Book Discussions Archives - Page 25 of 31 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

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|

Jesus as a First-Century Tea-Partier

I have decided not to provide a full and detailed review of O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus. It doesn’t really deserve it, and much more of what I have indicated before – on which see my previous posts. I will say that the book is extremely well written and easy on the eyes. It is entertaining. A lot of human-interest material, which is both its strength and its very great weakness, as almost all of this, as I’ve mentioned before, is simply MADE UP, even though it is presented as if were historical fact. There is page after page after page of that kind of thing. This is not a research book written by a scholar and his writing buddy -- with, for example, footnotes indicating where they got their information from. It can’t be that, since almost all of the details didn’t come from ancient sources but from their own fertile imaginations And since that is the main source for the Gospel according to Bill, and since most of us know what Bill’s imagination spends its [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:58-04:00October 6th, 2013|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Religion in the News|

Riled by O’Reilly

OK, I know I promised to read and review Killing Jesus. But I’m not sure I can do it. It’s just so aggravating. Pointing out its flaws is like shooting fish in a barrel. I’ll make one general comment in this post and in the next one mention one of the leading themes of the book to show why its so problematic and then, unless I have a complete change of heart or people ask me pointed questions, I think I’ll just let it go. For now, a general comment. I was one of the 4893 people who wrote a book *about* the Da Vinci Code (Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code: A Historian Reveals What We Really Know about Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and Constantine, 2004). The other 4892 people, so far as I know, were religious – usually religious scholars – who were afraid that Dan Brown might lead the faithful astray by his wild claims, and for religious reasons wanted to set the record straight. As an agnostic, that was nowhere [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:58-04:00October 4th, 2013|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Religion in the News|

Killing Jesus is Killing Me….

I received my copy of Killing Jesus in the mail today and started to glance at it. I know I said I would read it, but I’m just not sure I can bring myself to do it. The opening “Note to Readers” makes one’s heart sink. We are told that this will be a “fact-based book.” Oh, that’s good, the reader thinks: it won’t be biased but will be objective, based only on facts. Until you begin to read the opening page of ch. 1 “Heavily armed solders from the capital city of Jerusalem are marching to this small town, intent on finding and killing the baby boy. They are a mixed-race group of foreign mercenaries from Greece, Gaul, and Syria….” Oh dear. So, for our FOX historian of antiquity writing this account – the Gospel according to Bill – who is giving us only “facts,” it turns out that the “slaughter of the innocents” in Bethlehem, taken from Matthew’s infancy narrative, is a factual, historical account. We not only know it happened, we know [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:43-04:00October 3rd, 2013|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Religion in the News|

Bill O’Reilly’s Jesus

Several people have (urgently) asked me to write up a review of the new blockbuster hit, Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus. So, my short answer to the request is that, well, I haven’t read it. It did just come out after all! But I see it is – from the get-go – the #1 book (in the world!) on Amazon. I will obviously have to read it: just as I have to read Reza Aslan’s Zealot. The latter I will be reading over the next month or so in conjunction with my course on “Jesus in Scholarship and Film,” since otherwise I won’t be able to grade my students’ book reviews of it! But I will not be assigning O’Reilly, since it just came out and I won’t be changing my syllabus. I’ve ordered the O’Reilly book (against my wishes; I really don’t want to “contribute to the cause.” But I obviously have to read it) and will be able to give an evaluation soon enough. For now I should make just a couple of comments. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:43-04:00October 2nd, 2013|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions, Religion in the News|

My Bible Introduction!

