Book Discussions Archives - Page 28 of 31 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

How Jesus Became God: More Questions

In yesterday’s post I began to explain some of the problems that I had started to have with my original way of imagining this book, How Jesus Became God (I give the original prospectus in the three posts preceding that one). The problem I mentioned yesterday was a big one: I came to think that the proposal did not take into account fully enough the variety of Christological expressions that one finds at the same time in early Christianity, but seemed to assume that there was some kind of straight line, linear progression from a low Christology to a high one. To some extent I still think that there was a progression. It is clear, at any rate, that the Christology embraced at the Council of Nicea was MUCH “higher” than the one found in the Gospel of Mark. You’d have to be blind not to see the difference. But something has to account for the fact that in our earliest source – Paul – we appear to get some kind of high Christology already, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:23-04:00February 5th, 2013|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture|

How Jesus Became God: My Change of Direction

Over the course of my last three posts I have indicated what my original idea was for the book How Jesus Became God. When I first started writing the proposal for the book (as you have seen it) I had planned to write it with Oxford University Press. But about three or four years ago I made a career decision. At that point I had published three trade books with HarperOne (an imprint of Harper Collins, the branch that publishes in religious studies). All three of them had made it onto the New York Times Bestseller list. That had never happened to me before. A lot of that is luck, but it takes a *ton* of work from the publisher to make it even possible. I think Oxford is an absolutely terrific press. In my opinion they are absolutely among the best press in the world at publishing scholarly monographs and *are* the best at publishing college level textbooks in religious studies. But they are not as geared toward trade books. With Harper, on the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:23-04:00February 5th, 2013|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

How Jesus Became God: The “Original” Idea, Part 3

This is the third installment of the thread. For those who didn’t read the first two installments, I repeat the introduction I gave to them: *** Several people have asked about the book I’m working on this term, How Jesus Became God, in particular in relation to what I mentioned in my earlier post, how I’ve learned a lot doing my research and changed my views on important issues related to the book. Explaining all that is a bit complicated, and I thought one good way to do it would be to show what I had *originally* planned to do with this book when I first proposed it to a publisher maybe seven or eight years ago, and then explain how the book now will be different, both in the way I’ll set it up and in what I think now about the topic. So for these posts I will reproduce my original book proposal. REALIZE, please, that this is what I was ORIGINALLY planning. In lots of ways it still makes sense, but I’ve [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:23-04:00February 3rd, 2013|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine|

How Jesus Became God: The “Original” Idea, Part 2

This is the second installment of the thread. For those who didn’t read the first installment from yesterday’s post, I repeat the introduction I gave to it there (though this post will make better sense if you read that one first): *** Several people have asked about the book I’m working on this term, How Jesus Became God, in particular in relation to what I mentioned in my earlier post, how I’ve learned a lot doing my research and changed my views on important issues related to the book. Explaining all that is a bit complicated, and I thought one good way to do it would be to show what I had *originally* planned to do with this book when I first proposed it to a publisher maybe seven or eight years ago, and then explain how the book now will be different, both in the way I’ll set it up and in what I think now about the topic. So for this post and the next two I will reproduce my original book proposal. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:23-04:00February 1st, 2013|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine|

How Jesus Became God: The Original Idea

Several people have asked about the book I’m working on this term, How Jesus Became God, in particular in relation to what I mentioned in yesterday’s post, how I’ve learned a lot doing my research and changed my views on important issues related to the book. Explaining all that is a bit complicated, and I thought one good way to do it would be to show what I had *originally* planned to do with this book when I first proposed it to a publisher maybe seven or eight years ago, and then explain how the book now will be different, both in the way I’ll set it up and in what I think now about the topic. So for this post and the next two I will reproduce my original book proposal. REALIZE, please, that this is what I was ORIGINALLY planning. In lots of ways it still makes sense, but I’ve changed it now, and to make sense of the changes, you have to see what the original looked like. So here’s part 1 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:23-04:00January 31st, 2013|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine|

