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

Discussions and comments about Bart’s latest book.

Creation in 4004 BCE?

In my Bible Intro, I am including a number of "boxes" that deal with issues that are somewhat tangental to the main discussion, but of related interest or importance. Here's one of the ones in my chapter on Genesis, in connection with interpretations that want to take the book as science or history. For a lot of you, this will be old news. But then again, so is Genesis. *********************************************************************************************************************** In 1650 CE, an Irish archbishop and scholar, James Ussher, engaged in a detailed study of when the world began. Ussher based his calculations on the genealogies of the Bible, starting with those in the book of Genesis (which state not only who begat whom, but also indicate, in many instances, how long each of the people thus begotten lived) and a detailed study of other ancient sources, such as Babylonian and Roman history. On these grounds, he argued that the world was created in 4004 BCE — in fact, at noon on October 23. This chronology became dominant throughout Western Christendom. It was printed [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:35:15-04:00July 5th, 2012|Book Discussions, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Income from Books

QUESTION: Do you mind if I ask you about how the financial incentives for you compare between these types of projects? I assume that your books for scholars are not expected to make much money directly, although they are important for your career in other ways. Textbooks are very expensive compared to popular books; for example the list price for your textbook “The New Testament” (paperback) is $65. That’s actually not particularly high as textbooks go, but still at least three times as expensive as your popular books. Its also longer of course at 600 pages vs e.g. about 250 pages for “Misquoting Jesus” so they must take you longer to write. How does the compensation on your end compare? RESPONSE: Not a problem -- there's nothing very secretive about it. The first thing to say, though, is that authors have NO say (*NO* say!) over the price of their books. Publishers don't even ask for an author's opinion! Scholarly books are not profitable, and usually pay nothing or next to nothing. In lots [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:35:31-04:00July 4th, 2012|Book Discussions, Reader’s Questions|

My Bible Introduction

As predicted, I began work on my Introduction to the Bible yesterday, and it has been as intense as expected. This is to be a fifteen-chapter introduction of the entire Bible, Jewish Scripture (= Old Testament) and New Testament, Genesis to Revelation (including Apocrypha). What a scream…. The really difficult thing for this book – as for every book – is to make it just right for the audience. My audience in this case is not readers at Barnes and Noble (the general public) and not my colleagues among the scholars. It is 19 year olds and their teachers. What is tricky is the balancing act between the two. For their teachers (who have to be thought of, since they are the ones who decide which textbooks will be used for the courses, and the whole point is to get your textbook used), I have to be knowledgable, scholarly and academically respectable, well organized, clear, and insightful. For the 19 year olds I have to be interesting and worth the trouble of reading (and informative, [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-23T13:34:22-05:00July 2nd, 2012|Book Discussions, Public Forum|

My Next Book

Several readers have suggested that this kind of post should be available on the blog for everyone, not just members. I think they're right! ******************************************************************************************************************* The next two weeks are going to be highly intense for me, and I’m a bit worried about how I will be able to fit in my “blog time.” The reason: I will be throwing myself day and night into writing my next book. Background Part One: As I think I’ve mentioned on the blog before, I try to write three different kinds of books for three different audiences. This keeps life interesting and varied for me. First, I write books for scholars, in which I try to advance serious scholarship, speaking the language that works with my colleagues who have PhD’s in the field and who are deeply conversant with all the ancient and modern languages and with all the major critical and historical issues. My most recent work of this kind is due out in October: Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in the Early Christian [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-23T15:42:58-05:00June 30th, 2012|Book Discussions, Public Forum|

Q & A with Ben Witherington: Part 10 (the last!)

CONTINUATION! Ben Witherington, a conservative evangelical Christian New Testament scholar, has asked me to respond to a number of questions about my book Did Jesus Exist, especially in light of criticism I have received for it (not, for the most part, from committed Christians!). His blog is widely read by conservative evangelicals, and he has agreed to post the questions and my answers without editing, to give his readers a sense of why I wrote the book, what I hoped to accomplish by it, and what I would like them to know about it. He has graciously agreed to allow me to post my responses here on my blog, which, if I’m not mistaken, has a very different readership (although there is undoubtedly some overlap). It’s a rather long set of questions and answers – over 10,000 words. So I will post them in bits and pieces so as not to overwhelm anyone. The Q is obviously his, the A is mine. Some of Ben Witherington’s most popular books are The Jesus Quest, and The [...]

