Reflections and Ruminations Archives - Page 15 of 31 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Can Historians Be Neutral?

I received a number of responses to my post this past week on whether Jesus would have received a decent burial on the day of his crucifixion. One of the most interesting responses was not so much about what I said or thought, but about a much broader question: how can one evaluate arguments over such controversial subjects without being entirely biased and subjective at the outset? It’s worth talking about. Here’s the question: QUESTION: Re: the burial of Jesus or not: Do you have any suggestions for how to be objective regarding issues like this? Maybe it would help to first figure out where the burden of proof should be. Does historicity demand something like clear and convincing evidence that something happened–so that any significant doubts require rejection of the supposed incident? Or just that one thing is more likely to have happened than another? RESPONSE: I won’t here deal with the particular issue of Jesus’ burial, but with the broader issue of how one remains “neutral” or “disinterested” when trying to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:46-04:00January 7th, 2018|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Year in Review 2017!

2017 has now come and, as of tonight, gone. For some of us it has been a very good year, for others a very bad one. Probably for most of us it has been mixed. For the blog, it has been very good indeed. So here are some of the important results! First, some background. As many of you know (some of you were actually here back then), we started this blog endeavor in April 2012. So we’ve been going at this for five years and nine months. The original purpose of the blog was to raise money for charity. Rather than using my somewhat limited culinary skills and even more limited time by volunteering for a local soup kitchen, I decided that I could use my scholarly skills more productively by starting a membership-only blog. Everyone thought I was crazy. This is the INTERNET!!! You can’t make people *pay* for it! I ignored all the advice and scorned all the warnings and tried it anyway. My original thought -- fool that I was – [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:45-04:00December 31st, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Christmas Reflection 2017

More than any other time, event, or celebration, Christmas, for me, shows that you can take the boy out of Christianity but you can’t take Christianity out of the boy. As much as I am a completely secular-humanist/agnostic/atheist (pick your term), I am still hopelessly attracted to Christmas and what it stands for. As I said in the previous post, it is not that I “believe” in the Christmas story (stories) as a historical event (events). In my judgment the biblical accounts have virtually nothing historical about them, other than that Jesus was born to two lower-class Jewish peasants somewhere in the land of Israel during the reign of Caesar Augustus. Beyond that – I don’t see anything historical in the accounts. No need to explain why here – I’ve talked about it enough on the blog before. And yet I’m drawn to the season and all it stands for, surely in a way that someone who had not been raised Christian simply cannot be. I think for me, in my thoroughly secular life, it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:32-04:00December 24th, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Is the Christmas Story a Myth?

Is the whole Christian story a myth? It probably depends on what you mean by myth. For a very long time now, scholars of religion have had hard and protracted debates on what the term “myth” means, or should mean. I won’t be going into any of that here. Instead I’ll begin by talking about two teaching experiences, one negative and one positive. Negative experience: my first teaching job was at Rutgers University, where I was asked to fill in for a professor of New Testament who had to take an emergency leave of absence in the middle of the spring term in 1984. Her husband had been diagnosed with cancer, he was dying, and she could not continue teaching after giving the midterm exam. Would I be willing to take over her class for the second half of the semester? Absolutely I was willing. And I did so. It was really hard. I had to pick up wherever she left off. Among other things, she was using a textbook that I did not like [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:32-04:00December 23rd, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Is the Blog Meaningful for You?

Last night I hosted a dinner here on my home-turf of Durham NC. If you recall, I put out an invitation about a month ago and limited the table to six of us. I was most impressed with my dining companions. Most of them came from out of town for the occasion, as far away as Pittsburgh and Dallas. Amazing. We had a fantastic time and it was great getting to meet members of the blog and hearing their varied and intriguing life stories. I am planning on doing this sort of thing more, not just here where I live, but in various places that I will be for speaking engagements in the months that lie ahead. Everyone at dinner had things they wanted to talk about – and so did I! My main question was how we could improve the blog and do so in a way that would generate more income for the charities it supports. Over the five and a half years I have been doing the blog, I have never made [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:31-04:00December 8th, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Jesus’ (Young?) Mother and (Half?) Brothers? The Proto-Gospel of James

