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Thinking about Hell

When I search my mind for times in my (distant) past that I thought about hell, I conjure up two very different moments.  Today when I think about them it is with a good sense of humor. The first is when I must have been maybe eight or nine.  I was at some kind of summer camp, and we had a daily camp meeting where we would sing songs and someone would come talk to us.  One day there was a local minister who came and told a story about a person who went first to hell and then heaven. When he went to hell he found that there was an enormous table filled with fantastic food – everything that everyone could imagine wanting.   But all the people there had three-foot long forks strapped to their arms, and it was impossible for them to pick up the food and bring it to their mouths.  And so they were starving in the midst of plenty. He then went to heaven and again, there was the enormous [...]

Moving to My Next Book

As I mentioned some time ago, I’ve decided to slow down a bit and enjoy life a bit more.   Since 1992 – that is, over the past 25 years – I have written or edited thirty books.  I’m not going to stop.  But I’m thinkin’ it’s time to ease off a bit.  Is there a reason I publish a book a year?  Not that I can think of. I’ve done it because it’s my passion.  Well, one of my passions.  I am a bit obsessed with the history of early Christianity and all that it entails.  My books have covered a wide range of fields within that broader area.  And I have tried to keep up publishing three different kinds of books: scholarly books for the academics; textbooks for the colleges students; and trade books for the general reading public. It’s been hard to balance all that, especially since I’ve tried to publish a new trade book every two years.  I’ve had to do the other books in my spare time, such as it is, [...]

My Work Habits the Letter allegedly by Jesus’ Own Brother: Mailbag 2/12/2017

I will be addressing two quite disparate questions in this week’s Readers’ Mailbag: one about my work habits and one about the New Testament epistle of James: how do we know that the author expected his readers to think (or know) that he was actually the brother of Jesus himself?  If you have questions you’d like me to address in a future Mailbag, send them along!   QUESTION: I notice you seem to get quite a bit done in a day (more than most people I know,) and that you have been doing that from a fairly young age (at one point you even experimented with decreasing your sleeping hours, If memory serves). The biggest hindrance to productivity for me is procrastination (like right now for example). How do you deal with it? You must feel it too sometimes. Did you always have an easier time concentrating than other folks? Did you learn it early in life (maybe by watching your parents)? If so, what techniques do you employ to deal with it?   RESPONSE: [...]

A Reflection on Christmas: Blast from the Past

Four years ago I made a very personal post about my feelings about Christmas, the day after.  It was one of my personal favorite posts of all time.  I repeat it again here, this time the day before. ************************************************************ In the opening chapter of my book God’s Problem, I talked about going to church on Christmas Eve in 2006 with my wife Sarah and brother-in-law Simon, in Saffron-Walden, a market town in England where Simon lives, not far from Cambridge.  It was a somber but moving Christmas Eve service, and yet one that had the opposite of the intended effect on me.  It made me realize just how estranged I was from the Christian faith, from the notion that with Christ God entered into the world and took its sufferings upon himself.   I just didn’t see it, and it made me terrifically sad, resentful, and even angry.  There is so much pain and misery all around us, and yet the heavens – in my judgment – seem to be silent. This is not what led me [...]

2017-09-25T21:35:33-04:00December 24th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Work for the New Revised Standard Version Committee

QUESTION: If my memory serves me, you (as a graduate student?) were involved in the development of the NRSV Bible version in 1989. Could you describe your work please? RESPONSE: Yes, that’s right.  The New Revised Standard Version Committee was appointed by the U.S. National Council of Churches to produce a revision of the famous Revised Standard Version (RSV) of the Bible, which had come out in 1952.  Since the time when the RSV had been produced (mainly in the 1940s), many important developments had happened in the scholarship of the Bible. New discoveries had been made and partially published, especially: the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Scrolls contained a number of different kinds of writings, produced by Jews living at the turn of the Christian era, including a large number of copies of the Hebrew Bible, in Hebrew, as it was known in that day.  These are very important for determining the oldest form of the Hebrew text of the Bible for some of its books. The English language had changed in important ways. That [...]

