Public Forum Archives - Page 86 of 89 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Some Blog Self-Scrutiny

I’ve spent the past day or so thinking about the Blog. By many standards I think it is going very well. As I’ve pointed out on numerous occasions, we managed to raise $37,000 last year for the charities that the blog supports, all of them dealing with hunger and homelessness. If we do that for a number of years – we’re talking some serious money! Most of that amount came from membership fees; a good chunk came from extra donations, some of them extraordinarily generous. I anticipate that we will have an even higher total this year, although it is yet to be seen. In any event, we are slightly ahead of where we were last year at this point. But I never seem satisfied! Maybe it’s my driven personality. But I wonder how we can do better. Much better. Some things we simply can’t do *more* of. I already post about six times a week, and I try to mix up what I do: some posts are “public interest” items (like O’Reilly or that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:59-04:00October 13th, 2013|Public Forum|

Colbert on his Hero O’Reilly

OK, this really is my last post on O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus. It’s not much of one! But today is the day I normally take “off” from the blog. Monday’s are my day from hell: a three-hour undergraduate seminar (“Jesus in Scholarship and Film”) in the morning (today: students compared all the accounts of Jesus’ Passion in the four Gospels, seeing if there were any differences they thought were irreconcilable; we discussed it all; and then we watched four movie clips – Passion scenes from the 1925 silent Ben Hur; the 1959 Ben Hur; the Greatest Story Ever Told; and the 1977 Zephirelli Jesus of Nazareth – in order to see how directors chose what to include, what to exclude, what to do when different Gospels relate different stories, that sometimes really can’t be easily reconciled, etc. Great stuff) and then a three hour seminar (“Early Christian Apocrypha”) in the afternoon (today: The Coptic Gospel of Thomas - -when was it written? Where? In what language? Is it dependent on the NT Gospels? Is it Gnostic? [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:58-04:00October 7th, 2013|Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Religion in the News, Video Media|

Jesus as a First-Century Tea-Partier

I have decided not to provide a full and detailed review of O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus. It doesn’t really deserve it, and much more of what I have indicated before – on which see my previous posts. I will say that the book is extremely well written and easy on the eyes. It is entertaining. A lot of human-interest material, which is both its strength and its very great weakness, as almost all of this, as I’ve mentioned before, is simply MADE UP, even though it is presented as if were historical fact. There is page after page after page of that kind of thing. This is not a research book written by a scholar and his writing buddy -- with, for example, footnotes indicating where they got their information from. It can’t be that, since almost all of the details didn’t come from ancient sources but from their own fertile imaginations And since that is the main source for the Gospel according to Bill, and since most of us know what Bill’s imagination spends its [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:58-04:00October 6th, 2013|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Religion in the News|

You Won’t Find This in the New Testament!

In my graduate course last week, we analyzed the Proto-Gospel of James (which scholars call the Protevangelium Jacobi -- a Latin phrase that means “Proto-Gospel of James,” but sounds much cooler….). It is called the “proto” Gospel because it records events that (allegedly) took place before the accounts of the NT Gospels. Its overarching focus is on Mary, the mother of Jesus; it is interested in explaining who she was. Why was *she* the one who was chosen to bear the Son of God? What made her so special? How did she come into the world? What made her more holy than any other woman? Etc. These questions drive the narrative, and make it our earliest surviving instance of the adoration of Mary. On the legends found here was built an entire superstructure of Marian tradition. Most of the book deals with the question of how Mary was conceived (miraculously, but not virginally), what her early years were like (highly sanctified; her youth up to twelve (lived in the temple, fed every day by an [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:43-04:00September 29th, 2013|Christian Apocrypha, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum|

Jesus at the Movies: Infancy Narratives

I’m having a terrific time with my undergraduate course this semester, a first-year seminar that I call “Jesus in Scholarship and Film.” Last month I posted my syllabus for the class on the blog. This past week was the first time we’ve done any film in the class, and it was very interesting. For the class I had the students do a writing assignment, in which they compared the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke in detail (Mark and John, of course, don’t *have* anything about Jesus’ birth). They were to find both similarities and differences, and then they were to decide if any of the differences were irreconcilable. This was to set up what they were going to see in the film clips that I was set to show. The similarities are pretty interesting if you come up with a full list: Jesus is born in Bethlehem; his mother Mary is a virgin; after his birth he is visited by a group of men (shepherds in Luke; wise men in Matthew) who have been [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:43-04:00September 27th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Jesus and Film, Public Forum|

