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My Response to A Book That Responded To My Book: How Jesus Became God

I was browsing through some blog posts from many years ago and came upon this one, which I had completely forgotten about. It gets a bit feisty at the end, and that's because it was written back when I was ... feistier. Even so, it makes an overarching point I still agree with. It's about my book that tries to explain how the early Christians came to see Jesus as God. ****************************** My publisher, HarperOne, asked me to write a 1000-word response to the book that was written in response to How Jesus Became God. As you probably know, the book is called, somewhat expectedly, How God Became Jesus. I have toyed with the idea of giving a chapter-by-chapter response here on the blog. I’ve grown a bit cold to the idea, though, since I’m not sure every chapter of their book really needs a response. I may respond to a couple of the chapters. In the meantime, here’s one response you can read that is, interestingly, written by Daniel Kirk, a professor of NT at the [...]

BDEhrman2022-02-06T19:43:49-05:00February 13th, 2022|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions|

Did My Shift in Thinking Destroy my Own Views? Guest Video Post #4 by Kurt Jaros
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Did My Shift in Thinking Destroy my Own Views? Guest Video Post #4 by Kurt Jaros

Bart's Critics, New Testament Manuscripts

Did My Shift in Thinking Destroy my Own Views? Guest Video Post #4 by Kurt Jaros

Kurt Jaros provides here the fourth in his series of videos about my views of whether we can know what the authors of the New Testament actually wrote. It is an intriguing series: Dr. Jaros is a conservative evangelical Christian scholar who thinks that other public evangelical figures have misrepresented my views. But this is a tricky one. What do you think? Dr. Jaros will be willing to address any comments/questions you have. ****************************** Misquoting Ehrman – Part Four: Ehrman’s Shift Oops! Did I get Dr. Ehrman’s position wrong? In a debate against Dan Wallace, Ehrman claims to have changed his mind on whether we can speak meaningfully about the original text. Does his shift lead to a significant change about the knowledge we can have of the original wording of the text? In this video, I look at the distinction between the “original” and the “earliest available form” of the text.

BDEhrman2022-01-13T19:41:39-05:00January 13th, 2022|Bart's Critics, New Testament Manuscripts|

With Respect to Others Who Did Not Like My Newsweek Article

When the editor at Newsweek asked me if I would be willing to write an article on the birth of Jesus, I was hesitant and wrote him back asking if he was sure he really wanted me to do it. I told him that I seem to be incapable of writing anything that doesn’t stir up controversy. It must be in my blood. Still, he said that they knew about my work and were not afraid of controversy, and they did indeed want an article from me. What’s interesting to me is that I’ve been getting it from all sides. I don’t know why that should surprise me. It seems to be the story of my life. For years my agnostic and atheist readers were cheering me on from the sidelines as I talked about the problems posed by a critical study of the New Testament: there are discrepancies and contradictions, the Gospels are not written by eyewitnesses, and the stories they contain were modified over time, and many of them were invented in the [...]

BDEhrman2020-12-26T00:19:20-05:00January 2nd, 2021|Bart's Critics, Canonical Gospels|

Responses to my Newsweek Article on Jesus

Just as happened the first time I made a couple of posts on the article I wrote about Christmas for Newsweek, this time too, in my reposts, I've been asked about the kinds of reactions I received. Back then I gave two follow up posts, and here is the first. It's a pretty funny one, from my perspective. I start out being completely defensive (not that I have a thin skin or anything) and cap it all off by emphatically insisting that I was not being defensive. As I get older, I find I have a better sense of humor about myself... Here's the first of the two posts. ******************************************************** 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 fundamentalists for the most part, from what I can [...]

BDEhrman2020-12-21T19:08:38-05:00December 30th, 2020|Bart's Critics, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

On Ignorant Critics…

Sometimes people say the most ridiculous things. Especially when they want to argue against you. It’s amazing what people can dream up. And not just in politics – just in everyday life. You no doubt have noticed yourself… I want to talk about an instance of this which, for me, gets particularly bizarre near the end of this post. You probably have this experience too. People who don’t know me say all sorts of things that just make me scratch my head. WHAT??? Interestingly, given my situation, I get vitriol mainly from two sides, which stand at polar opposites from one another. On one side are some fundamentalists/very conservative evangelicals who think I am out to destroy the faith (that side is understandable; at least I myself understand it, having once been a fundamentalist/very conservative evangelical who said nasty things about liberal scholars whom I thought were out to destroy the faith :-) ) and the other are some “mythicists” – the ones who think that there never was a historical man, Jesus, but [...]

