Book Discussions Archives - Page 13 of 31 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Being Blindstruck by Triumph

O frabjous day, callouh, callay. My book was published, just today! The Triumph of Christianity was, in some senses, many years in the making. Here is how I talk about how the idea for it first blindsided me, two decades ago. ************************************************************* The idea for this book struck me twenty years ago during my first trip to Athens. I was keen to explore the archaeological wonders of the city, and most especially the Agora and the Acropolis. The Agora was the ancient center of the city and is still filled with monumental buildings: the old Athenian meeting place called the Metroon; the impressively reconstructed Southern Stoa with its rooms, shops, and areas for people to mingle; and a number of ruined sacred sites – including the single best preserved Greek temple to come down to us from antiquity, one dedicated to the Greek god Hephaestus, god of volcanos, fire, and metal working. Constructed from 449 BCE- 415 BCE during the glory days of Athens, it is a large and imposing structure in the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:01-04:00February 13th, 2018|Book Discussions|

The Conversion of Constantine

My book comes out tomorrow and I’m very excited! Here is a foretaste of what is in it. This is how I begin Chapter 1, which focuses on the conversion of Constantine. ***************************************************** Few events in the history of civilization have proved more transformative than the conversion of the emperor Constantine to Christianity in the year 312 CE. Later historians would sometimes question whether the conversion was genuine. But to Constantine himself and to spiritual advisors close to him, there appears to have been no doubt. He had shifted from one set of religious beliefs and practices to another. At one point in his life he was a polytheist who worshiped a variety of pagan gods -- gods of his hometown Naissus in the Balkans, gods of his family, gods connected with the armies he served, and the gods of Rome itself. At another point he was a monotheist, worshiping the Christian God alone. His change may not have been sudden and immediate. It may have involved a longer set of transitions than he later [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:01-04:00February 12th, 2018|Book Discussions, Constantine, Fourth-Century Christianity, Spread of Christianity|

Beginning the Triumph of Christianity

I’m in Washington D.C., where I just now gave my first “book talk,” a reading from part of my new book The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World, at the wonderful bookstore, “Politics and Prose.” The book is officially published on Tuesday! And for those interested, this is how I begin the Preface, on a personal note before getting to the matter at hand. *************************************************** In my junior year of college I took a course in English literature that made me understand for the first time how painful it can be to question your faith. The course introduced me to poets of the nineteenth century who were struggling with religion. Even though I was a deeply committed Christian at the time, I became obsessed with the work of the great Victorian poet of doubt, Matthew Arnold. Nowhere is Arnold’s struggle expressed more succinctly and movingly than in that most famous of nineteenth-century poems, Dover Beach. The poem recalls a brief moment from Arnold’s honeymoon in 1851. While standing by an open [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:01-04:00February 11th, 2018|Book Discussions, Public Forum, Spread of Christianity|

Do We KNOW the Original Words of the NT?

A final post on the conservative evangelical critics of my book Misquoting Jesus. One of the most common views they express is that we are virtually certain about what the authors of the New Testament wrote. We have thousands of manuscripts, and are better informed about the text of the New Testament than for any other book from the ancient world. By way of response, to begin with, I completely agree (of course!) that we have thousands of New Testament manuscripts of the New Testament and are better informed about its text than any other book in the ancient world that is absolutely right. (It’s not surprise why we have so many more manuscripts of the NT than for any other ancient book, btw. Who was copying manuscripts in the Middle Ages – whence the vast bulk of our manuscripts derive? Monks in Christian monasteries. What books were Christian monks more inclined to copy -- the writings of Sophocles or the writings of Scripture?) My conservative opponents sometimes press the fact that we are well [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:00-04:00February 5th, 2018|Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

On Being Controversial

I woke up this morning thinking I'd like to start finishing out this little mini-thread on Misquoting Jesus by talking about how I never thought of anything in the book being particularly controversial, even though it struck a lot of people that way. I was going to call the post "On Being Controversial." And then I thought Wait a minute: That sounds familiar! And I checked it out, and I wrote almost exactly that post some three years ago. So, rather than reinventing the wheel, I give it here. After this, in my next post, I'll explain how one claim that I do make about the manuscripts among the New Testament *is* controversial -- not one I make (to a general audience) in Misquoting Jesus but one I make in scholarly contexts, one that really irritates some (a lot) of my colleagues. ******************************************************************* In this post I am going to take a bit of time out to do some self-reflection. An issue I’ve been puzzling over for some time is the fact that people keep [...]

admin2025-07-16T17:28:23-04:00February 4th, 2018|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Do the Differences in Our Manuscripts Matter?

