Reflections and Ruminations Archives - Page 24 of 30 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Year Three on the Blog

QUESTION: If I remember right, you just passed the three year mark of the blog. How much have you raised total? RESPONSE: Right! This will be just a short post to provide an update on the blog. Yes indeed, we passed the three-year mark a month ago, on April 4. I was going to make a post summarizing the year, but other things got in the way and I ended up doing other threads and never got back to it. So I’ll do it now, a month late. The blog is still doing great and getting ever better, in my opinion. First, in direct answer to the question about the money that has been raised. That is the matter particularly near and dear to my heart. It’s my ultimate interest, as I’ve said numerous times, since the entire point of the blog, in one sense, is to raise money for charity. I am very happy indeed to say that we raised $78,000 in our third year of operation. That is significant money, obviously, and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:13-04:00May 9th, 2015|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Truth and History

In my recent post in which I made a paean to memory – which will be the way I end my current book dealing with memory and the historical Jesus -- I said the following. MY REMARK: “The comment that I sometimes get from readers that I find puzzling or disheartening is when they tell me that if there is something in the Gospels that is not historical, then it cannot be true, and if it is not true, then it is not worth reading. My sense is that many readers will find it puzzling or even disheartening that I find this view puzzling and disheartening. But I do. Please call me a prophet if you must, but I would like to point out that a number of readers on the blog did indeed find my view puzzling and disheartening. Mainly puzzling. The following was a very well reasoned response from a reader, to which I would like to reply: READER’S COMMENT: Indeed, stories that aren’t true are no less worthwhile to read. The Bible [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:13-04:00May 8th, 2015|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

On Being Controversial

In this post I am going to take a bit of time out to do some self-reflection. An issue I’ve been puzzling over for some time is the fact that people keep referring to my work as “controversial.” I hear this all the time. And truth be told, I’ve always found it bit odd and a disconcerting. This past week I’ve had two people tell me that they know that I “like to be controversial.” That’s actually not the case at all. One person told me that she had seen a TV show where someone had said that they didn’t believe that Jesus existed, and she thought that was right up my alley. I didn’t bother to tell her that I had written an entire book arguing that Jesus certainly did exist. She simply assumed that this was the sort of view that I myself would have and delight in making public. The reason I find that the idea I’m controversial is that my views about the historical Jesus, the authorship of the books of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:00-04:00April 19th, 2015|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

What Is A Memory?

A number of readers on the blog have objected to my understanding of memory, specifically to what a memory is, that is, to what constitutes a memory. As a rule, these readers have argued – some with considerable force and conviction! – that a “memory” is a mental recollection of something that one has personally experienced. Let me cite one of the more closely reasoned expressions of this alternative view by one of my respondents, before explaining my view and why I have it. COMMENT: Bart, I think people might be confused by your definition of false memories. In the medical, psychological and legal literature, false memories are defined as BELIEVED-IN MEMORIES OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCES that are false or are falsely remembered by specific persons. Beliefs ,stories, narratives, myths, folklore and conspiracies that are false but are circulating in a community or culture are not considered false memories by memory experts since these are not claimed to be first-hand memories of personal experiences. For example, a false memory can be created in the mind [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:56-04:00April 13th, 2015|Memory Studies, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Ramblings on Charity and Religion

QUESTION: Don't you think that being raised in Christianity makes it more likely that you will make decent contributions to others like you do with your charity contributions? I know that one does not have to be Christian to be decent, but it seems, for many of us, to help increase the odds of being decent at least some of the time. RESPONSE: This is a really interesting question. And maybe unanswerable! Why are those of us who are concerned deeply about others and their welfare so … concerned? Is it because we are religious? Or, as in my case, because we used to be religious? In one of my public debates with Dinesh D’Souza a few years ago, this came out as a point of disagreement. Dinesh believes that only Christianity drives people to be concerned about others who are in need. For him, it is not religion in general, but Christianity in particular, that makes people want to be charitable. In the debate, I found that view to be a bit outrageous. Really? [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:56-04:00April 11th, 2015|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

