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A Different Interpretation of the Mischievous Boy, Jesus

I have decided that I can't simply post yesterday's blast from the past about the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and leave it at that, since the way we today tend to read the account (where Jesus seems, to our eyes, to be a Super-Brat) may not be the way it was read in antiquity (believe it or not!). So here is the post that I wrote to explain that, when I first dealt with the matter three years ago. **************************************************************************** I had a great time giving my lectures at the Smithsonian yesterday. Terrific crowd, very attentive, highly intelligent, great questions. And a completely exhausting day. Four lectures back to back is tough. So I came back to my room and did football, pizza, and beer all night, which was just what the doctor ordered. (I am a Dr., after all) The first lecture, as I indicated in my previous post, was on the Infancy Gospels, or at least on two of them, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Proto-Gospel of James (Protevangelium Jacobi). I [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:47:10-04:00December 10th, 2016|Christian Apocrypha, Public Forum|

Jesus the Superboy: A Blast From the Past

As is my wont, this time of year, I've been thinking about the stories of Jesus' birth and early life for a few days now. And just this instant I was looking at some old posts on the blog, from years ago -- and this one turned up from 2013. A matter of ongoing interest: if Jesus was the miracle working Son of God as an adult, what was he like as a kid? We have stories about that from the early church. Here's the post, occasioned by some lectures I was giving: ***************************************************************************** I just (now) flew into Washington D.C., to give four lectures tomorrow (count them, four) on “The Other Gospels” at the Smithsonian. Each lecture is about an hour, followed by 15 minutes of Q & A. It’ll be a grueling day. I do these Smithsonian things once or twice a year on average. They’re great – 160 adults who have paid good money and devoted an entire day to hearing lectures on a topic important to them. It’s a terrific audience, [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:47:19-04:00December 9th, 2016|Christian Apocrypha, Public Forum|

Free Memberships for those Who Need Them!

Thanks to the incredible 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 me a separate email, privately, at [email protected]. In your email, let me know your situation (why you would like to take advantage of this offer) and provide me with the following information: 1) Your first and last name. 2) Your preferred personal email. 3) Your preferred user name (no spaces). 4) Your preferred password (should be 8 or more characters, no spaces). The donors will remain anonymous, but here let me publicly extend my heartfelt thanks for [...]

BDEhrman2016-12-08T09:45:50-05:00December 8th, 2016|Public Forum|

A Personal Transition

A week ago today I finally sent off the very last and final version of The Triumph of Christianity to my editor. It is done, as good as I can make it. Now it will go to a copy-editor who will go over it line by line, word by word to make sure the grammar, punctuation, and even spelling is all correct, and to make suggestions for writing style as needed. Depending on the copy-editor, sometimes there are tons of these stylistic suggestions, sometimes hardly any. As an author, I much prefer the “hardly any” approach – it’s much easier on me and more, well, affirming of my writing style. When I do get a lot of suggestions I have to take a deep breath and remind myself that the copy-editor is just doing his/her job and trying to make the prose better. But I do hate that part. I will then go through the copy-edited manuscript, approve or reject all the suggested changes, and return the book to the editor, for it to go [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:47:27-04:00December 7th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Finding Meaning in the Bible: More Responses to my Christmas Article

In the previous post I indicated some of the initial reactions, four years ago, to my Newsweek article on the Gospel stories about Christmas. I received yet more reaction after that old post, and so posted again, dealing this time with people who thought I was too kindly disposed to anyone who found the stories meaningful. Here is what I said at the time. (I still stick by it, for what it's worth!) ********************************************************************** When the editor at Newsweek ask me if I would be willing to write an article on the birth of Jesus, I was hesitant and wrote him back asking if he was sure he really wanted me to do it. I told him that I seem to be incapable of writing anything that doesn’t stir up controversy. It must be in my blood. Still, he said that they knew about my work and were not afraid of controversy, and they did indeed want an article from me. What’s interesting to me is that I’ve been getting it from all sides. [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:47:39-04:00December 5th, 2016|Bart's Critics, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Is the New Testament Authentic? Readers’ Mailbag December 4, 2016

