Bart’s Biography Archives - Page 10 of 11 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

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 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:53-04:00December 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 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:53-04:00December 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 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:39-04:00December 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 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:39-04:00December 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 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:38-04:00December 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 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:23-04:00November 9th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha|

The Apostolic Fathers: Serendipity Strikes

It seems that much that has happened in my professional life has been because of serendipity. Back when I was a believer, we called it Providence. (!) It’s how I got my first job at Rutgers in 1984; how I got my current position at UNC in 1988; how I got asked to write something other than a technical study involving the Greek manuscript tradition of the New Testament – a textbook for undergraduates (in the early 1990s), and thus, in a sense, started my publishing career; how I had my first bestselling book (Misquoting Jesus) become a NY Times bestseller in 2005; and, as it turns out, how I came to undertake my first major translation project, a new edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library (starting in 1999; published in 2003). I may tell the other stories at some point (I think I’ve told the first one already on the blog; I’ll have to look to see). For now, the Loebs. So in 1999 (I *think* that was the year [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:58-04:00October 28th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Proto-Orthodox Writers|

Books and Icebergs

A couple of snapshots of my life right now, followed by a comment. Snapshot One: Snapshot one: I’ve had a couple of people ask me why I’m reading so many books and articles about the resurrection right now, in preparation for my book How Jesus Became God. The resurrection, of course, is key to answering the question of the title, since if Jesus was thought to have been executed, and to have stayed dead, not only would there never have been anything like Christianity, but Jesus himself would have been thought of by posterity as, possibly, a Jewish preacher who ended up on the wrong side of the law, or a failed messianic pretender, or yet another prophet who met a bad end, or something else – but not God. The resurrection itself did not immediately make anyone think Jesus was God (at least that’s what I’m going to argue in the book), but without the resurrection, the thought process that eventually declared he was God would never have been set in motion. But back [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:07-04:00October 14th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions|

A Problem with My Textbook

Writing any kind of book whatsoever is really difficult. But each *kind* of book is difficult in its own way. I tend to write three kinds of books: scholarly works for scholars (not for general consumption!); popular trade books for broader audiences of intelligent adults; and textbooks for college kids. As I’ve repeatedly said, I’m now finishing up my new textbook on the Bible for introductory level classes. The audience is, basically, American 19 and 20-year olds. And I’m finding it hard! There are several things that are just inherently hard for this kind of thing. It is hard to take something that can so easily be made dull and lifeless and make it interesting and even intriguing. It is hard to write at the right level so that the readers are treated like adults but not too much knowledge is assumed. It is hard to take complicated ideas and concepts and make them simple and understandable enough for 19-year-olds who may be having the first introduction to the subject matter ever. It is hard [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:53-04:00September 20th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Teaching Christianity|

How My Loss of Faith Affected My Scholarship

As I was making the long series of posts about my relationship with Bruce Metzger, in response to a question of how he reacted to my loss of faith, I got a number of interesting questions from readers. One that particularly struck me – as it caused me to think for a bit – was about how my loss of faith affected my scholarship. That’s a really good question. And now that I’ve thought it over a bit, I think the answer is a little surprising. To my knowledge, my loss of faith has had almost ZERO effect on my scholarship. That seems weird, since my scholarship is on the New Testament and the history of early Christianity, and you would think that if I were no longer a believer, that it would certainly change how I look at both the NT and the history of the early church. But in fact, I don’t think I have had any change of scholarly views at all to accompany my loss of faith. FOR THE REST OF [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:53-04:00September 17th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Autobiographical. Metzger and My Loss of Faith