O frabjous day! Callouh, Callay! I’m chortling in my joy. Today my textbook on the entire Bible – Genesis to Revelation – gets published: The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction. This was a long time in the making, and it is a huge relief to see it finally out. I think Oxford did an amazing job on it – as they usually do. I love the cover, the layout, the whole production. You can buy it on Amazon or most anywhere else. It is priced a little higher than most of my books this size, but that’s because it’s a textbook, and that’s just what happens with textbooks. Even so, it is priced lower than the competition. And in my humble and completely unbiased opinion, you get a lot more bang for your buck. I had agreed to do a textbook on the entire Bible many years ago, when my friend and editor at OUP (who lives in Chapel Hill now, even though he works out of the New York office; thank the gods [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:42-04:00September 16th, 2013|Book Discussions, Teaching Christianity|

Reza Aslan’s View of Jesus

I am saddened and grieved to report that everyone on the blog who has responded to me about yesterday’s pop quiz has gotten one of the questions wrong. :-) More on that tomorrow. (But in the meantime: I’m giving brownie points for anyone who can indicate which question everyone is missing and why they’re getting it wrong!) But on rather more serious matters: back to Reza Aslan’s book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Let me state emphatically that I have not yet and am not now writing a review of the book. I’m not attacking its views or its scholarship, I’m not praising its brilliant insights and clear vision, and I’m not recommending that you read it or, instead, use it as a very handy doorstop. I HAVEN’T READ IT! And unlike some people I know (oh so well), I don’t believe in passing judgment on a book I haven’t read. My first post on the book was in response to a question of whether I consider to Aslan to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:25-04:00August 27th, 2013|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions, Religion in the News|

Reza Aslan on Jesus

QUESTION: Do you consider Reza Aslan to be a recognised scholar of early Christianity? Larry Hurtado described the thesis circulating in lay circles, that Jesus was a military revolutionary, as a "zombie" idea (from what I gather, a key conclusion of Aslan's 2013 book) which had been debunked over and over again by scholarship in the past century. RESPONSE: OK, I need to begin with a very serious disclaimer. I haven’t read Aslan’s book (Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth) yet. So what I say will not be based on careful observation of his views or the evidence that he cites to support them. My comments will not require any of that, as you’ll see. His publisher sent me a copy gratis, for which I’m very grateful. He sent it to me before he knew that it was going to be the #1 Bestseller in nonfiction on the New York Times Bestseller list – which it is still this week, I see in this morning’s paper – and when he was interested [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:24-04:00August 25th, 2013|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions, Religion in the News|

Personal Response to Suffering?

QUESTION: I would like to know more about your personal beliefs regarding the god issue and human suffering in all of it’s forms…all forms…war, poverty, governmental responsibility in suffering, population explosion, church persecutions and tortures…everything. I’m not just referring to your book on the history of the problem of suffering (God’s Problem) but your personal thoughts about it and how you are involved to help alleviate suffering and what you think the future of humanity is since there seems to be no stop to suffering. Suffering (not just people but animals) is of great concern to me and I see no solution…ever. REPLY: For the past week or ten days I’ve been answering questions one at a time, one post per question. This is the kind of question that makes me feel a whole series of posts coming on, a real thread. We’ll see. The first thing to say is that God’s Problem is not really about the history of the problem of suffering, or the history of the discussion of the problem of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:55-04:00July 15th, 2013|Book Discussions, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Jesus’ Literacy

QUESTION: I don't know if you have covered this or not, but how about the issue of whether Jesus was literate or not? I came across a recent book on Amazon.com titled "Jesus' Literacy: Scribal Culture and the Teacher from Galilee" by Chris Keith, and the topic sounds interesting. RESPONSE: Yes indeed, it’s a very interesting – and much debated – issue. I have not yet read Chris Keith’s book, but it’s on my (very long) list. I do know what he argues (since I just asked him in an email): he thinks that Jesus was not trained in reading and writing, the way scribes in Palestine were; but it may be that lower class people who heard Jesus engage in serious discussion over the meaning of the Torah may well have *mistaken* him for someone who was. Scribes themselves would have looked on him as not up to their standards. I’ll have to read the book before passing judgment. But basically, it sounds like he and I are on the same page. Here [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:55-04:00July 12th, 2013|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship, Reader’s Questions|

On the Cutting Room Floor: Part 5 and Final!