The Messy World of Second Century Gospels

This thread has taken several detours (never mind the mixed metaphor), and I want to end it where I had planned to take it all along. What’s been going on in my mind has been an issue that I raised in one of the posts, about how we are to conceptualize the situation of first and early second century when it comes to our Gospels. I’ll talk about it with reference to Papyrus Egerton 2, about which I’ve only said a few things – lots more there to talk about. (But I’ll be moving on after this.) Before doing so let me recap the situation: Scholars have traditionally thought of the four canonical Gospels as THE Gospels that were available, so that when a new Gospel like the Unknown Gospel in Papyrus Egerton 2 appeared the question always was: WHICH of the canonical Gospels was the author familiar with (and which did he use). I challenged that view in my earlier post. We shouldn’t think that there were basically FOUR, and everything else was dependent [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:43-04:00September 25th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Christian Apocrypha, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum|

Harmonizing the Gospels

I mentioned yesterday that one of the quotations of the Gospel of the Ebionites, as preserved in the writings of Epiphanius, appears to represent some kind of harmonization of the Gospels, an attempt to explain how the three different versions of what the voice from heaven says at Jesus’ baptism can *all* be right (since the voice says different things in each of the three Gospels). Solution: the voice spoke *three* times, saying something different each time. (!) This way of solving discrepancies in the Gospels has persisted through the ages. Most people don’t realize that it goes way back to the early church. I’ll say more about that eventually. For now I want to say something about it in modern times. When I was in college – as a good hard-core fundamentalist who did not think there could be any real discrepancies in the Gospels (since they were inspired by God, which means there could be no mistakes, which means there could be no contradictions) – I was an expert at reconciling differences among [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:42-04:00September 12th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Christian Apocrypha, Public Forum|

My PhD Seminar: Early Christian Apocrypha

A couple of weeks ago I shared on the blog the syllabus for my undergraduate class, “Jesus in Scholarship and Film.” Periodically I’ll discuss on the blog what I’m doing in that class. But I thought today I could provide the syllabus for my other course, a PhD Seminar that meets for three-hours, once a week, to discuss “Early Christian Apocrypha.” Here it is! ************************************************************************************** Reli 801: Early Christian Apocrypha Instructor: Bart D. Ehrman Fall 2013 The Early Christian Apocrypha are an amorphous collection of early and medieval Christian writings, many of which were forged in the names of the apostles. They have long been a subject of fascination among scholars. In this course we will consider a selection of the most interesting and historically significant examples. Closely connected with the apocrypha are the writings that eventually made it into the New Testament; part of the course will involve understanding the process by which some early Christian texts came to be included among the canonical scriptures whereas others came to be excluded. We will engage [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:26-04:00September 8th, 2013|Christian Apocrypha, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Teaching Christianity|

The Final Part of My First-Day Quiz

Here is the second half of my pop quiz (see yesterday’s post); some of the questions are just … factual questions. Some of them give me a chance actually to teach something. …. According to the Gospels, who baptized Jesus? Who carried his cross? Who buried him? Answers: John the Baptist, Simon of Cyrene and/or Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea. So this question allows for a teachable moment. Mark’s Gospel indicates that Simon of Cyrene carried the cross for Jesus. It does NOT say that Jesus started to carry it, stumbled, and so they had Simon carry it. That’s how it’s portrayed in a lot of the movies. But the reason is because of the Gospel of John. In John we’re told that *Jesus* carried his cross. How can both be right? Well, if he stumbles and then Simon (unwillingly) comes on board, the problem is solved. Part of my course is designed to show how directors have to make decisions when the Gospels are at odds, and this is a place where that has [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:25-04:00August 30th, 2013|Public Forum, Teaching Christianity|

My Pop Quiz For First-Year Students

It’s been a very long day of teaching (six hours of talking!), so something substantive for the blog will need to wait for another day. Instead, I’ll say something about what happened today. As some of you have seen by examining my syllabus, I begin my class on Jesus by giving a pop quiz. I did that this morning. The class has 24 students in it, all first-year students, most of them 18 and 19. (One swallows hard to think of it, but that means the incoming class was born in 1995. Ai yai yai….) I begin most of my undergraduate classes with a pop quiz, both to see how much knowledge the students already have about very basic issues related to the NT and to have an opportunity to teach them some very basic issues (such as dates of important events in antiquity, the use of the abbreviations CE and BCE, the diversity of early Christianity, some basic Gospel facts,), to stress some others (Jesus was a Jew, not a Christian), and to have [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:24-04:00August 26th, 2013|Public Forum, Teaching Christianity|

Who Cares?

