Canonical Gospels Archives - Page 24 of 36 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Jesus’ Virgin Birth in Mark (Reader’s Mailbag February 26, 2016)

It is time for the weekly Readers’ Mailbag. This week I will be dealing with only one question, one that I find particularly intriguing. If you have any questions you would like me to answer, either in a comment or in the mailbag, let me know. I can’t answer every question I get, either because I don’t know the answers (often enough!) or because I can’t get to them all. But I take them all seriously and will do my best to get to yours! ******************************************************* QUESTION: I've read of one NT scholar who is critical of your reasoning in How Jesus Became God. He says that your argument from silence is fallacious. For example, he says that just because the virgin birth is absent in Mark's gospel does not constitute evidence that the writer did not believe in the virgin birth. RESPONSE: Great question. The first and most obvious thing to point out is that there is no way to know what another person believes (either the person who wrote Mark or [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:19-04:00February 26th, 2016|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Christ as Son of God in Mark’s Gospel

In my previous post I indicated that by the early fourth century, the debates over Christ’s divine nature had become extraordinarily sophisticated and complex (though not as sophisticated and complex as in the two centuries to follow!). At the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE the question was over whether Christ, the God who created the world, was a subordinate divinity to God the Father, one who came into being at some point in time, or if, instead, he was just as eternal, just as powerful, and just as glorious as the Father, completely “one” with him, even in his essence. It was this latter view that won the day. One of the things that I contend in my book How Jesus Became God, and in the debate, I had in New Orleans with Michael Bird (as many of you will know by now) was that these issues were not at *all* what the earliest Christians were debating and arguing about, either with one another or with non-believers. Michael Bird’s most popular books are The [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:19-04:00February 21st, 2016|Bart's Debates, Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

Weekly Readers’ Mailbag: February 18, 2016

Here is the weekly Readers’ Mailbag, three questions this time – one about my alleged “support of Islam against Christianity,” one about why we think the NT Gospels were originally written in Greek, and one about what I mean when I talk about the views held by the majority of “critical” scholars (as opposed to what other kind of scholar?)? Feel free to ask questions you have; some I will not be able to get to (either because I don’t know the answer or because the answer is a one-liner instead of a two-paragrapher or for some other reason); and the list is always growing (making it harder and harder to answer them all). But give it a shot! I love to hear your questions. COMMENT: [After pointing out that whoever said I was about ready to convert to Islam was obviously makin’ in up, or influenced by someone else who was makin’ it up, this Muslim reader commented as follows:] Anyways, that won’t stop us from using your awesome arguments against Christianity. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:19-04:00February 19th, 2016|Canonical Gospels, History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Weekly Readers’ Mailbag: January 30, 2016

In this installment of the Weekly Readers’ Mailbag, I’ll address two questions, one about the Jewishness of Jesus the other about my personal (bad) experience with editors. If you have a question, either send it via a comment here or zap me an email. QUESTION: What is it in the NT portrayal of Jesus that tends to obscure the centrality of his Jewishness? RESPONSE: The person who asked this question mentioned the fact that it is only in fairly recent times, since the second half of the twentieth century, that scholars have emphasized that Jesus was thoroughly Jewish. Prior to that, Jesus’ Jewishness was commonly downplayed. So the question is, what about the New Testament led scholars away from recognizing how thoroughly Jewish he was? I have three things to say in response to this very good question. First, my sense is that in no small measure, the earlier scholars who did not see Jesus’ Jewishness were living and doing research in an environment that was itself anti-Jewish. Christianity, as we long know, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:02-04:00January 31st, 2016|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Early Judaism, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Did Jesus Urge People to Repent?

Below is the third guest post by my colleague David Lambert, connected to his book How Repentance Became Biblical. For many readers of the blog, this will be the most important and interesting of them all. It deals with the historical Jesus. Did Jesus tell people that they needed to repent? You might think the answer is obvious…. ****************************************************************** Did Jesus Preach Repentance? In my past two posts, I argued that the concept of repentance, as we use it today and as it first developed within Judaism and Christianity, was not originally found in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Now, it’s possible that you might be tempted by this argument to draw the conclusion that repentance is a specifically Christian concept. It’s important, however, to keep in mind that, even though repentance became very important to Christianity, it actually first developed in the context of late Second Temple Judaism shortly before the advent of Christianity. The concept, for instance, is alive and well in the writings of Ben Sira (also known as Ecclesiasticus) a text that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:02-04:00January 27th, 2016|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

