Public Forum Archives - Page 59 of 89 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Fundamentalism and the Truth of the Bible

I have recently received a number of inquiries about why realizing there may be mistakes in the Bible might lead someone to become an agnostic. Here is one that came a few days ago: QUESTION: I want to thank you for your extensive work in explaining … your journey from believing that the bible contained no errors to proving the bible is not inerrant and simply the work of human writers. What I would like to be explained is the necessary logic to go from believing that the bible is not inerrant or the "word of God" to believing there is no God. RESPONSE My view of the matter may seem odd to a lot of people, but it is nonetheless held by most critical scholars of the Bible and trained theologians. What is the “necessary logic to go from believing that the bible is not inerrant … to believing there is no God? There is no necessary logic at all. I have never thought that ... To See The Rest of this [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:10-04:00May 15th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Eyewitnesses and the Gospels: A Blast From the Past

Five years ago today I received and answered this question on the blog. I thought it would make a nice break from my current discussion of my change of faith, a topic to which I'll return tomorrow. For now, here's a blast from the past. *********************************************************************** QUESTION One of the major points of your work (if I understand correctly) is that the contents of the New Testament are at a vast remove in time, place, and source from any eyewitness account of Jesus' life. But when I consider this point in my ignorance, and simply from the perspective of chronology (from the time of Jesus to the accounts in the earliest gospels), it seems to me that at least one very old eyewitness of Jesus' life might have been able to report a significant amount of information about Jesus and his teachings directly to, say, Mark. In view of this, I wonder how scholars know that no New Testament account of Jesus could have been received directly from any eyewitness. RESPONSE It’s a very [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:10-04:00May 14th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Memory Studies, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Finding More Problems in the Old Testament

Yesterday I started detailing some of the contradictions and historical or scientific problems with the Old Testament that I started to find when I was a graduate at Princeton Seminary, starting to examine the Bible not as the inerrant revelation from God Almighty but as a more human book that could indeed have mistakes in it. The account I gave of these problems was lifted straight from my textbook: The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction. There’s a reason for that. The problems I found early on in my more scholarly investigation of the Bible have stuck with me and continue to strike me as some of the truly most important ones, and therefore the ones most appropriate to introduce to college students themselves reading the Bible critically for the first time. This is a second and final post on the same topic: a few more comments on a few more problems that strike me as completely irreconcileable, once a person admits that there can indeed be problems in the Bible. Again, this is excerpted [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:10-04:00May 12th, 2017|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

Finding Problems in the Old Testament

I have been explaining that while at Princeton Theological Seminary, I started finding that there could be mistakes in the Bible. My first realization of this involved my study of the Gospels, but I was studying the Hebrew Bible as well, and I finally got to the point where I had to admit there appeared to be mistakes there as well. Lots of mistakes. Contradictions, discrepancies, historical errors. And these show up right off the bat, in the book of Genesis. Let me detail some of the differences I started finding, as I later summarized them, many years later, in my textbook on the Bible, where I talk about why Moses almost certainly didn’t write the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible, Genesis through Deuteronomy) and about some of the tensions one finds in the text. ************************************************************* As already mentioned, the critical scrutiny of the traditional view of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch deepened and became more rigorous as scholarship advanced. In addition to the problems just mentioned, other troubling features of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:10-04:00May 11th, 2017|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

How I First Realized There Are Mistakes in the Bible

I have told the story before of how I first came to realize there might be mistakes in the Bible. Rather than paraphrasing it again, I’ll simply reproduce the account as I presented it the first time I went public with my faith journey, back in my 2005 book Misquoting Jesus. Here is what I said there: ************************************************************** Upon arriving at Princeton Theological Seminary, I immediately signed up for first-year Hebrew and Greek exegesis (= interpretation) classes, and loaded my schedule as much as I could with such courses. I found these classes to be a challenge, both academically and personally. The academic challenge was completely welcome. But the personal challenges that I faced were emotionally rather trying. As I indicated, already at Wheaton I had begun to question some of the foundational aspects of my commitment to the Bible as the inerrant word of God. That commitment came under serious assault in my detailed studies at Princeton. I resisted any temptation to change my views, and found a number of friends who, like me, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:10-04:00May 9th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Resistance to Change at Princeton Seminary

