Bart’s Biography Archives - Page 4 of 11 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Did Paul Think Jesus’ Body Remained in the Grave? Mailbag July 14, 2017

I will address two very different questions in this edition of the Readers’ Mailbag. If you have a question you would like me to address, ask away, and I’ll add it to the list. QUESTION: I just finished reading scholar Gregory Riley’s Resurrection Reconsidered. He presents the position that people in the Greco-Roman world had a very different perception about spirits (ghosts) than we do today. Riley states that people living in the first century Roman Empire believed that dead people frequently came back to visit the living, appearing in “bodies” that looked exactly like their former fleshly bodies, and having the same capabilities of their former fleshly bodies: capable of eating food, drinking wine, and even engaging in sex…even sex with the living! The ONLY difference between a spirit body and a fleshly body was that USUALLY a spirit body was impalpable (could not be touched). Riley believes that Paul would have been shocked to hear about an empty tomb as he would have believed that Jesus’ fleshly body would OF COURSE [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:04-04:00July 14th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Teaching about How The Bible Explains Suffering

I’m not sure exactly when the suffering of others came to pose a problem for my own faith; but I do remember clearly when the issues first crystalized for me. I started my teaching career at Rutgers University while I was a PhD student working on my dissertation in 1984. It was a fantastic job for me (teaching at a very good research university, without yet even having my degree), but it was not tenure-track. I was a poorly-paid adjunct instructor, teaching two or three courses a semester, in a range of areas: Introduction to the New Testament; Introduction to the Hebrew Bible; The Life and Letters of Paul; The Gospel of John; and so on. I had never taught any of these courses before, of course, since this was just the beginning of my career. And back then my idea was that when I gave lectures, I would actually write out them out, word for word, by hand (I didn’t own a computer then), on yellow pads. If I was teaching three courses – [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:46-04:00July 7th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Role in Editing My Most Important Book that No One Has Heard Of.

Just one question in this week’s blog, about a book that I edited that most readers of the blog have never heard of, let alone read, but that is probably one of the most important books I’ve ever been involved with. QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman, in your first and second edition of The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis that you co-edited with Dr. Michael Holmes, what was your role in editing, especially since some articles were beyond your admitted expertise? - Dr. Michael Holmes is also the author of The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations and The Greek New Testament, among other works. RESPONSE: This is actually a terrific question, but before addressing it directly I need to provide a bit of background. The book this person is asking about is in the field of “textual criticism” in its technical sense, that is, the study of how to reconstruct the original text of the New Testament given the fact that we don’t have the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:45-04:00June 25th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Why I Was Afraid to Become an Agnostic

I started feeling the tug toward agnosticism sometime during my PhD program. I remember clearly a particular moment, and it was, somewhat ironically, while I was serving as the pastor of the Princeton Baptist Church. Even though I was incredibly busy at the time (I was taking a full load of graduate seminars, preparing to take my PhD exams, serving as a Teaching Assistant for a class taught by Bruce Metzger, AND serving as the pastor of the church) I enjoyed the ministry very much. Well, parts of the ministry. I have never enjoyed transition rituals very much: baptisms, weddings, funerals, and the like. And of course pastoring a church involves doing such things. And I wasn’t thrilled with visiting the sick – I was a bit out of my depth on that one. But I did very much enjoy interactions with the people I worked with in the church, and I especially liked preaching nearly every week. I remember thinking at the time, though, that ... Only Members can read the rest of this [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:45-04:00June 23rd, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Even Bother Being a Liberal Christian?

Some people have asked me, and I have asked myself, why, as a liberal Christian, did I continue to “believe,” or at least to act as if I believed? I didn’t think Jesus was literally born of a virgin and I wasn’t sure if he was physically raised from the dead. I didn’t think that he existed before he came into the world, let alone that he had been God from eternity past. I didn’t think there was a hell and I didn’t know about heaven. I believed in the Big Bang and evolution, not in creation. I thought the Bible was filled with mistakes, historical inaccuracies, contradictions, and discrepancies, that its authors were fully human and were (simply) providing their views of this that or the other thing. So why did I go to church every week, say the creed, sing the hymns, say my prayers, confess my sins, take communion, teach adult education, and all the rest? I’m not sure I’ve ever explained this to anyone before, though I certainly explained it to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:45-04:00June 22nd, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

