Reflections and Ruminations Archives - Page 11 of 30 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Being Willing to Accept the Truth

Here I’d like to add just a couple of more reflections on whether critical scholars *have* to claim there are contradictions in the Bible because of their beliefs. As I tried to state as strongly as I could in my previous post, I think the answer is absolutely not. To begin with, let me stress that I started learning about serious contradictions when I was in a Christian theological seminary taking biblical studies courses with committed Christian teachers who were devoted to the church. But they were also scholars and refused to accept fundamentalist understandings of the Bible. Their theology was much more sophisticated than the simple “The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it” mentality I had grown up on. These were incredibly intelligent and learned scholars intimately familiar with the texts in Greek and Hebrew and massively well-read in scholarship going back centuries in various modern languages. They didn’t accept easy answers and pushed their students to realize that knowing what the New Testament really is, as opposed to what [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:01-04:00May 21st, 2019|Bart's Debates, Canonical Gospels, Reflections and Ruminations|

Do My Biases Mean I Have to Find Contradictions?

I have now had a week to reflect on my debate with Matthew Firth about whether there are contradictions in the Bible. Now I’d like to give my personal reactions. I don’t mean for this to be a continuation of the debate per se -- I won’t be adducing more evidence or counter-evidence. But I thought it might be helpful to put some thoughts on paper (well, on screen) about what a debate like this can show or at least did show, in my opinion. Matthew is on the blog and he’s perfectly welcome to comment on these posts or even to respond with one or more posts of his own, giving his own second-level reflections. So here are mine. Since I’d like to flesh these out at some length (since they might be helpful for others thinking generally about their view of the Bible and what constitutes a contradiction), this will take several posts. I begin with the question of whether either of us have a particular agenda/bias that more or less require us [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:01-04:00May 20th, 2019|Bart's Debates, Reflections and Ruminations|

Judging the Debate!

Now that my debate with Matthew Firth over the contradictions in the Gospels has ended, I would like to know your reactions. Any reactions are fine. There is the obvious question of which side you found more convincing, but also the less obvious question of why that is. What about the argument, or counter-argument, was compelling or not compelling? Part of the problem, of course, is that virtually everyone listening in on the debate already had a pretty firm idea of what they think about the issues. And because of “confirmation bias” we tend to agree with what we already think, and anyone who says it is obviously right! (Hence the problem with most viewers of both FOX and MSNBC.) But for my money, the most interesting responses come from people who have changed their minds. Still, in all the public debates I’ve had, in front of many thousands of people, I almost never have heard of anyone changing their mind. So what’s the point? I often ask myself that! And often I ask it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:00-04:00May 15th, 2019|Bart's Debates, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Early Christian Liars

Yesterday I started explaining in some depth how forgers in early Christianity – that is, authors who falsely claimed to be, say, Peter or Paul or James (as in the case of the authors of 2 Peter, 1 Timothy, the Proto-Gospel of James, etc.) – could justify their lies. I need to stress, the idea that they were lying is not just a modern one. The ancients talk about forgery a good deal; they never approve of it and they explicitly called it lying. Yet people did it, producing forgeries far more often than happens today. How did they live with themselves – especially those Christians who insisted that nothing was more important than “truth”? I pointed out yesterday that there were very broadly speaking two views of lying in early Christainity: 1) that it was sometimes acceptable; 2) it was never acceptable in any circumstance whatsoever. It’s not hard to see where forgers lined up on the spectrum. Here I continue the discussion, repeating the final paragraph of yesterday’s post for context. This is [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:40-04:00May 7th, 2019|Forgery in Antiquity, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Could Christian Forgers Justifying Lying?

Yesterday, in response to a question, I started to discuss the age-old problem of literary forgery (authors lying about their true identity), and specifically the question of why Christians would engage in it. In my two books on the topic I spend considerable time trying to demonstrate that forgery was indeed understood – in antiquity – to involve lying, and that the authors who claimed (falsely) to be Plato or Galen or Peter or Paul knew they were lying. But why would they do that? Especially the Christians? Here is a fuller answer that I give at the end of my book: Forged: Writing in the Name of God. It follows a discussion of a number of modern (mainly 19th century) forgeries of Gospels, including the ones that claim that, for example, Jesus went to India as a young man to learn the ways of the Brahmins…. ************************************************************** Christian Forgeries, Lies, and Deceptions This issue of modern hoaxes brings me back to a question that I have repeatedly asked in my study of forgeries: [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:39-04:00May 6th, 2019|Forgery in Antiquity, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Contradictions and Contradictions: Final Response to Matt Firth

