Reflections and Ruminations Archives - Page 18 of 31 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

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|

Pastor Goranson, the Son of God, and I: A Blast From the Past

A former colleague of mine contacted me last week -- not a colleague from any of my teaching positions, but a colleague in ministry from forty years ago when I was the Youth Pastor at Trinity Covenant Church in Oak Lawn, Illinois. I've been reminiscing about those days, and I remembered an event connected with that church that I talked about in my book How Jesus Became God, involving a moment when my doubts about the Christian faith were starting to take hold. Here is a post that I made about it exactly four years ago today. ************************************************************** 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 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:33-04:00March 14th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Are Group Visions Possible?

I have received a number of interesting responses to my claim in yesterday’s post that it is possible for groups of people to have the same non-veridical vision (that is, hallucinations). I used the phenomenon of the Blessed Virgin Mary: she seems to appear a good deal, to groups of people – sometimes large groups. In this post I thought I would respond to two of the highly intelligent demurrals. DEMURRAL: As a former evangelical Protestant we believed that Roman Catholics who claim to see the Virgin Mary as a group are in a state of emotional hysteria and seeing an illusion not experiencing a group hallucination. An illusion is a distorted perception of something that really is present, such seeing a stain on a wall or a cloud formation in a photograph and seeing the Virgin Mary or Jesus in it. Many thousands of Roman Catholics claimed to have experienced a visitation of the Virgin Mary in Fatima Portugal not due to seeing and hearing a woman in flowing robes speak the same [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:33-04:00March 13th, 2017|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

What I’m Thinking about the Afterlife

I became interested in writing this book about the afterlife a couple of years ago, when I realized with unexpected clarity – out of the blue (I don’t know what sparked my thinking) – that the views most people have are not from the Bible. Many people, of course, do not believe in the afterlife at all. But at least in my parts of the world (both where I grew up, and where I have lived my life, first Chicago, then New Jersey, and now for the past 28 years North Carolina) those people who do believe in an afterlife (with a few, but only a very few exceptions), think that your body dies and your soul lives on. In the now traditional Christian idea, your soul goes to heaven or hell. Where did that idea come from? Most of the Bible, of course, is the Old Testament (it’s about 3-4 times as large as the New Testament). And the Old Testament teaches no such thing. Moreover, Jesus himself did not teach any such thing. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:33-04:00March 10th, 2017|Afterlife, Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Does the Afterlife Matter for Other Things?

This past Friday I went up to NYC to meet with my editor, and the marketing team, at my new publisher Simon & Schuster, both to discuss the next book coming out in September AND to talk (with my editor herself) about the possible new book, the one I am tentatively calling The Invention of the Afterlife (dealing with the question of where the widespread views of heaven and hell come from, especially since they are not actually what the Old Testament, Jesus, or the NT writers actually taught). This was kind of a first pitch, to get them interested. They are indeed interested, and so now the next step for me will be to write a prospectus to get them to agree formally and finally. I want to do this now, so I don’t spend months reading about the topic – both ancient writings that deal with the afterlife and modern scholarship on the matter – only to find out that this will *not* be my next book. Just to write the prospectus I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:32-04:00March 8th, 2017|Afterlife, Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Me and Jesus
Gallery
Me and Jesus

Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations

Me and Jesus

Yesterday I explained why, in my own opinion, I can no longer consider myself a Christian, and I received a lot of responses: some sympathetic, others not so sympathetic; some seeing the point and others disagreeing. One particular disagreement gets to the heart of what I was trying to say. Several people (OK, lots of people) have commented that if I follow the ethical teachings of Jesus that in that sense I really am a Christian and might as well admit it. Part of me agrees with that – it’s what I’ve long thought – but what I came to realize yesterday during my class lecture is that there is a strong sense in which that is also not true. Here I’ll try to explain. I do indeed try to adhere to the ethical teachings of Jesus as I see them. He himself summarized the entire Torah of Moses by stating two principal commandments. The first was Deuteronomy 6:4-6, that you should love God with all your heart, soul, and being. OK, I don’t follow [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:32-04:00March 7th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Do Good People Suffer? A Blast from the Past

I was looking around for an interesting post from a few years ago, and I found this one, from March 2013, which, as it turns out, is relevant to what I am going to want to say in the thread I've just started on views of the afterlife that developed in ancient Israel (leading up to the Christian views that eventually came to be so dominant throughout the West.). The post provides, in a nutshell, three major views about why there is suffering. Why is that relevant? One of my theses I have going into my research for my next book is that views of the afterlife developed originally as a way to explain why there are such inequities in the present life. Here's the post: ************************************************************************ I’m in New York City for a few days. Last night I gave a lecture at NYU; they had asked that I talk about “God, The Bible, and the Problem of Suffering.” That’s the topic of my book God’s Problem, and so I spun off a talk [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:32-04:00March 5th, 2017|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Thinking about Hell

