Public Forum Archives - Page 60 of 88 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Eternal Life and Damnation

In my summaries of the Apocalypse of Peter and the Apocalypse of Paul, as a couple of readers noticed, there was a striking difference in emphasis. Both of these early Christian texts (the first from the second century, the other from the fourth or possibly the fifth?) narrate guided tours of the realms of the blessed and of the damned, and both seem more interested in describing the torments of the lost than the ecstasies of the saved. The former focuses on moral sins that lead to eternal punishment: seductresses, adulterers, murderers, children who are disobedient to parents, slaves who are disobedient to masters, women who had sex before marriage; and sundry other things. To be sure, some of the sins are “religious” – blasphemy, socerery, and so on. But in this case, “torment is for everyone forever according to his deeds.” The Apocalypse of Paul, on the other hand, is far more concerned about sins within the church, sins of ecclesiastical and doctrinal error: ascetics who break their vows; church people not commited completely [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:34-04:00March 27th, 2017|Afterlife, Christian Apocrypha, Public Forum|

Bart Ehrman & Robert Price Debate – Did Jesus Exist?

As many of you know, this past October I had a public debate with Robert Price on the question of whether Jesus actually existed. To my knowledge Robert is the only "mythicist" (one who thinks Jesus is a complete myth) who actually has a PhD in the relevant field of New Testament studies. For years I've been asked by people to debate a mythicist; I've always resisted, in part because I've thought that by doing so I would lend credibility to their view, which, in my judgment, is not credible. But Robert is a nice guy and I finally yielded and said OK. This is the debate. It was lively in places and -- to my surprise -- ended up being a nice experience. The event was part of the "Mythinformation Conference" Buzzed Belief Debate Series presented by Mythicist Milwaukee at Turner Hall in Milwaukee, WI on Friday October 21st 2016. Mythicist Milwaukee focuses on educating the freethought/skeptic/atheist community about what the organization considers to be the mythological origins of religion. The people [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:34-04:00March 26th, 2017|Bart's Debates, Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Public Forum, Video Media|

Questions on the Resurrection and My Personal Spiritual Experiences: Readers’ Mailbag

I'll address two questions on this week's readers' mailbag, one about what we can say about the resurrection of Jesus (a specific question about it) and one about whether my (one-time) faith was based on the Bible or on spiritual experiences I had. (The answer is apparently not what the questioner expected.) QUESTION: How do you separate the fact from fiction on the risen Jesus? You accept, as historical, that the disciples believed they had visions of the risen Jesus – so how do you reject, as legendary, the physical interactions with the risen Jesus as they are drawn from the same accounts? RESPONSE: Ah, this is a good question: it gets to the heart of what it means to engage in a historical analysis of our early Christian traditions. Each and every tradition (e.g.: the followers of Jesus came to believe he was raised from the dead because they saw him alive afterward; or Jesus ate some fish in their presence after he had died) has to be evaluated on its own merits [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:34-04:00March 24th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Another Gory Account of the Afterlife: The Apocalypse of Paul

Yesterday I discussed the first surviving Christian account of a tour of heaven and hell, an apocalypse allegedly, but not really, written by Jesus’ disciple Peter. Here is one other, this time allegedly, but not really, written by the Apostle Paul. I have taken this description from my book Forgery and Counterforgery (which I have revised a bit to get rid of some of the scholarly jargon). ***************************************************** Far more influential on the history of Christian thought than the Apocalypse of Peter, though clearly dependent on it for many of its traditions, the Apocalypse of Paul was originally composed in Greek but came to be translated into a number of languages: Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Slavonic, and Ethiopic. The text as we have it is dated at the outset: “In the consulate of Theodosius Augustus the Younger and of Cynegius, a certain respected man was living in Tarsus….” Commonly this is taken to indicate that the book was composed, in its final form, around 388 CE, but scholars today think that it may derive from the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:34-04:00March 22nd, 2017|Afterlife, Christian Apocrypha, Public Forum|

