I'm very excited to announce that I will be doing a new course on April 6, on the resurrection narratives of the New Testament, called "The Other Doubting Thomases: Did Jesus's Disciples All Believe in the Resurrection?" The course is not connected to the blog, but may well be of interest to all you blog members!  For more information and registration, go to https://www.bartehrman.com/the-other-doubting-thomases/   Early bird pricing goes till March 23, and note: you can get a blog discount by using the code BLOG 5 Of course everyone assumes the eleven remaining disciples of Jesus did believe in the resurrection, and the New Testament certainly says so in places.  But there are other passages that raise significant questions, that to my knowledge are almost never considered by scholars let alone other readers.  Why is it that even in the passages that describe Jesus' resurrection -- nearly all of them in the Gospels and Acts -- we are told that some of the disciples "doubted."  What was there to doubt?  Especially if Jesus was right in [...]

I'm going on a cruise this summer and it looks like a complete winner.  I've made a video explaining it and inviting people to consider coming, including where to call/email to get more info.  Hope some of you can consider it! https://vimeo.com/1060335268/95523b1f33?share=copy

Register: https://unc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_9Oxg0DBJQ_2WiyHKO7Elsw Donate: https://give.unc.edu/donate?f=105550&p=aasf https://vimeo.com/1063322255/1f0e8c4faa?share=copy Will I See Fido in Heaven? The Afterlife of Animals in Buddhism and Christianity Do our pets go to heaven? Do they have souls? Can we talk about the salvation of a pet? What about reincarnation, can our pets come back as other animals, or even as people? This new webinar from UNC Chapel Hill explores these questions by bringing together experts on Christianity and Buddhism to compare how these religions view animals. Please join us for a conversation about the religious lives of the most beloved members of our households, our pets (and other animals, too)! This engaging webinar will feature Barbara R. Ambros, an internationally recognized expert on Buddhism and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies, and Bart Ehrman, a leading scholar of early Christianity and James A. Gray Professor of Religious Studies. Together, they will explore, compare, and discuss the fascinating perspectives these two distinct religious traditions offer on animals and the beyond. The suggested donation is $10. 100% of your gift goes the Robert Miller Graduate [...]

A while back blog member Kevin Grant and I did a recorded interview on the teachings of Jesus about the coming apocalypse.  Did he really mean it?  Are we supposed to take it literally?  How can readers understand the dire predictions?   Here is the video! Kevin is the author of What the Hell is Hell?  A Non-religious Look at the Facts and the Love that Shows You How to Soar, available  on Amazon.com.

Now that I’ve devoted two posts to the major sine qua non of the Gospel of Mark – one that lays out its major themes and emphases, the other that deals with who wrote it, when, and why, I can provide a bibliography of important works, written by scholars for non-scholars. You may find one or more of these useful if you choose to dig more deeply into the the Gospel. For each of the books in this this list I provide brief annotations to give you a sense of what it’s about and so help you decide which, if any, might be worth your while. I have divided the list into three sections: Books that provide important discussion of Mark in general or with respect to a particularly key topic Commentaries that give lengthy introductions to all matters of importance about the Gospel and then go passage by passage to provide more detailed interpretation (that’s where you can dig more deeply into “what does this particular word actually mean?”; “what is the real point [...]

Who actually wrote the Gospel of Mark?  When?  And Why? In my previous post I laid out the major themes and emphases of Mark’s Gospel, and now I want to turn to some of the key historical issues about it.  I begin with the author. The two most important things to note are (1) every surviving manuscript that preserves a title ascribes the book to Mark, either calling it “The Gospel according to Mark” or “The Holy Gospel according to Mark,” or just “According to Mark” and (2) these manuscripts were produced over three centuries after the book was placed in circulation. Our oldest two manuscripts (Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, for you fellow Bible nerds) come from toward the end of the fourth century (around 375 CE), and they have the titles (“According to Mark”).  What about manuscripts before then?  We just have no information (since these are our two earliest).  But it does mean that some 300 years after Mark had been circulating, scribes copying it were entitling it that.  And how much earlier than [...]

How could Jesus be the messiah?  Wasn’t the messiah to be a powerful figure sent from God to overthrow the enemies of the Jews and establish a new kingdom on earth?  How could a person publicly humiliated and tortured to death by his enemies be considered the Mighty One to Come?  That is the question Mark sets out to address in his narrative, the first of our surviving Gospels. My goal in this entire thread on the books of the New Testament is to provide four major posts on each of the books, one summarizing its major themes; another dealing with the historical questions of who wrote it, when, and why; another providing an annotated bibliography of other work written by scholars for a non-scholarly audience – studies, commentaries, and online resources; and a final one dealing with one of its key, interesting aspects. I have done that for Matthew, and now I do it for Mark. This post is on its overarching and distinctive themes. As I did with Matthew, here I begin by [...]

2024 has been a remarkable year for the Blog.  We have set a record for the amount of money we raised and donated to our charities; we have hired a highly skilled CEO who has taken charge and already made vast improvements, and we have chosen a design company to come up with a whole new platform (Blog 3) that will revolutionize how we do things. Details to follow.  But first let me say I am especially pleased that we have succeeded in pursuing the original goals of the blog (in some ways, better than ever).    Namely: (1) To spread and propagate real knowledge about the historical Jesus, the New Testament, and the history and literature of Christianity over its first four centuries or so, and in doing so to generate more interest, dispel more ignorance, and encourage more thinking on religious, historical, and literary issues that are of particularly keen interest to the two billion Christians in the world and also of keen interest to the billions of others who are not believers but [...]

Here now is the eleventh of my twelve favorite Christmas posts of years gone by, in our celebration of the Twelve Days of Christmas. ****************************** I mentioned in my previous post that in 2012 I was asked to write an article on Newsweek about the Christmas story.  Before it appeared I posted it on the blog; here it is in full (at least as I sent it in to the magazine), in two parts. Here is the first half: This past September, Harvard University professor Karen King unveiled a newly discovered Gospel fragment that she entitled “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.”  This wisp of a papyrus has stirred up a hornet’s nest and raised anew questions about what we can know about the historical Jesus of Nazareth, and about whether there are other Gospels outside the New Testament that can contribute valuable information. Few questions could be more timely, here in the season that celebrates Jesus’ birth. The fragment is just a scrap – the size of a credit card – written in Coptic, the language of [...]

Here now is the tenth of my twelve favorite Christmas posts of years gone by, in our celebration of the Twelve Days of Christmas. ****************************** Browsing through holiday-season blogs from previous eras, I came across my first small thread on Christmas from exactly six years ago.  I had forgotten about this.  Some of the material has shown up occasionally in the intervening years, but maybe it’s a good time to repost a bit of it.  Here is the first: an account of what we can, and cannot, know about Jesus’ birth.  Bethlehem?  Virgin?  Date?   Or even … year? I have decided to provide a series of posts related to the stories of Christmas in the New Testament. This first post more or less states some of the basic information that most readers know, but that it’s worth while stressing as a kind of ground clearing exercise. To begin with, we are extremely limited in our sources when it comes to knowing anything at all about the birth of Jesus. In fact, at the end of the [...]