Public Forum Archives - Page 51 of 89 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

What Is My Best Book for a General Audience?

I recently received this question for the Mailbag, dealing, roughly, with my own personal feelings about my “best” work. QUESTION: A mailbag question that I am not sure I have read your thoughts on; what do you feel is your best published work for lay people and why? Just curious! RESPONSE: Ah, this is a difficult question to answer. The books you write are kind of like your children: you love each and every one of them with every ounce of your being! And you’re not supposed to have favorites. OK, but people do. So there are three ways I look at this issue. One is, what is the book that is most useful for lay people? Another is: what is the book that most laypeople themselves have found most useful? And yet other is, what do I myself think is my very best book for lay people? I’ll try to answer all three. Before I do, I need to be clear that I’m talking now only about my trade books for a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:00-04:00January 28th, 2018|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Pre-order Triumph of Christianity and Get Some Serious Perks!!

Preorder Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World, and get significant perks! The book will appear in book stores on February 13. But if you order it online before that, whether a member of the Bart Ehrman Blog or not, you can receive some hefty discounts. FIRST: anyone who buys the book in advance online (e.g., at Amazon, or Barnes and Noble, or wherever) who is NOT already a member of the Bart Ehrman Blog will be given a FREE one-month trial membership, with full access to the posts, past and present. SO, if you are not a member – go for it! If you are a member: tell everyone you know: a FREEBIE! SECOND: for everyone, blog member or not: if you buy the book in advance online,, by special arrangement with the Great Courses (previously called The Teaching Company), you will be able to order any of my (eight) courses for an 80% discount. 80%! These are the courses I’ve done for the Great Courses: The New Testament The Historical [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:46-04:00January 15th, 2018|Public Forum|

Request for Help! Your Favorite Podcasts.

One month from today -- on Feb. 13 -- my new book will be published. As many blog members know, over the years I have written (in broad terms) three kinds of books: academic books for hard hitting scholars in my fields of interest; college-level textbooks for undergraduates; and trade books for a broader audience of interested (and interesting!) people. This new book The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World will be the thirty-first book I’ve published, my fifteenth trade book. Among those fifteen books, by far the best selling one has been Misquoting Jesus. In my personal opinion, the best (in terms of overall quality) was probably How Jesus Became God. But (we all have our favorites), I think The Triumph of Christianity is even better, the most important, and the best conceived, researched, and written. But, again, that’s just me. It is very difficult for any book, no matter who wrote it or in what circumstances, to make a difference and to become a best-seller. Every author (whether they [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:46-04:00January 13th, 2018|Public Forum|

Accessing the Bart Ehrman Blog Podcast

I neglected in my previous post to mention how you can actually *access* the weekly podcast! If you go to iTunes and type in "Bart Ehrman" it is the top podcast to appear and individual episodes appear as well. Or, just click here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/bart-ehrmans-sunday-sermon/id1265249890

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:46-04:00January 12th, 2018|Public Forum|

My Greek New Testament Course

For the first time in forever I am teaching a new course -- one I've never taught before -- at UNC, a class for classics students (and others who already know Greek) on the Greek New Testament. It is obviously a very small class (6 or 7 students); to be in it students have to have already had at least a couple of years of Greek. So the class is not teaching the rudiments of Greek grammar, but it assuming knowledge of that. We are reading/translating/analyzing lots of Greek in the class; learning about "textual criticism" (how to establish the oldest wording of the text given all variations among the manuscripts); and acquiring the skills to read and analyze actual manuscripts (the hand written copies of the New Testament, as opposed to the printed editions of the Greek). For anyone interested in the details and the play-by-play, here is the syllabus I handed out yesterday: ************************************************************************************* NEW TESTAMENT GREEK Religion 409 / Greek 409 Spring 2018 Instructor: Dr. Bart D. Ehrman Course Description This [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:46-04:00January 12th, 2018|Public Forum, Teaching Christianity|