BDEhrman2020-11-15T17:47:37-05:00November 20th, 2020|Bart's Critics, Bart’s Biography|

Randy Alcorn’s Response to Some Blog Criticisms (part 2)

A few days ago I posted the first part of Randy Alcorn's explanation of his views, in response to a number of criticisms blog members leveled at his review of my book Heaven and Hell. In particular, a number of readers thought that he was unduly harsh and even "slandered" me. Here he provides a response. Feel free to make further comments, though Randy probably will not be responding directly. ******************************************************************************************************* From Randy Alcorn: I’ve changed my mind on various things, I assume Bart has too. In a few cases I wish I wouldn’t have cited info that at the time appeared accurate but turned out not to be (my publishers have sometimes cringed when I insist on another update and revision, as well as corrections that are sometimes expensive). To your charge of slander, Truncated, I don’t consider it slander to say that I believe someone appears to think he’s 100% right in certain areas when there are many people as smart and educated as he is that disagree. I do think at times Bart [...]

BDEhrman2020-06-29T15:05:09-04:00June 29th, 2020|Bart's Critics, Fourth-Century Christianity|

Bart’s Latest Attack on Christianity by Randy Alcorn

As you know, books on controversial topics get reviewed by all sorts of readers; some reviews are glowing and others are, well, nasty. About a month or so ago several reader sent me an online review of my book Heaven and Hell on patheos.com (check it out: it's a website dealing with issues connected with religious faith) by Randy Alcorn, a prominent evangelical author with a high public profile, who has written a number of books about Heaven from his faith perspective. You can check him out online: Randy Alcorn is the founder and director of Eternal Perspective Ministries (EPM) and the author of more than 55 books, including Heaven and If God Is Good: Faith in the Midst of Suffering and Evil. More than 11 million copies of his books have been sold. They’ve also been translated into 70 languages. Randy's review was, shall we say, of the harsh variety. But now that I'm getting older and the body-joints aren't working as well as in the days of my youth, my knee doesn't seem [...]

BDEhrman2020-06-21T10:10:49-04:00June 21st, 2020|Afterlife, Bart's Critics, Book Discussions|

What I Do Argue in Misquoting Jesus

In my previous post I pointed out that lots of people -- friends and foes -- misconstrue what I say in Misquoting Jesus. It's a particular problem with people who want to attack my views, often without seeing what I actually say. Sometimes when someone tells me what they object to in my book I ask them if they've read it. "Well, no, but I heard about it." Sigh.... Even scholars -- including scholars I'm friends with -- have said things about my views that are absolutely not true (e.g., a common one, that I became an agnostic once I realized how many differences there were among the manuscripts of the NT. Good grief. Where do they get such ideas from?? I knew about massive differences in the manuscripts when I was a *fundamentalist*!!) Anyway, what do I talk about in the book, and why have people found it objectionable? Here are some reflections I had on the issues when I thought about them some years ago. ********************************************** One of the most interesting things in [...]

BDEhrman2020-10-15T02:09:44-04:00April 27th, 2020|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

Misquoting Misquoting Jesus

Misquoting Jesus is my most widely read book. And I continue to be a bit amazed and dismayed at how widely it is misunderstood. The book was meant to deal with one very specific issue connected with the New Testament, and people who have read it – let alone the people who have not – often assume it’s about some *other* issue, or rather, some other very broad issue, normally something that it is decidedly not about. One of the problems is that people who are specialists in a field make very fine distinctions that seem absolutely OBVIOUS to them, when the distinctions are very fuzzy indeed to anyone who is an outsider. It’s true of every field of expertise. When a scholar of medieval English literature whom I know very well is at a cocktail party with non-academics, she will frequently talk to people who, to keep the conversation going, ask about anything from the life of Charlemagne to, say, Beowulf, on the assumption that those are what her research is about. Uh, no. [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-26T14:04:15-04:00April 26th, 2020|Bart's Critics, New Testament Manuscripts|

Why Do Smart People Make Stupid Arguments?