Weekly Readers’ Mailbag: January 24, 2016

A day late, here is this (past) week’s Readers Mailbag. I will be dealing with two questions this time, one on why Mark includes Aramaic words in his accounts of Jesus’ sayings and the other on where someone might find English versions of the surviving Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. If you too have a question, simply ask it here as a comment, or send me an email, and I will add it to the list! QUESTION: Why is Mark sometimes quoting Jesus in Aramaic? I know, that Jesus cry on cross is possibly reference to the psalms, but why is Mark spicing his gospel with Aramaic much more than other gospel authors? Is it sign of a oral/written source used by Mark? RESPONSE: Ah, good question. It’s true that Mark on occasion does record some of the words of Jesus in Aramaic. For example, in chapter 5 Jesus is told that a young girl (daughter of Jairus) has died; he goes to her in her room, and taking her by the hand [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:02-04:00January 24th, 2016|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Jesus and the Son of Man

Over the past few weeks, as I have been talking about the rise of Jewish apocalypticism, in relation to the historical Jesus, a number of readers have asked me to explain what I think about the “Son of Man” in the sayings of Jesus Jesus. Did Jesus call himself the son of man? If so, what did he mean? And if not, what did he mean? As it turns out, these are some of the most complex, convoluted, and confounding questions confronting scholars of the historical Jesus. Many books, some of them big and dense, have been written on the issue. There are lots of opinions about it. Here I’ll try to explain my view, and try to justify it. The following is taken from my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium ***************************************************************** The Coming Son of Man Among the most heated, and least enlightening, debates among New Testament scholars has been the question of the origins of the phrase “the Son of Man” in the teachings of Jesus. Everyone agrees -- since [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:02-04:00January 21st, 2016|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Readers’ Mailbag: December 27, 2015

QUESTION: [Bart has said:] “Jesus must have been called the messiah during his lifetime, or it makes no sense that he would be called messiah after his death”: [Comment:] By this line of reasoning, then surely one would conclude that Jesus was considered divine during his lifetime, else it makes no sense he would be considered divine after his death? RESPONSE: The first line in the question is a quotation of a view I have elaborated on the blog. The logic, in short (see the posts for a fuller explanation) is that no one on the planet expected that the messiah would die and rise again. And so even someone who came to believe in Jesus’ resurrection would never conclude: OH! He must be the messiah? That’s because that is not what the messiah was supposed to do. The questioner then is arguing that the same thing applies to the question of Jesus’ divinity, that the resurrection would not make anyone think Jesus is divine. My view is that this is precisely wrong. It [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:45-04:00December 27th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

The Myth of the First Christmas

Over the years I’ve been asked to write short articles on the meaning of Christmas for various news magazines. Looking back at some of these articles makes me realize how many different views of the season seem to be competing with each other inside my head. Or maybe I’ve just been in different moods! I thought I would reproduce a couple of these articles on the blog. The following is one I wrote a few years ago for the British journal The New Statesman. I called it “The Myth of the First Christmas.” (Apologies to those with better memories than mine: I just checked after posting this article and see that I did so earlier -- three years ago! But no matter, I didn't remember what was in it, and so probably you won't either!) ****************************************************************** Once more the season is come upon us. At its heart stands a tale of two-thousand year vintage, the Christmas story. Or perhaps we should say the Christmas myth. When Post-Enlightenment scholars turned their critical tools on the tales [...]

admin2025-07-16T17:24:02-04:00December 23rd, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Resurrection of the Son of God

I’m in the midst of the most entangled thread I have yet produced in my well-over-three-years of doing the blog. It started with orthodox scribes who were altering their texts of Scripture (specifically Luke 22; this was part of a thread I began in April! I’ll get back to it….) and it has now managed by a number of intricate twists, turns, and interweavings to end up at the resurrection of Jesus. I have been arguing that the resurrection radically changed the disciple’ understanding of the belief that he was the messiah – a belief that he himself had, and that they shared. I have argued that given everything we know about Jewish beliefs at the time, almost certainly anyone hearing that a man (such as Jesus) was the messiah would have thought that this meant that he was (or would become) the king of the Jewish people. That’s certainly how the Roman governor Pontius Pilate took it. It was because Jesus made such a claim that Pilate ordered him crucified. The crucifixion proved beyond [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:45-04:00December 16th, 2015|Afterlife, Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Did Some Disciples Not Believe in the Resurrection?

