Bart’s Biography Archives - Page 6 of 11 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Beginning My Study of the Bible

This thread is becoming a tapestry. Its ultimate goal is to explain why, unlike most scholars, I ended up being able to write trade books and not only scholarly books. I’m taking a rather circuitous route to getting there (to change the metaphor). In my last post I discussed how and why I first became interested in the Bible, back as a fifteen year-old born again Christian. At that point I became convinced that only Bible-believing Christians (who were, of course, also born again) were the real Christians and any other people who claimed to be Christian (for example, most of the people who went to my own Episcopal church) were not *really* Christian, except in name only. Again, the reason I thought so is because the born-agains I hung around with all said so, and they seemed to know what they were talking about. Especially the fellow who “led me to Christ,” a mid-20s something fellow named Bruce. Bruce had a winsome personality and strong charisma, and he ran the Campus Life Youth for [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:29-04:00August 25th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Original Passion for the Bible

I have been talking about the areas of New Testament studies that were emphasized in my Masters and PhD programs at Princeton Theological Seminary, back in the late 70s and early to mid 80s. It was a long program, even though I sped through it a couple of years faster than most of my colleagues. The Masters program was three years (that is typical for a masters of divinity degree); my PhD was four years (most of my friends took five to seven). That’s full time work, for all those seven years. It’s a lot! Most of the training that most of my friends/colleagues had was in New Testament exegesis and theology, as I’ve described. My passions lay elsewhere, and my plan is to talk a little about them. But it just occurred to me this morning that my *original* interest in the New Testament was in fact exegesis and theology, even though I would not have used those terms for it. I had been mildly interested in the Bible even as a child. Very [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:13-04:00August 24th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Jesus’ Death and Resurrection for Salvation; Paul’s Collection; and My Sunday Mornings: Readers’ Mailbag June 11, 2016

Did all the early Christian groups agree that Jesus’ death and resurrection brought salvation? Why was Paul gathering money for the Christians in Jerusalem? And, well, what do I myself now do on Sunday mornings since I don’t go to church? This is this Weekly Readers’ Mailbag, with the normal range of unrelated but interesting questions! If you have a question you would like me to address, ask away! QUESTION: To which of the other early variants of Christianity does this creed (1 Cor 15:3-5) apply just as well as to the proto-orthodox? If it applies to most just as well, then Paul could have been the founder of the proto-orthodox variant of Christianity. RESPONSE: Ah, good question! Just to refresh everyone’s memory, this is the passage where Paul indicates that “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures” and that “he was raised from the dead on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.” So the question is: did all early Christians agree that it as the death and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:41-04:00June 11th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

A Personal Note and a Bit of a Bummer

This post is on a personal note and will be a bit self-indulgent, so if you’re looking for some information about the history or literature of early Christianity, this won’t the right time or place. As many of you know from earlier blog posts, I was supposed to go off on a research trip to Greece (Athens), Egypt (Alexandria), and Italy (Rome), in connection with my work on my current project, The Triumph of Christianity (or whatever we call it) dealing with the Christianization of the Roman Empire. My idea was to go to these places to see formerly “pagan” sites that were lost, changed, “converted” or destroyed by Christians in the fourth and later centuries (e.g., destroyed temples; shrines converted into churches; and so on). I was supposed to go today. But I have had to cancel the trip. Yesterday while starting to do some preliminary packing I bent over to pick up a bag of books, and my back went out. Bad. Not “Call-911-and-the-Morgue” bad, but bad enough. I had done something similar [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:23-04:00May 29th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why I Have Moved to a New Publisher

In my previous post I began to talk about how I have now changed publishers. This past book Jesus Before the Gospels, was my last with HarperOne, and now I have a two-book contract, for the next two books (obviously), with Simon and Schuster. A couple of readers have inferred that I have left Harper because I did not like the way they had handled my most recent book. That’s not the case at all. I made the decision before they even *started* handling the book. And let me stress, I have had a wonderful experience with Harper. They really are one of the truly great publishing houses in the world. Absolutely. How could I possibly complain? Since 2005 I have done seven books with them. One of those seven was a a book that none of us -- not me, not my editor, not my publicist, not anyone in the Harper hierarchy, not anyone on the planet – thought was going to be a big selling book. This was Did Jesus Exist? We originally [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:51-04:00April 11th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

