Dear Fellow Bloggers! I want to let you know that I will not be able to respond to comments this week (or a bit more: July 21-28).  BUT, the blog itself will be going along swimmingly.  I've queued up all the posts for the week , you can make all the comments you want as normal, Jen will  be on top of all things as usual, and all else will be AOK,  likely even thriving.  I just won't be around and will not be able to respond to comments. So sorry!  But, well, not totally.  I'm  off for the week on a meditation retreat -- not, as normally happens, with others but all by my lonesome, living the life of the anchorite.  Kind of.  I'll be in a reasonably remote place in a nice part of the world where I can meditate, read, hike, think deep thoughts, figure out my life (and all things of universal significance),  recharge my depleted batteries, and hope they don't need to be replaced.  I did something [...]

I'm just about finished (finally) with a reasonably polished draft of my next book, The Origins of Altruism: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West.  We have decided to turn the moment into a fund-raising opportunity for the blog. Unlike our other fundraisers, where we suggest an amount but accept whatever you can pay, for this one we are asking for set donation amounts for anyone who can and wants to participate.  If you can't afford this, no fears! The book itself will eventually be published and you can read it to your heart's content.  But if you want to see it in its prepublished state, make comments on it for me, and be acknowledged by name in the Preface (if you choose; this is not a requirement!), then this is the fundraiser for you! I will also be sending it out to colleagues in the field who are expert in one or another of the areas I cover in my discussions (there are a lot of them).  But since it [...]

The ancient triumph of Christianity proved to be the single greatest cultural transformation our world has ever seen.  Without it the entire history of Late Antiquity would not have happened as it did.  We would never have had the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Renaissance, or modernity as we know it.   There could never have been a Matthew Arnold.   Or of any of the Victorian poets.  Or of any of the other authors of our canon: no Milton, no Shakespeare, no Chaucer.  We would have had none of our revered artists: Michelangelo, Leonardo, or Rembrandt.  And none of our brilliant composers: Mozart, Handel, or Bach.  To be sure, we would have had other Miltons, Michelanglos, and Mozarts in their place, and it is impossible to know whether these would have been better or worse.  But they would have been incalculably different. By conquering the Roman world, and then the entire West, Christianity not only gave rise to a vast and awe-inspiring set of cultural artifacts, it also changed the way people look at the world [...]

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Here is a list of readings on Philemon, all of which are relevant to all the undisputed Pauline epistles, with a couple of commentaries specifically on this significant, short letter.  One benefit of serious commentaries is that they always begin by discussing major critical issues in understanding a book: authorship, date, historical context, major themes, disputed issues, and so on.  ****************************** Aune, David. The New Testament in Its Literary Environment. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1987. Includes a superb discussion of the practices of letter writing in Greco-Roman antiquity as the social context for Paul’s epistles. Beker, J. Christiaan. Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980. A sophisticated and astute discussion of the apocalyptic character of Paul’s theology and its various forms of expression in different situations that the apostle confronted. For advanced students. Bruce, F. F. Apostle of the Heart Set Free. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977. A full study of Paul’s life and teachings by a major evangelical Christian scholar. Dunn, James D. The Theology of Paul the Apostle. Grand Rapids, [...]

As part of our ongoing effort to improve the Ehrman Blog (including a major redesign to enhance the site and user experience) we recently invited members to participate in a comprehensive reader survey. If you completed the survey, we have a special thank-you just for you: You’re invited to attend a live webinar with Bart on Sunday, July 13 at 1pm Eastern. Bart will give a brand-new lecture titled: What I’ve Learned After 4,000 Blog Posts: Why the Bible Still Surprises Me, followed by a Q&A with attendees. To attend, you must register in advance using the same email you used to complete the survey: User Survey Webinar Registration Note: Please register with the same email address you used to complete the user survey. All registration requests will be validated against our list of completed user surveys. If you are not able to attend live, but would like to view the lecture, please send an email to [email protected] after the event and the recording will be shared with you. We look forward to seeing you [...]

I come now to the final Pauline letter of the New Testament, Philemon.  If you recall, Paul’s letters are ordered by length; this is by far the shortest, a real one-pager.  Given it’s brevity, I’ll be dealing with its major themes and emphases and the questions of Who, When and Why in just this one post. First, a 50-word summary: Paul’s letter to his former convert Philemon concerns Philemon’s slave Onesimus, who has fled from his master, possibly with stolen goods, found Paul in prison, converted, and begged him to intervene on his behalf-- which Paul does by urging Philemon to receive his slave as a fellow believer, without punishment. Here is how I discuss the letter in my book The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Oxford University Press), edited a bit. ************* The letter to Philemon is a little gem hidden away in the inner recesses of the New Testament. Merely a single page in length, the size of an average Greco-Roman letter, it is the only [...]

Here is an annotated list of books on 2 Thessalonians, most of them relevant to all the Deutero-Pauline epistles (that is, the letters that are assigned a “secondary” standing in the New Testament collection of Paul’s letters because scholars doubt they were actually composed by Paul himself) with a couple of commentaries that deal with 2 Thessalonians.  One benefit of serious commentaries is that they always begin by discussing major critical issues in understanding a book: authorship, date, historical context, major themes, disputed issues, and so on. ****************************** Beker, J. Christiaan. The Heirs of Paul: Paul’s Legacy in the New Testament and in the Church Today. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1991. A clear assessment of the theology of the Deutero-Pauline, especially in light of the views embodied in the undisputed Paulines. Ehrman, Bart D. Forged: Writing in the Name of God—Why the Biblical Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are. San Francisco: Harper One, 2010. An account of the phenomenon of literary forgery (pseudepigraphy) throughout the early Christian tradition that asks how and why a [...]