Interested in coming to hear me give a talk/book reading? It’s next Tuesday, August 23, in Waynesville NC. All proceeds go to the local Indie, Blue Ridge Books, a terrific bookstore that managed to survive the crisis. I hope you can come!
In my previous posts on how we got the canon of the New Testament I’ve discussed several books allegedly written by Peter – one that got into the New Testament (2 Peter); one that came close to getting in (the Apocalypse of Peter – the one that gives Peter’s first-hand description of heaven and hell; NOT the “Coptic” Gnostic one that I discussed last week in two posts); one that was thought by some proto-orthodox Christians (but maybe not many) as having a rightful place (the Gospel of Peter); and one that really never had much of a chance (Peter’s letter to James). I can now set forth an overview of what I plan to cover in my book on the canon – when I eventually write it -- and the conclusions I will draw under a series of interrelated rubrics. These can be imagined as chapter divisions, to come after an introduction that explains the importance of the question of how we got the canon, how it has become such a pressing question for [...]
Have you signed up yet? See the annoucement below. I hope you can come! ******************* We will be holding a blog fundraiser, donations voluntary, on Wednesday August 17, 8:00 - 9:15 PM Eastern Time. It will be an Ask Bart Anything. Any question on any topic is welcome. If I am unable to answer, I won't. I can only think of a few things I'd be unwilling to answer, and I'm not going to tell you what they are. We are raising money for the people suffering in Ukraine, and will split the proceeds between two of our charities: Doctors without Borders and CARE. We are asking for voluntary donations of $30. We would LOVE it if you could give more for this worthy cause. Anyone who comes up with $30,000, I'll buy you a Happy Meal. But if you can't afford $30, or can't afford anything, we completely understand. Give what you can, if you can, and come anyway! All are welcome. I will personally match the amount of donations we bring in up [...]
This incredibly thoughtful guest contribution by Judy Yates Siker is part of an ongoing series I'm posting in honor of the tenth anniversary of the blog. All the guest posts in the series are by serious scholars who have provided us with us with guest posts before, over the years; one of the striking features of these posts, as a group, is just now different they are in perspective and insight. I've known Judy well for thirty-three yeas, since she entered the UNC PhD program in New Testament Studies (in the field of Ancient Mediterranean Religions) 1989. While doing her degree and then afterwards Judy taught at an intriguing range of schools to very different groups of students: Meredith College; American Baptist Seminary of the West, Loyola Marymount University, and San Francisco Theological Seminary -- where she eventually became Vice President. All these years Judy has long been one of my closest and dearest friends. She is an ordained Presbyterian minister, active in church ministry now that she's retired from teaching, and living in Raleigh [...]
Dear Gold Members, Yet again, it's time for our monthly Gold Q&A. Have a question? Ask it! It can be anything related to the blog. To enter your question on to the list: send it to Diane at [email protected] The DEADLINE for your question is this Sunday, August 14 midnight (whenever midnight is where you live). I will record the session soon thereafter and, if all goes to plan (does it ever?) have it released by August 18. Questions that are relatively short (a sentence or two) are more likely to be chosen; and feel free to trip me up! Bart
We will be holding a blog fundraiser, donations voluntary, on Wednesday August 17, 8:00 - 9:15 PM Eastern Time. It will be an Ask Bart Anything. Any question on any topic is welcome. If I am unable to answer, I won't. I can only think of a few things I'd be unwilling to answer, and I'm not going to tell you what they are. We are raising money for the people suffering in Ukraine, and will split the proceeds between two of our charities: Doctors without Borders and CARE. We are asking for voluntary donations of $30. We would LOVE it if you could give more for this worthy cause. Anyone who comes up with $30,000, I'll buy you a Happy Meal. But if you can't afford $30, or can't afford anything, we completely understand. Give what you can, if you can, and come anyway! All are welcome. I will personally match the amount of donations we bring in up to $5000. Moreover, if there are any individual donations over $1000, I will be happy [...]
Several scholar-friends and colleagues graciously have written guest posts for the blog to celebrate our tenth anniversary. I am posting one a week and we will gather all of them together down the line to make them available as a group. This week's contribution comes from James Tabor, retired Professor of Christian Origins and Bible from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (a scholar many of you will know) who has written a large number of popular books, along with serious scholarship, and most recently his own fresh translation of the book of Genesis. This post is especially interesting: James deals with problems of translating the Hebrew Bible that I bet you don't even realize are problems. ****************************** What is the best-known verse in the Bible—one that millions could quote immediately by heart? Christians might say John 3:16—after all, one even sees placards and signs reading “John 3:16” at sporting stadiums! But I think the very first verse of the Bible—Genesis 1:1—most likely would win the universal familiarity content: In the beginning God created the [...]