A Less Weighty, Personal Matter

A lot of people have noticed that I’ve lost a good bit of weight, and have asked if I’m OK. So, this is obviously of limited interest to people on the blog! But instead of answering each query, I thought I would waste a blog post and say something more broadly. Or less broadly. The short answer is that I’m more than OK: I’m in the best shape I’ve been in for probably thirty years! So here’s the deal, for those who want to know, and even for those who don’t. This past April I went in for my annual physical and my blood tests came back: pre-diabetic. I thought there must be a mistake. Pre-diabetic?!? I didn’t have the typical indications: no history in the family, no high blood pressure, and so on. Well, I was a little overweight. OK, maybe you think more than a little, but still. I had been working out regularly, sleeping well, and was in good cardio-shape. But, well, I did have a bit of a beer gut. Years [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:19-04:00February 23rd, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Drew Marshall Show – How Jesus Became God

On May 17th, 2014 I appeared on The Drew Marshall Show with Professor Natalie Evans from University of Waterloo.. The broadcast was recorded from the studio of CJYE based in Oakville, Ontario Canada. Drew Marshall begins the show by discussing my spiritual journey initially and then focusing on his latest book "How Jesus Became God." Please adjust gear icon for high-definition.

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:01-04:00February 14th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Video Media|

Upcoming Debate!

This coming weekend, Feb. 12-13, I will be holding a debate at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary on the topic "How Did Jesus Become God?" They are calling it a "Dialogue," but that's just because they're being nice. It's actually a great group of people, even though, as you might imagine, we agree on very little when it comes to matters of faith. My worthy opponent is Michael Bird. You may have heard of him. He is the author of The New Testament in Its World, and Introducing Paul: The Man, His Mission and His Message, among other books. Back when I published How Jesus Became God, he was the one who edited the response book that came out the same day, How God Became Jesus. He wrote one of the articles in the book. We will both be staking out our claims on Friday night. The next day are papers delivered by scholars we have hand-chosen for the event, two each: mine are my good friends Jennifer Knust (Boston University) and Dale Martin [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:18-04:00February 8th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Am I Converting to Islam?

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 to get a surprise from you soon. I asked him how so, and he said that you would be reverting to the Muslim faith. Apparently, reverting is something like converting according to him. I asked him how he knew this information, and he said a friend of his (a friend that he only knows through FB) that is a neighbor of yours said you were very impressed with the Quran and that you haven't made it public about reverting, but you would be soon. It took me a couple of days to find out the name of this person who is supposedly your friend, [...]

Diane2025-09-10T13:07:14-04:00January 20th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Christians, Muslims, and God: Wheaton College in the News

I am sure that many of you have heard of the recent incident involving Christianity and Islam at Wheaton College, my alma mater, an evangelical liberal arts college outside of Chicago. Several readers have asked me about it. Here is a typical query: QUERY: Wheaton College was in the news this past week. Apparently one of the professors was suspended because she claimed that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Also, she wore a hijab to show solidarity with Muslims. You can read more about it at http://thinkprogress.org/education/2015/12/16/3732884/wheaton-suspends-professor-same-god/ I have believed the same, that the Christian God and the Muslim God are one and the same. Could you comment on this? RESPONSE: Let me start by saying that I deeply enjoyed and highly valued the education I received at Wheaton. At the time – and still today, I’m sure – it was considered the premier liberal arts college in the evangelical Christian tradition. Its evangelical credentials were and are completely bona fide. Students there were all to agree to the evangelical doctrinal position [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:45-04:00December 21st, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations, Religion in the News|