Several people have asked me to unpack what I meant in the last sentence of yesterday’s post because, well, it doesn’t make sense. What I was trying to say was that I had a crisis of faith in Seminary – as many people do, as it turns out – because I thought I could prove my faith claims were true (an Enlightenment position: “truth” is objective and can be proved), but the more research I did, the more I found that the facts seemed to contradict my faith claims (as many scholars of the Enlightenment had long realized). Let me explain. First I want to stress – in case anyone queries me on it (as people do) – that my faith ultimately, in my own head at least, was based on what I took to be a personal relationship with God through Christ. How personal? We talked all the time. So, on one level, my faith was not simply a set of propositions that I thought could be demonstrated (God exists; Christ is the Son [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:09-04:00May 8th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Encounter with the Enlightenment

I know I have talked about how I lost my faith before. But I’ve never talked about it in the terms I’m going to be describing it in this post and the next. It has to do with what happened with my notion of “truth” when I went to Princeton Theological Seminary. Princeton Theological Seminary is not administratively connected to Princeton University – it simply is in the same town, across the street, and has a shared ancient history. What is now Princeton University started off in the mid-18th century as a place to train Christian ministers. Eventually the school split, with the Seminary, under a different administration, becoming its own entity. By the time I went there as a 22-year-old in 1978, Princeton was a leading a Presbyterian seminary whose mission is to train ministers for the Presbyterian Church. I had never even stepped foot in a Presbyterian church and really knew almost nothing about it, or about Princeton Seminary. But I suspected that many of the students and faculty there were not really [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:09-04:00May 7th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Mythicists and the Virgin Birth: Readers’ Mailbag May 6, 2017

I’ve been devoting the blog to some autobiography recently, so in this Readers Mailbag I’ll make a shift to a couple of academic questions, one about Mythicist claims on the virgin birth and the other about the usefulness of ancient translations of the New Testament for establishing the original text. QUESTION: I often read mythicists argue that Jesus was a mythological figure because he (allegedly) has many parallels in pagan gods. One of the parallels, of course, is him being born to a virgin. My question is: do mythicists realize that the concept of the virgin birth is a much later development? RESPONSE: I have spent time with Mythicist groups, and have always enjoyed myself, finding the people friendly, eager to talk, cordial, and interesting. But the general lack of basic knowledge about the Bible is shocking, even among the most outspoken among them. What is shocking is not that they don’t know much about, say, the New Testament – that’s true of most people on the planet -- but that they have [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:09-04:00May 6th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Mythicism, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

What Happened Next: My Life After Moody Bible Institute

Here I’ll continue relating what I told my New Testament class the last period, when I was explaining what I personally believed and why (for anyone who wanted to come). For me, as I indicated in the last post, going to Wheaton College (Billy Graham’s alma mater) was a step toward liberalism. Students there were not as gung-ho about the Bible – well, fanatical about the Bible – as we had been at Moody. They were evangelical Christians, all of them so far as I could tell, yes, and they were committed to the inspiration of the Bible, most of them even the infallibility of the Bible. But their academic interests almost always resided elsewhere. That’s because Wheaton was a liberal arts college, and most students were majoring in English, history, psychology, biology, and so on. The students I hung around with most were in fields like philosophy and classics and, of course, my own major, English. I chose to major in English for a rather missionary reason. I wanted to ... To See The [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:09-04:00May 5th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Life Story I Tell My Students

As I’ve indicated, my last class of the semester in my Introduction to the New Testament course is optional. In it I explain to anyone who wants to come what I really believe and why I believe it. The way I do it is by telling my life story, from childhood till today. That takes about twenty or twenty-five minutes, and then I answer any questions for the rest of the time. The questions could go on for hours – students have a lot of them – and some of the questions are very personal. But I try to answer them as directly and honestly as I can. The story I tell starts with me as a church-going Episcopalian as a child, committed to the church, saying the Creed, confessing my sins, believing in God and Christ, serving as an altar boy. And then in high school, I had a religious transformation. I started attending a Campus Life Youth for Christ meeting that involved a social event every week and ended with a spiritual lesson [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:09-04:00May 3rd, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Spilling the Beans on my Beliefs on the Last Day of Class

