Historical Jesus Archives - Page 24 of 35 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Press Release! Jesus Before the Gospels

In just over a month now, my new book, Jesus Before the Gospels, will be published. As avid readers of the blog know, for a couple of years I was obsessed with issues related to human memory and oral tradition, especially as these relate to the question of how the stories about Jesus were being transmitted, shaped, altered, and invented as they were told year after year, decade after decade, before the Gospels were written. It was these remembered/ altered / invented stories that the Gospel writers themselves inherited and then edited (and thus changed) when they wrote them down when producing our Gospels. What does knowing about the processes of memory, and about oral cultures who transmit their traditions by word of mouth, tell us about the nature of the Gospels, the communities that stood behind them, and the historicity of the traditions they relate? These are all questions I deal with in the book, reaching some conclusions that many readers will not suspect. Please note: you can buy the book at discount already [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:02-04:00January 25th, 2016|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

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’ Weekly Mailbag: January 2, 2016

It is weekly Readers’ Mailbag time again. If you have a question you would like me to address in a future post, just comment here, or send me a private email. Today there are three questions, on three very different topics: the goddess Sophia, the rise of non-apocalyptic Christianity, and the evidence for John the Baptist. ****************************************************************** QUESTION: In your debate with Justin Bass, you mention the divinity of Sophia. I googled “Sophia” and can’t quite figure this out. Could you educate us about Sophia? RESPONSE: Ah, this will be tough to do in a short answer! Sophia” is the Greek word for “wisdom” (we get a number of English words from it, for example “sophisticated” and “sophistry”). In ancient religious circles, both pagan and Jewish, “Sophia” came to be thought of as not simply a divine attribute (God is “wise”) but as a kind of divine emanation (“wisdom” actually “comes from” or “derives from” God) and then as an actual divine hypostasis. The term “hypostasis” does not have an easy English equivalent. It refers [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:46-04:00January 2nd, 2016|Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Jesus’ Resurrection as an Apocalyptic Event

In my previous post I started to discuss the eschatological implications drawn by Jesus’ followers once they became convinced that he had been raised from the dead. I pointed out that the very fact that they interpreted their visions of him as evidence of “resurrection” shows that they must have been apocalyptic Jews prior to his death (as I have argued on other grounds ad nauseum on the blog!). And I also suggested two of the key conclusions they drew with respect to eschatology (their understanding of what would happen at the end): they came to conclude that Jesus himself was the Son of Man that he had been proclaiming as the future judge of the earth, and they came to believe that they were living at the very end of time. In this post I am not going to talk about Jesus as the Son of Man – that will require several posts that I will take up soon. But I do want to talk about this business of Christians thinking that they were [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:46-04:00December 30th, 2015|Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

Jesus’ Return to Life as a Resurrection

So far I have talked about the significance of the belief in Jesus’ resurrection for both Christology (the understanding of who Jesus was) and soteriology (the understanding of how salvation works). It also was significant for eschatology (the understanding of what would happen at the end of time). Christologically, the resurrection proved that Jesus really was the favored one of God, appearances notwithstanding. It may have *seemed* like the crucifixion would show that Jesus was not God’s son, and certainly not the messiah; but the resurrection (for those who came to believe in it) showed that in fact he was. He was the son of God in an even more exalted sense than anyone had thought – he actually had been made into a divine being. So too he was the messiah in a more exalted sense than had been expected – he was not a mere human king but the divine King of all. Soteriologically, the resurrection showed that the death of Jesus had not been a mere miscarriage of justice or the unfortunate [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:46-04:00December 29th, 2015|Afterlife, Early Judaism, Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

The Death of the Messiah for Salvation

In a previous post I argued that Christians invented the idea of a suffering messiah. Because Jesus was (for them) the messiah, and because he suffered, therefore the messiah *had* to suffer. That was clear and straightforward for the Christians. They backed up their newly devised theology by appealing to Scripture, finding passages of the Bible where a righteous person suffered but was then vindicated by God, passages such as Isaiah 53, Psalm 22, Psalm 69 and so on. They reinterpreted these passages (where the messiah is never mentioned) in a messianic way, and they were massively successful in their reinterpretations. Many Christians today cannot read these passages without thinking (knowing!) that they refer to Jesus, the suffering messiah. But why would the messiah have to suffer? Yes, for Christians, it was because it was “predicted.” But why would God predict it? That is, why would he want his messiah to suffer? This is where Christians came up with yet another innovation, the idea that the death of the messiah brought about the salvation of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:45-04:00December 28th, 2015|Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Jesus the Suffering Messiah