More of What I Believed When I Was a Committed (non-fundamentalist) Christian

Yesterday I started explaining what it was I believed when I left fundamentalism but remained a committed Christian – one who realized that the Bible was not at all an infallible book but was still a person of faith. I’ve never talked about any of this before in print, either on the blog or in any of my books. One reason for wanting to do so now is that I think I must have given some people the false impression that I went from being a fundy to being an agnostic in one step, that once I came to see that my fundamentalist views were just wrong, I immediately became a non-believer, having no other options to fall back on. In fact it didn’t happen that way, at all. I was a committed Christian for many years after giving up on conservative evangelicalism. Here is more of what I believed at the time. The ultimate teaching of the Gospel was love. Love of God. Love of neighbor. Jesus not only taught this ethic and lived it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:27-04:00June 11th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

What I Believed as a Committed but but non-Fundamentalist Christian

It is a little hard to encapsulate what I thought, believed, and practiced during those years when I had moved away from being a hard-core Bible-believing conservative (as I was in college) but remained a committed Christian (as I was for years after that). The change did not come overnight so that one day I was one thing (a fundy) and the next I was something else (a liberal). It was a gradual change marked by important moments and key shifts. But let me pick a time in my life and try to explain what my faith meant to me at that time. This will take a couple of posts. Quick biographical background: when I was doing my PhD in New Testament Studies, a lot of things happened to me personally that affected my faith. My studies, of course, were one thing. But outside of that was my daily life. I was attending the small but interesting Princeton Baptist church, which was part of the American Baptist denomination (very different, and far more diverse, than [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:27-04:00June 10th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

What I Came To Believe About the Bible

It is a little difficult for me to describe what I believed after I gave up on my view that the Bible was the inerrant revelation from God with no mistakes in it whatsoever. In part that is because there was a long transition period, and over time my beliefs evolved as I studied more, talked with friends and colleagues more, encountered more ideas, thought more. I was in the perfect situation for this kind of study and reflection. I was already a PhD student at Princeton Theological Seminary and I was literally surrounded by people who spent most of their days, every day, reading, studying, talking, and thinking about the Christian faith from both a personal and an academic perspective. I spent every day for lunch with people doing research and thinking about the Christian faith. Every day I read significant books and articles on everything having to do with ancient Christianity. Every day I had conversations about religious topics – mainly about the academic study of the New Testament and early Christianity, but [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:27-04:00June 6th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

What Really Happened to Me: Demythologizing the New Testament

As I suggested in yesterday’s post, the reason I’ve been trying to show that biblical scholars who still revere the Bible but recognize that it is, even so, filled with mistakes, discrepancies, and contradictions is to explain what happened to my faith once I realized that the Bible was not the inerrant revelation from God that I had always assumed it was. It is amazing how often people tell me – usually with a touch of personal complacency – that the reason I lost my faith was that I was a fundamentalist. If I had only had a more reasonable understanding of the faith (like *them* for example!) then the problems I encountered would not have led me to become an agnostic. In their view, I am at heart still a fundamentalist. In their view I had thought (as a fundamentalist) that if every word in the Bible can’t be completely true and accurate, then none of it can be true and accurate, and that for that reason, once I realized there were mistakes in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:27-04:00June 5th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Have I Stopped Explaining How I Lost My Faith? Readers’ Mailbag June 4, 2017

I will be dealing with two questions in this weeks’ Readers’ Mailbag. The first is about what happened to that thread I was supposed to be doing on why I lost my faith (!) and the other about whether Mark’s account of Jesus’ death contains an inner discrepancy (one verse flat out contradicting another). QUESTION: I'm a bit confused. A few weeks ago you said you were going to write about what you tell your students on the last day of school about why you lost your faith, but it seems you may have gotten off track, unless I missed a post or two…. Anyway, I am sorry I seem to have missed the posts that were about what you say to your class each year about why you lost your faith. I hope you will repeat it sometime soon. RESPONSE: Ha! Right! I can see how this could be confusing. When I started this thread I did not know it was even going to *be* a thread. I had planned to make [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:27-04:00June 4th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why It Didn’t Happen that Way. The Stories of Jesus’ Birth