I have come now, by an unusually circuitous route, to answer the question that got me started in talking about my relationship with Bruce Metzger, my work for the NRSV Bible translation committee, my view of the NRSV as a translation, the textual problems of Luke 22:19-20 and 22:43-44 and, well sundry other things. The reader’s question was how Metzger responded to my loss of faith. When I first got to know him, I was a strong evangelical Christian. In the years before he died, I had become an agnostic. How did he respond to that. After all that I’ve written in these posts, I’m afraid the direct answer will be a bit of a disappointment. The answer is: I don’t know. FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click here for membership options. If you don't belong yet, JOIN!! Metzger and I never talked about either my faith or his. He was my teacher and I was his student, and we talked almost exclusively about scholarship: New Testament studies, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:53-04:00September 14th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Autobiographical: Back to Metzger and Me

After all the tangents and side-tracks, I can return now to my reminiscences of my relationship with Bruce Metzger. Perhaps I should say a few things about his personality, as I perceived and experienced it. I think everyone who knew him would say that he was a true Christian gentleman. He was respectful of all people, polite to a fault, and cordial. But he was not someone that anyone became intimate with. I am absolutely positive that I came to be closer to him than any PhD student he supervised in his 40 plus years teaching at Princeton Theological Seminary. He as much as told me so. I knew his wife and his two sons (a bit); he invited my family to Christmas dinner; for several weeks I lived with him and his wife in their home. But there was always a kind of distance to him as well. He never let down his hair. The best I can put it is that he was cordial rather than warm and intimate. He was a shy [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:53-04:00September 12th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Autobiographical. Metzger and Me: More on the NRSV

MORE REFLECTIONS IN RESPONSE TO THE QUESTION ABOUT MY RELATIONSHIP WITH MY MENTOR BRUCE METZGER ***************************************************************************************************************** Two rather humorous stories connected with my work as the administrative assistant for the revision of the Revised Standard Version. In that capacity I was, of course, present for the various deliberations of the committee. Among the many issues they discussed was what to call the new revision. Ultimately it stood in the tradition of the “Authorized Version” – the technical name of the King James Version. In 1881, the KJV underwent an “official” revision (i.e., authorized by the ecclesiastical authorities who owned the copyright) in the Revised Version. Its committee received a lot of flak for the changes it made. Even though it was an English revision, there were several Americans who were on the committee. As part of their terms of involvement, they agreed not to publish and American version of the translation (making changes as they saw fit and bringing spelling and punctuation into conformity with American usage) for 20 years; and so in 1901 was [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:39-04:00August 26th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

The NRSV Bible Translation Committee (Part 2)

A CONTINUATION OF MY POSTS OF MY RELATIONSHIP WITH BRUCE METZGER I served as one of the secretaries for the NRSV, as explained in my previous post, for a couple of years. It was not onerous work and was quite a privilege to be able to associate with some of the greatest biblical scholars and Semitic philologists of the time. I was, of course, a complete nobody. Some of the members of the committee treated me (and the other secretaries) as complete nobodies (these tended to be the less qualified and more insecure members of the committee; I won’t name names!); others treated me (and the others) in a dignified and respectful way, realizing that we were, after all, just graduate students, but knowing that we were advanced and heading into academic careers of our own. When I graduated from my PhD program I was teaching part time at Rutgers, but I did not have a full time, tenure-track position there. It was a slightly oppressive situation, as adjunct positions at universities typically are. I’ll [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:39-04:00August 23rd, 2012|Bart’s Biography, History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Autobiographical. Metzger and Me. The NRSV Bible Translation Committee

A CONTINUATION OF MY RECOLLECTIONS OF BRUCE METZGER, MY MENTOR. When I was still a graduate student in the PhD program at Princeton Theological Seminary, Metzger invited me to serve as a secretary for the committee that was producing the new revision of the Revised Standard Version translation of the Bible. The RSV (on which the new translation was to be based) had come out in 1952, and it had caused a huge furor at the time. It was an “official” revision of the King James Bible, that was supposed to update the language (English has changed a lot since 1611), to take into consideration new manuscript discoveries (especially important for the New Testament, since the KJV was based on only a few medieval manuscripts that were not of very high quality; hundreds of better ones had since been discovered, and to incorporate the findings of modern Biblical scholarship). The RSV of 1952 was an “official” translation because it was authorized by the National Council of Churches in the U.S. But in the opinion of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:39-04:00August 21st, 2012|Bart’s Biography, History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

