Reflections and Ruminations Archives - Page 10 of 30 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Did God Want Us To Have His Word?

In my previous post I said that, in my opinion, the best way to approach the “original” text of the New Testament – given the fact that we don’t actually *have* it – is to make a working assumption that we are pretty darn close, in most places, most of the time. I openly admit, and always have, that this is an *assumption*. But since it’s one that “works,” well, I think I’ll continue calling it a working assumption! And I’ll show why there are really very good grounds for it. But first I want to affirm strongly that the assumption is contrary to what most people think about the New Testament – both scholars and lay folk. Among virtually everyone else that I’ve ever heard talk about it, there are two views, one the massive consensus and one the tiny minority; and I don’t agree with either one. The consensus view seems to be that we really do *know* what the authors of the New Testament wrote. Deeply committed Christian readers of the Bible [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:31-04:00October 11th, 2019|New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

Modern Defenders of the Faith: Why Not Just Tell the Truth?

Next week I'm off to give a talk at an evangelical Christian conference that is dealing with contradictions in the Gospels; the other speakers will be explaining either why they don't actually exist or why they are completely insignificant or how they can be comfortably explained given ancient writing practices or ... or some other point that will assure their committed Christian audience that there's nothing really to worry about. It will be in Chicago and is called the Defenders Conference. I quite admire the organizers of the conference because they genuinely want to hear the other side from me. As y'all know, I think there are serious contradictions in the Gospel that cannot be reconciled or explained away, and these demonstrate that the Gospels are not historically reliable. I'm not saying (I'm NOT saying) that there is *nothing* reliable in the Gospels. Of course there are lots and lots of reliable materials in the Gospels (the key is figuring out which ones they are). But anyone who thinks they give a fully reliable account [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:31-04:00October 7th, 2019|Bart's Debates, Reflections and Ruminations|

How Can You Still Believe? Guest Post by Judy Siker

One of the questions I get asked the most frequently from blog members is how someone can possibly continue to be a believing Christian if they understand the enormous problems presented by the critical study of the New Testament. I always tell them that in fact it’s not only possible – it happens all the time. Sometimes they are incredulous, but it’s not only true, it’s so true that my friends who know everything I know about the Bible and are still believers often find the question / issue completely puzzling. They have trouble understanding why anyone thinks it’s a problem. As we learned from "Cool Hand Luke" (a great movie, btw, with tons of Christ-images), “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” I have asked my former student and long-time friend Rev. Dr. Judy Siker to write a couple of posts from a personal standpoint, indicating why/ how she continues to be a believer and faithful church person even though she is, at the same time, a critical scholar of the Bible. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:31-04:00October 2nd, 2019|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Is It Ever Right to Lie? Or Was It? Even in Early Christianity? The Relevance for Forgery.

Is it ever morally acceptable – even desirable – to tell a bald-faced lie? That was probably a topic covered in your Philosophy 101 course. At a historian, I’m interested in the question from an ancient perspective. What did people in antiquity think about it? In particular Christians. Did they think – based on the Ten Commandments, say, or the teachings of Jesus, that a person should never lie? Or were they quite lax on the matter? Or something in between? I was actually a bit surprised to learn the answer to the question. And as you might expect, the answer is complicated. My original interest in the issue had to do with forgery. A forger claims to be someone famous, knowing full well he is someone else. That’s a lie, that is, it is a falsehood told intentionally. How did forgers justify that? It turns out, there appear to be answers. This is how I dealt with the matter in my lecture on forgery given at the conference in Quebec a couple of weeks [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:30-04:00September 29th, 2019|Forgery in Antiquity, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reflections and Ruminations|

