Public Forum Archives - Page 87 of 89 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Something New on the Blog

I have received a number of suggestions about how to improve this blog, and so far the one I like best is for me to have an occasional guest make a contribution that people could interact with -- that is, someone who is, like me, a scholar of NT or early Christianity who has a different thing or two to say. I think it's a great idea. And I'm going to implement it for the first time tomorrow. Here is a question I have recently been asked: You've mention that most of your past/present fellow colleagues, friends, loved ones etc... agree with you when it comes to historical understanding of the bible and Christianity, but remain believers. I also understand the problem of suffering was the real reason for your loss of faith and not completely historical understanding. I guess my question is this: What keeps them believing in the very human invention of Christianity? Is it because they have a very liberal understanding and are more like Crossan and Borg, reinventing Christianity to make [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:08-04:00January 24th, 2013|Public Forum|

Why Jesus?

This will be my last post for a while dealing with the question of whether Jesus’ ethics can be translated from his own mythological context of Jewish apocalyptic thought into the modern world that is based (for me at least) on a completely different view of life, meaning, and reality. In my last post I indicated that I thought that it was indeed possible to make this kind of translation if one wants to. But I ended by asking why one – or rather I – would want to. That is, why focus on Jesus in particular? I don’t think I want to do so because I think that Jesus is “the greatest ethical teacher of all time.” I have no idea if this is even a contest that can be won, and even if it is, I am not qualified to evaluate Jesus in relation to other great ethical teachers so as to declare him a winner. So that seems to me to be a dead end. So why Jesus? I don’t have a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:08-04:00January 22nd, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

New Reference Tool

I’m pleased to be able to announce (and only a month after the fact) that after years of labor, the thirteen-volume Encyclopedia of Ancient History, ed. by Roger Bagnall, Kai Bodersen, Craige Champion, Andrew Erskine, and Sabine Hueber has now appeared, published by Wiley-Blackwell. It’s not exactly an affordable reference tool for everyone’s library. The list price is $1995.00! But you can save $354 on Amazon, if you’re loaded and looking for the most authoritative and up-to-date reference on all things ancient (Western world, roughly the ancient Mediterranean, including Egypt and the ancient Near East), from the Bronze Age up to the seventh century CE. There were twenty-two of us who were “area editors.” The areas include such things as “Classical Greece,” ”Jewish History,” “Late Antiquity,” “Religion,” “Roman Military History,” and “Science.” I was responsible for the area of “Christianity.” In that capacity, I chose 195 topics that needed articles to be written, ranging from 500 to 2500 words; I solicited scholars to contribute articles; I edited all the articles once they were written; and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:54-04:00January 6th, 2013|Public Forum, Teaching Christianity|

End of the Year Reflections on the Blog

So, it’s the last day of the year, and I thought I would take a moment to reflect on life, meaning, and the state of the blog. Mainly, for now, the state of the blog. Some statistics would be useful, both of what I wanted to accomplish before the year was out (which will be in five and a half hours, my time) and what we did accomplish. So, to start with, my plan at the outset. I really didn’t know how the blog would go, whether it would have any success at all or be a complete dud. My computer guru for the site, Steven Ray, and I worked for months getting it set up. Well, actually, he worked for several months. I dilly-dallied and told him what to do. He had earlier designed my website, www.bartdehrman.com , which I liked very much (and still do like), and so I asked him to set up the blog. He did almost all the work, and I still think it looks fantastic and works great. Any [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:53-04:00December 31st, 2012|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Christmas Longings

So we have managed to make our way through another Christmas season. I had a number of posts leading up to the big day, and now I’d like to make a couple of others looking back upon it from this side. But first let me say that I hope all of you – whether fundamentalist (not too many of *you* on this blog!!), liberal Christian, Jew, Muslim, agnostic, atheist, or none of the above – had a very nice, relaxing, rejuvenating, and fulfilling holiday. I did. In the opening chapter of my book God’s Problem, I talked about going to church on Christmas Eve in 2006 with my wife Sarah and brother-in-law Simon, in Saffron-Walden, a market town in England where Simon lives, not far from Cambridge. It was a somber but moving Christmas Eve service, and yet one that had the opposite of the intended effect on me. It made me realize just how estranged I was from the Christian faith, from the notion that with Christ God entered into the world and took [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:53-04:00December 27th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Reflections on the Season