BDEhrman2020-12-02T00:11:16-05:00June 29th, 2012|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, Early Judaism, Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters|

The Hebrew Bible and Its Sources

QUESTION: Do you have a suggestion for a book concerning the OT's construction? I believe in the History of God (by K. Armstrong) she mentioned that there were about five distinct writers for the OT. Is this the scholarly view and do you have a book suggestion to delve deeper into it? RESPONSE: Right! The Old Testament (for Christians; otherwise: the Jewish Scriptures, the Hebrew Bible; the Tanakh – these are all more or less synonyms.) It’s been on my mind a lot lately. Right now, my current writing project is a college-level textbook on the entire Bible, Genesis to Revelation. This seems to me to be way too much to cram into a semester, but as it turns out, something like half the colleges in the country teach biblical courses this way, rather than having Hebrew Bible in one semester and New Testament another. And, in my judgment, the textbooks currently available for the course are not as good as they should be. So my publisher, some years ago, urged me to write [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:36:13-04:00June 25th, 2012|Book Discussions, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reader’s Questions|

Some Reading Suggestions on the New Testament

QUESTION: I've enjoyed reading "Jesus Interrupted" and "Misquoting Jesus". I am also listening to two of The Teaching Company courses you recorded - "The New Testament" and "Lost Christianities". Here is my question: Can you suggest additional books by other authors that provide balanced information on the New Testament? Such a bibliography would be a nice addition to your web site. RESPONSE: Ah yes! It’s important to hear various (balanced) views. I tell my students this and they sometimes are surprised, since they think that I imagine that my view is the only one worth hearing! But in my textbook on the New Testament (The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings) I provide suggestions for further reading at the end of each of the thirty chapters, for each relevant topic. I include, in virtually every chapter, an important book that I completely disagree with. Students, of every age, should get a range of perspective, weigh evidence, and make a decision for themselves. FOR THE REST of this Response, go to [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:38:30-04:00June 17th, 2012|Book Discussions, Reader’s Questions, Teaching Christianity|

Q&A With Ben Witherington: Part 1

Ben Witherington, a conservative evangelical Christian New Testament scholar, has asked me to respond to a number of questions about my book Did Jesus Exist, especially in light of criticism I have received for it (not, for the most part, from committed Christians!). His blog is widely read by conservative evangelicals, and he has agreed to post the questions and my answers without editing, to give his readers a sense of why I wrote the book, what I hoped to accomplish by it, and what I would like them to know about it. He has graciously agreed to allow me to post my responses here on my blog, which, if I’m not mistaken, has a very different readership (although there is undoubtedly some overlap). It’s a rather long set of questions and answers – over 10,000 words. So I will post them in bits and pieces so as not to overwhelm anyone. The Q’s are obviously his, the A’s mine. Some of Ben Witherington’s most popular books are The Jesus Quest, and The Problem with [...]

BDEhrman2020-12-17T23:39:40-05:00June 6th, 2012|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Mythicism|

At the Beach (2): Reflecting on Books

One of my favorite parts of the beach (in addition to the walks, the eating, the drinking, the talking, the sleeping) is thinking about books. The novels I’m reading, the books I’m writing. The books I learn about from Sarah and Dale. What I pick up from these two is really something. Sarah in particular is a voracious reader; I’ve never met anyone or seen anything like it before. This week she is reading through the novels of Elizabeth Taylor (not the American actress! The British novelist, who wrote twelve, evidently amazing, novels). And the nice thing about Sarah is that I almost never can read a book she hasn’t read. This week I was devouring Vanity Fair. Oh yes, she was examined on it for her Alevels (back when she was, like 17, before heading off to read English at Oxford. And yes, she can still talk about it….) Among other things, since this beach holiday always comes at the end of the school year, I spend some time thinking back over what I’ve [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-27T16:26:19-04:00May 27th, 2012|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Did Jesus Exist as Part One

Writing Did Jesus Exist was an interesting task. For one thing, before writing the book, like most New Testament scholars, I knew almost nothing about the mythicist movement. I think mythicists themselves find this very frustrating, that their work is not taken seriously – in fact is not really even known – by precisely the scholars they would most like to convince. But that’s just the way it is. Many scholars have heard of G. A. Wells, who for years has propounded a mythicist view (of sorts: he actually thinks there was a man Jesus, but he is essentially unrelated to the Christ of Christian tradition). And Robert Price has a PhD in the field and wrote a bona fide scholarly book The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man. But scholars who know about the mythicists – e.g. by reading the second edition of Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus, where he effectively disposes of the mythicists of his day – whether for good reason or not, simply do not take them seriously. And many scholars [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:43:57-04:00May 5th, 2012|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Mythicism|

