Reader’s Questions Archives - Page 11 of 29 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

What Is My Best Book for a General Audience?

I recently received this question for the Mailbag, dealing, roughly, with my own personal feelings about my “best” work. QUESTION: A mailbag question that I am not sure I have read your thoughts on; what do you feel is your best published work for lay people and why? Just curious! RESPONSE: Ah, this is a difficult question to answer. The books you write are kind of like your children: you love each and every one of them with every ounce of your being! And you’re not supposed to have favorites. OK, but people do. So there are three ways I look at this issue. One is, what is the book that is most useful for lay people? Another is: what is the book that most laypeople themselves have found most useful? And yet other is, what do I myself think is my very best book for lay people? I’ll try to answer all three. Before I do, I need to be clear that I’m talking now only about my trade books for a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:00-04:00January 28th, 2018|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Pontius Pilate: A Sensitive Guy….

QUESTION: Could Pilate have conceded over burial rights also? Granted this may not extend to those accused of treason, but as Pilate did permit some local customs, does this not open up sufficient space for Josephus’ claim over burial rights to be taken seriously? RESPONSE: This question arose a couple of weeks ago after I had returned briefly to an older conversation about whether Jesus would have been buried on the afternoon he was crucified. I tried to show that if so, this would have been in clear violation of policy and precedent. Part of the entire punishment for capital offenses -- especially crimes against the state (e.g., claiming to be a ruler of a people ruled instead by Rome) -- was to be left *on* the cross for days, as a public display, and a humiliation and denigration: bodies were left subject to the elements, the scavengers, and natural decay. The Romans wanted everyone to know that THIS is what happens to those who cross the power of Rome. A number of readers [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:59-04:00January 21st, 2018|Early Judaism, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Paul’s Views of Women

In this week’s mailbag I take up a very interesting question about whether there are other passages in the New Testament that are found in all of our manuscripts but that appear not to have been originally written by the author. That is, they were (possibly) passages inserted by a later editor, before any of our surviving manuscripts were made, so that they are universally attested, but probably not original. That is what I argued for 2 Corinthians 6:14 (it’s a standard scholarly view). And that prompted the following question: QUESTION: I hadn’t noticed the oddness of the 2 Corinthians 6:14 passage before, but it does seem out of place. Kind of like the woman-caught-in-adultery story in John 8, where the narrative flows smoother without that insert. Are there any other major examples of significant insertions into the NT books? RESPONSE: It is important to note the difference between 2 Cor. 6:14 and the passage in John 8. The latter is missing in our oldest and best manuscripts; the former is found in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:46-04:00January 16th, 2018|Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions, Women in Early Christianity|

Can Historians Be Neutral?

I received a number of responses to my post this past week on whether Jesus would have received a decent burial on the day of his crucifixion. One of the most interesting responses was not so much about what I said or thought, but about a much broader question: how can one evaluate arguments over such controversial subjects without being entirely biased and subjective at the outset? It’s worth talking about. Here’s the question: QUESTION: Re: the burial of Jesus or not: Do you have any suggestions for how to be objective regarding issues like this? Maybe it would help to first figure out where the burden of proof should be. Does historicity demand something like clear and convincing evidence that something happened–so that any significant doubts require rejection of the supposed incident? Or just that one thing is more likely to have happened than another? RESPONSE: I won’t here deal with the particular issue of Jesus’ burial, but with the broader issue of how one remains “neutral” or “disinterested” when trying to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:46-04:00January 7th, 2018|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Did Romans Allow Jews to Bury Crucified Victims? Readers’ Mailbag January 1, 2018
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Did Romans Allow Jews to Bury Crucified Victims? Readers’ Mailbag January 1, 2018

Early Judaism, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions

Did Romans Allow Jews to Bury Crucified Victims? Readers’ Mailbag January 1, 2018

Here on the first day of the new year, I was digging around on the blog and I found a post that I *meant* to make a couple of months ago that I never did. Don't remember why! But here it is. It is from the Readers' Mailbag, and about a very interesting and controversial issue: would the Romans have allowed anyone to bury Jesus the afternoon on which he was crucified? I think not, even though I'm in the decided minority on that one. Here's the post: ****************************** QUESTION: In Josephus's Jewish Wars he states:: “Nay, they proceeded to that degree of impiety, as to cast away their dead bodies without burial, although the Jews used to take so much care of the burial of men, that they took down those that were condemned and crucified, and buried them before the going down of the sun.” It looks like (to me) that the Jews were allowed to bury the crucified before sunset – how do you interpret this passage? RESPONSE: I dealt [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:15-04:00January 1st, 2018|Early Judaism, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Are There Cut-and-Paste Jobs in the New Testament? The Case of 2 Corinthians

