Book Discussions Archives - Page 3 of 31 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Discussions and comments about Bart’s latest book.

Love in Action: Christian Views of Charitable Giving

As I indicated in my previous post, the ethics of Christian love (and the very term used for it) differed from what could be found broadly in the Greek and Roman worlds. This different understanding of love had concrete practical implications, especially in how early Christians understood charitable giving. That will be the next part of my book, The Origins of Altruism, as I explain here as I continue to extract from the initial sketch of the book I've written for myself. ****************************** Part Three: Charitable Giving (chs. 6, on the Greco-Roman world, and 7, on Jesus and his later followers) Since love in the teachings of Jesus and then agapē in the early Christian movement was not an emotion, connected with personal feelings or passion but a kind of disinterested activity in relation to others, including strangers, its most concrete manifestation involved providing resources for those in need. In the broader Greek and Roman worlds, virtually all the discussion of personal resources (money and goods) focused on the very wealthy. Moral philosophy was written by elites [...]

BDEhrman2024-01-15T13:58:45-05:00January 21st, 2024|Book Discussions, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, Historical Jesus, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Is Christian Love Different from Love?

One of the most talked about and least understood teachings within Christianity is the idea of love. Do you want some evidence of the misunderstanding? Read 1 Corinthians 13, the "love chapter," in its original context (coming between, well, 1 Corinthians 12 and 14! A little consideration almost no one has thought about!), and then consider it in relation to the 498 times you've heard it in weddings. I'm all for it's being read at weddings! But, uh, is Paul talking about marital bliss? Uh, nope, not at *all*..... I am in the middle of a thread excerpting a sketch of my book (which I'm still researching; won't start writing for a while). So far I've talked about what it's about. Now I'm getting into some detail, by describing the book chapter by chapter -- including the opening bit about Christian ethics and the opening section that deals with love in the Christian tradition. ****************************** The book will comprise an Introduction and four main parts containing two chapters each. Introduction (ch. 1) I’ll [...]

BDEhrman2024-01-15T13:58:37-05:00January 20th, 2024|Book Discussions, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, Historical Jesus, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

The Fate of Jesus’ Ethics after His Death

Did Jesus' followers actually follow his teachings? In my previous post I pointed out that Jesus had a radical ethic, a view based on the teachings of Hebrew Scripture but radicalized because of his understanding of the apocalyptic event very soon to occur with the end of history as he knew it. As we know from history, those who expect the End soon can behave in extreme ways (sell the farm!). Jesus' teachings, as I indicated, are, in shorthand, "prophetic ethics on apocalyptic steroids." How did his followers carry on his teachings? That's what I deal with here, as I continue to excerpt a sketch of my book that I myself wrote for me myself (I won't start writing the book itself for some months probably. Still have work to do). Here I explain the book's basic plotline, theses, and organization. ****************************** The ultimate argument of my book is that after Jesus’ death, as Christianity expanded throughout the Roman world, eventually to conquer it, converts to the new faith naturally accepted and adopted [...]

BDEhrman2024-01-15T13:58:26-05:00January 18th, 2024|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

The Origins of Altruism: My Next Book as It Stands Now
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The Origins of Altruism: My Next Book as It Stands Now

Book Discussions, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, Historical Jesus

The Origins of Altruism: My Next Book as It Stands Now

My book I'm working on now has gone through significant transformations since I first conceived of it a few years ago. I am at the stage now (finally!) where I really think I know what it's going to be. It started out as a book dealing with the history of charitable giving, morphed into a book on the broader subject of ethics as taught by Jesus, moved onto the specific question of how the Christian concept of "love" differed in significant ways from what could be found generally in the Greek and Roman worlds, shifted to add a discussion of how the Christian idea of "forgiveness" also differed fron what was found elsewhere and ... and ended up where it is now. It is really a book about altruism in the Christian tradition and its effect on the ethical views and practices of western culture. My tentative title is: The Origins of Altruism: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Conscience of the West. As always, I have no idea if my publisher will go with it or [...]

