Reader’s Questions Archives - Page 19 of 30 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

More on the Name “Nazareth”

My post on the archaeological proof that Nazareth did in fact exist elicited a number of responses, some of them asking for more details – especially about whether the name of the town could have been invented by someone who thought Jesus was a “Nazirite.” I actually deal with that question in my response to mythicists in my book Did Jesus Exist? There I deal with the arguments of mythicists Frank Zindler and G.A. Wells. Here is what I say there: ************************************************************** Frank Zindler, for example, in a cleverly entitled essay, “Where Jesus Never Walked,” tries to deconstruct on a fairly simple level the geographical places associated with Jesus, especially Nazareth. He claims that Mark’s Gospel never states that Jesus came from Nazareth. This flies in the face, of course, of Mark 1:9, which indicates precisely that this is where Jesus did come from (“Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee”), but Zindler maintains that that verse was not originally part of Mark; it was inserted by a later scribe. In my view, this making a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:23-04:00March 3rd, 2015|Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Reader’s Questions|

On Debating a Fundamentalist

READER COMMENT: I just came across a post by Kyle Butt regarding your debate with him in 2014: http://www.apologeticspress.org/APContent.aspx?category=12&article=4844 He accuses you of “deception” and dishonesty. He says it is not credible that you spent much time writing books and going to debates, if it weren’t for the motive of convincing and persuading people that the Christian God doesn’t exist. He names you as someone who “has done as much or more than any single individual in modern times to destroy the Christian faith of literally thousands of people, young and old alike, across the globe.” RESPONSE: Wow. I didn’t know about Mr. Butt’s post. It is virtually beyond belief. If it weren’t so outrageously funny, I would find it completely outrageous. But look – maybe he doesn’t mean it seriously? I mean, his rhetoric certainly seems serious. But to say that I have “done as much or more than any single individual in modern times to destroy the Christian faith of literally thousands of people, young and old alike, across the globe” – [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:23-04:00February 22nd, 2015|Bart's Critics, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

More on Greek Numerals

A member of the blog, Douglas Harder, was inspired by yesterday's post on how to make numbers in Greek, to come up with a full description and chart of how it works. He sent it to me and gave me his approval to post it. I think it is very clear and interesting. So here is what he has come up with. (In my next couple of posts I'll talk about how knowing this information matters for understanding some early Christian texts, including a curious passage in the letter of Barnabas and, then, the 666 -- the number of the Beast -- in the book of Revelation.) ************************************************************************ Greek numerals Like the Romans, the Greeks used letters to represent numbers. An older pre-Hellenistic Greek alphabet had 27 characters, not 24, and this allowed them to create three groups of nine letters where the first nine represented the values 1 through 9, the next nine represented 10, 20, 30 up to 90, and the last nine represented 100, 200, 300 and up to 900. These [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:22-04:00February 11th, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

How To Make Greek Numbers (!)

QUESTION: Listening to your Great Courses lesson on Greatest Controversies: you say Alpha and Omega adds up to 801. How? Your lessons also refer to the meaning of 666, etc. Could you post something sometime about how the Greek alphabet was used numerically? I get Alpha as 1, but Omega as 800? Some lessons on Biblical numerology would be interesting. RESPONSE Ah, good question! And the answer is not one that is widely known. So it works like this. In English, we have different alphabetic and numerical systems. That is to say, we use the roman alphabet (a b c d… etc.) but arabic numerals (1 2 3 4 … etc.). Sometimes we use roman numerals (LXIV; CVII; etc.), but only in rare instances when we’re trying to confuse one another. Most ancient languages... THE REST OF THIS POST IS FOR MEMBERS ONLY. If you don't belong yet -- GET WITH THE PROGRAM!!! Most ancient languages did not have a separate alphabetic and numerical system. They used the letters of the alphabet for their [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:22-04:00February 10th, 2015|Reader’s Questions|

False Rumors (or lies?) About My Teaching

QUESTION: In my talks with my family I have referenced your work, and my family typically rolls their eyes and tells me that they hold no respect for your work. When pressed on why I have gotten different answers most of them I can dismiss easily but lately they have been sticking to a new story and it goes like this. “I have a friend from church who has a son and he as a faience who took one of Dr. Ehrman’s classes at UNC. The first day of class he walked in and asked if there were any Christians in the room. He then told them that if they were still Christians by the end of the course that they are idiots and would probably fail. “ So first off please let me know if you have ever said anything like this before and if so why or was it in jest? RESPONSE: I find this comment about me (from the person’s family) to be deeply disturbing and really offensive. It’s not their [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:22-04:00February 9th, 2015|Reader’s Questions, Teaching Christianity|

