Bart's Debates Archives - Page 2 of 6 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

My Debate With Roman Catholic Apologist Jimmy Akin

This Jimmy Akin debate is a first. I never debated a Roman Catholic apologist before. In fact, I didn't know there *were* Roman Catholic Apologists! I did know there used to be lots of them who were intent on defending the Catholic tradition against Protestants. And as it turns out, there are still some of them around. There is an interesting organization in San Diego that sponsors their work, called "Catholic Answers." Jimmy Akin Debate: A Catholic Apologist I was invited to go out there to debate one of their speakers, Jimmy Akin -- not about the superiority of Catholicism over Protestantism (about which I don't have much of an opinion, as someone who is neither) but about the reliability of the NT Gospels. The reliability of the Gospels? Isn't this a Protestant evangelical passion? Yup, and of some Catholics too apparently (though before this I had never met one for whom it was). At least for Jimmy Akin. So we had a debate. I decided to take a slightly different tone in this one [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:58:06-04:00May 10th, 2022|Bart's Debates, Canonical Gospels|

Debate Announcement! Did the Resurrection of Jesus Really Happen? Two Bible Scholars Debate the Evidence

I would like to announce a major public debate that I will be having with the well-known conservative evangelical apologist Mike Licona on the resurrection of Jesus. The title is “Did the Resurrection of Jesus Really Happen? Two Bible Scholars Debate the Evidence.” It will be held remotely on April 9th from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 pm EST. The debate is not directly connected with the blog but is my own thing, done in conjunction with the courses I've been recording for the Bart Ehrman Professional Services. There will be a charge for the event. Some of the profits will be redirected to the blog, and blog members will get a discount (see below). If you have any interest at all, check out the video below. And if you want to learn more or sign up, here is the link: https://www.bartehrman.com/debate/ For now: more on the debate. If you are attentive to numbers, you will notice that this debate will be an all-day affair. Seven hours. Pray for my soul! On the upside (for you [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:57:22-04:00March 15th, 2022|Bart's Debates, Public Forum|

My Pet Peeve: Simplistic Answers to Explain Suffering

In my last post I discussed two things that get under my skin in professional contexts, making me blow my top (to mix the metaphor): ignorance posing as expertise (not just in biblical studies but generally) and facile answers, by “experts,” to the biggest personal/philosophical/religious problem people have to face, why there is suffering in the world if there is an all powerful and loving God in charge of it. As I pointed out, I have no problem with people in general not knowing lots of things. I don’t know massive amounts of things. But I at least acknowledge it and try not to pretend to be an expert in something I have only a casual knowledge of. And I have no objection to people having answers that make sense to them, explaining why they themselves, or those they love, or the millions of people they don’t know experience such misery and pain, suffering in extremis. I do object when people who claim to be experts spread simplistic answers to difficult questions without bothering to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:56:22-04:00January 5th, 2022|Bart's Debates, Reflections and Ruminations|

Bart Behaving Badly: Podcasts on the Problem of Suffering

I’m getting much more mellow and much less feisty the older I get, but, well, I still have my moments. I’ve always loved a good argument and for most of my life I could get pretty intense when having one – even when it was about something that really was quite immaterial. These days, though, I pretty much have a live and let live attitude. In part I imagine that’s because I realize that all of us are probably wrong about lots of things (most?) and usually it doesn't much really matter, as long as being wrong doesn’t do anyone much harm. Let the one without error be the first to cast a stone. But I’ve had a couple of bad experiences in the past month on podcasts I’ve done, when I wasn’t my usual affable self and I’ve been trying to figure out what set me off, making me rather hyper-confrontational and – can you believe it? – possibly (probably) pretty rude. As I’ve thought about it I’ve come to realize (or at least [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:56:22-04:00January 2nd, 2022|Bart's Debates, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Original Blog Post!! Misquoting Misquoting Jesus!

As you can see, we have now launched our new version of the blog, very new and much improved. I've decided to start our new life together by returning to the beginning. Over the next week I will be posting five of my favorite posts from years past, one from each of the first five years of the blog. Here is the very first post I made. Looking back, to me it looks a bit, well, feisty. I was a bit more cantankerous and, uh, defensive in those days. Nonetheless, I agree with just about everything in it still. But I should say, in case any of you wonder, that Ben Witherington, whom I address here, and I are actually friends in the field. He has attacked me a good deal in the past, in very public forums; but I maybe go a bit overboard here. Still, this post is a nice museum piece, at least in my mind. Some of Ben Witherington’s most popular books are The Jesus Quest, and The Problem with Evangelical [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:51:03-04:00October 22nd, 2020|Bart's Debates, Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

An Unusual Podcast Interview with a Muslim about How I Debate. Check This One Out!