BDEhrman2024-01-16T14:50:37-05:00January 17th, 2024|Book Discussions, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, Historical Jesus|

An Intriguing and Unusual Demonstration of Early Christian Differences…

Nine years ago when I was discussing on the blog the topic of the current thread -- the wide diversity of early Christianity -- I took the occasion to mention a book that I had just read and found to be unusually interesting and enlightening. It is by two Italian scholars, married to each other, who teach at the Università di Bologna: Adriana Destro, an anthropologist, and Mauro Pesce, a New Testament specialist whose teaching position is in the History of Christianity. Their book is called Il racconto e la scrittura: Introduzione alla lettura dei vangeli. It is about all the things I am currently interested in: the life of Jesus as recounted by his earliest followers, the oral traditions of Jesus, and the Gospels as founded on these oral traditions. In it they develop a theory that I had never thought of before. I’m not sure all the evidence is completely compelling, but the overall view is very interesting and very much worth thinking about. As an anthropologist, Prof Destro looks at things in [...]

BDEhrman2023-11-25T15:34:52-05:00November 25th, 2023|Book Discussions, Heresy and Orthodoxy|

Reading the Bible in a Secular Age: Guest Post by Prof. Julius-Kei Kato

I am pleased to publish this guest post by Dr. Julius-Kei Kato, a scholar and professor of New Testament (and other things!) at King’s University College at Western University, London, Ontario, Canada, and, luckily for us, a member of the blog. You can learn more about him here: Dr. Julius-Kei Kato (uwo.ca) Just over a month ago Julius-Kei published a book of relevance and surely of interest to members of the blog: Reading the Bible in a Secular Age: The New Testament as Spiritual Ancestry (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2023). I asked him to write a blog post about it, to explain what it is and to indicate where, if you're interested, you can get a copy. He has happily complied, and here is his post. If you have any comments/questions, he will be happy to reply. ****************************** The burning question of this book is: Why still read the Bible in a secular age? My answer, briefly stated: For us who are located in the West, the Bible is an important part of our “spiritual ancestry,” [...]

BDEhrman2023-09-18T10:06:15-04:00October 3rd, 2023|Book Discussions, Public Forum|

How the Bible Can Help Those in Pain — Even Non-Believers. Guest Post by Glenn Siepert
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How the Bible Can Help Those in Pain — Even Non-Believers. Guest Post by Glenn Siepert

Book Discussions, Public Forum

How the Bible Can Help Those in Pain — Even Non-Believers. Guest Post by Glenn Siepert

Are you interested in seeing how the Bible can be important and meaningful even for those of us who do not believe? Glenn Siepert is one of our Blog Volunteers, who provides graphics for our public posts; he has just published a very interesting book for which I wrote a blurb (endorsement) for the cover. Glenn Siepert has an interesting background and story to tell, and he uses his book to help others think about their own stories in light of the biblical narratives, showing how this is a crucially important way to read the Bible – even for those who don’t (or no longer) believe in its literal truth. Glenn’s moving book is called Emerging from the Rubble: Thirty Stories about Grief, Shattered Dreams, Broken Relationships, and Finding the Courage to Keep Going. I’ve asked Glenn to provide us some blog posts explaining the book and its background in his own life. Here's the first: ****************************** A little about me - I grew up in the world of Christian Fundamentalism. How "fundy" was I, [...]

BDEhrman2023-07-03T22:53:47-04:00July 4th, 2023|Book Discussions, Public Forum|

The Radical Teachings of Jesus–And Why No One Follows Them
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The Radical Teachings of Jesus–And Why No One Follows Them

Book Discussions, Historical Jesus

The Radical Teachings of Jesus–And Why No One Follows Them

This is the title I’d like for my next book. Of course, I may change my mind (it happens all the time) and of greater moment, what I propose to my publisher as a title book often ends up having little effect or influence on the actual title. Publishers have the final say on that, and even though there is a lot of back and forth, discussion, and negotiation – in the end, well, good luck winning *that* decision! Even so, it’s what I’m calling the book now because I think it encapsulates what I want to say in it. My view is that Jesus’ teachings on how to live in relation to others were radically different from what can be found in (a) the teachings of Greek and Roman moralists (“moral philosophers”), (b) on the ground, in the Roman empire generally (among non-philosophers) (insofar as we can tell how people normally lived, given the scarcity of our sources of information), and (c) even in the Hebrew Bible tradition in which Jesus “lived, moved, and [...]

