Bart’s Biography Archives - Page 7 of 11 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

My Fundamentalist Beginning

Lately I’ve been thinking a good deal about my completely ambivalent relationship to my past, in particular in relation to my education at Moody Bible Institute. In part my thinking has been set off by an email I received from my roommate and best friend at the time, and for years, who was the best man in my wedding and confidante and most closest male friend I had ever had. He has remained a committed evangelical Christian all these years and continues in ministry. We never have contact any more, but he reached out to me to say hey, and I’ve been flooded with memories and thoughts since. There is a very big part of me – probably the most noticeable part – that is deeply resentful toward my time at Moody. But there is another part that occasionally arises to the surface, which realizes that in many ways those three years were very good for me. Without them, I would not be who I have become and what I am. Sometimes I forget that. [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:44:24-04:00May 11th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why I Shifted My Research Plans

In my last post I started explaining how I came to work on issues of memory. My plan had been something else, to write a detailed commentary on the Gospel of Peter and other early Greek Gospel fragments. I had been committed to do this for years, with a book contract with Fortress Press for their commentary series that is called Hermeneia. Just by way of background: when I was just out of graduate school, I vowed to myself that there were three kinds of books I would never, ever write. I would never write a textbook. I would never write a book on the historical Jesus. And I would never write a commentary. The reason for each was that there simply were too many of each kind of book out there already, and I simply didn’t want to tread where so many others had trod. So much for my vows. I did end up writing a textbook on the NT. That wasn’t my idea; my publisher twisted my arm and I agreed, and I [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:53:28-04:00March 30th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Non-Disclosure Agreement and the Gospel of Judas

I broke off the thread on the Gospel of Judas and the non-disclosure agreement that I had to sign at … at the point where I had to sign the non-disclosure agreement! Here I resume. So the deal was this: in order to be allowed to see the manuscript, to examine it, to have access to a translation of it, to study the translation, and to write an essay based on it for the National Geographic’s intended book on the Gospel of Judas – all of this before anyone else in the universe (apart from Rodolphe Kasser who had access to the manuscript, and the people that he was working with to restore it) had a chance to see it – I had to agree not to tell anyone about it. The choice was this: I could agree not to tell anyone, and so be given access to the text and its translation; or I could decide not to agree and not be given access. I didn’t like the choice, but it was really a [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T14:07:11-04:00February 10th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Christian Apocrypha|

How I First Learned that the Gospel of Judas Had Been Discovered

I started this thread by mentioning a non-disclosure agreement I once had to sign, involving the Gospel of Judas. To explain the situation, I have been discussing how I first came to know about the existence of the text. After receiving an out-of-the-blue query about the Gospel of Judas I looked it up to refresh my memory: it was allegedly a book used by a group of Gnostics named the Cainites, a book that told the story of Jesus from the perspective of Judas Iscariot, his betrayer – not in order to malign Judas but, evidently, to celebrate his deed, since it was (somehow) to Jesus’ advantage. Soon after reading up on the Gospel (there was very little to read about it, since we didn’t have it; all we had were some comments in the writings of church fathers who opposed it, principally Irenaeus), I received a second phone call, this one from a person at National Geographic, asking what I knew about the Gospel of Judas. I obviously realized that something was up. So [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T14:07:30-04:00February 4th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Christian Apocrypha|

Non-Disclosure Agreements and the Gospel of Judas Iscariot

A number of people have asked me about scholars and non-disclosure agreements. This is tangentially related to the long thread I’ve just finished on the alleged first-centry copy of the Gospel of Mark. Scholars have told us it exists and that they have had something to do with it. We all *assumed* it was because they had actually seen it and probably studied it; turns out *that* was wrong. They almost certainly haven’t studied it and evidently haven’t seen it. Why do I say “almost certainly and “evidently”? Because they won’t tell us. And why won’t they tell us? Is it because they are mean-spirited? Unreliable? Boasters-but-not-doers? Liars? No, not at all. It’s because they’ve signed a non-disclosure agreement. So, what does that mean, and what do I think about it? It turns out that I’ve been in that boat myself – of having signed a non-disclosure agreement -- and later took a lot of heat for it, a few years ago. That had to do not with an alleged early manuscript of the New [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T14:07:47-04:00February 2nd, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Christian Apocrypha, Reader’s Questions|