The Blog Podcast

As most of you may be aware, the “Bart Ehrman Blog Podcast” began six months ago. John Mueller, who has been a blog member for many years but doesn’t comment much, reached out to me last summer and offered to create the it. His idea for the podcast was simply to read some of my posts, each week. He hoped that the podcast would attract more people to the blog, which in turn would increase membership in the blog, which in turn would raise more money for the charities supported by the blog, which in turn would help eradicate poverty, hunger, and homelessness, and hence, he would feel good about himself because he did his part to help the World and the Universe as we know it. John gave me an offer he hoped I “couldn’t refuse.” He offered to set up the podcast, fund it, choose what is read each week, narrate it, publish it, keep me updated on its numbers, and scrap it at a moment’s notice if I so requested. My obligation [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:46-04:00January 11th, 2018|Public Forum|

Can Historians Be Neutral?

I received a number of responses to my post this past week on whether Jesus would have received a decent burial on the day of his crucifixion. One of the most interesting responses was not so much about what I said or thought, but about a much broader question: how can one evaluate arguments over such controversial subjects without being entirely biased and subjective at the outset? It’s worth talking about. Here’s the question: QUESTION: Re: the burial of Jesus or not: Do you have any suggestions for how to be objective regarding issues like this? Maybe it would help to first figure out where the burden of proof should be. Does historicity demand something like clear and convincing evidence that something happened–so that any significant doubts require rejection of the supposed incident? Or just that one thing is more likely to have happened than another? RESPONSE: I won’t here deal with the particular issue of Jesus’ burial, but with the broader issue of how one remains “neutral” or “disinterested” when trying to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:46-04:00January 7th, 2018|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Long Favorite Pauline Letter: Philippians

There is one other book in the New Testament that may be a cut-and-paste job, and as it turns out, it is another one of Paul’s letters, Philippians. Philippians was for a long time my favorite Pauline letter, back in my late teens when I was first starting to read the Bible. It contains the first verse I ever memorized: “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain” (1:21); and it is the first book that, a couple of years later, I committed completely to memory, word for word. Little did I know, back then, that some scholars think it is in fact two different letters of Paul’s that have been spliced together. The evidence of there being two letters in Philippians is not as clear and compelling as in the case of 2 Corinthians, and I suspect, but do not know for a fact, that the *majority* of scholars hold to the “integrity” of the letter. In this case, the word integrity has nothing to do with “honesty.” It is the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:46-04:00January 5th, 2018|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

January Dinner Full!

I'm pleased and sorry to say that the table for the Blog dinner in Naples Florida on January 24 is now full! Sometimes people cancel, however, so if you would like to be put on a waiting list, I am happy to do that. I'm looking forward to meeting those who have signed up. For all others -- next time!!

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:46-04:00January 4th, 2018|Public Forum|

February Dinner Full!

I'm pleased and sorry to say that the table for the Blog dinner in D.C. on February 9 is now full! Sometimes people cancel, however, so if you would like to be put on a waiting list, I am happy to do that. I'm looking forward to meeting those who have signed up. For all others -- next time!!

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:45-04:00January 4th, 2018|Public Forum|

Speaking Engagements and Blog Dinners for January and February

Here is a first-of-the-year update on my speaking schedule. If you happen to be in the area where I’m giving a talk – come! For two of the events (Jan. 24 in Naples Florida; Feb. 9 in D.C.) I’d like to organize a small Blog Dinner, if anyone will be there. Blog Dinner? Wednesday January 24, Naples Florida. See the event below. Is anyone interested in having dinner, either because you’ll be attending the event or because you just happen to be around? My idea is to have 3-5 people and to eat good food, drink good drink, and talk about anything you feel like talking about for a couple of hours. The dinner will have to start late, 8:30 pm or so (I think), since I’ll be flying in only after my morning-long seminar. If you’re interested, let me know via email, at [email protected]. The first five to reply get the lucky award. If there aren’t two or three interested, we’ll put it off for another time. There is THIS proviso though: I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:45-04:00January 3rd, 2018|Public Forum|

Is 2 Corinthians FIVE Letters?