Non-Disclosure Agreements and the Gospel of Judas Iscariot

A number of people have asked me about scholars and non-disclosure agreements. This is tangentially related to the long thread I’ve just finished on the alleged first-centry copy of the Gospel of Mark. Scholars have told us it exists and that they have had something to do with it. We all *assumed* it was because they had actually seen it and probably studied it; turns out *that* was wrong. They almost certainly haven’t studied it and evidently haven’t seen it. Why do I say “almost certainly and “evidently”? Because they won’t tell us. And why won’t they tell us? Is it because they are mean-spirited? Unreliable? Boasters-but-not-doers? Liars? No, not at all. It’s because they’ve signed a non-disclosure agreement. So, what does that mean, and what do I think about it? It turns out that I’ve been in that boat myself – of having signed a non-disclosure agreement -- and later took a lot of heat for it, a few years ago. That had to do not with an alleged early manuscript of the New [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:05-04:00February 3rd, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Christian Apocrypha, Reader’s Questions|

How Accurate Are our Earliest NT Manuscripts?

QUESTIONS I have received the following three, interrelated, questions from an inquiring mind that wants to know, all of them involving the potential accuracy of the manuscript tradition of the NT based on what we can deduce from the early papyri. My responses will follow. In your last debate with Dr. Wallace, he seemed to argue, in part, for the relative integrity of the early NT manuscript tradition. He referred to p75 as being representative of other early NT MSS in that, while obviously the product of non-professionals, it yielded variants that were easy to correct, in the nature of "onion instead of union". Is this a fair characterization on his part of these early texts? What portion of these variants would indeed fall into the category of "easy to correct"? Citing Dr. Metzger, Dr. Wallace also claimed that Alexandria was one place where uncontrolled early scribal practices was not the norm. You countered with the letters of Clement of Alexandria as evidence against this conclusion. Could you please elaborate on this point & mention [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:04-04:00January 26th, 2015|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Whom Do We Admit into our Graduate Program?

So, now finally to get to the question I was asked, which led me into a discussion of what our graduate program entails. Here was the original question QUESTION: Can you write something about the background of your PhD students, how you selected them, what makes a prospective doctoral candidate stand out against the pack, whether there is a huge academic gulf between knowledge and argumentative skills of your undergraduates and research students. RESPONSE: Like all good graduate programs, ours is very difficult to get into. In a typical year, we will have maybe 30-35 students apply to study the New Testament/Early Christianity. We can normally admit only one, or maybe two. So competition is very stiff. All of the students who apply have undergraduate degrees, usually from good schools. A lot of them already have masters degrees. Most of them (the applicants) have lots of background in the field and one or more ancient languages. I tell prospective students that we look for a range of things in our applicants, all of them obvious [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:04-04:00January 19th, 2015|Reader’s Questions, Teaching Christianity|

The Graduate Program in Religious Studies

QUESTION: Can you write something about the background of your PhD students, how you selected them, what makes a prospective doctoral candidate stand out against the pack, whether there is a huge academic gulf between knowledge and argumentative skills of your undergraduates and research students. RESPONSE: Ah, this is an interesting question, and as I’ve thought about it I’ve realized that there are lots of things that I take for granted about the process of admitting students into our graduate program what would not be “common sense” at all to someone who is not deeply involved in the process. I’ve been admitting graduate students for 25 years now. (Occasionally I realize that I’ve never been out of school. After high school I went straight to college, which took me five full years; after college – in fact the next month, because I had to finish courses over the summer – I went into my MDiv program; after my MDiv program I went directly into my PhD program; and I started teaching at Rutgers while I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:03-04:00January 12th, 2015|Reader’s Questions, Teaching Christianity|

Matthew’s Ancient Approach to Scripture

QUESTION: (The following question was raised by a reader who objected to Matthew’s attempt to interpret passages in the Hebrew Bible as having relevance for Jesus – especially passages that appear to have been taken radically out of context). Here’s the question: Well then, the Christians of Matthew’s day did not read the OT very carefully at all. For example, when Matthew says that Jesus returning from Egypt was a fulfillment of Hosea 11:1 (out of Egypt have I called my son), did he not read the first part of that verse? It reads “When ISRAEL was a child, I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt.” Is this not clearly referring to the Exodus? How could Matthew (or whoever) determine that this referred to Jesus when it clearly states it is Israel? RESPONSE: Yes, Matthew certainly did not interpret the Bible the way we would teach people! On the other hand, he does seem to have interpreted it in ways that would have seemed sensible to many ancient readers. The puzzling [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:46-04:00January 6th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