A Personal Transition

A week ago today I finally sent off the very last and final version of The Triumph of Christianity to my editor.  It is done, as good as I can make it.  Now it will go to a copy-editor who will go over it line by line, word by word to make sure the grammar, punctuation, and even spelling is all correct, and to make suggestions for writing style as needed.   Depending on the copy-editor, sometimes there are tons of these stylistic suggestions, sometimes hardly any. As an author, I much prefer the “hardly any” approach – it’s much easier on me and more, well, affirming of my writing style.  When I do get a lot of suggestions I have to take a deep breath and remind myself that the copy-editor is just doing his/her job and trying to make the prose better.  But I do hate that part. I will then go through the copy-edited manuscript, approve or reject all the suggested changes, and return the book to the editor, for it to go [...]

Bruce Metzger Beliefs, My Loss of Faith: A Blast from the Past

I mentioned my mentor, Bruce Metzger, in a recent post.  In this blast from the past, I reprint a post I did almost exactly four years ago, in response to a question that I was then asked about how Metzger, a devoted Christian and minister of the church, responded to the fact that I (one of his closest students) lost my faith.   The question generated a series of posts on related topics, but here is the one where I actually answer the question: Bruce Metzger Beliefs I have come now, by an unusually circuitous route, to answer the question that got me started in talking about my relationship with Bruce Metzger, my work for the NRSV Bible translation committee, my view of the NRSV as a translation, the textual problems of Luke 22:19-20 and 22:43-44 and, well sundry other things. The reader’s question was how Metzger responded to my loss of faith. When I first got to know him, I was a strong evangelical Christian. In the years before he died, I had become [...]

Why Textual Criticism is “Safe” for Conservative Christians

It is probably not an accident that when I was a very conservative evangelical Christian who wanted to get a PhD in New Testament studies, I chose to focus, in particular, on textual criticism, the study of manuscripts in order to establish the wording of the original text.  That was, and is, a fairly common “track” for evangelicals who want to be biblical scholars.  Maybe it’s not as common now as it used to be.  But it used to be common. As it turns out, most of the scholars who work in the field of New Testament textual criticism in North America either are or used to be committed evangelical Christians.   You might think that the findings of textual criticism would drive evangelicals away from their faith.  But just the opposite is the case.  I know very few people who have found their faith challenged by their knowledge of the textual problems of the New Testament.  Very few indeed.  I was a bit of an oddball that way.  (I’ll say more about that in a [...]

My Original Interest in Textual Criticism

As I have indicated, my interest in textual criticism – the scholarly attempt to reconstruct what the authors of the New Testament actually wrote, given the fact we don’t have the originals but only altered copies – did not originate with my going to Princeton Theological Seminary to study with Bruce Metzger.   On the contrary, I went to study with him precisely because that had been an area of fascination for me starting in my first year of college, as an eighteen year old. I mentioned already that I had a course at Moody Bible Institute that dealt with the questions of biblical inspiration (how God had inspired the biblical writers to say what they did), the formation of the canon (how God had ensured that we got the right twenty-seven books), and the problem of the text (the fact we don’t have the copies produced by the authors themselves).   I was deeply interested in all three areas, but was especially intrigued by the third, for a couple of reasons. One reason was theological.  I [...]

Becoming a Textual Critic

Back to my narrative of how I got interested in biblical studies, and specifically textual criticism.   I was just thinking last night about how people (on the blog or elsewhere) sometimes report to me that they have heard my conservative evangelical critics say that I’m not a biblical interpreter (exegete) or a historian, but I’m a textual critic (someone who studies the manuscripts of the New Testament).  And I started thinking about all my training in the Bible and the history of early Christianity. I did three years at Moody studying mainly Bible and theology; I did a two year completion degree at Wheaton majoring in English; I then did a three-year Master’s of Divinity degree at Princeton Theological Seminary; and finally a four-year PhD in New Testament also at Princeton Seminary.  Over the course of all those years I must have taken, what?   70 or 75 courses?  How many of those courses were on textual criticism? I had one class at Moody that was maybe ¼ devoted to the topic.   And one class in [...]