In my previous posts I’ve talked about writings that claimed to be written by Peter, the closest disciple to Jesus – a Gospel, and Apocalypse, and an Epistle . These are not the only Petrine writings floating around in the early church. Among other things, we have two other (different) apocalypses, one of them unusually fascinating that was discovered only in 1945 (a Gnostic writing). None of these was actually written by Peter, and I don’t think there’s a biblical scholar on the planet who seriously thinks it was. It appears that writing books in the name of Peter was something of a cottage industry in early Christianity. That should give us pause. There are two books that also claim to be written by Peter that actually are in the New Testament. If we know that such pseudepigrapha were floating around, on what grounds should we think these two were authentic? Of all the books of the NT that have been thought to be forged – written by an author falsely claiming to be [...]
I have been discussing my thoughts about a future book on the canon of the New Testament for a broad reading audience, a book that explains why we got our 27 books, why other books didn’t get in, who made the decisions, on what grounds, and when. To introduce some of these issues I’ve already discussed two books that claimed to be written by the apostle Peter (but weren’t), the Apocalypse and the Gospel of Peter. Neither of them made it into the NT, obviously, but both were thought by some Christian leaders to be bona fide texts of Scripture. That may be true for the third example I’ll be giving here (of a book allegedly written by Peter), but in this case it is difficult to know if anyone took it as inspired Scripture. Whether they did or not, it never really had much of a chance to make it in. Even so, it’s a fascinating book whose author almost certainly wanted it to be granted apostolic and canonical authority. It is a letter [...]
BE Bloggers! I'm going to be in the Asheville NC area (Waynesville, actually) August 9-28 or so. I'm out there a good bit, but not usually for this amount of time. If any of you are in the area, let me know: if there are a few of you, maybe we could work out a blog dinner. It would be for blog members only; each person would pay for him/herself; and we would spend an evening engaged in interesting discourse! Let me know -- not here but on my private email -- and we'll see what, if anything, can happen! [email protected]
This is a reminder (or a minder, if you missed it the first time) that I will be doing an eight-lecture online course this coming weekend, four lectures on on Saturday and four on Sunday, with Q&A following each, on the four canonical Gospels. Here was the original announcement from a couple of weeks ago. ****************************** I am pleased to announce that I will be doing another online course, the second in the series: How Scholars Read the Bible. The first, if you recall, was a six-lecture course on Genesis. This one will be an eight-lecture course called: The Unknown Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. As with all the courses I do online, this one will NOT be in connection with the blog per se – it is part of my separate venture (Bart Ehrman Professional Services) that you can find at my personal website http://www.bartehrman.com. I am announcing it here on the blog because I know some of blog members will be interested (and some would be rather aggravated if I [...]
I am publishing a series of guest posts that have been generously contributed to the blog in honor of our ten-year anniversary. Each post is written by a recognized expert in our field who has previously made guest posts for us. This one comes from Jason Staples, my erstwhile PhD student who now teaches at North Carolina State and whose (long!) dissertation has turned into TWO separate monographs, the first already published by Cambridge University Press (The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism), and the other now forthcoming from Cambridge (focusing on Paul). Here, after some much-appreciated kind words, Jason deals with an unusually important and little-understood topic, of ultimate relevance to us all! ****************************** Thanks to multiple best-selling books, Bart is one of the few widely recognized names in the field of biblical studies, and when people learn I did my training under his guidance, I invariably get asked, “so, what was that like?” Many of the more conservative-leaning Christians are surprised when I tell them the truth: it would be difficult to [...]
As I indicated in my previous post, I’m planning to write a book (after the one on charity in early Christianity) explaining how we got the canon of the New Testament. Who choose the books? On what grounds? And when? I continue the thoughts I’m laying out in my prospectus here, in the first of four case studies – a book that almost made it in. ****************************** Four Vignettes to Explain the Issues To illustrate some of the major issues, to show how the process worked, to give a sense of the historical disputes, and to show their inherent interest, I here provide four vignettes, all involving books that explicitly claim to be written by the apostle Peter. Peter is Jesus’ closest disciple and confident in the Gospels. No one could carry more authority for explaining Jesus’ teachings and his plans for his followers after his death. It comes as no surprise, then, to find a number of early Christian books that claim to be written by Peter. Two of them are [...]
