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Bart Responds to readers as time allows.

Argument Against Jesus’ Burial in HJBG, Part 2

This is the second of two posts in which I lay out (part of) my case for why I think Jesus was not given a decent burial by Joseph of Arimathea.  I am not devoting a post to the second of my three specific arguments – where I talk about typical Roman burial practices for criminals – simply because Craig Evan’s does not do much with it in his counter-argument.  But my section on Pontius Pilate is especially important, as you’ll see when I begin to summarize and respond to Craig’s essay. ***********************************************************   The Policies of Pontius Pilate in Particular My third specific reason for doubting the burial tradition has to do with the Roman rule of Judea at the time.  One of the chief regrets of any historian of early Christianity is that we do not have more – lots more – information about Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judea from 26-36 CE, who, among many other things, condemned Jesus to be crucified.   What we do know about him, however, all points in [...]

2020-04-03T16:46:11-04:00July 3rd, 2014|Bart's Critics, Historical Jesus|

Argument Against Jesus’ Burial in HJBG, Part 1

The most important thing about this post is – that you need to read yesterday’s post!   Here I am including a section from my book How Jesus Became God that deals with the question of whether Jesus was actually given a decent burial by Joseph of Arimathea.  In my book I begin by doing a detailed analysis of the biblical accounts in order to show that Paul did not know of any such tradition and that it was probably not in circulation prior to the Gospels, and that even within the NT there are conflicting accounts of Jesus’ burial.  Then I get into more detailed historical argumentation.  Here is the first of two bits from this argumentation, straight from my book: ******************************************************************   In addition to the rather general considerations I have just given for calling into question the idea that Jesus received a decent burial by Joseph of Arimathea, there are three more specific reasons for doubting the tradition that Jesus received a decent burial at all, in a tomb that could later be [...]

2020-05-27T15:37:06-04:00July 2nd, 2014|Bart's Critics, Historical Jesus|

New Thread on the Burial of Jesus

As many of you know, when my book How Jesus Became God appeared in March, a response book appeared, simultaneously, in which a group of evangelical Christian scholars provided their contrary views on many of the topics that I dealt with.  They called their book – to no one’s real surprise! – How God Became Jesus.   I devoted one post to their book on May 2, and you may want to look at that again if you’re interested. The five scholars who produced the response each wrote an essay or two on various aspects of my discussion – e.g., Michael Bird on whether Jesus thought that he was God; Simon Gathercole on what the earliest Christains thought about Jesus; Charles Hill on issues related to later debates over Christology on the church.   Also contributing were Chris Tilling (the one of them I don’t know) and Craig Evans. I thought some of the essays were learned and interesting, though not entirely relevant to the claims or arguments of my book; others I thought were a bit [...]

2020-04-03T16:50:44-04:00July 1st, 2014|Bart's Critics, Historical Jesus|

Christ as an Angel in Paul

This will be my final set of comments on the evaluation of How Jesus Became God by Larry Hurtado, on his blog.   His review consisted of a set of positive comments, of things that he appreciated (for which I’m grateful); several misreadings of my positions, in which Larry indicates that my book was asserting a view that, in fact, it was not (he corrected those after our back and forth in a subsequent post); one assertion that I was motivated by an anti-Christian agenda and wanted to convince readers that Jesus’ followers had hallucinations (I dealt with that assertion yesterday; I do not think that it is a generous reading of my discussion – especially since I explicitly stated on repeated occasions that I was *not* arguing for a non-Christian or anti-Christian view); and, well, this one point that I’ll discuss here, on which we have a genuine disagreement.   The point has to do with whether the apostle Paul understood Christ, in his pre-existent state, to have been an angelic being.   Larry devotes two paragraphs [...]

Why I (Actually) Discuss Hallucinations

In this post I continue with my response to Larry Hurtado’s critique of How Jesus Became God.  In the previous posts I dealt with factual errors – where he assigned views to me that I do not state and do not have.  As I have pointed out, Larry was generous to retract these critiques in a subsequent post on his blog.   In this post I want to deal not with a factual mistake but with an assertion he makes about my motive for part of my discussion – an assertion that I take issue with. One of my major premises in How Jesus Became God is that Jesus was not considered divine during his lifetime, but that it was belief in his resurrection that made his followers begin calling him God.   But since my study is a historical account of how Jesus came to be considered God, rather than a theological or religiously motivated account, I have to deal with a very big problem, which is that historians cannot declare a God-produced miracle as a [...]