When I search my mind for times in my (distant) past that I thought about hell, I conjure up two very different moments. Today when I think about them it is with a good sense of humor. The first is when I must have been maybe eight or nine. I was at some kind of summer camp, and we had a daily camp meeting where we would sing songs and someone would come talk to us. One day there was a local minister who came and told a story about a person who went first to hell and then heaven. When he went to hell he found that there was an enormous table filled with fantastic food – everything that everyone could imagine wanting. But all the people there had three-foot long forks strapped to their arms, and it was impossible for them to pick up the food and bring it to their mouths. And so they were starving in the midst of plenty. He then went to heaven and again, there was the enormous [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:16-04:00March 3rd, 2017|Afterlife, Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Views of the Afterlife

If my publisher agrees that my next book can/should be “The Invention of the Afterlife” (or whatever we call it) I will, as you might suspect, be thinking a lot about heaven and hell over the next couple of years. I”ve already been thinking a lot about them over the past six months as I’ve been reading broadly on the topic. I’m NOT, of course, mainly reading about what REALLY happens to us when we die. No one knows that. Or maybe I should rephrase that. There are a lot of people who *think* they know that, but in my opinion no one does. Most of the books I’ve been reading are about what people have *thought* about heaven and hell over the past three thousand years. I’m interested in knowing where current thinking came from – since what is now “common sense” in some circles was never dreamed of for most of human history. There are some people, of course, who argue that their views are not simply common sense – that is, views [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:16-04:00March 1st, 2017|Afterlife, Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Moving to My Next Book

As I mentioned some time ago, I’ve decided to slow down a bit and enjoy life a bit more. Since 1992 – that is, over the past 25 years – I have written or edited thirty books. I’m not going to stop. But I’m thinkin’ it’s time to ease off a bit. Is there a reason I publish a book a year? Not that I can think of. I’ve done it because it’s my passion. Well, one of my passions. I am a bit obsessed with the history of early Christianity and all that it entails. My books have covered a wide range of fields within that broader area. And I have tried to keep up publishing three different kinds of books: scholarly books for the academics; textbooks for the colleges students; and trade books for the general reading public. It’s been hard to balance all that, especially since I’ve tried to publish a new trade book every two years. I’ve had to do the other books in my spare time, such as it is, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:16-04:00February 28th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Work Habits the Letter allegedly by Jesus’ Own Brother: Mailbag 2/12/2017

I will be addressing two quite disparate questions in this week’s Readers’ Mailbag: one about my work habits and one about the New Testament epistle of James: how do we know that the author expected his readers to think (or know) that he was actually the brother of Jesus himself? If you have questions you’d like me to address in a future Mailbag, send them along! QUESTION: I notice you seem to get quite a bit done in a day (more than most people I know,) and that you have been doing that from a fairly young age (at one point you even experimented with decreasing your sleeping hours, If memory serves). The biggest hindrance to productivity for me is procrastination (like right now for example). How do you deal with it? You must feel it too sometimes. Did you always have an easier time concentrating than other folks? Did you learn it early in life (maybe by watching your parents)? If so, what techniques do you employ to deal with it? RESPONSE: [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:15-04:00February 12th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

How Do We Know What “Most Scholars” Think?

I have received a particularly interesting question that has led to a bit of back and forth between me and a person on the blog. This person pointed out that in my writings I often indicate that a view that I have (e.g., that the Gospel of John was not written by John the son of Zebedee; that the book of Ephesians was not really written by Paul even though the author claims to be Paul; or that the Gospels are all 40-65 years after the death of Jesus, etc.) is held by the majority of scholars. But fundamentalist and conservative evangelical scholars say just the opposite, that their views (e.g., that John the son of Zebedee did write the Gospel of John, or that the Gospels date to before the destruction of the Jerusalem in the year 70) are the views of the majority of scholars. So who is right? And how can a person know? In my initial response to this person, I told him that what I always try to say (maybe [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:58-04:00January 20th, 2017|Bart's Critics, History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Problem(s) With Fundamentalism: A Blast from the Past

What are fundamentalists, and why don't I like them? Here is a post I published almost exactly four years ago now. My views have not changed! ********************************************************************** QUESTION: You note that fundamentalism is dangerous and harmful. How do you define fundamentalism and why do you think it’s dangerous? RESPONSE: There are of course actual definitions of “fundamentalism” that you can find in scholarship on religion, but I sense that you’re asking more for a rough-and-ready description. Years ago I started defining fundamentalism as “No fun, too much damn, and not enough mental. When I was a fundamentalist myself (yet to be described) I understood it in a positive way. Originally, in Christian circles, it referred to believers who held on to the “fundamentals” of the faith, which for us included such things as the inspiration of Scripture, the full deity of Christ, the Trinity, the virgin birth, the physical resurrection, and, well, probably a collection of other doctrines. Fundamentalism, for us, was to be differentiated from liberalism, which had sacrificed these basic fundamental doctrines to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:58-04:00January 14th, 2017|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

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