Talks at the Smithsonian, March 21

My friends at the Biblical Archaeology Society sent this around to some people on their mailing list, announcing my talks on March 21 in Washington DC – talks not for them (the Biblical Archaeology Society) but for the Smithsonian. Here is the announcement, with the blurb and description of the talks. Maybe some of you can come! *********************************************** If you plan to be in Washington DC during March you might try to catch his lectures while you are here. To register for his appearance at the Smithsonian in Washington DC All-Day Seminar Great Controversies in Early Christianity: The Life and Death of Jesus: Saturday, March 21, 2015 - 9:30 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. : http://smithsonianassociates.org/ticketing/tickets/reserve.aspx?performanceNumber=230583. If you are a registered member of the Smithsonian the cost is $90.00 else the cost for Gen. Admission will be $130.00. Description of lectures Jesus of Nazareth is perennially in the news. Over the course of the past year, two books about his life and death became No. 1 New York Times bestsellers: Zealot by Reza Aslan and Killing Jesus [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-09T11:08:37-05:00January 28th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum|

Why Do I Devote Myself to Studying the Bible?

QUESTION: The one thing that I do not understand about you is that you have stated you have lost your faith. That being said, how do you continue to work in your field? Have you ever wanted to redirect your academic career to study other subjects? RESPONSE: I get this question a lot. On one level I understand it: if I don’t believe in the Bible, why would I dedicate my life to studying it, researching about it, writing about it, and teaching about it? From the perspective of someone who has strong feelings about the Bible – for example, as a believer who holds that the Bible is the word of God or as an atheist who thinks the Bible is the root of all kinds of evil – it may seem like a mystery that someone in my boat would be interested in spending such an enormous amount of time and effort in studying it. Or from the perspective of someone who is completely apathetic about the Bible: why would you bother? But [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-09T16:08:31-05:00December 13th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Don’t You Believe Like Your Teacher, Dr. Metzger?

QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman just out of curiosity, why do people pit you against your teacher Dr. Bruce Metzger? Did Metzger also find the construction of the originals impossible due to the late manuscript attestation and the inability to know what the original looked like? Or did your teacher, Dr. Metzger, disagree and hold to biblical inerrancy? RESPONSE: It’s a very good question and it has a very straightforward answer. The people who do this are all, to my knowledge, conservative evangelical Christians who find it upsetting over two of the things that I say: (1) that I am now no longer a believer because I do not think the Christian faith can adequately explain how a good and powerful God can be in control of this world when there is so much senseless pain, misery, and suffering in it and, completely unrelatedly (2) that since we do not have lots of early manuscripts of the New Testament (let alone the originals) there are places where we cannot know for sure what the authors originally wrote. [...]

BDEhrman2022-06-12T20:09:38-04:00November 23rd, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Why I’m To Be Pitied for Having Been the Wrong Kind of Fundamentalist

Several readers of this blog have pointed me to an article in the conservative journal First Things; the article (a review of a book by the evangelical scholar Craig Blomberg) was written by Louis Markos, an English professor at Houston Baptist University. The title is called “Ehrman Errant.” I must say, that did not sound like a promising beginning. I had never heard of Louis Markos before – had certainly never met him, talked with him about myself or my life, shared with him my views of important topics, spent time to see how he ticked and to let him see how I do. I don’t know the man, and he doesn’t me. And so it was with some considerable surprise that I read the beginning of his article. “I feel great pity for Bart Ehrman.” So, from someone I don’t know, that’s a bit of a shocker. I can understand why a friend of mine might feel some (but not great?) pity for me at some points of my life – when I had [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T16:28:08-04:00November 1st, 2014|Bart's Critics, Bart’s Biography, Public Forum|

A Text-Critical Dissertation

The point of this short thread dealing with my graduate training is to explain why it is that lots – probably most – New Testament scholars do not consider textual critics to be competent in a wide range of fields normally associated with New Testament scholarship. I know that must seem very strange to outsiders, but it’s the case. Textual critics are often thought of as a rather strange group of technicians without broad competency in the areas that other New Testament scholars are interested in – for example, the Jewish environment or the Greco-Roman worlds from which the New Testament emerged, the historical Jesus, the interpretation of and historical problems associated with the Gospels, the life and letters of the apostle Paul, the theology of the different NT writers, and on and on. The reason for this is that to be competently trained in textual criticism is a long and hard process and it’s very difficult to do that *and* to learn all the other things that most other NT scholars are competent and [...]

