Book Discussions Archives - Page 21 of 31 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Agreeing to Do the Textbook

In my previous post I indicated that I was not at all inclined to write a textbook on the New Testament. In fact, before the editor at Oxford University Press asked me to do it, I had never given it a moment’s thought – except for that moment when I thought (some years before), that whatever I did with my publishing career, I did *not* want to write such a thing. Looking back on it, I’m not sure why I was so dead set against it. I suppose it was because my plan was to write scholarship for scholars and nothing but scholarship for scholars. About a week after I turned down the offer to do the textbook, she called me again to see if I had changed my mind. No, I hadn’t. But I had started thinking about it. When she called me the third time I had begun to think that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all. There were several reasons I had begun to change my mind. For [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:39-04:00September 23rd, 2014|Book Discussions, Teaching Christianity|

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 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:39-04:00September 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 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:38-04:00September 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 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:38-04:00September 10th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions|

Communicating with Non-Scholars

In my previous post I talked about how I go about choosing what to write a trade book on. In some cases I have chosen to write on a topic that involves a well-worked field in biblical studies or early Christianity, that has not, however, been introduced to a wider reading public. I’ve always found it highly unfortunate that scholars as a rule are not interested in communicating with non-scholars. I should be clear about one thing, though: some scholars – or rather, most scholars – simply don’t *know* how to communicate with non-scholars about whatever it is they’re doing. And to a large extent, it’s not actually their fault. Many (most?) scholars don’t know how to communicate with others is that they were never trained to do that. In fact – this will come as a surprise to many people – back when I was in graduate school, in the 1980s, people being trained to become university teachers almost *NEVER* had any instruction on how to teach. My program was typical of most. My [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:38-04:00September 9th, 2014|Book Discussions|

Choosing a Topic for A Trade Book

In this thread I’ve been talking about how I go about writing a trade book, and I am now dealing with the question of how an author chooses what to write about. I was indicating earlier that some of my graduate students have a difficult time knowing what to focus on in their dissertations. Most of my students come up with amazingly good ideas; but every now and then I have a student who simply can’t decide what to do. It’s hard because the dissertation is their first book, it has to be academically rigorous, on a topic of some intellectual importance, and dealing with it in a way that has never been done before. The same is true with all works of serious scholarship. Having said that, I should point out that the New Testament itself is the most heavily researched book (or set of books) in the history of civilization. And lots of areas of New Testament scholarship are thoroughly “over-researched.” That makes it hard for students and even senior scholars sometimes to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:38-04:00September 8th, 2014|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 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:38-04:00September 6th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions|

Where Do You Start Reading?

In my previous post I talked about the sequence that I go through in writing a trade book for general readers. I must admit, I’ve never systematically thought through that sequence until yesterday! I just have a way of working, and when I thought about what that was, I realized it was this sequence. 1. Doing basic research/reading/and outlining; 2. Writing a prospectus for the publisher; 3. Reading massively; 4. Outlining the book; 5. Writing it; 6. Revising it. I will describe how I go about doing each of these steps in the following posts. The first question is this: if one needs to do some basic research and reading, leading to a basic outline, as the first step – how does one decide what to read? That’s an especially acute question if you want to be working in a field that you are not overly familiar with, as was my case when I wanted this past March to start reading about “memory” – both from psychological perspectives (especially cognitive psychology) and social (“collective” memory). [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:25-04:00September 4th, 2014|Book Discussions|

Writing a Trade Book

QUESTION: I am interested in your writing process, and want to know how much planning you do before you put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard? Have you planned the whole book? How detailed are the plans for each chapter or do you just work with a thesis for each chapter? I am speaking of the process you go through for a trade book. I assume the process for the scholarly book is a bit different, but if so, how so? RESPONSE: I get asked this question every now and then, and think that maybe I’ll devote a few posts to trying to answer it. I will focus my response to the question specifically of how I go about writing trade books. Writing scholarly monographs is a different kettle of fish, and more people are interested, I think, in the books for general audiences, since these are the ones that get read the most. So how do I go about writing a trade book? As a preliminary I should say that I am on [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:25-04:00September 3rd, 2014|Book Discussions, Reader’s Questions|