Very rarely do I myself find an interview that I've done very interesting -- usually because they are often on the same topics, over and over again. And I almost *never* listen to one afterward. This one is an exception. Everyone has her or his preferences, but I really like this one. It is also one of the weirdest interviews I've ever done. This guy contacted me out of the blue about a new podcast he was doing. He lived in Chicago. I was going to be in Chicago to give a talk at a conservative evangelical "apologetics" conference; the three other speakers were all hard-core evangelicals who believed the Bible is "inerrant," and I was speaker number 4. That in itself was going to be a scream (it was; I had a great time). But this guy wanted to interview me. He was going to the conference. And he was a Muslim. I'm thinkin': Really?!? He asks for an interview a couple of times; I tell him I'm not sure the organizers are going [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:50:45-04:00September 11th, 2020|Bart's Debates, Public Forum, Video Media|

Views of Suffering Among Those Who Suffer

There is always a lot of suffering going on around us, if not in our neighborhood then certainly in our country, not to mention our world. Now more then ever. And more obviously than ever. But the "ever" itself is really very bad, when you think of the millions being slaughtered in civil war and unrest, driven from their homes, starving, dying of curable disease for want of medicine or from lack of clean water, etc. etc. etc. But it's on our minds right now more than ever, between a worldwide pandemic and a national recognition of deeply rooted and massive racial violence and injustice. Suffering is always there, but now it is all we are talking about. I was browsing through old posts on the blog and came across this one I wrote eight years ago. As some of you know, one of my books, God's Problem, deals with the problem of why there is suffering. In it I examine what different biblical authors have to say about it to show that they represent many [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:49:26-04:00June 3rd, 2020|Bart's Debates, Reflections and Ruminations|

If We Did Have the “Original” Gospels, Would That Make Them True?

Have you ever noticed how people who are having an argument often use a slight of hand, either not realizing what they are doing or doing it in order to misdirect the discussion? What I have in mind is when someone wants to prove a view that we will call X, but instead of directly dealing with the issues of central importance to X, they divert attention to something else that we can call Y. Then, when they claim they have proved Y they lead their audience to think they therefore proved X. On one hand, a lot of time they haven’t even proved Y. But they claim not only they have done *that* but that since they have done that they have also thereby proved X, even though Y is not the same as X. Sometimes Y is not even related to Y. I don’t know if you’ve seen this before, but it happens a lot, in all sorts of arguments about religion, politics, society, and so on. It certainly happens a lot in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:49:26-04:00May 31st, 2020|Bart's Debates, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

Do We NEED to Suffer? The Argument from Tectonic Plates

I decided to take a stroll down memory lane and look at posts I made at the beginning of the blog, and came upon this one, made almost exactly eight years ago today. Since I've been talking about Ecclesiastes and the meaning of life, and, consequently, the meaning of suffering, it is particularly relevant, now more than ever in recent history. It's ultimately about whether humans *have* to suffer if God created the world and life in it. And weirdly, it involves a connection between Dinesh D'Souza and tectonic plates. ******************************************************************* I have always found it interesting that when I talk about how there can be suffering in the world if there is a good God who is in charge of it, someone will tell me that it is all because of “free will.” I think most of us – not Sam Harris, of course, or some others, but most of us – think that there is such a thing as free will, that our actions are not completely determined for us but to some [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:48:51-04:00April 21st, 2020|Bart's Debates, Reflections and Ruminations|

Is the Bible Inspired by God? Guest Post by Evangelical Apologist Mike Licona

This particular post is free and open to the public. If you belonged to the blog, you would get five posts a week, for about what it costs to send a letter. And every penny goes to charity! So why not join? Mike Licona has burst on the scene as one of the leading spokespersons for evangelical Christianity and its theological claims, especially that Jesus was physically raised from the dead, that purely historical research can actually demonstrate that it happened, and that the Bible is literally inspired by God himself and to be accepted as inerrant. As many of you know, I have had three public debates with Mike (on the question of whether historians can proved that Jesus was raised from the dead; the debates were not about whether Jesus was raised from the dead – they were about whether this kind of claim can be proved by historians using historical methods, or, instead, is a theological claim that cannot be demonstrated historically); and recently we shared a stage at an evangelical Christian [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:06-04:00November 17th, 2019|Bart's Debates, Historical Jesus|