How much of the early Christian writings consist of scissors-and-paste jobs, where later editors cut up earlier writings and stitched them together into one continuous work, so that what we have now are not the originals but only the final edited version? Are there books like that, for example, in the New Testament? In a recent post I mentioned how the early Christian writing called the Didache is that kind of thing, with three documents artificially combined into the 16-chapter book we now have. That prompted the following question from a blog member. QUESTION: It seems like there was a lot of “cutting and pasting” in early Christianity. It reminds me of how I cobbled together different parts of the World Book when I turned in my first high school papers. Do we know whether or not this kind of editing was a common practice during the first three centuries? RESPONSE: Yes, it does appear that we have other examples of that kind of thing in the surviving early Christian writings – including at least [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:45-04:00December 30th, 2017|Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Managing the Time! Readers’ Mailbag December 17, 2017

In this weeks’ Readers’ Mailbag I will be dealing with a personal question, one that I get a good bit (twice this week!). Here is how it came to me from one blog-member QUESTION: You should once write an article on time management. Unless you sleep only 2 hours a day, I can’t imagine how you manage to publish lengthy posts, answer all comment questions every day, read lectures at the university(including all the academic responsibilities there: quizzes, exams etc.), read books/papers (both scholarly and others) and of course write them! And that’s only the academic part of your life. That’s both amazing and mysterious! RESPONSE: I have to admit, I have a lot of bad personality traits (just ask my wife!), but I have a couple of good ones too, at least ones that help me in my life. For example, I’m an unusually good sleeper! (8 hours a night, at least, and all of it solid.) And without great effort I enjoy the many simple pleasures in my life (quality time [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:32-04:00December 17th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

A $1000 Challenge to Me: Did the Author of Matthew Use Luke?

As some of you know, a member of the blog, Evan, recently offered a $1000 donation to the blog if I would respond to the claims of New Testament scholar, Alan Garrow, that in studying the Synoptic Gospels, a completely compelling case can be made that the author of Matthew knew and used the Gospel of Luke. This is a view that almost no one in the academy holds. After a bit of back and forth – which I give below – Evan agreed that if I could find another respected expert in the field to respond to Garrow’s claims, instead of doing it myself, he would still donate the money. One of the scholars on the blog happens to be my colleague in New Testament studies at Duke, Mark Goodacre, who has spent the majority of his distinguished scholarly career researching, writing, and teaching on the Synoptic Problem. There is no one better to respond. And as it turns out, he volunteered to write a response without my even asking! Many thanks to Evan [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:31-04:00December 11th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

The Pope and the Lord’s Prayer

I have received numerous queries about the Pope’s recent comments about the Lord’s Prayer. There has been a good deal of news coverage on the topic. Here is an article from my local paper: http://digital.olivesoftware.com/Olive/ODN/NewsandObserver/shared/ShowArticle.aspx?doc=NAO%2F2017%2F12%2F09&entity=Ar05202&sk=CF05DD44&mode=text The issue is summed up in that article as this: In a new television interview, Pope Francis said the common rendering of one line in the prayer – “lead us not into temptation” – was “not a good translation” from ancient texts. “Do not let us fall into temptation,” he suggested, might be better because God does not lead people into temptation; Satan does. “A father doesn’t do that,” the pope said. “He helps you get up right away. What induces into temptation is Satan.” In essence, the pope said, the prayer, from the Book of Matthew, is asking God, “When Satan leads us into temptation, You please, give me a hand.” And so I have been asked by several people what I think about that. There are at least three issues involved: What should Christians today pray? On this, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:31-04:00December 10th, 2017|Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions, Religion in the News|

The Exasperatingly Fragmentary Gospel of Peter: Readers’ Mailbag December 4, 2017

My Readers’ Mailbag is stuffed, and I need to clear out a few questions to make room for others that come in. So I may be answering more than normal over the next couple of weeks. Here is one that I find intriguing: QUESTION If you could choose any currently-fragmentary or otherwise lacunose document from antiquity and magically receive a reconstructed version to read, what would it be? RESPONSE Wow. There are lots to choose from. I would probably come up with different answers on different days of the week, but the first thing that springs to mind is the Gospel of Peter, one of the most interesting of the ancient non-canonical Gospels. We have only a fragment of the book, which begins smack dab in the middle of an episode and ends, literally, in the middle of a sentence. To show why that’s so tantalizing, let me first say a bit about what the Gospel is (at least that part of it we still have!). The Gospel comes from one of the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:31-04:00December 4th, 2017|Christian Apocrypha, Reader’s Questions|