I’m always puzzled about why smart people make (and believe) such stupid arguments. We see this all the time, of course, in political discourse and family disagreements, not to mention department meetings, but since my field is religious studies I hear it the most in connection with the great religions of the world. Actually, I guess I find it less puzzling than aggravating. A lot of conservative Christians get upset with me when I push them for evidence for their views, and so I thought I should devote this post to give equal share time to other religions whose self-appointed representatives send me proofs of the superiority of their views, based on hard “evidence.” It is really difficult to believe that someone can actually be persuaded by these claims. Let me stress, I am NOT (repeat NOT) saying anything negative about any of these religions – in this case Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. I’m decidedly not. I’m saying something negative about very bad arguments used to “prove” their inherent superiority to one another. I will [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-02T14:27:54-04:00February 9th, 2020|Bart's Critics, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

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 [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-26T23:57:14-04:00November 21st, 2019|Bart's Critics, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Why I’m To Be Pitied for Being the Wrong Kind of Fundamentalist!

I was browsing though old posts from five years ago, and came across this one I had forgotten all about. You'll see I got a bit feisty here, but it sounds like I was having fun. Well, in a way. The whole thing really is a bit aggravating. ***************************************************************** Several readers of this blog have pointed me to an article in the conservative journal First Things; the article (a review of a book by the evangelical scholar Craig Blomberg) was written by Louis Markos, an English professor at Houston Baptist University. The title is called “Ehrman Errant.” I must say, that did not sound like a promising beginning. I had never heard of Louis Markos before – had certainly never met him, talked with him about myself or my life, shared with him my views of important topics, spent time to see how he ticked and to let him see how I do. I don’t know the man, and he doesn’t know me. And so it was with some considerable surprise that I read the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-02T14:38:38-04:00November 3rd, 2019|Bart's Critics, Reflections and Ruminations|

Who Would Invent the Story of Women at the Tomb??

Who in the ancient world would ever try to *prove* the resurrection by making up a story that women, in particular, discovered Jesus' empty tomb? Weren't women seen as complete unreliable witnesses? Their testimony never even accepted in a court of law? If someone want to prove that Jesus had been raised -- and that therefore the tomb was empty -- they would have invented *men* at the tomb (reliable witnesses) rather than *women* (untrustworthy). Right? I've been asked this question several times since my recent post on Jesus' women followers not doubting the resurrection. The reason anyone ever has this question is because it is a favorite claim of Christian apologists wanting to prove that Jesus really was raised from the dead. Proof? The tomb really was empty. How do we know? We have witnesses. How do we know we can trust the reports of these witnesses? No one would have made them up: the witnesses in the stories are always * and no one would invent "unreliable" witnesses to back up "proof-claims." When [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-01T12:59:48-04:00October 22nd, 2019|Bart's Critics, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Women in Early Christianity|

Misconstruing My Words. Can We Know What the Authors of the New Testament Originally Said?

Sometimes people take what I say to an extreme that I don’t mean to convey. That especially happens when I talk about the textual criticism of the New Testament. As a reminder, “textual criticism” is a technical term. It does not refer to the interpretation of texts or to the history behind the composition of texts or to the assessment of the original context of texts or anything like that. It is used to refer specifically to the attempt to reconstruct the words of a text. That is, textual criticism is not interested in understanding what the text means; it is interested in figuring out what words the author originally used. And in seeing how the author’s original words may have been changed over in the process of copying. Textual criticism is a fundamental aspect of literary study – certainly for the Bible, but for all texts. There are textual critics who avidly work on the classics (Homer, Virgil, Cicero, etc. etc.); and on medieval literature and on modern literature. It’s a huge field, e.g., [...]

BDEhrman2022-07-03T16:41:51-04:00October 8th, 2019|Bart's Critics, New Testament Manuscripts|

An Ancient Author Trying to Justify His Deceit

Yesterday I talked about one Christian forger who got caught red handed who had to explain himself. Well, justify himself. Well, bend over backwards to make himself look innocent. We've been seeing a lot of that these days. It goes way back. Humans are humans. Here is my assessment of the situation, not in terms of our own front-page news but in terms of this obscure little controversy, which highlights my obscure little academic point: in the ancient world, readers simply did not *like* it when they found out someone had written a book claiming to a be a famous person. They condemned it. That should be borne in mine when thinking of other instances of the phenomenon, such as those found in far more familiar books from the early Christian tradition. (And this is the point the riles a number of my scholar friends, who just can't *believe* ancient authors would do something deceitful....) I'll start this post with a bit from the end of the previous one, to remind you about it. If [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-11T17:12:17-04:00August 12th, 2019|Bart's Critics, Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity|

A Christian Forger Caught in the Act

Next month I will be giving a keynote address at a conference dealing with ancient pseudepigrapha at the University of Laval, in Quebec City. I have recently been discussing the topic (of ancient authors falsely claiming to be a famous person) on the blog in relation to the letter of James, and as you know, it was the subject of my monography Forgery and Counterforgery ten years ago, and my spin-off popular account Forged. I haven't worked seriously on the problem since then. But now, because of this upcoming lecture, I'm having to think about it long and hard again, a decade later. Lots of scholars simply don't (or can't?) believe that ancient people -- especially Christians, but others as well -- would lie about their identities. It's not that these scholars doubt that there are lots and lots of pseudepigrapha out there, Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian. There are. But these scholars don't think that the authors were doing anything duplicitous. There are different ways scholars have made this argument, but the basic line [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-11T16:01:58-04:00August 11th, 2019|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity|

Is History a Four-Letter Word?