A few days ago lot of readers made comments on the question (thanks to the Roy Moore newsflashes) of whether Mary was a young girl when she got married; and now I have mentioned Jesus' mother and brothers in Mark's Gospels. So let me say a few more things about them. The earliest non-canonical source that talks about Jesus' mother (indicating she was a teenager -- not something found in the NT) and his brothers (were they really is brothers?) is in the non-canonical Proto-Gospel of James, from some time in the second century. I thought it might be useful for me to re-post a discussion of the matter from a number of years ago, here: ************************************************************** The Proto-Gospel of James was very popular in Eastern, Greek-speaking Christianity throughout the Ages, down to modern times; and a version of it was produced – with serious additions and changes – in Latin, that was even more influential in Western Christianity (a book now known as the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew). In some times and places, these books [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:39:15-04:00November 20th, 2017|Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reflections and Ruminations|

Taking the Temperature of the Blog October 2017

It is useful on occasion to step back and take the temperature of the blog, to see how things are going and to consider how they might improve. Do you have suggestions for how to make the blog better and more attractive? What I’m especially interested in are ways to attract more people to join. If you have bright ideas, let me know. I’d say the blog is going extremely well on the whole. What do you think? There seems to be a lot of interaction – I’m getting tons of comments on posts – and membership is staying at a steady state. In terms of numbers, since starting in April 2012, I have made 1616 posts. Now *that* seems like a lot! Because of these large reserves, I am able, about once a week, to post a “blast from the past.” That seems useful to me. Most members now were not reading posts back in 2012 or 2013, and even those who were probably don’t remember these particular posts. Or at least I would [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:58-04:00October 29th, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Academic Study of the New Testament

Students who are thinking about signing up for my undergraduate Introduction to the New Testament sometimes ask me whether they will have an insurmountable disadvantage if they haven’t ever read, let alone studied, the New Testament. It’s a completely understandable question. Other students almost certainly take the course precisely because they think it will be easy-shmeasy for them: they grew up in church, and went to Sunday School their entire life, and so how hard can a course on the New Testament be? They already know all about it! Obviously in some ways if a student already knows things about the New Testament they have an advantage. But actually, as it turns out, there is a HUGE advantage to not knowing anything at all about the New Testament, and often my best students are precisely the ones who come in without any background in the field at all. (As I’ll explain below.) And so when students ask me if they’ll be at a disadvantage, I tell them not at all. But why is that? It’s [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:57-04:00October 23rd, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Was My Weird Background a Help or a Hindrance: Mailbag October 22, 2017

In this week’s readers’ mailbag I deal with a personal question about my background and whether it gave me and advantages or disadvantages in my rather unusual line of work as a secular scholar of the Bible. QUESTION: Just as a matter of empirical fact, do you think that your religious background gave you any (intellectual) advantages, or disadvantages, in your work over someone who lacked that background? RESPONSE: Every now and then I look back on my life and think: Wow, now that was weird. Even though I’m a pretty normal American guy in lots of ways – at least normal as an American guy who is a professional scholar (OK, that’s already weird, but it’s weird in a socially normal way) (my normalcies: I have passions for football, basketball, working out, reading novels and nonfiction, traveling, the outdoors, hiking, family, kids, grandkids; I love martinis and cigars [both of which I enjoy much more rarely than I would like, since I’d like to enjoy them for many more years….]; I’m politically [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:57-04:00October 22nd, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

How Old Was Jesus at His Baptism, Start of His Ministry & Death?
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How Old Was Jesus at His Baptism, Start of His Ministry & Death?

Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations

How Old Was Jesus at His Baptism, Start of His Ministry & Death?

How old was Jesus at his baptism, when he started his ministry, or when he died? You've probably seen the popular inspirational quote that goes something like this, "Jesus didn't start his ministry until he was 30 years old, and yet he changed the world." I guess this is supposed to encourage people in their teens and twenties that haven't accomplished much in their life. (As if comparing their potential future to the accomplishments of the supposed "son of God" is supposed to make them feel better! Ha!) It also illustrates a common assumption (or perhaps misconception), that Jesus was 30 years old when he began his ministry. Is that a fact? If so, where does the Bible say so? How Old Was Jesus When He Died? This is not a slam dunk answer. In fact, I ask all my students at Chapel Hill this question (many of whom answer incorrectly) on their first-day quiz. Almost everyone who thinks about the matter thinks that Jesus was 33 years old when he died. But the New [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:38:56-04:00October 11th, 2017|Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

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|

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