Several people – on the blog and off of it – have asked me about the broader significance of my research on the Patristic citations of the NT, specifically the quotations of the Gospels in the writings of Didymus. Did this research contribute to my loss of faith? Did it lead me away from evangelical Christianity? Did it affect my understanding of any Christian doctrine – my view of God, my view of Christ, my view of salvation? Did it affect my understanding of Scripture as the inspired Word of God? Did it change anything that I thought about anything apart from the Patristic evidence for the text of the New Testament? The answers are clear and straightforward: no, no, no, no, and no! The follow-up question (when asked; you possibly have the same question) has always been: why did you do it then? My answer to *that* is also straightforward. I did it because I’m a scholar who is committed to scholarship and who thinks scholarly research is important. And this kind of textual [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:24-04:00August 23rd, 2013|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Did Luke Originally Have Chapters 1-2?

Now that I have finished my unusually deep (for this blog) set of harder-hitting posts on the text of Luke 3:22 I want to move on to other things – very soon to get back to the question of the problems of using Patristic evidence. But I want to pause first and given the scholarship a rest, and ask a question for those of you who are paying your hard-earned money to belong to and support this blog (but let me stress yet again: the money all goes to charity – so you should feel good about how it is being spent!). So here’s the deal. As a result of this set of posts, I have had a number of people ask me – either in the comment section or via email – if I thought that Luke 1-2 was in fact NOT part of the original version of the Gospel of Luke, but was added on after a version of Luke had originally been published, a version that *began* with what is now chapter [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:24-04:00August 15th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

A Plea for My Blog

It is good to see that thousands of people are reading the excerpts of my blog posts, either on the blog or on my facebook page. I intentionally cut these excerpts off part way through, usually before I get to the most interesting and important part. My hope is that people reading a bit of what I have to say will want then to go on and read all of what I have to say. To do that, they (you) need to join the blog itself. Some people inspired by these excerpts have taken the plunge. I want to urge the rest of you to do so as well. I post five or six times a week on the blog – usually six. The posts are normally 800-1100 words long. Some of them are about things that I’m thinking or writing about, or that I think are timely, interesting, or significant; others of them are in response to questions that I get. Virtually all of them have to do with the New Testament and the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:09-04:00August 4th, 2013|Public Forum|

Suffering and My Blog

For over a week now I’ve been dealing with a question concerning my views on suffering. I could go on for days and days, weeks and weeks, about how the problem of suffering is discussed by the writers of the Bible and how I see it from my own perspective. But it’s not the most cheerful of subjects and I need/want to move on to other things. I’ve said enough to make my basic points, I think (if anyone wants more on any specific related topic, just let me know and I can squeeze it in): suffering is a real problem for anyone who stands firmly within the Judeo-Christian tradition, where God is understood to be the all-powerful Creator of all there is and Sovereign over what he created, and yet there is horrible suffering going on around us all the time – and has been since time immemorial. How does one explain that? The biblical authors have many different ways of explaining it. The prophets have one way, the prose author of Job another [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:08-04:00July 25th, 2013|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Evaluation of Job’s Short Story

In my previous post I laid out the “short story” of Job – the prose narrative that begins and ends the book that was, I contended, originally a free-standing story that existed independently of the poetic dialogues between Job and his friends that take up the great bulk of the book (this isn’t my idea: it’s been a standard view in scholarship for a long time). This short story has a different view of Job, of the reason for his suffering, of his response to suffering, and just about everything else from the poetic exchanges of chapter 3-42. Interpretations simply get fuzzy and confused when they treat the book as a literary whole – or at least the views of each of the two constituent parts gets completely altered when they are combined together into a rather large work, as was done by an unknown editor who spliced them into the book that we now have today. And so, just sticking with what we find in the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:55-04:00July 19th, 2013|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

Personal Response to Suffering?