This first paragraph is repeated from my earlier posts: I have now finished with my final edits for my book How Jesus Became God. In the process of doing these final edits, I have cut out large sections of my Preface and the Introductions of four of my chapters and replaced them with other, hopefully better, sections. But I really like the old ones as well. So, since they won’t appear in print, I decided to post them here as a record of what almost was. The all involve anecdotes about my past. In most instances (the Introductions to the four chapters), these were narratives related to my “deconversion” from Christianity. My editor and I agreed that the reading public has heard enough about all that, and there’s only so much more that could still be interesting to them. And so I have replaced those anecdotes with other things. But I will present them here, anyway, for your reading pleasure or displeasure. The following is drawn from my old chapter 9. This will be the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:39-04:00June 22nd, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

On the Cutting Room Floor: Part 4

This first paragraph is repeated from yesterday’s post: I have now finished with my final edits for my book How Jesus Became God. In the process of doing these final edits, I have cut out large sections of my Preface and the Introductions of four of my chapters and replaced them with other, hopefully better, sections. But I really like the old ones as well. So, since they won’t appear in print, I decided to post them here as a record of what almost was. The all involve anecdotes about my past. In most instances (the Introductions to the four chapters), these were narratives related to my “deconversion” from Christianity. My editor and I agreed that the reading public has heard enough about all that, and there’s only so much more that could still be interesting to them. And so I have replaced those anecdotes with other things. But I will present them here, anyway, for your reading pleasure or displeasure. The following is drawn from my old chapter 8. ***************************************************************************** It is always interesting [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:39-04:00June 21st, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

On the Cutting Room Floor: Part 3

This first paragraph is repeated from yesterday’s post: I have now finished with my final edits for my book How Jesus Became God. In the process of doing these final edits, I have cut out large sections of my Preface and the Introductions of four of my chapters and replaced them with other, hopefully better, sections. But I really like the old ones as well. So, since they won’t appear in print, I decided to post them here as a record of what almost was. The all involve anecdotes about my past. In most instances (the Introductions to the four chapters), these were narratives related to my “deconversion” from Christianity. My editor and I agreed that the reading public has heard enough about all that, and there’s only so much more that could still be interesting to them. And so I have replaced those anecdotes with other things. But I will present them here, anyway, for your reading pleasure or displeasure. The following is drawn from my old chapter 7. ***************************************************************************** I first began to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:39-04:00June 20th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

On the Cutting Room Floor: Part 2

This first paragraph is repeated from yesterday’s post: I have now finished with my final edits for my book How Jesus Became God. In the process of doing these final edits, I have cut out large sections of my Preface and the Introductions of four of my chapters and replaced them with other, hopefully better, sections. But I really like the old ones as well. So, since they won’t appear in print, I decided to post them here as a record of what almost was. The all involve anecdotes about my past. In most instances (the Introductions to the four chapters), these were narratives related to my “deconversion” from Christianity. My editor and I agreed that the reading public has heard enough about all that, and there’s only so much more that could still be interesting to them. And so I have replaced those anecdotes with other things. But I will present them here, anyway, for your reading pleasure or displeasure. The following is drawn from my old chapter 4. ***************************************************************************** I was raised in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:38-04:00June 16th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

On the Cutting Room Floor: Part 1

I have now finished with my final edits for my book How Jesus Became God. IN the process of doing these final edits, I have cut out large sections of my Preface and the Introductions of four of my chapters and replaced them with other, hopefully better, sections. But I really like the old ones as well. So, since they won’t appear in print, I decided to post them here as a record of what almost was. The all involve anecdotes about my past. In most instances (the Introductions to the four chapters), these were narratives related to my “deconversion” from Christianity. My editor and I agreed that the reading public has heard enough about all that, and there’s only so much more that could still be interesting to them. And so I have replaced those anecdotes with other things. But I will present them here, anyway, for your reading pleasure or displeasure. The following is from what was originally going to be my Preface; it is the opening gambit. ************************************************************************* The issue that lies [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:38-04:00June 15th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

