Interested in a free lecture on who wrote the Gospels? As you may know, I’ve started doing some online courses on the Bible (and related topics) as part of my new venture, Bart Ehrman Professional Services (= BEPS).  This venture is not connected with the blog, but I do like to announce what is going on over there since a number of blog members have been interested. If you want to see what it all involves – and to see which courses are already available – you can find them on my personal website, www.bartehrman.com. The courses are for purchase, but I’ve decided to do a freebie for anyone interested.  It will be a live event on Sunday June 12, 2:00 pm ET; a recording of it will also be made available. The title of my talk:  “Did Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John Actually Write Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John”?    Here's the link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81200470127?pwd=bU82SGFTT3lLdlhSbkEwdnNrcWFQdz09 If you'd like to officially register for the event (this is not necessary but if you do so, we will [...]

In celebration of our tenth year anniversary on April 18, I'm publishing all the posts from previous years on April 18.  It's a random collection.  Here's the second in the series, from 2013; it's a self-congratulatory one (!)  that I was using to explain the different kinds of colleges/universities around the country (in later posts on that thread). ****************************** It is always interesting for me to travel around the country giving lectures at different colleges and universities. This past week I have been struck with just now different institutions of higher education can be from one another. Let me preface my remarks by saying – in this post -- that I absolutely love my university. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is always ranked very near the top of state research universities in the country, and for very good reasons. The faculty are on the whole absolutely stellar. Just within my own Department of Religious Studies we have eighteen full time tenured or tenure-track faculty, not counting adjuncts and emeriti, and every single [...]

In celebration of our blog 10 year anniversary on April 18, I've decided to post the past ten years posts that were posted on April 18 of each year!   Here is the first, from April 18, 2012.  You will notice (if you pay attention to how I write these posts), that I was even more thin-skinned, defensive, and argumentative than I am now!  Ha.  I thought about editing these then thought, ah, why?  In this first from ten years ago, I was responding to an accusation that I don't do my own work. (!) ****************************** I was surprised, shocked, dismayed, incredulous, and well, OK, pretty ticked off and aggravated when some of the mythicists that I deal with in my book, Did Jesus Exist, went on the attack and made it personal.   Let me make a confession: before getting ready to do this Blog, and getting into Facebook as a preparation for it, I had no idea how grimy the Internet can be.   It is one messy place.  I know, I know – welcome to [...]

Here now is THE post that has received the very most comments in the past ten years - 233 - more than any of the 2,965 OTHER posts.  And as it turns out, it's on an unusually important topic, for both Christians and those who want to understand Christians:  is Jesus' death and resurrection predicted in the Hebrew Scriptures?  Read on:   ****************************** Readers Mailbag: Does Isaiah 53 Predict the Death and Resurrection of Jesus? May 8, 2020 I would like to get back into the practice of devoting one post a week to answering questions raised by blog members.  I have a fairly long list of good questions I haven’t been able to get to, so why not just go through them week by week?  If you have any pressing questions that are particularly intriguing or perplexing for you about the NT or early Christianity or any related topic, let me know as a comment on a post (any post will do, whether relevant or not).  If it’s not something I can address or [...]

This post appeared on Easter day, four years ago, and received the second-most comments of any that I have done (218 of them).  It is, in fact, a reflection on the significance of that holiday and how Christianity itself actually began.   ****************************** An Easter Reflection 2018 April 1, 2018 It is highly ironic, but relatively easy, for a historian to argue that Jesus himself did not start Christianity.  Christianity, at its heart, is the belief that Jesus’ death and resurrection brought about salvation, and that believing in his death and resurrection will make a person right with God, both now and in the afterlife.  Historical scholarship since the nineteenth century has marshaled massive evidence that this is not at all what Jesus himself preached. Yes, it is true that in the Gospels themselves Jesus talks about his coming death and resurrection.  And in the last of the Gospels written, John, his message is all about how faith in him can bring eternal life (a message oddly missing in the three earlier Gospels of Matthew, [...]

Here now is my #3 all time most commented-on post, coming in at 210 comments.  It's about my religious views as an agnostic.  Or an atheist?   Or, actually, how should we think about whether we even *could* imagine a God.  Read on.   ****************************** A Revelatory Moment about “God” January 12, 2020 I had a “revelatory moment” last week that I think may have changed my view about “God” for a very long time – or at least about the existence of superior beings far beyond what we can imagine. As most of you know, I have long been an agnostic-atheist, and as some of you may recall, I define “atheist” differently from most people, at least in relationship to “agnostic.”   The word “agnostic” means “don’t know.”   Is there a God?  I don’t’ know.  How could I possibly know?  How could you?  I know a lot of you do “know” – or think you know.  But my view is that if you’re in that boat you “think” there is a God – really, really think [...]

Here now is my most-commented-from-the-last-ten-years-post #4.  It is also by far the longest post I have done in all this time.  It addresses an attack on my stupidity and ignorance. I should say at the outset that the one issue/topic I do NOT enjoy going into on the blog these days (for the past three or four years) is the "mythicist" view of Jesus (the idea that Jesus never existed; there never was a Jesus of Nazareth; it's all made up).  The people who hold this view tend to have completely boundless energy and no matter what you say, they keep coming back at you like a terrier.  It's exhausting.  And so these days I stay away from it all.  Let them get on with it. But it is the topic of one of my books (what was I thinking?), and oh boy did it provoke a response.  I thought *Christian fundamentalists* were a hard audience.  HA!  Welcome to the mythicists. All that is explained in this post, which in the end elicited 207 comments. [...]

We are counting down the TOP TEN commented posts in our TEN year venture on the blog.  We've had a range of topics so far, and here now is Post #5, with 207 comments.   ******************************   The Religion of a Sixteen-Year-Old June 1, 2014 I just got home from spending a week in Lawrence Kansas, my home town.   As I’ve done now for years, I took my mom fishing in the Ozarks for a few days.  She’s 87, and on a walker, but still able to reel them in! I go back to Lawrence probably three or four times a year, and each time it is like going down memory lane.  I left there to go to Moody Bible Institute in 1973, when I was all of 17 years old; I still called it home for years, but never lived there full time, not even in the summers usually.  I was married and very much on my own only four years later.  So my memories of the place are entirely of childhood through high [...]