Readers’ Mailbag December 18, 2015

It is time for my weekly Readers’ Mailbag. If you too have a question you would like me to address – on much of anything at all! – let me know, either by sending me an email or by commenting on this post. I’ll be dealing with two questions today, one on dealing with where apocalyptic views came from, the other with my personal experience as a born-again Christian who had been raised Episcopalian. ********************************************************************************************* QUESTION: Was there something in the air roughly 2000 years ago that gave rise to apocalyptic beliefs? Was the world uniquely viewed as a ‘hell on earth’ requiring imminent Godly intervention, or are such views one of those ‘hardy perennials’ that exist all the time with deluded individuals perceiving themselves as possessing unique insight into the mind of God and so qualified to opinions on The Plan? RESPONSE: I suppose the answer is both Yes and Yes! There certainly was a historical and cultural context from which apocalypticism emerged. Scholars of ancient Judaism have traced the origins of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:45-04:00December 18th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Early Judaism, Reader’s Questions|

Readers’ Mailbag December 11, 2015

Time again for my weekly Readers’ Mailbag. I have three questions to deal with today, one that is substantive and about the New Testament, one about my personal life as an evangelical turned agnostic, and one about my views of the beginnings of life! Quite a mix. As questions occur to you, please feel free to ask, either in a comment on this post or in an email. If it’s something I can handle, I will add your question to the list. QUESTION: You have pointed out that Jesus was rejected by his family, and by his listeners in Nazareth and other towns & villages of Galilee. What do you think is the main reason for this widespread rejection? Is it because of his apocalyptic message? RESPONSE: This question gives me the opportunity to make an important distinction that I’m afraid I have not always been careful enough to make on the blog. It is the distinction between the literary reading of a text and the question of historical reality. When I have [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:32-04:00December 11th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Do I Have a Grudge Against Dr. Bruce Metzger?

QUESTION: A more personal question: did you have a grudge against Dr. Bruce Metzger? I have always seen conservative textual critics and scholars pit you against Dr. Metzger's views. RESPONSE: When I first read this question I was very surprised indeed. A grudge against Bruce Metzger??? Metzger, as many readers of this blog know, was my teacher and mentor, and I never had anything but the most profound and utmost respect for him, from the moment I first had the privilege of meeting him until the time of his death – and still today. Dr. Bruce Metzger - The Greatest New Testament Scholar in North America I don’t think there’s anyone in the known universe who would disagree that Bruce Metzger was the greatest NT textual scholar ever to come out of North America. I first heard about him when I was an undergraduate at Wheaton College. I was taking Greek there and began to be interested in pursuing the study of Greek manuscripts. I knew that Metzger had been one of the five editors [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:39-04:00September 20th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

My Original Foray into Textual Criticism

I have been explaining why “textual criticism,” the discipline that examines the surviving manuscripts of a text and then tries to reconstruct what the author originally wrote, had fallen on hard times by the time I got into the field. The main reason, I think, is that most New Testament scholars thought that all the serious work in the field had been done, that we pretty well knew what the “original text” said, and that all that was left were a few mopping up exercises. Moreover, to engage in those exercises required extraordinary expertise in remarkably recondite areas of inquiry. It was a lot of very hard work to deal with all the evidence, and the yield was so slight (change of a word or phrase here or there throughout the New Testament), that most scholars didn’t see why they should bother. Why not do more interesting things, like actually *interpret* the text? I was an exception to that rule. I was passionate about the field of textual criticism. Looking back, I think I became [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:21-04:00August 19th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

When I Started in Textual Criticism

For a very long thread now, I have talking about the textual criticism of the New Testament. As I said early on, “textual criticism” is a technical term. It does not refer to any kind of analysis of the texts of the New Testament; that is to say, it is *not* about the interpretation of the New Testament texts. It is specifically about how one goes about evaluating the surviving manuscripts (and versions, and church father quotations) of the New Testament in order to reconstruct what the authors originally wrote: (that is, it does not ask what the authors *meant* by what they wrote; it is instead concerned with establishing what, exactly, they did write. Textual criticism needs to be applied to every surviving writing – from Homer’s Iliad to Wordsworth’s poems to … the Bible. Without textual criticism you would not know what an author said. All of this discussion has been preliminary to answering the question asked by a reader concerning what I had in mind when I wrote my book The Orthodox [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:20-04:00August 14th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts|

