Paul and His Letters Archives - Page 15 of 20 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Weekly Readers’ Mailbag: February 7, 2016

Time for my weekly mailbag. Before dealing with two rather more direct questions that have come to me – one about eyewitness testimony and the other about whether I hope to get on Fresh Air and Colbert with the new book – I thought I would include an item that did not come to me from the blog, but on my Facebook page. It’s a brief exchange I had with some anonymous figure. I seem to have a lot of these. Please excuse his/her (lack of) syntax; grammar is evidently not a strong suit. But I think you get the idea of the question. At least I thought I did. FACEBOOK EXCHANGE: bart you said on npr that you feel as that the eye witness all had visions or hallucinations.that jesus didn`t rise from the tomb.do you really expect serious students of the word to accept that,do you know that the expert on the resurrection gary habermas of liberty university called your explanation total nonsense.the ration that over 500 people all experiencing the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:18-04:00February 7th, 2016|Memory Studies, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Weekly Readers’ Mailbag: January 16, 2016

It is time for the weekly mailbag. This week there are only two questions, but the first has two parts: why (many) Christians are so pro-Israel and how can they be pro-Jewish and still worship Jesus. The second question involves how we know which letters of Paul were actually written by him. If you would like me to address any question you have, just add a comment here or at any other time on the blog, or send me an email ********************************************************************** QUESTION: Why are Christians so Pro Israel? Seems like to me if they agree with Judaism they couldn't be a Christian. Because of the first commandment. RESPONSE: I’ll answer the second part of the question first. What the reader is saying (I think) is that since the first commandment is “You shall have no other gods before me,” then Christians cannot be pro-Jewish because they also worship Jesus – therefore two gods. I have two responses to that. The first is that the commandment is *not* that: “You must believe that I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:01-04:00January 16th, 2016|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

The Resurrection in Paul

I have been discussing an apocalyptic understanding of Jesus’ resurrection. For the earliest followers of Jesus, coming to think that Jesus was raised from the dead provided both a confirmation and an elaboration of their understanding of the end times. Prior to Jesus’ death they had come to think that they were living at the end of the age and that God was soon to bring history to a climactic end through a cataclysmic act of judgment; this final event in history would involve a resurrection of all those who had died to face judgment. When these disciples came to think that Jesus himself had been raised, they naturally concluded that the resurrection had begun. Jesus was the first to rise; he had been exalted to heaven; he himself was to return to earth as the powerful Son of Man to raise all people from the dead. All this would happen very soon. As it turns out there were other apocalyptic lessons that could be drawn from Jesus’ resurrection. One of the most interesting – [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:46-04:00January 3rd, 2016|Afterlife, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

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|

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 Beginning and End as Keys to the Middle

In my last post I showed why it is so widely acknowledged that Jesus began his ministry by associating with John the Baptist, an apocalyptic preacher of coming doom. The reason that matters for our purposes in this thread is that it shows that Jesus chose, of his own free will, to join an apocalyptic movement at the very beginning of his public ministry. That certainly demonstrates that Jesus started out his public life as a fervent advocate of a Jewish apocalyptic message. He too must have been expecting the judgment of God soon to appear in which those aligned against God would be destroyed and those who sided with God would be rewarded. That in itself does not show, however, that Jesus’ own proclamation, after he got started, was apocalyptic. Maybe he changed his mind! Maybe he decided John was wrong! Maybe he went his own direction! There are two arguments against the idea that he changed. The first is one I have already recounted several posts ago: apocalyptic sayings are significantly attributed to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:30-04:00November 19th, 2015|Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Another Problem with Calling Jesus the Messiah

I have been arguing that most Jews rejected Christian claims about Jesus because Jesus was just the *opposite* of what the messiah was expected to be. The messiah was to be a figure of grandeur and power who would overthrow God’s enemies and set up a new kingdom on earth in which God’s will would prevail. Jesus was and did none of that. He was a lower-class peasant who was arrested, humiliated, tortured, and executed. He didn’t destroy God’s enemies. He was crushed by them. Paul is the first Jewish persecutor of the Christians that we know by name; there is really no doubt that he was bent on wiping out the followers of Jesus – since he himself says so (and says so to his own shame [Gal 1:13); he did not gain any glory for this rather despicable past) (despicable in both his eyes and the eyes of the Christians). Presumably his reasons for hating and opposing the followers of Jesus were comparable to those of other Jewish persecutors. But Paul gives us [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:13-04:00November 9th, 2015|Paul and His Letters, 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|

The Crucified Messiah in 1 Corinthians

Historians usually have reasons for what they say; that is, when they make a historical claim, it is almost always based on a close reading of the surviving sources. When it’s not, they’re just blowin’ smoke. But if they’re blowin’ smoke – that is, taking a guess –they’ll usually tell you. I suppose that’s one difference between an expert (in any field) and an amateur: the expert actually has a deep and nuanced reading of the sources that informs his/her views. I have to say, as you probably have noticed in your own areas of expertise, it is pretty easy if you are an expert to know who else is an expert and who is not. I say that as someone who is an expert in one or two areas, but an amateur in thousands. When I have an interpretation of Hamlet or Lear that I bounce off my wife – who is a hard-core, internationally recognized expert on Shakespeare – I realize that, for the most part, I’m just taking a stab at something [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:13-04:00November 5th, 2015|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