Matt: thanks for your additional comments. I’ve given my replies below. At the outset I should say that I’m not sure I understand what a “genuine contradiction” would look like for you. If you have two authors who at least appear to contradict each other, surely the best explanation will not be one that: Suggests an author / speaker really doesn’t mean what he says but means something else. Suggests an option that has never ever happened, to our knowledge. With that in mind, I turn to your new explanations. I’ll respond in green. Thanks very much, Bart, for these interesting responses. I will get straight into explaining why I still don’t think you have shown that the examples you have offered are genuine contradictions. In the case of Luke 24 you say that the grammar of the Greek indicates that ‘Luke is extremely careful to date the entire sequence of chapter 24, at the beginning of each major paragraph. It all happens on the day of the resurrection.’ But we know from Acts, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:39-04:00May 3rd, 2019|Bart's Debates, Canonical Gospels, Reflections and Ruminations|

Similarities and Differences: Which Matter the Most?

I have been thinking a lot about the categories of “similarities” and “differences” recently. In fact, now that I look back, I’ve been thinking about these categories for about forty years. It’s funny the things we think about. But for a scholar of early Christianity, these categories matter a lot. When I was a conservative evangelical Christian, reading, studying, and thinking about the Bible, I was completely focused on similarities. This book, this passage, this teaching is very similar to that one. I did focus on differences about lots of *other* things (other than the Bible). That person is Jew and not a Christian, and therefore will have to face judgment and be condemned, unlike *me* a Christian. Or that person is a Roman Catholic and so is not a real Christian and therefore… Or that person does not have the right theology about salvation, or Christ, or predestination, or the Bible, and therefore…. So I knew and thought about differences a lot and knew that they were highly significant. Even eternally significant. Anyone who [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:39-04:00April 29th, 2019|Reflections and Ruminations|

A Blog Anniversary! Seven Years!

Today is the seven anniversary of the blog. My first post (which I reposted a few days ago) appeared on April 3, 2012. I never thought it would last this long. I figured I would run out of things to say in about six months. Hasn’t happened yet! There’s so much interesting material back in ancient Christianity, starting with Jesus and the New Testament, and going on up through the next three hundred years, that it seems inexhaustible. And readers have so many interesting and important questions, many of them that take numerous posts just to answer (without even getting into the weeds). When I started the blog I was really not sure what it would be or become. In *principal* I knew what I had in mind. The idea was guided by two desiderata: (1) to disseminate scholarly knowledge about the New Testament and early Christianity to a wider reading public of non-scholars, in terms that were intelligent and sensible, but not overly technical or loaded with jargon or requiring extensive background information; and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:22-04:00April 3rd, 2019|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Very Funny…

I normally post only once a day, but in tracing down a Blast From the Past to give today, I ran across this little nugget that I had completely forgotten about, also from this time six years ago. Too good to not repost! **************************************************** OK, this is completely irrelevant to anything related to the blog – especially early Christology, my current topic. But I thought it was too funny to pass up. A fellow who lived in my neighborhood, but whom I never knew (to my regret: he sounds like he was a remarkably interesting guy), beloved chemistry professor Dr. James Bonk died Friday at the age of 82, ending his 53-year career at Duke University. According to the local newspaper: Bonk’s classes were such a staple that Duke introductory chemistry classes became known as “Bonkistry” classes, which approximately 30,000 students attended. He was nationally known for comical incidents with students, one rumored to have taken place in the 1960s. The Bonk joke is that the weekend before a final exam, four students decided to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:04-04:00March 16th, 2019|Reflections and Ruminations|

My Doubts about the Son of God: A Blast from the Past

Here's a post I made six years ago, when just starting to think about what I would do in my book How Jesus Became God, where I recount a rather emotional experience of starting to doubt my faith. ************************************************************************************************************ When I attended Moody Bible Institute in the mid 1970s, every student was required, every semester, to do some kind of Christian ministry work. Like all of my fellow students I was completely untrained and unqualified to do the things I did, but I think Moody believed in on-the-job training. And so every student had to have one semester where, for maybe 2-3 hours one afternoon a week, they would engage in “door-to-door evangelism.” That involved being transported to some neighborhood in Chicago, knocking on doors, trying to strike up a conversation, get into the homes, and convert people. A fundamentalist version of the Mormon missionary thing, also carried out two-by-two. One semester I was a late-night counselor on the Moody Christian radio station. People would call up with questions about the Bible or with problems in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:04-04:00March 16th, 2019|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Protestant Obsession with Origins