Touring Hell: The Apocalypse of Peter

I am about ready now (I think!) to dig more deeply into a thread on the Invention of the Afterlife – the tentative title of the book that I *hope* will be my next one. I’ve been putting off starting the thread in earnest because, in fact, I don’t feel particularly ready for it. I’m just at the preliminary stage of my reading and have many dozens of books I need to work through before I can even think about sketching out how I want to broach the subject in my book (I have about a hundred unread books on various aspects of the matter sitting on my shelf now, as we speak, and I’m collecting more virtually every day). But I think that I will be doing this book differently from others I’ve done – at least with respect to the blog. I’m thinking about using the blog as a way to think out loud about some of the topics I’m covering in my reading. I’m not sure that everything I read about will [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:34-04:00March 21st, 2017|Afterlife, Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity, Public Forum|

The Burial of Jesus: A Blast from the Past

Two thought-events happened today that oddly enough coalesced. First, I've been thinking about the fact that the blog is approaching five years old in about ten days, and musing on all that has happened on the blog over all this time. I decided to look up my very first posts, and found this one among them. Second, as it turns out, this post is exactly on a topic that I happened to lecture on today to my undergraduate class (what I said may well have scandalized some students, but I made sure to tell them that my opinion on this matter is a minority view among scholars; I always try to let them know if what I'm saying is standard fare -- which is normally the case -- or a minority opinion). In any event, in both my lecture and in this primeval post, the topic is: was Jesus given a decent burial by Joseph of Arimathea (or anyone else)? My views have considerably deepened over the past five years, but I still hold to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:34-04:00March 20th, 2017|Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Does Jesus Claim to Be God in Mark? And My Former Converts. Mailbag March 19, 2017

Two questions in this week’s Mailbag, one about whether Jesus was claiming to be God in the Gospel of Mark, and the other about my personal life: whether today, as an agnostic, I ever meet people I once converted when I was a gung-ho conservative evangelical Christian. If you have a question you would like me to address, ask away! QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman, the other day I was discussing with an Evangelical pastor that the sayings of Jesus in which he claimed to be God were only found in the Gospel of John. He had me read Mark 2:5-7. This is the verse where Jesus heals a paralytic and says to him “Son, your sins are forgiven”. The religious leaders say “Who can forgive sins but God alone”. The pastor said that this shows that even in the earliest Gospel Mark, Jesus claimed to be God. I wasn’t sure how to respond but told him that there was still a big difference in the comparison. Do you have any thoughts or comments in which [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:33-04:00March 19th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Pastor Goranson, the Son of God, and I: A Blast From the Past

A former colleague of mine contacted me last week -- not a colleague from any of my teaching positions, but a colleague in ministry from forty years ago when I was the Youth Pastor at Trinity Covenant Church in Oak Lawn, Illinois. I've been reminiscing about those days, and I remembered an event connected with that church that I talked about in my book How Jesus Became God, involving a moment when my doubts about the Christian faith were starting to take hold. Here is a post that I made about it exactly four years ago today. ************************************************************** When I attended Moody Bible Institute in the mid 1970s, every student was required, every semester, to do some kind of Christian ministry work. Like all of my fellow students I was completely untrained and unqualified to do the things I did, but I think Moody believed in on-the-job training. And so every student had to have one semester where, for maybe 2-3 hours one afternoon a week, they would engage in “door-to-door evangelism.” That involved being [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:33-04:00March 14th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Are Group Visions Possible?