An Irritating Criticism: My View of Paul’s View of Christ

QUESTION: Below is one Christian's comment about your position on Galatians 4:14. How would you respond to this criticism: "The question to ask of this is why make Galatians 4:14, with an interpretation not readily accepted by even non-Christian scholars, the lynchpin? What was it about this verse that made it the focal point, especially when Paul isn't really making a Christological argument there? Why not statements like Philippians 2 which is quoted? Note also that Philippians ends with every knee bowing and every tongue confessing that Jesus is Lord. That was reserved for YHWH alone. It also has Jesus being in the form of God, and that's a pretty clear statement about where Jesus ranks." RESPONSE: I have to say, this kind of criticism REALLY gets under my skin. You would think I’d have thicker skin by now. Just to unpack what is going on here a bit. The (unnamed) critic is objecting to my view that the apostle Paul understood Christ, before coming into the world, to have been the great angel [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:31:12-04:00October 28th, 2015|Bart's Critics, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

How God Could Become a Human

I have finished my posts on the passage of the so-called “bloody sweat” in Luke 22:43-44. I devoted some considerable time to this text (for a second time on the blog) because I wanted to use it to set up a discussion in response to a question that a reader asked (that I started answering a very long time ago. June 30 in fact….) about what motivated me to write my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. Now, after setting the stage for about two months, I’m able to answer the question. About time, you might think…. But first, in response to my recent posts, I received this interesting query from a reader, not about the textual tradition of the New Testament but about early Christian understandings of Christ. Here’s the question. QUESTION: Have any Christians suggested that Jesus was fully God (from all eternity); but *because* he was God, and was *omnipotent*, he could choose to incarnate as a human and – for a planned period of time – *forget* that he was [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:22-04:00August 26th, 2015|Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Gentle as a Nurse in 1 Thessalonians 2:7

I am about ready to wrap up my discussion of the textual problem of 1 Thessalonians 2:7. When recalling his time with the Thessalonians, when he had worked hard not to be a burden with any of them, did Paul indicate that he and his missionary companions had become "as infants, as a nurse tending her children" or that they had become "gentle, as a nurse tending her children." It is not an obvious decision, whether you think the change was made accidentally or on purpose. (If you think it *is* obvious, look at the preceding two posts). It seems like it might go either way. I myself have an opinion on the matter (textual scholars tend to have opinions); but I"ll hold off on that for a minute. First: some of you might be wondering: which of these readings do the best surviving manuscripts actually suggest? Is one of the readings ("infants" or "gentle") better attested than the other? Which reading do our oldest and best manuscripts have? Here, as it turns out, the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:20-04:00August 13th, 2015|Paul and His Letters|

More Intriguing Problems with 1 Thessalonians 2:7

The textual problem of 1 Thess 2:7, as I have started to outline it, is an unusually interesting one for textual critics, since the arguments for one reading or another seem to cancel each other out so neatly. It is a difference of only one letter. Did Paul remind the Thessalonians that when he and his missionary colleagues were with them they became like “infants” among them rather than great, powerful, and demanding apostles? Or did he say they became “gentle” among them? Now, you might be saying: Who Cares? Well, it does matter to New Testament interpreters. It may not matter like having a passage that determines a major doctrine (Who was Christ? Was his death an atoning sacrifice? Is there a trinity?). But there are lots of things that matter that are not major doctrines. Any scholar of the New Testament wants to know the basic gist of each book of the New Testament; and its major themes and ideas; and the meaning of each of its passages; and the meaning of each [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:20-04:00August 11th, 2015|Paul and His Letters|

The Textual Problem of 1 Thessalonians 2:7

Now that I have discussed the purpose of 1 Thessalonians and spent a couple of posts talking about one of its most interesting passages, on which the modern Christian notion of a “rapture” is based, I am able to return to my point of departure, a textual variant found in 1 Thess. 2:7. This variant has nothing to do with the question of what Paul thought would happen when Jesus returned, sometime in his lifetime. It is an earlier part of the letter where Paul is reminding the Thessalonians of the time that he had spent with them when he converted them to their new faith. This is a very joyful part of the letter, one of the most sentimental passages of all of Paul’s letters, where he speaks of the relationship he had with his converts when he was there. But the description is a bit hard to pin down, in part because of this one textual variant. The variant depends on the presence or non-presence of just one letter of the alphabet. Some [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:20-04:00August 10th, 2015|Paul and His Letters|

