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How Changing My Views Affected My Relationships
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How Changing My Views Affected My Relationships

Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations

How Changing My Views Affected My Relationships

I’ve decided to answer a personal question in this week’s Readers’ Mailbag, about how my relationships with others changed as I went from being a very conservative evangelical Christian to becoming an agnostic/atheist. QUESTION Would you be willing to elaborate on how your changing views affected your relationships with friends and family and how people reacted to your changing perspective? Thanks so much! RESPONSE As it turns out, in my case, the biggest “problem” for my relationships with family and friends was not so much when I became an agnostic, over twenty years ago now, but when I left the evangelical beliefs I had held as a young adult to become a “liberal” Christian with critical views of the Bible, the historical Jesus, and the development of early Christian theology. For some years, from the time I had become a “born-again” Christian when I was fifteen up through the years I was at Moody Bible Institute and then Wheaton College, and even my first year in a Masters of Divinity program, I had been a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:40-04:00September 17th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Controversy Sells!

A couple of days ago I asked members of the blog for some feedback about the current thread focusing on the development of the views of the afterlife in antiquity – the topic of my next book. And I’m really glad I asked, because it helped clarify my thinking considerably about the direction I am going to be taking in the book. For what it’s worth, it is *not* the direction I’ve been taking this thread. At least it is not in the *style* that I’ve been developing this thread. Let me explain. When I give public talks around the country, the advance publicity often describes me as “one of the most controversial Biblical scholars” in the field. I’ve always been puzzled by that. I really don’t see myself as very controversial. The scholarship that I present in my public talks, and in my popular books, is simply widely accepted scholarship, the kind of thing that critical scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity have long known and quite frequently simply assume. The difference [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:39-04:00September 14th, 2017|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Major Anxiety for my Book. Are People Interested in the Afterlife?

As an author (such as me, for example) thinks ahead to the next book, he has a number of worries, concerns, and anxieties that crop up. This is all part of the process – deep and cutting anxiety is what ends up inspiring quality. Otherwise, we would just dash off books without a care in the world, and they would be completely mediocre, not-well thought out, uninteresting, not grappling with the really complex issues in ways that are clear and easy to understand. Wait a second. That’s how most books are! Seriously, one has to grapple with innumerable problems, issues, and concerns from virtually the beginning of a book project. Some of these concerns are small, but at the outset they tend to be large, big-scale. Then, the more one works on a book, the smaller (and more specific) the issues get. These small ones are of huge importance, because it is getting the small things right that makes an OK book good, a good book really good, and a really good book fantastic. I’m [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:39-04:00September 12th, 2017|Afterlife, Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Fun with the Jewish Christian Gospels: A Blast from the Past

I was looking through the blog archives today, and ran across this interesting one from four years ago. In additional to being rather informative about Gospels outside the New Testament, it shows how even in antiquity Christians had to figure out how to reconcile minor discrepancies among the canonical Gospels. Enjoy! ********************************************************************* Yesterday in my graduate seminar we spent three hours analyzing the three so-called “Jewish-Christian Gospels.” These are very tricky texts to deal with. We don’t have any manuscripts of them – even small fragments. They come to us, instead, in the quotations of church fathers such as Origen, Didymus the Blind, Jerome, and Epiphanius. These (orthodox) church fathers sometimes quoted or referred to one or the other of the Gospels in order to relate what it said; and sometimes it was in order to attack what it said. There are all sorts of questions raised about these no-longer surviving Gospels in these quotations. A good part of the problem is that some of these fathers – especially Jerome, on whom we depend for [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:23-04:00September 8th, 2017|Christian Apocrypha, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reflections and Ruminations|

My New Scholarly Project

I have a lot more to say about the development of the views of the afterlife in ancient Jewish and Christian thinking – specifically, about how we got from an understanding that there would be a resurrection of the body (the view I’ve been discussing) to the idea that when a person dies, their soul (not their body) goes to heaven or hell -- the view most (not the *vast* majority, of course) people have today. It’s a good thing I have a lot more to say about it, since, well, that’s what my next book is about! But I want to introduce at this point a thread-within-the-thread, about a related topic (involving the afterlife and my larger understanding of it) that I am more fervently passionate about at just this time. And to explain just why I’m passionate about it, I need to take a brief detour into my personal life. I think that a good while back (last year at this time? I don’t remember) I talked a bit on the blog about [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:22-04:00August 24th, 2017|Afterlife, Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Physical Persecution and the Physical Resurrection of the Dead