BDEhrman2023-06-12T10:38:12-04:00June 13th, 2023|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

Does Understanding “Memory” Have Any Bearing on the Study of the Historical Jesus?

In my earlier posts I began to discuss my book, Jesus Before the Gospels, which deals with how understanding how "memory" works can contribute to our assessment of the Gospels stories about Jesus. Long before starting the book I had been intrigued the question of how eyewitnesses would have remembered the Jesus' life, and how the stories about Jesus may have been shifted and altered and invented in later times based on faulty or even false memories. Those questions led me to be interested in memory more broadly. Memory is an enormous field of research, just within cognitive psychology. I spent many months doing nothing but reading important studies, dozens and dozens of books and articles. It is really interesting stuff. Memory is not at all what I started out thinking it was. Like most people I had this vague notion in my head that memory worked kind of like a camera. You see or experience something and take a photo of it and store it in your head. Sometimes the photo might fade, or [...]

BDEhrman2023-05-01T10:50:29-04:00May 10th, 2023|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

When I Got Seriously Interested in Memory (at least insofar as I remember)

(Recall: this post came from the past, when I was working on my book about Jesus and Memory, badly titled Jesus Before the Gospels. I had forgotten about the post till just now!) As I indicated in my previous post, I have long been interested in memory for both personal and professional reasons. On the personal level, I have known people very close to me who have experienced serious memory problems, for example through strokes. Depending on what part of the brain is affected, different memory functions are damaged. For example, someone may remember perfectly well what happened in an event 20 years ago, but forget a conversation they just had. I have often wondered why and how that is.. And then there was my own memory. For some things I have a terrific memory. And for lots of things I have an absolutely terrible memory. I especially have a terrible “episodic” memory (as psychologists call it), a memory for things that happen in your life and you experience. Let me give an example. About [...]

BDEhrman2023-05-06T11:32:19-04:00May 4th, 2023|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Memory Studies|

My Best Best-Selling Fluke

A couple of weeks ago I published a post about how an author writes a bestseller (she doesn't! It becomes one or not for reasons other than the author's intent or writing...) I remembered I had posted something on the topic years ago, based on a blog member's question about my personal best-selling book, Misquoting Jesus, and why it did so well. In some ways it's a real puzzle. The book is about Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. HUH??? A bestselling book? What??? (That, at least, is what all my friends said!) But the answer relates to my previous post. Here is the Q and then the A. QUESTION: In your previous answer to me you indicated that what makes a bestseller, in the end of the day, is massive media attention. My question now is what sparks this attention. In other words, why, out of all your books, did Misquoting Jesus receive a great attention from the media? RESPONSE: Ha! It’s a great question. I’ll start by saying that if there were [...]

BDEhrman2023-04-28T16:01:53-04:00April 26th, 2023|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions|

How Does An Author Write a Bestseller?

Almost everyone has the wrong idea about how a book becomes a bestseller. In the crowd I run around with, the term “bestseller” tends to have a technical meaning: a book on the New York Times Bestseller List. Every week the NY Times receives data from all the major book-selling outlets – from Amazon to Indies – and crunches the numbers for their various lists (Fiction Hardbacks, Non-Fiction Hardbacks, paperback fiction, etc.). There are 25 books in each category that make the list, but they *print* only the top 15. To put that list in a bit of perspective, there are about 700 – 800 new books published in the U.S. every day (not counting self-published books). To make the top 25 in a given week is … well, not easy. As many of you know, a non-fiction “trade book” is one written for a broad, general audience rather than for scholars in a field of study (an “academic” book or a “monograph”) or for classroom use for students (a textbook). Normally, the point of [...]

