Historical Jesus Archives - Page 28 of 35 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Form Critics and Oral Tradition

Once it came to be realized that Mark’s Gospel – the earliest of our surviving accounts of Jesus – was driven not purely by historical interests in order to record biographical information with historical accuracy, but was (like the other Gospels) written in order to convey theological ideas in literary guise, the movement to use Mark to write a “Life of Jesus” more or less collapsed on itself, for a time and among most New Testament scholars. What arose from the ashes of this “Quest of the Historical Jesus” could not have been foreseen by its devotees – as often happens in times of disciplinary progress and change. The big breakthrough came with the work of Karl Ludwig Schmidt (whose most important book was never translated into English, to my knowledge). Schmidt realized that the theologically loaded parts of Mark’s Gospel were not found in the core stories found throughout its account, but in the “framework” for these stories, that is, in the narrative transitions that the author himself provided for moving from one story [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:15-04:00May 23rd, 2014|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship, Memory Studies|

More Background on Oral Traditions

Up until the 1920s, critical scholars who were deep into questions of New Testament studies had focused a lot of their attention (not all of it, obviously) on questions of textual criticism (how do we know what the “original” text was?) and source criticism (what are the written sources lying behind the New Testament – especially the Gospels?). The former was a matter of concern largely because it was thought that the words of Scripture were inspired by God – so it was important to know what those words were! The latter was a matter of concern in no small measure because of the intriguing questions themselves (was Mark the first Gospel? Did Matthew and Luke copy it? Did Q exist? and so on) but even more because of the significance of their answers for understanding the historical Jesus. If we want to get back to Jesus, and the later Gospels represent alterations of the traditions about him by later authors, then surely the best procedure is to determine our *earliest* sources. And if Mark [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:15-04:00May 22nd, 2014|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship, Memory Studies|

My Other Next Book

In my previous post I indicated that I am debating over my next trade book (for general audiences. The one I described there has to do with how Christians appropriated the Jewish Scriptures for themselves, leading to (and being implicated in) the rise of Christian anti-Judaism. It’s a fascinating topic, and I’m definitely planning on writing the book. But something else has come up that is driving my research right now instead, and I suspect this will be the next book. But I’m happy to hear your opinions about the value of doing one or the other first. First I need to provide a bit of background. As I have mentioned a number of times on the blog, I am trying to alternate the kinds of books I write – hard-hitting scholarly work, textbooks for university students, and trade books for normal human beings. My next scholarly book was supposed to be a commentary on the early Greek Gospel fragments of the second century (the Gospel of Peter; Papyrus Egerton 2; and a bunch of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:14-04:00May 20th, 2014|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Memory Studies|

Other Options for Paul and Jesus

In my last post I started giving the principal options, as I see them, for why Paul did not mention more about the historical Jesus. Below are two other leading options. As I’ve indicated, there are probably others, and if some occur to you, feel free to comment! ************************************************* Option Two: Paul knew more of the traditions of Jesus, but considered them irrelevant to his mission. This option relates closely to the one preceding, with a major difference. In this case, Paul did not himself teach his congregations many of the traditions about Jesus that he knew, nor did he refer to them extensively either in person or in writing -- not because he had no occasion to (since he clearly did) but because he chose not to. Why would he choose not to? Perhaps because he considered the traditions about Jesus' words and deeds to be irrelevant to his message of Jesus' death and resurrection. Support for this view can come from a passage like 1 Cor 2:2, where Paul insists that the only [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:14-04:00May 17th, 2014|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters|

Why Doesn’t Paul Say More About Jesus?

To this point I have enumerated everything that Paul explicitly says about what Jesus said, did, and experienced during his earthly life. The driving question is the one that I turn to now and in the next post. Why didn’t Paul tell us *more*? I’ve long been fascinated by this question, and even though I’ve thought about it for well over thirty years, I’ve never decided on what I really think. There are just too many counter-arguments for every perspective that I’ve heard or thought of! In these two posts I want to lay out three of the main options. If you think of others that need to be aired, feel free to make a comment. I have taken the following from my textbook The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. *********************************************************** Paul of course has a lot to say about the importance of Jesus, especially the importance of his death and resurrection and his imminent return from heaven. But in terms of historical information, what I've listed above [i.e., in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:14-04:00May 14th, 2014|Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters|

