Reflections and Ruminations Archives - Page 17 of 30 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

How Does A Book Become A Bestseller? Readers’ Mailbag April 21, 2017

In this week’s Mailbag I deal with a question about how a book written for a popular audience becomes a bestseller, specifically with regard to Misquoting Jesus, my book that has sold the best of all by far. QUESTION: In your previous answer to me you indicated that what makes a bestseller, in the end of the day, is massive media attention. My question now is what sparks this attention. In other words, why, out of all your books, did Misquoting Jesus receive a great attention from the media? RESPONSE: Ha! It’s a great question. I’ll start by saying that if there were a sure-fire formula for how to get media attention, every author in the planet would do it and we would *all* be on the NY Times Bestseller list! But the reality is that there are hundreds of books sold every day in English (I was told some years ago that it’s about 600 per day, but I have no way of knowing if that is right or not; maybe someone [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:10-04:00May 21st, 2017|Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Can Myths Be True and Meaningful?

Yesterday I received this interesting comment on my most recent post. It embodies a view that a lot of other members of the Blog have, and so I thought I should respond to it. It is about whether there can be meaningful myths in the Bible. Here is what the reader says. Imaginative stories by definition are false. To say something is myth and by extension imaginative, is asserting that it is false. For us to say something is a myth, we have to be sure that it is entirely false. Or is it not the case? I addressed a similar issue in the conclusion of my most recent book Jesus Before the Gospels. There I take a different stance on whether non-historical accounts (which would include myths) can be meaningful to us or not, whether they can be “true” in any sense. Here is what I say there (with respect more to the NT than the OT, but the same reasoning applies. ****************************************************************** Like most authors, I get a lot of email from people [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:10-04:00May 19th, 2017|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Appreciating the Myths of the Bible

When I came to see that there are mistakes in the Bible, I did not jettison it all as a waste of time. Not at all. On the contrary, I continued to value and cherish it, as a book that could reveal truths about God. Yes it had discrepancies, contradictions, historical errors, glaring scientific mistakes, and so on. Of course it did. But that for me was not the ultimate point. The Bible It was a product of its own time, a very human book. Even so, it was a book through which God continued to speak. I came to think that the Bible was more important for the valuable lessons it conveyed than for the factual (or problematic) information it contained. This view worked on two levels. For one thing, I came to see it was important to realize that even for ancient readers what mattered about the Bible was not its factual accuracy in its details, but for the ideas that it was trying to present. And for me personally, it was important [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:10-04:00May 17th, 2017|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Becoming a Non-Fundamentalist Christian

After realizing that the Bible does in fact contain mistakes, I became a non-fundamentalist Christian and remained one for many years. It is not easy to describe exactly what I believed “at the time”. It was a good expanse of time and there was a kind of transition period in which I evolved into the kind of open-minded, reflective believer that I became and remained, again for some years. In the early stages, I suppose you could describe me as a fairly liberal evangelical. There are lots of Christians like that in the world, and most of my friends at Princeton Seminary were in that mold. How does one describe that kind of Christian? The Evolution of a Non-Fundamentalist Christian These Christians very much, and wholeheartedly, think that God speaks through the Bible. He uses it to communicate with his people, not to give them science lessons. To instruct that about how they should live and be. But what really happened on the third day of creation? God wants his people to show love to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:10-04:00May 16th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Fundamentalism and the Truth of the Bible

I have recently received a number of inquiries about why realizing there may be mistakes in the Bible might lead someone to become an agnostic. Here is one that came a few days ago: QUESTION: I want to thank you for your extensive work in explaining … your journey from believing that the bible contained no errors to proving the bible is not inerrant and simply the work of human writers. What I would like to be explained is the necessary logic to go from believing that the bible is not inerrant or the "word of God" to believing there is no God. RESPONSE My view of the matter may seem odd to a lot of people, but it is nonetheless held by most critical scholars of the Bible and trained theologians. What is the “necessary logic to go from believing that the bible is not inerrant … to believing there is no God? There is no necessary logic at all. I have never thought that ... To See The Rest of this [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:10-04:00May 15th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