More Misreadings of How Jesus Became God

This will be my final post in which I indicate places where Larry Hurtado has critiqued How Jesus Became God by attributing to me views that I don’t have and positions that I have never taken.    These are the only positions – the ones that I have never taken – that he charges me with in order to show that I am lacking in expertise and, as an outsider to the field of early Christology, simply don’t know in places what I’m talking about.   Yesterday I looked at what he had to say about my views about the Son of Man, today I’ll look at two others.   Let me say again that when I pointed out to Larry that I never express the views that he has cited to show that I am curiously ill-informed, he graciously published a second post in which he set that bit of the record straight. After this post I will discuss in future posts a couple of the areas where Larry does correctly read my views and on which [...]

The Son of Man and Jesus

In my previous post I began to discuss Larry Hurtado’s evaluation of How Jesus Became God.   For the link to his initial post, see  http://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/how-jesus-became-god-per-ehrman/   As I indicated, after I read his comments we had some exchanges on email, and he graciously agreed to correct several of his mistaken comments, in which he attributed views to me that I do not have and never expressed in my book.  (These views, which I do not hold, are the reasons he claims I’m out of date and ill informed).  The post in which he gives his corrections can be found here: http://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2014/06/02/ehrman-on-jesus-amendments/   In this post I’d like to begin to reiterate the points that he makes in the second post, but quoting his initial comments that I thought were in error, and saying a few things about them. The first comment that startled me was the following: As I’ve mentioned, on several matters Ehrman seems ill-informed and/or not current.  For example, he assumes that the expression “the son of man” (used numerous times by Jesus in the [...]

Larry Hurtado’s Critique of How Jesus Became God

One of the leading scholars of early “Christology” (i.e., early portrayals/beliefs about Christ) in the English speaking world is Larry Hurtado, emeritus professor of New Testament at the University of Edinburgh.   Larry is an established New Testament scholar, with additional expertise in such fields as the Gospel of Mark and textual criticism – the area of his dissertation work in the 1970s.   I first came to know Larry in connection with textual criticism.  He was probably 10 years ahead of me in the field, but our dissertations dealt with roughly similar subjects.  He has written two particularly important books on Christology, one a short piece and the other fairly massive.  He is widely seen as an expert. Larry has a blog and on it he has written a critique of How Jesus Became God, which, as you know, is a kind of Christology for popular audiences.   Much of what Larry says in his blog post is positive, but some, as you would expect, is negative.  I agree completely with his positive comments and with none [...]

Response to the Response: How God Became Jesus

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 evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary, about one of the better chapters in their book: http://www.jrdkirk.com/2014/04/24/god-became-jesus-part-1-review-evangelical-response-ehrman/ What I give below is the overall response to the book that I wrote for my publisher.  We had thought about publishing it somewhere, but I’ve decided to give it here instead. ************************************************************ It is always exciting to publish a book that is considered controversial; it is more exciting when it is thought to be controversial before anyone [...]

2017-12-14T23:20:59-05:00May 2nd, 2014|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, Public Forum|

Attacks from the Other Side: An Ill-Tempered Richard Carrier

Sometimes I think that if I’m “getting it from all sides,” I may be doing something right. The religious conservatives seems to be up in arms about my book How Jesus Became God – both conservative evangelical Protestants and conservative Roman Catholics like the Very Reverend Robert Barron. In fact, as I’ve said, I do not think anything in the book is inimical to Christian faith, unless it is completely committed to a view of the infallibility of the Bible and its full, historical accuracy. The Christianity I admire is not like that. But I get it from the non-religious left as well. Yesterday a member of the blog sent me the following critique – delivered in terms of mocking incredulity – by Richard Carrier, the mythicist (i.e., one who does not believe that Jesus existed) who has shown more vitriol, hatred, and mean-spiritedness toward me than almost any of the fundamentalists who attack me from the other side. The following is in reference to my point that we do not have any references to [...]

