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

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|

Exciting Discovery of a Hebrew Bible Scroll

An exciting discovery has been made of the oldest scroll containing the Pentateuch (it is not as old as the Leningrad *codex* from around the year 1000; but it is the oldest *scroll* with the entire text – 12th century or 13th). My thanks to my colleage Evyatar Marienburg, knowledgeable about all scholarship Jewish, for informing me about this. For the fuller account, see https://www.facebook.com/groups/375003239611/permalink/10151699916354612/ PRESS RELEASE THE MOST ANCIENT EXISTING SCROLL OF THE HEBREW PENTATEUCH, DISCOVERED AT THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF BOLOGNA The document, located and identified by a professor of the University of Bologna contains the entire text of the Torah, dates back to a period between the second half of the 12th century and the beginning of 13th (1155-1225) and is kept at the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna (BUB). Bologna, 28 May 2013. The University Library of Bologna has kept from times immemorial, and without knowing, the world’s oldest scroll of the Hebrew Pentateuch. The document, labeled as "Roll 2", is of soft sheep leather (36 meters long and 64 cm high), [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:25-04:00May 28th, 2013|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum, Religion in the News|

Geza Vermes

Now that I have been posting on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the historical Jesus, I would be remiss not to mention that one of the absolutely great scholars of modern times, one of the world experts on both the Scrolls and Jesus, died several days ago. Geza Vermes was a formidable scholar. Of the three major English translations of the Scrolls, it is his that I typically use and prefer. In the 1970s he began publishing a series of books on Jesus that did more than almost anything to push for the idea that if Jesus is to be understood, he must be understood as a first century Jew. This was something of a novel idea at the time. It has become the standard view that virtually every Jesus scholar on the planet shares. Vermes was a scholar’s scholar. Professor at Oxford, he was an incredible linguist, intimately familiar with every ancient historical source of relevance, a creative thinker. He wrote books for scholars but also books that were accessible to the educated layperson. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:24-04:00May 19th, 2013|History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations, Religion in the News|

Back in the Saddle. Sort of….

My plan had been to return to the blog in full force when I got back to the States but, well, I’m a little slow on the uptake. We got back late Saturday night, and I decided to blow Sunday off. Actually, I watched the golf tournament all afternoon. Half way through I started feeling odd. By the end I wasn’t good at all. Stomach virus, probably. Brought it back with me from Israel. As did several other guys on the trip – four men, and none of their wives (including mine) affected. Very strange. Anyway, I’m feeling a bit better now but not quite 70% yet. And I’m finding that I have little mental, as well as physical, energy. SO, what I would propose is that this would be a very good time indeed for some of you to raise some questions for me to address on the blog, about anything having to do with the New Testament, the historical Jesus, the history of early Christianity, or anything else of relevance. I imagine [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:24-04:00May 14th, 2013|Public Forum|

More in Jerusalem

This has been a great trip. One of the things I’ve liked about it is that it has been focused on Israel in a number of historical periods as well as in the present; it has not been entirely about Christian and Jewish Holy Sites. And so, for example, today we did the City of David (that I’ll talk about below), had a grand overview of the Temple Mount (with the Dome of the Rock), walked through good chunks of the Jewish Quarter, had a very nice lunch outside the old city walls, went to the Jerusalem Market (outdoors, lots of food and spice merchants, etc.), and so on. It wasn’t just one holy site after the other, but there was plenty of holy site time as well. The City of David is in some sense the “original” Jerusalem, the place that King David allegedly conquered from the Jebusites and where he then set up his kingdom. It is outside the “old” city walls, which in fact are (only!) from the 16th century, built when [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:11-04:00May 9th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

Off to Israel

I'm off to Israel first thing tomorrow morning, and will be gone for ten days. I’ll be on email most days; I’m not sure how much time I’ll have to blog, but I’ll do my best. So this is an alumni tour for UNC, just over 20 people going (they limited it to that size), along with Sarah and me. It’s a great deal for me. On these things the university will send a faculty member who gives a few lectures, hangs out with the people, answers questions, engages in conversation – and gets a free trip out of it! Things could be worse…. This will be my fourth time in Israel. The first time I went was in 1993, and I remember quite vividly thinking before that that it was not a place I much wanted to visit. That seems weird – and seemed weird to me even at the time – since obviously a good deal of my research has to do with Israel 2000 years ago. But I think that I had [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:11-04:00April 29th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Sorry!