More on Jesus’ Teachings in Paul

I have been talking about Paul’s knowledge of the historical Jesus, and yesterday began a discussion of what Paul clearly knew about Jesus’ teachings. That’s where I will pick up here. Again, I have taken the discussion from my book Did Jesus Exist?, so the orientation of what I have to say is toward showing that Paul provides solid (and for my mind, virtually incontrovertible) evidence that Jesus was not simply “made up” but was an actual historical figure – an issue that, for most people in the universe of intelligent humans, is not much of an issue, but which is disputed by that tiny but oh-so-vocal group of “mythicists” about which I have said some things before. In any event, there are a few more interesting aspects of the question of Paul’s use of Jesus’ teachings, as follows: ********************************************************* There are no other obvious places where Paul quotes Jesus, although scholars have often found traces of Jesus’ teachings in Paul. The big question is why Paul does not quote Jesus more often. That [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:14-04:00May 14th, 2014|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters|

Paul’s References to Jesus’ Teachings

So far I have been discussing what Paul says about the historical Jesus in his surviving seven letters. For the next couple of posts I’ll indicate what he says about the teaching of Jesus. Once again there are two observations to make. The first is that he obviously knew that Jesus taught some things. The other is that it is a bit surprising that he doesn’t tell us more. I will be dealing with that second issue soon, when I discuss why Paul doesn’t give us more information about the historical Jesus (there are several options). The following discussion is taken from my book Did Jesus Exist, which was meant to deal more with the first issue: the fact that Paul quotes Jesus on occasion shows at the least that Paul knew Jesus existed (as do the other data that he mentions about Jesus’ life). ***********************************************************8 The Teachings of Jesus in Paul In addition to these data about Jesus’ life and death, Paul mentions on several occasions the teachings he delivered. We have seen two [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:14-04:00May 13th, 2014|Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters|

More on Paul’s Knowledge of Jesus’ Life

In my last post I began to enumerate the things that Paul said about Jesus. *Most* of what he says about Jesus has to do with the significance of his death and resurrection. But what if we wanted to know about the *life* of Jesus – the things that Jesus said, did, and experienced between his birth and his death? Paul doesn’t tell us a ton, as has frequently been noted. But he does tell us some. In addition to what I laid out in the previous post, there are the following bits of information, again taken from my fuller analysis in Did Jesus Exist? FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click here for membership options. If you don't belong yet, ARE YOU WAITING FOR CHRISTMAS???? ********************************************************* Paul knows that Jesus was a teacher, because he quotes several of his sayings. I will deal with these later [in my next post]. For now it is worth noting that two of the sayings of Jesus that Paul quotes were [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:14-04:00May 10th, 2014|Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters|

What Did Paul Know About the Historical Jesus?

I have been approaching the relationship of Jesus and Paul from only one angle, to this point – viz., did they represent fundamentally the same religion or not? But there is a second, equally interesting question. How much did Paul actually know about the historical Jesus? In an earlier iteration of my Introduction to the NT class, this was what I had my students debate. I never could figure out a good way to word the resolution, but most of the time I gave it as this: “Resolved: Paul Knew Next To Nothing About the Historical Jesus.” The problem with that resolution is that it asserts a negative, so that the affirmative team is arguing for a negative resolution. Not good. But I couldn’t come up with anything I liked better, and so went with it. Most students are surprised to find that if they simply make a list of what Paul says about Jesus between the time of his birth and the time of his death, they don’t need much more than a 3x5 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:13-04:00May 8th, 2014|Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters|

Jesus and Paul Compared and Contrasted

I have been talking about the relationship of Jesus’ proclamation of the coming Kingdom of God to Paul’s preaching about the importance of the death and resurrection of Jesus. In the previous post I argued that the fundamental concerns, interests, perspectives, and theologies of these two were different. In this post I’d like to give, in summary fashion, what strikes me as very similar and very different about their two messages. Again, in my view it is way too much to say that Paul is the “Founder of Christianity”: that assumes that he is the one who personally came up with the idea of the importance of the death and resurrection of Jesus for salvation, whereas almost certainly this view had been around for a couple of years before he came onto the scene. And it is probably too much even to say that he was the “Co-founder of Christianity,” for much the same reason. But it is safe to say that of all the early Christian thinkers and missionaries, Paul is the one we [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:01-04:00May 8th, 2014|Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters|

