Of all the holidays we celebrate in the U.S., Christmas evokes the most extreme emotional reactions.  Where do you line up? Many of us grew up thinking Christmas was the most sacred time of the year, a time to remember and celebrate the most wonderful, touching, and humbling event in human history, the entrance of God into our world as a little child, come to save us all from our sins. Even for many of us who no longer celebrate the religious side of the holiday, it can be a time of joy, of appreciating others, of giving, and of reflection. But Christmas is obviously about a lot more than even that, at least as it has come to be institutionalized in our world.  And so many of us growing up absolutely thrived on receiving gifts and having special times with family.  And many of us have loved all the accoutrements of the season: snow, Christmas trees, lights, candles, decorations, festivities, carols, the movies (A Christmas Carol!  The Christmas Story!  It’s a Wonderful Life!  White [...]

Thanks to the incredible ongoing generosity of members of the blog, I am happy to announce that there are a limited number of free one-year memberships available.   These have been donated for a single purpose: to allow those who cannot afford the annual membership fee to participate on the blog for a year.   I will assign these memberships strictly on the honor system: if you truly cannot afford the membership fee, but very much want to have full access to the blog, then please contact me. Do NOT reply here, on the blog, as a comment.   Send us a separate email, privately, at [email protected]  .In your email, please provide me with the following information: Your first and last name. Why you would like to take advantage of this offer -- that is, why you  can't afford it. I don't need or want all the details, just an idea of why you aren't able just now to purchase a membership. Country of citizenship (we're required, as a non-profit, to ask). Your preferred personal email. Your preferred user [...]

I was pleased a couple of weeks ago to see that my new course for the Great Courses (formerly called the Teaching Company; now called Wondrium [??]) “The Triumph of Christianity” has now seen the light of published day.  This is my ninth course for them and is obviously based on my book of the same name. Do you know about the Great Courses?  If not, you should.  They are *terrific*.  I don’t mean mine – I mean in general.  I’ve watched a ton of them, on Classical music, astronomy, psychology, neurology, Roman history, and and and.  They get really fine lecturers (except for the ones they hired a long time ago, not to name names). All but one course I’ve seen has been superb. Bart Ehrman Great Courses I did my first course for the Company in 1999, published, I think in 2000.  In fact, I did two courses at virtually the same time, an Introduction to the New Testament and a Life of the Historical Jesus.  I was absolutely convinced, and told them [...]

For some years now we have taken Christmas donations to provide a membership to those who would very much want one but cannot afford it.  Blog members who want to make it possible donate the fee and we put memberships on offer.  It's a nice holiday tradition. I will post on my social media (Facebook and Twitter) as well as on a public post here, the availability of memberships starting in a couple of days.  I will give out as many as we have.  Would you like to provide one or more people the opportunity?  I get requests *ALL* the time -- not just in response to this annual announcement (dozens then) but also throughout  the year, often a couple of times a week. Your donation can make it possible. As you know, annual memberships start at $29.95.  So let's think in terms of $30 increments.   If you'd like to donate a membership, that would be $30.  Three?  $90.   827?  $24,810.  You get the idea. This is a win-win situation.  Your donation is completely tax [...]

I love Thanksgiving.  Absolutely love it.  For me it’s the best holiday of the year – family, friends, food, and football.  How good can it get?   (OK, a lot of my family and friends would drop the football.)  And it’s always a time for me actually to realize how much good there is in the world and in my life. On the other hand, every Thanksgiving has a darkside for me, a sense of guilt that I myself have so much to be thankful for. Isn’t that a bit triumphalist and self-congratulating, given how awful so many people feel, not because of self-pity (though there is a lot of that also) but because their lives really are filled with pain and misery? These two feelings of gratitude and guilt are simultaneous.  That is weird and possibly paradoxical, but I never try to resolve the tension between them, to make one triumph over the other or to reconcile them to one another.  They are both real and true but obviously at odds.   I think that’s worth [...]

Here is my second post on Bill O'Reilly's Killing Jesus from many years ago.   As you'll see, I was no happier about the book once I started reading it than when I was anticipating doing so.  But here at least I give some reasons that show my fears were starting to be confirmed.  Confirmation bias?  Yeah, maybe.  But well, in this case, I don't think so.... I will say, though, I was much feistier eight years ago when I wrote this thing.... ****************************** I received my copy of Killing Jesus in the mail today and started to glance at it.  I know I said I would read it, but I’m just not sure I can bring myself to do it. The opening “Note to Readers” makes one’s heart sink.  We are told that this will be a “fact-based book.”  Oh, that’s good, the reader thinks: it won’t be biased but will be objective, based only on facts.  Until you begin to read the opening page of ch. 1 “Heavily armed solders from the capital city [...]