And Then There Was Q

After my post yesterday about the "priority of Mark" (the view almost universally held among scholars that Mark was the first Gospel written and that Matthew and Luke used it for many of their own stories) I received a number of queries from readers about the "Q" source. So I better address that as well. Matthew and Luke obviously share a number of stories with Mark, but they also share with each other a number of passages not found in Mark. Most of these passages (all but two of them) involve sayings of Jesus -- for example, the Beatitudes and the Lord's Prayer. Since they didn't get these passages from Mark, where did they get them? Since the 19th century scholars have argued that Matthew did not get them from Luke or Luke from Matthew (for reasons I'll suggest below); that probably means they got them from some other source, a document that no longer survives. This came to be known as the "Sayings Source." The scholars who developed this view were principally German, and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:15-04:00November 29th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

The Women in Matthew’s Genealogy: Answer to a Reader

Yesterday I received this question in response to a post: QUESTION: I have also heard that hints of the possibility of Jesus’ illegitimacy can be found in Matthew’s hereditary narratives. It is a bit of a stretch but Matthew names 4 women in them and all 4 are somewhat” loose” women, giving the hint that illegitimacy can still produce remarkable people. Any thoughts on this? RESPONSE: Ah, great question. Here is what I say about it in my textbook on the New Testament: There is one other interesting and frequently-noted feature of Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus (actually, not of Jesus, but of Joseph). That is the fact that it makes explicit reference to women among Jesus’ ancestors. That is highly unusual. Women scarcely ever appear in most ancient Israelite and Jewish genealogies;, which invariably trace a person’s lineage from father to son (or vice versa) all the way back through the family line; see, as I pointed out earlier 1 Chronicles 1-9. Where are the women? For ancient genealogists, as a rule, they were not [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:15-04:00November 21st, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

How Do I Read Books? A Blast From the Past

Here is an interesting and always germane question I received five years ago. I would answer the same way today! QUESTION: How do you go about reading books? Which methods do you use in order to read as much as possibile? How do make plans how much to read? Do you highlight things in books? Do you you’re your own comments? Summaries? Any other tips? RESPONSE: Ah, this is an interesting question. As it turns out, there’s not an easy answer. That’s because there are many different ways I read books, depending on what kind of book it is. I realize we’re talking about books dealing with scholarship – not Victorian novels! But I read different books differently depending on what it is, what it’s about, and what I want/need to get out of it. When I was in graduate school I had a friend who insisted that anyone should be able to read an entire book of scholarship every day. I had trouble believing him, but in fact it’s true. In fact, when you [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:14-04:00November 14th, 2017|Book Discussions, Reader’s Questions|

More on 666: The Number of the Beast: A Blast from the Past

My post yesterday about manuscripts that give the number of the beast in Rev. 13 as 616 instead of 666 prompted a number of queries. I'll answer a couple of them directly in my next post; but some people emailed me asking me what the number is all about in the first place. I discussed the issue a few years ago on the blog. Here is what I said. ************************************************************* This post will be the culmination of my thread that deals with ancient numerology, especially as it is based on the fact that ancient languages used letters of the alphabets for their numbers, making it possible to add up the numerical equivalent of any word. In this post I will explain how that relates to one of the great mysteries of the Bible, the identification of the Antichrist in the book of Revelation, whose number was 666. Yesterday’s post was meant as background to this brief discussion, and I’d suggest reading it first to make sense of what I’ll say here. I also need to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:14-04:00November 6th, 2017|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Revelation of John|

Were All Textual Changes Made by Scribes by 300 CE? Readers’ Mailbag November 5, 2017

For today’s Readers’ Mailbag I deal with an interesting and important question about the changes that scribes made in their manuscripts. QUESTION In several of your books you mention that most modifications in the NT manuscripts happened in first 3 centuries. If I’m correct we have no manuscript from 1st century and only few from the 2nd. That means we can say almost nothing about changes during this time. This is however more than half of the “greatest modifications” historical period. RESPONSE This comment is more of a statement than a question, but the question is clearly implied: how do we know (or why do we think) that almost all of the changes in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament as found in later manuscripts were made early in the history of the tradition, in the first three centuries, if we don’t have many manuscripts from that period to prove it? Great question. But with an answer that I think just about every textual scholar agrees with. To begin with: when textual [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:14-04:00November 5th, 2017|Fourth-Century Christianity, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Was My Weird Background a Help or a Hindrance: Mailbag October 22, 2017

