Reflections and Ruminations Archives - Page 20 of 31 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Newsweek Article on Christmas: Part 2

Yesterday I gave Part 1 of my Newsweek article on Christmas, published in 2012. Here is Part 2! *************************************************************** Most modern readers who are not already familiar with these stories [in the apocryphal Gospels such as the Proto-Gospel of James] tend to find them far-fetched. That’s almost always the case with miraculous accounts that we have never heard before – they sound implausible and “obviously” made up, as legends and fabrications. Rarely do we have the same reaction to familiar stories known from childhood that are also spectacularly miraculous, and that probably sound just as bizarre to outsiders who hear them for the first time. Are the stories about Jesus’ birth that are in the New Testament any less far-fetched? It depends whom you ask. This past November, Pope Benedict XVI published his third book on the life of Jesus, this one focusing on the New Testament accounts of his birth, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives. Before his ascent to the head of the Catholic Church, Joseph Ratzinger was best known as a leading [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:22-04:00November 29th, 2016|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Looking Ahead to Christmas: A Blast from the Past

With the passing of Thanksgiving, Christmas season has now officially arrived (whether that brings you joy, despair, or indifference!). Here is a post that I made exactly four years, prompted in part by my decision to publish an edition of “other” Gospels (that did not make it into the New Testament, including some that deal with the birth of Jesus. ****************************************************** Right now I have the “other” Gospels on my mind. It’s true, I often have them on my mind, since they have been a focus for a good deal of my research over the past few years, and will continue to be for some years to come. But just now, they are particularly on my mind even though the book I’m currently writing (How Jesus Became God) is about something else. They’re on my mind for three reasons. First, I’ve agreed with Oxford Press, to produce, along with my colleague Zlatko Plese, an English-only edition of The Apocryphal Gospels, which came out in a Greek/Latin/Coptic-English edition last year; this new edition will include only the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:22-04:00November 27th, 2016|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Improving the Blog 2016

I would like some ideas for making this blog better. Do you have any? As you know, the blog really has two functions. On one hand, the idea behind it is to disseminate as widely as possible the views, perspectives, evidence, arguments, and conclusions of scholars who devote their lives to the study of the New Testament and the history of early Christianity. As the disseminator-of-such-things-in-chief, I think we are doing a pretty good job with that. The blog covers lots and lots of topics: the historical Jesus; the New Testament Gospels; the life, theology, and writings of Paul; the other writings of the New Testament; the Apostolic Fathers; the early Christian apocrypha (books that did not make it into the New Tesament); the formation of the Christian canon; heresy and orthodoxy in early Christianity; persecution and martyrdom of Christians; early Jewish Christian relations; the conversion and life of Constantine; and … and lots of other things. We basically cover everything that I know anything about, and the only things we don’t cover are (a) [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:22-04:00November 26th, 2016|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Personal Thoughts on Thanksgiving, 2016

I have been thinking, as is my wont, about giving thanks, on this Thanksgiving. Many of my thoughts have been about all the things I am so incredibly thankful for, as is appropriate for the day. But another line of thinking has hit me as well, involving the ironies of giving thanks. Some background, from my personal life. As much as I love my live, the older I get, the more I realize just how weird this of mine life has been, as a scholar of religion who is not himself religious, an expert on Jesus and the New Testament who does not believe in Jesus or the New Testament, an academic obsessed with the history of Christianity who is not personally connected with Christianity. As many of you know, the weirdness in part comes from the fact that when I started out I was completely committed religiously, as a believer in Jesus, the Bible, and all things Christian. When I was seventeen, I was not just your run-of-the-mill-go-to-church-on-Sunday kind of Christian. I was a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:22-04:00November 24th, 2016|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

What If the Mythicists Were Right: Mailbag November 6, 2016

QUESTION: It must be difficult going into these types of debates knowing that if Robert Price is actually right, your entire career would be pointless and irrelevant. I certainly don’t believe this, but it must have crossed your mind before? RESPONSE: This question arose from the debate I had a couple of weeks ago with Robert Price, on whether Jesus existed. Price argued, as you know, that there never was a historical man Jesus, but that the earliest “Christians” believed in a cosmic Christ, a mythical figure who lived above in the heavenly realm who was crucified by demons in outer space. This is the Christ attested, for example, he claimed, in Paul. But later Christians invented a historical figure Jesus out of this Christ, and the Gospels portray this fictitious figure that was simply made up. Jesus of Nazareth never existed. And so this question is whether I really can’t entertain this view as an option since, if it were true, I wouldn’t have a career. My career is based on the history [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:05-04:00November 6th, 2016|Mythicism, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

What Can We Do About Presuppositions?

