Reader’s Questions Archives - Page 14 of 29 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Is the New Testament Authentic? Readers’ Mailbag December 4, 2016

QUESTION Dr Ehrman, I found this attack against you: Bart likes to deceive his listener by claiming more variations and more copies give birth to less authenticity. Actually flip that and you’ll begin to “see the light”. The Bible manuscripts were transmitted not in a linear way, as in “Chinese whispers” but geometrically as in 1 produced by 5 others which in turn then produced, say 20, etc. I think you already dealt with this claim, but I am unable to find your post. RESPONSE I have to admit that I have a hard time responding to this objection because I don’t know what the person is talking about. Maybe someone else can enlighten me. For openers, I’m not sure what he means that I “like” to deceive my listeners – I think that must mean I do this a lot. And the “deception” appears to be that I think lots of variations in the manuscripts of the New Testament make something “less authentic.” But what does the person mean? Exactly what is less [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:22-04:00December 4th, 2016|Bart's Critics, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Does Paul Know that Judas Betrayed Jesus?

QUESTION: In your list of the things Paul tells us about the historical Jesus (he was born of a woman, he was a Jew, he had brothers, he had twelve disciples, etc.) one thing you seem to have left out was the fact that he was “betrayed” on the night he had the last supper. 1 Corinthians 11:23 says “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread,24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you…” Why haven’t you included the betrayal as part of the tradition about Jesus that Paul knows? RESPONSE: Ah, good question. Many years ago when I was first teaching I did include that datum as rather important. I don’t do so any longer any more for one particular (and, in my books, very good) reason: I think the word “betrayed” is a mistranslation of the Greek of the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:05-04:00November 12th, 2016|Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

What If the Mythicists Were Right: Mailbag November 6, 2016

QUESTION: It must be difficult going into these types of debates knowing that if Robert Price is actually right, your entire career would be pointless and irrelevant. I certainly don’t believe this, but it must have crossed your mind before? RESPONSE: This question arose from the debate I had a couple of weeks ago with Robert Price, on whether Jesus existed. Price argued, as you know, that there never was a historical man Jesus, but that the earliest “Christians” believed in a cosmic Christ, a mythical figure who lived above in the heavenly realm who was crucified by demons in outer space. This is the Christ attested, for example, he claimed, in Paul. But later Christians invented a historical figure Jesus out of this Christ, and the Gospels portray this fictitious figure that was simply made up. Jesus of Nazareth never existed. And so this question is whether I really can’t entertain this view as an option since, if it were true, I wouldn’t have a career. My career is based on the history [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:05-04:00November 6th, 2016|Mythicism, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

What Can We Do About Presuppositions?

QUESTION: Would you mind expanding on the issue of presuppositions, either in an article or in the readers mail bag? What are presuppositions? Why we all have them. And how do we make sure we have the right ones, or at least good ones. Having come out of Fundamentalist circles I heard so much about “presuppositions”, “worldviews”, “presuppositional apologetics” and so on. Seems the argument goes “Well, we all have presuppositions. No one is free of them. Therefore it is just as valid to come to historical and scientific issues with the presupposition that the claims are all true. Just as unbelievers come to the evidence with the presuppositions that there are no such things as miracles.” RESPONSE: This is a huge question (and a very important one), and requires a long answer. I can’t answer it any better than I already tried to do in my book How Jesus Became God. This is what I say there, in response to a particular issue, of how presuppositions can or should affect our ability to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:05-04:00October 30th, 2016|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Best Manuscripts and Social Justice: Readers’ Mailbag October 23, 2016

Question: When you say earliest and “best” manuscripts, what do you mean by “best”? Response: This question was asked in response to my statement, with respect to the famous story of the woman taken in adultery in John 8 (where Jesus says, “Let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her), that we know it was not originally in the Gospel of John in part because it is not to be found in the “oldest and best manuscripts.” And so the question is, “how do we know what the best manuscripts are?” It’s a great question and one that has, as you might imagine, occupied textual scholars for a very, very long time. In fact, for as long as there have *been* textual scholars (i.e., hundreds of years!) The problem, in a nutshell, is this. If we have hundreds, or thousands, of manuscripts (centuries ago we knew of hundreds, now we know of thousands), how do we know which ones are more likely to preserve the “original” [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:04-04:00October 23rd, 2016|Historical Jesus, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Why Don’t People See Discrepancies in the Bible? Readers’ Mailbag October 15, 2016