In a previous post I tried to show how the belief in Jesus’ resurrection completely altered the disciples’ perspective on who Jesus was. During his lifetime they thought he would be the future king of Israel; when he was crucified they realized they were wrong; when they then came to believe he had been raised they realized that they had been right, but in a way they did not at the time think. Jesus, for them, now that they believed he was raised, was far more than a human king. He was a divine being, the ruler of the world, the king of All. Yes, he would be the ruler of Israel as well. But that was when he came back from heaven as the victorious Son of Man, destroying his enemies and all those who were aligned against God, before bringing in his utopian kingdom. That was to happen very, very soon. The resurrection of Jesus not only made the followers of Jesus rethink their views of who (and what) he was; it also [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:45-04:00December 19th, 2015|Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

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|

Ehrman-Bass Debate Did the Historical Jesus Claim to be Divine

On September 18th, 2015 I had a debate with Justin Bass on the question "Did the Historical Jesus Really Claim to Be God?" As you might imagine, I argued that the answer is "Decidedly No." He argued "Decidedly Yes." The debate was held at the Collin College Preston Ridge Conference Center in Frisco, TX. The event was hosted by "1042 Church" http://www.1042church.com where Justin Bass is the lead pastor. Most of the audience came from members of Justin's congregation and friends they brought. It was a very kind and receptive crowd for most of the debate. During the debate I had mixed feelings about it. I'm never quite sure if this kind of thing is worth it, since it seems that there is scarcely any chance of getting anyone to think seriously about changing whatever views they already have. But I keep telling myself that if I can simply get a couple of people to think more deeply about an issue, see the other side, and possibly realize that their views are deeply problematic, I've done [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:56-04:00December 12th, 2015|Bart's Critics, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Video Media|

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|

Does Paul Know about Judas Iscariot?

In my previous post I indicated that Paul shows no evidence of knowing about the tradition that Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus. In fact, one passage may suggest that he actually did not know about it. I’ll get to that in a second. First I need to stress that we really don’t have any way of know most of what Paul knew, or thought he knew, about Jesus’ life. He tells us so very little. As I have mentioned on the blog before, scholars have had long and hard debates about why Paul says so little about Jesus’ life: Did incidents from Jesus’ life seem irrelevant to what really mattered to him (salvation through Jesus’ death and resurrection)? Did information of Jesus’ life not matter for the issues that he was addressing in his letters to his trouble congregations? Did he simply not know any more than he mentioned? Each of these options is attractive and each of them is seriously problematic. But the reality is that Paul doesn’t tell us much and we can’t actually [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:32-04:00December 9th, 2015|Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

The Reversal of the Disciples’ Decisive Disconfirmation

In my previous post I argued that the crucifixion of Jesus, rather than being the fulfilment of his own and his disciples’ hopes, was the utter and virtually irrefutable destruction of them. He, and they, had expected that God would intervene in the course of history to bring his good kingdom on earth, destroying the forces of evils – including the ruling powers of the present – and installing Jesus and his followers as rulers of the new order. Jesus would be the messiah and his followers would be his co-regents. Instead, Jesus was arrested, tried, humiliated, tortured, and crucified. This was not an end that ANYONE anticipated for a “messiah.” And this kind of fate showed conclusively to anyone paying attention that Jesus was not, after all, the messiah. He was just the opposite of the messiah. Instead of a figure of grandeur and power who had destroyed the enemies of God, Jesus was a weak and insignificant figure who had been crushed by his enemies. No greater disconfirmation of his expectations could be [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:32-04:00December 8th, 2015|Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

How the Crucifixion Destroyed Jesus’ Vision of the Future

I have been arguing that during his lifetime Jesus had come to think that he was the messiah of God, the one who would be king when God intervened in history to overthrow the forces of evil and establish a good kingdom here on earth. A number of readers have asked how or why he would come to that view about himself. I’m afraid the answer is that I don’t know, and either does anyone else. There are, of course, lots of theories, some of which are no doubt held by different people on this blog, for example, Christians often say that it was because he really is the coming messiah and that God had told him this. Others might say that he had some kind of visionary experience that led him to think this (at his baptism? During his 40 days in the wilderness? Some other time?). Others might think that this is a rather exalted view to have of oneself as a lower class peasant in the remote backwaters of Galilee – that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:32-04:00December 7th, 2015|Historical Jesus|

Readers’ Mailbag December 4, 2015

It is time for my weekly Readers’ Mailbag. I can’t answer these questions by devoting long threads to them – even though they each deserve a thread; but I can give quick responses, and hope that will be enough for now. If you have a question you would like me to address in the future, please attach it as a comment to this post. QUESTION: It is not surprising that Jesus was an apocalyptic end-of-times messiah figure, because we have such people at least once each generation (often leading their people to disappointment if not disaster). Any thoughts on why this is such a persistent theme, even though every previous apocalypticist has been wrong? RESPONSE: Yes, a lot of my students think that the end of the world will happen sometime in their own lifetimes, that we are living at the end of time, that things taking place in our world are happening in fulfillment of Scripture, that these are the last days proclaimed by the prophets. And why wouldn’t they [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:31-04:00December 4th, 2015|Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Jesus Death as King of the Jews