QUESTION: Would you mind expanding on the issue of presuppositions, either in an article or in the readers mail bag? What are presuppositions? Why we all have them. And how do we make sure we have the right ones, or at least good ones. Having come out of Fundamentalist circles I heard so much about “presuppositions”, “worldviews”, “presuppositional apologetics” and so on. Seems the argument goes “Well, we all have presuppositions. No one is free of them. Therefore it is just as valid to come to historical and scientific issues with the presupposition that the claims are all true. Just as unbelievers come to the evidence with the presuppositions that there are no such things as miracles.” RESPONSE: This is a huge question (and a very important one), and requires a long answer. I can’t answer it any better than I already tried to do in my book How Jesus Became God. This is what I say there, in response to a particular issue, of how presuppositions can or should affect our ability to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:05-04:00October 30th, 2016|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Marcion as Alive and Well Among Us

As I’ve been thinking about Marcion over the past couple of days, it has occurred to me that in some ways he is still alive and well among us. I have known Christians over the years who in fact have views in many ways close to what Marcion taught. These people would, of course, deny they have anything like the touch of the heretic about them. But at the end of the day, their views are not so different. Maybe they are not as extreme as him, but they do seem to be dwelling on the fringes of his camp. First, I have known a lot of Christians who think that the Old Testament has a God of wrath and condemnation and the New Testament has a God of love and mercy. Students say this to me with some regularity. The God of the Old Testament gives difficult laws that no one can possibly follow (how, exactly, are you supposed to keep from “coveting” anything??). And then he condemns people for not keeping them. But [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:35:03-04:00October 19th, 2016|Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Don’t People See Discrepancies in the Bible? Readers’ Mailbag October 15, 2016

QUESTION: I assume that Bart Ehrman today when he reads the books of the New Testament sees large discrepancies between them. My question is about the precocious sixteen-year-old Ehrman, Did he too see this variousness (which opens up the possibility of inconsistency)? Or did it all as he read it cohere, seem of a piece, convey one doctrinally comprehensive and orthodox and uniform message? And if it did, how does today’s Ehrman think young Ehrman managed to overlook all those obvious discrepancies? RESPONSE: The sixteen-year-old Bart Ehrman who revered the Bible was probably like almost every sixteen-year-old on the planet who reveres the Bible. We were (and people are still now) taught that the Bible was the inspired Word of God. We knew that it was God’s revelation to humans before we had ever read a word of it. Even before I was an evangelical Christian I simply assumed it had been given by God. If that’s what a person simply assumes before coming to the Bible, then when she or he reads the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:47-04:00October 15th, 2016|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Jesus, The Law, and the New Covenant

This past week I gave a lecture at the University of Michigan called “Jesus, the Law, and the New Covenant.” The occasion was a symposium in honor of the life and work of Old Testament scholar George Mendenhall. I never knew Mendenhall. He was a highly prominent figure in the field of Hebrew Bible in the middle of the 20th century, known especially for his work on the significance of “covenant” for understanding both the Hebrew Bible and the history of the Israelites. The symposium itself was a day-long affair in which scholars of Hebrew Bible, Ancient Near Eastern Studies, and post-biblical Judaism gave academic papers dealing with the concepts of covenant and law in their fields of interest. The organizers of the conference asked me to give the keynote address the evening before the symposium itself. When I was asked, I told them how deeply honored I was, knowing the importance of Mendenhall’s scholarship. But I pointed out that my expertise is not Hebrew Bible, and I would not be able to interact intelligently [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:46-04:00October 12th, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reflections and Ruminations|

(Later) Early Christian Understandings of Heaven and Hell

Yesterday I gave Part One of a two-part discussion of the “invention” of heaven and hell, from my book Jesus Interrupted. There I sketched out the apocalyptic vision of what would happen at the end of time as the original view among the followers of Jesus. Here is where I continue that discussion into some reflections of where the Christian teachings of the afterlife, as later formulated, came from. ********************************************** The Transformation of the Apocalyptic Vision What happens when this expected end doesn’t happen? What happens when the apocalyptic scenario that Jesus expected to occur in “this generation” never comes? When Paul’s expectation that he will be alive at the second coming of Christ is radically disconfirmed by his own death? When the resurrection of the dead is delayed, interminably, making a mockery of the widespread belief that it will happen “soon”? One thing that happens, of course, is that some people begin to mock. That is the problem addressed in the final book of the New Testament to be written, 2 Peter, which [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:46-04:00October 10th, 2016|Afterlife, Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Don’t I Call Myself a Christian? Mailbag: October 8, 2016