During my Leave…

I have received several responses to my post yesterday about my being on leave; most of them can be summed up in two questions: What am I doing during my leave (besides spending my days watching soaps and eating bon-bons)? And will I keep my blog going after I’m done with the leave and return to teaching? I’ll answer the second question first. Yes, my plan is to keep the blog going. I started it while I was teaching last Spring (though it was a the tail end of the term; but the planning had been going on for months), and I intend to keep it up once I’m back in the classroom in the Fall. I won’t lie: it’s a lot of work. Posting an average of six times a week is a bit hard sometimes. But I’m blessed with the ability to write fast, and doing this blog has made me even faster! I have to budget at least 45 minutes a day to focus on the blog (not to mention the time [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:23-04:00January 30th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Introductions to The Lost Gospels

As many of you know, this past year my colleague Zlatko Plese and I published a bilingual edition of the Apocryphal Gospels. Actually, it was quadrilineal. We included all the Gospels of the early centuries (up until the Middle Ages, and some important ones even from then) in Greek, Latin, and Coptic, with the original language on the left side of the page and a new English translation on the right. This past summer, after it came out, I decided that it would be really nice to have an English-only edition of these texts for people (this would be most people) who aren’t interested in seeing what the original languages say. There are about 40 Gospels altogether that we included, with short introductions. To produce the English version we are simply reproducing our translations, with Introductions geared for general readers rather than for scholars. So I’m touching up the introductions to try to get them at the proper reading level/expertise/level of interest. I’d like to get some feedback. FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:53-04:00December 29th, 2012|Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha|

Feedback on Excursus

Warning. This is a long post. I am editing the first chapter of my Bible Introduction. At its end, I give an excursus that explains that we will be approaching the Bible from a literary and historical perspective, not a confessional perspective. It’s a very tricky and touchy topic, as this is meant for 19 and 20 year olds, most of whom know the Bible, if they do at all, only from church and Sunday school – believing perspectives. I give this kind of excursus in my New Testament textbook, and most teachers like it. But I’ve altered it for this book, to stress that the emphasis is both literary and historical. I would like some feedback: do you think this works, is sensitive to students, yet is clear about what the book will be doing and why? Let me know, if you feel so inclined. Excursus Most of the people who are deeply interested in the Bible in modern American culture are committed Jews or Christians who have been taught that this is a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:38-04:00December 3rd, 2012|Book Discussions, Teaching Christianity|

Rene Salm at the SBL (2)

In my post yesterday I began to explain why René Salm’s claim that Nazareth did not exist in the days of Jesus is dead wrong and is rejected by every recognized authority – whether archaeologist, textual scholar, or historian; whether Jewish, Christian, agnostic, or other . Here is my second and final post on the subject, again, with apologies to those who have read it already, lifted from my treatment in Did Jesus Exist? ***************************************************************************************************************** Salm also claims that the pottery found on the site that is dated to the time of Jesus is not really from this period, even though he is not an expert on pottery. Two archaeologists who reply to Salm’s protestations say the following: “Salm’s personal evaluation of the pottery … reveals his lack of expertise in the area as well as his lack of serious research in the sources.” They go on to state: “By ignoring or dismissing solid ceramic, numismatic [that is, coins], and literary evidence for Nazareth’s existence during the Late Hellenisitic and Early Roman period, it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:38-04:00November 29th, 2012|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Mythicism|

Rene Salm at the Society of Biblical Literature Meeting

Several people have sent me private emails asking why René Salm was put on the program at the Society of Biblical Literature meeting, given the fact that he is not a scholar and has no credentials in the field. For those of you who don’t know, Salm has written a book claiming that Nazareth did not exist in the first century, so that Jesus couldn’t be there. He argues this in part because he doesn’t think Jesus existed and so wants to discredit the Gospel stories by saying the Christian authors made the whole thing up. Several scholars (well, everyone who mentioned it to me) were outraged that Salm was allowed to be on the program. This meeting is of a learned society and is to be for scholars with established expertise. It is not to be a venue for people without qualifications to spout their wild theories. Salm claims that those who oppose him have a theological or religious bias against his views, but this simply is not true. EVERYONE who is an expert [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:38-04:00November 29th, 2012|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Mythicism|