My First Teaching Position

ONE OF MY RECENT POSTS ON BRUCE METZGER MADE ME THINK OF WHEN I GOT MY FIRST TEACHING JOB. NOT SURE WHY. BUT HERE ARE SOME REFLECTIONS ABOUT IT.... ********************************************************************************************************************** My students are alternatively comforted and chagrined to learn how hard it was for me to get a teaching position. It makes them feel good that they are not alone, but bad that they too might have a hard time – even harder. I was on the job market while I was writing my dissertation.. And even though there were job openings, I couldn’t get an interview to save my soul. Part of the problem was that my PhD was from a theological seminary, and a lot of the jobs were at secular institutions – state universities, private colleges, and the like. Most places simply don’t want to take a chance on someone who has been trained in a theological environment. Especially someone like me at the time. I had never set foot in a secular setting since high school! Starting when I was 17, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:38-04:00August 20th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Sad News: The Passing of Marvin Meyer

Yesterday was a sad day for me and for biblical/early Christianity scholarship. Marvin Meyer passed away, the victim of melanoma. He could not have been old – maybe in his early 60s. He was a superb scholar and one of the most generous, affable, energetic, personable scholars you would ever hope to find. Marvin was the Griset Professor of Bible and Christian Studies at Chapman University and Director of the Albert Schweitzer Institute I knew about Marvin’s work for many years before I met him. He was some years older than me and was well established in the field before I showed up on the scene. I think the first work of his I used was his translation of Coptic Magical Texts. Coptic is an ancient Egyptian language, in which a large number of important works were translated in antiquity; in many instances, these translations are the only forms of the text that we have available. This is true of these magical texts that we have, which are fascinating and of real importance for scholars [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:24-04:00August 19th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Autobiographical. Metzger and Me. The Dissertation Defense

I CONTINUE HERE WITH MY REMINISCENCES OF MY INTERACTIONS AND RELATIONSHIP WITH MY MENTOR, BRUCE METZGER ********************************************************************************************************************* In almost (but not absolutely) all PhD programs in this country, the doctoral candidate has do have an “oral defense” of the dissertation. If s/he successfully defends, the PhD is then granted. Here at UNC, the defense is conducted in front of the five-person dissertation committee. Everyone on the committee has read the dissertation – carefully, in theory – and the defense is designed to see if, well, the thesis is defensible. In other words, faculty members do not hold back but probe deeply into the work to see if there are any flaws in it. If a student fails the defense, s/he has to revise the dissertation and try again. Even if it is considered passable, revisions of some sort are often considered necessary. FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click here for membership options. If you don't belong yet, JOIN!! My own dissertation defense was in 1985. Metzger had [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:24-04:00August 16th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Reader’s Questions, Teaching Christianity|

Autobiographical. Metzger and Me: Finishing the Dissertation

SOME MORE ON MY RELATIONSHIP WITH BRUCE METZGER, ON FINISHING THE DISSERTATION Different dissertation advisors have different approaches to supervising a dissertation. Some are extremely hands on, to the point of working over every thought and every sentence. Not too many are like that, because if they were, they would never do anything else with their life. Plus, the idea is for the student to figure it out and get good at it. That takes some trial and error. Other advisors go for the big picture and like to talk over the big ideas. Others basically don’t give a rip how the dissertation is coming along – they want to see it at the end, and when it’s done, they’ll tell the student whether it’s good enough or not. Others … well, there are lots of other approaches. Sometime I’ll explain mine, which is not quite any of the above. Metzger took an approach that other students may have found frustrating, but that was absolutely perfect for me. He basically let me do my own [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:24-04:00August 14th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reader’s Questions|

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