I now can mount a second argument for why Jesus almost certainly called himself the messiah during his lifetime. Remember: by that I do not mean that Jesus wanted to lead a military rebellion against the Romans to establish himself as king. On the contrary, I think Jesus was not a supporter of a “military solution.” Jesus was an apocalypticist who believed that God himself would take action and do what was needed – overthrow the evil ruling authorities in a cataclysmic show of power and destroy all that was opposed to himself, and so bring in a good, utopian kingdom on earth. And Jesus would be made the king. I don’t need here to give the extensive reasons for thinking that Jesus held to this kind of apocalyptic view in general – I’ve talked about it at length both in a number of my books and on the blog. The question here is the more narrow one: did Jesus think he would be the king of the coming kingdom? I have given one strong [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:31-04:00December 2nd, 2015|Historical Jesus|

Judas and the Messianic Secret

Yesterday I gave one reason for thinking that Jesus considered himself the future messiah: he almost certainly told his twelve disciples that they would be future rulers in the coming kingdom. It is hard to imagine how they could be twelve rulers in a kingdom if he himself was not the one over them, as the ultimate ruler, the king. Jesus understood the coming kingdom in an apocalyptic sense: it would be brought in by a cataclysmic act of God in which the forces of evil were destroyed prior to the utopian rulership appeared. And Jesus would be the king. In *that* sense, he was to be the future messiah. I’ll give a second reason for thinking this in my next post. For now I want to show how this understanding of Jesus’ view of himself makes sense of one other very puzzling datum, the betrayal of Judas. I don’t think there can be much doubt that Jesus really was handed over to the authorities by one of his own followers, Judas Iscariot. Some people [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:31-04:00December 1st, 2015|Historical Jesus|

Jesus’ Claim to Be the Messiah

I’m afraid I have been sidetracked from my thread within a thread within a thread, but now want to get back to it. This particular sub-sub-thread is about whether Jesus considered himself to be the Jewish messiah. My view is that Yes he did. But he meant something very specific by that, and it is not what most people (Christians and non-Christians) today mean by it. Recall what I have tried to show thus far. There were various expectations of what the messiah would be like among Jews of Jesus’ day – a political ruler over Israel, a great priest who ruled God’s people through God’s law, a cosmic judge of the earth who would destroy God’s enemies in a cataclysmic act of judgment. All these views had one thing in common: the future messiah would be a figure of grandeur and might who would come with the authority and power of God. And who was Jesus? For most people of his day, Jesus was just the opposite – an itinerant Jewish preacher from [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:31-04:00November 30th, 2015|Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

Readers’ Mailbag November 27, 2015

I hope everyone had a fulfilling (and fillingful) Thanksgiving! Now it is time to answer some questions I have received over the past couple of weeks, in short rapid-fire order. If you have a question you would like me to address, please ask it in a comment to this post. I am keeping a list and deal with the questions, weekly, more or less in the order in which I receive them. And I’m running low on questions! So ask away! QUESTION: Why do you think Jesus remained single his whole life? Could that have been part of the reason he was seen as a divine being? Ordinary people marry, not highly esteemed divine beings? RESPONSE: That’s an interesting hypothesis, but I don’t think it is “it.” Let me start with the necessary preliminary: I do indeed think that Jesus was, in fact, unmarried. People have disputed that (most notably that inestimable authority on ancient Christianity, Dan Brown, in the Da Vinci Code!) but the evidence is very strong. I have dealt [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:31-04:00November 28th, 2015|Historical Jesus, New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

The Teaching of Jesus

I have been providing necessary background to the question of whether Jesus could have considered himself the messiah, and have done so by trying to situate him in the world of first century Jewish apocalyptic thinking. We now need to move to a summary of Jesus’ teaching given that apocalyptic framework. We could obviously have a year-long thread on the topic of what it was Jesus taught during his itinerant preaching ministry. Many people have written very long books on the subject – and the books just keep comin’ out. If you want a more extended discussion of my views on the matter, you can see my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. I include bibliography of other works to consult. For my money, among the best and most influential have been John Meier, E. P. Sanders, Dale Allison, and Paula Fredriksen – all of whom agree that Jesus is best understood as an apocalyptic preacher. Here let me summarize under several rubrics what I think we can say with reasonable reliability about [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:30-04:00November 24th, 2015|Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

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|

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