About fifteen years ago or so I started doing something completely different on my last day of class in my New Testament course. I have a lecture scheduled for then, of course, but the scheduled lecture rehashes material that is earlier covered in the class and that students can pick up easily from their reading – so it’s not one of the crucial class periods of the semester. Sometimes that last class is not even that (depending on how the semester schedule works out) but is a kind of review session. But about two weeks before the end, I tell the students that I have an option for the last day, and I’ll let them vote on it. The option is to do the class as scheduled or, instead, to have a non-required class (no taking of attendance, no reason to come unless they want to) in which I explain what I myself really believe and why I believe it. That is of some relevance to the class, of course, since the beliefs I’ll be [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:09-04:00May 2nd, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Can Teaching Be Objective?

I have been discussing how I see the separation of church and state when it comes to teaching religious studies in a secular research university. All of this has been a lead up to what I do on my final day of class in my course, Introduction to the New Testament. On that last day, if students want, I tell them what I actually believe and why. I feel constantly torn between two different perspectives on teaching, which I call the Socratic and the Kierkegaardian models. For Socrates (at least as reported by Plato) (which means that this may be Plato’s view, rather than Socrates’s) truth was truth, and the person who spoke the truth was irrelevant to the question of whether it was true or not. What matters is whether one can establish through logic, reasoning, and evidence that claims are true or not. The person delivering the claim has nothing to do with it. Fools can speak the truth (sometimes) and savants can utter nonsense (often!). The 19th century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:09-04:00May 1st, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

The Text of the New Testament: Are the Textual Traditions of Other Ancient Works Relevant? A Blast From the Past
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The Text of the New Testament: Are the Textual Traditions of Other Ancient Works Relevant? A Blast From the Past

Bart's Debates, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum

The Text of the New Testament: Are the Textual Traditions of Other Ancient Works Relevant? A Blast From the Past

Funny how some topics keep recurring in my head. Here is a post from exactly five years ago, on a topic I still get asked about a lot. The really interesting bit of it starts about four paragraphs down. Turns out, I still think the same things today! ************************************************************************** I have had three debates with Dan Wallace on the question of whether or not we can know for certain, or with relative reliability, whether we have the “original” text of the New Testament. At the end of the day, my answer is usually “we don’t know.” For practical reasons, New Testament scholars proceed as if we do actually know what Mark wrote, or Paul, or the author of 1 Peter. And if I had to guess, my guess would be that in most cases we can probably get close to what the author wrote. But the dim reality is that we really don’t have any way to know for sure. Our copies are all so far removed from the time when the authors wrote, that even [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:09-04:00April 30th, 2017|Bart's Debates, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Teaching the Bible as a Historical Book

Ever since I first put foot in a university classroom as a professor of religious studies, I have been firmly committed to the constitutional separation of church and state. I have never seen it to be my mission either to convert someone to a new religious point of view or to deconvert them from their old one. My goals have been to teach about the history and literature of the New Testament from a non-confessional point of view and to make students think hard about whatever their views might be. The goal is not religious but humanistic -- as is appropriate in a secular research university – namely, to help students learn how to think. There are few subjects that are more perfectly suited to the university's ultimate goal of training thinking human beings than religious studies, especially in the part of the world where I teach, the American South. Nearly all of my students come into class with a life-long belief involving the material we cover in the syllabus. Most of my students have [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:08-04:00April 28th, 2017|Public Forum, Teaching Christianity|

Teaching Religion in a Secular Environment

This little diversion of a thread was going to be a simply one-post on the talk I’ll be giving today to my undergraduate Introduction to the New Testament class, where I spill the beans about what I personally believe and why. But it’s turned into a four-post mini-thread on my views of the separation of church and state. So far it’s been all background – how my twelve years of higher education were all done in Christian confessional contexts, not in secular schools, even though all of my teaching has been in research universities. Go figure. As I indicated in my previous post, as a PhD student I tried to broaden my range significantly so it would not look like I could do nothing except for textual criticism, the study of the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament with the ultimate goal of figuring out what the biblical authors actually wrote. My intention all along was to find a teaching position either in a divinity school/seminary (for the training of pastors) or in a Christian [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:52-04:00April 26th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