BDEhrman2020-12-29T01:07:27-05:00October 11th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts|

My Graduate Training (Textual Criticism??)

I saw my master’s thesis as the perfect assignment to get me grounded in the entire, complicated field of New Testament textual criticism. Ever since then I’ve been in favor of students writing master's theses, even if it is not required for a master’s program. For one thing, doing so gets you into the frame of mind that you need to be in when you get to the point of writing a dissertation at the PhD level – which for most students is the first time they write a book. The masters thesis is usually much shorter – say 100-120 pages. But the layout tends to be similar. Most theses I’ve been involved with, including my own, have entailed an introduction, three chapters, and a conclusion. So the student learns to think in terms of writing chapters, each of which has its own thesis and point; but all of them work together in order systematically to set forth the overarching thesis of the work. This is a hard transition for some students, who for their [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T16:30:09-04:00October 10th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Training as a Textual Critic

In some of my previous posts I’ve indicated that since I was known as a textual critic (one who worked with Greek manuscripts of the New Testament in order to determine both what the authors originally wrote and how the text came to be changed over the centuries) I was not widely seen as a candidate for writing a New Testament textbook for undergraduates. Several readers have expressed some perplexity over this. Aren’t textual critics, by their very nature, background, and training, proficient in the wider field of New Testament studies? The answer may surprise you: it may be that they should be, but many (at one time, most) are not. It’s a little hard to explain why, but I’ll try. As is my wont, I’ll start autobiographically. In my case, the great bulk of my graduate training actually had very little to do with textual criticism. When I came to Princeton Theological Seminary as a master’s student ) in 1978 (after I had finished my BA in English at Wheaton college), I was required [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-11T14:15:00-04:00October 9th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

Getting the Facts of My Life Straight

I have to admit, I sometimes get a bit tired of being the whipping boy for fundamentalist and conservative evangelical Christian apologists. If they would deal with my views head on and actually get the facts of my life right, it would be one thing. But when they publicly accuse me of holding, or having held, positions that I never did – when they are flat our wrong in what they say about me -- it gets under my skin. The first time I noticed this in a big way was when Craig Evans – a long time colleague and friend – indicated, in writing!, that the reason I had become an agnostic was that I came to realize that there were differences in our manuscripts of the New Testament. Good grief. I had known about differences in our manuscripts from the time I was sixteen years old!! I had studied them and known all about them in all the years I was a fundamentalist. These differences had nothing – Zero, Nada, Not a Thing [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-14T15:47:22-05:00October 6th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum|

My New Testament Textbook

I thought I would take a few posts to talk about what I’m working on these days – for the past month or so, with another month or so to go. As many of you know, I spent almost the entire summer doing nothing but reading books and articles about “memory” and related topics (such as the telling of stories in oral cultures) from a variety of perspectives: cognitive psychology, neurology (very low level!), anthropology (oral cultures and how they pass along their traditions), sociology (communal memory), folklore (urban legends, rumors, gossip), and so on. All of this was in preparation for my next trade book dealing with what we can say about the oral traditions of Jesus as they were passed along in the years before the Gospels were written. I am still leaving open the possibility of writing a scholarly monograph on a similar topic. But I have had to take a break from all that. And with huge reluctance. There are dozens and dozens of books and articles that I’m still desperate [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T16:33:16-04:00September 22nd, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Teaching Christianity|

How I Actually Write

I can now explain how I actually go about writing a trade book (how I do it with a scholarly book is a bit different, mainly because it is a much slower and laborious process). As I’ve indicated, before I start writing at *all*, I have already read everything that I have needed to read (nothing still left! Otherwise it’s a disaster), taken notes on everything, reviewed my notes assiduously, and made detailed and lengthy outlines of each chapter. Then I’m ready to go. The writing of the book itself is the only anxiety-producing, tense, emotionally difficult point of the entire process. I feel no nervousness or anxiety or dread in any of the other stages of the work – only in the writing. Moreover, this is far and away the most intense point of the process, where I completely go into a zone and live in an alternative universe. Different people have different views of how to write. Some scholars prefer to write slowly, carefully crafting every sentence, being sure that one sentence is [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T16:34:54-04:00September 11th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions|