Why It Is Hard To Publish a Translation of an Ancient Text

In my last post, en route to discussing my latest attempt at publishing both a scholarly and a trade book on the same topic, I talked about how I took on the task of doing a new Greek-English edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library. At the end of the post I indicated that doing that edition was one of the hardest things I have ever done. There were lots of things that made it very difficult – deciding which form of the Greek text to use for each of the writings included (i.e. what to do in the many places where the manuscripts differed from one another), doing all the research in order to write up competent and relatively complete Introductions to each text, studying the history of research into various problems posed by the Apostolic Fathers, from the 17th century until today, and so on. But the hardest part was the translation itself. The Greek of the Apostolic Fathers is not incredibly difficult, as far as Greek goes. It is [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:12-04:00September 29th, 2019|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Approaching Birthday

I turn 64 in just under two weeks – October 5. I have to admit, for most of this past year I’ve had Paul McCartney ringing in my ears, “When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now…. Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64”…. As I get older, I think more and more about what I value in life, often with regrets for not always valuing what I now, at this point, think is truly valuable, but – for years and years – sometimes throwing myself into things that now seem so ephemeral and rather pointless. It’s not that I’m a particularly regretful person; on the contrary, I tend to throw myself into the moment with an eye to the future, is i.e., dealing with things I can change/do now, rather than being eaten up with things I can no longer do anything about. But most of the time I find myself narrowing my values and latching on to fewer things, things that I can truly [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:30-04:00September 22nd, 2019|Reflections and Ruminations|

My Conference on Pseudepigraphy

I have just returned from four days in Quebec City, attending a conference called “Regards Croisés sur la Pseudépigraphie dans l’Antiquité” – “Perspectives on Pseudipigraphy in Antiquity.” It was focused, obviously, on ancient practices of pseudepigraphy, the practice of writing a book in someone else’s name, claiming to be someone famous (while knowing full well you were not that person). In the New Testament, for example, 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus all claim to be written by Paul, but they almost certainly were not. They were written by other authors *claiming* to be Paul. 1 and 2 Peter were almost certainly not written by Peter, or James and Jude by their eponymous authors. And so on. It was a phenomenon widely spread in antiquity, among Greeks, Romans, Jews, and Christians. The conference papers were all about particular instances, and were never really about whether the work in question really was authentic (i.e. written by the reputed author, or not); they were always about ancient books that have already been known [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:13-04:00September 15th, 2019|Reflections and Ruminations|

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|

Why It’s Hard to Publish a Translation: Blast from the Past

In my last post in this thread, en route to discussing my latest attempt at publishing both a scholarly and a trade book on the same topic, I talked about how I took on the task of doing a new Greek-English edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library. At the end of the post I indicated that doing that edition was one of the hardest things I have ever done. There were lots of things that made it very difficult – deciding which form of the Greek text to use for each of the writings included (i.e. what to do in the many places where the manuscripts differed from one another), doing all the research in order to write up competent and relatively complete Introductions to each text, studying the history of research into various problems posed by the Apostolic Fathers, from the 17th century until today, and so on. But the hardest part was the translation itself. The Greek of the Apostolic Fathers is not incredibly difficult, as far as Greek [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:12-04:00September 2nd, 2019|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Did Superior Health Care Lead to the Dominance of Christianity?

Interesting question from a recent member of the blog: QUESTION: In the August 5/12 New Yorker, a review of a new book, “The mosquito: A Human History of our Deadliest Predator.” In this review, this sentence: “In the third century, malaria epidemics helped drive people to a small, much persecuted faith that emphasized healing and care of the sick, propelling Christianity into a world-altering religion.” I realize that medical history is not your thing. If nonetheless you’d care to comment, any warrant for this assertion? RESPONSE: I don’t know that I’ve ever written about mosquitoes before, either on the blog or anywhere else, but I have dealt with issues connected with ancient health care, and in particular with the theory that superior health care was one of the factors that led Christianity to expand to become a dominant (*the* dominant religion) of the Roman world. It is an intriguing idea indeed, and was a popular theory for a very brief moment, about when this book reviewed in the New Yorker came out. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:12-04:00August 28th, 2019|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations, Spread of Christianity|

