Public Forum Archives - Page 81 of 89 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Freedom From Religion Foundation Lecture

On May 3 of this year I gave a lecture at a meeting of the Freedom from Religion Foundation in Raleigh NC. The lecture is about what it is like to be an agnostic who writes about religion. That's an irony that I am constantly aware of and most of the lecture is about my experience as a non-religious person who is an expert in something he doesn't believe in. I also used the lecture to stress that being "free from religion" is not the same thing as "attacking religion." I absolutely agree with the founding principle of the FFRF that no religion (of any kind, Christian or otherwise) should be imposed on us by the state. But I do not at *all* think that this is the same thing as being opposed to religion. I am personally not opposed to religion or people who practice it (although I *am* quite definitely opposed to fundamenalist kinds of religion -- whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or whatever). And I think organized agnostic/atheist/secular/humanist attacks on religion per [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:24-04:00August 16th, 2014|Public Forum, Video Media|

Clarification!

I need to clarify something that I said in my earlier post today about my next project, since I have elicited several demurrals in response, and it was because I didn't express myself very clearly. What I said was this: Scholars have long held that Mark was the first of our Gospels to be written, and that it probably appeared sometime around the year 70 CE. Some scholars think it might have been a bit before that (I used to think that); more scholars think that it might have been a bit after. But almost everyone agrees that Mark dates to around the end of the Jewish War (66-70 CE). The only ones who consistently have argued otherwise are fundamentalists and very conservative evangelicals, who very much want Mark, our earliest Gospel, to be closer to the time of Jesus. When I said that the only scholars "who consistently" argued for an earlier date I didn't make myself clear. The reason I said "consistently" is because the only group of scholars that regularly [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:08-04:00August 13th, 2014|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum|

Suggestions for Improving the Blog (Its Content)

In my previous post I discussed some of the ideas that had been put forth for increasing the amount of money that the blog takes in – which is my ultimate goal, as I’ve repeatedly said. I realize that for most of you (all of you?), that’s *not* the ultimate goal. Most of you are interested in what the blog can provide by way of substance and content. So, on that topic…. I have tried to vary my posts since this endeavor started over two years ago now, and looking at the categories in which the posts appear, I think that has worked pretty well. And so far I have not run out of things to say and, to my knowledge, I have not yet repeated a post. Maybe I have and didn’t notice, and you were too kind to point it out! (Sometimes I have had ideas and searched only to see, yup, did that one already….) I have received a number of good suggestions about possible ways to change the blog to make [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:08-04:00August 11th, 2014|Public Forum|

National Cathedral Lecture – Misquoting Jesus

Here is a version of my lecture "Misquoting Jesus." Some of you have seen a different version of the lecture (I'm sure I've posted one!); I'm particularly fond of this particular one, both because of its setting in the Washington National Cathedral and because, well, I just think I was on better form than usual. The lecture was given on Feb. 6, 2007.

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:07-04:00August 10th, 2014|Public Forum, Video Media|

Ideas for Raising More Money on the Blog

Many thanks to everyone who responded to my request for comments about how to improve the blog. I am taking all of them under advisement! Here I’d like to flesh out a bit three specific suggestions and give my take on them (I will address a few others in my next post). Please consider each of these and respond if you feel so moved! These are themed: they are all about money and about how to raise more of it – one of my ongoing interests and concerns 1. The Price of the Blog. Several people suggested that if I want to achieve my fund-raising goals for the charities I support (i.e., make more money), I could raise the cost of the blog. Simply charge more. Some suggested $50 instead of $24.95. I was amused to see that no one suggested I charge *less* in order to make more money. It made me think that maybe there are more Democrats than Republicans on the blog. J The reason I don’t want to charge more is [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:08-04:00August 7th, 2014|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Follow-up Apologies for the Post on Dinesh D’Souza

I was completely taken aback when I got up this morning (I’m in London – five hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time) to check my blog and Facebook pages to find that I caused a bit of a firestorm by my comments on Dinesh D’Souza when in yesterday’s post I introduced the video of the debate that I had had with him a couple of years ago. That was not my intention at *all* and I’m non-plussed, surprised, and embarassed. All sides of the political spectrum have reacted strongly – rabid liberals hee-hawing and rabid conservatives fuming and others weighing in one way or the other. Woops. Not what I had in mind. Now that I re-read my opening comments, I see how they are being read, and they are not being read in the way that I meant them. But I need to apologize to Dinesh and to anyone else I have offended. My intention was *not* to badmouth Dinesh, whom I like on a personal level even if absolutely not on the political. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:07-04:00August 3rd, 2014|Bart's Debates, Public Forum|