In this post I’m thinking out loud rather than making a definitive statement. A question occurred to me a week or so ago that, since I am on the road and rather unsettled just now, I have not had a chance to look into. Maybe someone on the blog knows the answer. Prior to the persecution of Jews by Antiochus Epiphanes in 167 BCE, do we have a record of *any* group of people in the entire Mediterranean world being violently opposed precisely for their religious practices? I can’t think of any, with the (partial) exception of the Roman suppression of the Bacchanals in 186 BCE (it was a partial exception because they were suppressed for their illegal and dangerous social activities that allegedly involved ritual sexual violence and murder). There was, of course, lots and lots and lots of violence in the ancient world. Most (all?) of the “world empires” – Assyria, Babylonia, (Persia?), Greece, Rome – throve on violence. Powerful dominance was the accepted, promoted, and assumed ideology; it was not (as for [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:21-04:00August 18th, 2017|Afterlife, Early Judaism, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Is There Evidence that Luke Originally Did Not Have the Story of Jesus Birth?

This is the second of three posts on the question of whether Bible translations should place the first two chapters of Luke's Gospel in brackets, or assign them to a footnote. For background: read the post from yesterday! Again this is a Blast from the Past, a post I made back in December 2012. . ******************************************************************** In my previous post, ostensibly on the genealogy of Luke, I pointed out that there are good reasons for thinking that the Gospel originally was published – in a kind of “first edition” – without what are now the first two chapters, so that the very beginning was what is now 3:1 (this is many centuries, of course, before anyone started using chapters and verses.) If that’s the case, Luke was originally a Gospel like Mark’s that did not have a birth and infancy narratives. These were added later, in a second edition (either by the same author or by someone else). If that’s the case then the Gospel began with John the Baptist and his baptism of Jesus, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:21-04:00August 14th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, Heresy and Orthodoxy, New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

A New Blog Podcast!

There is a new feature of the blog (or rather: connected with the blog) that I hope you like. It is the brainchild of a blog member, John Mueller, who not only conceived of the idea but is doing every single bit of work for it. It involves a weekly podcast in which John reads two posts that have previously appeared on the blog, some of recent vintage and some archived, often from long ago. It is called the Bart Ehrman Blog Podcast. John has volunteered to create, manage, finance, and voice the Podcasts each week. He made an offer that was difficult for me to refuse (namely: he would do it for free). While some (many? all?) of you would probably prefer to hear my voice read my own stuff, unfortunately, there are only so many hours in a day and only so many things I can do. So the ball is completely in John’s court. The duration of each Podcast will be roughly 15 to 20 minutes. I hope you will share this [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:06-04:00August 11th, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Origins of Heaven and Hell

Where did the idea of a “differentiated” afterlife come from? I’m not overly fond of the word “differentiated,” since it’s not one we normally use. But for the moment I can’t think of a better one for the phenomenon I’m thinking of. An “undifferentiated” afterlife is one in which everyone has the same experience: there is no difference between one person and the next. It doesn’t matter if the person lived a good life, was kind to strangers, was meek, humble, and mild, did his or her best to help those in need, lived a faithful and loving life OR was a wicked, mean-spirited, arrogant, violent sinner who disrespected others and went out of his or her way to do them harm. The loving and meek, and the despicable and murderous: It doesn’t matter. Both kinds of people end up in the same place and have the same experience after death (in an undifferentiated afterlife). As we have seen, that was the view of most of the Hebrew Bible. At death, everyone goes to Sheol. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:05-04:00August 3rd, 2017|Afterlife, Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

A New Attack on My Views

As someone on the blog has pointed out, there appears to be another “response book” written to critique what I have written about the New Testament. I’ve included here, below, the Amazon description of the book. Several things about it strike me as rather strange. Most of all is that the author refuses to name himself/herself. Why publish an anonymous book if you want to challenge a view that is open and in the public? There is nothing mysterious about my views: they are in readily available publications with my name on them. If you want to attack those views, why not say who you are? This is kind of like running for public office to get rid of that awful person who is now in charge, without letting the voters know your name. OK, maybe it’s not *exactly* like that, but it does seem very odd to me. Does someone have an explanation for it? I'm not sure what the author’s “metaphysical” approach to resolving the contradictions of the Bible are, but I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:05-04:00July 31st, 2017|Bart's Critics, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Threads and Comments on the Blog