The Pope’s New Book

So, I read the Pope’s new book last night, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives. It wasn’t what I expected. I don’t know why it wasn’t what I expected: about thirty seconds solemn reflection should have told me what it would be. But I believed the media reports and was led astray. The press coverage stressed the things I pointed out in my post yesterday: we don’t know what year exactly Jesus was born, since the calendar devised by the sixth-century Dionysius Exiguus was off; we don’t know if Jesus was born on December 25; there is no NT record of an ox and an ass at the manger scene; etc. etc. But as it turns out, these are very, very minor points in the book, and not what the Pope is interested in at all. As it often does, the media cherry picked the parts of the book, minor as they are, in order to stress what seems (to the media) as sensational and newsworthy. But these things are not what the book is [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:38-04:00November 27th, 2012|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Religion in the News|

How Do I Read Books?

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 get good at it, you can read much more than that. It all depends on what you are reading it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:37-04:00November 19th, 2012|Book Discussions, Reader’s Questions|

Modern Interest in the Apostolic Fathers

An interest in the "church Fathers" emerged in Western Europe among humanists of the Renaissance, many of whom saw in the golden age of patristics their own forebears -- cultured scholars imbued with the classics of Western Civilization, concerned with deep religious and philosophical problems. No wonder, then, that the humanists focused their attention on the writings of the "great" Fathers of the church such as Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, the Cappadocians, and the like, while showing virtually no interest in their comparatively "primitive" and "uncultured" predecessors, such as Ignatius of Antioch, Clement of Rome, Barnabas, and Hermas, who on no reckoning were cultured scholars or brilliant thinkers. When a “most ancient” church Father like Irenaeus was mentioned, it was usually in order to show the unrefined nature of his theology and to censure his aberrant doctrinal views, which failed to reflect the more mature and nuanced statements of later times. The Reformation provided some impetus for the study of Christian writings immediately after the New Testament period, but even then few scholars evinced an [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:37-04:00November 18th, 2012|Book Discussions, History of Biblical Scholarship, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers|

The Collection: Apostolic Fathers

About a week or so ago I talked about translating the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library. Some people have asked me to say more about the Apostolic Fathers. It may be useful to devote a couple of posts to this collection: when were these authors first gathered together? Who decides which books should be included in the corpus? On what grounds? Etc. For much of this I draw from the Introduction in my edition. The term “apostolic father” first occurs in the Hogedos of Anastasius, the seventh-century anti-monophysite abbot of St. Catherine’s monastery on Mount Sinai, who spoke of “the apostolic father Dionysius the Areopagite.” Somewhat ironically, the works of Dionysius the Areopagite, allegedly the convert of the apostle Paul (Acts 17:34), have never been included in modern collections of the Apostolic Fathers: since the sixteenth century they have been recognized as forgeries of later times (possibly the early sixth century). (They are still fascinating reading: but they are not writings by someone from the generation after the apostles.) In any event, neither Anastasius [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:23-04:00November 17th, 2012|Book Discussions, Forgery in Antiquity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers|

Forgery and Counterforgery

Forgery and Counterforgery is the first comprehensive study of early Christian pseudepigrapha ever produced in English. In it, Ehrman argues that ancient critics–pagan, Jewish, and Christian–understood false... [button url="https://ehrmanblog.org/forgery-and-counterforgery/" target="_blank" size="small" style="teal grey" ]Learn More[/button]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:23-04:00November 14th, 2012|Book Discussions|

It Has Arrived! Forgery and Counterforgery in Early Christian Polemics.