In my previous post I tried to show why most critical scholars think that the letter of 2 Corinthians is actually two different letters that have been spliced together. When I was back in graduate school, I learned – to my surprise – that there were scholars who thought that in fact 2 Corinthians was made up of five different letters, all spliced together. At first that struck me as a bit crazy, but as I looked at the evidence I began to see that it made a good bit of sense. I’m not completely committed to that idea, but I’m inclined toward it. My sense is that this is the view of a sizeable minority of critical scholars, but I have no data, only anecdotal evidence, to back that up. In any case, what matters more is what you yourself might think of it. I won’t be giving the evidence in full, but here is how I lay it out for students to consider in my textbook on the New Testament for undergraduates. To [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:45-04:00January 2nd, 2018|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Year in Review 2017!

2017 has now come and, as of tonight, gone. For some of us it has been a very good year, for others a very bad one. Probably for most of us it has been mixed. For the blog, it has been very good indeed. So here are some of the important results! First, some background. As many of you know (some of you were actually here back then), we started this blog endeavor in April 2012. So we’ve been going at this for five years and nine months. The original purpose of the blog was to raise money for charity. Rather than using my somewhat limited culinary skills and even more limited time by volunteering for a local soup kitchen, I decided that I could use my scholarly skills more productively by starting a membership-only blog. Everyone thought I was crazy. This is the INTERNET!!! You can’t make people *pay* for it! I ignored all the advice and scorned all the warnings and tried it anyway. My original thought -- fool that I was – [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:45-04:00December 31st, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Virgin Birth and the Gospel of John: A Blast from the Past

As I've indicated on the Blog before, I tend to go to a Christmas Eve Midnight service with my wife Sarah (usually my one time in church during the year), and this year was no exception. We were in Suffolk, England, in the town of Woodbridge, and attended the Anglican church there for a very nice service. The Gospel reading was from John (1:1-14), a standard reading. But I wondered whether anyone in the congregation realized that this passage in John says nothing about Jesus' being born of a virgin -- one of the very big points of the Christmas message today! And just now I wondered if I had ever talked about that very interesting factoid on the blog. It turns out, the answer is yes, precisely three years ago today. This is what I said then. ********************************************************************* I have pointed out that our earliest Gospel, Mark, not only is lacking a story of the virgin birth but also tells a story that seems to run precisely counter to the idea that Jesus’ mother [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:45-04:00December 28th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

Did They Crucify the Wrong Guy? Jesus’ Identity Switch.

Yesterday I posted about the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter, which clearly differentiated between the man Jesus and the spiritual being, the Christ, who inhabited him temporarily – leaving him at his suffering and death since the divine cannot suffer and die. That understanding of Jesus Christ is not, strictly speaking, “docetic.” The term docetic comes from the Greek word DOKEO which means “to seem” or “to appear.” It refers to Christologies in which Jesus was not a real flesh-and-blood human but only “seemed” to be. In reality, what they saw, heard, and touched was a phantasm. That is not what is going on in the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter. Here there really is a man Jesus – flesh and blood like the rest of us. But he is indwelt by a divine being who leaves him at his death, abandoneding him to die alone on the cross. That is similar to a docetic view, but also strikingly different. I call it a “separationist” Christology because it separates Jesus from the Christ (who himself separates from [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:45-04:00December 27th, 2017|Early Christian Doctrine, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Heresy and Orthodoxy, Public Forum|

Did Jesus’ Death Matter? The Intriguing View of the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter

From remembering the birth of Jesus (Christmas!), we turn for a moment to remembering his death. I recently received this question, in response to my statement that some Christians did not think the death of Jesus mattered for salvation, and others maintained that he never actually died. QUESTION: Can you give some reference to where I can explore this idea of the Crucifixion being unimportant or not happening at all? RESPONSE: I will take two posts to answer this question, since they involve two different sets of “Gnostic” belief, which, in brief, was a distinctive and “declared-heretical” understanding of the Christian faith that stressed that the ultimate divine realm was not closely connected with this material world (the highest God was not the Creator), a world that was to be escaped, not one that would be redeemed. One document that embraces the view that the death of Jesus had no bearing on salvation is the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter, which provides an alternative understanding of what happened at Jesus’ death – as witnessed by [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:45-04:00December 26th, 2017|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Doctrine, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Heresy and Orthodoxy, Public Forum|

Christmas Reflection 2017

More than any other time, event, or celebration, Christmas, for me, shows that you can take the boy out of Christianity but you can’t take Christianity out of the boy. As much as I am a completely secular-humanist/agnostic/atheist (pick your term), I am still hopelessly attracted to Christmas and what it stands for. As I said in the previous post, it is not that I “believe” in the Christmas story (stories) as a historical event (events). In my judgment the biblical accounts have virtually nothing historical about them, other than that Jesus was born to two lower-class Jewish peasants somewhere in the land of Israel during the reign of Caesar Augustus. Beyond that – I don’t see anything historical in the accounts. No need to explain why here – I’ve talked about it enough on the blog before. And yet I’m drawn to the season and all it stands for, surely in a way that someone who had not been raised Christian simply cannot be. I think for me, in my thoroughly secular life, it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:32-04:00December 24th, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Is the Christmas Story a Myth?

Is the whole Christian story a myth? It probably depends on what you mean by myth. For a very long time now, scholars of religion have had hard and protracted debates on what the term “myth” means, or should mean. I won’t be going into any of that here. Instead I’ll begin by talking about two teaching experiences, one negative and one positive. Negative experience: my first teaching job was at Rutgers University, where I was asked to fill in for a professor of New Testament who had to take an emergency leave of absence in the middle of the spring term in 1984. Her husband had been diagnosed with cancer, he was dying, and she could not continue teaching after giving the midterm exam. Would I be willing to take over her class for the second half of the semester? Absolutely I was willing. And I did so. It was really hard. I had to pick up wherever she left off. Among other things, she was using a textbook that I did not like [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:32-04:00December 23rd, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Ethical Teachings of the Didache

We have been talking about the Didache on the blog, and it occurred to me that it might be useful to post part of its text, so readers can see what we’re talking about. The book has several discrete parts: it begins with a discussion of the “two ways” – one that leads to life and one to death. This is a set of ethical instructions for Christians. As you’ll see, the author appears to have taken materials from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew and various other passages chiefly from Matthew and Luke; but he cites other ethical injunctions (some of them unusual) from other, unknown sources. After the “two ways” comes a set of instructions about church life and ritual – for example, how to baptize and what prayers to say at the eucharist meal. At the end comes a one-chapter “apocalyptic discourse” describing what will happen at the end of time. Here is the opening discussion of the two ways; it is my own translation, which, in a later version, appeared [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:32-04:00December 21st, 2017|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers, Public Forum|

Blog Christmas Gift Idea #2: Gift Subscriptions

Just one week before Christmas!! Are you searching for that perfect gift for someone you know and love? Or at least know? Something that would be highly meaningful on the one hand, but dead-easy to give on the other? I have the perfect suggestion: A GIFT MEMBERSHIP FOR THE BLOG!! On the landing page, at www.ehrmanblog.org, there is a bright link that allows you to give someone else a one-year membership. It looks like this: Just click it and give it! Easy as that. What fantastic gift. Something unlike anything they've ever received; access to posts week in and week out, throughout the year; the chance to make comments and interact with other; perfect for anyone with even a modicum of interest in the New Testament and early Christianity. A great gift for family members, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and your favorite family doctors, dentists, plumbers, electricians, teachers, and .... and the guy down the street. So why not?!? Go for it and your Christmas anxieties will end. And the world will be a better place!

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:32-04:00December 18th, 2017|Public Forum|

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