This post will discuss several issues connected with the blog; hopefully that will be of some interest to anyone who pays good money to be on it. If you are ever inclined to make a comment on any of the posts, or a comment on any of the comments, then please do read the bit at the end. I think this is a good moment to pause a second and think about the blog. I have spent the last two and a half months on a thread that came out of nowhere. For those of you with long memories, you will recall that back in April I was in the middle of a completely different thread, about my current understandings of where the traditional Christian view of the afterlife (that you die and your soul goes to heaven or hell) came from. This is connected to my current book project that I am tentatively calling “The Invention of the Afterlife: A History of Heaven and Hell” (or some such thing). This is the second book [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:04-04:00July 25th, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Teaching Religion as an Agnostic

When I finally admitted to myself that I was an agnostic, I had already been teaching New Testament and the history of early Christianity for ten years or so, first at Rutgers in the mid 1980s and then at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill starting in 1988. It comes as a surprise to some people when I tell them that my decision to leave the Christian faith made absolutely no difference at all, of any kind, in either what I taught or how I taught it. I think people find that very strange indeed because they have a rather serious misconception about what it means to teach religious studies in a secular research university. Many people imagine that teaching religious studies is simply different from teaching anything else. I think in part that is because they really haven’t given it much thought. Religion, in this common view, is different from other fields of study and inquiry. Political science, or history, or literature, or anthropology, or classics, or even philosophy – any of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:04-04:00July 23rd, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Was There a “Moment” When I Left the Faith?

I sometimes get asked if there was a moment when I realized I simply did not believe in the Christian God and subscribe to the Christian faith any more. What I have been trying to explain is that for me it was a long drawn out process. It was not a matter of my being a fundamentalist, then finding a contradiction in the Bible and throwing up my hands in despair and saying “Oh no! There *is* no God!!” It didn’t happen like that at all. I didn’t go from being a fundamentalist to being an agnostic. It was a many-year struggle in which I went from a rabid fundamentalist to becoming a slightly left of center evangelical to being for many years a liberal Christian active in the church and thinking as deeply as I could about the theological views that had long been established in my tradition. I explained in the previous post how it was the problem of suffering that finally made me leave the faith. And in a sense there *was* [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:03-04:00July 22nd, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Leaving the Faith

By the early to mid-1990s I had come to think that whatever I had held dear and cherished on the basis of my belief in the Christian God, could still be held dear and cherished without that belief. Do I stand in awe before the unfathomable vastness and incredible majesty of the universe? Do I welcome and feel heartfelt gratitude for moments of grace? Do I value the love of family and the companionship of friends? Do I appreciate the many good things in life: My work? Travel? Good food and good drink? All the little things that make life enjoyable? Yes, but what does any of this necessarily have to do with God? As a Christian – from the time I was able to think, through my teenage and early-twenties fundamentalist period, up to my more mature adult liberal phase – I had believed in some form of the traditional, biblical God. This was a God who was not some kind of remote designer of the universe who had gotten the ball rolling and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:03-04:00July 20th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Growing into Unbelief

As I continued to go to church in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I found that I simply believed less and less of the Christian tradition in anything like a literal sense. Was God the creator? Well, maybe in some kind of ultimate sense, but not literally. The universe was billions of years old, it came into being at the Big Bang, it has been expanding ever since, and the reaches of space – with its unfathomable numbers of galaxies each with billions of stars –as surely not “created” by a being principally concerned with a form of life that happened to evolve on one small planet circling one relatively small star, one of many, many billions in one relatively small galaxy. The human-centeredness of the view of “creation” did not, at the end of the day, really make sense to me. And God himself? Did he exist? Yes, I thought he did. But I wasn’t sure we could possibly know much if anything about him. I assumed he was somehow in some sense [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:46-04:00July 19th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Apocalypticism in a Modern Idiom