How I’m Writing This Book

I have been asked about how I am actually writing my book just now. Here are some reflections. One of the things you figure out pretty quickly when writing a book is that it never goes as planned. Things (usually) take longer than you thought they would; or they (rarely) go faster. For most authors, the structure of the book changes as they start writing it, and they realize that they really have to say more about this and they really probably should say less about that. They realize that, contrary to what they thought, they need to devote an entire chapter to something that they had planned to cover in a few paragraphs. Key (verbal) illustrations that they planned to use don’t actually work that well. And they come up with new ideas in the process of writing. Different authors have remarkably different approaches to writing. My wife Sarah and I are about as different as they come. In large measure, I think, that’s because our brains work so differently. Sarah is drop-dead brilliant. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:56-04:00April 6th, 2015|Book Discussions, Memory Studies, Reflections and Ruminations|

Different Kinds of Memory

I indicated in the last post that I got interested in the study of memory for both personal and professional reasons. Professionally, I had long been interested in the question of how eyewitnesses would have remembered the life of Jesus, and how the stories about Jesus may have been shifted and altered and invented in later times based on faulty or even false memories. That led me to be interested in memory more broadly. Memory is an enormous field of research, just within cognitive psychology. I spent months doing nothing but reading important studies, dozens and dozens of books and articles. It is really interesting stuff. Memory is not at all what I started out thinking it was. Like most people I had this vague notion in my head that memory worked kind of like a camera. You see or experience something and take a photo of it and store it in your head. Sometimes the photo might fade, or you might mistake one photo for another, but basically it is all in there in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:55-04:00April 1st, 2015|Book Discussions, Memory Studies, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why I Shifted My Research Plans

In my last post I started explaining how I came to work on issues of memory. My plan had been something else, to write a detailed commentary on the Gospel of Peter and other early Greek Gospel fragments. I had been committed to do this for years, with a book contract with Fortress Press for their commentary series that is called Hermeneia. Just by way of background: when I was just out of graduate school, I vowed to myself that there were three kinds of books I would never, ever write. I would never write a textbook. I would never write a book on the historical Jesus. And I would never write a commentary. The reason for each was that there simply were too many of each kind of book out there already, and I simply didn’t want to tread where so many others had trod. So much for my vows. I did end up writing a textbook on the NT. That wasn’t my idea; my publisher twisted my arm and I agreed, and I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:28:55-04:00March 30th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

Do You Have To Believe in the Virgin Birth?

This post will provide a brief respite from my discussion of the authorship of 2 Thessalonians. I went back “home” to Kansas last week to spend a few days with my mom here before the holiday season. Dutiful son that I am, I took her to church. I go to church about once every year or two, these days, and normally when I go it is to an Episcopal church on Christmas Eve. This was a conservative evangelical Free Methodist Church – one that my mom has attended for many years. It’s not really my style – I rather prefer centuries-honored liturgy to electric guitars and drums, myself – but I wasn’t there to satisfy my own aesthetic preferences. (She doesn’t like the guitars and drums either, but we missed the earlier service with the choir). The sermon in that kind of church is very different from what one hears in an Episcopal church and is also very different from the kind of sermon I learned to preach when I was in my Masters of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:45-04:00December 21st, 2014|Reflections and Ruminations|

Giving Ideas

This post is about two “Gift Ideas” for this Season of Gifts. First: Holiday Giving! Most of us at this time of year are involved in giving and receiving. And most of us spend a good deal of time scratching our heads trying to figure out what we can give a person – a family member, a friend, a neighbor, a colleague, a boss, a secretary, a baby-sitter, a pet-sitter, a teacher, a golf coach, a knitting club member, a favorite person, a whatever. Here’s an idea. Why not give a gift subscription to the Bart Ehrman Blog? It’s dead easy to do, and odds are, the person doesn’t have one! All you need to do is go to the site at https://ehrmanblog.org/ and on the right side of the screen click on “Gift Subscriptions”. There may be lots of people you can think of who would enjoy having full access to the blog. So give several. Give many. Give many thousands. You’ll make people happy, you’ll make yourself happy, you’ll make me happy, you’ll [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:31-04:00December 14th, 2014|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Do I Devote Myself to Studying the Bible?

