Bart’s Biography Archives - Page 9 of 11 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Teaching at Carolina

It is always interesting for me to travel around the country giving lectures at different colleges and universities. This past week I have been struck with just now different institutions of higher education can be from one another. Let me preface my remarks by saying – in this post -- that I absolutely love my university. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is always ranked very near the top of state research universities in the country, and for very good reason. The faculty are on the whole absolutely stellar. Just within my own Department of Religious Studies we have eighteen full time tenured or tenure-track faculty, not counting adjuncts and emeriti, and every single one of them has a national reputation in his or her field, and several have international reputations. We all write books, articles, book reviews, essays, and so on. Many are absolutely at the top of their fields. It would be hard to assemble a more impressive faculty if you tried. I would stack us up against any faculty of [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:36:01-04:00April 18th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Explaining myself….

This post will be on something different for a change. So my current reality is that every day of the week, for several weeks now, I have either been travelling or working on How Jesus Became God. Neither activity is conducive to writing posts for the blog. When I write on the book – as I did yesterday – it usually means going at it intensely all day long, until I’m brain dead, which luckily tends to coincide with the end of a chapter. Yesterday I did chapter 8, which deals with the Christological controversies of the second and third centuries, as some Christians insisted that Jesus was human but not divine (e..g, the Ebionites and the Roman Adoptionists), others maintained that he was divine but not human (the opponents of 1 John and Ignatius, and then Marcion), others claimed he was two entities, a human Jesus who was temporarily inhabited by a divine being from the heavenly realm (the Gnostics), and others who claimed he was just one entity who was both divine and [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-31T23:14:09-05:00April 17th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Moving from the Faith

I wrote chapter 7 of How Jesus Became God today, and started with this anecdote that will sound somewhat familiar to those who know my story.... ******************************************************************************************************************** I first began to have serious doubts about my faith when I was in graduate school. After I had graduated from Moody Bible Institute I had gone off to finish my undergraduate degree at Wheaton College, a strongly evangelical liberal arts college and the alma mater for Billy Graham. For me this was a step toward liberalism. I was a very hard core evangelical in those years. But even though the liberal arts did expand my horizons significantly they did not make me particularly liberal. I came to graduate studies at Princeton Theological Seminary firmly convinced that the Bible was without error in any of its teachings and that the doctrines I accepted as a conservative Christian were given by God himself. That began to change the more I studied the Bible. I had taken Greek at Wheaton as my foreign language, to allow me to read the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:39:50-04:00April 9th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Making Things Interesting

I’m traveling hither and yon over the next couple of months giving lectures on a variety of topics. Right now I’m in Kansas City, near my old stompling grounds of Lawrence Kansas, to give two lectures at the annual Lyceum conference at Unity Village. It’s an unusual place, the center of a religious organization (denomination? They debate how to describe themselves apparently; but they are two million strong around the world), known as Unity. The people here are spectacularly friendly and helpful; I would say that their religious views are very, very far to the left of the spectrum; their group began as a New Thought movement in the 1880s, influenced by Transcendentalism among other things, highly spiritual and as far from doctrinally oriented as can be. For anyone interested, here is their website: http://www.unity.org/ In any event, Unity Village is a beautiful campus in a rural setting. The Lyceum is their annual conference which is put on every five years. I was a speaker at their first Lyceum in 2008, and they asked me [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:40:23-04:00April 4th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Jesus and My First Girlfriend

Just a short anecdote today. Not sure if I’ll use it in the book. My first serious girlfriend was Lynn, whom I met when we were starting our sophomore year in high school. She was funny, personable, attractive, intelligent, and Jewish. I’m not sure I had ever known a Jewish person before her. I think she was somehow related to the Levi-Strauss branch of reality, although she and her two sisters and mom (who was divorced and a single mother) were not rich. But they were pretty much like me and my family, middle class and doing fine. I don’t recall that we ever talked about religion, and looking back I suppose it’s a bit surprising. They certainly weren’t observant Jews and my uninformed sense is that they were completely secular. I don’t know if they went to synagogue or kept any of the holidays, but I kind-a doubt it. In any event, at that point in my life religion wasn’t really my main concern when it came to a girlfriend. We were a hot [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:43:30-04:00March 15th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