I have received a number of interesting responses to my claim in yesterday’s post that it is possible for groups of people to have the same non-veridical vision (that is, hallucinations). I used the phenomenon of the Blessed Virgin Mary: she seems to appear a good deal, to groups of people – sometimes large groups. In this post I thought I would respond to two of the highly intelligent demurrals. DEMURRAL: As a former evangelical Protestant we believed that Roman Catholics who claim to see the Virgin Mary as a group are in a state of emotional hysteria and seeing an illusion not experiencing a group hallucination. An illusion is a distorted perception of something that really is present, such seeing a stain on a wall or a cloud formation in a photograph and seeing the Virgin Mary or Jesus in it. Many thousands of Roman Catholics claimed to have experienced a visitation of the Virgin Mary in Fatima Portugal not due to seeing and hearing a woman in flowing robes speak the same [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:33-04:00March 13th, 2017|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

What I’m Thinking about the Afterlife

I became interested in writing this book about the afterlife a couple of years ago, when I realized with unexpected clarity – out of the blue (I don’t know what sparked my thinking) – that the views most people have are not from the Bible. Many people, of course, do not believe in the afterlife at all. But at least in my parts of the world (both where I grew up, and where I have lived my life, first Chicago, then New Jersey, and now for the past 28 years North Carolina) those people who do believe in an afterlife (with a few, but only a very few exceptions), think that your body dies and your soul lives on. In the now traditional Christian idea, your soul goes to heaven or hell. Where did that idea come from? Most of the Bible, of course, is the Old Testament (it’s about 3-4 times as large as the New Testament). And the Old Testament teaches no such thing. Moreover, Jesus himself did not teach any such thing. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:33-04:00March 10th, 2017|Afterlife, Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Does the Afterlife Matter for Other Things?

This past Friday I went up to NYC to meet with my editor, and the marketing team, at my new publisher Simon & Schuster, both to discuss the next book coming out in September AND to talk (with my editor herself) about the possible new book, the one I am tentatively calling The Invention of the Afterlife (dealing with the question of where the widespread views of heaven and hell come from, especially since they are not actually what the Old Testament, Jesus, or the NT writers actually taught). This was kind of a first pitch, to get them interested. They are indeed interested, and so now the next step for me will be to write a prospectus to get them to agree formally and finally. I want to do this now, so I don’t spend months reading about the topic – both ancient writings that deal with the afterlife and modern scholarship on the matter – only to find out that this will *not* be my next book. Just to write the prospectus I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:32-04:00March 8th, 2017|Afterlife, Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Me and Jesus
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Me and Jesus

Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations

Me and Jesus

Yesterday I explained why, in my own opinion, I can no longer consider myself a Christian, and I received a lot of responses: some sympathetic, others not so sympathetic; some seeing the point and others disagreeing. One particular disagreement gets to the heart of what I was trying to say. Several people (OK, lots of people) have commented that if I follow the ethical teachings of Jesus that in that sense I really am a Christian and might as well admit it. Part of me agrees with that – it’s what I’ve long thought – but what I came to realize yesterday during my class lecture is that there is a strong sense in which that is also not true. Here I’ll try to explain. I do indeed try to adhere to the ethical teachings of Jesus as I see them. He himself summarized the entire Torah of Moses by stating two principal commandments. The first was Deuteronomy 6:4-6, that you should love God with all your heart, soul, and being. OK, I don’t follow [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:32-04:00March 7th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Do Good People Suffer? A Blast from the Past

I was looking around for an interesting post from a few years ago, and I found this one, from March 2013, which, as it turns out, is relevant to what I am going to want to say in the thread I've just started on views of the afterlife that developed in ancient Israel (leading up to the Christian views that eventually came to be so dominant throughout the West.). The post provides, in a nutshell, three major views about why there is suffering. Why is that relevant? One of my theses I have going into my research for my next book is that views of the afterlife developed originally as a way to explain why there are such inequities in the present life. Here's the post: ************************************************************************ I’m in New York City for a few days. Last night I gave a lecture at NYU; they had asked that I talk about “God, The Bible, and the Problem of Suffering.” That’s the topic of my book God’s Problem, and so I spun off a talk [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:32-04:00March 5th, 2017|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Thinking about Hell