My Debate with Dinesh D’Souza on the Problem of Suffering

A prominent figure in the news lately has been Dinesh D'Souza. Dinesh is best known as a hyper-conservative political commentator. His most recent book is America, and this week it is #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for non-fiction. It has a companion documentary film. If you're politically very-right-wing conservative and despise Barack Obama and everything he stands for -- this is the book for you! Dinesh was a policy analyst in the Reagan White House as a 20-something Wunderkind; he has served as John M. Olin Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. The New York Times Magazine named him as one of America's most influential conservative thinkers. Newsweek listed him as one of the country's most prominent Asian Americans. Dinesh has also been in the news for several other things in the past two years, in connection with his (former) presidency of Kings college -- a conservative evangelical institutions that trains conservative Christians in business and finance so that they can get high level places at Goldman Sachs-- and more recently because [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:46-04:00August 2nd, 2014|Bart's Debates, Public Forum, Video Media|

About the Blog

I have now finished with my extensive comments on Jesus’ burial. Some of you may be relieved to hear that. I know I am! That was the most intense thread that I’ve done on the blog since its inception over two years ago. It was really more like producing scholarship than anything else I’ve done. And I know that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. So now I can move on to other things on the blog. If you weren’t really into that more hard-core kind of thing, then I hope that the sorts of things that I’ll be doing now for a while will strike your fancy. I thought this would be a good time to pause and think a bit about the blog, and to hear your ideas and suggestions for it. As probably everyone on the blog knows, I have two major objectives in doing it, one far more major than the other. The one that is *less* major for me is the one that is *more* major for virtually everyone else. I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:07-04:00August 1st, 2014|Public Forum|

The Skeletal Remains of Yehohanan and Their Significance

I plan to make this the last post responding to Craig Evans’s article, “Getting the Burial Traditions and Evidences Right,” in which he attempts to refute my argument in How Jesus Became God, that Jesus was probably not given a decent burial on the day of his crucifixion. Several readers have asked me interesting questions about this or that thing that I’ve said, and I may try to answer these questions in a few days or, well, eventually; but for now, this will be my last post on it. It think maybe this thread has been more than enough! I have dealt with a wide range of Craig’s arguments, and have saved his two strongest arguments for last. In my last post I dealt with the claim of Josephus that Jews (always? usually? sometimes?) buried crucifixion victims before sunset, and I showed that as a general statement it simply isn’t true, and argued that in any event it would not have applied to a case such as that of Jesus, one who was crucified as [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:07-04:00July 31st, 2014|Bart's Critics, Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

Hiatus: A New Teaching Company Course

Another brief hiatus as we near the end of my thread on the burial traditions of Jesus, occasioned by the inquiries of several members of the blog, and others not on the blog, about my new course for the Teaching Company (the company is also called The Great Courses). A couple of days ago my new course on “How Jesus Became God” came out. It is obviously based (roughly) on the book of the same title. The Course consists of twenty-four lectures, each thirty minutes in length, and as with all the Great Courses, it is available in numerous formats: on CD for audio only, or DVD for video, or as a download, and so on. For a quick link: http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=6522 You’ll see that it is right now being offered at a serious discount. One hint about the Teaching Company courses: ALWAYS buy them at discount! (They all get discounted on and off.) These are the titles of each of the lectures: 1 Jesus—The Man Who Became God 2 Greco-Roman Gods Who Became Human 3 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:06-04:00July 26th, 2014|Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Teaching Christianity|

Pilate the Intransigent

To make the best sense of this post it is important to keep in mind what I said in the previous one. In his response to my views of in How Jesus Became God – that Jesus most likely was not given a decent burial on the day of his crucifixion by Joseph of Arimathea – Craig Evans has maintained, among other things, that Pilate was not the kind of governor who would ignore Jewish sensitivities. For Craig, Pilate started his rule by making a big mistake of bringing into Jerusalem the Roman standards that bore on them the image of the emperor. But once he realized that the Jewish populace was offended, he backed down and from then on he showed that he had learned his lesson. For that reason, Craig finds it “hard to believe” that at a later time Pilate would do something so opposed to Jewish custom as allow a body unburied on the day of a person’s death. This view strikes me as extremely problematic, for several reasons. To start [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:49-04:00July 19th, 2014|Bart's Critics, Early Judaism, Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

Violent Opposition to the Romans in the Days of Jesus (or Brian)?