QUESTION: The one thing that I do not understand about you is that you have stated you have lost your faith. That being said, how do you continue to work in your field? Have you ever wanted to redirect your academic career to study other subjects? RESPONSE: I get this question a lot. On one level I understand it: if I don’t believe in the Bible, why would I dedicate my life to studying it, researching about it, writing about it, and teaching about it? From the perspective of someone who has strong feelings about the Bible – for example, as a believer who holds that the Bible is the word of God or as an atheist who thinks the Bible is the root of all kinds of evil – it may seem like a mystery that someone in my boat would be interested in spending such an enormous amount of time and effort in studying it. Or from the perspective of someone who is completely apathetic about the Bible: why would you bother? But [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:30-04:00December 13th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Best of Times and the Worst of Times

Like many of us at this time of year, I am looking at my life and thinking how incredibly thankful I am for all the good things I have: a beautiful, brilliant, humane, and loving wife; a fantastic, interesting, and caring son and daughter; the two best grandchildren the world has ever seen; a teaching position I absolutely love and thrive on; chances to do what I really want to do with my so-called free time – reading and writing; good health; good friends who, like me, love good food, good drink, and good conversation about important things; and, well, lots of other things. When I first became an agnostic, I had a problem with thankfulness. I felt very thankful (though, frankly, times were hard: divorce, money issues, familial and life uncertainties) . But it seemed weird to feel thankful. I had always thought of thankfulness to be something you have *toward* somebody. When you say thank you, you say thank you precisely to someone. But who was I to thank for the good things [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:27:30-04:00December 12th, 2014|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

On Changing One’s Mind

I thought today I would break up the monotony of the current thread by posting on something completely different. It will take me a couple of posts to finish up my reflections on what kind of training is necessary to make a good textual critic – which is really a sub-thread (OK, call it a tangent) within my larger thread about how I went about writing my textbook and what changes I made in it. And I’ll get back to both the sub-thread and the larger thread. But this post is on something else. Changing one’s mind. The reason this has become a topic of interest for me – today, for instance – is that I just finished reading something that I wrote ten years ago and something that I wrote on the same topic seven years later, just three years ago, and noted that, well, I had changed my mind! Reversed directions. Completely altered not only what I thought but what I said. And that has led me to reflect on the phenomenon of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:55-04:00October 12th, 2014|Reflections and Ruminations|

My Graduate Training (Textual Criticism??)

I saw my master’s thesis as the perfect assignment to get me grounded in the entire, complicated field of New Testament textual criticism. Ever since then I’ve been in favor of students writing master's theses, even if it is not required for a master’s program. For one thing, doing so gets you into the frame of mind that you need to be in when you get to the point of writing a dissertation at the PhD level – which for most students is the first time they write a book. The masters thesis is usually much shorter – say 100-120 pages. But the layout tends to be similar. Most theses I’ve been involved with, including my own, have entailed an introduction, three chapters, and a conclusion. So the student learns to think in terms of writing chapters, each of which has its own thesis and point; but all of them work together in order systematically to set forth the overarching thesis of the work. This is a hard transition for some students, who for their [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:55-04:00October 10th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Training as a Textual Critic

In some of my previous posts I’ve indicated that since I was known as a textual critic (one who worked with Greek manuscripts of the New Testament in order to determine both what the authors originally wrote and how the text came to be changed over the centuries) I was not widely seen as a candidate for writing a New Testament textbook for undergraduates. Several readers have expressed some perplexity over this. Aren’t textual critics, by their very nature, background, and training, proficient in the wider field of New Testament studies? The answer may surprise you: it may be that they should be, but many (at one time, most) are not. It’s a little hard to explain why, but I’ll try. As is my wont, I’ll start autobiographically. In my case, the great bulk of my graduate training actually had very little to do with textual criticism. When I came to Princeton Theological Seminary as a master’s student ) in 1978 (after I had finished my BA in English at Wheaton college), I was required [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:55-04:00October 9th, 2014|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why We Need Tenure