QUESTION: I would like to know more about your personal beliefs regarding the god issue and human suffering in all of it’s forms…all forms…war, poverty, governmental responsibility in suffering, population explosion, church persecutions and tortures…everything. I’m not just referring to your book on the history of the problem of suffering (God’s Problem) but your personal thoughts about it and how you are involved to help alleviate suffering and what you think the future of humanity is since there seems to be no stop to suffering. Suffering (not just people but animals) is of great concern to me and I see no solution…ever. REPLY: For the past week or ten days I’ve been answering questions one at a time, one post per question. This is the kind of question that makes me feel a whole series of posts coming on, a real thread. We’ll see. The first thing to say is that God’s Problem is not really about the history of the problem of suffering, or the history of the discussion of the problem of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:55-04:00July 15th, 2013|Book Discussions, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Personal, Executive Privilege: My Daughter and Homeschooling!

I have made an executive decision to post something completely unrelated to Christianity in Antiquity. So please indulge me! It’s short... My daughter Kelly launched her new business this month - Lavender's Blue Homeschool. She supports families who want to homeschool with a thoughtful, holistic, and creative approach over at her website www.lavendersbluehomeschool.com and she just released her first curriculum - the complete guide to Waldorf-inspired kindergarten at home. If you know anyone who is interested in or is doing homeschooling, this is a top-rate curriculum that really should be on their radar-screen. You can connect with her on facebook @lavendersbluehomeschool or on her blog at www.lavendersbluehomeschool.com/blog where she writes all about peaceful parenting, holistic homeschooling, magical childhood, and enjoying the early years at home. Any of you who are so inclined, please spread the word!

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:55-04:00July 11th, 2013|Public Forum|

My New Course for The Teaching Company (The Great Courses)
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My New Course for The Teaching Company (The Great Courses)

Public Forum, Teaching Christianity

My New Course for The Teaching Company (The Great Courses)

New Teaching Company Course! A temporary “time-out” from my posting on the Jewishness of Matthew’s Gospel. I received the good news that my new course with the Teaching Company (now called the Great Courses) has become available today. I am, needless to say, very pleased. Those of you who have been reading every post for the past few months will remember me talking about the course. It is called “The Greatest Controversies in Early Christianity.” As with all the courses I’ve done, this one was 24 lectures in length, each lecture 30 minutes in length. As I indicated before, these are the topics it covers: Was Jesus Born in Bethlehem? Was Jesus’ Mother a Virgin? Did Jesus have a twin brother, Thomas? Is Jesus in the Dead Sea Scrolls? Did Jesus Preach that the World Would End in his own day? Was Mary Magdalene Jesus’ Closest Disciple? Was Jesus Married? What Did Judas Betray? Did the Jews kill Jesus? Was Pontius Pilate a Secret Christian? Why Did Jesus’ Early Followers Claim that He Was Raised from [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:39-04:00June 28th, 2013|Public Forum, Teaching Christianity|

Outta Here

FYI: I am heading out of town for a few days and will not be able to interact with comments on the blog during that time. I'm taking my 86-year old mom trout fishing in the Ozarks, and will not have internet access. I saved up a couple of posts and handed them over to my trusty computer person and internet tech, who keeps this blog running, Steven Ray -- so posts should appear a while I'm incommunicado. But I won't be able to reply or post any comments that come in during that time. I should be back on board by Friday.

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:38-04:00June 17th, 2013|Public Forum|

Historical Problems with the Hebrew Bible: The Conquest of Canaan

This will be my final post, for now, on the problems with the Hebrew Bible. I couldn’t resist one last set of comments on the historicity of the accounts narrated there, this time with respect to the stories in the book of Joshua about the Conquest of the Promised Land (Jericho and so on). Here too I am citing what I lay out in my forthcoming textbook on the Bible ***************************************************************************** When considering the historicity of the narratives of Joshua, the first thing to re-emphasize is that these are not accounts written by eyewitnesses or by anyone who knew an eyewitness. They were written some 600 years later, and were based on oral traditions that had been in circulation among people in Israel during all those intervening centuries. Moreover, they are clearly molded according to theological assumptions and perspectives. Biblical scholars have long noted that there is almost nothing in the accounts that suggest that the author is trying to be purely descriptive of things that really happened. He is writing an account that appears [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:38-04:00June 10th, 2013|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

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