My Approach to Doing Research

QUESTION: You’ve told us about reading book after book after book before you are chose to write your book. I’d appreciate your sharing a little info on how you take notes during all of this reading. And how do you decide what to make notes on what not to put into notes? RESPONSE: Right – this is a very big issue for scholars in the Humanities, since what we do, for the most part, is read books and write books. So knowing how to read books is very important. In particular it is important because there are so *many* books to read (not to mention articles – there are even more of these). How does one master the massive amount of scholarship that is out there, on any one problem? Every year, for example, there are dozens of books and articles written about, say, Jesus, or the Gospel of John, or the writings of Paul, or – pick your topic. So if one has not kept up with scholarship on, say, Jesus, for ten [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:25-04:00September 3rd, 2014|Book Discussions, Reader’s Questions|

Titles for Trade Books, Like Misquoting Jesus

In my previous post I discussed the strategies behind giving a title to a scholarly book. When it comes to trade books, written for popular audiences, it is a different ballgame altogether. Whereas scholarly books are meant to sound erudite and learned, or if they are meant to be “clever” then only clever to those on the academic inside who catch the allusions, trade books are meant to be witty and intriguing for a general reader, and a sign that the book will be really interesting and about something that the reader wants to learn more about. In the best cases, the reader – a non-scholar – should read the title and think, “Huh, I’d like to know about that!” or “Huh, I wonder that that’s about.” The trick is to be able to grab a reader’s attention without being overly sensationalized, and that’s a very fine line indeed. It’s hard to know whether a title will accomplish its task or not. I thought my last book “How Jesus Became God” would be a real [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:25-04:00August 30th, 2014|Book Discussions|

Titles of Scholarly Books

In my previous post I talked about how I chose a scholarly-sounding title for my scholarly book on the use of literary forgery in the early Christian tradition. All of the titles for my scholarly books are ones that I’ve chosen, and they are all meant to signal that the book is … scholarly. A number of my scholarly titles have been very straightforward – informative but not scintillating (and not meant to be scintillating). My first attempt at a title was for my dissertation, and I realized afterward that there was a bit of a problem with it. I wrote the dissertation at Princeton Theological Seminary under Bruce Metzger, who was (and is) without peer, in my opinion and everyone else’s, as the leading NT textual scholar America has ever produced. It was an amazing and humbling experience working under him. I was his final doctoral student, and he and I became very close. The dissertation topic was one he suggested to me. It involved combing through the newly discovered Old Testament commentaries of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:25-04:00August 28th, 2014|Book Discussions|

Scholarly vs. Trade Books

In the past thread I was discussing how, on three occasions, I produced both a scholarly book and a trade book for popular audiences on the same topic. I thought that now it would be interesting for me to say a few words about what I see as the difference between these two kinds of books. On one level, I think the difference would be obvious to anyone who would compare two of the books I’ve mentioned, for example, my scholarly monograph Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics with my popular book, Forged: Writing in the Name of God – Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are. They are on the same topic. But they are oh so different. For openers, the titles are dead give aways. Titles are a tricky business. Publishers are the ones who ultimately decide on what a title will be. I should say that for almost all of my scholarly books (in fact, I think for every single one of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:25-04:00August 27th, 2014|Book Discussions|

The Other Gospels: The Trade Book Version

The edition of the non-canonical Gospels that I’ve been discussing in previous posts (The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations), which I published with my colleague Zlatko Plese, was meant for academics – professors of New Testament and early Christianity and their graduate students. Most other people, of course, have no need or desire to see the original Greek, Latin, or Coptic of a text along with a translation. People generally just want an English translation. But having a facing-page translation is a great thing for scholars and budding scholars. The only way really to understand a foreign language text in its many nuances is to read it in its own language. And since these are texts that deserve to be studied carefully, minutely, with full attention to all the fullness of their meaning, they really need to be read in the Greek, Latin, and Coptic languages in which that they have come down to us. For some scholars, the book would be useful because it provides the original language text for all these writings, and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:24-04:00August 26th, 2014|Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha|