Most people on the planet simply are not interested in history. I’d say that’s true of most American high school and college students. History classes can be dreadfully boring, especially with the wrong teacher -- and it is very hard to be a good teacher of history. In high school, I had almost no interest in my history classes. Names, dates, things that happened that had no relevance to anything I was interested in or what I felt like doing day to day. Ugh. But a good history teacher is a marvel to behold. There is so much about the past that is fascinating, and, of course relevant. And so, as it turns out, I’ve turned into a professional historian. Go figure. I’ve been thinking about this because of that debate I had on Monday with Peter Williams, a very bright evangelical Christian and a fine scholar of ancient Semitic languages who firmly believes that the Bible conveys God’s Truth, in every way, so that there are no mistakes of any kind in it. Peter [...]

BDEhrman2020-12-17T16:40:42-05:00July 19th, 2019|Bart's Critics, Canonical Gospels, Reflections and Ruminations|

Flat-out Lies or Willful Ignorance. How Do They Get Away With It?

Sometimes it’s enough to make my blood boil. Maybe someone can explain it to me. If you were to interview the 7,346,235,000 occupants of this planet, you would find *no* group of people who declare themselves MORE committed to “truth” than the evangelical Christians. Evangelical Christianity, historically, is about nothing other than the Truth. Jesus himself said “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no one comes to the Father except by me” (John 14:6); and “You shall know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free” (John 8:32). The Christian faith, for these people, is all about finding the Truth that leads to eternal life. So why do so many of their spokespersons simply tell lies? Or at least propagate willful ignorance? Those are the two choices: they either know what they’re saying is absolutely false or they don’t go to the bother of finding out, when the information is readily available to anyone who wants to take 38 seconds to look for it. I don’t get it. Well, OK, I [...]

BDEhrman2019-06-26T09:04:50-04:00June 26th, 2019|Bart's Critics, Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Very First Post: Do Textual Variants Matter??

In three days we will hit the seventh-year anniversary of the blog. I thought it would be fun (for me) to look at the earliest posts. Here is the very first one, from April 3, 2012 (I've edited it a bit to tone down the rhetoric; I was a bit more hot-headed in those days!) It's about one of the most interesting and hotly disputed topics I've dealt with throughout my career. ******************************************************************** Probably more than any of my other books, Misquoting Jesus provoked a loud and extensive critique from scholars – almost exclusively among evangelical Christians, who appear to have thought that if readers were “led astray” by my claims in the book they might be in danger of losing their faith or (almost worse!) changing what they believed so that they would no longer be evangelical. I’m not so sure there is really much danger in presenting widely held scholarship to a lay-readership, and so I was a bit surprised at the vitriol I received at the hands of some of my evangelical [...]

BDEhrman2020-12-02T00:12:49-05:00March 31st, 2019|Bart's Critics, New Testament Manuscripts|

My Testier Days: A Response to a Critique of How Jesus Became God

I often look back over all the posts I've made on the blog over the past six years, and one of the things that constantly strikes me, these days, is how testy I frequently was, in those days! Four years ago I expressed some dismay at a review of my book How Jesus Became God. A bit thin-skinned, would you say? Either I'm getting a better sense of humor, or am taking myself less seriously, or am becoming more laid back, or, well, just getting older. Anyway, here is the post. ********************************************************************** The responses to How Jesus Became God are starting to appear, and I must say, I find the harshest ones bordering on the incredible. Do people think that it is acceptable to attack a book that they haven’t read – or at least haven’t had the courtesy to try to understand? Some of the reviewers are known entities, such as the Very Rev. Robert Barron, a Roman Catholic evangelist and commentator who has a wide following. His full response is available at http://wordonfire.org/Written-Word/articles-commentaries/April-2014/Why-Jesus-is-God--A-Response-to-Bart-Ehrman.aspx I [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T01:26:49-04:00April 17th, 2018|Bart's Critics|

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