I’ve decided to address two personal questions in this week’s Readers’ Mailbag, one about why I don’t want to call myself a Christian and the other about where the idea for this blog came from. If you have questions you would like me to address, either personal or dealing with anything having to do with the NT and the history of early Christianity, just make a comment on any post and ask them! QUESTION: I find it interesting that you and Lüdemann each create an extremely narrow rule separating Christians from non-Christians and then use it to exclude yourselves from Christianity. It is almost as if you somehow intuitively sense that you should not define yourself as being within Christianity, so you take up a narrow rule that “all Christians must believe in physical resurrection” or whatever, so you can declare that you are not a Christian. Not being a Christian is the goal, and making up a rule is the means. What do you think? Faced with similar dissonance, some others find a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:46-04:00October 8th, 2016|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Invention of the Afterlife: Request for Ideas!

Toward the end of this post I will be asking for your opinions and ideas. So I hope you get that far! Now that I have sent my manuscript on The Triumph of Christianity off to my editor, and before she gets back to me for revisions and edits, I am turning my thoughts to the next book. The reality is that I am not 100% certain what it will be. That still has to be worked out, negotiated, and approved by the publisher. I’m committed to Simon & Schuster for this next book, as well as Triumph (we originally negotiated a two-book deal), so that part is set. But in our contract deal, the next book was more or less called a “player to be named later.” Now it is time to figure out what it will be. I do have a strong preference, and hope to sell the publisher on the idea. So far they are receptive. But we’ll see. I started out with a vague idea, that has now evolved into a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:46-04:00October 6th, 2016|Afterlife, Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

How I Learned To Write for a General Audience

It is time -- after many fits, starts, and interruptions -- to bring this thread to a close, the thread that started with my saying I wanted to explain why I was in a better position to write trade books (for a general audience) than most of my peers who were with me in my New Testament PhD program and others in the guild of New Testament studies. I won’t re-discuss all the background I gave over a long series of posts, but I do need to summarize the one most important point. Almost everyone I knew in my PhD program, and most biblical scholars I know today, think (with good reason in many cases) that what they are doing in their work of interpreting the New Testament or explaining its religious significance should be interesting to lots of people. And in fact it usually is interesting to the (small) groups of people that they typically associate with (for example in church contexts). I never had that problem. For my PhD I was working on [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:46-04:00October 5th, 2016|Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Inerrancy of the Bible? And Those Who Doubt. Readers’ Mailbag October 2, 2016

How did I deal with inconsistencies and discrepancies as a young Christian? And why does the NT indicate that some of Jesus' own followers doubted the resurrection? Those are the two questions I deal with in this week's readers' mailbag. QUESTION: I assume that Bart Ehrman today when he reads the books of the New Testament sees large discrepancies between them. My question is about the precocious sixteen-year-old Ehrman, Did he too see this variety (which opens up the possibility of inconsistency)? Or did it all as he read it cohere, seem of a piece, convey one doctrinally comprehensive and orthodox and uniform message? And if it did, how does today’s Ehrman think young Ehrman managed to overlook all those obvious discrepancies? RESPONSE: Ah, right, my former life! When I was young and Christian – say, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two – I was already passionate about the Bible, but was absolutely convinced that it was, in every way, the Word of God. I never doubted it. And I never saw [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:46-04:00October 2nd, 2016|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Process of Publishing a Book

I mentioned yesterday that I have now sent in my manuscript on The Triumph of Christianity to my editor at Simon & Schuster. It occurs to me that readers might be interested in knowing how the editorial process works. I know I was almost completely ignorant of the process when I first started publishing books. My unreflective thought then is that once I would finish writing a book and editing it as best I could, the process would be more or less over, without much left to do. Wrong. The process goes on and on and you think it’ll never end! So leading up to this point I have written the book. That itself was a long process with a large number of stages. I started by accumulating bibliography on the topic, reading the classics in the field, finding new books and articles that needed to be read, reading those, discovering other books and articles that had to be read, reading those, and so on. On everything I read I took notes, so I could [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:46-04:00September 30th, 2016|Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Writing Books that Are Interesting and Important