When I search my mind for times in my (distant) past that I thought about hell, I conjure up two very different moments. Today when I think about them it is with a good sense of humor. The first is when I must have been maybe eight or nine. I was at some kind of summer camp, and we had a daily camp meeting where we would sing songs and someone would come talk to us. One day there was a local minister who came and told a story about a person who went first to hell and then heaven. When he went to hell he found that there was an enormous table filled with fantastic food – everything that everyone could imagine wanting. But all the people there had three-foot long forks strapped to their arms, and it was impossible for them to pick up the food and bring it to their mouths. And so they were starving in the midst of plenty. He then went to heaven and again, there was the enormous [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:16-04:00March 3rd, 2017|Afterlife, Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Views of the Afterlife

If my publisher agrees that my next book can/should be “The Invention of the Afterlife” (or whatever we call it) I will, as you might suspect, be thinking a lot about heaven and hell over the next couple of years. I”ve already been thinking a lot about them over the past six months as I’ve been reading broadly on the topic. I’m NOT, of course, mainly reading about what REALLY happens to us when we die. No one knows that. Or maybe I should rephrase that. There are a lot of people who *think* they know that, but in my opinion no one does. Most of the books I’ve been reading are about what people have *thought* about heaven and hell over the past three thousand years. I’m interested in knowing where current thinking came from – since what is now “common sense” in some circles was never dreamed of for most of human history. There are some people, of course, who argue that their views are not simply common sense – that is, views [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:16-04:00March 1st, 2017|Afterlife, Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Moving to My Next Book

As I mentioned some time ago, I’ve decided to slow down a bit and enjoy life a bit more. Since 1992 – that is, over the past 25 years – I have written or edited thirty books. I’m not going to stop. But I’m thinkin’ it’s time to ease off a bit. Is there a reason I publish a book a year? Not that I can think of. I’ve done it because it’s my passion. Well, one of my passions. I am a bit obsessed with the history of early Christianity and all that it entails. My books have covered a wide range of fields within that broader area. And I have tried to keep up publishing three different kinds of books: scholarly books for the academics; textbooks for the colleges students; and trade books for the general reading public. It’s been hard to balance all that, especially since I’ve tried to publish a new trade book every two years. I’ve had to do the other books in my spare time, such as it is, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:16-04:00February 28th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The First Textual Variant in the Gospel of Mark

I have been talking about some of the textual variants in Mark, and wanted to address the very first one that can be found in our textual witnesses, one that occurs in the first verse of the Gospel. I have decided to do so by showing how a relatively hard-core argument is made by textual scholars. To do that I have copied in my discussion of the passage in my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. This was not a Barnes & Noble book, but was written for academics. But I think it’s useful to get a sense for that kind of discourse on occasion (OK: rare occasion) on the blog. So here it is. As you’ll see, it presupposes some knowledge of adoptionistic Christologies, the topic of yesterday’s post. (I have eliminated part of the discussion that gets particularly technical, involving the surviving manuscripts that evidence the textual variant) (And apologies for the odd spacing...) ***************************************************************** The vast majority of manuscripts introduce the Gospel of Mark with the words: “The beginning of the Gospel [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:16-04:00February 27th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Christians Who Thought Jesus Was Adopted by God: A Blast From the Past

I have been talking about some of the textual variants in the Gospel of Mark, and I want to discuss the very first one in the Gospel, whether Mark 1:1 calls Jesus the "Son of God" or not. But to make sense of what I want to say about that matter, I need to provide some background that at first sight may not seem all that relevant. But it's highly relevant. It has to do with how some early Christians understood Jesus not to be innately the Son of God, but the Son of God because God "adopted" him, the man Jesus, to be his son at some point of his life. I've covered that issue before on the blog, and so this is a blast from the past: ****************************************************************************** For some posts now I have been talking about “docetic” Christologies in the early church – views of Christ that said he was so much divine that he was not really a human – and about how these influenced proto-orthodox scribes who changed their texts [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:16-04:00February 26th, 2017|Heresy and Orthodoxy, Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

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