How I First Realized There Are Mistakes in the Bible

I have told the story before of how I first came to realize there might be mistakes in the Bible. Rather than paraphrasing it again, I’ll simply reproduce the account as I presented it the first time I went public with my faith journey, back in my 2005 book Misquoting Jesus. Here is what I said there: ************************************************************** Upon arriving at Princeton Theological Seminary, I immediately signed up for first-year Hebrew and Greek exegesis (= interpretation) classes, and loaded my schedule as much as I could with such courses. I found these classes to be a challenge, both academically and personally. The academic challenge was completely welcome. But the personal challenges that I faced were emotionally rather trying. As I indicated, already at Wheaton I had begun to question some of the foundational aspects of my commitment to the Bible as the inerrant word of God. That commitment came under serious assault in my detailed studies at Princeton. I resisted any temptation to change my views, and found a number of friends who, like me, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:10-04:00May 9th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Resistance to Change at Princeton Seminary

Several people have asked me to unpack what I meant in the last sentence of yesterday’s post because, well, it doesn’t make sense. What I was trying to say was that I had a crisis of faith in Seminary – as many people do, as it turns out – because I thought I could prove my faith claims were true (an Enlightenment position: “truth” is objective and can be proved), but the more research I did, the more I found that the facts seemed to contradict my faith claims (as many scholars of the Enlightenment had long realized). Let me explain. First I want to stress – in case anyone queries me on it (as people do) – that my faith ultimately, in my own head at least, was based on what I took to be a personal relationship with God through Christ. How personal? We talked all the time. So, on one level, my faith was not simply a set of propositions that I thought could be demonstrated (God exists; Christ is the Son [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:09-04:00May 8th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Encounter with the Enlightenment

I know I have talked about how I lost my faith before. But I’ve never talked about it in the terms I’m going to be describing it in this post and the next. It has to do with what happened with my notion of “truth” when I went to Princeton Theological Seminary. Princeton Theological Seminary is not administratively connected to Princeton University – it simply is in the same town, across the street, and has a shared ancient history. What is now Princeton University started off in the mid-18th century as a place to train Christian ministers. Eventually the school split, with the Seminary, under a different administration, becoming its own entity. By the time I went there as a 22-year-old in 1978, Princeton was a leading a Presbyterian seminary whose mission is to train ministers for the Presbyterian Church. I had never even stepped foot in a Presbyterian church and really knew almost nothing about it, or about Princeton Seminary. But I suspected that many of the students and faculty there were not really [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:09-04:00May 7th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

What Happened Next: My Life After Moody Bible Institute

Here I’ll continue relating what I told my New Testament class the last period, when I was explaining what I personally believed and why (for anyone who wanted to come). For me, as I indicated in the last post, going to Wheaton College (Billy Graham’s alma mater) was a step toward liberalism. Students there were not as gung-ho about the Bible – well, fanatical about the Bible – as we had been at Moody. They were evangelical Christians, all of them so far as I could tell, yes, and they were committed to the inspiration of the Bible, most of them even the infallibility of the Bible. But their academic interests almost always resided elsewhere. That’s because Wheaton was a liberal arts college, and most students were majoring in English, history, psychology, biology, and so on. The students I hung around with most were in fields like philosophy and classics and, of course, my own major, English. I chose to major in English for a rather missionary reason. I wanted to ... To See The [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:09-04:00May 5th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Life Story I Tell My Students

As I’ve indicated, my last class of the semester in my Introduction to the New Testament course is optional. In it I explain to anyone who wants to come what I really believe and why I believe it. The way I do it is by telling my life story, from childhood till today. That takes about twenty or twenty-five minutes, and then I answer any questions for the rest of the time. The questions could go on for hours – students have a lot of them – and some of the questions are very personal. But I try to answer them as directly and honestly as I can. The story I tell starts with me as a church-going Episcopalian as a child, committed to the church, saying the Creed, confessing my sins, believing in God and Christ, serving as an altar boy. And then in high school, I had a religious transformation. I started attending a Campus Life Youth for Christ meeting that involved a social event every week and ended with a spiritual lesson [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:09-04:00May 3rd, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Spilling the Beans on my Beliefs on the Last Day of Class

