Canonical Gospels Archives - Page 21 of 35 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Did Luke’s Gospel Originally Have The Birth Story? Readers Mailbag and a Blast from the Past

QUESTION: If, in your suspicion, the original Gospel of Luke began at 3:1 and the infancy narrative found in 1:5-2:52 is a later addition, do you think that should be indicated in NT reconstructions and translations in a way similar to how Mark 16:9-20 is often bracketed? RESPONSE: This is a great question. I could answer it just yes or no, but I'm afraid that wouldn't make much sense to many readers. The question itself seems simple but is actually a bit complicated, and the answer needs to be even more so! The basic question is this. If I think, as I sometimes (often? most of the time?) do, that Luke did not originally have chapters 1 and 2 -- the story of Jesus' birth (the Annunciation; Joseph and Mary's trip to Bethlehem, there "is no room in the inn," the worship of the shepherds, and so on and on) -- but started with what is now 3:1, the account of Jesus' genealogy, then do I think that the chapters should be put in brackets in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:06-04:00August 13th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

How Biblical Discrepancies Can Be Theologically Liberating for a Christian

I have been trying to show that the portrayal of Jesus going to his death in Mark’s Gospel is radically different from the portrayal in Luke’s Gospel. I’ve been making this comparison for a purpose, in order to show as clearly as I can that reading the Bible historically – seeing its discrepancies – does not compromise its value. On the contrary, as I came to see as a committed Christian who was no longer a conservative evangelical, this way of reading the Bible *increases* its value. A person can still revere the Bible while thinking there are contradictions and discrepancies in it, not only in small things but in large things. But one has to understand it in a non-fundamentalist way to do so. The point of finding discrepancies is *not* so you can go away saying that the Bible is worthless (“bunch of contradictions”) but, on the contrary, so you can recognize the vast depths of its theological meaning, as seen precisely *in* the (big) differences you find in it. Here is how [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:44-04:00June 19th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

A Very Different Portrayal of Jesus’ Death

I am talking about how I came to understand and appreciate the Bible once I realized that there were widely different perspectives presented in one author or another – even when talking about the same thing. The example I’m using is the Gospel portrayals of Jesus’ death. In my previous post I laid out how Mark depicts it; here I will discuss how Luke does. What I came to see (back when I was a graduate student, still a committed Christian but no longer a fundamentalist) was that it was both fruitless and impoverished to think the two Gospels were both trying to say the same thing. Each of them is rich in meaning, but they meaning they ascribe to the event is very different. Failing to appreciate the difference means failing to understand each author and the point that he is trying to make. Here is what I say about Jesus’ death in Luke, in contrast to Mark, in my book Jesus Interrupted. ******************************************************** Luke’s account is also very interesting, thoughtful, and moving. But [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:27-04:00June 16th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

How a Non-Historical Account Can Be Meaningful: The Death of Jesus in Mark

I am now at a point where I can explain how I read the Bible when I was a committed Christian who was not, however, a conservative evangelical convinced that the Bible was a completely inerrant revelation from God without any discrepancies or differences in it. As I have already indicated, my new way of reading of the Bible did not denigrate the Bible at all, as often happens when people realize there are mistakes in it and come away saying something like: “It’s worthless, just a pile of contradictions!” That wasn’t my view at all. On the contrary, the differences revealed the true richness of the Christian tradition. The Gospels, rather than simply being completely accurate accounts of what really happened were theological reflections on the significance of Jesus. Different reflections, by different authors, all of whom had something to teach me as someone who was himself wrestling with the significance of Jesus. One way to see the true depth of these different reflections is to compare them carefully with one another. I explain [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:27-04:00June 15th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

Why Have I Stopped Explaining How I Lost My Faith? Readers’ Mailbag June 4, 2017

I will be dealing with two questions in this weeks’ Readers’ Mailbag. The first is about what happened to that thread I was supposed to be doing on why I lost my faith (!) and the other about whether Mark’s account of Jesus’ death contains an inner discrepancy (one verse flat out contradicting another). QUESTION: I'm a bit confused. A few weeks ago you said you were going to write about what you tell your students on the last day of school about why you lost your faith, but it seems you may have gotten off track, unless I missed a post or two…. Anyway, I am sorry I seem to have missed the posts that were about what you say to your class each year about why you lost your faith. I hope you will repeat it sometime soon. RESPONSE: Ha! Right! I can see how this could be confusing. When I started this thread I did not know it was even going to *be* a thread. I had planned to make [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:27-04:00June 4th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why It Didn’t Happen that Way. The Stories of Jesus’ Birth