The Myth of the Rapture: Calling a Spade a Spade

I am sometimes torn between wanting to be sensitive to people’s deeply rooted religious convictions and calling a spade a spade. think many readers would be surprised (and dubious) that have this sensitivity, since I’m often blasted precisely for trouncing people’s religious beliefs. But that’s almost never my intention. The one exception is when it comes to fundamentalism. I have no qualms about attacking Christian fundamentalist thinking head-on. But even then try to be sensitive to the people holding onto this kind of thinking, and I try to engage it with reason and evidence rather than with ridicule. But there are times when it is worthwhile calling a spade a spade, and sometimes we ought to just do that. I’ve been thinking about the passage summarized in the post yesterday from 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, the passage from which the fundamentalist view of the “rapture” principally comes from. Jesus returns on the clouds of heaven, the dead in Christ rise first, and then those who are alive who are his followers are snatched up into the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:20-04:00August 8th, 2015|Paul and His Letters, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Return of Jesus (Rapture?) in 1 Thessalonians

Since I’ve started talking about Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians, the earliest Christian writing of any kind that we have, in preparation for discussion one tiny little textual variant in 1 Thess. 2:7,which involves only the presence or absence of a single letter in a single word, but on which the meaning of the passage hinges, I can’t let the opportunity pass without saying something further by way of background (none of which is especially relevant to this particular textual variant!) on the letter. The reason: this is the letter that modern-day conservative Christians who believe that the “rapture” is about to occur base their views on. The “rapture” is a modern doctrine/idea. Even though some conservative Christians think this is one of the main points of the Christian faith, historically it has rarely been that. In fact, for most of history, most Christians simply haven’t believed in a rapture. The doctrine of the rapture is that Jesus will be returning from heaven (sometime soon) and when he does those who had believed in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:20-04:00August 6th, 2015|Paul and His Letters|

Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians

In my two previous posts I discussed a textual variant that could be explained either as a scribal accident or as an intentional change. I thought it might be interesting to point out a few other variants that also could go either way. These are all intriguing problems in and of themselves, and by talking about them I can illustrate a bit further the kinds of quandaries textual critics find themselves in when trying to decide what an author wrote when we have different versions of his words in different manuscripts. My plan right now is to look at three variants in three different mini-threads (all of them subsumed under the larger thread of why I wrote The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture). Today is one of my favorites, a particularly thorny issue found in 1 Thessalonians 2:7. I can’t get to a discussion of that issue without providing some important background; just the very basics of the background will take me two posts, before I can even start to explain the textual problem. First Thessalonians [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:20-04:00August 5th, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters|

Orthodoxy and Heresy in the New Testament Itself

I am now getting back to the question of early Christian diversity – all in the context of setting up the answer to the question I got about what I had in mind when I decided to write my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. I have been discussing the views of Walter Bauer, in his classic work, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, who maintained that from the earliest of times, so far as we can tell from our surviving records, Christianity was not a single unitary thing with one set of doctrines that everyone believed (orthodoxy), except for occasional groups that sprang up as followers of false teachers who corrupted that truth they had inherited (heresies). Instead, as far back as we can trace the history of theology, Christianity was always a widely disparate collection of various beliefs (and practices). In the struggle for converts, one form of the Christian faith ended up becoming dominant. When it did so, it declared itself orthodox and all other forms of the faith heretical; and then [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:30:01-04:00July 12th, 2015|Heresy and Orthodoxy, Paul and His Letters|

Taming the Diversity of the New Testament

In my previous post I started to show why it is difficult to use the New Testament itself as evidence that Christianity started out as an original unity, only to come to be fragmented with the passage of time into the second and third Christian centuries. It is true that the NT is the earliest set of Christian writings that we have, and that most of the books can probably be dated to the first Christian century. We don’t have any other books (well, virtually any other books) this early (I don’t think the Gospel of Thomas can date to the first century; the one exception to the rule would probably be 1 Clement, which is usually dated to the mid 90s CE, and which is, indeed, a proto-orthodox writing). The two problems I’ve isolated with using the NT to demonstrate early Christian unity are that: 1) The reason we have these books and no others from the time is that these are the books that later orthodox church fathers deemed scripture and worked to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:46-04:00July 8th, 2015|Catholic Epistles, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Paul and His Letters|

Jesus, Matthew, and the Law
Gallery
Jesus, Matthew, and the Law

Canonical Gospels, Paul and His Letters

Jesus, Matthew, and the Law

In my previous post I discussed the differences – what strike me, at least, as the differences – between the Gospel of Matthew and Paul’s letter to the Galatians and with respect to whether the followers of Jesus are to follow the law or not. Matthew’s Gospel indicates that the law will not cease to be in force until the heavens and earth pass away, and that Jesus’ followers need to follow the law to the limit, to follow it even better than the scribes and Pharisees do. Paul, on the other hand, insists that the followers of Jesus must not think that they have to follow the law. Any gentile who thinks he has to be circumcised, or to follow other aspects of the Jewish law, is in danger of losing salvation. I would like to clarify one point about my view and explain one of its complications. Clarification: in my post I was not discussing whether Paul saw eye-to-eye with Jesus about this issue. My post was about the Gospel of Matthew. I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:40-04:00March 27th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Paul and His Letters|

Previous 1···141516···20 Next