The final two arguments that conservative critics of Misquoting Jesus have made, time and time again, are that (a) none of the variations in our manuscripts is particularly significant and (b) at the end of the day, we really do know what the original words of the New Testament were – far better than for any other book from the ancient world. These are two points that my old friend and debate opponent Dan Wallace makes emphatically every time he hears a whiff of my name. On the matter of significance there are a couple of things to be said. The first is that some readers of my book have misunderstood my claims and have thought that I was saying something like “There are manuscripts of the New Testament that get rid of the resurrection!” or “There are manuscripts of the New Testament that deny God exists!” or “There are manuscripts of the New Testament that claim that Jesus was a Zoroastrian!” or some such thing. That’s obviously not at all what I’ve ever said [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:00-04:00February 2nd, 2018|Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

Conservative Reactions to Misquoting Jesus

I don’t think I was prepared for the reaction that my book Misquoting Jesus elicited, especially among conservative evangelical Christians. I was suddenly transformed from being a competent scholar with whom others might disagree here or there to being a Major Public Enemy. Conservative scholars said all sorts of bizarre things about me in the wake of the book. My long-time acquaintance and occasional debate opponent, Craig Evans, wrote, in a book, that I had become an agnostic as soon as I realized that there were lots of textual differences among our manuscripts, and he pointed out how absurd that was. It was indeed absurd – but not because this was why I became an agnostic but because Craig assumed (and informed his readers) that it was. My realizing that there are differences among our manuscripts had precisely NOTHING to do with my becoming an agnostic, and Craig should have known that. If he didn’t know it, he could have asked me. But instead he made this outrageous claim to his conservative readers, eager to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:00-04:00February 1st, 2018|Book Discussions, New Testament Manuscripts|

Misquoting Jesus and My Fundamentalist Faith

As I was saying in my previous post, when I decided to write Misquoting Jesus my friends thought I was nuts. Even specialists in the New Testament are not, as a rule, interested in textual criticism, the scholarly endeavor to reconstruct the original Greek text of the New Testament given the fact that we have thousands of manuscripts with hundreds of thousands of minor differences among them, and even some rather major differences. New Testament scholars know *that* much about the manuscripts, but most scholar don’t have a deep knowledge of the situation. That is for one main reason: they find the topic terribly technical and massively boring! So if scholars who have devoted their lives to the study of the New Testament aren’t interested in knowing more about textual criticism, why would lay people who are just lookin’ for something interesting to read on the weekend? Who in the world would want to buy a book about *that*? But I obviously did find it interesting. By this point in my life (I was writing [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:00-04:00January 30th, 2018|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

How Do I Read Books? A Blast From the Past

Here is an interesting and always germane question I received five years ago. I would answer the same way today! QUESTION: How do you go about reading books? Which methods do you use in order to read as much as possibile? How do make plans how much to read? Do you highlight things in books? Do you you’re your own comments? Summaries? Any other tips? RESPONSE: Ah, this is an interesting question. As it turns out, there’s not an easy answer. That’s because there are many different ways I read books, depending on what kind of book it is. I realize we’re talking about books dealing with scholarship – not Victorian novels! But I read different books differently depending on what it is, what it’s about, and what I want/need to get out of it. When I was in graduate school I had a friend who insisted that anyone should be able to read an entire book of scholarship every day. I had trouble believing him, but in fact it’s true. In fact, when you [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:14-04:00November 14th, 2017|Book Discussions, Reader’s Questions|