QUESTION Dr Ehrman, I found this attack against you: Bart likes to deceive his listener by claiming more variations and more copies give birth to less authenticity. Actually flip that and you’ll begin to “see the light”. The Bible manuscripts were transmitted not in a linear way, as in “Chinese whispers” but geometrically as in 1 produced by 5 others which in turn then produced, say 20, etc. I think you already dealt with this claim, but I am unable to find your post. RESPONSE I have to admit that I have a hard time responding to this objection because I don’t know what the person is talking about. Maybe someone else can enlighten me. For openers, I’m not sure what he means that I “like” to deceive my listeners – I think that must mean I do this a lot. And the “deception” appears to be that I think lots of variations in the manuscripts of the New Testament make something “less authentic.” But what does the person mean? Exactly what is less [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:47:48-04:00December 4th, 2016|Bart's Critics, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Response to my Newsweek Article on Christmas

Earlier this week I posted my Newsweek article on Christmas from four years ago, and several people have asked me what kind of reaction I received. I made two posts about that at the time. Here’s the first. I find this post rather humorous now, years later, since I was obviously being wildly defensive (halfway through the response) before denying I was defensive at all (at the end)! What funny people we can be…. ******************************************************** My Newsweek article this week has generated a lot of response. I have no idea what kind of comments they typically get for their stories, but so far, as of now, there have been 559 on mine; and most of them are negative – to no one’s surprise – written by people (conservative evangelicals and fundamenalists for the most part, from what I can tell) who think that the Gospels are perfectly accurate in what they have to say about Jesus – not just at his birth but for his entire life. A lot of these respondents think that anyone [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:48:19-04:00December 2nd, 2016|Bart's Critics, Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Gift Subscriptions, 2016!!

It is now December (can any of us believe it?) and we are blasting from one holiday to the next. For the occasion, I want to open up a holiday giving option that can help out people who really want to be on the blog but cannot afford the membership fees. As many of you know, for the past three of years, thanks to a number of generous donors, we pulled this off in a big way. It has happened in two stages. It started off when two anonymous donors proposed that they provide some funds to pay for memberships for a few people who wanted to be on the blog but because of personal circumstances, could not afford the membership fees. I put out the offer on my Facebook page, asking if anyone was in that boat, and within twenty minutes I had thirty requests –all from people who were eager to join but simply did not have the means to do so. I had to shut down the offer nearly as soon as [...]

BDEhrman2016-12-01T10:19:28-05:00December 1st, 2016|Public Forum|

Newsweek Article on Christmas: Part 2

Yesterday I gave Part 1 of my Newsweek article on Christmas, published in 2012. Here is Part 2! *************************************************************** Most modern readers who are not already familiar with these stories [in the apocryphal Gospels such as the Proto-Gospel of James] tend to find them far-fetched. That’s almost always the case with miraculous accounts that we have never heard before – they sound implausible and “obviously” made up, as legends and fabrications. Rarely do we have the same reaction to familiar stories known from childhood that are also spectacularly miraculous, and that probably sound just as bizarre to outsiders who hear them for the first time. Are the stories about Jesus’ birth that are in the New Testament any less far-fetched? It depends whom you ask. This past November, Pope Benedict XVI published his third book on the life of Jesus, this one focusing on the New Testament accounts of his birth, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives. Before his ascent to the head of the Catholic Church, Joseph Ratzinger was best known as a leading [...]

BDEhrman2020-12-17T16:30:13-05:00November 29th, 2016|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Newsweek Article on Christmas: Part 1

In my last post I made an off-the-cuff comment about an article about Christmas that I wrote for Newsweek four years ago (2012). Someone asked for more information, and I see now that I never posted the article on the blog. So I’ll post it here in two parts. Here is the first half: ******************************************************************* This past September, Harvard University professor Karen King unveiled a newly discovered Gospel fragment that she entitled “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.” This wisp of a papyrus has stirred up a hornet’s nest and raised anew questions about what we can know about the historical Jesus of Nazareth, and about whether there are other Gospels outside the New Testament that can contribute valuable information. Few questions could be more timely, here in the season that celebrates Jesus’ birth. The fragment is just a scrap – the size of a credit card – written in Coptic, the language of ancient Egypt. It contains only eight broken lines of writing, but in one of these Jesus speaks of “my wife.” [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:48:38-04:00November 28th, 2016|Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