OK, apologies to all 29,475 of you who noticed that I said "astrology" instead of "astronomy" yesterday, and that I dated the earth -- not the universe --at 13.8 billion years old. Mistakes noted! It was a long day: ten hours of writing and editing, and then the blog. Yuk! But, well, at least I know that lots of you were paying attention. I won't post your comments if they simply were making corrections this time around..... I am nearing the finish line with the draft of the book. I've written all ten chapters and the Preface, and edited it all once. Now I'm working on the second time through, editing, adding footnotes, improving style, polishing, and so on. On Monday I'll be sending it to four very sharp colleagues in the field: they've agreed to read it and make comments on everything from substance to style. I HATE this part of it, because I always want anything I write to be perfect, and it never is, and people notice, and I have a thin [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:10-04:00April 26th, 2013|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Explaining myself….

This post will be on something different for a change. So my current reality is that every day of the week, for several weeks now, I have either been travelling or working on How Jesus Became God. Neither activity is conducive to writing posts for the blog. When I write on the book – as I did yesterday – it usually means going at it intensely all day long, until I’m brain dead, which luckily tends to coincide with the end of a chapter. Yesterday I did chapter 8, which deals with the Christological controversies of the second and third centuries, as some Christians insisted that Jesus was human but not divine (e..g, the Ebionites and the Roman Adoptionists), others maintained that he was divine but not human (the opponents of 1 John and Ignatius, and then Marcion), others claimed he was two entities, a human Jesus who was temporarily inhabited by a divine being from the heavenly realm (the Gnostics), and others who claimed he was just one entity who was both divine and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:10-04:00April 17th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Paul’s Christology

A small bit from my now chapter 7: ********************************************************************************************************************** I have read, pondered, researched, taught, and written about the writings of Paul for forty years, but until recently there was one key aspect of his theology that I could never quite get my mind around. I had the hardest time understanding how, exactly, he viewed Christ. Some aspects of Paul’s Christological teaching have been clear to me for decades – especially his teaching that it was Jesus’ death and resurrection that makes a person right with God, rather than following the dictates of the Jewish law. But who did Paul think Christ was exactly? One reason for my perplexity was that Paul is highly allusive in what he says. He does not spell out, in systematic detail, what his views of Christ are. Another reason was that in some passages Paul seems to affirm a view of Christ that – until recently – I thought could not possibly be as early as Paul’s letters, which are our first Christian writings to survive. How could Paul [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:56-04:00April 10th, 2013|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Our One-Year Anniversary!

Today is a day of celebration. It was one year ago today that we started what was originally called Christianity in Antiquity (CIA), The Bart Ehrman Blog, now called The Bart Ehrman Blog: The History & Literature of Early Christianity. So Happy Anniversary to us! It has been a busy and successful year. When I started the blog I didn’t know what to expect: whether it would be worth all the time and effort, how many posts a week I could manage to do, and at what length, how often I could review and approve comments, how many questions I could answer, how many people would be interested in joining, how much money could be raised for charity. We now have the answers, and everything is better than I anticipated. I had hoped to get 1000 people to join the blog, either on a trial or yearly basis, during the first year; we’ve done better than that. Over 1300 have joined, and more join every day. Altogether I have made nearly 300 posts (not counting the partical [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:56-04:00April 3rd, 2013|Public Forum|

Modern Visions of Jesus

The disciples were not, of course, the only ones who had visions of Jesus after he died. People continued to see Jesus alive afterwards. And in fact, he continues to appear in modern times. Here are a couple of interesting examples taken from the draft of ch. 5 of my book, How Jesus Became God: ************************************************************************************************************************ And consider the modern appearances of Jesus. Some of these are documented by Phillip H. Wiebe, in his book Visions of Jesus: Direct Encounters from the New Testament to Today. I should stress that Wiebe is not a religious fanatic on a mission. He is chair of the Philosophy Department at Trinity Western University, which is to be sure, a Christian school, but it is not a place for wackos. And Wiebe is a serious scholar. His book is published by Oxford University Press. Still, at the end of the day, he thinks that something “transcendent” has led to some of the modern visions of Jesus that he recounts. In other words, they – or some of them – [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:55-04:00March 28th, 2013|Book Discussions, Public Forum|

Seriously off topic….

