Here are some spot-on questions from readers with (spotty?) attempts to answer from me....   QUESTION:  (Note: this is a question about my views on how early Christians appealed to their martyrs as evidence of the truth of the Christian message in order to convert outsiders.  The question is specifically based on the book called “the Martyrdom of Polycarp,” our earliest account of a Christian being tried and martyred for his faith) Your integrated model, developed over this series, is becoming clearer: hell provides urgency, miracles provide credibility, and martyrdom functions as miracle in human form. That is a coherent and serious historical account. But reading Polycarp’s response to the proconsul, I find myself pausing. The proconsul threatens him with fire. Polycarp answers calmly. He does not sound like a man under pressure making a difficult calculation. He sounds almost expectant, as if death is not the worst thing that could happen to him, but something closer to a threshold he is ready to cross. Your model explains well why that composure was persuasive to [...]

Here are some excellent questions I've received from readers of the blog that I'd like to share with y'all, along with my attempts at responding....   QUESTION: Do you think that the presence of mass suffering is not necessarily an argument against the existence of God, but rather an argument against the existence of a loving God? If so, what would a loving God be expected to do regarding suffering? Or at what point does the amount of suffering become incompatible with the existence of a loving God? I’m curious how you would define divine love in this context and what implications that definition would have for the problem of suffering/evil. RESPONSE: I think the problem of suffering becomes a serious objection to “God” when the suffering is so intense, so widespread, so gratuitous, so random, and so horrible  (as it has been from the beginning of human existence) that one can no longer believe a God is in charge. And so I'd say it's an argument against a God who is both [...]

Here are three quite disparate questions from readers (with attempts at answers), each interesting and together showing the kind of range of issues that are involved with trying to make sense of the Bible from a historical point of view.   QUESTION: I am at one of the hardest points of my life, the dimming of my faith. I have always been a person of faith throughout my young age, and I really want to keep that faith mainly because I want a better future for my son. However, upon the discovery of the contradictions, errors, and upon actually studying the difficult-to-digest parts of the Bible, I do not know what to think anymore. I still pray and read the Bible, but it’s like the house is slowly crumbling down; I can’t even read without being critical of the text. I know your position regarding faith, but also know that you have many friends and family members who still hold faith. How do they do it? How do they keep faith despite the facts mentioned [...]

More interesting questions for readers -- including issues connected with miracles...   QUESTION: I have a question about the epistemological limits of historical inquiry—one that I have long wondered about without finding a clear answer. My understanding is that historians work with surviving evidence and attempt to reconstruct what most probably happened. Because historical method generally operates with methodological naturalism, events such as miracles—for example, the resurrection—appear either extremely improbable or methodologically excluded within historical analysis, at least methodologically speaking. If this is the case, theology (or faith) seems to operate on a different explanatory level, allowing for the possibility that events beyond currently known natural laws may occur. This raises a question for me: if historical method assumes methodological naturalism in advance, how can it fairly evaluate historical claims whose very content is supernatural without narrowing the range of possible conclusions beforehand? Related to this, I wonder whether historical reasoning itself—because it relies heavily on probability and patterns derived from repeated experience—may face limits when addressing singular events in the past. [...]

Readers have given me some tough nuts to crack:  Problems with proving the resurrection and with knowing if books of the New Testament may have been scissored and pasted together.  Here are intriguing and important questions I've received, with my attempts to answer them.   QUESTION: When I first began to read Bart’s Blog, he was just pointing out textual errors. Now it seems he is trying to destroy Christianity. Christianity lives or dies by the resurrection. That is our hope. Without the resurrection of Jesus Christ we have no hope. In those days, history and events were passed down verbally and by the written word. What was the incentive to pass down a bunch of hoaxes? I can’t think of any, maybe some of the readers can. RESPONSE: I'm afraid you misunderstand me.  I am not saying Jesus was or was not raised from the dead.  I'm saying the Christian claim that he was raised from the dead is a matter of faith, not historical demonstration.  That's very different from trying [...]

