Canonical Gospels Archives - Page 36 of 36

Undergraduate Courses (1): Introduction to the New Testament (Part 1)

In my post on The Work of a Professional Scholar I gave a brief overview of the sorts of courses that I teach at UNC. There is nothing particularly unusual about the courses I teach. I have hundreds of friends and colleagues who teach classes on the New Testament and on Early Christianity around the country, and most of them have courses very similar to the ones I teach – so long as they are not teaching in a fundamentalist or conservative evangelical environment. One difference among my friends and colleagues has to do with the teaching load. At major research institutions such as UNC, the normal teaching load is relatively light – two courses a semester (for me that translates into one undergraduate lecture course and one PhD seminar each term; the seminars are much smaller, but they are also way, way more work!). At smaller colleges the load may be as many as four or five courses each term. Obviously the research expectations in that setting are much lower, just as the expectations [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:17:20-04:00May 20th, 2012|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Teaching Christianity|

Why Did Jesus Go To Jerusalem?

QUESTION Just what did the historical Jesus think he was doing that last week in Jerusalem? It looks to me like he was working as hard as he could to get himself killed. If that's what he was doing, then why was he doing it? RESPONSE Interesting question! There have been scholars, of course, who have argued that this is precisely what Jesus was doing, that he went to Jerusalem in order to be crucified. It is interesting that those who take that view cover as wide a range of ideology and theology as you could possibly imagine. Conservative Christian thinkers (from protestant fundamentalists to Roman Catholic theologians to … well, take your pick) have long thought that the point of the Jerusalem trip was in fact the crucifixion, since this was all part of God’s plan. Jesus’ mission on earth was to be crucified; he went to Jerusalem to make it happen. This is what I myself thought for many, many years. On the other side of the theological spectrum is someone like [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:17:20-04:00May 18th, 2012|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Question about Eyewitnesses and the Gospels

Please Note: Normally I will be addressing questions that I receive in the members only site ("Bart Answers His Readers"). But occasionally I will post a question and answer here, in the Public Forum, to give a sense to everyone what sorts of things are available for anyone willing to give a bit to charity and to join the site. 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 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:17:20-04:00May 14th, 2012|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

Dates of the Gospels

EMAIL QUESTION How are the dates that the Gospels were composed determined? I've read that Mark is usually dated to 70 or later because of the reference to the destruction of the temple. Is this the only factor that leads scholars to conclude that it was composed in 70 CE or later or are there other factors? I've heard that Luke and Matthew are likewise dated aroun 80-85 CE to give time for Mark to have been in circulation enough to be a source for them. Is this accurate? How is John usually dated to around 95 CE (or whatever the correct period is) since it is usually described as independent of the other Gospels? RESPONSE This is a great question, and one that I get asked a lot. How do we actually know when the Gospels were written? It is actually a difficult question to answer, but the things you’ve already read and heard cover some of the important territory. So let’s start on some basics that I think everyone can agree on. (Well, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:17:19-04:00May 7th, 2012|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

A Final (for now) Post on the Resurrection

A final posting, for now, on the question I was asked on the resurrection. Most people – even those who believe in Jesus’ resurrection – never stop to think about what the idea of resurrection would have meant to first century Jews. Jesus’ followers, of course, were just that, Jews from Palestine in the first century. Today people (Christians) are so accustomed to thinking of Jesus’ resurrection that there is nothing odd about it – it fits directly into our (their) way of thinking about the world. But in fact the very notion of resurrection is a thoroughly Jewish notion with deep roots in the Jewish apocalyptic (as opposed, say, to the American capitalistic) world view. Throughout most of their earlier history, Jews did not hold to the idea of a resurrected afterlife. In the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament), most authors (e.g., of Job and Ecclesiastes) think that death is the end of the story, so that there is no afterlife, or that if there is an afterlife it is a shadowy [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:17:01-04:00April 29th, 2012|Afterlife, Canonical Gospels, Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reader’s Questions|

More on the Resurrection

As I pointed out in the previous posting, we cannot know that there was an empty tomb three days after Jesus’ death. We also cannot know which of his twelve disciples came to believe that he had been raised from the dead, or when they started to believe it. They later indicated that he was raised on the third day, as Paul, a later Christian who knew some of the disciples, tells us in 1 Corinthians 15:3-5. But Paul does not indicate that the disciples of Jesus started to believe that it was three days after Jesus’ death that his disciples started to believe he had been raised –only that that was the day on which he was raised. They may have come to realize it weeks later. The Gospels, written decades after Paul, indicate that the disciples came to believe on the third day. And it indicates that they all (except Judas Iscariot, of course) came to believe. I don’t know if that is historically right or not. There are a lot of Christian [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:17:01-04:00April 28th, 2012|Afterlife, Canonical Gospels, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Another Question on the Resurrection

[h3]EMAIL QUESTION[/h3] From all of my studies, I still have one open question about the resurrection…or the resurrection story. I do not understand how or why or when that story was invented. It is easy to understand the retroactive invention of the virgin birth stories and other theoretical miracles of Jesus, but it seems to me that no one would have gone to the trouble to create those prior stories if they had not believed sincerely in the resurrection. …but how did the resurrection story get started? Practically speaking, after Jesus’ crucifixion, I imagine the Disciples were terrified. My hunch is they wanted to get out of Dodge as quickly as possible. So, after the horror of the crucifixion…..what in the world triggered one of them to say…”you know, Jesus was really the Messiah…we have to spread his message…but nobody will believe us so how do we get the message across? O.K. Let’s make up a story about him being resurrected…and then we will tell everyone about that miracle and then certainly they will believe [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:17:00-04:00April 28th, 2012|Afterlife, Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

Sorting by

Undergraduate Courses (1): Introduction to the New Testament (Part 1)

Why Did Jesus Go To Jerusalem?

Question about Eyewitnesses and the Gospels

Dates of the Gospels

A Final (for now) Post on the Resurrection

More on the Resurrection

Another Question on the Resurrection