Book Discussions Archives - Page 24 of 31 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

My First Radio Interview on How Jesus Became God

I am lined up to do a number of interviews for the new book, and here is the first, with a program called Interfaith Voices, hosted by Mareen Fiedler. Interfaith Voices is the nation's leading public radio show about faith, ethics and spirituality, and plays on WAMU 88.5 FM in Washington, DC. The following is an interview taped on March 20th, 2014. She titles the radio program, "The Debate over the Divinity of Jesus" while referencing my latest book "How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee." She asks good, perceptive questions that allow me to talk about key aspects of my thesis in the book. The interview will provide a good overview of what you'll find in it, once you get your grubby paws on it (now that my grubby paws are off it). Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition:

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:46-04:00March 26th, 2014|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Video Media|

How Books Are Sold

How Jesus Became God is released tomorrow. So I’m pumped. This is the most exciting time for an author of a trade book (written for a general audience). It’s always great, of course, beginning the research on a new project; and it’s always fantastic, if nerve wracking, to begin the writing; of course it’s always a huge relief to finish the book and send it off to the publisher. But the most exciting time is when the book is just about to be released. Outside of my small little world of trade book authors, the whole process is not well known. At least, it was not known to me, even as a widely published scholar, before I went into this world. In fact, it took a couple of trade books before I started understanding this world. One thing that I completely misunderstood, as a scholar just starting to write books for a general audience, was what it was that created sales. At first I thought that if you wrote a good book, it would sell [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:46-04:00March 25th, 2014|Book Discussions|

How Jesus Became God!!

It is time – well past time, some of you may think – for a new thread. And one is oh-so-ready-to-hand. My new book, How Jesus Became God, will be released on Tuesday (March 25). I am unusually eager for that to happen. I’ve never had a trade book (i.e., written for a popular audience) that I’ve been as invested in. Many of my other ones have done well, and I’ve been proud of each and every one of them (they’re like your children – you love each of them dearly and deeply ….). But this is that one that I think is the really important one – in its way, more important than Misquoting Jesus, and all the rest. That’s because the question it’s dealing with is really BIG, in my opinion. It may sound a bit outlandish, crazy, or over the top, but I think a case can be made that the question of how Jesus became God is one of the most important questions for the history of Western Civilization. OK, that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:45-04:00March 23rd, 2014|Book Discussions, Memory Studies, Public Forum|

How Jesus Became God

Ehrman sketches Jesus's transformation from a human prophet to the Son of God exalted to divine status at his resurrection. Only when some of Jesus's followers had visions of him after his death... [button url="http://www.bartdehrman.com/books/How-Jesus-became-God.htm" target="_blank" size="small" style="teal grey" ]Learn More[/button]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:32-04:00March 22nd, 2014|Book Discussions, Memory Studies|

More on the Response Book

Another post on the forthcoming “response book,” titled How God Became Jesus, written in reaction to my book How Jesus Became God. As I indicated in my previous post, I gave my publisher permission to share my manuscript with the five scholars who produced the response, so they were not simply guessing about what I had to say. They had it in their hands. They responded in kind and allowed their publisher to share with me their book. I haven’t read it yet. The reason that they shared their book with me in advance of its appearance is that we are being asked to do some media events that will require knowledge of each others’ books. The event that has been set up already is a kind of on-radio debate with one of the five authors, Simon Gathercole, who teaches at Cambridge University. Next week I’m heading over to London for Spring break, mainly to see family and so on. But I’ve agreed to do a taped radio show. Unlike the States, in England (as [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:31-04:00March 1st, 2014|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

Books and Response Books

So, in almost exactly a month, my new book How Jesus Became God, gets published, March 25. The book is completely done and produced. I received a preliminary copy a couple of days ago. I think it looks *great* -- a very interesting piece of cover art, good blurbs on the back, interesting explanations about what the book is. HarperOne has done a terrific job with it. Naturally I’m interested, concerned, and invested in how well it does. Any author who thinks s/he has something to say – which, by definition, is every author -- very much wants lots and lots of people to read their work. And with a book like this, which in my opinion deals with what is arguably the most important question in the history of Western religions, it’s especially important (to me). So I am eager for this to happen. There are several things that authors really want when they’ve written a book that will be seen as controversial. For one thing, the author wants a lot of controversy! Not [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:30-04:00February 28th, 2014|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