About fifteen years ago or so I started doing something completely different on my last day of class in my New Testament course. I have a lecture scheduled for then, of course, but the scheduled lecture rehashes material that is earlier covered in the class and that students can pick up easily from their reading – so it’s not one of the crucial class periods of the semester. Sometimes that last class is not even that (depending on how the semester schedule works out) but is a kind of review session. But about two weeks before the end, I tell the students that I have an option for the last day, and I’ll let them vote on it. The option is to do the class as scheduled or, instead, to have a non-required class (no taking of attendance, no reason to come unless they want to) in which I explain what I myself really believe and why I believe it. That is of some relevance to the class, of course, since the beliefs I’ll be [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:09-04:00May 2nd, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Can Teaching Be Objective?

I have been discussing how I see the separation of church and state when it comes to teaching religious studies in a secular research university. All of this has been a lead up to what I do on my final day of class in my course, Introduction to the New Testament. On that last day, if students want, I tell them what I actually believe and why. I feel constantly torn between two different perspectives on teaching, which I call the Socratic and the Kierkegaardian models. For Socrates (at least as reported by Plato) (which means that this may be Plato’s view, rather than Socrates’s) truth was truth, and the person who spoke the truth was irrelevant to the question of whether it was true or not. What matters is whether one can establish through logic, reasoning, and evidence that claims are true or not. The person delivering the claim has nothing to do with it. Fools can speak the truth (sometimes) and savants can utter nonsense (often!). The 19th century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:37:09-04:00May 1st, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Teaching Religion in a Secular Environment

This little diversion of a thread was going to be a simply one-post on the talk I’ll be giving today to my undergraduate Introduction to the New Testament class, where I spill the beans about what I personally believe and why. But it’s turned into a four-post mini-thread on my views of the separation of church and state. So far it’s been all background – how my twelve years of higher education were all done in Christian confessional contexts, not in secular schools, even though all of my teaching has been in research universities. Go figure. As I indicated in my previous post, as a PhD student I tried to broaden my range significantly so it would not look like I could do nothing except for textual criticism, the study of the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament with the ultimate goal of figuring out what the biblical authors actually wrote. My intention all along was to find a teaching position either in a divinity school/seminary (for the training of pastors) or in a Christian [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:52-04:00April 26th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

My “Preparation” to Teach in a Secular Research Institution

Wednesday is my last lecture of the semester in my undergraduate Introduction to the New Testament class. It will be something different. I have made it an optional class, for anyone who wants to hear me talk about what I really believe, personally, about the material we’ve been covering in the class. I’ve done this in years past, and usually it is the best attended class of the semester. I’m not sure what that says about my teaching otherwise…. In a subsequent post I’ll talk about that upcoming talk. In this post I’d like to set it up by talking about my views about teaching religion/religious studies in my particular environment. It’s very different from other environments. Here’s a scary factoid about myself. I never ... The Rest of this Post is for Members Only. If you don't belong yet, you better join, or you'll never know! It doesn't cost much, it gives a lot, and every dime goes to charity. So JOIN!!! I never set foot in a secular university classroom until my first [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:52-04:00April 24th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

About Graduate Studies: A Blast from the Past

Two days ago someone asked me about doing graduate studies. He had a master's degree and was wondering about whether to do a PhD. I told him that if he could imagine doing something else with his life, he probably should do so. Doing a PhD is just too painful. It's long (in my field it typically takes about 6-8 years *after* doing a Masters; lots of students take longer), it's really hard, it's really painful, and there's no guarantee of a job when you 're finished. If it's your passion, and you can't imagine doing anything else, you should do it (I told him). But otherwise ... not so much. Looking back over old blog posts, I see that I talked about graduate studies almost exactly four years ago today. Here is what I said then: ****************************************************************** I teach one undergraduate and one graduate course a semester. Teaching undergraduates is a passion of mine. I love doing it. These are nineteen year olds who are inquisitive, interested, and interesting. I enjoy lecturing to a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:51-04:00April 23rd, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Did David Exist? And When Did I Know I Lost My Faith? Mailbag April 15, 2017