Pastor Goranson, the Son of God, and I

Here is the kind of anecdote that I’m thinking about including in my book on How Jesus Became God; if I use it – or others like it – it would begin a chapter, before I move to the scholarly issues. ************************************************************************************************************ When I attended Moody Bible Institute in the mid 1970s, every student was required, every semester, to do some kind of Christian ministry work. Like all of my fellow students I was completely untrained and unqualified to do the things I did, but I think Moody believed in on-the-job training. And so every student had to have one semester where, for maybe 2-3 hours one afternoon a week, they would engage in “door-to-door evangelism.” That involved being transported to some neighborhood in Chicago, knocking on doors, trying to strike up a conversation, get into the homes, and convert people. A fundamentalist version of the Mormon missionary thing, also carried out two-by-two. One semester I was a late-night counselor on the Moody Christian radio station. People would call up with questions about the Bible [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:43:39-04:00March 14th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Maintaining Your Moral Compass – Morally Agnostic

Agnostics with a moral compass. In this post I’ll be sticking with my theme of yesterday, related to the lecture I gave at NYU, two nights ago now, about how the Bible deals with the problem of suffering. At the end of the lecture I indicated that I have a view of suffering related to that set out in the book of Ecclesiastes. The author of Ecclesiastes, claiming to be king of Solomon (even though he was living many centuries later) stressed that life is short. It is here for a little while and then gone – and that our view of how to live should be controlled by that uncomfortable but very real fact. For this author there is no obvious justice in the here and now. Righteous people suffer and the wicked often prosper. And the injustice of this life will not be made up in the afterlife since, for this author, there is probably not going to *be* an afterlife. This life is all there is. Which is why, for him, “a [...]

BDEhrman2022-12-31T16:18:55-05:00March 9th, 2013|Afterlife, Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

Exaltation Christology: Some Background

Yesterday I posted the first in what will be a series of reflections on the earliest Christian Christologies (understandings of Christ), a in this post I would like to provide some necessary background information that will allow that post to make even better sense. In that post 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 [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:49:18-04:00February 7th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine|

During my Leave…

I have received several responses to my post yesterday about my being on leave; most of them can be summed up in two questions: What am I doing during my leave (besides spending my days watching soaps and eating bon-bons)? And will I keep my blog going after I’m done with the leave and return to teaching? I’ll answer the second question first. Yes, my plan is to keep the blog going. I started it while I was teaching last Spring (though it was a the tail end of the term; but the planning had been going on for months), and I intend to keep it up once I’m back in the classroom in the Fall. I won’t lie: it’s a lot of work. Posting an average of six times a week is a bit hard sometimes. But I’m blessed with the ability to write fast, and doing this blog has made me even faster! I have to budget at least 45 minutes a day to focus on the blog (not to mention the time [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:01:17-04:00January 30th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Being on Leave

As I may have mentioned on the blog already, I am on academic leave this entire year. Most places call that a sabbatical, but in North Carolina sabbatical is a four-letter word. The idea here is that since we are state-employees and, well, other state-employees don’t get time off from their day job to do their research – so why should professors? Interesting point. But of course for professors at research universities, it is all about the research. When I was in my PhD program, my plan was to teach in a Christian seminary or divinity school, hopefully one like Princeton Theological Seminary, where in addition to training future ministers, faculty have a chance to train PhD students – who will themselves go out to teach and train future ministers. I got into the Bible business as a seventeen-year old eager to learn all I could about the Bible since I believed it was the word of God (more about that, possibly, in a future post); I eventually changed my views about the Bible (as, [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:01:24-04:00January 29th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Jesus?