Last week I interrupted the thread I had been pursuing about why my unusual academic background prepared me to write books for general audiences in order to talk about my lecture in Odense, Denmark, at the University of Southern Denmark, on the relationship between the worship of the Roman emperor and the rise of Christian understandings of Christ as “Savior” and “Lord” and “God” (titles given to the emperor as well). There is more to be said about this latter topic, some of it very interesting – but I think I’ve said enough for now. I want to finish off the earlier thread. And for a rather momentous (for me!) occasion. Two days ago, I finished my book manuscript The Triumph of Christianity and sent it off to my editor for her to work her magic with it. I am very excited about this process, more so (maybe a lot more so?) than normal. This will be the thirty-first book that I’ve published (some edited, most written). So I do this kind of thing a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:46-04:00September 29th, 2016|Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Faith and History: A Blast From the Past

Here is a post that I made exactly four years ago today, on a topic of perennial interest: the relationship between theological belief and historical study: ******************************************************************* I received a number of responses to my post yesterday about faith and history – some on the blog itself and some via emails (I prefer questions/comments on the blog itself, by the way, as I can deal with them more efficiently. In case anyone should ask you which I prefer :) ). Some of these comments were all heading in the same direction, and were made, I think, because (can you imagine it?) I was not as clear as I could be in what I was trying to say about the relationship of faith and history. In these responses my responders pointed out that it really is impossible to keep faith and history separate from one another, since in many instances the historical conclusions one draws may stand in conflict with theological beliefs. So something has to give, either the history or the theology. But that means that they [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:45-04:00September 26th, 2016|Bart's Critics, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Debate with a Mythicist! And the Book of Revelation. Readers’ Mailbag September 25, 2016

In this week’s Mailbag I’ll be addressing two questions, one about me personally – my preparations for the upcoming debate with Robert Price on the question of whether Jesus even existed as a human being – and the other about the book of Revelation. If you have a question you would like me to address on the Mailbag, simply ask it in a comment on this post or any other. ************************************************************************ QUESTION It seems the debate between yourself and Robert Price will be going ahead next month, right? I follow Price on Facebook and he has evidently been re-reading all your books in preparation. How much of his books do you intend on reading prior to the debate? How will you prepare for the debate? I’m really looking forward to it! RESPONSE Right! Yes indeed! On October 21 I will be having a three-hour debate in Milwaukee with Robert Price, who has two PhDs from Drew University, one in New Testament Studies and the other in Theology, and who is an atheist who supports [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:45-04:00September 25th, 2016|Bart's Debates, Canonical Gospels, Mythicism, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations, Revelation of John|

Fear of Dying etc.: Weekly Readers Mailbag, September 18, 2016

What is my personal feeling toward death? That's the first of two questions in this weeks' Readers' Mailbag! QUESTION: How do you feel about dying? Is that not in some part terrifying? And us losing our loved ones forever? How do you get over that? RESPONSE: Ah, how do I feel about dying? In general, I’m against it. :-) But do I find the prospect terrifying? I would say that over the years I have had different attitudes toward death. I suppose when I was very young, I hoped I was a good enough person to go to heaven. I was certainly terrified of going to hell. When I had a born again experience in high school, I became absolutely convinced I was going to heaven, as would anyone else who did what I did (accept Christ as their Lord and Savior) and believe what I did. Anyone else (i.e., most of the billions of people in the world): well, too bad for them. They are going to roast forever in hell. When, over [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:31-04:00September 18th, 2016|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Arguments, Evidence, and Changing Your Mind

In this series of posts on how I got interested in textual criticism, I’ve had a number of people indicate that they don’t see how the problems posed by our manuscripts did not absolutely destroy my evangelical faith. By implication, I think, they are wondering why evangelicals broadly, to a person, don’t see these problems and realize that they don’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to their belief in the Bible. The logic these commenters are applying is one that I discuss in my book Misquoting Jesus. If the evangelical belief is rooted in the sense that the Bible contains the very words that God inspired, and if a study of our manuscripts reveals that there are thousands – hundreds of thousands – of places where these words were changed, so that there are some places where we cannot know what the authors actually wrote, then isn’t that an insurmountable problem? Why would God inspire the words of Scripture (that would take a mighty miracle!) if he did not make sure [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00September 14th, 2016|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

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