As I pointed out some weeks ago on the blog, in the mid to late 1980s, as a liberal Christian, I was fully aware that the Bible was filled with mythological views that could no longer be accepted as literal truths but had to be translated into a modern idiom if they were to have any relevance. And I thought that the Bible did have relevance. But not in its literal sense. This made interpretation of the Bible an extremely important affair. It was the *interpretation* of the text that determined how, in what sense and in what way, the Bible could and should determine how a person understood the world, the deity, and our relationship to both (the world and the deity). The teachings of Jesus, the writings of Paul, and in fact most of the earliest Christian tradition as found in the New Testament, was rooted in apocalyptic views that were very much situated in their own time and place, but were no longer tenable for 20th century Americans (i.e., for me in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:46-04:00July 18th, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Did Paul Think Jesus’ Body Remained in the Grave? Mailbag July 14, 2017

I will address two very different questions in this edition of the Readers’ Mailbag. If you have a question you would like me to address, ask away, and I’ll add it to the list. QUESTION: I just finished reading scholar Gregory Riley’s Resurrection Reconsidered. He presents the position that people in the Greco-Roman world had a very different perception about spirits (ghosts) than we do today. Riley states that people living in the first century Roman Empire believed that dead people frequently came back to visit the living, appearing in “bodies” that looked exactly like their former fleshly bodies, and having the same capabilities of their former fleshly bodies: capable of eating food, drinking wine, and even engaging in sex…even sex with the living! The ONLY difference between a spirit body and a fleshly body was that USUALLY a spirit body was impalpable (could not be touched). Riley believes that Paul would have been shocked to hear about an empty tomb as he would have believed that Jesus’ fleshly body would OF COURSE [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:04-04:00July 14th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Origins of Apocalypticism

In my previous post I began to explain how, in 1985, while teaching a class at Rutgers on the Problem of Suffering, I came to realize that I simply didn't accept any longer most of the views of the Bible on why there was suffering in the world. But one view did continue to appeal to me, the apocalyptic view that emerged toward the end of the New Testament period, and became the view of Jesus, John the Baptist before him, the apostle Paul after him, and, in fact, most of the early Christians. This would be a good time to review where this view came from and what motivated it. For that I am going to return to a post that I made on the blog a couple of years ago. Here I set up what apocalypticists believed (especially about suffering) by contrasting it with the view out of which it arose and to which it was reacting, the view of the traditional Hebrew prophets. ********************************************************************** The Prophetic Perspective We have seen that the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:46-04:00July 11th, 2017|Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Explaining a Columbian Mudslide

During the term when I was teaching my class on the problem of suffering at Rutgers in 1985, one of those unthinkable natural disasters occurred that made headline news and disturbed all caring people around the world. The night before there had been a volcanic incident in Columbia that caused a mudslide that wiped out several villages, killing thousands of people in their sleep. The death toll in the end was 23,000, men women and children. Some people blamed the Columbian government – they shouldn’t have allowed these villages to be near a volcano. Fair enough I suppose. You have to blame *someone*. And who can blame a volcano? But why do disasters like this have to happen in the first place? And how do people who believe in the God of the Bible account for such things? Blaming government officials for a volcanic eruption seems a bit lame. And it didn’t occur to most of us at the time, as we were reading accounts in the papers. Instead, our reactions were “Oh my God! [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:46-04:00July 10th, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Variety of Views of Suffering in the Bible

Some thirty years ago now, when I taught my class at Rutgers on “The Problem of Suffering in the Biblical Traditions,” I came to realize – or at least came to realize more clearly – that a number of the views set forth in the Bible simply did not resonate with me. Which, I suppose, is a more tactful way of saying that I simply didn’t agree with them. By far the most prominent explanation for suffering in the Bible is that God is using pain, misery, and human disaster in order to punish his people because they have failed to live up to his standards and to follow his will. He penalizes them by inflicting pain That is why there are droughts, famines, economic crises, and military disasters. That lesson is taught time after time after time in the Hebrew Bible – just read Deuteronomy, or Amos, or Jeremiah, or, well, any of the prophets. I suppose when I was a fundamentalist I completely accepted that view. But eventually – probably when teaching this [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:46-04:00July 9th, 2017|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

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