A Thief in the Night

Discussing the mythology found in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 has made me remember something that happened some 35 years ago. It’s a pretty funny story. At the time I was still a church going Christian. The church I was attending was evangelical, but I was moving away from a conservative theology and its strict, literal interpretation of the Bible. I was becoming socially quite liberal, and was starting to take a more liberal view of the Bible. I still thought that in *some* sense it was the Word of God, but I did not think that it was infallible or true in every way. I had already come to see that parts of it contradicted one another, that there were historical implausibilities, and mistakes of various kinds. For me at that stage, the Bible was not so much the words God had given his human authors as it was a book that was written with real religious insight by special authors whose words were a medium through which God could deliver his message to humans. It wasn’t [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:20-04:00August 9th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

What I Saw at St. Catherine’s Monastery

In my last post I began to relate an anecdote about a traveling adventure I had several years ago, when giving lectures for a UNC trip to Egypt and Jordan with a stop at the famed St. Catherine’s monastery in the southern part of the Sinai peninsula, the place where Tischendorf had discovered the biblical manuscript codex Sinaiticus in the mid 19th century, and where a fire at the monastery in the 1970s had uncovered a hidden room found to contain manuscripts, including the pages from the Old Testament of the codex Sinaiticus that Tischendorf had not come away with from the monastery when he took the bulk of the manuscript with him back to Russian. (That is the longest sentence I’ve ever produced on the blog; it’s because I’m reading Proust right now….) For me, one of the highlights of this trip was to be a visit to the monastery, a place that I had wanted to see for years. It is located in a completely barren location in the wilderness and is the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:45-04:00June 15th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

St. Catherine’s Monastery

In my previous post I talked about Constantin von Tischendorf and his discovery of the Codex Sinaiticus in St. Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai peninsula in 1844 and then 1859. I have a personal anecdote to relate about the manuscript, one of the most interesting things every to happen to me on my various travels hither and yon. To make sense of the anecdote I need to provide some background information. As I indicated in my previous post, when Tischendorf discovered the codex Sinaiticus (as it was later called), he considered it to be the most ancient biblical manuscript then known to exist. He was right. It was. Tischendorf claimed that the manuscript was gifted to him by the head of the monastery. The monastery later claimed, and still claims to this day, that he stole it from them. The manuscript consists of... THE REST OF THIS POST IS FOR MEMBERS ONLY. If you don't belong yet, JOIN!!! It doesn't cost much at all, and every penny goes to charity!! The manuscript consists of both [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:45-04:00June 14th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Fourth-Century Christianity, New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Trip to Turkey

I am en route to Istanbul now with a layover, at this moment, as we speak, in London’s Heathrow airport. I’ll be in Turkey for nearly three weeks. This is a trip sponsored by my home institution, the General Alumni Association of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As is true of most universities, UNC has a vibrant travel program for alumni. Trips can be on the expensive side, but they are usually fantastic. As the guest lecturer, I get a free trip out of it. There are four people connected with the blog on the trip (maybe more: but there are four that I know of so far). (It may seem strange, but one does not have to be an alum of the university to go on an alumni trip!) It is intentionally a small group, just twenty-five of us. Turkey is one of the great places on earth, with a massive and varied cultural history. My lectures concern only one small part of the Turkish legacy. As it turns out, this [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:29-04:00June 3rd, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Resentment at Moody Bible Institute

OK, I want/need to bring this current thread – or rather, this current tangle of threads – to a close. I started out talking about what, looking back, I thought favorably about my three years at Moody Bible Institute, and what I felt resentful about it. This got me on to other things, which I was happy to do, since ten days ago I was at the end of the semester and the end of a book project (which happened simultaneously) and I was burned out and brain dead, and I couldn’t get up the energy to write anything about serious scholarship on the blog. But I’m recovered now, and can get on to more important things than me and my life. Which, frankly, would be most everything!! But I do need to spend this final post on the original thread to explain in very brief order what I am resentful about when it comes to my education as a 17-21 year old at Moody. There are three things, all of which I could expand [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:28-04:00May 21st, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

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