Reflections and Ruminations Archives - Page 11 of 31 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

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|

Feedback on the Blog?

I’m back from Greece and Turkey now, with two weeks with nothing to do but work like a wild-person day and night on my book project on Christian tours of heaven and hell in relation to their Greek and Roman predecessors. I’m madly into Virgil’s Aeneid just now. Great stuff. I’ll say more about it anon. But it seems like a good time for me to pause for a day and take assessment of developments on the blog and get your reactions. I do this a couple of times a year, as old-timers will know. My basic questions: How is the blog going, from your point of view? And is there anything we should change/do differently? Any feedback at all is welcome – just let me hear it. The goal, of course, is to keep the customers satisfied and to draw more in. I’d like to use the blog to disseminate scholarly knowledge of the New Testament and the early Christian movement more broadly, for three interrelated reasons. First, of course, is that I think [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:19-04:00June 19th, 2019|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Is There a “Best” Bible Translation Out There? A Blast from the Past

Here is one of the most frequently questions I have received over the years; I addressed it exactly seven years ago on the blog, as I have just discovered while rummaging through the archives. And since it continually comes up, I thought it would be a good time to address it again. Here's what I said then (and what I still think now!). ******************************************************************************** QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman, most of your readers doe not know the ancient languages thatthe Bible was written in and therefore must rely on translations. Clearly no one translation is conclusive, but for clarity of reading and reliable research, can you recommend some translations to us? Conversely, do you have any that readers should avoid, because of clear bias or a little too loose? RESPONSE: When I published Misquoting Jesus (2005) I received a lot of emails from a lot of people asking a lot of questions. But the one question I got asked more than any other was this one (in various forms): which translation of the Bible do I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:45:02-04:00June 5th, 2019|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

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|

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