I will need to take a break from posting to the blog for a few days. I am in London and the next few days will be visiting family; I will be incommunicado until the day after Boxing Day (as they call it here). For those of you who don’t know, my wife Sarah is a Brit, and her family is all here. We have a flat in London (Wimbledon, actually) and we spend 2-3 months out of the year here. This time of year there is a lot of seeing family. It’s not *exactly* the twelve days of Christmas, but sometimes it feels like it – opening presents with one part of the family, then another, then another. This really is one of my favorite times of the year. When I was a kid, as is true for a lot of kids, Christmas was a big deal for me. I loved all the trappings: Christmas trees, Christmas shopping, Christmas lights, Christmas presents. And as a kid I very much appreciated the religious aspects of it as [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:53-04:00December 24th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Responses to my Newsweek Article

My Newsweek article this week has generated a lot of response. I have no idea what kind of comments they typically get for their stories, but so far, as of now, there have been 559 on mine; and most of them are negative – to no one’s surprise – written by people (conservative evangelicals and fundamenalists for the most part, from what I can tell) who think that the Gospels are perfectly accurate in what they have to say about Jesus – not just at his birth but for his entire life. A lot of these respondents think that anyone who thinks that the New Testament contains discrepancies is too smart for his or her own good and blind at the same time (not sure how it can go both ways, but there it is). I’ve also been getting a lot of email from incensed readers, including a sixteen-year old girl who tells me that she is a Pentecostal Christian who has read the Bible 160 times and is now starting her 161st; she was [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:39-04:00December 14th, 2012|Bart's Critics, Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Religion in the News|

An Agnostic Reflects on Christmas

I suppose a lot of people have the birth of Jesus on their minds these days. Hard not to. It occurred to me that it might be interesting to do a series of posts on what ancient Gospels – mainly the two of the New Testament, but also some of the others outside – say about it. When I indicate that there are two in the NT that talk about it, it is because Matthew and Luke are the only ones that say anything about the birth of Jesus. I think what I’ll do in these posts is talk about features of each one separately and then talk about the two of them together, with a few posts here at the beginning to provide different angles to introduce to the matter. But I’ll also talk about other Gospels, like the Proto-Gospel of James (which in the Middle Ages was in some places at least as popular as the NT Gospels) and the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. One of the reasons this is on my mind just [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:38-04:00December 5th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Melito and arly Christian Anti-Judaism

I AM IN THE PROCESS OF MAKING THE PENULTIMATE EDITS ON MY MY BIBLE INTRODUCTION. TODAY I HAD TO REVIEW AN EXCURSUS ON EARLY JEWISH-CHRISTIAN RELATIONS IN WHICH I DISCUSS THE RISE OF ANTI-JUDAISM IN THE EARLY CHURCH, IN CLUDING THIS BIT ON MELITO OF SARDIS. I THOUGHT IT MIGHT BE WORTH POSTING HERE. ******************************************************************************************************************** Melito was a bishop of the city of Sardis in Asia Mino in the mid to late second century. Today he is best known for a sermon he wrote that lambasts the Jews for the role they played in the death of Jesus. In it we find the first instance of a Christian author claiming that since the Jews killed Jesus, and since Jesus was God, the Jews are guilty of deicide – the murder of God. This charge was used, of course, to justify all sorts of hateful acts of violence against Jews over the centuries. In part, the rhetorical eloquence with which the charge was sometimes leveled has contributed ot the emotional reaction that it produced. Consider Melito’s [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:38-04:00December 2nd, 2012|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers, Public Forum|

The SBL Meeting

I’m just back from the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting, which took place, this year, in Chicago. This is a professional meeting that always occurs the week before Thanksgiving, where professors of biblical studies from around the country (and less-so, around the world) come together for about four days to give and hear academic papers on an enormous range of topics related to biblical studies. Maybe 5000 or 6000 of them/us? The vast majority of people in that camp are themselves religiously committed in one way or the other (mainly Christian, fewer Jews); some of us are not believers but are simply interested in the Bible for historical, cultural, or literary reasons – although even most of us in that boat started out in our academic lives as believers. I read two papers at the conference. One was actually at a meeting going on in conjunction with it, rather than part of it, the Biblical Archaeology Society Fest – where they bring in twenty scholars, most of the archaeologists, to discuss with the lay [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:37-04:00November 21st, 2012|History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

It Has Arrived! Forgery and Counterforgery in Early Christian Polemics.