How We Got Our 27-Book New Testament: The Case of Didymus

As I pointed out in my previous post, when I was a graduate student I wanted to show that I was not interested only in New Testament textual criticism (using the surviving witnesses to establish what the authors of the New Testament originally wrote) but in a range of important historical and interpretive issues in early Christianity. I wanted to be broad ranging. And I wanted this already at the very beginning of my graduate work. My first semester in the PhD program I had a seminar on the “Canon of the New Testament” with Bruce Metzger. This was a class that focused on the questions surrounding how we ended up with the twenty-seven books in the New Testament. Who decided that it would be these twenty-seven books, and no others? What was motivating these people? What were the grounds for their decisions? And when did they make them? These are all, of course, fundamental questions, and Metzger himself wrote the authoritative book on the topic – which is still the authoritative book. In the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:52-04:00April 25th, 2017|Fourth-Century Christianity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum|

My “Preparation” to Teach in a Secular Research Institution

Wednesday is my last lecture of the semester in my undergraduate Introduction to the New Testament class. It will be something different. I have made it an optional class, for anyone who wants to hear me talk about what I really believe, personally, about the material we’ve been covering in the class. I’ve done this in years past, and usually it is the best attended class of the semester. I’m not sure what that says about my teaching otherwise…. In a subsequent post I’ll talk about that upcoming talk. In this post I’d like to set it up by talking about my views about teaching religion/religious studies in my particular environment. It’s very different from other environments. Here’s a scary factoid about myself. I never ... The Rest of this Post is for Members Only. If you don't belong yet, you better join, or you'll never know! It doesn't cost much, it gives a lot, and every dime goes to charity. So JOIN!!! I never set foot in a secular university classroom until my first [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:52-04:00April 24th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

About Graduate Studies: A Blast from the Past

Two days ago someone asked me about doing graduate studies. He had a master's degree and was wondering about whether to do a PhD. I told him that if he could imagine doing something else with his life, he probably should do so. Doing a PhD is just too painful. It's long (in my field it typically takes about 6-8 years *after* doing a Masters; lots of students take longer), it's really hard, it's really painful, and there's no guarantee of a job when you 're finished. If it's your passion, and you can't imagine doing anything else, you should do it (I told him). But otherwise ... not so much. Looking back over old blog posts, I see that I talked about graduate studies almost exactly four years ago today. Here is what I said then: ****************************************************************** I teach one undergraduate and one graduate course a semester. Teaching undergraduates is a passion of mine. I love doing it. These are nineteen year olds who are inquisitive, interested, and interesting. I enjoy lecturing to a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:51-04:00April 23rd, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Background to a Different View of the Afterlife: The Maccabean Revolt

The views about the afterlife found in the Hebrew Bible are not, by and large, replicated in the New Testament. A new view had developed in Judaism by that time, rooted in the ideology known as "apocalypticism," which I have talked about before on the blog. Ideologies do not arise in a vacuum of course, but are responses to concrete historical, social, and cultural forces, events, and situations. To make sense of the Jewish notion of "resurrection" (the dominant view of what the afterlife would involve in the New Testament -- in contrast to the Old Testament) it is important to know what socio-political events led to it. And so here is a very brief sketch of the history of Judea over the four hundred years from approximately 540 BCE, when the Persians were in control, up to 63 BCE, when the Romans came in and took over. I’ve taken the sketch from my textbook, The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction. ************************************************************************** The Later History of Judea In the Persian period (starting in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:51-04:00April 21st, 2017|Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

Dinner With Me? A Blog Idea.

A member of the blog has sent me an email (and given me permission to cite it here) with an idea that may be attractive to some of you. Or you might think it’s a bit crazy. It involves giving people a chance to have dinner with me in exchange for a sizeable donation (which would go not to me but to the blog; every penny of it, then, would go to the charities the blog supports). It could be fun, but for it to work it would have to raise some significant dosh. At this point, I’m not interested in actually *doing* it. I’m interested in knowing what you think. Any ideas you have about it, comments, suggestions etc. would be welcome. (For it to work, the dinner would almost certainly have to be on my home turf.) Here’s what he says: ************************************************************ So, on to my idea. You can take this and run with it, or tell me I'm nuts! I know you have lots of members on the blog; many who are [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:51-04:00April 20th, 2017|Public Forum|

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