Forgeries in the Name of Paul

QUESTION: Something I would love to see you talk about is how the letters we think were written by Paul differ from the letters we think were not written by him. RESPONSE: Yes, this is an all-important question, and one I’ve been interested in for a very long time. As many readers of the blog know, I’ve recently published two books on the broad question of “forgeries” in early Christianity, one of them written for scholars at a fairly dense, academic level, and the other for a lay audience (“normal” people, as opposed to abnormal scholars). In these books I use the term “forgery” in a very specific, technical sense, to refer to books that make a false authorial claim – that is, a “forgery” is a book whose author claims to be someone other than who he is, almost always someone famous. For the early Christians, these would invariably be the “authorities” who knew Jesus during his lifetime or soon after (so, Peter, Mary, James, Paul, Thomas, Philip, etc – we even have a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:31-04:00December 15th, 2014|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Why Do I Devote Myself to Studying the Bible?

QUESTION: The one thing that I do not understand about you is that you have stated you have lost your faith. That being said, how do you continue to work in your field? Have you ever wanted to redirect your academic career to study other subjects? RESPONSE: I get this question a lot. On one level I understand it: if I don’t believe in the Bible, why would I dedicate my life to studying it, researching about it, writing about it, and teaching about it? From the perspective of someone who has strong feelings about the Bible – for example, as a believer who holds that the Bible is the word of God or as an atheist who thinks the Bible is the root of all kinds of evil – it may seem like a mystery that someone in my boat would be interested in spending such an enormous amount of time and effort in studying it. Or from the perspective of someone who is completely apathetic about the Bible: why would you bother? But [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:30-04:00December 13th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Not the Gospel of Peter?

In my discussion of why the four Gospels were given their names, I hypothesized that it was because an edition of the four was produced in Rome in the mid second-century, and that this edition named the Gospels as “according to Matthew” “according to Mark” “according to Luke” and “according to John.” The trickiest name to account for is Mark’s. Here I suggested that the editor of this Gospel edition wanted the readers to understand that this Gospel presented the views of Peter; but he did not call the Gospel of the Gospel according to Peter because such a Gospel was already known to exist. This naturally led several of my readers to pose an important question. Here is how one reader worded it: QUESTION: If this hypothetical edition of the four gospels in Rome did not attribute 'Mark's gospel to Peter because the gospel of Peter was already known at that time, why did this edition of four gospels also not include the gospel of Peter? RESPONSE: Ah, that was a part I forgot [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:30-04:00December 9th, 2014|Christian Apocrypha, Fourth-Century Christianity, Reader’s Questions|

Do Textual Variants Really Matter for Anything?

QUESTION: I got the impression (I can’t remember where or if you said this… or if Bruce Metzger said it) that no significant Christian doctrine is threatened by text critical issues… and so, if that is the case, who cares if, in Mark 4: 18, Jesus spoke of the “illusion” of wealth or the “love” of wealth. I mean, who cares other than textual critics and Bible translators? RESPONSE: This is a very good question, and one that I get a lot. I’ve given an answer to it before on the blog, but since it periodically reappears, I thought that maybe I should give it another shot. The first thing to emphasize is a point that I repeatedly make and that many people seem never to notice that I make (especially my fundamentalist friends who very much object to my views about textual criticism): of the many hundreds of thousands of textual variants that we have among our manuscripts, most of them are completely unimportant and insignificant and don’t matter for twit. Why should [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:29-04:00November 29th, 2014|History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Why Don’t You Believe Like Your Teacher, Dr. Metzger?

QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman just out of curiosity, why do people pit you against your teacher Dr. Bruce Metzger? Did Metzger also find the construction of the originals impossible due to the late manuscript attestation and the inability to know what the original looked like? Or did your teacher, Dr. Metzger, disagree and hold to biblical inerrancy? RESPONSE: It’s a very good question and it has a very straightforward answer. The people who do this are all, to my knowledge, conservative evangelical Christians who find it upsetting over two of the things that I say: (1) that I am now no longer a believer because I do not think the Christian faith can adequately explain how a good and powerful God can be in control of this world when there is so much senseless pain, misery, and suffering in it and, completely unrelatedly (2) that since we do not have lots of early manuscripts of the New Testament (let alone the originals) there are places where we cannot know for sure what the authors originally wrote. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:29-04:00November 24th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Why Would Christian Authors Write Forgeries?