Here is a post where I raise a fundamental question that I find very hard to answer. I will not be able to respond to all your reflections, but I will read them all and am very eager to see what you have to say. In connection with my next book I’ve been reading a lot of writings by the church fathers from the 2-5th centuries to see what they have to say about giving away wealth. A big issue for some of these writers was whether committed Christians should give away *everything* to the poor, or rather keep most of their wealth but still be generous in their giving. Throughout history, of course, most Christians have been (and still are) attracted to the second option. I’ve argued in previous posts, however, that Jesus appears to have taken the first, urging his followers to divest completely and live lives of abject poverty. It’s not an attractive option, and very few see the point of it – to the extent that most people simply say that [...]
This will be the last of my posts on this thread, connected with what I hope is my next book, that I’m calling tentatively, The Creation of Charity: How Christianity Transformed our World. Here I talk about one of the lesser-known aspects of early Christianity – a surprising one to most people. Arguably the most important development in the Christian history of charity came in the institutionalization of giving, not on the governmental level but through extra-mural ecclesiastical organizations. Of these, none proved more historically significant than the invention of the hospital. Most health care in the Greek and Roman worlds took place in the home, with families bearing the responsibility of nursing the sick. That, of course, is not the most effective mode of health care, but even simple nursing often produces salubrious results. Certainly, there were doctors trained in medical science who attended the sick, but these were private initiatives and as a rule benefited only with those of means. Doctors worked as individuals, out of their homes or through home-visitations to those who [...]
I am pleased to announce that I will be doing another online course, the second in the series: How Scholars Read the Bible. The first, if you recall, was a six-lecture course on Genesis. This one will be an eight-lecture course called: The Unknown Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. As with all the courses I do online, this one will NOT be in connection with the blog per se – it is part of my separate venture (Bart Ehrman Professional Services) that you can find at my personal website http://www.bartehrman.com. I am announcing it here on the blog because I know some of blog members will be interested (and some would be rather aggravated if I didn’t mention it….). I will be giving the course live on Saturday August 6 and Sunday August 7 (four 30-minute lectures each day; each day’s session followed by a live Q&A). You don’t need to come to the live sessions to purchase the course; those who do come will also receive the recorded version. I see this [...]
I'm looking forward to our re-rescheduled Platinum-Onlies Webinar on Tuesday! Topic: Peter and Paul: The Dueling Apostles Time: 7:30 - 9:00 pm. Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83457463872?pwd=aGl5eHVRNURscllOdEN0SEZNdnJ2dz09 Meeting ID: 834 5746 3872 Passcode: 334283 Hope to see you there! = Bart
Dear Gold Members, These monthly Gold Q&A's have been a lot of fun to do. Time for another one! Have a question? Ask it! Anything related to the blog! To enter your question on to the list: send it to Diane at [email protected] DEADLINE for your question. Saturday July 16, midnight (whenever midnight is where you live). I will try to get it recorded soon after that, with a goal of releasing it on or around the 20th. Sorry for the short notice. July has been a killer--more on that another time! Questions that are relatively short (a sentence or two) are more likely to be chosen; and feel free to ask a zinger! Bart
As you may know, Platinum level members of the blog are allowed to make guest posts to their fellow Platinum members, and periodically they vote on one to be posted for all blog members. Here is the most recent winning post, by Dan Kohanski. (You may want to check out the benefits that accrue to the different levels of membership, and consider moving to a different level! Just go here: Register - The Bart Ehrman Blog )! In this post Dan treats a perennially important topic: how ancient people (including biblical authors) understood the legitimacy of war, particularly in light of their specific historical and cultural contexts. What could be of more on-going relevance? Dan will be happy to address questions and comments. ******************************* The history of how religions approach war is evidence that theology is a product of reaction to events rather than the application of eternal and unchanging laws. Look at the ancient Israelites, who lived in a period of endemic local wars, in which one petty kingdom after another (including those [...]
Several people alerted me to Mike Licona's response to my post on our debate over a specific contradiction in the Gospels. I checked it out and thought it would be interesting to get your response before giving my own. I asked Mike if it was OK to share it on the blog, and yes indeed, it is. As you'll see, it is over a very simple matter. When Jesus sent his disciples on a mission to preach the kingdom, did he tell them explicitly to *take* a staff with them (Gospel of Mark) or tell them explicitly *not* to take a staff (Matthew and Luke)? Mike does not think it's a contradiction. If Matthew reports that Jesus said TAKE a staff and Mark reports that he said DO NOT take a staff it means basically the same thing. That may sound counterintuitive, but Mike explains his reasoning: if you look at the entire context, the gist of the saying is the same between the two accounts; Matthew is just simplifying a detail in Mark. For [...]