A Recent Interview

Here, for anyone interested, is a link to a recent interview I did (2012). It is relatively short (Q&A via email), but it covers a range of topics, with some really terrific questions, I thought. http://www.theporpoisedivinglife.com/porpoise-diving-life.asp?pageID=657 Post Update 10/2014: The original post resided on now an expired blog "The Porpoise Diving Life: Reality for the Rest of Us or Picking Up Where Purpose-Driven Peters Out" moderated by Bill Dahl, who interviewed me after the printed release of "DID JESUS EXIST?". The following interview was fully restored from the Internet Archive Way Back Machine by my blog support. ______________________________________________________________________________ First, allow me to express our sincere thanks to Dr. Bart D. Ehrman of UNC - Chapel Hill for agreeing to this interview. Thanks also to Julie Burton, Publicity Director at HarperOne in San Francisco. His most recent book is "Did Jesus Exist?" (HarperOne 2012). First, my review of the book: This, I believe, is one of the MOST IMPORTANT books the vast majority of purported Christians will never read. Why? Because most have a self-confessed understanding of Jesus wrapped up in a tidy [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-14T23:36:25-05:00May 2nd, 2012|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Public Forum|

Response to Carrier

A lot of people have been asking me when I will be replying to Richard Carrier's full-frontal assault (!) on my book. I've started to reply in a couple of posts (maybe some haven't noticed....), but I hope to have a fuller set of comments soon, on his charges of "Errors of Fact." I know what I want to say, but am simply overwhelmed right now with other things to do. Long story, I won't bore you with it. But I *hope* to have a fairly sizeable posting on the topic by Wednesday (I'm saying this here so I don't need to reply individually to everyone who has asked). I have decided that I will post it on the Public Forum, since I really do take his charges of scholarly incompetence seriously and feel that I need to address them. In the meantime, someone forwarded to me the following post on R. Joseph Hoffmann's blog. I think it's pretty good and amusing and worth reading. I don't think I've ever met Hoffmann, but I've known [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-14T23:38:50-05:00April 24th, 2012|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Public Forum|

Richard Carrier on The Huffington Post Article (1)

I began to write replies to Richard Carrier’s rather heated response to my Huffington Post article before his now more extensive review of my book appeared on his blog. I will first reply in a series of posts to the first response, and then deal with the more extensive and, well, overly heated (!) later response. This was my first response: Richard Carrier has written a rather intemperate reaction to my piece in the Huffington Post in which I summarize, in about a thousand words, some of the major points I make in my new book Did Jesus Exist (361 pages! It is not easy to condense that much material in three pages!). One thing he objects to most vehemently to is my claim that there are no scholars trained in the relevant fields of academic inquiry (e.g., New Testament; early Christianity) and teaching at a recognized institution of higher learning who takes the position that he and his fellow mythicists take, that Jesus never existed. I can understand why Carrier is so upset. He [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-27T16:01:15-04:00April 21st, 2012|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

Latest HarperOne Book: Did Jesus Exist?

Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth Book Publication Date: March 20, 2012 Large numbers of atheists, humanists, and conspiracy theorists are raising one of the most pressing questions in the history of religion: "Did Jesus exist at all?" Was he invented out of whole cloth for nefarious purposes by those seeking to control the masses? Or was Jesus such a shadowy figure—far removed from any credible historical evidence—that he bears no meaningful resemblance to the person described in the Bible? In Did Jesus Exist? historian and Bible expert Bart Ehrman confronts these questions, vigorously defends the historicity of Jesus, and provides a compelling portrait of the man from Nazareth. The Jesus you discover here may not be the Jesus you had hoped to meet—but he did exist, whether we like it or not. Publisher Reviews “Ehrman’s clarity is something to emulate.” —Newsweek “Ehrman] is a lucid expositor.” —The New Yorker “[God’s Problem is a] serious inquiry. . . . Ehrman pursues it with an energy and goodwill that invite further conversation [...]

BDEhrman2024-12-13T10:17:05-05:00April 4th, 2012|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Public Forum|

Ben Witherington Critique

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 (in many instances, these critics pointed to claims that in fact I never claimed!) they might be in danger of losing their faith – or 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 critics. There were four entire books written to refute my discussion: (1) Dillon Burroughs, Misquotes in Misquoting Jesus: Why You Can Still Believe; (2) Timothy Paul Jones, Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies of Bart Ehrman's "Misquoting Jesus"; (3) Nicholas Perrin, Lost In Transmission?: What We Can Know About the Words of Jesus; and (4) Gregory Koukl, [...]

BDEhrman2021-01-10T00:57:34-05:00April 3rd, 2012|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

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