Looking Ahead to Christmas: A Blast from the Past

With the passing of Thanksgiving, Christmas season has now officially arrived (whether that brings you joy, despair, or indifference!). Here is a post that I made exactly four years, prompted in part by my decision to publish an edition of “other” Gospels (that did not make it into the New Testament, including some that deal with the birth of Jesus. ****************************************************** Right now I have the “other” Gospels on my mind. It’s true, I often have them on my mind, since they have been a focus for a good deal of my research over the past few years, and will continue to be for some years to come. But just now, they are particularly on my mind even though the book I’m currently writing (How Jesus Became God) is about something else. They’re on my mind for three reasons. First, I’ve agreed with Oxford Press, to produce, along with my colleague Zlatko Plese, an English-only edition of The Apocryphal Gospels, which came out in a Greek/Latin/Coptic-English edition last year; this new edition will include only the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:51:57-04:00November 27th, 2016|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Improving the Blog 2016

I would like some ideas for making this blog better. Do you have any? As you know, the blog really has two functions. On one hand, the idea behind it is to disseminate as widely as possible the views, perspectives, evidence, arguments, and conclusions of scholars who devote their lives to the study of the New Testament and the history of early Christianity. As the disseminator-of-such-things-in-chief, I think we are doing a pretty good job with that. The blog covers lots and lots of topics: the historical Jesus; the New Testament Gospels; the life, theology, and writings of Paul; the other writings of the New Testament; the Apostolic Fathers; the early Christian apocrypha (books that did not make it into the New Tesament); the formation of the Christian canon; heresy and orthodoxy in early Christianity; persecution and martyrdom of Christians; early Jewish Christian relations; the conversion and life of Constantine; and … and lots of other things. We basically cover everything that I know anything about, and the only things we don’t cover are (a) [...]

BDEhrman2016-11-26T10:59:00-05:00November 26th, 2016|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Personal Thoughts on Thanksgiving, 2016

I have been thinking, as is my wont, about giving thanks, on this Thanksgiving. Many of my thoughts have been about all the things I am so incredibly thankful for, as is appropriate for the day. But another line of thinking has hit me as well, involving the ironies of giving thanks. Some background, from my personal life. As much as I love my live, the older I get, the more I realize just how weird this of mine life has been, as a scholar of religion who is not himself religious, an expert on Jesus and the New Testament who does not believe in Jesus or the New Testament, an academic obsessed with the history of Christianity who is not personally connected with Christianity. As many of you know, the weirdness in part comes from the fact that when I started out I was completely committed religiously, as a believer in Jesus, the Bible, and all things Christian. When I was seventeen, I was not just your run-of-the-mill-go-to-church-on-Sunday kind of Christian. I was a [...]

BDEhrman2017-09-25T21:45:19-04:00November 24th, 2016|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Jesus’ Private Teachings about the King of the Jews

In this thread I am discussing whether Jesus considered himself the messiah prior to his death. So far I have made one major argument for that view, involving his death itself. All of our sources report Jesus was executed by the Romans specifically for calling himself the King of the Jews. They do not report that the Roman governor Pontius Pilate ordered him crucified for raising an army, or for causing a disturbance in the temple, or for being a pain in the neck for the Sadducees, Pharisees, or anyone else. They report that the charge was for calling himself the Jewish king. This seems almost certainly historical, because it is not a report Christians would have made up. The title “King of the Jews” appears in the Gospels only in connection with Jesus’ trial and crucifixion. It is not a title that Christians ever (so far as we can tell) used of Jesus. And so it’s unlikely they invented it for the occasion of his death. Moreover, I think it is fair to say [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:52:05-04:00November 23rd, 2016|Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

Jesus’ Crucifixion as King of the Jews

One of the main reasons I think Jesus called himself the future messiah is that this best explains the best attested event of his entire life: his crucifixion by the Romans. There are a few things we can say with virtual certainty about Jesus. For example: he was a Jewish preacher from rural Galilee who made a fateful trip to Jerusalem and was crucified by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. There are, of course, lots of other things that we can say, without quite so much certainty (see my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium). But that much is certain. So why did the Romans crucify him? Romans had to have a reason to crucify a person. There had to be a criminal charge. There could be lots of charges – runaway slaves, brigands, insurrectionists, all could be crucified. So why was Jesus crucified? The Gospels tell us, and in this particular case, there are very good reasons for thinking what they say is right. Jesus was crucified for calling himself King of [...]

