Reader’s Questions Archives - Page 6 of 30 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Why Do Smart People Make Stupid Arguments?

I’m always puzzled about why smart people make (and believe) such stupid arguments. We see this all the time, of course, in political discourse and family disagreements, not to mention department meetings, but since my field is religious studies I hear it the most in connection with the great religions of the world. Actually, I guess I find it less puzzling than aggravating. A lot of conservative Christians get upset with me when I push them for evidence for their views, and so I thought I should devote this post to give equal share time to other religions whose self-appointed representatives send me proofs of the superiority of their views, based on hard “evidence.” It is really difficult to believe that someone can actually be persuaded by these claims. Let me stress, I am NOT (repeat NOT) saying anything negative about any of these religions – in this case Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. I’m decidedly not. I’m saying something negative about very bad arguments used to “prove” their inherent superiority to one another. I will [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:48:02-04:00February 9th, 2020|Bart's Critics, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Rapid Fire Questions and Answers on Biblical Manuscripts

I recently responded to a request from a European journalist writing an article about how we got the Bible and what we can say about the collection and illicit sale of manuscripts. When I get these requests, I'm usually tempted to send back a list of books and tell them to do some homework. But, well, they have deadlines and it ain't gonna happen. So I went ahead and gave some brief answers to some rather important questions. I thought blog readers might enjoy this kind of very condensed (but very simple) exchange. Here are it is, questions in black, responses in red. ******************************************************************************** -Why do you think that some apocryphal books were not included in the Bible? What was the selection criteria? Do you know when the Bible like we know today were completed? Church father debated for centuries which books to include. The side that “won” the debate applied several criteria: The rest of this post is available to all blog members. You too could be among the chosen few, and growing. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:48:01-04:00January 29th, 2020|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

Problems with Thinking That Luke Wrote Luke (and Acts)

I continue now with my discussion of whether one of Paul's traveling companions wrote the account of his life in the book of Acts, and thus, by association, the Gospel of Luke. It turns out to be a really sticky problem -- one of those that can't be solved simply by looking at a couple of verses and applying some basic logic. In my previous post I gave the logic that is typically adduced for thinking that the Luke was probably written by Luke, the gentile physician who was a companion of Paul for part of his missionary journeys. The short story, in sum: the author of Luke also wrote the book of Acts; the book of Acts in four places talks about what “we” (companions with Paul) were doing; both books were therefore written by one of Paul’s companions; Acts and Luke appear to have a gentile bias; only three of Paul’s companions were known to be gentiles (Colossians 4:7-14); Luke there is a gentile physician; Luke-Acts appears to have an enhanced interest in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:44-04:00January 8th, 2020|Acts of the Apostles, Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Did “Luke” Really Write Luke? And the book of Acts?

Here is an important question that I received recently, which I’ve addressed long ago on the blog, before living memory. Time to address it again! The basic issue: isn’t there good evidence that the book of Acts, which describes the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman world, especially through the missionary efforts of Paul, was written by an eyewitness, an actual traveling companion of Paul who was with him for a number of his endeavors? (Whoever the author is, he wrote the Gospel of Luke as well – so he wrote more words than any other author of the New Testament! Even more than Paul.) Here’s the question and the beginning of a response, the totality of which will take two or three posts. In this beginning, I explain how the tradition started that the author was someone named “Luke” the traveling companion of Paul. ******************************************************************************* QUESTION: Acts mentions Luke as a traveling companion with Paul. And in areas where it appears the Luke joined Paul, Acts point-of-view changes from “he” to “we”, and then [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:44-04:00January 5th, 2020|Acts of the Apostles, Reader’s Questions|

Misunderstandings???

Some blog readers have had a misunderstanding. The blog post on Jan. 2, 2021 on Why Do Christians Try To Convert People was written by *me*, not John Loftus. I'm not sure what created the misunderstanding!

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:44-04:00January 4th, 2020|Reader’s Questions|

Was Christianity a Missionary Religion with No Missionaries?