Apocryphal Gospels: The Scholarly Version

In my last couple of posts I began to describe how my edition of the Apocryphal Gospels came about. 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 without a publisher. I should say – this may not be widely known – that most of the time a scholar writes a book, s/he does not know who will be publishing it, or even if *anyone* will be. This can be a source of real anxiety, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:24-04:00August 25th, 2014|Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha|

How I Decided to Publish the Apocryphal Gospels

My previous two posts were meant to be a kind of lead-up to this one; this thread started by my talking about the times I have published both a scholarly work and a trade book for popular audiences on the same topic. The third and most recent time had to do with an edition of the Apocryphal Gospels. I’ve now given some of the backstory: I had done a translation project creating a new bi-lingual edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library, and had vowed I would never do something like that again. But I broke my vow. It all began innocently enough. I had a scholar from England as a houseguest back in 1999 or so. David Parker is the premier New Testament textual critic in the U.K. these days, or in the English-speaking world for that matter. He is a real, hard-core manuscript guy. At that point of my career – fifteen years ago now – I too was actively involved in that field. Some of our interests and writings [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:24-04:00August 22nd, 2014|Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha|

The Difficulties of Publishing a Translation

In my last post, en route to discussing my latest attempt at publishing both a scholarly and a trade book on the same topic, I talked about how I took on the task of doing a new Greek-English edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library. At the end of the post I indicated that doing that edition was one of the hardest things I have ever done. There were lots of things that made it very difficult – deciding which form of the Greek text to use for each of the writings included (i.e. what to do in the many places where the manuscripts differed from one another), doing all the research in order to write up competent and relatively complete Introductions to each text, studying the history of research into various problems posed by the Apostolic Fathers, from the 17th century until today, and so on. But the hardest part was the translation itself. The Greek of the Apostolic Fathers is not incredibly difficult, as far as Greek goes. It is [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:24-04:00August 21st, 2014|Book Discussions|

My Third Scholarly and Trade Book Combination, Told Tangentally

The third time I produced both a scholarly and a trade book on the same topic was a completely different situation from the other two I have described. One thing that was similar was that in this instance yet again I had no idea, initially, of producing a trade version, but planned simply to publish a work of scholarship. Only later did I realize that a trade version could be very useful. This scholarly book – trade book combination involved an edition of the apocryphal Gospels. To explain how the books came to be imagined I need to provide a bit of background. Actually, a lot of background. This will take a couple of posts. It all started with a completely different project altogether, unrelated to the apocrypha. In the mid 1990s I was teaching the very same graduate course that I’m teaching this semester, a PhD seminar on the group of authors known as the “Apostolic Fathers.” Sometimes non-experts use this term in a broad sense to refer to the writings of early church [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:24-04:00August 21st, 2014|Book Discussions, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

My Scholarly and Trade Books on Forgery

A couple of posts ago I mentioned the books that I anticipate writing in the future. I like to plan my life in advance. I like to plan my week in advance. I like to plan my day in advance. I like to plan. For my current ten-year publishing plan, the two immediate goals are not so immediate, as they will take three or four years, I should think. The next book, I hope, will be the trade book for popular audiences on the oral traditions of Jesus in the years before the Gospels were written; that will be followed by a scholarly book on a very similar topic, not written for normal human beings but for abnormal academics. In my last post I began to talk about how I had done something similar before. My trade book Misquoting Jesus, was a popular treatment of topics that I had dealt with at a scholarly level in several books and a number of academic articles. I did something comparable with two other trade books. It worked [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:24-04:00August 20th, 2014|Book Discussions, Forgery in Antiquity|

Trade Books and Scholarly Books

I indicated in my previous post that I would say a few things about each of the books that I am planning – today at least – to try to write over the next ten years or so. The very next book will be trade book on Jesus Before the Gospels, a study of what happened to the stories about Jesus as they were altered, and invented, by Christians circulating them word of mouth before the writing of the Gospels. The next book after that will be a scholarly treatment of the same thing. Or that’s the plan. The reason I’m hedging my bet is because I never know whether there will be a scholarly book in my current research until my current research is my past research and I see whether there really is something there that I have to say to scholars, or not. At this point, even though I have a rough idea of how I want to organize a trade book, and know where I need to go in order to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:24-04:00August 17th, 2014|Book Discussions, Memory Studies|

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