I will be dealing with two questions in this weekly Readers’ Mailbag. The first has to do with the historical evidence, if any, for the Israelite kings Saul, David, and Solomon – did they exist, or are the stories about them entirely legendary? The second, coming to us from a different universe, is about me personally, and my faith, whether there was a proverbial straw that broke my faith-camel’s back. QUESTION: According to Finkelstein and Silberman’s book, The Bible Unearthed, which I know you admire, there is zero evidence for the existence of Solomon and not much more for David and Saul (Shlomo Sands takes a similar view). Your position seems to be that all three existed: can you please tell me why you think this? RESPONSE: First let me say that I think Finkelstein and Silberman’s book is absolutely terrific. I often get asked what book I would recommend to people who are interested in the critical study of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) comparable to the kind of thing I do [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:51-04:00April 15th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Meditation Practice and Women at the Empty Tomb: Readers Mailbag April 9, 2017

I will be dealing with two questions in this week’s mailbag, one about me personally – do I meditate? – and one about the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection: in all our narratives it is specifically women who are said to have found the empty tomb and so to be the first witnesses to the resurrection. Given ancient views that denigrate women, is it likely that anyone would make up such a story? If someone made up the tomb-discovery story, wouldn’t they have claimed that that *men* found the tomb empty? And doesn’t that suggest the story really happened as narrated? QUESTION: Do you meditate? If so, which techniques do you use? Do you find it helpful? RESPONSE: Yes indeed, I do meditate. Every New Years I make it a resolution to meditate each and every day. This year I’m doing pretty well *except* when I’m traveling (which, unfortunately, is a lot this semester); that’s probably when I need most to meditate and I just have real trouble scheduling it in. Not good. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:51-04:00April 9th, 2017|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Our Fifth Year Anniversary!

Today is a huge day for us: the fifth anniversary of the blog! Hard to believe. But we’ve come through five years. And it’s been one busy lustrum. I just added up some numbers. Here they are. Since April 3, 2012: I have made 1462 posts. That comes to 5.6 per week. I have not missed a week so far in the entire stretch. To my *knowledge* (I may be wrong about this, and given the sharp readers we have, I’m sure someone will let me know in no uncertain terms if I am; but to my knowledge…, I have not missed doing at least 5 posts a week yet. Again, maybe I have!) Most of the posts are slightly more than 1000 words (some a lot more). That means I have written about 1.5 million words for the blog. THAT seems like a lot. There have been 49,284 comments read and approved for the blog. That is 190 per week, for five years. Many of the comments have asked questions, and I have [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:50-04:00April 3rd, 2017|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Questions on the Resurrection and My Personal Spiritual Experiences: Readers’ Mailbag

I'll address two questions on this week's readers' mailbag, one about what we can say about the resurrection of Jesus (a specific question about it) and one about whether my (one-time) faith was based on the Bible or on spiritual experiences I had. (The answer is apparently not what the questioner expected.) QUESTION: How do you separate the fact from fiction on the risen Jesus? You accept, as historical, that the disciples believed they had visions of the risen Jesus – so how do you reject, as legendary, the physical interactions with the risen Jesus as they are drawn from the same accounts? RESPONSE: Ah, this is a good question: it gets to the heart of what it means to engage in a historical analysis of our early Christian traditions. Each and every tradition (e.g.: the followers of Jesus came to believe he was raised from the dead because they saw him alive afterward; or Jesus ate some fish in their presence after he had died) has to be evaluated on its own merits [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:34-04:00March 24th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

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