Public Forum Archives - Page 58 of 89 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Why I Was Afraid to Become an Agnostic

I started feeling the tug toward agnosticism sometime during my PhD program. I remember clearly a particular moment, and it was, somewhat ironically, while I was serving as the pastor of the Princeton Baptist Church. Even though I was incredibly busy at the time (I was taking a full load of graduate seminars, preparing to take my PhD exams, serving as a Teaching Assistant for a class taught by Bruce Metzger, AND serving as the pastor of the church) I enjoyed the ministry very much. Well, parts of the ministry. I have never enjoyed transition rituals very much: baptisms, weddings, funerals, and the like. And of course pastoring a church involves doing such things. And I wasn’t thrilled with visiting the sick – I was a bit out of my depth on that one. But I did very much enjoy interactions with the people I worked with in the church, and I especially liked preaching nearly every week. I remember thinking at the time, though, that ... Only Members can read the rest of this [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:45-04:00June 23rd, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Even Bother Being a Liberal Christian?

Some people have asked me, and I have asked myself, why, as a liberal Christian, did I continue to “believe,” or at least to act as if I believed? I didn’t think Jesus was literally born of a virgin and I wasn’t sure if he was physically raised from the dead. I didn’t think that he existed before he came into the world, let alone that he had been God from eternity past. I didn’t think there was a hell and I didn’t know about heaven. I believed in the Big Bang and evolution, not in creation. I thought the Bible was filled with mistakes, historical inaccuracies, contradictions, and discrepancies, that its authors were fully human and were (simply) providing their views of this that or the other thing. So why did I go to church every week, say the creed, sing the hymns, say my prayers, confess my sins, take communion, teach adult education, and all the rest? I’m not sure I’ve ever explained this to anyone before, though I certainly explained it to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:45-04:00June 22nd, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

How Biblical Discrepancies Can Be Theologically Liberating for a Christian

I have been trying to show that the portrayal of Jesus going to his death in Mark’s Gospel is radically different from the portrayal in Luke’s Gospel. I’ve been making this comparison for a purpose, in order to show as clearly as I can that reading the Bible historically – seeing its discrepancies – does not compromise its value. On the contrary, as I came to see as a committed Christian who was no longer a conservative evangelical, this way of reading the Bible *increases* its value. A person can still revere the Bible while thinking there are contradictions and discrepancies in it, not only in small things but in large things. But one has to understand it in a non-fundamentalist way to do so. The point of finding discrepancies is *not* so you can go away saying that the Bible is worthless (“bunch of contradictions”) but, on the contrary, so you can recognize the vast depths of its theological meaning, as seen precisely *in* the (big) differences you find in it. Here is how [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:44-04:00June 19th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

How Did Judas Iscariot Die? Readers’ Mailbag June 18, 2017

Two questions in this week’s Readers’ mailbag. The first concerns the very strange tradition about how Judas Iscariot actually died, as found in the writings of the early church father Papias; the second is about modern evangelical Christian biblical scholars: how do they deal with the fact that our manuscripts contain so many textual variants? If you have a question, feel free to ask, and I’ll add it to the ever growing mailbag. QUESTION: Papias didn’t think very highly of Judas. I can’t remember exactly what he said, is his version closer to Matthew or Acts? Or a different tradition altogether? RESPONSE: First some background. Papias is one of the fascinating and virtually unknown figures from the early church. He is normally thought to have been writing around 120 or 130 CE. His major work was a five-volume discussion of the teachings of Jesus, called Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord. We very much regret that we no longer have this book – it would have been the first known explanation of/commentary [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:28-04:00June 18th, 2017|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

A Very Different Portrayal of Jesus’ Death

I am talking about how I came to understand and appreciate the Bible once I realized that there were widely different perspectives presented in one author or another – even when talking about the same thing. The example I’m using is the Gospel portrayals of Jesus’ death. In my previous post I laid out how Mark depicts it; here I will discuss how Luke does. What I came to see (back when I was a graduate student, still a committed Christian but no longer a fundamentalist) was that it was both fruitless and impoverished to think the two Gospels were both trying to say the same thing. Each of them is rich in meaning, but they meaning they ascribe to the event is very different. Failing to appreciate the difference means failing to understand each author and the point that he is trying to make. Here is what I say about Jesus’ death in Luke, in contrast to Mark, in my book Jesus Interrupted. ******************************************************** Luke’s account is also very interesting, thoughtful, and moving. But [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:27-04:00June 16th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