It was especially in the nineteenth century that scholars of religion, theology, and biblical studies became deeply obsessed with the question of “origins.” In many ways, the roots for this interest – in these fields in particular – lay in the Protestant Reformation, and it is no accident that the major research on the question was done in predominantly Protestant countries (especially Germany; somewhat in England and, even less, in America) and by Protestant professors in these fields, scholars who had themselves received theological training before themselves giving instruction in universities. Roughly speaking, it was possible to think about “origins” in two very different ways, one we might label “Catholic” and the other “Protestant.” In the Catholic way of thinking, the “origins” of something was the starting point, from which important developments began to transpire, as religion, theology, and even “the truth” evolved into higher forms over the centuries. This evolutionary model, of course, owed a good deal to other intellectual currents of the day, for example in the understanding of languages: they become more [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:04-04:00March 13th, 2019|History of Biblical Scholarship, Reflections and Ruminations|

Who Cares How It All Started?

Once I realized that so much of the scholarship on the Christian accounts of journeys to the realms of heaven and hell was focused almost exclusively on the ultimate question of where this idea of taking an actual trip to the afterlife came from – ancient Greek myths? Jewish apocalypses? – I was deeply puzzled by it. Why is the *origin* of an idea the most important or revealing thing about it? Would any scholar of Victorian English dealing with David Copperfield be concerned *only* with knowing where the idea of writing a novel originated? It’s an interesting and important question, but is that really the main thing we want to know about the book? Why would it different with this kind of ancient religious writing? Why this one focus? And what was driving the concern? I immediately realized that it was tied in to lots of other fields of inquiry going on in the 19th century. Origins seemed to be everywhere. Scientists were interested in the origins of life, and the origins of humankind [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:04-04:00March 12th, 2019|Reflections and Ruminations|

The Passion for Origins

After I had engaged for a couple of months doing some real research and thinking seriously about my scholarly book on visions of and journeys to the realms of heaven and hell (tentatively entitled, for now, Otherworldly Journeys: Katabasis Traditions in Early Christianity), I thought I might start it all by doing a kind of history of research. This is how scholarly books commonly used to start – especially books of German scholarship and American dissertations. Chapter one would be a discussion of what all the other scholars had said about a topic, and use that history of scholarship to set up what the author him/herself wanted to explore, argue, and say that was different – whether it involved new data or new interpretations of old data, etc. That way of preceding was always highly informative (and often seen as essential: my dissertation advisor insisted on it!) but not always scintillating, and most books today are more driven by scintillation. So I certainly was not planning, for this book, on giving a blow-by-blow account of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:04-04:00March 11th, 2019|Afterlife, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reflections and Ruminations|

My Next Scholarly Book: Visits to Heaven and Hell

As I have indicated on the blog before, I like to mix up the various kinds of research and writing projects that I do. My time is not split evenly, but over the years I have written scholarly books for scholarly audiences, trade books for the wider reading public, and textbooks for college-level students. Usually it’s one thing at a time, but as it turns out now I’m in the midst of three tasks – revising two of my textbooks (The New Testament and a Brief Introduction to the New Testament), writing up proposals for two future trade books to submit to my publisher to see if they would agree to publish them, and, principally, working on the next scholarly project. When I first started thinking about the scholarly project, I came up with the title: “Observing the Dead: Otherworldy Journeys in the Early Christian Tradition.” I may still call it that – as you may know from my other posts over the years, titles usually are the last thing decided when it comes to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:04-04:00March 6th, 2019|Afterlife, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Homosexuality and the New Testament. Guest Post by Jeff Siker.