OK, this is comletely irrelevant to anything related to the blog – especially early Christology, my current topic. But I thought it was too funny to pass up. A fellow who lived in my neighborhood, but whom I never knew (to my regret: he sounds like he was a remarkably interesting guy), beloved chemistry professor Dr. James Bonk died Friday at the age of 82, ending his 53-year career at Duke University. According to the local newspaper: Bonk’s classes were such a staple that Duke introductory chemistry classes became known as “Bonkistry” classes, which approximately 30,000 students attended. He was nationally known for comical incidents with students, one rumored to have taken place in the 1960s. The Bonk joke is that the weekend before a final exam, four students decided to visit the University of Virginia for the weekend and let off some steam. They were due back Sunday in time for their exam Monday morning, but were too hung over to travel. When they arrived back at Duke late, they told Bonk that they [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:40-04:00March 17th, 2013|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Biblical Views of Suffering

On something different from Christology! 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 from there. Part of the point of the book is that the Bible has a large number of views about why people – especially the people of God – suffer, many of these views are at odds with one another, and most of them are different from what people, even highly religious people, even highly religious people who think they based their views on the Bible, tend to think. The lecture was only to be 50 minutes so I couldn’t spend much time on this that or the other view, and in fact could not deal with most of the biblical perspectives. I didn’t talk about Job, for example (which, in the judgment of most biblical scholars, is made up of the work [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:40-04:00March 8th, 2013|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

What Kind of a Text is the King James Bible?

Introduction: On January 24, 2013, the traveling exhibition Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible opened at the William H. Hannon Library at Loyola Marymount University. The keynote talk for the opening: "What Kind of a Text is the King James Bible? Manuscripts, Translation, and the Legacy of the KJV" was presented by Dr. Bart Ehrman, James A. Grey Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at UNC Chapel Hill and New York Times bestselling author. In this lecture by Dr. Bart Ehrman, a leading authority on the New Testament and New York Times bestselling author, you will hear why the KJV has received such praise and adoration over the centuries, and then turn to consider aspects of the translation that also need to be considered when assessing its greatness and value: the archaic language that at times can confuse modern readers; the inferior ancient manuscripts on which the translation was based; and the theological biases that occasionally led the translators to make the biblical text say something other than it originally meant. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:39-04:00February 26th, 2013|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Video Media|

A Brief Break from Christology

With this post I want to take a brief break from what I’ve been doing on the blog to assess how it’s going. A couple of weeks ago now I decided to start posting on my current book project, How Jesus Became God. My idea was that this would allow me to “think through” some issues out loud, as it were, as I put thoughts on screen, and it would allow people on the blog to see where I’m going with the book. And so I’ve posted about a dozen or so posts on the topic, virtually without stop (well, there have one or two other things). On the whole I would characterize these posts as relatively heavy-hitting as far as posts go: I’ve been trying to write for the blog members, (you!), who as a rule are not scholars but are highly intelligent lay people who may not have all the jargon and background of professional biblical folk, but who are interested in topics related to NT and early Christianity, and don’t mind seeing [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:24-04:00February 15th, 2013|Public Forum|

How Jesus Became God: My Change of Direction

Over the course of my last three posts I have indicated what my original idea was for the book How Jesus Became God. When I first started writing the proposal for the book (as you have seen it) I had planned to write it with Oxford University Press. But about three or four years ago I made a career decision. At that point I had published three trade books with HarperOne (an imprint of Harper Collins, the branch that publishes in religious studies). All three of them had made it onto the New York Times Bestseller list. That had never happened to me before. A lot of that is luck, but it takes a *ton* of work from the publisher to make it even possible. I think Oxford is an absolutely terrific press. In my opinion they are absolutely among the best press in the world at publishing scholarly monographs and *are* the best at publishing college level textbooks in religious studies. But they are not as geared toward trade books. With Harper, on the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:23-04:00February 5th, 2013|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Posts by Outsiders

Now that we’ve seen a couple of posts by Jeff Siker (the author of Jesus, Sin, and Perfection in Early Christianity and Homosexuality in the Church) – taking a position quite different from my own on a question of broad importance – and some of the comments that have come back on it, and his reply at length to one of them, I think we are in a position to sit back and see how that “worked” for the blog. My sense is that it worked very well. If you think otherwise, please let me know. I do not want to do this sort of thing every week – but I’m thinking once every three or four weeks might be interesting. I have received several suggestions for the kinds of things people would like to see, as follows: A Hebrew Bible scholar talking about the historical problems with the Hebrew Bible comparable to those we deal with on this blog for the New Testament; An archaeologist to discuss the evidence that Nazareth really did exist; [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:09-04:00January 28th, 2013|Public Forum|

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