In the previous post I began to discuss (as a review for many readers of the blog) the historical problems with the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke. The point of the discussion is that the stories cannot be accepted as historically accurate. This is a huge issue mainly for fundamentalist Christians and conservative evangelicals – and those they have managed to persuade that if a story does not describe what actually happened, then it is worthless and should simply be thrown out. For others – whether theologians, pastors, parishioners, or simply lay-folk interested in Christianity – the stories are important for other reasons, for example in the ideas they are trying to convey. In any event, here is the second post dealing with the historical problems that arise when you compare the two accounts to one another. ***************************************************** It may be possible to reconcile these accounts if you work hard enough at it. I suppose you’d have to say that after Joseph and Mary returned to Nazareth, as in Luke, they decided to move [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:27-04:00June 2nd, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

Becoming a Non-Fundamentalist Christian

After realizing that the Bible does in fact contain mistakes, I became a non-fundamentalist Christian and remained one for many years. It is not easy to describe exactly what I believed “at the time”. It was a good expanse of time and there was a kind of transition period in which I evolved into the kind of open-minded, reflective believer that I became and remained, again for some years. In the early stages, I suppose you could describe me as a fairly liberal evangelical. There are lots of Christians like that in the world, and most of my friends at Princeton Seminary were in that mold. How does one describe that kind of Christian? The Evolution of a Non-Fundamentalist Christian These Christians very much, and wholeheartedly, think that God speaks through the Bible. He uses it to communicate with his people, not to give them science lessons. To instruct that about how they should live and be. But what really happened on the third day of creation? God wants his people to show love to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:10-04:00May 16th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Fundamentalism and the Truth of the Bible

I have recently received a number of inquiries about why realizing there may be mistakes in the Bible might lead someone to become an agnostic. Here is one that came a few days ago: QUESTION: I want to thank you for your extensive work in explaining … your journey from believing that the bible contained no errors to proving the bible is not inerrant and simply the work of human writers. What I would like to be explained is the necessary logic to go from believing that the bible is not inerrant or the "word of God" to believing there is no God. RESPONSE My view of the matter may seem odd to a lot of people, but it is nonetheless held by most critical scholars of the Bible and trained theologians. What is the “necessary logic to go from believing that the bible is not inerrant … to believing there is no God? There is no necessary logic at all. I have never thought that ... To See The Rest of this [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:10-04:00May 15th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

How I First Realized There Are Mistakes in the Bible

I have told the story before of how I first came to realize there might be mistakes in the Bible. Rather than paraphrasing it again, I’ll simply reproduce the account as I presented it the first time I went public with my faith journey, back in my 2005 book Misquoting Jesus. Here is what I said there: ************************************************************** Upon arriving at Princeton Theological Seminary, I immediately signed up for first-year Hebrew and Greek exegesis (= interpretation) classes, and loaded my schedule as much as I could with such courses. I found these classes to be a challenge, both academically and personally. The academic challenge was completely welcome. But the personal challenges that I faced were emotionally rather trying. As I indicated, already at Wheaton I had begun to question some of the foundational aspects of my commitment to the Bible as the inerrant word of God. That commitment came under serious assault in my detailed studies at Princeton. I resisted any temptation to change my views, and found a number of friends who, like me, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:10-04:00May 9th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Resistance to Change at Princeton Seminary

Several people have asked me to unpack what I meant in the last sentence of yesterday’s post because, well, it doesn’t make sense. What I was trying to say was that I had a crisis of faith in Seminary – as many people do, as it turns out – because I thought I could prove my faith claims were true (an Enlightenment position: “truth” is objective and can be proved), but the more research I did, the more I found that the facts seemed to contradict my faith claims (as many scholars of the Enlightenment had long realized). Let me explain. First I want to stress – in case anyone queries me on it (as people do) – that my faith ultimately, in my own head at least, was based on what I took to be a personal relationship with God through Christ. How personal? We talked all the time. So, on one level, my faith was not simply a set of propositions that I thought could be demonstrated (God exists; Christ is the Son [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:09-04:00May 8th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Encounter with the Enlightenment