In the previous post I began to discuss (as a review for many readers of the blog) the historical problems with the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke. The point of the discussion is that the stories cannot be accepted as historically accurate. This is a huge issue mainly for fundamentalist Christians and conservative evangelicals – and those they have managed to persuade that if a story does not describe what actually happened, then it is worthless and should simply be thrown out. For others – whether theologians, pastors, parishioners, or simply lay-folk interested in Christianity – the stories are important for other reasons, for example in the ideas they are trying to convey. In any event, here is the second post dealing with the historical problems that arise when you compare the two accounts to one another. ***************************************************** It may be possible to reconcile these accounts if you work hard enough at it. I suppose you’d have to say that after Joseph and Mary returned to Nazareth, as in Luke, they decided to move [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:27-04:00June 2nd, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

Another “True” Story that Didn’t Happen? Jesus’ Birth in Luke

I have been trying to illustrate the point that critical scholars who remain Christian have long made, that there can be stories in the Bible that are not historically accurate but that are trying to convey larger theological truths. My first illustration had to do with the death of Jesus; in this post and the next, I will deal with the birth of Jesus. This is a topic I’ve dealt with several times over the years on the blog; but it’s worth covering it again! I’ve drawn this discussion, again, from my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. ***************************************************** “True” Stories that Didn’t Happen (at least as narrated): Jesus’ Birth in Luke We may take an example from the familiar stories at the beginning of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. These are the only Gospels that narrate the events of Jesus’ birth (in both Mark and John, Jesus makes his first appearance as an adult). What is striking – and what most readers have never noticed – is that the two accounts [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:26-04:00June 1st, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

Is Theological “Truth” More Important than Historical Accuracy?

In the previous post I began to explain how there could be an account in the Gospels that is not historically accurate because an author is more interested in conveying what, to him, is a theological “truth” than in giving a history lesson about what actually happened in the life of Jesus. In my view, the early Christian story tellers and Gospel writers (often?) changed historical data in order to make theological points. What mattered more than historical accuracy was the ultimate point of the story. In this post I give a concrete example of how it works. To make sense of what I have to say about this story you need to remember what I said yesterday about how the Passover feast worked in the days of Jesus. This particular example involves only a small detail in the Gospel of John – a tiny detail, in some ways. But it is illustrative of a larger point. Sometimes Christian authors changed a historical fact in order to express what, for them, was a theological “truth.” [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:26-04:00May 30th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

An Example of a True Story that Didn’t Happen: Part 1

I have been trying to explain (without complete success) that the Bible, in the view of some scholars starting in the early 19th century, could contain “true” stories that “didn’t happen” – or at least didn’t happen as they are narrated. One important point I want to make about this claim: I am *not* saying that I personally hold this view. I’m not saying I think these stories are necessarily “true” as far as I’m concerned. I’m saying that the idea is that these stories were designed to convey truths, rather than objective history lessons. I talk about that in my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium, and try to demonstrate the point by giving a couple of particular examples. The first example will take two posts for me to cover. ********************************************************* What, though, is the evidence (that there could be true stories in the Bible that didn’t happen)? Or is this simply a theory cranked up by biblical scholars with too much time on their hands and not enough sense simply to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:26-04:00May 29th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

True Stories that Didn’t Happen

In my previous post I explained how the term “myth” came to be applied to the miracle stories of the New Testament in the work of David Friedrich Strauss in 1835-36. This is all background to what happened to me personally – 150 years later! Before talking about how my views of the Bible changed once I realized many of its stories could not be literally, historically true, I should expand a bit on the very notion that, as Strauss thought, there could be true stories that didn’t happen. What?? Yup. Here’s how I explain it in my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. ******************************************** Skipping on to Modern Times A lot – a very lot – has happened since Strauss published his Life of Jesus in 1836. Scores of scholars have pored over every detail of the Gospels, thousands of books and articles have been churned out, countless views have been marshaled, debated, believed, and spurned. And none of that is going to end soon, unless some of the people who think [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:26-04:00May 26th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Gospels as Myths