Another Translation Project: The Apocryphal Gospels

In my last reposted-post I mentioned that some years after the Apostolic Fathers (after, apparently, I had forgotten all the pain involved), I took on another (very large) translation project, of wider interest to the world at large -- the ancient Gospels that did not make it into the New Testament. Here is how I have described that one, just to finish out the thought. ******************************************************** After having done the Apostolic Fathers in two volumes for the Loeb, I had decided never to do another translation project again. Too hard! But then, forgetting my decision, I thought it would be useful to have a Greek/Latin – English version of the early Christian non-canonical Gospels. And at the urging of the editor at Harvard, submitted a proposal also for the Loeb Classical Library. But the editorial board decided that they did not want to start publishing new editions of Christian texts in the series, since that would detract from its typical focus on Greek and Roman classics. And so I was now interested in a project [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:58-04:00November 1st, 2017|Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha, Public Forum|

The Loeb Apostolic Fathers: The Challenges (Again)

This will be the last of my three blasts from past discussions of my translation of the Apostolic Fathers; in it I explain the difficulties involved in producing a "facing page translation" edition of ancient texts ("facing page" means you have the original language text -- in this case Greek -- on one page and then across from it, on the other page, your English translation) ************************************************************************* To continue my thread about translating the Apostolic Fathers for the Loebs…. So, the editor at Harvard Press, Peg Fulton, asked me if I would be interested in taking on the task of doing a new edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loebs. She wasn’t offering me the opportunity then and there. She was suggesting that I write up a prospectus that she could take to the board of the Loebs, in which I described the need for a new edition and explained how I would go about making one. After I thought about it for a while, and got advice from my friends, I decided to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:58-04:00October 31st, 2017|Book Discussions, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers, Public Forum|

The Apostolic Fathers: Serendipity Strikes

In my previous post I blasted from the past about my translation of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classsical Library. That was actually the first of a few posts on the topic, and since I referred to the next ones, I thought I should give them -- at least the one that followed. Here it is. As I point out, in a way it's about how, in a concrete way, life is a series of chances..... ************************************************************** 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 [...]

admin2025-07-16T17:27:48-04:00October 30th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Proto-Orthodox Writers, Public Forum|

Translating the Apostolic Fathers: A Blast from the Past

In my last post I answered a question about whether I would ever publish a translation of the New Testament. (Short answer: almost certainly not!). But I want to take a couple of posts to talk about the work of translation. There is a very big difference between being able to read an ancient text in its ancient language (Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Coptic, whatever) and producing a translation of it for publication. You might think that it’s all basically the same thing: if you can read it, you can publish a translation of it. But as it turns out, it’s not that simple. I didn’t realize this for years and years, until I started publishing translations of ancient texts. My first experience was about fifteen years ago now, when I was asked to do a new edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library. Here I’ll give some background on that project and the series it appeared in, and in the next post I’ll talk about the difficulties of producing a translation. FOR [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:57-04:00October 27th, 2017|Book Discussions, History of Biblical Scholarship, Proto-Orthodox Writers, Public Forum|

Reasonable Doubts – How Jesus Became God

I have not posted any audio (or video!) appearances for a while. Here's one from a few years ago. On July 25, 2014, I was interviewed by Jeremy Beahan and Justin Schieber for their podcast called "Reasonable Doubts" on my book "How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee." The issue of the book is how Jesus, an apocalyptic prophet from Galilee, came to be regarded as a God by his followers. Reasonable Doubts was a production of WPRR Reality Radio (Grand Rapids, MI) and was the winner of the 2009 Peoples Choice Award for Best Religious/Inspirational Podcast. Please adjust gear icon for 1080pp High-Definition: If you don't belong to the blog yet, why not join? It won't cost much, you get mega-tons for your money, and every dime goes to charity.

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:41-04:00October 6th, 2017|Book Discussions, Public Forum, Video Media|

Controversy Sells!