QUESTION: I assume that Bart Ehrman today when he reads the books of the New Testament sees large discrepancies between them. My question is about the precocious sixteen-year-old Ehrman, Did he too see this variousness (which opens up the possibility of inconsistency)? Or did it all as he read it cohere, seem of a piece, convey one doctrinally comprehensive and orthodox and uniform message? And if it did, how does today’s Ehrman think young Ehrman managed to overlook all those obvious discrepancies? RESPONSE: The sixteen-year-old Bart Ehrman who revered the Bible was probably like almost every sixteen-year-old on the planet who reveres the Bible. We were (and people are still now) taught that the Bible was the inspired Word of God. We knew that it was God’s revelation to humans before we had ever read a word of it. Even before I was an evangelical Christian I simply assumed it had been given by God. If that’s what a person simply assumes before coming to the Bible, then when she or he reads the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:47-04:00October 15th, 2016|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Anti-Judaism in the Gospels: A Blast From the Past

Four years ago now I offered up the following response to a question about whether the Gospels of the New Testament are anti-Semitic. Here's the post! ****************************************************************** QUESTION: It is in my understanding that it is of common scholarly opinion that the Gospel writers (at least Matthew, Luke, and John) were rather anti-Semitic in nature. Correct? How would you respond to that claim? After reading “The Origin of Satan” by Elaine Pagels, it is a subject that deeply interests me, and I would love to hear your professional opinion on the matter. RESPONSE: This question actually ties into some of the things I’ve been thinking about with respect to the stories of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and so it seems appropriate to answer it now rather than in a separate blog. I won’t deal with the question on the very broadest level, but will consider one feature of the Gospels that shows that with the passing of time they become more and more anti-Jewish. I should say at the outset that I do not think [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:47-04:00October 14th, 2016|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Why Don’t I Call Myself a Christian? Mailbag: October 8, 2016

I’ve decided to address two personal questions in this week’s Readers’ Mailbag, one about why I don’t want to call myself a Christian and the other about where the idea for this blog came from. If you have questions you would like me to address, either personal or dealing with anything having to do with the NT and the history of early Christianity, just make a comment on any post and ask them! QUESTION: I find it interesting that you and Lüdemann each create an extremely narrow rule separating Christians from non-Christians and then use it to exclude yourselves from Christianity. It is almost as if you somehow intuitively sense that you should not define yourself as being within Christianity, so you take up a narrow rule that “all Christians must believe in physical resurrection” or whatever, so you can declare that you are not a Christian. Not being a Christian is the goal, and making up a rule is the means. What do you think? Faced with similar dissonance, some others find a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:46-04:00October 8th, 2016|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Inerrancy of the Bible? And Those Who Doubt. Readers’ Mailbag October 2, 2016

How did I deal with inconsistencies and discrepancies as a young Christian? And why does the NT indicate that some of Jesus' own followers doubted the resurrection? Those are the two questions I deal with in this week's readers' mailbag. QUESTION: I assume that Bart Ehrman today when he reads the books of the New Testament sees large discrepancies between them. My question is about the precocious sixteen-year-old Ehrman, Did he too see this variety (which opens up the possibility of inconsistency)? Or did it all as he read it cohere, seem of a piece, convey one doctrinally comprehensive and orthodox and uniform message? And if it did, how does today’s Ehrman think young Ehrman managed to overlook all those obvious discrepancies? RESPONSE: Ah, right, my former life! When I was young and Christian – say, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two – I was already passionate about the Bible, but was absolutely convinced that it was, in every way, the Word of God. I never doubted it. And I never saw [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:46-04:00October 2nd, 2016|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Debate with a Mythicist! And the Book of Revelation. Readers’ Mailbag September 25, 2016

In this week’s Mailbag I’ll be addressing two questions, one about me personally – my preparations for the upcoming debate with Robert Price on the question of whether Jesus even existed as a human being – and the other about the book of Revelation. If you have a question you would like me to address on the Mailbag, simply ask it in a comment on this post or any other. ************************************************************************ QUESTION It seems the debate between yourself and Robert Price will be going ahead next month, right? I follow Price on Facebook and he has evidently been re-reading all your books in preparation. How much of his books do you intend on reading prior to the debate? How will you prepare for the debate? I’m really looking forward to it! RESPONSE Right! Yes indeed! On October 21 I will be having a three-hour debate in Milwaukee with Robert Price, who has two PhDs from Drew University, one in New Testament Studies and the other in Theology, and who is an atheist who supports [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:45-04:00September 25th, 2016|Bart's Debates, Canonical Gospels, Mythicism, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations, Revelation of John|