Paul and Jesus

I spent several posts explicating Paul’s understanding of his gospel, that by Christ’s death and resurrection a person is put into a restored relationship with God. He had several ways of explaining how it worked (the “judicial” model; the “participationist” model; and the other models I described). But in all of these ways, it was Jesus’ death and resurrection that mattered. It was not keeping the Jewish law. It was not knowing or following Jesus’ teaching. It was not Jesus’ miracles. It was not … anything else. It was Jesus’ death and resurrection. I then summarized in my previous post, the teaching of Jesus himself, about the coming Son of Man and the need to prepare by keeping the Law of God, as revealed in the Torah, as summarized in the commandments to love God above all else and to love one’s neighbor as oneself. Do these represent the same religion? I see this as one of the most fundamental and important questions in all of early Christianity. I’m not asking if Paul invented Christianity, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:00-04:00May 7th, 2014|Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters|

The Message of Jesus

To this point in the thread I have been talking about Paul’s “religion” – specifically, what he thought was important in a person’s relationship with God. He expressed his views in a variety of ways – I have talked about his judicial and his participationist understandings of salvation, and have made brief comments on yet other “models” that he used to express his view about the act of salvation that God had achieved through Christ. In all of these models, it was the death and resurrection of Jesus that was of paramount importance. It was that, nothing else, that brought about salvation. And what did Jesus himself think? This is arguably the most important point to consider about early Christianity. Did the best known apostle of Christ proclaim the same, or very similar message, to Jesus himself? Or not? In my New Testament class every semester I have my students debate, in class, a resolution dealing with the issue: “Resolved: Paul and Jesus represented fundamentally different religions.” Students are surprised by the topic. Until they [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:00-04:00May 6th, 2014|Historical Jesus|

Attacks from the Other Side: An Ill-Tempered Richard Carrier

Sometimes I think that if I’m “getting it from all sides,” I may be doing something right. The religious conservatives seems to be up in arms about my book How Jesus Became God – both conservative evangelical Protestants and conservative Roman Catholics like the Very Reverend Robert Barron. In fact, as I’ve said, I do not think anything in the book is inimical to Christian faith, unless it is completely committed to a view of the infallibility of the Bible and its full, historical accuracy. The Christianity I admire is not like that. But I get it from the non-religious left as well. Yesterday a member of the blog sent me the following critique – delivered in terms of mocking incredulity – by Richard Carrier, the mythicist (i.e., one who does not believe that Jesus existed) who has shown more vitriol, hatred, and mean-spiritedness toward me than almost any of the fundamentalists who attack me from the other side. The following is in reference to my point that we do not have any references to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:00-04:00April 21st, 2014|Bart's Critics, Historical Jesus, Mythicism|

More on the Very Reverend Robert Barron

I have not decided yet whether I will be dealing point-by-point with every one of the Very Reverend Robert Barron’s critiques of How Jesus Became God. I frankly found none of them very convincing, largely because, as I indicated in the previous post, he does not appear to have read my book very carefully, but at best skimmed it to find what he was expecting to find. But I thought I would deal at least with his opening counter-argument, over whether Jesus saw himself or proclaimed himself to be God. Here is what he says. Ehrman’s major argument for the thesis that Jesus did not consider himself divine is that explicit statements of Jesus’ divine identity can be found only in the later fourth Gospel of John, whereas the three Synoptic Gospels, earlier and thus presumably more historically reliable, do not feature such statements from Jesus himself or the Gospel writers. This is so much nonsense. It is indeed the case that the most direct affirmations of divinity are found in John—“I and the Father [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:59-04:00April 19th, 2014|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