In my previous post I cited the box in the new edition of my textbook that explained how Christian authors may have justified themselves in writing “literary deceits,” that is, books that claimed to be written by someone else, for example, a famous apostle such as Peter and Paul (as is almost certainly true of Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, and 1 and 2 Peter, e.g.). Several readers have asked me, though, why a Christian author would *do* such a thing as commit forgery. It’s one thing to indicate how an author would justify such a deceit (the point of my last post); but why would he engage in the deceit in the first place? In my books on forgery(both the trade book Forged and the scholarly monography Forgery and Counterforgery) I indicate a number of motives that ancient authors (for example, Jews and pagans) had for producing their forgeries: some did it to make money, some did it to attack a personal enemy, some did it to authorize a philosophical [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:12-04:00November 4th, 2014|Book Discussions, Forgery in Antiquity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reader’s Questions|

Can My Students Believe in the Inerrancy of the Bible?

QUESTION: Do you ever get a student in your class who doggedly insists upon the inerrancy of the Bible? If so, and if they write their term papers in support of Biblical inerrancy, is it possible for them to get a passing grade in your class? RESPONSE: HA! That’s a great question! So, part of the deal of teaching in the Bible Belt is that lots of my students – most of them? – have very conservative views about the Bible as the Word of God. A few years ago I used to start my class on the New Testament, with something like 300 students in it, by asking the students a series of questions, just for information. I would ask: How many of you in here would agree with the proposition that the Bible is the inspired Word of God (PHOOM! Almost everyone raises their hands) OK, great: Now, how many of you have read the Harry Potter series? (PHOOM! Again, almost everyone raises their hand). And now, how many of you have [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:56-04:00October 24th, 2014|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Teaching Christianity|

The Bloody Sweat and Historical Plausibility

QUESTION: The following question was raised by a reader on the blog, based on my discussion of the so-called “bloody sweat” passage of Luke 22:43-44, which I maintained was not originally part of Luke’s Gospel (or any Gospel) but was added by later scribes. Here’s the question Even if this event of Jesus sweating, as it were, great drops of blood was in the original manuscript, one must wonder how the author knew of it. Luke 22:41 tells us that Jesus left his disciples and went off on his own to pray. Then, after his agony and the angelic assistance, he rises up and goes back to his disciples only to find them sleeping (v.45). And, according to V.46, “while he was yet speaking” he was betrayed by Judas and arrested. How then, did the author know what had happened? When I was a believer, such questions never occurred to me. They do now. A lot. RESPONSE: This is a great question. It reminds me that with any passage in the New Testament, there [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:56-04:00October 22nd, 2014|Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Writing a Trade Book

QUESTION: I am interested in your writing process, and want to know how much planning you do before you put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard? Have you planned the whole book? How detailed are the plans for each chapter or do you just work with a thesis for each chapter? I am speaking of the process you go through for a trade book. I assume the process for the scholarly book is a bit different, but if so, how so? RESPONSE: I get asked this question every now and then, and think that maybe I’ll devote a few posts to trying to answer it. I will focus my response to the question specifically of how I go about writing trade books. Writing scholarly monographs is a different kettle of fish, and more people are interested, I think, in the books for general audiences, since these are the ones that get read the most. So how do I go about writing a trade book? As a preliminary I should say that I am on [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:25-04:00September 3rd, 2014|Book Discussions, Reader’s Questions|

My Approach to Doing Research

QUESTION: You’ve told us about reading book after book after book before you are chose to write your book. I’d appreciate your sharing a little info on how you take notes during all of this reading. And how do you decide what to make notes on what not to put into notes? RESPONSE: Right – this is a very big issue for scholars in the Humanities, since what we do, for the most part, is read books and write books. So knowing how to read books is very important. In particular it is important because there are so *many* books to read (not to mention articles – there are even more of these). How does one master the massive amount of scholarship that is out there, on any one problem? Every year, for example, there are dozens of books and articles written about, say, Jesus, or the Gospel of John, or the writings of Paul, or – pick your topic. So if one has not kept up with scholarship on, say, Jesus, for ten [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:25-04:00September 3rd, 2014|Book Discussions, Reader’s Questions|

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