2020-05-27T15:59:57-04:00April 21st, 2014|Bart's Critics, Historical Jesus, Mythicism|

More on the Very Reverend Robert Barron

I have not decided yet whether I will be dealing point-by-point with every one of the Very Reverend Robert Barron’s critiques of How Jesus Became God.  I frankly found none of them very convincing, largely because, as I indicated in the previous post, he does not appear to have read my book very carefully, but at best skimmed it to find what he was expecting to find.   But I thought I would deal at least with his opening counter-argument, over whether Jesus saw himself or proclaimed himself to be God.   Here is what he says. Ehrman’s major argument for the thesis that Jesus did not consider himself divine is that explicit statements of Jesus’ divine identity can be found only in the later fourth Gospel of John, whereas the three Synoptic Gospels, earlier and thus presumably more historically reliable, do not feature such statements from Jesus himself or the Gospel writers. This is so much nonsense. It is indeed the case that the most direct affirmations of divinity are found in John—“I and the Father [...]

2020-04-03T17:02:48-04:00April 18th, 2014|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

Critique of the Very Reverend Robert Barron

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 find it very disappointing.  Here is his opening gambit: **************************************** "In this most recent tome, Ehrman lays out what is actually a very old thesis, going back at least to the 18th century and repeated ad nauseam in skeptical circles ever since, namely, that Jesus was a simple itinerant preacher who never claimed to be divine and whose “resurrection” was in fact an invention of his disciples who experienced hallucinations of their master after his death. Of course Ehrman, like so many of his skeptical colleagues across the centuries, breathlessly presents this thesis [...]

Why Sell Books?

In a previous post I dealt with the question of How Books Sell, and tried to explain that trade books that make it big, if they make it big, do so by receiving substantial media attention.  When Reza Aslan had that immortal (not to say immoral) interview on FOX, it sealed the deal.  His book went up to #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list – every author’s dream.   Without the interview, it wouldn’t have happened. In this post I want to deal with a correlative question that may have been on precisely no one’s mind: Why Sell Books?   Well, it’s on my mind, anyway.  And it’s on my mind because invariably when a scholar publishes a book for a popular audience, his/her colleagues (some of them) in the field get all sniffy and huffy about it.   What you often hear them say (when they don’t know you’re listening) is: “Oh, he just wants to sell books!” You’d think I’d be ready for this by now, but I’m flabbergasted every time it happens, still.   [...]

2020-04-03T17:15:08-04:00March 27th, 2014|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions|

More on the Response Book

Another post on the forthcoming “response book,” titled How God Became Jesus, written in reaction to my book How Jesus Became God. As I indicated in my previous post, I gave my publisher permission to share my manuscript with the five scholars who produced the response, so they were not simply guessing about what I had to say. They had it in their hands. They responded in kind and allowed their publisher to share with me their book. I haven’t read it yet. The reason that they shared their book with me in advance of its appearance is that we are being asked to do some media events that will require knowledge of each others’ books. The event that has been set up already is a kind of on-radio debate with one of the five authors, Simon Gathercole, who teaches at Cambridge University. Next week I’m heading over to London for Spring break, mainly to see family and so on. But I’ve agreed to do a taped radio show. Unlike the States, in England (as [...]

2020-12-17T16:34:31-05:00March 1st, 2014|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

Books and Response Books

So, in almost exactly a month, my new book How Jesus Became God, gets published, March 25. The book is completely done and produced. I received a preliminary copy a couple of days ago. I think it looks *great* -- a very interesting piece of cover art, good blurbs on the back, interesting explanations about what the book is. HarperOne has done a terrific job with it. Naturally I’m interested, concerned, and invested in how well it does. Any author who thinks s/he has something to say – which, by definition, is every author -- very much wants lots and lots of people to read their work. And with a book like this, which in my opinion deals with what is arguably the most important question in the history of Western religions, it’s especially important (to me). So I am eager for this to happen. There are several things that authors really want when they’ve written a book that will be seen as controversial. For one thing, the author wants a lot of controversy! Not [...]