Yesterday Jeff Siker, PhD in NT and editor of two books that discuss biblical/Christian views of homosexuality, started his summary and assessment of what the Bible has to say about same-sex relations, in light of the recent vote of the United Methodists not to welcome “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” in their churches. In that post he dealt with the salient passages in the Old Testament; today he moves to the controversial texts of the New Testament and ends with some insightful reflections on the relevance of the Bible for same-sex relations in the modern context. Jeff Siker is the author of Jesus, Sin, and Perfection in Early Christianity, Liquid Scripture: The Bible in the Digital World and Homosexuality and Religion: An Encyclopedia. ****************************************************** Romans 1:26-27 “For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:03-04:00March 4th, 2019|Paul and His Letters, Reflections and Ruminations, Religion in the News, Sex and Sexuality in the Bible|

University Professors and their Research

As some of you know, a couple of years ago I decided to slow down on my research and writing. I was feeling burned out and wondering what the point was. Do I really need to keep writing more books? Why not read more novels, cook more, take more walks, get in more work outs, watch more football/basketball/tennis/golf, and on and on? So I did. It lasted about four months. As it turns out, I am indeed doing all these other things more than I was. But I’ve also cranked up (rather than down) the research and writing. How is that possible? Because I’m on academic leave this year (at UNC, for some historical reasons we don’t call these “sabbaticals”). Batteries are getting recharged, I’m having a great time, and doing tons of research/writing on a number of projects, enough to make my head spin at times. But all in a good way. It’s been fantastic. And I was thinking this morning that it might be interesting for me to lay out on the blog [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:44:03-04:00March 1st, 2019|Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Textual Criticism Seemed to Be on Death’s Door

In last week’s readers’ mailbag I started to answer a question that I never finished – in fact, I never got around to the question! Here it is again. QUESTION: Is there a story (post) about your move from textual criticism to other things? RESPONSE: In my two-part (non-)response to this question I first explained that my training in graduate school actually was not in textual criticism, but was mainly in the interpretation of the New Testament and the history of earliest Christianity. But my passion was textual criticism -- that is, analyzing the surviving manuscripts of the New Testament – and related textual witnesses [early translations of the NT into other languages; and especially the quotations of the NT in the writings of early church fathers] – in order to determine both what the authors originally wrote and figuring out how, why, and when the text came to be changed by scribes who were copying it. It was precisely because my training was actually in something different from my passion that I ended [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:45-04:00February 17th, 2019|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Pursuing My Passion for Textual Criticism

Yesterday I started answering the question of how I moved on from doing research principally on New Testament textual criticism to do other things, mainly involving different aspects of the literature and history of Christianity in the first three centuries CE. I pointed out there that my training/education was actually not in textual criticism, but mainly in the exegesis (and theology) of the New Testament, and on various aspects of the history of earliest Christianity (from the historical Jesus to the formation of the canon to early heresy and orthodoxy etc.). But even though that was my *training*, my principal interest all along had been textual criticism, figuring out what the original wording of the New Testament in Greek was (verse by verse by verse), and seeing both how and why the text had been changed by scribes over the years. This was an interest that was generated very early on in my academic career. In fact, before I had an academic career. Before I or anyone else could have imagined I’d have an academic [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:45-04:00February 11th, 2019|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

On Being Just a Textual Critic

I’ve decided to address a question about my own academic life in this week’s Readers’ Mailbag. It involves an issue that comes up a lot, but not in this form. QUESTION: Is there a story (post) about your move from textual criticism to other things? RESPONSE: I can’t remember if there is (though I’m sure someone will tell me!). But I would like to say something about it, since it is an issue that seems to come up a good deal, not usually from people who are genuinely interested in knowing about my academic life per se (as this questioner is), but from critics who aren’t at *all* interested, but who want to inform their readers that my books are not written by an expert but by someone who was only trained as a textual critic. Most recently this was brought to my attention in a comment by the Christian apologist, himself a professional philosopher, William Lane Craig, who told his readers that I had no expertise on the question of whether Jesus’ [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:45-04:00February 10th, 2019|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

How Does A Book Actually Get Published?

I will be sending the very final manuscript of my book Heaven, Hell, and the Invention of the Afterlife off to my editor at Simon & Schuster tomorrow (I still don’t know what the actual title will be). As is always the case, it has been a very long haul, and I want to explain how publishing a trade book like this for a general audience “works” and “happens” since most people who’ve never done it have no idea, or rather, have completely wrong ideas. But before doing that I need some help so I don’t have egg on my face. One of my many, many faults as a human being is that I don’t keep good enough records of really important information. Just ask my tax person. As most of you know, in the summer, after writing the first draft, I asked members of the blog if they would be interested in making a donation in order to have the right to read the book in manuscript and make suggestions for improvement. A number [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:43:44-04:00January 23rd, 2019|Reflections and Ruminations|

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