BDEhrman2019-11-10T11:09:21-05:00November 21st, 2016|Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

The Apocalyptic Background to Jesus’ Messiahship

To make sense of my claim that Jesus himself told the disciples that he thought he was the messiah, I have to set his teachings generally in a wider context. As I have repeatedly argued on the blog, Jesus’ teachings are best understood as apocalyptic in nature, and to understand any of them it is important to remember what the world view we call Jewish apocalypticism entailed. This is essential background to the question I’m pursuing, since I will be maintaining that Jesus did indeed consider himself the messiah, and said so to his disciples, but he meant this in a completely apocalyptic sense. So, to set the stage for my consideration of the messianic self-teaching of Jesus, I need to provide a quick refresher course on Jewish apocalypticism. Here is what I said in an earlier post on the matter. ****************************************************************** Jewish apocalypticism was a very common view in Jesus’ day – it was the view of the Essenes who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, of the Pharisees, of John the Baptist, later of [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:52:14-04:00November 20th, 2016|Early Judaism, Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

Why Would Jesus’ Disciples Think He Was The Messiah?

The big question to emerge from my previous post is: If Jesus’ disciples (or at least some of them) believed he was the messiah before he died (as I tried to show they must have done) then what would have led them to think so? I think there are two possibilities, one of which strikes me as implausible. The implausible one, in my opinion, is that Jesus did things that the messiah was expected to do, and because of that, his followers thought he was the messiah. My reason for not being drawn to this interpretation is precisely that Jesus in fact did not do any of the things that the messiah was expected or supposed to do. Some of my Christian students don’t get this. Doesn’t the Bible predict that... The Rest of this Post is for Members Only. It doesn't cost much to join -- about a Starbuck's coffee a month (NOT a decaf caramel macchiato or whatever crazy other thing people drink -- just a coffee!) . And the blog will keep [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:54:30-04:00November 18th, 2016|Early Judaism, Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

Jesus the Messiah Before the Resurrection

In my recent posts I have argued, against the Mythicists, that the idea of someone (or lots of someones) inventing Jesus as a crucified messiah does not seem plausible, given the fact that no one expected a messiah to be crucified. If you were to invent a messiah, it would not be one that was completely different (opposite, actually) to what anyone expected. In response to these posts, several readers have asked why, then, Jesus’ own followers thought he could be the messiah while he was alive: the historical man himself, as reconstructed by contemporary scholars, also does not seem to be like what anyone would have expected the messiah to be. He too was not a warrior-king, or a cosmic judge coming on the clouds of heaven, or a mighty priest (he was not from the priestly line, for one thing). So why would anyone think a lower-class itinerant preacher from the rural backwoods of Galilee was the messiah? It’s a great question, and obviously a completely fundamental one. The followers of Jesus did [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:54:39-04:00November 17th, 2016|Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

The Invention of a Crucified Messiah

This is a follow-up to my recent post in which I argued, against the mythicists who maintain that Jesus was not a real person but was invented by his earliest followers who had learned of a cosmic Christ who was crucified by demons in outer space, that it does not make sense, in my judgment, that first century Jews would make up the idea of a human messiah who got crucified. I received a number of responses to that post, most of which were very positive. But every now and then I got a response that said something like this: “I would say inventing a God/man who was crucified *does* make sense in a 1st century context.” It’s an important objection and I want to take it very seriously. First, recall my argument, the precise nature of which is important. I am not arguing in a vague way that no one would make up someone who was crucified, or that no one would make up an important person who was crucified, or that no one [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:54:47-04:00November 16th, 2016|Bart's Debates, Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Public Forum|

Lost Gospels: The Greater Questions of Mary. A Blast From the Past

Here is a blast from the past -- almost exactly four years ago now -- about one of my all time favorite "lost" Gospels. If it ever existed. One very imaginative church father certainly thought it did. It was a Gospel featuring Mary Magdalene and a rather wild encounter she had with Jesus. Here is what I said in the post of November 2012. ************************************************************************* I have been discussing some of the Gospels that we know about because they are mentioned, or even quoted, by church fathers, but that no longer survive. Another, particularly intriguing, Gospel like this – one that I desperately wish we had, for reasons that will soon become clear -- is known as “The Greater Questions of Mary” (i.e., of Mary Magdalene). My following comments on it are more or less lifted from my Introduction in the recent Apocryphal Gospels volume. One of the “great questions” for scholars is whether such a book ever really did exist. It is mentioned only once in ancient literature, in a highly charged polemical context [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-01T13:47:14-04:00November 14th, 2016|Christian Apocrypha, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Women in Early Christianity|

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