In providing background to how I began to understand the Bible once I realized that it was not an inerrant revelation from God, I have been giving a kind of history of scholarship on the Gospels, explaining how it was that, before the Enlightenment, virtually everyone understood the Gospels to be Supernatural Histories, and that during the Enlightenment there were scholars who maintained they were Natural Histories. Now I can complete this short survey by talking about a significant development, one of the most significant in the history of the entire discipline of New Testament studies, in which the Gospels came to be understood as Myths. Let me stress that I am not saying that everyone started accepting this new view or, more germane to this series of posts, that I agree with this view as I’m presenting it: I’m simply indicating what happened in the field of New Testament studies. Later I’ll explain its relevance for my views. This, again, is taken from my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. ********************************************************* The [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:26-04:00May 24th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum|

The Gospels as Natural Histories

I indicated in my last post that, to my surprise, I had never written about the history of the scholarship on the Gospels in terms of the major shift from seeing them as Supernatural Histories to Natural Histories to Myths. And just as I was preparing to write about the move to see them as Natural Histories, in today’s post, I read a comment from a reader (Bless his soul, as we used to say!) who pointed out that I did indeed have a detailed discussion of the matter in my first trade book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. I looked it up, and lo and behold, I absolutely did -- and inn precisely the terms I wanted to discuss the matter here on the blog. For some reason none of my search engines picked it up when looked through all my files. So, today I will talk about The Gospels as Natural Histories, as lifted from that treatment in my book. As I hope you’ll agree, this shift in understanding the Gospels [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:11-04:00May 23rd, 2017|Canonical Gospels, History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum|

The Gospels as Supernatural Histories

In order to explain the view I started having about the Bible after I had come to realize that it was filled with discrepancies, contradictions, historical errors, and other mistakes – and yet remained a committed Christian – I have to set out my understanding at the time of the Bible as “myth.” And to do that I have to give a very brief (though this will take a few posts) history of scholarship on the New Testament itself, specifically the Gospels. (What I say about the Gospels can be applied more broadly to the Bible, as I’ll explain). When I was preparing to write this post I *thought* I was simply going to be able to copy and paste this explanation from something I had written before. But I’ve looked everywhere, and I can’t find that I’ve ever written about it in any context whatsoever, books, articles, blog posts, nada. How strange. I lecture on this all the time. The history of Gospel scholarship is, of course, extraordinarily complex. There are hundreds of scholarly [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:11-04:00May 22nd, 2017|Canonical Gospels, History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum|

Eyewitnesses and the Gospels: A Blast From the Past

Five years ago today I received and answered this question on the blog. I thought it would make a nice break from my current discussion of my change of faith, a topic to which I'll return tomorrow. For now, here's a blast from the past. *********************************************************************** QUESTION One of the major points of your work (if I understand correctly) is that the contents of the New Testament are at a vast remove in time, place, and source from any eyewitness account of Jesus' life. But when I consider this point in my ignorance, and simply from the perspective of chronology (from the time of Jesus to the accounts in the earliest gospels), it seems to me that at least one very old eyewitness of Jesus' life might have been able to report a significant amount of information about Jesus and his teachings directly to, say, Mark. In view of this, I wonder how scholars know that no New Testament account of Jesus could have been received directly from any eyewitness. RESPONSE It’s a very [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:10-04:00May 14th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Memory Studies, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Mythicists and the Virgin Birth: Readers’ Mailbag May 6, 2017

I’ve been devoting the blog to some autobiography recently, so in this Readers Mailbag I’ll make a shift to a couple of academic questions, one about Mythicist claims on the virgin birth and the other about the usefulness of ancient translations of the New Testament for establishing the original text. QUESTION: I often read mythicists argue that Jesus was a mythological figure because he (allegedly) has many parallels in pagan gods. One of the parallels, of course, is him being born to a virgin. My question is: do mythicists realize that the concept of the virgin birth is a much later development? RESPONSE: I have spent time with Mythicist groups, and have always enjoyed myself, finding the people friendly, eager to talk, cordial, and interesting. But the general lack of basic knowledge about the Bible is shocking, even among the most outspoken among them. What is shocking is not that they don’t know much about, say, the New Testament – that’s true of most people on the planet -- but that they have [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:09-04:00May 6th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Mythicism, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Bart Ehrman Resurrection of Jesus: A Blast from the Past