How a Non-Historical Account Can Be Meaningful: The Death of Jesus in Mark

I am now at a point where I can explain how I read the Bible when I was a committed Christian who was not, however, a conservative evangelical convinced that the Bible was a completely inerrant revelation from God without any discrepancies or differences in it. As I have already indicated, my new way of reading of the Bible did not denigrate the Bible at all, as often happens when people realize there are mistakes in it and come away saying something like: “It’s worthless, just a pile of contradictions!” That wasn’t my view at all. On the contrary, the differences revealed the true richness of the Christian tradition. The Gospels, rather than simply being completely accurate accounts of what really happened were theological reflections on the significance of Jesus. Different reflections, by different authors, all of whom had something to teach me as someone who was himself wrestling with the significance of Jesus. One way to see the true depth of these different reflections is to compare them carefully with one another. I explain [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:27-04:00June 15th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

A New Way of Reading the Bible

I have been discussing how I experienced a radical change in my Christian faith, from being a conservative evangelical to being a more open-minded and better informed Christian. I can now begin to talk about how my new way of understanding the faith intersected with the scholarship I was involved with in pursuing the academic study of the Bible. As a budding biblical scholar, I had come to see that the Bible was filled with problems. As a believer with a new perspective these problems were not detrimental to my faith but actually provided important insights that previously I simply had no access to. To explain that will take a couple of posts. The overarching point is that the discrepancies, contradictions, and mistakes of the Bible reveal clearly that we are dealing here with different authors with different perspectives, and it is important to let *each* author speak for himself to see what he wants to emphasize. The viewpoint each one has is important, and it is crucial not to confuse the message of one [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:27-04:00June 14th, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

More of What I Believed When I Was a Committed (non-fundamentalist) Christian

Yesterday I started explaining what it was I believed when I left fundamentalism but remained a committed Christian – one who realized that the Bible was not at all an infallible book but was still a person of faith. I’ve never talked about any of this before in print, either on the blog or in any of my books. One reason for wanting to do so now is that I think I must have given some people the false impression that I went from being a fundy to being an agnostic in one step, that once I came to see that my fundamentalist views were just wrong, I immediately became a non-believer, having no other options to fall back on. In fact it didn’t happen that way, at all. I was a committed Christian for many years after giving up on conservative evangelicalism. Here is more of what I believed at the time. The ultimate teaching of the Gospel was love. Love of God. Love of neighbor. Jesus not only taught this ethic and lived it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:27-04:00June 11th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

What I Believed as a Committed but but non-Fundamentalist Christian

It is a little hard to encapsulate what I thought, believed, and practiced during those years when I had moved away from being a hard-core Bible-believing conservative (as I was in college) but remained a committed Christian (as I was for years after that). The change did not come overnight so that one day I was one thing (a fundy) and the next I was something else (a liberal). It was a gradual change marked by important moments and key shifts. But let me pick a time in my life and try to explain what my faith meant to me at that time. This will take a couple of posts. Quick biographical background: when I was doing my PhD in New Testament Studies, a lot of things happened to me personally that affected my faith. My studies, of course, were one thing. But outside of that was my daily life. I was attending the small but interesting Princeton Baptist church, which was part of the American Baptist denomination (very different, and far more diverse, than [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:27-04:00June 10th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Can (or Should) We Change the Canon of Scripture? A Blast from the Past

Digging around in posts from five years ago now, I came across this one --as interesting to me now as it was then! Hope you think so too. It's a response to a penetrating question. QUESTION: Given the criteria used to determine what would go on to constitute the New Testament canon, how is it that Hebrews and the book of Revelation remain part of the canon? I understand that Christians came to believe that they were authored by the apostles which is why they made it into the canon, but we now know that they weren't authored by Paul or John..so why are they still in the NT? RESPONSE: Interesting idea! I sometimes get asked what I would exclude from the canon if given the choice, and I almost always say 1 Timothy (because of what it says about women in 2:11-15, and how the passage has been used for such horrible purposes over the years). But, well, it ain’t gonna happen. I don’t get a vote. And that’s the problem with Hebrews [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:27-04:00June 9th, 2017|Catholic Epistles, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Update on my Publication Plans