More Criticisms of the Historical Criticisms of John (by John! Spong)

Yesterday I wrote a post in which I began to discuss the recent Huffington Post article from 2103 by John Shelby Spong in which he discusses his then new book on John; the book is called The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic and the article can be found this address: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-shelby-spong/gospel-of-john-what-everyone-knows-about-the-fourth-gospel_b_3422026.html?ref=topbar Today I will finish out what I started to say yesterday. Let me say again that I long appreciated Spong’s work and was sympathetic to his mission. He was trying to do from inside the church something very similar to what I' ve long tried to do outside of it: help educated lay people outside the field of biblical scholarship see what scholars – believers and non-believers alike – are saying about the New Testament. Since Spong was operating within the church, however, and saw himself as a Christian, some of his perspectives and goals were different from mine. At the end of the day, he was interested in reforming Christianity in order to make it sensible for the twenty-first century. That [...]

BDEhrman2026-06-03T12:12:58-04:00June 14th, 2013|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Religion in the News|

Spong’s New Book on John

John Shelby Spong, former Episcopal bishop of New Jersey and highly controversial author (because of his skeptical views about the New Testament and traditional Christian doctrine) has just published a new book on the Gospel of John, called The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic. I have not read the book, but Spong has written an interesting article on it that appeared in the Huffington Post yesterday, at this address: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-shelby-spong/gospel-of-john-what-everyone-knows-about-the-fourth-gospel_b_3422026.html?ref=topbar In the article Spong summarizes the conclusions he advances in the book, based on an “intensive five-year long study.” He acknowledges that many of his findings are those that scholars have held for a long time. Spong himself is not trained as a biblical scholar but has made a very successful, and useful, career out of making scholarship known to a wider audience. So too, his goal in the book, in large measure, is to bring major scholarship to a general reader, a goal I obviously sympathize with deeply. The following are the points that he stresses in his HuPo article. I will [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:38-04:00June 13th, 2013|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Religion in the News|

Future Books

QUESTION: I'm curious to know of future projects you have in mind after you complete your commentary on 2nd century gospels. RESPONSE: As I’ve indicated on this blog before, I try to alternate the kinds of books I write. Most scholars don’t do it that way. I have friends – my closest friends in the field, in fact – who want only to do scholarship and nothing else, and so they write scholarly monograph after scholarly monograph. This is an enormous service to the academic community, as it is only through work like that that we are able to advance knowledge. I know of other people who want only to write for popular audiences. And it is easy to see how someone can get “bit by the bug” and want to do nothing else. Some popular authors make a lot of money from their books, they get asked to give lectures in front of large audiences, they get their names in the media, and it’s all very seductive. FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:25-04:00May 31st, 2013|Book Discussions, Reader’s Questions|

More on Jews, Christians, and the Battle for Scripture

In yesterday’s post I indicated that my next trade book, to be written in a couple of years, would deal with the question of Jews and Christians, centered on the question of why Christians kept the Old Testament and how doing so led to controversies with Jews. The following is how I set up the issue that I will be addressing. The second-century Christian theologian Marcion maintained that the Old Testament was the Scripture of the Jews. Christians, however, were not Jews; they were followers of Jesus. Moreover, the loving God of Jesus was not the wrathful God of the Jews. For Marcion, Jews and Christians had nothing in common except in a negative sense: the Jews represented everything the Christians rejected, including the inferior, legalistic God who chose the Jewish people and gave them their Scriptures. Christians have their own beneficent and salvation-bringing God, and their own Scriptures. For Marcion, the Old Testament is not part of the Christian Bible. FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click here for [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:25-04:00May 27th, 2013|Book Discussions, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reader’s Questions|

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