Jesus Kissing Mary Magdalene

QUESTION: I know that the “Gospel of Philip does not have much if any real historical veracity to it about Jesus’ life, but does the references about Jesus and Mary Magdalene being lovers and the holes in the papyrus ‘kissing’ verse (verses 32 and 55 in your “Lost Scriptures” book), help support the view that this most likely Gnostic Christian sect truly believed and taught that Jesus and Mary M were married? RESPONSE: Yes, this is one of those questions I get asked about on occasion. I have a reasonably full discussion of the relevant issues in my book Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene. In the book I put the discussion in the context of – yes, you guessed it -- Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, the one source many people turn to for the Gospel of Philip. (!) Here’s what I say there: ************************************************************** Some of the historical claims about the non-canonical Gospels in the Da Vinci Code have struck scholars as outrageous, or at least outrageously funny. The book claims, for example, that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:13-04:00February 5th, 2014|Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions, Sex and Sexuality in the Bible, Women in Early Christianity|

The New and Improved After the New Testament

Now that I’ve summarized what happens in the second edition of my reader, After the New Testament, I can say a couple of things about what I’ve changed this time around. First, there were several important texts that neither I nor any other thinking person I know can believe that I left out of the first edition. I’ve included them here in the revision. In addition, as I’ve indicated, I have added two new chapters, one dealing with Women in the Early Church and the other with Early Christian Theories and Practices of Biblical Interpretation. Each has a number of selections of primary source texts connected with it. Moreover, I have expanded the coverage of some of the chapters, by adding a few new texts here and there. Altogether I have about 20 additional texts in this new edition. I have also “switched out” some of the translations – changing to more recent translations (a bunch of these are my own translations published since the first edition – for example of the Apostolic Fathers and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:56-04:00January 15th, 2014|Book Discussions|

Final Bit of The Introduction to After the New Testament

I have been providing the “Introduction” to my book After the New Testament. Here is the end of it. In this version, I include two additional paragraphs on chapters not found in my first edition (chapter 10 and chapter 14). I’ll explain why I added these chapters (and the reading s in them) along with the other changes that I have made in the book, in a subsequent post. In reading through the new edition of the book – I’m virtually finished and ready to send it in to the publisher – I have been struck by just how significant these early texts that I anthologize are. Second and third century Christianity was a highly intriguing phenomenon, and there was a lot “to it.” As soon as I’m done with all my current writing projects (and the gods know when *that* will be) I am planning on writing a college-level textbook on the period, going from after the period right after the New Testament , around 100 CE, up through the Council of Nicea in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:56-04:00January 15th, 2014|Book Discussions, Teaching Christianity|

More on After the New Testament

The following is the continuation of my Introduction (chapter 1) of my book After the New Testament. In it I start to explain each of the chapters of the book, all of which deal with a variety of aspects of Christianity in the second and third centuries. I will give the remainder of the Introduction in my next post, since I don’t want to make these too long to be manageable. After that I will talk about what I’m doing new in the second edition that I’m producing now. ************************************************************************ It might be useful to say a word about the nature of the rubrics under which the chapters of the book are organized, and the logic of their sequencing. This need not entail a lengthy discussion: each chapter begins with a sketch of the important historical aspects of the topic, and each individual text is introduced with brief comments concerning its historical context and significance. One of the first things to consider about early Christianity is how it spread so far and wide in its [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:56-04:00January 14th, 2014|Book Discussions, Spread of Christianity, Teaching Christianity|

My New Edition of After the New Testament

Several people have asked me what I’m working on these days. Answer: I’m doing a new, second edition of my college-level text-book/reader/anthology of ancient texts, After the New Testament. It is meant to be a topically-arranged collection of primary readings from after the New Testament period up to the time of the Emperor Constantine. Before explaining what I am doing to make the second edition different from the first (I am revising it seriously), I should say something about what the first edition, published in 1999, was all about. To do that I give here the first part of the Introduction to the text. I’ll give the second part anon. ******************************************************************** Over the past century and a half, archaeological discoveries have played a significant role in our understanding of early Christianity. These include (a) the serendipitous discovery of entire libraries of ancient texts, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, found in the wilderness of Judea, and the library of Gnostic writings uncovered near Nag Hammadi, Egypt; (b) the equally fortuitous unearthing of individual documents, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:56-04:00January 13th, 2014|Book Discussions|