This announcement is not directly related to the blog -- but some of you may be interested.  My long-time colleague (of nearly 30 years!) Carl Ernst, one of the leading experts on Islam in North America, will be holding a remote webinar for my Department of Religious Studies, along with another expert (a PhD from our program) on how Islam influenced "Dune" -- both the book (which I *loved* in college!) and the movie (which does look amazing). It will be Saturday November 13.  Interested?  You don't have to have read the book or seen the movie for the discussion to be extremely enlightening.  Here's the info! Webinar on Dune and Islam: How To Understand the Movie   Frank Herbert’s Dune is inspired by themes from the history of Islam that are both direct and subtle. Carl Ernst and Michael Muhammad Knight will discuss the new film and the book it is based on and explore how Islam is part of its foundation on November 13, 2021 on Zoom and YouTube Live. Register here. The webinar is free. $10 suggested donation: https://go.unc.edu/PeckFundDonation Carl Ernst is a leading [...]

Here is an intriguing guest post!  And a controversial one.  Did Jesus actually heal people? As you know, blog members who are at the Platinum level can submit posts for other Platinum members.  Would you be interested in doing so?  Move up to Platinum!  Every month or so, Platinum members can vote on a recent post to appear on the entire blog.  This is the current WINNER. Our guest poster is Doug Wadeson, himself a medical doctor with (obviously) a lifelong interest in healing but also a keen interest in the historical study of the NT Gospels.  In this series he combines these two interests and provides some some unusually interesting reflections.   ****************************** The Gospels portray Jesus as performing amazing miracles.  Some of them have to do with nature, such as calming a storm or turning water into wine.  Most have to do with healing a variety of afflictions, including leprosy and possibly other infectious diseases (like Peter’s mother-in-law, and maybe Jairus’ daughter?), blindness, being mute and deaf, paralysis (or some form of crippling [...]

I have talked a lot on the blog about my understanding of how biblical scholarship relates to Christian faith claims.   Since the early 19th century critical scholars have dug deeply into the Bible and discovered discrepancies, contradictions, historical errors, geographical mistakes, anachronisms, and claims that make no sense in light of what we know about the world today from biology, geology, astronomy, physics, anthropology, and … and well the list goes on. Different people draw different faith conclusions from this kind of scholarship.  Some think it’s irrelevant to their faith;  others think it requires them to change what they believe, possibly radically; yet others think that it negates the possibility of faith altogether  -- either confirming the atheism they already hold or driving them to abandon their faith and become non-believers. Is any of these a sensible option?  Is any of them the obvious and necessary option?  What about the obstacles that stand in the way of change, unrelated to biblical scholarship, such as not being able to leave a conservative evangelical community because of [...]

Soon after Jesus’ death, his disciples claimed that he was God. What did they mean by that?  Did they think he was God *before* he died, during his public ministry?   Did they think he had always been God?  Did they think he Was he the One and Only God, Yahweh? More important still:  Did Jesus himself think he was God?   To find an answer, we have to explore two issues:  does Jesus actually ever call himself God in the Gospels, or give any other indication that he thought he was God?  If so, given the problems with the Gospels -- can we know if they are accurate on this point?  Can we show what the historical figure of Jesus actually said about himself? These are terrifically important questions.   Traditional Christianity, as it has come down over all the centuries, has always claimed Jesus himself is a divine being.  Did that teaching start with Jesus himself? Announcing a Webinar on the Topic! I will be doing a webinar on the topic on Sunday, November 7.  I [...]

In my last post I pointed out that the famous passage of the so-called “bloody sweat” in Luke 22:43-44 is thought by some scholars not to have been original to the Gospel of Luke.  I count myself in that number.  One of my very first scholarly articles was devoted to the question; I wrote it when I was a first-year graduate student – or rather, I co-wrote it, with a friend of mine who was in the PhD program at Princeton Seminary with me, a fellow named Mark Plunkett. Mark had done a study of the passage of Jesus’ prayer before his arrest and had realized something about the structure of the passage, which made me, in turn, realize, that if he was right, then the two verses about the bloody sweat could not have been original to the passage.  I’ll say more about that in my next post.  At the time, one of the reasons I thought that was so significant is that it confirmed what was already clear to me otherwise: these verses [...]