2020-04-03T17:19:16-04:00February 27th, 2014|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

Carrier, Bayes Theorem, and Jesus’ Existence

As most of you know, I’m pretty much staying out of the mythicist debates. That is for several reasons. One is that the mythicist position is not seen as intellectually credible in my field (I’m using euphemisms here; you should see what most of my friends *actually* say about it….) – no one that I know personally (I know a *lot* of scholars of New Testament, early Christianity, and so on) takes it at *all* seriously as a viable historical perspective (this includes not just Christians but also Jews, agnostics, atheists – you name it), and my colleagues sometimes tell me that I’m simply providing the mythicists with precisely the credibility they’re looking for even by engaging them. It’s a good point, and I take it seriously. In that connection I should say that I can understand how someone who hasn’t spent years being trained in the history of early Christianity might have difficulty distinguishing between serious scholarship that is accepted by experts as being plausible (even when judged wrong) and the writings of others [...]

2020-05-27T16:02:02-04:00November 7th, 2013|Bart's Critics, Bart's Debates, Historical Jesus, Mythicism|

Jesus’ Brother and the Mythicists (Part 2)

In my previous post I pointed out that mythicists have a real problem on their hands when it comes to insisting that Jesus didn’t exist (well, they actually have a *boatload* of problems; but this is one of them): Paul actually knew, personally, Jesus’ own brother, James. It’s hard to say that Jesus never lived if he in fact had a brother…. It doesn’t solve the problem to say that this was in fact Jesus’ cousin, since, well, he would still then be the cousin of (the real) Jesus (!) (plus the word Paul uses is “brother” not “cousin”) and it doesn’t work to say that he is Jesus’ brother meaning he is a member of the Christian church (since Paul differentiates him from himself and Peter by calling him the “brother” – and both Peter and Paul were also members of the church!). Mythicists have tried other approaches, including the one I discussed yesterday, of trying to claim that there was a group of fervent missionaries in Jerusalem called “the brothers of the Lord,” [...]

Brothers of Jesus and the Mythicists

QUESTION: Since you’ve brought up the subject of Jesus’ family perhaps it won’t be too far off the subject to ask this question. Mythicists are forced by their arguments to deal with Paul’s encounter with Peter and James in Galatians 1:18–20. They claim that when Paul refers to James as “The Lord’s brother” he does not mean that James is Jesus’ biological brother (which of course would mean that Jesus actually lived) but that he was using the word “brother” in the sense that all the disciples were “brothers” i.e., metaphorically. What about this? Is the word translated as “brother” in English that ambiguous in the original Greek? Can it be other than a biological relationship? Elsewhere I believe Paul uses the word “brothers” to describe fellow believers. Does he use the same Greek word? Thanks for the clarification. RESPONSE: Great question! I’ve dealt with the issue in my book Did Jesus Exist. I think this is one of the real deal-breakers for the mythicist position – that Paul was personally acquainted with Jesus’ own [...]

A Privileged View of Suffering

Sometimes people get upset because I deal with the problem of suffering even though I don’t seem to be experiencing any severe pain and misery myself. Here is an example of the kind of comment I occasionally receive, this from someone commenting to me on Facebook a couple of days ago: "Dude, in a world of suffering, you claim doubts in deity because you live the privileged life of a UNC professor. If you lived in a 40-year-old trailer in Tarboro, I'd take you more seriously. And you even charge people to read your self-indulgent crap. Just for the record, I'm a non-theist. But I'm not a hypocrite." I take comments like this very seriously. Even though I recognize that it is (needlessly?) hostile, my sense is that a lot of people who feel this way are themselves experiencing real hardship and find it offensive that I would have the gall to talk about issues of pain and suffering. And so I’m not at all inclined to reply in kind, with hostility. But I do [...]

2017-12-31T23:35:34-05:00March 11th, 2013|Bart's Critics, Reflections and Ruminations|

More Responses to My Newsweek Article

When the editor at Newsweek ask 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 [...]

2020-04-03T19:08:44-04:00December 15th, 2012|Bart's Critics, Historical Jesus, Religion in the News|
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