Final Loose Threads on the Zealot Hypothesis

I think I’ve gone on about Aslan’s Zealot long enough. Maybe more than long enough, many of you may think. My plan is to make this the last post. Let me reiterate that I think it is an exceptionally well-written, engaging book, and we can all be thankful to Aslan for bringing important historical issues about Jesus to the public attention. I may think that he’s wrong about his central thesis, and I may recognize a lot of errors in his book (about history, about the NT, about early Christianity). But I appreciate very much that he has gotten people talking about Jesus from a historical perspective – something that I think is of utmost importance, especially in our American context where Jesus typically is only spoken of by believers who do not appreciate the importance of history for knowing, well, about the past! In this final post I want to speak about a couple of threads, loose traditions that are sometimes used to argue that Jesus was most likely a zealot, someone who was [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:55-04:00January 8th, 2014|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

Jesus’ Crucifixion as King of the Jews

It is often said that one of the best pieces of evidence that Jesus is to be understood as a political insurgent who favored the overthrow of the Roman empire by means of (human) force is that he was crucified on charges of political insurgency. If he was charged with insurgency, he was probably an insurgent. There is, of course, a powerful logic to this view, but it has its flaws, and an alternative explanation actually works better. In terms of flaws, it needs to be noted and emphasized that in our sources the other two people crucified with Jesus were called lestai (sometimes translate “robbers” – but Josephus uses it to refer to someone engaged in guerrilla warfare against the ruling authorities, an armed insurgent). So too in the Gospel of John, Barabbas – the one the crowds preferred to Jesus – is also called a lestes. But – here’s the *big* point: Jesus is NOT called a lestes in these accounts. Ever. And he is not condemned to death –as are these others [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:22-04:00January 6th, 2014|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

Jesus and the Temple

Back to Aslan’s Zealot. I will not be going on forever, but I do want to make a few final posts. So far I have shown that the book is filled with mistakes, some of them important, about the ancient world, about the New Testament, and about early Christianity. These are simply errors, things (I tried to show) that Aslan just got wrong. After that I tried to show why the thesis itself was highly problematic by taking on his lead chapter and showing just why the claims he makes don’t “work” historically. And then, most recently, I’ve shown why scholars have widely opted for a solution that differs from Aslan’s view that Jesus is best seen as one totally zealous for the law and the land of Israel to the extent that he favored a military overthrow of the Roman empire as foreign occupiers. The alternative is that Jesus instead was a preacher of apocalyptic doom. It was not by military force that the enemy would be defeated, but by an act of God, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:55-04:00January 4th, 2014|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

Back to Aslan’s Thesis. An Alternative View: Jesus the Apocalypticist

I have spent considerable time showing just how problematic Reza Aslan’s view of Jesus is, as he set it forth in his bestselling Zealot. But it is not enough to attack someone else’s position if you don’t agree with it. You also have to have an alternative that is more attractive. So it’s time to move into that realm. As I have repeatedly stated on this blog, the view of Jesus that has dominated scholarship since the classic of Albert Schweitzer in 1906, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (actually, it was in German, with the title, Von Reimarus zu Wrede, which, frankly, is not nearly as catchy….), is that Jesus is best understood to have been – as were many of his contemporaries – a Jewish apocalypticist, one who believed that God was soon to intervene in history in a spectacular and cosmic way to overthrow the forces of evil in a supernatural show of power, and bring in a good kingdom on earth in which there would be no more injustice and oppression [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:43-04:00December 29th, 2013|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