Here are some of the excellent questions I've been receiving recently, and attempts to respond to them!     QUESTION: I understand why the problem of evil makes belief in God difficult. When you look honestly at suffering, it weighs heavily. I don’t think that should be dismissed. But I wonder… if the existence of evil counts as evidence against God, are we accounting for the existence of beauty/goodness? Why does self-giving love move us so deeply? Why does forgiveness feel noble? Why does injustice disturb us so profoundly? And what about beauty… music that stirs something almost sacred in us, acts of courage that restore our faith in humanity, moments of kindness that feel bigger than mere biology? If suffering makes us question whether a good God exists, could goodness point in the opposite direction? I’m not saying this solves the problem of evil. It doesn’t. But I do wonder whether we weigh only the darkness and forget the light. Maybe there’s something else to consider too: when we respond to evil by creating [...]

Among the questions I have received from readers recently have been a couple that deal with a crucial issue connected with both the canonical and apocryphal Gospels.  How much of these accounts was simply “made up” – so they are interesting legends, perhaps, but not historical?  And what sources of information did the authors have for their accounts?  And is there some way to know the authors were reliable investigators and/or that their sources were accurate (think… the Gospel of Luke!)   QUESTION (about made-up stories in the Gospels): Do you think some early Christians simply invented such stories, like the boy bitten by an asp and Jesus healing him, or did they evolve over time? For example, someone speculates, “Could Jesus heal when he was just a boy? What if a friend was bitten by an asp?” And they discuss it. And that discussion is shared with others, and over time it is taken as an actual event? If early Christians were willing to invent stories about Jesus, does that tell [...]

Here are some of the intriguing questions I've received recently, and my attempts to answer, on the consistency of Mark's Gospel, scribal changes of 1 Corinthians, the problem of suffering, and how to study the NT without knowing Greek.   QUESTION: Mark has his Jesus explaining and predicting that he will be betrayed, handed over to his enemies, greatly suffer and be killed. And he tells his disciples several times that all these things must come to pass. But then when Jesus is handed over, suffers and is rejected Mark has him cry out “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!” Whether this is a reference to Daniel or not, Mark clearly seems to be portraying Jesus as having genuinely felt forsaken and abandoned. But how can he when he knew this was all going to happen and that it was necessary to fulfill God’s will? Was Mark just hoping we’d forget about an earlier part of his story? Was he making a point other than Jesus psychological state? Was the climax of his story more important to [...]

QUESTION: You seem reluctant to view any of the early major figures in Christianity (Jesus, Paul, the author of Revelation) as endorsing the idea of eternal torment for the damned. Who do you think is the first figure in Christianity to endorse the idea unambiguously?   RESPONSE: Yes, I try to show in my book Heaven and Hell that none of these figures subscribed to the idea of eternal torment.  They talk about the ultimate punishment as "destruction" and "annihilation" rather than torture.  They do call it an "eternal” punishment, but that is because it will never be reversed (not that it will be eternal conscious torment). We don't know who first among the Christians came to the view of eternal torment; it starts finding expression at least by the time of the writing of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, which is often said to have been from around 155 CE or so, but may have been written some decades later.  By the third century eternal torment was starting to become the standard Christian view.  (it [...]

Here are some of the intriguing questions I've received recently: a number on how Jesus came into the world and the theology of the Gospel of John.   QUESTION: In your opinion, why did Paul say Jesus was “born of a woman” (Galatians 4:4)? To my memory it seems unique in the entire Bible, and unnecessary. Why would anyone talking about anyone feel the need to say that person was born of a woman? Should it not be a given? RESPONSE: Yup, in isolation it seems a very odd thing to say.  How ELSE would he have been born?  But it makes better sense in its literary context (Gal. 4:1-7).  Paul indicates that we ourselves were "children" enslaved to foreign powers; God sent his own son who was not just his son but the child of a woman, so that now with this child we could be adopted to be children of God and heirs of God.  Paul's playing with "son" / "child" language here.  Christ is God's son; a human's son; and [...]