A couple of people have asked me about the status of my two books – the one that is finished and coming out, The Triumph of Christianity: How A Forbidden Religion Swept the World, and the one I am now doing my research on The Invention of the Afterlife: A History of Heaven and Hell. First, Triumph. There is indeed news about this one, and I can’t decide if it’s good news or bad news. It feels (emotionally) like it’s bad but I think it is probably good. My publisher, Simon & Schuster, has decided to delay publication from this coming September until the following February. The new publication date is February 13. There are no glitches or problems with publishing it earlier. It is done and ready to go. I have read through two sets of page proofs, it has been copy-edited multiple times, it is sitting there waiting to be run off and sent out. But for a variety of complicated reasons Simon & Schuster wants to wait till February. The short story [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:27-04:00June 7th, 2017|Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

What I Came To Believe About the Bible

It is a little difficult for me to describe what I believed after I gave up on my view that the Bible was the inerrant revelation from God with no mistakes in it whatsoever. In part that is because there was a long transition period, and over time my beliefs evolved as I studied more, talked with friends and colleagues more, encountered more ideas, thought more. I was in the perfect situation for this kind of study and reflection. I was already a PhD student at Princeton Theological Seminary and I was literally surrounded by people who spent most of their days, every day, reading, studying, talking, and thinking about the Christian faith from both a personal and an academic perspective. I spent every day for lunch with people doing research and thinking about the Christian faith. Every day I read significant books and articles on everything having to do with ancient Christianity. Every day I had conversations about religious topics – mainly about the academic study of the New Testament and early Christianity, but [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:27-04:00June 6th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

What Really Happened to Me: Demythologizing the New Testament

As I suggested in yesterday’s post, the reason I’ve been trying to show that biblical scholars who still revere the Bible but recognize that it is, even so, filled with mistakes, discrepancies, and contradictions is to explain what happened to my faith once I realized that the Bible was not the inerrant revelation from God that I had always assumed it was. It is amazing how often people tell me – usually with a touch of personal complacency – that the reason I lost my faith was that I was a fundamentalist. If I had only had a more reasonable understanding of the faith (like *them* for example!) then the problems I encountered would not have led me to become an agnostic. In their view, I am at heart still a fundamentalist. In their view I had thought (as a fundamentalist) that if every word in the Bible can’t be completely true and accurate, then none of it can be true and accurate, and that for that reason, once I realized there were mistakes in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:27-04:00June 5th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Have I Stopped Explaining How I Lost My Faith? Readers’ Mailbag June 4, 2017

I will be dealing with two questions in this weeks’ Readers’ Mailbag. The first is about what happened to that thread I was supposed to be doing on why I lost my faith (!) and the other about whether Mark’s account of Jesus’ death contains an inner discrepancy (one verse flat out contradicting another). QUESTION: I'm a bit confused. A few weeks ago you said you were going to write about what you tell your students on the last day of school about why you lost your faith, but it seems you may have gotten off track, unless I missed a post or two…. Anyway, I am sorry I seem to have missed the posts that were about what you say to your class each year about why you lost your faith. I hope you will repeat it sometime soon. RESPONSE: Ha! Right! I can see how this could be confusing. When I started this thread I did not know it was even going to *be* a thread. I had planned to make [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:27-04:00June 4th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why It Didn’t Happen that Way. The Stories of Jesus’ Birth

In the previous post I began to discuss (as a review for many readers of the blog) the historical problems with the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke. The point of the discussion is that the stories cannot be accepted as historically accurate. This is a huge issue mainly for fundamentalist Christians and conservative evangelicals – and those they have managed to persuade that if a story does not describe what actually happened, then it is worthless and should simply be thrown out. For others – whether theologians, pastors, parishioners, or simply lay-folk interested in Christianity – the stories are important for other reasons, for example in the ideas they are trying to convey. In any event, here is the second post dealing with the historical problems that arise when you compare the two accounts to one another. ***************************************************** It may be possible to reconcile these accounts if you work hard enough at it. I suppose you’d have to say that after Joseph and Mary returned to Nazareth, as in Luke, they decided to move [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:27-04:00June 2nd, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