In my previous post I pointed out that we simply don’t know how many of Jesus’ disciples came to believe that he was raised from the dead. In my view there is actually some *evidence* that some of them never did believe it. I lay the evidence out in my book How Jesus Became God. It has to do with the fact that there is such a strong tradition of “doubt” in the resurrection among Jesus’ followers. Here is how I lay out the evidence there. *************************************************************** In considering the significance of the visions of Jesus, a key question immediately comes to the fore that in my judgment has not been given its full due by most scholars investigating the issue. Why do we have such a strong and pervasive tradition that some of the disciples doubted the resurrection, even though Jesus appeared to them? If Jesus came to them, alive, after his death, and held conversations with them – what was there to doubt? The reason this question is so pressing is because, as [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:45-04:00December 16th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Readers’ Mailbag December 11, 2015

Time again for my weekly Readers’ Mailbag. I have three questions to deal with today, one that is substantive and about the New Testament, one about my personal life as an evangelical turned agnostic, and one about my views of the beginnings of life! Quite a mix. As questions occur to you, please feel free to ask, either in a comment on this post or in an email. If it’s something I can handle, I will add your question to the list. QUESTION: You have pointed out that Jesus was rejected by his family, and by his listeners in Nazareth and other towns & villages of Galilee. What do you think is the main reason for this widespread rejection? Is it because of his apocalyptic message? RESPONSE: This question gives me the opportunity to make an important distinction that I’m afraid I have not always been careful enough to make on the blog. It is the distinction between the literary reading of a text and the question of historical reality. When I have [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:32-04:00December 11th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Readers’ Mailbag November 20, 2015

It is time for my weekly Readers’ Mailbag. I will be dealing with two questions this time. If you have questions, about anything at all related to the historical Jesus, the New Testament, the history of early Christianity, or anything else that I may have a remote chance of knowing something about, please ask! You can either respond with a comment/question to this post, or send me an email, or comment on any other post! QUESTION: An off-topic request: what are the five most puzzling questions about the historical Jesus you would love to see resolved in your lifetime? RESPONSE: Ah, this is a tough one. It is made particularly difficult by two competing phenomena. The first is that most scholars of the historical Jesus are pretty convinced that their views about what he said and did are on the money. So in that sense, what is there that can be answered that hasn’t been? The other is the unpleasant reality that in fact we know very few things for certain about Jesus – [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:30-04:00November 20th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Jesus and the Messianic Prophecies – Did the Old Testament Point to Jesus?

In my previous post I started to explain why, based on the testimony of Paul, it appears that most Jews (the vast majority) rejected the Christian claim that Jesus was the messiah. I have to say, that among my Christian students today (most of them from the South, most of them from conservative Christian backgrounds), this continues to be a real puzzle. "But there were prophecies of Jesus being the messiah," they argue. "Hundreds of Old Testament passages, such as Isaiah 53, describe him to a tee." They genuinely can’t figure it out. What About Old Testament Messianic Prophecies? In their view, the Old Testament makes a number of predictions about the messiah: he would be born in Bethlehem his mother would be a virgin he would be a miracle worker he would be killed for the sins of others he would be raised from the dead These are all things that happened to Jesus! How much more obvious could it be? Why in the world don’t those Jews see it? Are they simply hard-headed [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:13-04:00November 8th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Early Judaism, Public Forum|

Readers’ Mailbag on Revelation: November 6, 2015

Last week I started a new feature on the blog, a weekly “Readers’ Mailbag,” where I answer two or three fairly random questions that have come in to me, ones that I do not simply want to answer in a sentence, as in most of my replies to “Comments” on my posts, but also not as fully as a thread or even a full post. Most of these questions do indeed deserve full posts, or threads, and I may in fact get around to devoting some to them. But for now I will be content with giving short answers that are hopefully packed with content. Feel free to ask me questions for this weekly feature. I don’t know how I can get to all the viable questions by doing this just once a week (last week I received a dozen interesting questions). Some weeks possibly I’ll do the mailbag twice. But this week I do it just once, addressing three questions. QUESTION: Since Revelation was probably written around the year 95 why does it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:13-04:00November 6th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions, Revelation of John|