This will be my last post on the conference dealing with the Life of Brian and the historical Jesus. Here I would like to summarize one paper that I thought was unusually insightful, to give you an idea of the kind of thing that could be done on a topic like this. As it turns out, it was the opening paper of the conference, and it was delivered by Martin Goodman, professor of Jewish Studies at Oxford. I should begin by saying that scholars have their own internal ranking systems for who the really good scholars are, who the pretty good ones are, who the OK ones are, and who the rather miserable ones are. It’s like most fields: outsiders have trouble knowing which is which. (I couldn’t tell a mediocre physicist from a top-flight one if my life depended on it.) With that said, Professor Goodman is at the top of the heap, a world-class scholar who is unusually gifted and knowledgeable about both Jewish and Roman antiquity. He is the real item – [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:47-04:00June 30th, 2014|Historical Jesus, Jesus and Film, Public Forum|

Brian and the Apocalyptic Jesus Part 3

Here is the third and final section of the paper that I read at the Life of Brian conference. The entire paper tried to argue that parody can be an effective historical method. By providing a caricature of a narrative or an alleged historical event, the film was able to highlight some very important historical realia that otherwise are too easy to miss, or that have not been given enough prominence by biblical scholars and historians. This third part of my paper is the really controversial one (although part 2 raised some concerns as well!). Here is where I argue that Jesus was not given a decent burial, and I use the film to explain why. I should say that in a few days I am going to be devoting a sustained thread to just this issue, of why I think the story of Joseph of Arimathea in the NT is legendary, that Jesus was almost certainly not given a decent burial on the day of his crucifixion. My thread will be a response [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:47-04:00June 29th, 2014|Historical Jesus, Jesus and Film, Public Forum, Video Media|

Brian and the Apocalyptic Jesus Part 2

Here I give the second of three installments of the paper I read at the Life of Brian and the Historical Jesus conference. In this portion I deal with an issue that I have been spending a lot of time reading and thinking about over the past couple of months: the value of eyewitness testimony for establishing what really happened in the past. The reflections here are inspired by the first episode of Brian's adulthood in the film, where he is present, at a distance, at Jesus' famous Sermon on the Mount, and the people around Brian cannot make out exactly what Jesus is saying since they are so far away from him. Rather than "Blessed are the Peacemakers," Jesus is thought to have said "Blessed are the Cheesemakers"; and it was the Greek, not the meek, who will inherit the earth. And so it goes. It's the sort of scene that is both funny and insightful -- what *was* it like to hear a public speaker back in the days before there [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:31-04:00June 28th, 2014|Jesus and Film, Public Forum|

Brian and the Apocalyptic Jesus Part 1

I have decided to give, in three installments, the paper that I read for the Life of Brian conference. It was written for a general audience, even though scholars were in the crowd as well. It includes some short clips from the movie, which I showed by way of Power point, and which my computer assistant on the Blog, Steve Ray, managed to load up here for us. What I have to say makes better sense with the clips (there is one in this installment and two in the third), so I recommend looking at them at the proper time in the paper. The rest is self-explanatory: so here is the opening bit of the paper. ************************************************************************************ When the Life of Brian came out in 1979, I was an earnest and devout 23-year old student at Princeton Theological Seminary, studying for ministry. Even though Princeton Seminary at the time was not, on the whole, strongly conservative in its theological orientation, I was. I had come to the school from Wheaton, an evangelical [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:31-04:00June 27th, 2014|Historical Jesus, Jesus and Film, Public Forum, Video Media|

Day Two of Jesus and Brian
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Day Two of Jesus and Brian