Video Debate with Peter Williams: Can We Trust the Gospels

This was a video debate I did last summer in London with British Biblical scholar Peter Williams. Peter has been a friend for a long time, and is a real expert on the manuscript tradition of the New Testament. He is also a committed evangelical Christian who does not believe there are mistakes in the Gospels. I so disagree with that. We had a debate about it on the Christian Radio program "Unbelievable" under their new series "The Big Conversation" Season 2-Episode 3, hosted by Justin Brierley. It was a long and interesting debate. Peter has written Can We Trust the Gospels? and C S Lewis vs the New Atheists. My contention throughout the debate is that he has not answered the question adequately, that in fact virtually everything he says in the book is irrelevant to the question. It's a very interesting and unusual attempt that he makes. But most of the book completely misses the point. It's the kind of book that anyone who wants very much to trust the Gospels will come [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:49-04:00October 27th, 2019|Bart's Debates, Canonical Gospels, Video Media|

A New Way of Explaining Contradictions in an “Inerrant” Bible

The other recent development in conservative evangelical apologetics – so far as I can discern as an outsider – is a real move to adopt serious historical scholarship on the Bible and apply it to the defense of the reliability of Scripture. That may seem like a paradoxical move to non-evangelicals, since it is precisely serious historical scholarship that, since the 18th century, has been the major problem when it comes to the reliability of the Scripture. In fact, it’s the *main* problem. So, uh, how does that work? I believe, but I may be wrong, that Mike Licona is at the forefront of this development within evangelical circles. Two of his most popular books are Evidence for God and The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus. His view is that we should not try to harmonize different Gospel accounts in every instance. Sometimes, of course, it’s perfectly suitable and appropriate (I agree on this). But sometimes harmonization simply leads to weirdness and implausibility. At least in the eyes of most reasonable human beings. And [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:49-04:00October 21st, 2019|Bart's Debates, Canonical Gospels|

Modern Evangelical Christian Apologetics

This particular post is open-access. Anyone can read it. I post five times a week on all sorts of topics related to the New Testament and early Christianity. To read these posts, simply join the blog. It doesn't cost much, and every thin dime goes to charities helping those in need. No one loses, everyone wins, so join!! I spent yesterday at a conservative evangelical apologetics conference outside of Chicago and, as you might imagine, I was the odd person out. But I was very well received, people were overwhelmingly gracious and receptive and openly grateful that I had come. There were jokes about being thrown into the lions’ den, but it didn’t really feel like it. It felt like I was speaking to a crowd that wanted to hear, respected what I said, and simply fundamentally disagreed. In particular there was a group of current Moody Bible Institute students there; really interesting, interested, and good humored, and we had a great time together. What I was most interested in was how Christian apologetics [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:49-04:00October 20th, 2019|Bart's Debates, Canonical Gospels, Reflections and Ruminations|

Modern Defenders of the Faith: Why Not Just Tell the Truth?

Next week I'm off to give a talk at an evangelical Christian conference that is dealing with contradictions in the Gospels; the other speakers will be explaining either why they don't actually exist or why they are completely insignificant or how they can be comfortably explained given ancient writing practices or ... or some other point that will assure their committed Christian audience that there's nothing really to worry about. It will be in Chicago and is called the Defenders Conference. I quite admire the organizers of the conference because they genuinely want to hear the other side from me. As y'all know, I think there are serious contradictions in the Gospel that cannot be reconciled or explained away, and these demonstrate that the Gospels are not historically reliable. I'm not saying (I'm NOT saying) that there is *nothing* reliable in the Gospels. Of course there are lots and lots of reliable materials in the Gospels (the key is figuring out which ones they are). But anyone who thinks they give a fully reliable account [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:31-04:00October 7th, 2019|Bart's Debates, Reflections and Ruminations|

When You Feel Like You’re Talking to a Wall

I wrote this post a while ago, and now that I reread it, I think I might be kicking a dead horse. (Something, in case you wonder, I’ve never actually done.) But, well, I suppose it’s sometimes OK to leave written what has been written, so to say. So here ‘tis. There are times when I debate a committed evangelical or fundamentalist Christian on whether the Bible is reliable or not, and I feel like I’m talking to a Martian. Or maybe I’m a Martian. We are both educated human beings and do indeed seem to be speaking the same language (English); but how we understand what very same words virtually certainly have to mean is completely opposite. How can that be? Again, I’m not going to be trying to provide further counter-arguments for the back and forth that Matthew Firth and I had over whether there are contradictions in the Gospel or not. I said emphatically yes, he said emphatically no. But both of us seem to have felt like we were talking [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:01-04:00May 26th, 2019|Bart's Debates, Canonical Gospels|