On Producing a New Translation of Ancient Texts

I'm in the middle of discussing what it's like to publish a trade book for general audiences and an academic book for scholars on the same topic. The third time I did this involved a completely different situation from the other two I have described. One thing that was similar was that in this instance, yet again,I had no idea, initially, of producing a popular version, but planned simply to publish a work of scholarship. Only later did I realize that a trade trade version could be very useful. This scholarly book – trade book combination involved an edition of the apocryphal Gospels, the ancient accounts of Jesus words and deeds that did not make it into the New Testament. To explain how the books came to be imagined I need to provide a bit of background. Actually, a lot of background. This will take a couple of posts. It all started with a completely different project altogether, unrelated to the apocrypha. In the mid 1990s I was teaching a PhD seminar on the group [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:12-04:00August 27th, 2019|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Learning New Things

I am constantly awed by some fellow scholars,who have not just enormous range of knowledge about so many things but also an inordinate, almost insatiable curiosity. There aren’t many people like that, but I know some. At the same time I am regularly puzzled by people who simply have no curiosity about much of anything, who have strong opinions about lots and actual knowledge about little, who just don’t have any real curiosity or drive to find answers to anything. I’m not talking about the BIG questions of life (Why are we here? What is the purpose of it all? What should I be doing with my life? Etc. etc.) – although I do find it odd that so many people just don’t think about them. But here I’m talking about knowledge in general. People simply prefer to sludge through life without looking into anything beyond the headlines, without reading books, without finding anything worth looking into. I suppose I too was raised that way and was that way for the early part of my [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:59-04:00August 18th, 2019|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Who Is The Enemy?

This will be a very personal post, about being an enemy of the Christian faith. I’ve long been amazed, surprised, and perplexed about how, when it comes to religion, comments made in one context are completely non-problematic but when the (exact) same comments are made in another context, they are heinous and threatening. Some of it almost certainly has to do with tone and general attitude. But I wonder if it isn’t actually much broader than that. One of the ways I’ve seen this over the years is in the use of humor. When I was a conservative evangelical Christian at Moody Bible Institute there were all sorts of jokes we would tell about the faith or about our commitments or communities: just about Moody, we would call it Moody Instant Bibletute; or say we went to Moody, where Bible is our middle name. Or someone would say (with respect to the view that the “rapture” would occur prior to, not after, the millennium – something we were very big on indeed!) that he was [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:58-04:00August 9th, 2019|Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

My Current Research Projects, 7/2019

I often get asked what I’m doing in my personal research – both long term and, well, what is it I actually do during the day? It’s all related to the blog, so I thought I’d devote a single post to it, just a kind of overview of the kinds of things I’m working on. Right now, as it turns out, it’s a wide range. Tomorrow I’m off to Marburg Germany (I’ve been in London for most of the summer, so it’s a short flight) for an international conference of New Testament scholars, called the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas – i.e., Society for New Testament Studies. It’s an annual affair, mainly of Europeans and Americans, that takes place over four days, with major lectures, less major lectures, and seminar papers. The latter involves small groups of anywhere, I suppose, from five to twenty scholars discussing papers written in advance for an hour and a half each. I’m presenting a paper I’ve been working on for about a month now on and off, on the Katabasis [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:40-04:00July 29th, 2019|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Could Most People Write in Antiquity?

I am ready now to discuss in a couple of posts the issue of whether Jesus' brother James actually wrote the book of James, or if it was someone else wanting his readers to *think* it was him. To make sense of what I want to say about it at the outset (it will take a couple of posts), I've decided I need to re-post an old post on a broader and even more interesting question: who actually *could* write back then? Today most anyone can (just, well, check out the Internet!). But who could in, say, first-century Palestine. It seems so counter-intuitive that many people simply, without looking at any of the evidence, intuitively don't believe it. But the answer is, very, very few people indeed. A tiny slice of a minority. Here is what I said about the matter in the original post (devoted specifically to the question of whether Jesus' disciple Peter could have written 1 Peter). ************************************************************************************* In his now-classic study of ancient literacy, William Harris gave compelling reasons for thinking [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:39-04:00July 22nd, 2019|Catholic Epistles, Reflections and Ruminations|

Is History a Four-Letter Word?