Video: Forgery in the New Testament

On Monday, March 21, 2011, I gave a lecture at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club of California, underwritten by The Bernard Osher Foundation. The moderator was Alan Jones, Dean Emeritus, Grace Cathedral. Below is a link to the lecture. I gave the lecture soon after my book Forged: Writing in the Name of God. Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are appeared. In that book I try to present, to a lay audience, the evidence that scholars have found compelling that not only are some books *outside* the New Testament written (falsely) in the names of the apostles (for example, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas, the Apocalypse of Paul, and so on: these were not really written by Peter, Thomas, or Paul, as everyone agrees) but also books written *inside* the New Testament. This does not apply to "anonymous" books, where an author does not provide his name (e.g., Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John -- the authors themselves do not say who they are, it was only later [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:14-04:00November 8th, 2013|Book Discussions, Forgery in Antiquity, Video Media|

Upcoming Lectures at the Smithsonian

Now that the government is back in business, the Smithsonian Associates has resumed its work; they sponsor lectures and lecture series in Washington D.C., every week, all the time, and I usually do a day long series of lectures for them once or twice a year, based on a book I have coming out. I’m scheduled for the Spring 2014 in conjunction with my book How Jesus Became God. But I’ll also be doing one this December for the English-only version of the apocryphal Gospels that is to be published by then (edited from the original-language + English version that came out last year; this new one, like the old one, was written, edited, and translated with my colleague at UNC, Zlatko Plese). This first event is scheduled for Saturday Dec. 7; there will be four lectures, two in the morning and two in the afternoon. It’s a killer of a day (for me at least). But anyone in the area should consider attending. You can get further information at their website: http://smithsonianassociates.org/ticketing/index.aspx The following [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:59-04:00October 25th, 2013|Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus|

Jesus’ Brother and the Mythicists (Part 2)

In my previous post I pointed out that mythicists have a real problem on their hands when it comes to insisting that Jesus didn’t exist (well, they actually have a *boatload* of problems; but this is one of them): Paul actually knew, personally, Jesus’ own brother, James. It’s hard to say that Jesus never lived if he in fact had a brother…. It doesn’t solve the problem to say that this was in fact Jesus’ cousin, since, well, he would still then be the cousin of (the real) Jesus (!) (plus the word Paul uses is “brother” not “cousin”) and it doesn’t work to say that he is Jesus’ brother meaning he is a member of the Christian church (since Paul differentiates him from himself and Peter by calling him the “brother” – and both Peter and Paul were also members of the church!). Mythicists have tried other approaches, including the one I discussed yesterday, of trying to claim that there was a group of fervent missionaries in Jerusalem called “the brothers of the Lord,” [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:59-04:00October 24th, 2013|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Brothers of Jesus and the Mythicists

QUESTION: Since you’ve brought up the subject of Jesus’ family perhaps it won’t be too far off the subject to ask this question. Mythicists are forced by their arguments to deal with Paul’s encounter with Peter and James in Galatians 1:18–20. They claim that when Paul refers to James as “The Lord’s brother” he does not mean that James is Jesus’ biological brother (which of course would mean that Jesus actually lived) but that he was using the word “brother” in the sense that all the disciples were “brothers” i.e., metaphorically. What about this? Is the word translated as “brother” in English that ambiguous in the original Greek? Can it be other than a biological relationship? Elsewhere I believe Paul uses the word “brothers” to describe fellow believers. Does he use the same Greek word? Thanks for the clarification. RESPONSE: Great question! I’ve dealt with the issue in my book Did Jesus Exist. I think this is one of the real deal-breakers for the mythicist position – that Paul was personally acquainted with Jesus’ own [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:59-04:00October 23rd, 2013|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Jesus Books

QUESTION/REQUEST: You did mention one thing above that I think would be good to expand on: What are good books to read about the life of Jesus (and related issues) based on scholarship but intended to the general, but intelligent, reader. I would like you to consider someday to publish here a list of solid books (from various points of view), other than what you have written since most of us are likely familiar with your work, about the life of Jesus, the growth of Christianity, solid theology from various perspectives, the history and description of first century life in the Roman world and other issues that are written based on valid historical and textual research that are intended for readers like me…well educated but not a scholar. RESPONSE: What follows is a bibliography just on the historical Jesus that I published once, over ten years ago now, supplemented with a few of the most significant works to appear since. The list is highly selective – mainly books that I think are either good [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:59-04:00October 14th, 2013|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

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