I have rarely – ever? – been so pleased with the appearance of a publication in my life. Last night when I got home from running some errands, a box was waiting for me, from Oxford University Press. It had my ten author’s copies of Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics. I’m very excited about it, like a kid who has just gotten a fantastic present. In my opinion, this is the best book I’ve ever written, years in the making. As I have said before on this blog, it is written for scholars, although a number of people have commented that it seems, from the quotations I’ve given, to be accessible to laypeople as well (normal people, as opposed to abnormal scholars). I’ll say a bit more about it in the next post, for now, I thought I would simply give you a taste, by quoting the very first, opening, paragraphs (without the footnotes): *********************************************************************************************************************** Arguably the most distinctive feature of the early Christian literature is the degree [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:23-04:00November 13th, 2012|Book Discussions, Forgery in Antiquity, Public Forum|

The Sense of an Ending

I am today taking executive privilege and allowing myself a hiatus in my discussions of various things academic in this post. I still have several posts I want to make about editing the edition of the apostolic fathers – especially about translating them – and I want to get back to what I was writing about before all that, as I do more and more reading of relevance to the topic of belief in Jesus’ resurrection. And I want to talk about the two book ideas that I have been floating to my publisher. But all that can wait. I want to talk about an amazing novel I just finished. So, as background information that you didn’t ask for. This past New Years I made some resolutions and oddly enough, in a rare event of history, I’ve actually been keeping them. I vowed to lose 15 pounds (I did, and still want to lose 5 more; but it ain’t easy!) (my daughter, years ago, suggested that if I wanted to lose my beer gut I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:22-04:00November 1st, 2012|Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Blog Preferences

To: Members of the CIA. And potential members of the CIA. And anyone else who wants to be involved. From: The Director of the CIA Re: Overt operations OK, so here’s the deal. A couple of weeks ago I published a post indicating how we were doing now just over five months into this blog. A number of you commented about the number of posts that I’m doing, many of you (not all) indicating that it seemed like a lot, and some (not all) suggesting that fewer might be better. That got me thinking. I wonder if some people are turned off by the blog because there is simply too much information on it, and it’s a drag feeling like one has to plow through it all. That, obviously, would be counterproductive for what I want to achieve (which is maximum subscribers, to raise as much money for charity as I can). And so it occurred to me: maybe I should simply ask you, the readers, what you would prefer. So this is a kind [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:54-04:00October 1st, 2012|Public Forum|

On the Blog Itself

I am taking a moment out from a hectic life (who *doesn’t* have a hectic life?!?) to think a bit about the blog, and how it is going. Here are just a few reflections. We got it up and running at the beginning of April, so we have been at it now for just over five months. My goals at the outset were to disseminate knowledge about the New Testament and early Christianity as much as was within my abilities, and to raise money for charities dealing with hunger and homelessness. As I’ve stated frankly before, it was the charity that drove the idea at the outset, and that keeps me going now as we are well into things. As much as I enjoy answering questions and dealing with hard (and not so hard) historical and literary issues involving early Christianity and its literature, if it weren’t for the charity angle, I simply wouldn’t be doing this. It’s too much work! In terms of the work, I think I’ve been averaging about 6 posts [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:53-04:00September 16th, 2012|Public Forum|

Another Take on Jesus’ Existence

Some readers have objected to my insistence that New Testament scholars, on the whole, do not take seriously the claims of the mythicists that Jesus never existed. I have always stressed that Jesus' existence is known (and can be demonstrated) by thousands of New Testament scholars. But I have also always stressed that scholarly consensus on this issue is not in itself *evidence* (my detractors among the mythicists seem to overlook this little point, when they claim that I argue that since the consensus says something it must be true; that's not my view at all!). At the same time, it is worthwhile knowing what the experts say -- whether talking about the age of our universe (13.8 billion years; but I wouldn't be able to calculate that myself); about the theory of evolution (Hey, it's just a *theory*! yes, but so too is the "theory" of gravity!!); about the forgery of the Hitler diaries; or about anything else that involves expertise. At the same time, it is worthwhile in all these cases to know what [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:39-04:00August 30th, 2012|Bart's Critics, Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Public Forum|