Early Christians were bound and determined to convert others to their faith, as I indicated in my previous post. Or at least that’s what their literature suggests; I very much doubt if *everyone* was! But they certainly did convert people – within four hundred years a tiny handful of the disciples of Jesus’ uneducated and unimpressive disciples had become the official religion of the entire western world. The interest in making converts made this religion unlike anything else in the Roman empire (or outside of it). Now *that’s* interesting, and different from what we could expect. But what is also odd to modern eyes is that even though Christianity was evangelistic, there were almost no evangelists. That is to say, hardly anyone – so far as we know – went on a mission to other places to convert people, with one notable exception. So how did the Christians manage to convert millions of people? That’s the subject of this post, again taken from my book Triumph of Christianity. ******************************************** Christians then, starting at least with [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:44-04:00January 4th, 2020|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reader’s Questions, Spread of Christianity|

Why Do Christians Try to Convert People?
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Why Do Christians Try to Convert People?

Book Discussions, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Jews and Christians in Antiquity, Reader’s Questions

Why Do Christians Try to Convert People?

Why Do Christians Try to Convert People? I begin this New Year by addressing a really interesting question I received recently from a reader. It’s a question that has rarely occurred to most people. Today, we tend to think that religions are by their very nature interested in converting others to their views, that they are just inherently evangelistic, missionary, and proselytizing. If your religion is “the right one,” wouldn’t you want everyone to agree with you, so they too could be right, instead of wrong? Wouldn’t their salvation depend on it? That indeed has long been the view of both Christianity and (later) Islam and … well surely all religions, right? Uh, as it turns out, the answer is No. In the world that Christianity came into, for example, in the Roman empire, there simply weren’t such things as missionary/evangelistic religions. Huh? Then why was Christianity? Here’s the question I received. Why Do Christians Try to Convert People? QUESTION: Where/how/why did the new religion ‘about Jesus’ becomes – unlike most contemporary religions up to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:44-04:00January 2nd, 2020|Book Discussions, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Jews and Christians in Antiquity, Reader’s Questions|

Why Does Matthew Have the Story of the “Wise Men”?

QUESTION: My Bible group had a good time yesterday comparing Matthew and Luke's accounts of the Christmas story. One question that came up was why would Matthew relate the story of the Magi? RESPONSE Ah, it’s a great question and – as it turns out – an important one for understanding the Gospel of Matthew. The story is found only in this Gospel (But this time of year, who can keep ones mind from jumping to: “We Three Kings of Orient Are….”), and it is filled with intriguing conundra. For example, why would pagan astrologers from the East be interested in knowing where the King of Israel was born and come to worship him? Were they doing this for all babies who were bound to become kings of foreign countries? How does a star lead them to Jerusalem and then disappear and then reappear and lead the Magi not just to Bethlehem but stop over a *house*? How does a star stop over a house? If Herod really sent out the troops to kill [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:27-04:00December 26th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Why Would an Agnostic-Atheist Be A Bible Scholar??

Five years ago I received this question. I still hear it! And I would still answer it the same way. A question that makes a lot of sense in one way actually doesn't make a lot of sense looked at in another way. I suppose a lot of our questions are like that.... Here is the question and response. 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 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:24-04:00December 13th, 2019|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Don’t You Just Believe?

The following post is for anyone interested. You interested? Join the blog. You get five posts a week, each and every week of the year, on all sorts of intriguing topics connected with the New Testament and Early Christianity. QUESTION: What do you have to lose by having faith and believing that Christ was born supernaturally as a result of a virgin birth to Mary, that Christ performed miracles, that Christ died by crucifixion and came back to life from the dead, and that Christ went back into heaven in a supernatural ascension into heaven? I don't see any downside. RESPONSE: I get this kind of question on occasion. Usually when someone asks it they tie it to “Pascal’s Wager.” In case you’re not familiar with it, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662 CE), mathematician that he was, thought in terms of percentages and odds. And he applied it in a famous way to the question of belief – in an age when lots of intellectuals in Europe, and people they influenced, were having doubts about [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:07-04:00December 1st, 2019|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Setting Dates for the Gospels