Another “True” Story that Didn’t Happen? Jesus’ Birth in Luke

I have been trying to illustrate the point that critical scholars who remain Christian have long made, that there can be stories in the Bible that are not historically accurate but that are trying to convey larger theological truths. My first illustration had to do with the death of Jesus; in this post and the next, I will deal with the birth of Jesus. This is a topic I’ve dealt with several times over the years on the blog; but it’s worth covering it again! I’ve drawn this discussion, again, from my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. ***************************************************** “True” Stories that Didn’t Happen (at least as narrated): Jesus’ Birth in Luke We may take an example from the familiar stories at the beginning of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. These are the only Gospels that narrate the events of Jesus’ birth (in both Mark and John, Jesus makes his first appearance as an adult). What is striking – and what most readers have never noticed – is that the two accounts [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:26-04:00June 1st, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

Is Theological “Truth” More Important than Historical Accuracy?

In the previous post I began to explain how there could be an account in the Gospels that is not historically accurate because an author is more interested in conveying what, to him, is a theological “truth” than in giving a history lesson about what actually happened in the life of Jesus. In my view, the early Christian story tellers and Gospel writers (often?) changed historical data in order to make theological points. What mattered more than historical accuracy was the ultimate point of the story. In this post I give a concrete example of how it works. To make sense of what I have to say about this story you need to remember what I said yesterday about how the Passover feast worked in the days of Jesus. This particular example involves only a small detail in the Gospel of John – a tiny detail, in some ways. But it is illustrative of a larger point. Sometimes Christian authors changed a historical fact in order to express what, for them, was a theological “truth.” [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:26-04:00May 30th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

An Example of a True Story that Didn’t Happen: Part 1

I have been trying to explain (without complete success) that the Bible, in the view of some scholars starting in the early 19th century, could contain “true” stories that “didn’t happen” – or at least didn’t happen as they are narrated. One important point I want to make about this claim: I am *not* saying that I personally hold this view. I’m not saying I think these stories are necessarily “true” as far as I’m concerned. I’m saying that the idea is that these stories were designed to convey truths, rather than objective history lessons. I talk about that in my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium, and try to demonstrate the point by giving a couple of particular examples. The first example will take two posts for me to cover. ********************************************************* What, though, is the evidence (that there could be true stories in the Bible that didn’t happen)? Or is this simply a theory cranked up by biblical scholars with too much time on their hands and not enough sense simply to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:26-04:00May 29th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

Would I Be Personally Devastated if the Mythicists Were Right? A Blast From the Past

For my mailbag this week I dug into one from the past -- almost exactly five years ago. I would probably answer it the same today. My thoughts here on how we go about knowing what actually happened in the past strike me as having very broad application (not just to the question I was asked), and (especially toward the end of my answer) to have even greater relevance now than they did then, given our current historical moment. QUESTION: Was also wondering - and maybe you addressed this in your book ... would you feel an emotionally traumatic disappointment if it was conclusively proved that Jesus was indeed a mythical figure? In all honesty how would you feel if it were true beyond a doubt that all the arguments the 'mythicists' have presented were found to be correct (or mostly correct) regarding his assumed existence? This question is not meant to be offensive or unnecessarily provoking - I'm just curious. RESPONSE: I don’t address this in the book, and I think it is a terrific [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:26-04:00May 28th, 2017|Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

True Stories that Didn’t Happen

In my previous post I explained how the term “myth” came to be applied to the miracle stories of the New Testament in the work of David Friedrich Strauss in 1835-36. This is all background to what happened to me personally – 150 years later! Before talking about how my views of the Bible changed once I realized many of its stories could not be literally, historically true, I should expand a bit on the very notion that, as Strauss thought, there could be true stories that didn’t happen. What?? Yup. Here’s how I explain it in my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. ******************************************** Skipping on to Modern Times A lot – a very lot – has happened since Strauss published his Life of Jesus in 1836. Scores of scholars have pored over every detail of the Gospels, thousands of books and articles have been churned out, countless views have been marshaled, debated, believed, and spurned. And none of that is going to end soon, unless some of the people who think [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:26-04:00May 26th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

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