A couple of days ago I asked members of the blog for some feedback about the current thread focusing on the development of the views of the afterlife in antiquity – the topic of my next book. And I’m really glad I asked, because it helped clarify my thinking considerably about the direction I am going to be taking in the book. For what it’s worth, it is *not* the direction I’ve been taking this thread. At least it is not in the *style* that I’ve been developing this thread. Let me explain. When I give public talks around the country, the advance publicity often describes me as “one of the most controversial Biblical scholars” in the field. I’ve always been puzzled by that. I really don’t see myself as very controversial. The scholarship that I present in my public talks, and in my popular books, is simply widely accepted scholarship, the kind of thing that critical scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity have long known and quite frequently simply assume. The difference [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:39-04:00September 14th, 2017|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Major Anxiety for my Book. Are People Interested in the Afterlife?

As an author (such as me, for example) thinks ahead to the next book, he has a number of worries, concerns, and anxieties that crop up. This is all part of the process – deep and cutting anxiety is what ends up inspiring quality. Otherwise, we would just dash off books without a care in the world, and they would be completely mediocre, not-well thought out, uninteresting, not grappling with the really complex issues in ways that are clear and easy to understand. Wait a second. That’s how most books are! Seriously, one has to grapple with innumerable problems, issues, and concerns from virtually the beginning of a book project. Some of these concerns are small, but at the outset they tend to be large, big-scale. Then, the more one works on a book, the smaller (and more specific) the issues get. These small ones are of huge importance, because it is getting the small things right that makes an OK book good, a good book really good, and a really good book fantastic. I’m [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:39-04:00September 12th, 2017|Afterlife, Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Journeys to Heaven and Hell: A Sketch of My Project

As I indicated in my previous post, I’ve decided to write a scholarly book on tours of heaven and hell in ancient Christian texts. I am tentatively calling the book “Observing the Dead: Otherworldly Journeys in the Early Christian Tradition.” I decided last week to come up with a 1000 word sketch of what I am thinking so far, about what the book would be and why it is needed. This is just a draft for my own thinking, written for scholars more than for layfolk. But it’s pretty clear and understandable I think, and can indicate how/what I’m thinking in the broadest terms at this point. Tell me what you think! ******************************************************* My project entails an exploration of early Christian texts that narrate voyages to the realms of heaven and hell, depicting, often in graphic detail, the ecstasies of the blessed and the torments of the damned. My overarching goal will be to elucidate not only various conceptions of the mysteries of the beyond, but even more to explore how such afterlife journeys embody [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:22-04:00August 27th, 2017|Afterlife, Book Discussions, Public Forum|

My New Scholarly Project

I have a lot more to say about the development of the views of the afterlife in ancient Jewish and Christian thinking – specifically, about how we got from an understanding that there would be a resurrection of the body (the view I’ve been discussing) to the idea that when a person dies, their soul (not their body) goes to heaven or hell -- the view most (not the *vast* majority, of course) people have today. It’s a good thing I have a lot more to say about it, since, well, that’s what my next book is about! But I want to introduce at this point a thread-within-the-thread, about a related topic (involving the afterlife and my larger understanding of it) that I am more fervently passionate about at just this time. And to explain just why I’m passionate about it, I need to take a brief detour into my personal life. I think that a good while back (last year at this time? I don’t remember) I talked a bit on the blog about [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:22-04:00August 24th, 2017|Afterlife, Book Discussions, 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|

Update on my Publication Plans

A couple of people have asked me about the status of my two books – the one that is finished and coming out, The Triumph of Christianity: How A Forbidden Religion Swept the World, and the one I am now doing my research on The Invention of the Afterlife: A History of Heaven and Hell. First, Triumph. There is indeed news about this one, and I can’t decide if it’s good news or bad news. It feels (emotionally) like it’s bad but I think it is probably good. My publisher, Simon & Schuster, has decided to delay publication from this coming September until the following February. The new publication date is February 13. There are no glitches or problems with publishing it earlier. It is done and ready to go. I have read through two sets of page proofs, it has been copy-edited multiple times, it is sitting there waiting to be run off and sent out. But for a variety of complicated reasons Simon & Schuster wants to wait till February. The short story [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:27-04:00June 7th, 2017|Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

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