Historical Jesus, Jesus and Film, Public Forum, Video Media

Day Two of Jesus and Brian

I continue this coverage of the Life of Brian and the Historical Jesus conference with the second-day post by Mark Goodacre. - Mark Goodacre is the author of several books, including The Case Against Q, and Thomas and the Gospels. ********************************************************* Jesus and Brian Conference, Day 2 William Telford and Mark Goodacre After a wonderful first day, the Jesus and Brian conference began again on Saturday morning with a paper from one of the real gurus of Jesus films, William Telford. He had a superb series of reflections on the ways in which the Life of Brian parodies the Jesus films, and his paper was superbly performed. He does not just read his paper, in the manner all too common in the guild, but he acts it. It was compelling stuff. Just as compelling was the second paper, "Monty Python's Life of Philip Davies and James Crossley Jesus", in which first Philip Davies and then James Crossley took a more subversive look at the film and argued that it is not quite so benign [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:47-04:00June 25th, 2014|Historical Jesus, Jesus and Film, Public Forum, Video Media|

Day One of Jesus and Brian
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Day One of Jesus and Brian

Historical Jesus, Jesus and Film, Public Forum

Day One of Jesus and Brian

As indicated yesterday, I will now give a couple of play-by-play accounts of the Life of Brian Conference held this past weekend in London. Luckily, I do not need to write up an account myself. My friend and colleague from Duke, Mark Goodacre, also attended the conference and produced a very useful two-part account, the first of which I give here. I have taken this from Mark's blog, with his permission: http://ntweblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/jesus-and-brian-conference-day-1.html So, these are his words: ****************************************************************** It's not every day that you get to go to a conference on Monty Python. Jesus and Brian Or: What Have the Pythons done for us? is the mastermind of Joan Taylor at Kings College, London, with support from Richard Burridge. The focus isMonty Python's Life of Brian (dir. Terry Jones, 1979), and how it interacts with scholarship on the New Testament, Christian Origins, the Historical Jesus and the history of early Judaism. The conference began today at King's College London and continues for the next two days. As a long time fan of Life of Brian, and with an [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:31-04:00June 24th, 2014|Historical Jesus, Jesus and Film, Public Forum|

The Life of Brian Conference

I need to take a hiatus from my thread on textual alterations of the NT (you may be relieved to know!) in order to make some posts on the Life of Brian Conference, called “Jesus and Brian” that was held this past weekend at Kings College London. I will not be giving my personal blow-by-blow account. One of the attendees, Mark Goodacre, a friend and colleague who teaches New Testament at cross-town rival Duke, who has been a huge fan of Monty Python as well as the genre of the “Jesus film” for most of the years of his conscious being, is himself doing so, and has given me permission to use his account to inform you of what happened each day (although he had to leave before the third and final day, which happened to be the day on which I read my own paper). After this present short introductory post I’ll provide Mark’s post(s), and then possibly over the course of three posts or so give you the paper that I read. For [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:31-04:00June 23rd, 2014|Historical Jesus, Jesus and Film, Public Forum|

Radio Debate with Pete Williams on Textual Variants

I'm in the midst of a thread on the textual variants of the New Testament, and whether they matter, and thought that it might be good to give an alternative perspective. On January 3rd, 2009, Peter J. Williams and I appeared as guests on the radio show "Unbelievable," a weekly program on UK Premier Christian Radio, moderated by Justin Brierley. For this show we discussed my book "Misquoting Jesus" (In the UK the book, for some reason, is titled is "Whose Word Is It?"). Pete Williams is a British evangelical Christian scholar -- a very smart one, who knows a *lot* about the manuscripts of the NT -- who believes in the reliability of the New Testament and that thinks that my position is too pessimistic and extreme. He did his PhD at Cambridge. Peter is the author of Can We Trust the Gospels? and C S Lewis vs the New Atheists. Here's our back and forth. Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition:

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:31-04:00June 22nd, 2014|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Video Media|

Why Textual Variants Matter for the Rest of Us

In this thread I am discussing why it matters that there are so many variants in our surviving manuscripts of the New Testament. It does not matter because there are any “fundamental Christian doctrines” at stake, per se, but for other reasons. As I sketched in my previous post, it should matter for anyone who believes that God gave the very words of the Bible, since the facts that we don’t *have* the original words in some cases and that in many other cases the words themselves are in doubt, should call that belief into question. (I should point out that with the Hebrew Bible we are in MUCH worse shape in knowing what anything like the “original” -- whatever that might be – was. The textual situation there is really quite dire.) The second group that the variants should interest would include just about anyone -- whether scholar, student, or general reader – who is interested in knowing what the various authors of the Bible had to say about this, that, or the other [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:31-04:00June 21st, 2014|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

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