One of the questions I often get asked on the blog is how we know when the Gospels were written. I've answer the question at some length before, and thought it might be useful to answer it again. Here's what I said years ago, and looking at it, I'd say the same thing again. In fact, I will. Here: **************************************************************************** QUESTION: How are the dates that the Gospels were composed determined? I've read that Mark is usually dated to 70 or later because of the reference to the destruction of the temple. Is this the only factor that leads scholars to conclude that it was composed in 70 CE or later or are there other factors? I've heard that Luke and Matthew are likewise dated aroun 80-85 CE to give time for Mark to have been in circulation enough to be a source for them. Is this accurate? How is John usually dated to around 95 CE (or whatever the correct period is) since it is usually described as independent of the other Gospels? [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:07-04:00November 26th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

Do Textual Variants Actually Matter For Much??

In light of my previous post, I thought I should address a question I get asked a lot. Or rather, a rhetorical question that I hear posed a lot -- especially by evangelical apologists who want to insist that even though there are hundreds of thousands of differences in our manuscripts, none of them really matters for anything that's important. (This was a perennial objection to my book Misquoting Jesus.) Is that true? I dealt with it many years ago on the blog, and it's time to address it again. ************************************************************ 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: The first thing to emphasize is a point that I repeatedly make and that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:06-04:00November 21st, 2019|Bart's Critics, New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions|

What Does the Name Judas “Iscariot” Mean?

I received a number of questions about Judas Iscariot from my recent post. I had dealt with many of these within living memory on the blog, but given their frequency, I think I should deal with them again. Here is one of the most frequent: QUESTION: I read somewhere that “Iscariot” was a version of “Judas the Sicarii” which as it was handed down orally got altered. Is there any truth to this? RESPONSE: Behind this question is a bit of rare historical knowledge. In Jesus' day there was a group of Jewish insurrectionists supporting a violent overthrow of the Roman occupancy who were called "Sicarii" -- literally "people who wield daggers." They had a reputation for mingling in a crowd and stealing up to an aristocrat and killing him with a dagger, mixing in then with everyone else and escaping. The name Iscariot is very odd and no one really knows what it means. Could it mean that Judas was actually a zealot seeking a military uprising against Rome, so that when he realized [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:49-04:00October 28th, 2019|Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Can My Undergraduate Students Continue Believing the Bible is Inerrant?

Since my conference in Chicago last weekend I've been thinking a lot about the theologically conservative folk who really believe there can be no mistakes in the Bible. And just now browsing through some posts five years ago, I see someone raised a very interesting question about it, in relationship to my teaching at UNC. Here's the question and my response. I would still answer the same way today! 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 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:49-04:00October 24th, 2019|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Why Would Jesus’ Disciples Doubt the Resurrection?

I was just now browsing through posts from seven years ago, and came across this one, which is related to questions I get from time to time. It is an absolutely fundamental issue for Christian faith, but I almost *never* see anyone talk about it. Surprising! Here's the interesting question and my response (back when I was starting just to do work on the resurrection stories for my book How Jesus Became God). QUESTION: Are we to understand from this that some of the actual disciples, the inner circle, doubted? Is this the origin of the “Doubting Thomas” character in John? Maybe not everyone got a vision of the risen Christ? Perhaps these are hints that after the crucifixion some of the group ran away and DIDN’T come back! RESPONSE: This is a question specifically about the stories of the resurrection of Jesus, and it is one that I’ve been pondering myself intensely for a couple of weeks. It would help to have the data in front of us. The tradition that the disciples [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:48-04:00October 14th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

How Did We Get These 27 Books in the New Testament?