BDEhrman2023-04-10T11:50:25-04:00April 10th, 2023|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

REVELATION, A Novel. Excerpts from Blog Guest Poster Gary McCarragher

Last week I published a guest post by blog member Gary McCarragher, who has just published Revelation: A Novel, about a professor of New Testament studies at a certain university in the South. Gary and I had consulted on his work, and how it has seen the light of published day! We received a lot of good response from his post, and I asked him if he'd be interested in excerpting a bit of the novel for blog readers. He agreed, and has given us the first two chapters. As indicated below, you can purchase the book in a variety of places; I just checked and found it here: Revelation: A Novel - Kindle edition by McCarragher, Gary . Religion & Spirituality Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com. Thanks to Gary! ****************************** REVELATION, A Novel, published January, 2023 Editorial and proofreading services: Cath Lauria, Gina Sartirana Interior layout and cover design: Howard Johnson Photo Credits: Front Cover Image: Abstract self portrait, by Christian Beirle González; Image #100005105, Getty Images. Author Photo: by Terry Sbani, Woodside’s Photography [...]

Diane2023-03-14T13:55:49-04:00March 26th, 2023|Book Discussions, Public Forum|

Armageddon Has Arrived!

Normally one would not welcome Armageddon with rejoicing, but in this instance .... My book is published today: Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End. Now this is a book that has, in some sense, been in the works for 50 years, since the first time I started pondering the Apocalypse of John as a 17 year old, about to head off to Moody Bible Institute and realizing I better read the final book of the NT -- even though I was scared of it -- before taking the first-year Entrance Exam on the Bible possibly whiffing on a question about Revelation.j It took me a while to start figuring out the book -- say, grad school -- and about five years ago, as I began to study it really intensely, I changed my views of it. Hence the book. For reasons I explain in it, of all the books I've written I think this is the one most relevant for our world at large. And not because I think the apocalypse will [...]

BDEhrman2023-03-22T15:22:32-04:00March 21st, 2023|Book Discussions, Revelation of John|

Revelation — A Novel. Guest Post Announcing Publication, by Gary McCarragher
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Revelation — A Novel. Guest Post Announcing Publication, by Gary McCarragher

Book Discussions, Public Forum

Revelation — A Novel. Guest Post Announcing Publication, by Gary McCarragher

Just now published, here is a novel about a New Testament scholar named Bart, at a major university in the South, who comes from a fundamentalist background and continues running up against it. But this Bart's story ain't mine. As a novel, this is a fictional narrative, which does, however, deal with issues that I and many of you have confronted and dealt with at length: how to come to grips with a historical understanding of the New Testament when coming from an evangelical world, a world still inhabited by those we love. Gary McCarragher is a blog member, a physician, and award-winning author. He contacted me a couple of years ago to see if I'd be willing to consult with him on his novel. As some of you know, I run a writing consultation service off my website (unconnected with the blog) for authors of fiction and nonfiction, screenwriters, and playwrights. Gary and I had a number of sessions about his work, and it has resulted now in this novel, Revelation . I found [...]

BDEhrman2023-03-06T11:30:48-05:00March 7th, 2023|Book Discussions, Public Forum|

Wait, Was Jesus Married? Guest Post by Kyle Smith

This is now the second guest post by Kyle Smith, scholar of early Christianity, on a hot topic related to his recently published book. Kyle is Associate Professor and Director of the History of Religions Program at the University of Toronto. An award-winning teacher, he is the author or coauthor of five books about Christian saints and martyrs, including Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity (University of California Press, 2022). You can find him on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and the Peloton @kylesmithTO. ****************************** Few characterizations of Jesus’s life have spurred as much intrigue (and outrage) as the idea that he might’ve been married. In 2012, before it was discredited as a forgery, a scrap of papyrus inscribed with a few lines of Coptic set off a media furor when reports emerged that it quoted Jesus as saying, “My wife …” Conveniently, the rest was cut off. Despite the abiding popularity of books like The Da Vinci Code, which might lead one to think otherwise, there is no scholarly debate over whether Jesus [...]