I know I have talked about how I lost my faith before. But I’ve never talked about it in the terms I’m going to be describing it in this post and the next. It has to do with what happened with my notion of “truth” when I went to Princeton Theological Seminary. Princeton Theological Seminary is not administratively connected to Princeton University – it simply is in the same town, across the street, and has a shared ancient history. What is now Princeton University started off in the mid-18th century as a place to train Christian ministers. Eventually the school split, with the Seminary, under a different administration, becoming its own entity. By the time I went there as a 22-year-old in 1978, Princeton was a leading a Presbyterian seminary whose mission is to train ministers for the Presbyterian Church. I had never even stepped foot in a Presbyterian church and really knew almost nothing about it, or about Princeton Seminary. But I suspected that many of the students and faculty there were not really [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:09-04:00May 7th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

What Happened Next: My Life After Moody Bible Institute

Here I’ll continue relating what I told my New Testament class the last period, when I was explaining what I personally believed and why (for anyone who wanted to come). For me, as I indicated in the last post, going to Wheaton College (Billy Graham’s alma mater) was a step toward liberalism. Students there were not as gung-ho about the Bible – well, fanatical about the Bible – as we had been at Moody. They were evangelical Christians, all of them so far as I could tell, yes, and they were committed to the inspiration of the Bible, most of them even the infallibility of the Bible. But their academic interests almost always resided elsewhere. That’s because Wheaton was a liberal arts college, and most students were majoring in English, history, psychology, biology, and so on. The students I hung around with most were in fields like philosophy and classics and, of course, my own major, English. I chose to major in English for a rather missionary reason. I wanted to ... To See The [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:09-04:00May 5th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Life Story I Tell My Students

As I’ve indicated, my last class of the semester in my Introduction to the New Testament course is optional. In it I explain to anyone who wants to come what I really believe and why I believe it. The way I do it is by telling my life story, from childhood till today. That takes about twenty or twenty-five minutes, and then I answer any questions for the rest of the time. The questions could go on for hours – students have a lot of them – and some of the questions are very personal. But I try to answer them as directly and honestly as I can. The story I tell starts with me as a church-going Episcopalian as a child, committed to the church, saying the Creed, confessing my sins, believing in God and Christ, serving as an altar boy. And then in high school, I had a religious transformation. I started attending a Campus Life Youth for Christ meeting that involved a social event every week and ended with a spiritual lesson [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:09-04:00May 3rd, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Spilling the Beans on my Beliefs on the Last Day of Class

About fifteen years ago or so I started doing something completely different on my last day of class in my New Testament course. I have a lecture scheduled for then, of course, but the scheduled lecture rehashes material that is earlier covered in the class and that students can pick up easily from their reading – so it’s not one of the crucial class periods of the semester. Sometimes that last class is not even that (depending on how the semester schedule works out) but is a kind of review session. But about two weeks before the end, I tell the students that I have an option for the last day, and I’ll let them vote on it. The option is to do the class as scheduled or, instead, to have a non-required class (no taking of attendance, no reason to come unless they want to) in which I explain what I myself really believe and why I believe it. That is of some relevance to the class, of course, since the beliefs I’ll be [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:09-04:00May 2nd, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Teaching Religion in a Secular Environment

This little diversion of a thread was going to be a simply one-post on the talk I’ll be giving today to my undergraduate Introduction to the New Testament class, where I spill the beans about what I personally believe and why. But it’s turned into a four-post mini-thread on my views of the separation of church and state. So far it’s been all background – how my twelve years of higher education were all done in Christian confessional contexts, not in secular schools, even though all of my teaching has been in research universities. Go figure. As I indicated in my previous post, as a PhD student I tried to broaden my range significantly so it would not look like I could do nothing except for textual criticism, the study of the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament with the ultimate goal of figuring out what the biblical authors actually wrote. My intention all along was to find a teaching position either in a divinity school/seminary (for the training of pastors) or in a Christian [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:52-04:00April 26th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Previous 1···345···11 Next