In this week’s readers’ mailbag I deal with a personal question about my background and whether it gave me and advantages or disadvantages in my rather unusual line of work as a secular scholar of the Bible. QUESTION: Just as a matter of empirical fact, do you think that your religious background gave you any (intellectual) advantages, or disadvantages, in your work over someone who lacked that background? RESPONSE: Every now and then I look back on my life and think: Wow, now that was weird. Even though I’m a pretty normal American guy in lots of ways – at least normal as an American guy who is a professional scholar (OK, that’s already weird, but it’s weird in a socially normal way) (my normalcies: I have passions for football, basketball, working out, reading novels and nonfiction, traveling, the outdoors, hiking, family, kids, grandkids; I love martinis and cigars [both of which I enjoy much more rarely than I would like, since I’d like to enjoy them for many more years….]; I’m politically [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:57-04:00October 22nd, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Are Jews and Christians Monotheists? Mailbag October 15, 2017

I will be dealing with an unusually important question in this week’s mailbag: is it right to consider Judaism and Christianity monotheistic? QUESTION: Aren't Judaism and Christianity really henotheistic rather than monotheistic? For example, even in the 10 Commandments it merely says YHWH is the only god to be worshiped, not that He is the only god. And in Christianity there is the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, Satan, angels and demons, and in some sects, Mary the queen of heaven. And I would think all the pagans coming into the church would bring along their polytheistic thinking - perhaps that is part of the reason Jesus was elevated to the status of God. RESPONSE: This is a very good question, and as you might imagine, a lot of it comes down to how one defines one’s terms. One set of definitions involves the actual terms themselves. Normally “Monotheism” is understood to be the belief that there is only one God, no other; “Henotheism” is the belief that there are other gods, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:56-04:00October 15th, 2017|Early Christian Doctrine, Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Were the Disciples Martyred for Believing the Resurrection? A Blast From the Past

Here is an interesting question that I addressed on the blog exactly five years ago today, one that continues to be relevant and significant; ************************************************************ QUESTION: Another very very popular evidence put forward for the resurrection is “the disciples would not have died for what they knew was a lie, therefore it must have happened.” I hear this all the time. You note that they really believed they saw Jesus after he died so they were not lying. However, is there evidence (historical or literary) that they were killed because of their belief in Jesus’ resurrection? RESPONSE: Ah yes, if I had a fiver for every time I’ve heard this comment over the years, I could retire to a country-home in Maine…. Several other people have responded to this question on the blog by saying that we have lots of records of lots of people who have died for a something that they knew, literally, not to be true. I am not in a position to argue that particular point. But I can say something [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:56-04:00October 13th, 2017|Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Did Luke Have a Doctrine of the Atonement? Mailbag September 24, 2017

For this week’s readers’ mailbag I have chosen a question about my claim that the author of Luke-Acts, unlike other writers of the New Testament, does not have a doctrine of the atonement – that Jesus’ death brought about a restored relationship with God (for Luke, it was the *resurrection* that mattered, not the crucifixion). The questioner sets up the question with an important observation. I suspect my answer will not be what he expected. QUESTION: I have spent a lot of time looking in the gospels for teachings on the atonement. I could only find 5 passages (really more like 2, because they are parallel). Mt 20:28/Mk 10:45 Jesus life as a ransom for many Luke leaves this part out of the story Mt 26:28--this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. Mk 14:24--This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Lk 22:20 This cup that is poured out for you is the new [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:40-04:00September 24th, 2017|Acts of the Apostles, Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

What Did the Angels Tell the Shepherds? It Depends. Mailbag Sept. 10, 2017

I will be dealing with an interesting question in this week’ Readers’ Mailbag, having to do with the translation of the New Testament from Greek into English. It involves a problem with a familiar verse (recited every Christmas!) that has a textual problem: different manuscripts have different readings – involving a single letter! – that affect the translation. QUESTION: A lot of different hymns and liturgies and suchlike make reference to or paraphrase the Gloria, which in turn is based on Luke 2:14. I’d always heard (various permutations of) two different versions: “Glory to God in the highest and on Earth peace to men of good will” and “Glory to God in the highest and on Earth peace, goodwill to men”. That is, of course, quite a significant difference in meaning. The Latin is “Gloria in excelsis Deo et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis”, which I understand is is unambiguously “…men of good will”. Unfortunately, I don’t read a word of Greek; the text of the Gloria I found online was Δόξα ἐν [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:23-04:00September 10th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

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