How I Discovered Textual Criticism

It was at Moody Bible Institute that I first became interested in the textual criticism of the New Testament.  Let me stress a definitional point that some readers on the blog have not gotten or understood (I’ve said it a lot, so apologies for those who have gotten it! But even though I keep saying this, some people still don’t get it).   Textual criticism is NOT the study of texts to see what they mean.  For the last time (well, probably not): it is not the interpretation of texts.  Textual criticism, instead, is the attempt to determine what an author actually wrote if we do not have his one and only original copy.   It is independent of the question of what the author might have actually *meant* by what he wrote. Textual criticism is done on all texts – even modern ones.  There are textual critics who work on Wordsworth.  They try to determine if it’s possible to know the actual words of his original poems (given the fact that we have different editions and [...]

Learning to Teach at Moody

I will not be continuing this autobiographical thread (thread within a thread) for much longer (you may be glad to know), but I do want to get to the ultimate point (for the thread outside the thread), which is why by a couple of quirks/flukes I ended up better equipped to write books for general audiences than most of my colleagues in my PhD program.   The first has to do with what happened with me back in my days at Moody when I was learning tons about what was actually in the Bible (and the fundamentalist way of interpreting it all) (which, at the time, of course, I thought was the *only* correct way to interpret it). At Moody, every semester we were required to engage in some kind of formal ministry (“Practical Christian Experience”).  Everyone at Moody had to do one semester of “door-to-door evangelism,” where we were taken to one neighborhood or another somewhere in a suburb of Chicago, and literally knocked on doors to talk to people to try to convert them.  [...]

Moody Bible Boot Camp

Back to my narrative about becoming trained in the Bible (as a prelude to what I started talking about -- why my later technical training actually made me better prepared for writing books for general audiences than my peers who were not at all interested in the technical side of things).  So, I went to Moody Bible Institute – and took that entrance Bible exam – when I was all of seventeen years old.   And it was during my first semester that I decided what I wanted to do with my life. I really, really, really do not advise doing that.  For 99.999% of the human race, it would be a very bad idea indeed to decide how to spend the rest of your life when you’re all of seventeen and can’t even yet order a beer (drinking age back then, in the Pleistocene age, was eighteen) (and anyway, we weren’t allowed to drink beer at Moody) (or smoke, play cards, dance, or go to movies) (really) (and there was a dress code).   But I’m [...]

Am I A Better Person as an Agnostic? A Blast from the Past

I have started re-posting some of my posts from three or four years ago on occasion, at the suggestion of several people on the blog.   Frankly, I don't remember even writing most of them!  Here is one from four years ago, a response to the question of how losing my faith affected me -- did it make me a better (or worse) person? ***************************************************************************** QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman,  I am still reading your book (God's problem) which seems to be very interesting since you are not interesting to gain any approval from anybody but only to communicate what you believe and where you are today. Congratulations for that….   Did you became a better human being after losing your faith? RESPONSE: Great question! Most people have assumed the opposite, that anyone who loses his or her faith must become a worse person. The logic seems to be that without a belief in God, there would be no grounds for morals and that people left to their own unconstrained devices would have no reason to avoid living [...]

Beginning My Study of the Bible

This thread is becoming a tapestry.  Its ultimate goal is to explain why, unlike most scholars, I ended up being able to write trade books and not only scholarly books.  I’m taking a rather circuitous route to getting there (to change the metaphor).   In my last post I discussed how and why I first became interested in the Bible, back as a fifteen year-old born again Christian. At that point I became convinced that only Bible-believing Christians (who were, of course, also born again) were the real Christians and any other people who claimed to be Christian (for example, most of the people who went to my own Episcopal church) were not *really* Christian, except in name only.   Again, the reason I thought so is because the born-agains I hung around with all said so, and they seemed to know what they were talking about.  Especially the fellow who “led me to Christ,” a mid-20s something fellow named Bruce. Bruce had a winsome personality and strong charisma, and he ran the Campus Life Youth for [...]