On this Easter Sunday, I thought I should say something about the resurrection of Jesus. It turns out I've said a lot over the years on the blog (I just checked!). Here's a post from about five years ago, giving not my personal views but those of another well-respected New Testament scholar who, like me (we are a rare breed), is not personally a believer. Bart Ehrman Resurrection of Jesus: What Are My Thoughts? One of the first books that I have re-read in thinking about how it is the man Jesus came to be thought of as God is Gerd Lüdemann’s, The Resurrection of Christ: A Historical Inquiry (2004). Lüdemann is an important and interesting scholar. He was a professor of New Testament at Göttingen in Germany, and for a number of years split his time between there and Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville. He is a major figure in scholarship and is noteworthy for not being a Christian. He does not believe Jesus was literally, physically, raised from the dead, and he thinks [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:51-04:00April 16th, 2017|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Paul and His Letters|

My Meditation Practice and Women at the Empty Tomb: Readers Mailbag April 9, 2017

I will be dealing with two questions in this week’s mailbag, one about me personally – do I meditate? – and one about the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection: in all our narratives it is specifically women who are said to have found the empty tomb and so to be the first witnesses to the resurrection. Given ancient views that denigrate women, is it likely that anyone would make up such a story? If someone made up the tomb-discovery story, wouldn’t they have claimed that that *men* found the tomb empty? And doesn’t that suggest the story really happened as narrated? QUESTION: Do you meditate? If so, which techniques do you use? Do you find it helpful? RESPONSE: Yes indeed, I do meditate. Every New Years I make it a resolution to meditate each and every day. This year I’m doing pretty well *except* when I’m traveling (which, unfortunately, is a lot this semester); that’s probably when I need most to meditate and I just have real trouble scheduling it in. Not good. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:51-04:00April 9th, 2017|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Is Mark’s Gospel Unsophisticated?

I’ll be be dealing with just one question in this week’s Readers’ Mailbag, since the response will require some explaining. I has to do with the literary artistry of the Gospel of Mark – is it a fairly unsophisticated account of Jesus’ life and death? The question itself will require a bit of set-up and explanation. In an earlier post I argued that Mark’s Gospel almost certainly ended in chapter sixteen at verse 8. Jesus has been crucified, dead, and buried. On the third day some women go to his tomb to anoint his body more appropriately for burial, but when they arrive the tomb is already opened, Jesus’ body is not in it, but a young man is, who asks them if they are looking for Jesus of Nazareth. He then tells them that he has been raised and that they, the women, are to go tell the disciples that Jesus will meet them in Galilee. The women, though, flee the tomb and don’t say anything to anyone because they were afraid. In my [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:50-04:00April 2nd, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Does Jesus Claim to Be God in Mark? And My Former Converts. Mailbag March 19, 2017

Two questions in this week’s Mailbag, one about whether Jesus was claiming to be God in the Gospel of Mark, and the other about my personal life: whether today, as an agnostic, I ever meet people I once converted when I was a gung-ho conservative evangelical Christian. If you have a question you would like me to address, ask away! QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman, the other day I was discussing with an Evangelical pastor that the sayings of Jesus in which he claimed to be God were only found in the Gospel of John. He had me read Mark 2:5-7. This is the verse where Jesus heals a paralytic and says to him “Son, your sins are forgiven”. The religious leaders say “Who can forgive sins but God alone”. The pastor said that this shows that even in the earliest Gospel Mark, Jesus claimed to be God. I wasn’t sure how to respond but told him that there was still a big difference in the comparison. Do you have any thoughts or comments in which [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:33-04:00March 19th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

The First Textual Variant in the Gospel of Mark

I have been talking about some of the textual variants in Mark, and wanted to address the very first one that can be found in our textual witnesses, one that occurs in the first verse of the Gospel. I have decided to do so by showing how a relatively hard-core argument is made by textual scholars. To do that I have copied in my discussion of the passage in my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. This was not a Barnes & Noble book, but was written for academics. But I think it’s useful to get a sense for that kind of discourse on occasion (OK: rare occasion) on the blog. So here it is. As you’ll see, it presupposes some knowledge of adoptionistic Christologies, the topic of yesterday’s post. (I have eliminated part of the discussion that gets particularly technical, involving the surviving manuscripts that evidence the textual variant) (And apologies for the odd spacing...) ***************************************************************** The vast majority of manuscripts introduce the Gospel of Mark with the words: “The beginning of the Gospel [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:16-04:00February 27th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

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