Critique of the Very Reverend Robert Barron

The responses to How Jesus Became God are starting to appear, and I must say, I find the harshest ones bordering on the incredible. Do people think that it is acceptable to attack a book that they haven’t read – or at least haven’t had the courtesy to try to understand? Some of the reviewers are known entities, such as the Very Rev. Robert Barron, a Roman Catholic evangelist and commentator who has a wide following. His full response is available at http://wordonfire.org/Written-Word/articles-commentaries/April-2014/Why-Jesus-is-God--A-Response-to-Bart-Ehrman.aspx I find it very disappointing. Here is his opening gambit: **************************************** "In this most recent tome, Ehrman lays out what is actually a very old thesis, going back at least to the 18th century and repeated ad nauseam in skeptical circles ever since, namely, that Jesus was a simple itinerant preacher who never claimed to be divine and whose “resurrection” was in fact an invention of his disciples who experienced hallucinations of their master after his death. Of course Ehrman, like so many of his skeptical colleagues across the centuries, breathlessly presents this thesis [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:59-04:00April 18th, 2014|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

Interview on Trinities.org on How Jesus Became God Part 2

This is the second part of my interview with Dale Tuggy, the host and co-executive producer of Trinities.org podcast. The podcasts hosts debates, interviews, and historical and contemporary perspectives on issues related to Christian theology. The interview was focused on How Jesus Became God, although in spots we go afield. Some listeners have thought that this was one of the more interesting of the interviews I've done. The interview took place on April 14th, 2014 via telephone. Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition:

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:59-04:00April 17th, 2014|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Video Media|

Interview with Trinities.org on How Jesus Became God

I won't be posting every single interview I do for How Jesus Became God (you will be glad to know); but different interviewers are asking different kinds of questions, and so a range of them doesn't seem to be out of line. The one here is for a podcast called Trinities, hosted and produced by a fellow named Dale Tuggy. Dale is not completely sympathetic with all my views in the book, which makes the interview a bit more interesting from ones that simply lob me softballs. The interview took place on April 7, and happened over the phone. Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition:

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:47-04:00April 12th, 2014|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Video Media|

Why I’m Obsessed with Jesus

There is a relatively new online journal, “On Faith,” that is top-of-the line and very interesting. A couple of days ago they published a short article that I wrote, in connection with How Jesus Became God; I called the article “Why I Am Obsessed with Jesus.” It contains some views you will have seen from me before, and some others. Here is the article as I sent it to them. (The full link to the online version in the journal comes at the end). ********************************************************** I finally figured out why I’m so obsessed with Jesus. It makes sense that Jesus mattered to me when I was young. I was raised in a Christian household, we went to church, we revered the Bible, and Jesus was God. It makes sense that Jesus mattered to me as a late teenager, when I had a born-again experience and became a conservative evangelical. (What I converted from to “become a Christian” continues to puzzle me.) At that point Jesus became not only my Lord and Savior, but also my [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:47-04:00April 8th, 2014|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Reflections and Ruminations|

Article in the Huffington Post

The Huffington Post has just published an article that I wrote introducing How Jesus Became God. (Link below) Here’s the article as I wrote it and sent it in. I’ve written several others that I will be providing as well, as soon as they are available in their various venues, plus anything else of related interest. **************************************************************** Jesus was a lower-class preacher from Galilee, who, in good apocalyptic fashion, proclaimed that the end of history as he knew it was going to come to a crashing end, within his own generation. God was soon to intervene in the course of worldly affairs to overthrow the forces of evil and set up a utopian kingdom on earth. And he would be the king. It didn’t happen. Instead of being involved with the destruction of God’s enemies, Jesus was unceremoniously crushed by them: arrested, tried, humiliated, tortured, and publicly executed. FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. If you don't belong yet, GET WITH IT!!! And yet, remarkably, soon afterwards his followers began [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:46-04:00March 31st, 2014|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Religion in the News|

My First Radio Interview on How Jesus Became God

I am lined up to do a number of interviews for the new book, and here is the first, with a program called Interfaith Voices, hosted by Mareen Fiedler. Interfaith Voices is the nation's leading public radio show about faith, ethics and spirituality, and plays on WAMU 88.5 FM in Washington, DC. The following is an interview taped on March 20th, 2014. She titles the radio program, "The Debate over the Divinity of Jesus" while referencing my latest book "How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee." She asks good, perceptive questions that allow me to talk about key aspects of my thesis in the book. The interview will provide a good overview of what you'll find in it, once you get your grubby paws on it (now that my grubby paws are off it). Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition:

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:46-04:00March 26th, 2014|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Video Media|

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