Most people on the planet simply are not interested in history. I’d say that’s true of most American high school and college students. History classes can be dreadfully boring, especially with the wrong teacher -- and it is very hard to be a good teacher of history. In high school, I had almost no interest in my history classes. Names, dates, things that happened that had no relevance to anything I was interested in or what I felt like doing day to day. Ugh. But a good history teacher is a marvel to behold. There is so much about the past that is fascinating, and, of course relevant. And so, as it turns out, I’ve turned into a professional historian. Go figure. I’ve been thinking about this because of that debate I had on Monday with Peter Williams, a very bright evangelical Christian and a fine scholar of ancient Semitic languages who firmly believes that the Bible conveys God’s Truth, in every way, so that there are no mistakes of any kind in it. Peter [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:39-04:00July 19th, 2019|Bart's Critics, Canonical Gospels, Reflections and Ruminations|

Changing Your Mind. Or Not.

Two things have happened to me this week that have made me think rather intensely about the path I’ve taken in life, and how radically it has swerved from the paths of others who were like me at the age of 20. I emphasize “who were like me.” The reality is that the path I was on already at 20 was (now I see) extremely weird, and to outsiders looks more than a little bizarre. I was a hard-core evangelical Christian dedicated to ministry for the sake of the gospel. Not exactly what most 20-year olds (including any of my many high school friends) were doing at the time. If ever I want a conversation-stopper at a cocktail party, all I need do is say something about my past. Still, given that as my starting point, what happened next is even more highly unusual. And I was abruptly reminded it of it this week, twice. First, on Monday I had a radio/podcast debate here in London on “Premier Christian Radio” (it is the leading Christian [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:39-04:00July 17th, 2019|Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Was the World Created in 4004 BC?
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Why Was the World Created in 4004 BC?

Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reflections and Ruminations, Religion in the News

Why Was the World Created in 4004 BC?

Why was the world created? We appear to be living in an age where science no longer matters. As you may know, the English word "science" comes from the Latin term "scientia," which means "knowledge.: People who reject "science," well, what is it they're rejecting? We live in dangerous times. Apart from the more obvious examples of this rejection that you can find in the newspaper every day (involving a human-induced apocalypse of biblical proportions), there are still, of course, a large number of "creationists" out there, who not only deny evolution (as a student now then will always tell me, with passion in his voice, "Hey, it's ONLY a theory!!") but who also subscribe to a young earth theory. The earth has just been around for about 6000 years. Really. When I was a fundamentalist I knew people who seriously claimed not only that dinosaurs and humans were walking around the earth together, but that fossils that appear to date to millions of years earlier were put into the geological record by Satan, who [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:20-04:00July 1st, 2019|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reflections and Ruminations, Religion in the News|

Flat-out Lies or Willful Ignorance. How Do They Get Away With It?

Sometimes it’s enough to make my blood boil. Maybe someone can explain it to me. If you were to interview the 7,346,235,000 occupants of this planet, you would find *no* group of people who declare themselves MORE committed to “truth” than the evangelical Christians. Evangelical Christianity, historically, is about nothing other than the Truth. Jesus himself said “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no one comes to the Father except by me” (John 14:6); and “You shall know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free” (John 8:32). The Christian faith, for these people, is all about finding the Truth that leads to eternal life. So why do so many of their spokespersons simply tell lies? Or at least propagate willful ignorance? Those are the two choices: they either know what they’re saying is absolutely false or they don’t go to the bother of finding out, when the information is readily available to anyone who wants to take 38 seconds to look for it. I don’t get it. Well, OK, I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:20-04:00June 26th, 2019|Bart's Critics, Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

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