Fear of Dying etc.: Weekly Readers Mailbag, September 18, 2016

What is my personal feeling toward death? That's the first of two questions in this weeks' Readers' Mailbag! QUESTION: How do you feel about dying? Is that not in some part terrifying? And us losing our loved ones forever? How do you get over that? RESPONSE: Ah, how do I feel about dying? In general, I’m against it. :-) But do I find the prospect terrifying? I would say that over the years I have had different attitudes toward death. I suppose when I was very young, I hoped I was a good enough person to go to heaven. I was certainly terrified of going to hell. When I had a born again experience in high school, I became absolutely convinced I was going to heaven, as would anyone else who did what I did (accept Christ as their Lord and Savior) and believe what I did. Anyone else (i.e., most of the billions of people in the world): well, too bad for them. They are going to roast forever in hell. When, over [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:31-04:00September 18th, 2016|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Bruce Metzger Beliefs, My Loss of Faith: A Blast from the Past
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Bruce Metzger Beliefs, My Loss of Faith: A Blast from the Past

Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations

Bruce Metzger Beliefs, My Loss of Faith: A Blast from the Past

I mentioned my mentor, Bruce Metzger, in a recent post. In this blast from the past, I reprint a post I did almost exactly four years ago, in response to a question that I was then asked about how Metzger, a devoted Christian and minister of the church, responded to the fact that I (one of his closest students) lost my faith. The question generated a series of posts on related topics, but here is the one where I actually answer the question: Bruce Metzger Beliefs I have come now, by an unusually circuitous route, to answer the question that got me started in talking about my relationship with Bruce Metzger, my work for the NRSV Bible translation committee, my view of the NRSV as a translation, the textual problems of Luke 22:19-20 and 22:43-44 and, well sundry other things. The reader’s question was how Metzger responded to my loss of faith. When I first got to know him, I was a strong evangelical Christian. In the years before he died, I had become [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00September 12th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Does James Contradict Paul?

I have a number of questions that I want to address in my Readers’ Mailbag, but one particularly important one requires a rather long response, and so I dedicate this entire week’s mailbag to answering it. Here it is: QUESTION: Bart, what is your view with regard to Paul and James teaching on the doctrine of justification by faith – are they contradictory? RESPONSE: Ah, this is a perennial question among readers of the New Testament. I deal with it at some length in my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, in a chapter called “Does the Tradition Miscarry,” where I talk about whether Paul saw eye to eye with Jesus, with James, and with later traditions about Paul (e.g. in the Acts of Paul and Thecla). My answer about the letter of James may surprise some readers, who would expect me to find it completely at odds with Paul. Here is what I say in the book: ****************************************************** The most famous passage of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00September 4th, 2016|Catholic Epistles, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

How You Can Help!

Last week I asked you what you really liked about the blog and what you would recommend we change. I was gratified to hear lots of things people like and even more gratified to hear relatively few things that people don’t! I have taken all of your comments to heart and will keep doing things that seem to be working and try to change things that are not. My big concern in sending out my request for feedback was that our fundraising is not keeping pace with last year, at a time when I want to be doing *better* than last year! I did get a number of suggestions that were very helpful, and I thank you all for them. On my part, one of the things I will start doing (in addition to incorporating other changes that have been suggested) is saying more about the charities the blog supports. I think there is just a general, vague sense that “all the money goes to charity.” It would be useful, as readers have pointed out, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00September 3rd, 2016|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Am I A Better Person as an Agnostic? A Blast from the Past

I have started re-posting some of my posts from three or four years ago on occasion, at the suggestion of several people on the blog. Frankly, I don't remember even writing most of them! Here is one from four years ago, a response to the question of how losing my faith affected me -- did it make me a better (or worse) person? ***************************************************************************** QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman, I am still reading your book (God's problem) which seems to be very interesting since you are not interesting to gain any approval from anybody but only to communicate what you believe and where you are today. Congratulations for that…. Did you became a better human being after losing your faith? RESPONSE: Great question! Most people have assumed the opposite, that anyone who loses his or her faith must become a worse person. The logic seems to be that without a belief in God, there would be no grounds for morals and that people left to their own unconstrained devices would have no reason to avoid living [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:29-04:00August 28th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Were Jesus and His Followers Armed?