Being Willing to Accept the Truth

Here I’d like to add just a couple of more reflections on whether critical scholars *have* to claim there are contradictions in the Bible because of their beliefs. As I tried to state as strongly as I could in my previous post, I think the answer is absolutely not. To begin with, let me stress that I started learning about serious contradictions when I was in a Christian theological seminary taking biblical studies courses with committed Christian teachers who were devoted to the church. But they were also scholars and refused to accept fundamentalist understandings of the Bible. Their theology was much more sophisticated than the simple “The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it” mentality I had grown up on. These were incredibly intelligent and learned scholars intimately familiar with the texts in Greek and Hebrew and massively well-read in scholarship going back centuries in various modern languages. They didn’t accept easy answers and pushed their students to realize that knowing what the New Testament really is, as opposed to what [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:01-04:00May 21st, 2019|Bart's Debates, Canonical Gospels, Reflections and Ruminations|

Do My Biases Mean I Have to Find Contradictions?

I have now had a week to reflect on my debate with Matthew Firth about whether there are contradictions in the Bible. Now I’d like to give my personal reactions. I don’t mean for this to be a continuation of the debate per se -- I won’t be adducing more evidence or counter-evidence. But I thought it might be helpful to put some thoughts on paper (well, on screen) about what a debate like this can show or at least did show, in my opinion. Matthew is on the blog and he’s perfectly welcome to comment on these posts or even to respond with one or more posts of his own, giving his own second-level reflections. So here are mine. Since I’d like to flesh these out at some length (since they might be helpful for others thinking generally about their view of the Bible and what constitutes a contradiction), this will take several posts. I begin with the question of whether either of us have a particular agenda/bias that more or less require us [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:01-04:00May 20th, 2019|Bart's Debates, Reflections and Ruminations|

Judging the Debate!

Now that my debate with Matthew Firth over the contradictions in the Gospels has ended, I would like to know your reactions. Any reactions are fine. There is the obvious question of which side you found more convincing, but also the less obvious question of why that is. What about the argument, or counter-argument, was compelling or not compelling? Part of the problem, of course, is that virtually everyone listening in on the debate already had a pretty firm idea of what they think about the issues. And because of “confirmation bias” we tend to agree with what we already think, and anyone who says it is obviously right! (Hence the problem with most viewers of both FOX and MSNBC.) But for my money, the most interesting responses come from people who have changed their minds. Still, in all the public debates I’ve had, in front of many thousands of people, I almost never have heard of anyone changing their mind. So what’s the point? I often ask myself that! And often I ask it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:00-04:00May 15th, 2019|Bart's Debates, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Contradictions and Contradictions: Final Response to Matt Firth

Matt: thanks for your additional comments. I’ve given my replies below. At the outset I should say that I’m not sure I understand what a “genuine contradiction” would look like for you. If you have two authors who at least appear to contradict each other, surely the best explanation will not be one that: Suggests an author / speaker really doesn’t mean what he says but means something else. Suggests an option that has never ever happened, to our knowledge. With that in mind, I turn to your new explanations. I’ll respond in green. Thanks very much, Bart, for these interesting responses. I will get straight into explaining why I still don’t think you have shown that the examples you have offered are genuine contradictions. In the case of Luke 24 you say that the grammar of the Greek indicates that ‘Luke is extremely careful to date the entire sequence of chapter 24, at the beginning of each major paragraph. It all happens on the day of the resurrection.’ But we know from Acts, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:39-04:00May 3rd, 2019|Bart's Debates, Canonical Gospels, Reflections and Ruminations|

Contradictions in the Gospels – Rev Matthew Firth’s Second Response

Thanks very much, Bart, for these interesting responses. I will get straight into explaining why I still don’t think you have shown that the examples you have offered are genuine contradictions. In the case of Luke 24 you say that the grammar of the Greek indicates that ‘Luke is extremely careful to date the entire sequence of chapter 24, at the beginning of each major paragraph. It all happens on the day of the resurrection.’ But we know from Acts, Luke’s sequel, that Luke certainly does not think that all of Luke 24 happened on the day of the resurrection. He says in Acts 1:3 and the following verses that after Jesus’ suffering and resurrection, Jesus appeared to the apostles over a forty-day period, and after that he was taken up. This means that Luke is well aware that Luke 24:50-53 did not happen on the day of the resurrection, despite your assertion that the grammar makes it clear that all of the events of Luke 24 did happen on the day of the resurrection. [...]

admin2025-09-10T12:44:39-04:00April 28th, 2019|Bart's Debates, Canonical Gospels|

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