BDEhrman2023-02-13T11:29:18-05:00February 21st, 2023|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Is Christianity a Cult of the Dead? Guest Post by Kyle Smith, PhD

Now here's an intriguing topic I bet you've never thought about. Can you (should we?) consider early Christianity -- and in fact Christianity as a whole, as a "cult of the dead"? Kyle Smith is an associate professor and director of the History of Religions program in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto (See: Kyle Smith | Department of Historical Studies (utoronto.ca). I have known Kyle for many years, since he was a PhD student in early Chrsitianity at Duke. Since then he has become a well-known scholar of Christianity in late antiquity, who already now at a relatively young age (compared to us geezers) has published six books. (Not sure if you know this, but many, many senior scholars publish only two or three for their entire careers.) Five of them are hard-hitting scholarship. His most recent one is for a general audience, Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity (University of California Press, 2022). I think it's unusually interesting. I thought it would be extremely interesting to [...]

BDEhrman2023-02-06T19:32:26-05:00February 16th, 2023|Book Discussions, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

How Theologians and Historians Approach the Same Bible Differently. Guest Post by Daniel Kohanski

I am very pleased to announce that a scholar of religion who is also a log-term blog member, Dan Kohanski, has just published an intriguing book of direct relevance to what we do here on the blog (A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World). When I got the book I realized it would be great to have Dan do a couple of guest posts on the blog to share some of the views he develops in it. He agreed, and here is the first of three of his posts. Feel free to comment and ask questions! ****************************** (This essay is adapted from my just-published book, A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World, Apocryphile Press, 2023; https://apocryphilepress.com/book/a-god-of-our-invention-how-religion-shaped-the-western-world/ . Support your local independent bookstore and order using the “Buy paperback from Bookshop” link on that webpage.) There are several ways one can approach the Bible (including ignoring it), but I want to look here at two most of the most common ways: that of the theologian, and that of [...]

BDEhrman2023-02-01T12:07:07-05:00February 11th, 2023|Book Discussions, History of Biblical Scholarship|

Am I About To Become Muslim?

I often get asked about the Qur'an (on which I have zero expertise) and my views of Islam (which I admire as one of the great religions of the world with lots of problems involving how it sometimes gets interpreted and used, just like every other great religion of the world). I was just thinking about that this morning and remembered a post I did a long time ago answering a question a reader had raised with me. Is it true I am about to convert to Islam? Well, it hasn't happened yet, but I thought I would be worthwhile repeating the post: READER COMMENT: I received a message on Facebook a couple of weeks ago from a person who has been proselytizing to me about the Muslim faith. This has happened a few times with others on your FB page. I guess that's what they do. Anyway, the other day I asked him if he was on your blog. He responded with a yes. Then he said that we (the members) were going [...]

BDEhrman2023-02-10T11:16:23-05:00February 4th, 2023|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions|

Evidence of Forgery. More Reasons the Martyrdom of Polycarp Was Not Written by Someone There

In my previous post I began to lay out my case that the Martyrdom of Polycarp, our (allegedly) first full narrative account of a Christian martyr, who died 155 CE, written (allegedly) by an eyewitness, in fact was written decades later, by someone who wanted his readers to think he was an eyewitness and to that end (falsely) claimed to be one. Here I move from the intriguing fact (from the last post) that the author asserts his eyewitness authority precisely at the points that are, well, rather difficult to believe to other historical problems in the text that suggest the author was not living at the time or privy to what actually happened. Again, this is from my book Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (Oxford University Press, 2013). ***************************** Apart from the miraculous elements of the text – which include the martyr’s blood gushing forth in such profusion as to douse the flames of his pyre, and a dove emerging from his side and flying [...]

BDEhrman2023-01-23T11:25:22-05:00February 1st, 2023|Book Discussions, Forgery in Antiquity, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

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