Were Jesus and his followers armed? That’s the question for this week’s Readers’ Mailbag. I had started to address the question when I realized that I had already said what I have to say as well as I could say it in my recent book Jesus Before the Gospels. And so I will give that discussion here. So, here’s the question and my response QUESTION: What is the scholarly view on this subject: did Jesus himself, his movement and then early Christians walk around with weapons (swords, e.g.) to protect themselves, despite preaching the love for enemies? Do we have any historical evidence of how things looked like in this matter? RESPONSE: (Taken from Jesus Before the Gospels) In all four Gospels, at least one of Jesus’ followers is armed when he is arrested. In the Synoptics, this unnamed follower draws his sword and strikes the slave of the high priest, cutting off his ear (see Mark 14:47). In John’s Gospel we learn that the sword-bearing disciple was Peter (John 18: 10). Jesus [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:29-04:00August 26th, 2016|Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

My Work as a Historian and Paul in Conflict with the Jerusalem Church: Readers’ Mailbag August 20, 2016

Some people (conservative Christians who don’t like my scholarship) maintain that I’m not a historian, a view I find very odd since virtually all of my scholarship (for well over twenty-five years) is historical. I address the question in this week’s Readers’ Mailbag, along with a question that many readers will find more interesting (since it’s more germane to anything), of whether Paul and the Jerusalem church were on the same page theologically or if there were tensions between them. If you have any questions you would like me to address in a future Mailbag, let me know! QUESTION: In a debate online a Fundamentalist friend said you were a textual critic and not an historian. I said you wore both hats. Do you also consider yourself a historian? RESPONSE: Anyone who thinks I’m not a historian simply has never read any of my books – including my books on textual criticism! The vast majority of my books are not even about textual criticism, but about the history of early Christianity (first to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:13-04:00August 20th, 2016|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Speaking in Churches as an Agnostic; and Jewish Beliefs about Afterlife. Readers Mailbag August 13, 2016

I will be dealing with two rather wide-ranging questions in this week’s Readers Mailbag: What is it like for me, a public agnostic/atheist, to give a talk to believers in a church? And what did Jews believe about the afterlife in the time of Jesus? QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman, do churches hire you to lecture on Christianity knowing that you’re an atheist? Do you ever get tempted to say, “Let’s be honest here. I think all of your cherished religious beliefs are baloney, but I’ll humor you for the next couple of hours.” That’s how I feel when I tell someone that they can accept the Theory of Evolution and still believe in God, even though, deep down inside, I know that Evolution and God mix like oil and water, so I simply humor them. RESPONSE: Ah, right, this is a good question. As it turns out, I do get asked to speak in churches on occasion. Sometimes, of course, it is in order to have a debate with a conservative Christian apologist. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:13-04:00August 13th, 2016|Afterlife, Early Judaism, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Does a Person Need the Holy Spirit to Interpret the Bible? Is John’s Gospel Accurate? Readers Mailbag August 7, 2016

Does a person need to “have the Holy Spirit” in order to interpret the Bible? And does the Gospel of John give a historically accurate accounting of the teachings of Jesus? These are the two questions I will be dealing with on this week’s Readers’ Mailbag. If you have any questions, simply ask them as a comment to any of the posts on the blog, and I’ll add them to the list. QUESTION: How do you respond to those who say “you can’t correctly interpret the bible unless you have the Holy Spirit” RESPONSE: I’ve never found it at all convincing that a person needs the Holy Spirit in order to interpret the Bible. As an agnostic, of course, I don’t believe in the Holy Spirit (since I don’t believe in God). But even when I did believe in the Holy Spirit, I thought that it was silly to claim that a person could not interpret the Bible correctly without the Spirit – for a couple of reasons that have always struck me [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:12-04:00August 7th, 2016|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Celibacy and Polygamy in the Bible: Weekly Readers’ Mailbag July 30, 2016

In this week’s Readers’ Mailbag I’ll be addressing two questions having to do with marriage: first, is it possible that Jesus was not actually celibate but was married and second whether the Bible allows for multiple wives and/or husbands. Hot topics! QUESTION Why do so many NT scholars (most recently John Meier) state as fact that Jesus took a lifelong vow of celibacy? Wouldn't it be more historically accurate simply to say that the NT is silent on the topic? RESPONSE I have dealt with this issue on the blog before but here let me simply give the brief version, by making a couple factual points and then making a specific argument Factual points: No ancient source of any kind indicates that Jesus was married. The recent “discovery” of the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’ wife” has been shown to be a modern forgery. No Gospel (or any other writing from antiquity) indicates or even suggests that he had (or ever had) a wife (let alone that he had any kind of sexual relationship [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:12-04:00July 30th, 2016|Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Sex and Sexuality in the Bible|

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