I have rarely – ever? – been so pleased with the appearance of a publication in my life. Last night when I got home from running some errands, a box was waiting for me, from Oxford University Press. It had my ten author’s copies of Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics. I’m very excited about it, like a kid who has just gotten a fantastic present. In my opinion, this is the best book I’ve ever written, years in the making. As I have said before on this blog, it is written for scholars, although a number of people have commented that it seems, from the quotations I’ve given, to be accessible to laypeople as well (normal people, as opposed to abnormal scholars). I’ll say a bit more about it in the next post, for now, I thought I would simply give you a taste, by quoting the very first, opening, paragraphs (without the footnotes): *********************************************************************************************************************** Arguably the most distinctive feature of the early Christian literature is the degree [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:23-04:00November 13th, 2012|Book Discussions, Forgery in Antiquity, Public Forum|

The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations

I mentioned in my previous post that by a matter of serendipity, I decided to produce a bi-lingual edition of the Apocryphal Gospels. My idea was to make available to scholars who wanted easy access to (virtually all) the non-canonical Gospels in the original language a one-volume edition, and to make available to everyone, whether scholars or not, solid and new English translations of all these works. The original idea was to include all the early and important Gospels (up to the Middle Ages) in Greek, Latin, and English. But when I switched publishers to Oxford, I realized that I could do more than that, and decided to include some in Coptic as well. Had I been really ambitious I could have gone for some in other languages, but that would have stretched me too far. The Coptic itself was a stretch. I had read Coptic at a fairly basic level for years, but I was no expert. And so I decided to ask my colleague Zlatko Plese to join me in producing the volume. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:23-04:00November 10th, 2012|Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha, Heresy and Orthodoxy|

Serendipity 3: The Apocryphal Gospels Volume

I mentioned in previous posts that a good deal of my career has developed because of serendipitous moments. As I look back on it (from this halfway point ), most of the good things that have happened to me seem to have come about by pure chance. Of course, I took advantage of the chances as they came along. But still, no one can deny that a major chunk of life is all by chance. In those two earlier posts, I talked about how my first teaching position at Rutgers was pure chance – a professor of NT there had to take emergency leave in the middle of a semester because her husband had been diagnosed with cancer (and if I had not, as a result, landed that job, I never, ever would have been hired at the University of North Carolina, and could well be pursuing an entirely different career, as a result; I’ll say more of that in another post). And, far less momentously, I discussed in another post how I lucked into [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:23-04:00November 9th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha|

A Stranger Problem with Lake’s Translation

Other problems with the edition of the Apostolic Fathers done by Kirsopp Lake relate to the period when he produced it. This is scarcely an avoidable problem, of course; but the reality is that his time is not ours. Lake was born in 1872 and was given, then, a solid Victorian education in the classics in Oxford. And there are passages in his translation where his cultural milieu shines through, none more clearly than in Barnabas 10, where Barnabas is discussing some of the food laws of the Old Testament in order to show that Jews have misconstrued them in a literal way -- misled as they were by an evil angel -- when in fact God meant them to be taken figuratively as indications of how one was to live. And so, for Barnabas, the commandment not to eat pork, for example, does not literally mean not to eat pork; it is a command not to live like or associate with people who are like pigs -- who grunt loudly when hungry but are [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:23-04:00November 7th, 2012|Book Discussions, History of Biblical Scholarship, Proto-Orthodox Writers|

Problems with Lake’s Translation of the Apostolic Fathers

Some people have asked if I could give some examples of the problems with the translations of the Apostolic Fathers in the original edition done by Kirsopp Lake. It’s a fair enough question – although I do want to stress for the 29th time that I think on the whole he made a very fine translation indeed. But there are some serious and widely recognized problems with it. As one might expect, the translations are dated in places. No longer do we use intentionally archaizing language in translations to indicate their sacrality or antiquity. Lake did do that. It’s like speaking King James English, though, when talking about religion, instead of just talking as one normally talks. Technically it’s not wrong, but it’s a bit strange. Even the authors of the Bible (not to mention the Apostolic Fathers) spoke in the language of their day, not stilted language of 400 years earlier (despite what you hear from the people who still think the King James Version is the one and only inspired translation of the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:22-04:00November 6th, 2012|Book Discussions, History of Biblical Scholarship, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers|

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