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.   Please 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: Your first and last name. Your preferred personal email. Your preferred user name (no spaces). Your preferred password (should be 8 or more characters, no spaces). Country located The donors will remain anonymous, but here let me publicly extend my heartfelt thanks for such kind [...]

As you may know, there is a weekly Podcast connected with the blog, called, cleverly enough, The Bart Ehrman Blog Podcast.  The idea was hatched two years ago by blog member John Mueller, who has put a tremendous amount of effort into the whole affair every week since, producing and managing the podcast all himself, simply out of the goodness of his heart.  The podcasts appear in a variety of venues, most anywhere you typically go for such things (e.g., Itunes, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Spotify).  You can find it simply enough: just search for “Bart Ehrman” or look on the episode webpage:  http://ehrmanpodcast.libsyn.com/  John releases a new episode every Sunday and now, I am happy to say, we have reached a milestone.  Episode 100 is to be released this weekend. The goal of the podcast is to help raise blog awareness.  The theory was and is that this in turn would increase membership in the blog, which would then  raise more money for charity.  The best part of John’s offer to start the project is that [...]

In response to my post yesterday about whether the author of Mark was a Jew, in which I said no Jew would make the claim that Mark does, in chapter 7, that "all Jews" washed their hands before eating -- a claim that is simply not true -- a couple of astute blog members have pointed out  that there is another text, certainly written by a Jew, the Letter of Aristeas (about the how the Septuagint -- that is, the Greek translation of the Old Testament -- came into being), from the first century BCE or earlier, says something very similar about "all Jews" washing their hands.  Hmm....   I've only read the Letter of Aristeas about 75 times.  You'd think I would have noticed that.  But alas. So, for the first time in recorded history, I'm going to cover and atone for my abject shame by removing the post.  Ugh.  Many apologies for the false information, the fake news, and the alternative facts.

It is difficult for me to know what really “works” on the blog.   On the whole, most things seem to work well: as I’ve reported recently, the blog continues to grow.   We are working toward 7000 members (but I very much want that in six figures!) and this past year we raised on average over $420 a day for charity.  That’s a lot of dosh.  All to the good. But I’m concerned about the quality of the blog and whether it is doing what you yourself want it to.   I have only two ways of knowing: the rather crude rating system we use for blog posts and the feedback I get. The rating system could probably be improved, but I’m not completely sure how.   Of course each post isn’t read by 6700+ members every day, but even so, I typically will get somewhere between 5 and 10 people rating a post.  That much is helpful (especially if there is a consistent trend), but it’s not a lot to go by, nothing anywhere statistically significant. The [...]

Do you OR SOMEONE YOU KNOW want a free one-year subscription to the blog (because, for various reasons, you, or the one you know, cannot afford it)?   I STILL HAVE FREE MEMBERSHIPS TO GIVE OUT.   Please ask or encourage someone you know to ask. Here is the original announcement from a couple of weeks ago, with instructions about how to obtain one. ***********************************************************   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 [...]

I occasionally get asked what I’m “working on,” and it seems like January 1 is a good time to lay out my research goals/directions for the year.  As some of you know, a couple of years ago I decided to cut back and become less busy with research.  That lasted a couple of months.  But, well, it was a *nice* couple of months.  Now I’m back in over my head – but enjoying that immensely as well. I have four major research goals (at this point) for the coming year. Finish The Invention of the Afterlife. This is the trade book (that a few of you have read in draft!) that deals with the question of where the ideas of heaven and hell came from.  As I’ve mentioned before, 72% of Americans believe that there is a literal heaven, a place for blessed souls after death, and 58% in a literal hell, a place of torment for sinners.   The thesis of this book is that heaven and hell – as places of eternal reward and [...]

Here on this New Year’s Eve I would like to reflect for a minute on the last calendar year of the blog, our seventh year of operation. By nearly any metric, I would say it has been a very good year indeed. For just about all the users of the blog, of course, the primary interest is to read what scholars say about the subject areas that we cover, which are narrow, in one sense, in that they deal almost exclusively with the area of early Christianity (with some discussion of cognate fields, such as Hebrew Bible, early Judaism, Greco-Roman world, Roman religion, and so on).  But in another sense they are very broad, as the blog covers a range of subfields all of which entail scholarship produced by specialists who, in many instances, work in one small subfield or another.  (My best friend in graduate school, upon graduation, used to say that her expertise was on Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapters 9-11.   And she meant it!) And so the blog covers, among other [...]