How I Begin to Write

OK, I’m back from my tangent. This thread is about how I go about writing a trade book. So far I’ve discussed how I decide what to write on, how I imagine communicating with a popular audience about it, how I know where to begin reading, how I go about acquiring bibliography once I start, and how I try to read everything of relevance and take notes on it all. Now I can get to the writing process itself. For years I used to tell my graduate students what, in my opinion, was the best way to go about writing a book (when they were starting to work on their dissertations). To my knowledge, none of them ever took my advice. So I quit giving it. Not so much because I was disappointed but because I realized that everyone works differently. Then I met my now-wife Sarah and realized that some people work *completely* differently. Sarah could never do what I do (I’ll explain what that is in a moment). Her mind doesn’t work like [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-14T22:37:08-05:00September 10th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions|

How Do You Know What To Write About?

I continue here my thread on how I go about writing a trade book for general audiences. So far I have talked about how I start with reading about the topics of relevance. When I’ve done a lot of that I eventually get to the point where I realize I’ve read all the major works that I need to have read in order to have a good sense both of what others have said about a topic and about what I have to say myself. Maybe I should pause a bit – for a post or two -- on this question of “what I have to say.” There are several aspects of this question that are important and fairly interesting. The first has to do with having an idea about what to write. I’ll get to the issue in a roundabout way, which is my wont, as you may have noticed… I’ve had graduate students now for twenty-six years, and over the years they have evidenced a wide range of both ability and temperament. Of [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T16:35:40-04:00September 6th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions|

Upcoming Speaking Schedule and … Cruises!

I have finalized my speaking schedule for the Fall semester (I’m 58 and I still organize my life according to semesters… ) and more or less for the Spring as well. These are the events that are all open to the public; some charge for a ticket, others not. If any of these is near you, simply google the sponsor and my name, and normally that will take you to any information you may need should you want to attend. Two events in particular I want to highlight. The first is a cruise in the Caribbean this coming January 18-25. This event is sponsored by the Biblical Archaeology Society, and anyone who wants to purchase a place (and can do so) is absolutely welcome, whether you’ve ever been involved with or even have ever heard of the Biblical Archaeology Society or not. Now, you may wonder what the Caribbean has to do with Biblical archaeology. There is a clear and definite answer: Nothing At All. Well, except for the fact that the BAS is sponsoring [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-14T22:39:36-05:00September 1st, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum|

My Future Books

I mentioned in my previous post that I’ve been in London for the summer, spending almost all my time reading books. I should clarify that I’m not *only* reading books while I’m here! Among other things, once a week I've been taking my daily walk (I normally walk an hour a day around Wimbledon, where our flat is) to the large park nearby, and sit on a bench, listening to music with my earphones, watching people play football (a.k.a. soccer) or cricket with their kids, and smoking a very big cigar. I limit myself to one cigar a week, since if I did what I *wanted* to do, I would smoke three a day. But our flat is tiny, and there’s no way on God’s good earth that I would be allowed to smoke in it. So I go to the park. And sit, and listen to music, and … think deep thoughts. Some of my most creative thinking time is with plugs in my ears and a cigar in my hand (or, well, mouth) and [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-29T16:13:30-04:00August 15th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions|

The Religion of a Sixteen-Year-Old

I just got home from spending a week in Lawrence Kansas, my home town. As I’ve done now for years, I took my mom fishing in the Ozarks for a few days. She’s 87, and on a walker, but still able to reel them in! I go back to Lawrence probably three or four times a year, and each time it is like going down memory lane. I left there to go to Moody Bible Institute in 1973, when I was all of 17 years old; I still called it home for years, but never lived there full time, not even in the summers usually. I was married and very much on my own only four years later. So my memories of the place are entirely of childhood through high school. I can’t help reflecting on this, that, and the other thing in my past as I drive around town, remembering doing this thing here, that thing there, and so on. This time, for some reason, there was an unusually high concentration of “religious” recollections, [...]

BDEhrman2022-03-31T17:10:48-04:00June 1st, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

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