I often receive questions about how we got the canon of the New Testament. We have twenty-seven books in it. Who decided? On what grounds? And when? Here is a recent question on the matter. QUESTION I have always wondered about the men (only men!) who decided “this one’s in . . . that one’s out!” back in 325 (was it 325?) at Trullan, Rome, Trent and where else? Nicea? RESPONSE: The first thing to emphasize is that the most common answer one hears – an answer that seems to have become common sense among people-interested-in-such-things-at-large -- is completely wrong. It appears that people have this answer because they read it someplace, or heard it from someone who had read it someplace, and that someplace was a place in particular: Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code! (If you don’t know, I wrote an entire book pointing out the historical mistakes in the book. [title: Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code]. That was a particularly fun book for me to write. Some [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:31-04:00October 4th, 2019|Fourth-Century Christianity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reader’s Questions|

How Many Books in the New Testament Were Forged?

In response to the lecture on ancient practices of pseudepigraphy (writing in the name of a famous person when, alas, you are actually someone else), I received this important question, getting to the very basics – the heart and soul of the issue for students of early Christianity. QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman, I know you have published and spoken on the topic, but would you mind sharing which NT books are pseudepigraphical? RESPONSE Yes indeed, one of the reasons I’m so interested in this topic is that the use of pseudepigraphy, what today we would call “forgery,” was so much more widespread in antiquity than today, probably because there were far fewer people who were literate in the first place and so far fewer experts who could uncover a forgery; and those who could, of course, didn’t have our modern methods of analysis and technologies of data retrieval. It was very common in the Christian world as well. Before answering the question directly at the end of this post, let me just say something about how [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:30-04:00September 20th, 2019|Forgery in Antiquity, History of Biblical Scholarship, Reader’s Questions|

What About the Original Old Testament?

Recently several readers have asked me about the manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible; I talk a lot about the New Testament on the blog, but what about the Old Testament? Are there problems there too? Short answer, yes indeed. I'd say! Here's how I dealt with this in a post long ago, back in the days of my youth. Only one thing is different. I don't read from the Hebrew Bible every morning any more. I've gotten obsessed with classical Latin! Apart from that, everything here is still spot-on. Or at least what I would continue to say, which admittedly is not the same thing.... QUESTION: Bart, these issues you've found in the New Testament, have you studied and found similar issues in the Old Testament?" RESPONSE: Yes indeed! Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) was my secondary field in my PhD program, and I taught Introduction to Hebrew Bible at both Rutgers and UNC. A few years ago when I decided to write my Introduction to the Bible I decided that to do [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:13-04:00September 10th, 2019|Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reader’s Questions|

Some Pitfalls of Writing for a General Audience

As I was pointing out, scholars in most fields often have problems with colleagues who write trade books. It may seem weird to outsiders, but I explained one of the major reasons in the last post. Another is related: it is widely known that some scholars who start writing trade books never ned up doing anything else. That is, they become popularizers of knowledge rather than producers of knowledge, putting all their efforts into reaching the masses instead of doing any research themselves. Over the past thirty years or so this has certainly been true in the fields of New Testament and Early Christian studies. Scholars who had very promising careers as researchers making advances in their fields have written a trade book, enjoyed the success of it and, especially, relished being in the limelight, and have more or less (often completely) given up any serious scholarly agenda. They no longer write scholarly books, or scholarly articles, or review scholarly books for scholarly journals, or deliver hard-hitting scholarly papers that advance knowledge to scholarly conferences. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:13-04:00September 9th, 2019|Book Discussions, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Don’t More Scholars Write Trade Books?

This post is free for all readers. It can give you an idea of *one* kind of post you find on the blog, five days a week. Usually the posts are actually discussing what scholars say about the New Testament or the early years of Christianity; some are more like this. If you joined the blog you, could get all of them, each and every week, going back seven years. And comment on them. And hear me respond to your comments. So why not join? In my most recent thread I’ve been talking about trade books (written for popular audiences, rather than for scholars) and have received this interesting question, that I don’t recall actually addressing head on before. QUESTION: Why don’t more scholars try their hand at trade books? I agree with another blogger who said that the general public crave knowledge about technical and complicated subjects (history, science, philosophy, religion, etc.). Is it considered crossing over to the dark side?? RESPONSE: This is a great question, and one I think about [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:13-04:00September 8th, 2019|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

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