My Original Passion for the Bible

I have been talking about the areas of New Testament studies that were emphasized in my Masters and PhD programs at Princeton Theological Seminary, back in the late 70s and early to mid 80s.  It was a long program, even though I sped through it a couple of years faster than most of my colleagues.  The Masters program was three years (that is typical for a masters of divinity degree); my PhD was four years (most of my friends took five to seven).   That’s full time work, for all those seven years.   It’s a lot! Most of the training that most of my friends/colleagues had was in New Testament exegesis and theology, as I’ve described.  My passions lay elsewhere, and my plan is to talk a little about them.  But it just occurred to me this morning that my *original* interest in the New Testament was in fact exegesis and theology, even though I would not have used those terms for it. I had been mildly interested in the Bible even as a child.  Very [...]

Jesus’ Death and Resurrection for Salvation; Paul’s Collection; and My Sunday Mornings: Readers’ Mailbag June 11, 2016

Did all the early Christian groups agree that Jesus’ death and resurrection brought salvation?   Why was Paul gathering money for the Christians in Jerusalem?  And, well, what do I myself now do on Sunday mornings since I don’t go to church?   This is this Weekly Readers’ Mailbag, with the normal range of unrelated but interesting questions!  If you have a question you would like me to address, ask away!   QUESTION: To which of the other early variants of Christianity does this creed (1 Cor 15:3-5) apply just as well as to the proto-orthodox? If it applies to most just as well, then Paul could have been the founder of the proto-orthodox variant of Christianity.   RESPONSE: Ah, good question!   Just to refresh everyone’s memory, this is the passage where Paul indicates that “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures” and that “he was raised from the dead on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.”  So the question is: did all early Christians agree that it as the death and [...]

A Personal Note and a Bit of a Bummer

This post is on a personal note and will be a bit self-indulgent, so if you’re looking for some information about the history or literature of early Christianity, this won’t the right time or place. As many of you know from earlier blog posts, I was supposed to go off on a research trip to Greece (Athens), Egypt (Alexandria), and Italy (Rome), in connection with my work on my current project, The Triumph of Christianity (or whatever we call it) dealing with the Christianization of the Roman Empire.   My idea was to go to these places to see formerly “pagan” sites that were lost, changed, “converted” or destroyed by Christians in the fourth and later centuries (e.g., destroyed temples; shrines converted into churches; and so on).  I was supposed to go today.  But I have had to cancel the trip. Yesterday while starting to do some preliminary packing I bent over to pick up a bag of books, and my back went out.   Bad.   Not “Call-911-and-the-Morgue” bad, but bad enough.  I had done something similar [...]

Why I Have Moved to a New Publisher

In my previous post I began to talk about how I have now changed publishers.  This past book Jesus Before the Gospels, was my last with HarperOne, and now I have a two-book contract, for the next two books (obviously), with Simon and Schuster.   A couple of readers have inferred that I have left Harper because I did not like the way they had handled my most recent book.  That’s not the case at all.  I made the decision before they even *started* handling the book. And let me stress, I have had a wonderful experience with Harper.  They really are one of the truly great publishing houses in the world.  Absolutely.  How could I possibly complain? Since 2005 I have done seven books with them.  One of those seven was a a book that none of us --  not me, not my editor, not my publicist, not anyone in the Harper hierarchy, not anyone on the planet – thought was going to be a big selling book.   This was Did Jesus Exist? We originally [...]

A Less Weighty, Personal Matter

A lot of people have noticed that I’ve lost a good bit of weight, and have asked if I’m OK.  So, this is obviously of limited interest to people on the blog!  But instead of answering each query, I thought I would waste a blog post and say something more broadly.  Or less broadly. The short answer is that I’m more than OK:  I’m in the best shape I’ve been in for probably thirty years! So here’s the deal, for those who want to know, and even for those who don’t.   This past April I went in for my annual physical and my blood tests came back: pre-diabetic.  I thought there must be a mistake.  Pre-diabetic?!?  I didn’t have the typical indications: no history in the family, no high blood pressure, and so on.   Well, I was a little overweight.  OK, maybe you think more than a little, but still.  I had been working out regularly, sleeping well, and was in good cardio-shape.  But, well, I did have a bit of a beer gut.  Years [...]

2020-04-03T03:51:01-04:00February 23rd, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|
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