This will be my last post for a while dealing with the question of whether Jesus’ ethics can be translated from his own mythological context of Jewish apocalyptic thought into the modern world that is based (for me at least) on a completely different view of life, meaning, and reality. In my last post I indicated that I thought that it was indeed possible to make this kind of translation if one wants to. But I ended by asking why one – or rather I – would want to. That is, why focus on Jesus in particular? I don’t think I want to do so because I think that Jesus is “the greatest ethical teacher of all time.” I have no idea if this is even a contest that can be won, and even if it is, I am not qualified to evaluate Jesus in relation to other great ethical teachers so as to declare him a winner. So that seems to me to be a dead end. So why Jesus? I don’t have a [...]

BDEhrman2018-01-01T00:22:00-05:00January 22nd, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Misleading Translations in the King James

In a couple of weeks I’m going off to Los Angeles to give a lecture at Loyola Marymount University as a keynote address for their putting on of the (traveling) exhibition on the King James Bible, started in commemoration of its 400th year (in 2011). The exhibition is called Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible, and my lecture is entitled: “What Kind of a Text Is the King James Bible? Manuscripts, Translation, and the Legacy of the KJV.” In addition to celebrating the greatness of the translation – it’s obviously one of the greatest classics of the English language – I will be talking about various aspects of the KJV that make it less usable as a study or research Bible. I haven’t written the talk yet, but I’m thinking, at this point, about talking about three topics: The fact that in the New Testament the KJV was based on Greek manuscripts (the only ones available at the time, of course – so it was no one’s fault) that are [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:05:22-04:00January 9th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts|

An Agnostic Teaching the Bible

Question about an Agnostic teaching the Bible: I have recently wondered how you can truly enjoy (and endure) your line of work with your loss of faith. It would seem to me that the mental dissonance would lead to great frustration and personal anguish in studying and teaching about something which you know is not historically true and has led you away from your faith. Not to mention all of the flack you must have to dodge from the average person on a daily basis, including your beginning students, knowing that you will never change the minds of your most rigid fundamentalist critics. How do you deal with it…with any enthusiasm? I left church work because of that….what’s your secret? Response: It’s a good question, but there’s an easy answer, I think. It would probably be a real problem for me if I were teaching in a seminary or divinity school, or even a Christian college; in that scenario, I think I would be completely torn and agonizing the whole time, training ministers or teaching [...]

BDEhrman2022-06-27T23:27:36-04:00January 9th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Responses to Reactions (on “Christmas Longings”)

Thanks to all for your feedback on my “Christmas Longings” (yesterday’s post). It was/is interesting indeed to see the enormous range of reactions. I’ve not seen anything like that for any other post over the blog’s nine-months of existence. I will not respond at any great length to any of them here – or even make comments on all of them in the comment section – though I will respond there to a few of them that seem to me to require comment. But I appreciate all the feedback, one way or the other. After this short post, I will get back to the business at hand: Christianity in Antiquity (I’m working on an English edition of the Other Gospels just now, and have some things I want to post about it, starting tomorrow). But by way of shorthand, in brief response to the responses, I can say the following. For those who have wondered: No, I am not planning on going back to church regularly or to become a Christian. Don’t see how I [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:06:39-04:00December 28th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

Christmas Longings

So we have managed to make our way through another Christmas season. I had a number of posts leading up to the big day, and now I’d like to make a couple of others looking back upon it from this side. But first let me say that I hope all of you – whether fundamentalist (not too many of *you* on this blog!!), liberal Christian, Jew, Muslim, agnostic, atheist, or none of the above – had a very nice, relaxing, rejuvenating, and fulfilling holiday. I did. 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 [...]