Here are some of the really interesting questions I've received recently, and my responses. QUESTION: Bart, you have said:  “1 Thessalonians is a heartfelt connection from Paul to some of his converts where he tells them how well he thinks they are doing, urges them to keep on keeping on, reminds them to avoid sinful natures, and encourages to be patient now that some have fallen asleep, because the end is near.” It’s been a long time since I’ve read the book and I am struck with the passage  “…You suffered from your own people the same things those churches suffered from the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus…” “…the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus…”, in the earliest Christian document we have????? Dr. Ehrman, what are your thoughts on that? I didn’t remember Paul saying something so matter of fact blaming Jews for the death of Jesus.   RESPONSE: Yup, it's a tricky passage.  The important thing to notice is that Paul is talking about people in a region (around Thessalonica and [...]

Here are some of the scintillating questions I've received recently, on a range of topics, that I thought more readers would enjoy seeing, along with my responses.   QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman, I read a number of your trade books (inc. How Jesus became God) and found it really interesting that you showed the increasing exaltation of Jesus toward his current state of being coequal with God. Your book mentioned the “how” behind this exaltation process but I wanted to hear from you if you knew the “why”. Why did early Christians feel the need to exalt Jesus to that level?  Why not be content with understanding him as a divine servant of God (as what the Synoptics portrayed)?  Were there theological difficulties with limiting Jesus to a divine servant?   RESPONSE: My sense is that as Christians increasingly became amazed at the act of salvation Jesus brought they became increasingly convinced that he must have been even more amazing than they had first thought, and there was almost a competition among Christian believers [...]

I'm catching up on posting some of the very interesting questions I've received from blog readers.  This will take a couple of posts.  Here are three excellent ones, all going to the heart of what it means to engage in a historical/critical assessment of the New Testament.   QUESTION: Hey Bart, I have a question about the acceptance of the Deutero-Pauline epistles. If they were written while Paul was still alive, it seems like he would have said those weren’t his, and to knock it off. If they were written after Paul had died, it seems like his closest companions would have said that Paul had already died, the epistles were fake, and to knock it off – especially if the epistles were written years after Paul had died. So my question is, why were the Deutero-Pauline epistles accepted? RESPONSE: It was nearly impossible for authors in the ancient world to know which books were forged in their name and circulated, except by accident.  If someone in, say, Smyrna, forged a book [...]

Here some more of the excellent questions I have received from readers, and my responses.   QUESTION: Dale Allison has said that the word for buried in 1 Corinthians 15 means to be buried in a mass grave, tomb or stone cave but it does not mean in a shallow grave where bird eat the corpse.  Is this true? RESPONSE: The verb Paul uses in 1 Cor. 15:4, THAPTO, means to be placed in a TAPHOS, which is the place, of whatever kind, a corpse was buried or simply ended up in.  1 Clement uses it to refer to that dark place (i.e., nowhere, I guess) from which God brings people when they are born in the world (1 Clem 38:3); Ignatius of Antioch uses it to refer to the bellies of the wild beasts that he is going to when they rip him apart and devour him (Ignatius to the Romans 3:13). In short, it can mean any place that a dead (or nonliving) person "is." So, no, I don’t think [...]

Here are some of the more interesting questions from readers over the past few weeks, and my responses:   READER’S QUESTION Have you considered the angle that Jesus may have been a revolutionary Essene? This would explain his outward orientation instead of inward. I mean he fits right in with being a disciple of John the Baptist and has a very Essene worldview. A good amount of his followers were also followers of John the Baptist. Most of the points he makes, eating with tax collectors and sinners, doing things on the Sabbath, not obsessing over ritual purity. All of these seems strangely specifically targeted towards the essenes, which means he is very familiar and actively critiquing them. I am wondering if he could basically be what Luther was to Catholicism. As in Luther was a catholic and started a revolution inside Catholicism. Like on the surface it doesn’t fit but if he’s a counterculture within Essenism, it fits pretty well   MY RESPONSE: Yes, I’ve thought a lot about it and written about it. [...]