Sad News: The Passing of Marvin Meyer

Yesterday was a sad day for me and for biblical/early Christianity scholarship. Marvin Meyer passed away, the victim of melanoma. He could not have been old – maybe in his early 60s. He was a superb scholar and one of the most generous, affable, energetic, personable scholars you would ever hope to find. Marvin was the Griset Professor of Bible and Christian Studies at Chapman University and Director of the Albert Schweitzer Institute I knew about Marvin’s work for many years before I met him. He was some years older than me and was well established in the field before I showed up on the scene. I think the first work of his I used was his translation of Coptic Magical Texts. Coptic is an ancient Egyptian language, in which a large number of important works were translated in antiquity; in many instances, these translations are the only forms of the text that we have available. This is true of these magical texts that we have, which are fascinating and of real importance for scholars [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:24-04:00August 19th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Bible Intro: Nearing the finish line

I am happy to say that I have nearly finished writing the rough draft of my Introduction to the Bible; those of you who have been on the blog for a while know: this is a college level textbook (so, written for 19 year olds) for a one-semester course on the Bible, Genesis to Revelation. I’ve actually enjoyed doing it. In preparation I spent a couple of years teaching the Introduction to the Hebrew Bible course at UNC, refreshing my memory on the Jewish Scriptures and getting back abreast of scholarship, after I had not done much in Hebrew Bible for 25 years. And I realized, once I started getting into it, that some of the “knowledge” I had 25 years ago was given me by professors nearing retirement age who were, as a result, giving me information that was at that time 25 years out of date. So, well, I was 50 years behind the times. Not good. But I retaught myself Hebrew – which was fun; I’m still reading a bit every day. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:24-04:00August 15th, 2012|Book Discussions, Public Forum, Teaching Christianity|

Always Looking for MORE!!

Dear Devotees of the CIA :-), From where I sit, this blog is going very well. On average about two new members join a day. That may not seem like much, but at $24.95, a pop, over time, it adds up to some serious money for charities dealing with hunger and homelessness -- which is what is driving my efforts in the first place. But as I've indicated before, and will indicate yet again, time and time and time again, I want to do more and would like to see us be even more successful. Far more successful! I would like your help. I would like those of you who enjoy the blog to become shamelessly evangelistic for it, and try to get others to join. Those who join will get a lot of bang for their buck, and all proceeds go to charity. I have nothing else at stake in the whole affair: I certainly have other things I could be doing with my time (like, right now, watching the Olympics!) (OK, I've [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:23-04:00August 2nd, 2012|Public Forum|

So Much For THAT Idea….

My plan over the next three weeks was to write the seven chapters of my Bible Introduction. The best laid plans.... On the theme of "life sometimes interferes" I was presented yesterday, to my chagrin, with two tasks that require my attention, right away. Both of them unpleasant. Ugh. As I have indicated on this blog, I have a couple of books in the publication pipeline. One is The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research, which I am co-editing with my friend Michael Holmes (it's the second edition; the first edition came out in 1995 in honor of Bruce Metzger; it is being published by E. J. Brill in the Netherlands). This book consists of a collection of essays on every major aspect of New Testament textual criticism, for scholars and their students who are already abreast of the basic issues in the field. The other is my scholarly version of the forgery book, Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics (being published by Oxford University Press). As fate [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:22-04:00July 29th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Public Forum|

Accessing the Squirrel

Some members wrote me to say they had trouble accessing the second (and most interesting!) part of the Metzger and the Squirrel story a couple of days ago. Sorry not to respond sooner; I've been galavanting hither and yon. The mistake was mine (I hit a wrong button when posting the story), but it has been corrected, and you should be able to access it now.

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:09-04:00July 24th, 2012|Public Forum|

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