Jesus as the Messiah in Mark’s Gospel

Jesus as the Messiah in Mark's Gospel. In this thread within a thread within a thread, I’m discussing the portrayal of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark as the Son of God whom no one knows. For background, see my preceding post on the topic. One of my overarching points is that Mark goes out of his way to portray Jesus as the Son of God. Even though the title does not occur very often in the Gospel. Only at really crucial points of the narrative, in the first episode of Jesus’ life (his baptism), in the final episode of Jesus’ life (his crucifixion), and at the very middle of the Gospel (the transfiguration). My other point is that even though both Mark and God himself, in the narrative, declare straightforwardly that Jesus is the Son of God, no one understands it. When they do start to understand it, they misunderstand it. No One Around Jesus Got Him That no one “gets” it is obvious if you read the first eight chapters carefully. Everyone around [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:12-04:00November 2nd, 2015|Canonical Gospels|

Jesus as the Son of God in Mark

I am set now to return to my thread on the changes in our surviving manuscripts of the New Testament that were made in order to make the text more amenable to the theological agenda of orthodox scribes and to help prevent their use by Christians who had alternative understandings of who Christ was. I have been arguing, in that vein, that the voice at Jesus’ baptism in Luke’s Gospel originally said “You are my son, today I have begotten you” (as in some manuscripts) but that it was changed because scribes were afraid that the text could be too easily read to mean that it was at this point that God had adopted Jesus to be his son. These scribes believed that Christ had *always* been the son of God, and so God could not say that he “made” him the son on the day of his baptism. Their change was remarkably successful: the vast majority of manuscripts have their altered text, in which the voice says (as it says also in Mark’s version): [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:12-04:00October 30th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

Really??? Stories of Jesus’ Virgin Birth

COMMENT: When I bring up the possibility that the original Luke did not have the first two chapters which include the virgin birth narrative, Christians say to me: "How could such a new twist to the story of Jesus have developed so soon in the first century if some of Jesus' family, disciples, and friends were still alive to verify its accuracy? If Jesus had truly been Joseph's son, wouldn't SOMEONE have said, "Hey. Wait a minute. Jesus nor his mother ever claimed that he was the virgin-born son of Yahweh. This virgin birth story is bogus nonsense." RESPONSE: This is an interesting point and one that we should reflect on. As it turns out, it's one I’ve reflected on it for some thirty years now! (And it is related to what I discuss in my next book on how memory affected the oral traditions circulating about Jesus before the Gospels were written.) It is one of those points that on the surface sounds really convincing: of *course* that’s the case! No one could [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:12-04:00October 26th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

Is Luke’s Christology Consistent?

Does Luke present a (strictly speaking) consistent view of Jesus throughout his two-volume work of Luke-Acts? I raise the question because of the textual problem surrounding the voice at Jesus’ baptism. I have been arguing that it is likely that the voice did NOT say “You are my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased” (as in most manuscripts; this is what it clearly does say in Mark’s version; Matthew has it say something different still); instead it probably said “You are my Son, today I have begotten you.” In the past couple of posts I’ve suggested that this wording – found in only one ancient Greek manuscript, but in a number of church fathers who quote the passage (these fathers were living before our earliest surviving manuscripts) – makes particular sense if the Gospel did not originally have chapters 1-2, the accounts of Jesus’ birth. In yesterday’s post I gave the evidence for thinking that originally the Gospel began with Jesus’ baptism. But if I’m wrong about that (and hey, it won’t be [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:12-04:00October 23rd, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, New Testament Manuscripts|

Arguments that Luke Did Not Originally Have the Virgin Birth

In discussing the voice of God at Jesus’ baptism in Luke – where he evidently spoke the words of Psalm 2:7 “You are my Son, today I have begotten you – I have mentioned the possibility that originally Luke’s Gospel did not begin with the account of Jesus’ birth, as found now in chapters 1 and 2. I have broached that topic on the blog before, a couple of years ago (if you want to see that discussion, just search for “Did Luke Originally Have”). But my sense is that most people on the blog either weren’t on it back then or possibly don’t remember what I said (as, well, I myself didn’t remember till I looked it up!). So let me summarize some of the issues. The first thing is to re-emphasize that it would not be strange for Luke to lack an account of Jesus’ birth to a virgin mother in Bethlehem. That account is also lacking in Luke’s source, the Gospel of Mark, as well as in the Gospel of John. Moreover, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:12-04:00October 22nd, 2015|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts|

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