07-04:00November 27th, 2019|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Setting Dates for the Gospels

One of the questions I often get asked on the blog is how we know when the Gospels were written. I've answer the question at some length before, and thought it might be useful to answer it again. Here's what I said years ago, and looking at it, I'd say the same thing again. In fact, I will. Here: **************************************************************************** QUESTION: How are the dates that the Gospels were composed determined? I've read that Mark is usually dated to 70 or later because of the reference to the destruction of the temple. Is this the only factor that leads scholars to conclude that it was composed in 70 CE or later or are there other factors? I've heard that Luke and Matthew are likewise dated aroun 80-85 CE to give time for Mark to have been in circulation enough to be a source for them. Is this accurate? How is John usually dated to around 95 CE (or whatever the correct period is) since it is usually described as independent of the other Gospels? [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:07-04:00November 26th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

The Annual Meeting of Biblical Scholars, and ALL Those Books!!

I decided to look back to what I wrote on this day five years ago, and I started to laugh -- it's *exactly* the same think I was thinking just yesterday, about all the trillions of books that get written about the Bible and the scholars who write them. I've decided to re-post it, and simply update it to this very moment. ****************************************************** I've had a terrific and interesting first few days at the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting here in San Diego. This society comprises professors and other scholars of biblical literature mainly from the U.S., but with attendees from overseas as well. It meets along with the American Academy of Religion, which is the professional society for all professors of religion who are not teachers of biblical studies (so experts in Christianity outside the NT, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, anthropologists of religion, historians of religion, and so on and on). All together it is a very large group. I don’t have the exact numbers, but I think maybe there are 10,000 or 11,000 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:07-04:00November 25th, 2019|Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Maybe Jesus DOES Talk about “Homosexuality”?

In my recent post I pointed out that Jesus said nothing – nada! – about same sex relations in any of his surviving teachings. One blog member pointed out a post on a different blog by New Testament scholar Scot McKnight arguing that there are there passages in the Gospels where in fact Jesus *may* have been referring to homosexuality, in condemnatory terms. I thought, HUH? THAT’s interesting! I better look. So I did. I don’t think there’s any way this is right, but you can decide for yourself. This will take two posts. I’ll cite the the passages, then Scot’s assessment of them (which I summarize), and my response. Several things to say at the outset. I have known Scott (not well, but a bit) for many years. He is a bona fide scholar of the New Testament, a well-trained and careful interpreter of the text. He is also a committed evangelical Christian, and an interesting one: a few years ago he “converted” (or at least moved on or over) to join the Episcopal [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:06-04:00November 22nd, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Sex and Sexuality in the Bible|

Do Textual Variants Actually Matter For Much??

In light of my previous post, I thought I should address a question I get asked a lot. Or rather, a rhetorical question that I hear posed a lot -- especially by evangelical apologists who want to insist that even though there are hundreds of thousands of differences in our manuscripts, none of them really matters for anything that's important. (This was a perennial objection to my book Misquoting Jesus.) Is that true? I dealt with it many years ago on the blog, and it's time to address it again. ************************************************************ QUESTION: I got the impression (I can’t remember where or if you said this… or if Bruce Metzger said it) that no significant Christian doctrine is threatened by text critical issues… and so, if that is the case, who cares if, in Mark 4: 18, Jesus spoke of the “illusion” of wealth or the “love” of wealth. I mean, who cares other than textual critics and Bible translators? RESPONSE: The first thing to emphasize is a point that I repeatedly make and that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:06-04:00November 21st, 2019|Bart's Critics, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Introduction to the Manuscripts of the New Testament
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Introduction to the Manuscripts of the New Testament

New Testament Manuscripts

Introduction to the Manuscripts of the New Testament

This now will be the next portion of my longer blog post that will serve as an Introduction to the New Testament. The previous section was on how the 27 books came to be collected into “the” New Tesatment; this one is on how the books were copied/transmitted over the centuries. As with the other sections, I’ve made this one pretty short, because I’m trying to be as concise as I can, with links to other blog posts throughout. I don’t want the entire article to be massively long. One could obviously write a book or two on this topic (and many have!); but for a brief introduction, I want to hit only the really key points. The Text of the New Testament How, though, were the books copied? In the ancient world the only way to get a copy of a book was by copying it by hand or by having someone else do so: one page, one sentence, one word at a time. The earliest Christian copyists would not have been trained [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:06-04:00November 19th, 2019|New Testament Manuscripts|

Two More Openings for Blog Dinner in Durham, December 3. Interested?

Blogging friends! I have learned that two of the participants for the fund-raising blog dinner on December 3 will not be able to come after all. So there are two seats available. Here is the original announcement. If you're interested, please let me know! Tempus is fugiting. ******************************************************************************** On December 3, at 7:00 pm., I will be holding a new kind of blog event in Durham NC: a fund-raising dinner. It will be at a nice restaurant to be named later. We will have a maximum of seven places at the table (along with me, making eight). For the fund-raising: the event is $100 per plate, the money to be donated directly to the blog. Each person will also pay for his or her own meal. There will be no set agenda for the dinner. It will be a chance to get to meet each other and talk about matters of mutual interest and importance, especially as they relate to the blog –anything connected, even remotely, with the New Testament and early Christianity. The basic [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:06-04:00November 18th, 2019|Public Forum|

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