BDEhrman2018-01-01T01:17:08-05:00December 27th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Reflections on the Season

I will need to take a break from posting to the blog for a few days. I am in London and the next few days will be visiting family; I will be incommunicado until the day after Boxing Day (as they call it here). For those of you who don’t know, my wife Sarah is a Brit, and her family is all here. We have a flat in London (Wimbledon, actually) and we spend 2-3 months out of the year here. This time of year there is a lot of seeing family. It’s not *exactly* the twelve days of Christmas, but sometimes it feels like it – opening presents with one part of the family, then another, then another. This really is one of my favorite times of the year. When I was a kid, as is true for a lot of kids, Christmas was a big deal for me. I loved all the trappings: Christmas trees, Christmas shopping, Christmas lights, Christmas presents. And as a kid I very much appreciated the religious aspects of it as [...]

BDEhrman2018-01-01T01:17:35-05:00December 24th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Responses to my Newsweek Article

My Newsweek article this week has generated a lot of response. I have no idea what kind of comments they typically get for their stories, but so far, as of now, there have been 559 on mine; and most of them are negative – to no one’s surprise – written by people (conservative evangelicals and fundamenalists for the most part, from what I can tell) who think that the Gospels are perfectly accurate in what they have to say about Jesus – not just at his birth but for his entire life. A lot of these respondents think that anyone who thinks that the New Testament contains discrepancies is too smart for his or her own good and blind at the same time (not sure how it can go both ways, but there it is). I’ve also been getting a lot of email from incensed readers, including a sixteen-year old girl who tells me that she is a Pentecostal Christian who has read the Bible 160 times and is now starting her 161st; she was [...]

BDEhrman2018-01-01T01:26:12-05:00December 14th, 2012|Bart's Critics, Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Religion in the News|

Cover Stories on Jesus

Apologies to all for being “off” the blog for a couple of days. I’ve been in D.C. getting ready and primed for a new course that I’ll be doing with the Great Courses; it will be an audio course (no video for this one) called “The Greatest Controversies in Early Christianity,” where I deal with some hot topics, including two that I’ve been hitting here on the blog lately (Was Jesus Born in Bethlehem? And Was Jesus’ Mother a Virgin?), and others I haven’t (Was Paul the Real Founder of Christianity? Did the Jews Kill Jesus? Did Constantine Decide Which Books Would Be in the New Testament? Etc.) – 24 lectures altogether. I’ll be taping in February. (Now that I’ve thought about it, I think every lecture could be given with one word: No!) And while I was in D.C. – just yesterday – I learned that a story I wrote for Newsweek on the birth of Jesus was made the cover story this week. It’s kind of a goofy cover, but hey, I had [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:09:05-04:00December 11th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Religion in the News|

An Agnostic Reflects on Christmas

I suppose a lot of people have the birth of Jesus on their minds these days. Hard not to. It occurred to me that it might be interesting to do a series of posts on what ancient Gospels – mainly the two of the New Testament, but also some of the others outside – say about it. When I indicate that there are two in the NT that talk about it, it is because Matthew and Luke are the only ones that say anything about the birth of Jesus. I think what I’ll do in these posts is talk about features of each one separately and then talk about the two of them together, with a few posts here at the beginning to provide different angles to introduce to the matter. But I’ll also talk about other Gospels, like the Proto-Gospel of James (which in the Middle Ages was in some places at least as popular as the NT Gospels) and the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. One of the reasons this is on my mind just [...]

BDEhrman2018-01-01T01:31:24-05:00December 5th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Serendipity 3: The Apocryphal Gospels Volume

I mentioned in previous posts that a good deal of my career has developed because of serendipitous moments. As I look back on it (from this halfway point ), most of the good things that have happened to me seem to have come about by pure chance. Of course, I took advantage of the chances as they came along. But still, no one can deny that a major chunk of life is all by chance. In those two earlier posts, I talked about how my first teaching position at Rutgers was pure chance – a professor of NT there had to take emergency leave in the middle of a semester because her husband had been diagnosed with cancer (and if I had not, as a result, landed that job, I never, ever would have been hired at the University of North Carolina, and could well be pursuing an entirely different career, as a result; I’ll say more of that in another post). And, far less momentously, I discussed in another post how I lucked into [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:13:58-04:00November 8th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha|

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