I’ve been discussing what a university professor does with his or her time, and have devoted a couple of posts to the question of what it takes to receive tenure. In doing so I have indicated that tenure is a guarantee of life-long employment by the academic institution, barring such extraordinary circumstances as moral turpitude on the part of the professor (it happens!) and financial exigency of the institution (it too, alas, happens). I should say as well, though, that once one receives tenure it is no pure boondoggle for the rest of one’s life. At UNC, at least, we have a mandatory “Post-tenure Review” process every five years, where we who have tenure have to explain in writing what we have been doing in our teaching, research, and service since the previous review. If performance is not satisfactory, a plan of remedial action is implemented, and if things go from bad to worse, disciplinary actions can be implemented. But for most of us, we’re working our tails off all the time anyway, so there’s [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:39-04:00September 18th, 2014|Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

What Counts for Tenure?

I have one more post to make on this thread, which has taken me off onto a tangent, away from early Christianity per se and onto what it means to be a university professor at a research institution such as UNC. That other post – hopefully tomorrow – will be about why tenure is absolutely essential for this kind of job, even if it is highly unusual anywhere else (unheard of, of course, in the business world). But before then, I want to say one other thing about the tenure process, something that would not occur to most people and that in fact will be both surprising and, possibly, counter-intuitive. It has to do with what “counts” as research. Virtually every school on the planet will tell its assistant professors that there are three factors considered in evaluating a case for tenure: research, teaching, and service. The balance of those three factors, though, differs significantly from one school to another. Some schools focus almost exclusively on teaching, so that research is not that big of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:39-04:00September 17th, 2014|Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

The Academic Tenure Situation

In my previous post I discussed what a professor at a research university does with his or her time. I did not go into detail about a lot of the really time consuming obligations, which I may at some point devote a post to. For now I want to deal with one other thing that I mentioned in yesterday’s post: the question of tenure. Most people in the rest of the working world have trouble getting their mind around what university tenure is all about. You mean they guarantee you a job for life? They can’t fire you? Really??? Yes, pretty much really. With some provisos. The tenure system has come under fire in recent years by those outside the system who think that it is a disaster and a bit of a joke. It is sometimes thought or said that that once a professor has tenure, there is no incentive for him or her to do much of anything: they have a job -- permantently! And that, it is said, is a recipe for [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:38-04:00September 16th, 2014|Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Ideas for Raising More Money on the Blog

Many thanks to everyone who responded to my request for comments about how to improve the blog. I am taking all of them under advisement! Here I’d like to flesh out a bit three specific suggestions and give my take on them (I will address a few others in my next post). Please consider each of these and respond if you feel so moved! These are themed: they are all about money and about how to raise more of it – one of my ongoing interests and concerns 1. The Price of the Blog. Several people suggested that if I want to achieve my fund-raising goals for the charities I support (i.e., make more money), I could raise the cost of the blog. Simply charge more. Some suggested $50 instead of $24.95. I was amused to see that no one suggested I charge *less* in order to make more money. It made me think that maybe there are more Democrats than Republicans on the blog. J The reason I don’t want to charge more is [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:26:08-04:00August 7th, 2014|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

A Hiatus in the Thread: Editorial Duties!

This is simply a short post to say that even though I’ve just started on my thread on the burial of Jesus, I need to take a two-day hiatus (yesterday and today). Yesterday was completely blocked out because I had to go to Leiden, in the Netherlands, for an editorial board meeting. I’m staying in London for the summer – my wife Sarah is teaching her six-week Duke-in-London theater program (the students discuss a play – after reading it and writing something on it – every morning, and then that evening they actually go to see it on the London stage; about 30 plays altogether; it’s a *fantastic* program, and Sarah is completely energized by it); getting to Leiden from here is remarkably easy. It’s about an hour by air to Amsterdam from Gatwick airport, and then a short train ride into central Leiden. Leiden is a great city, and I really need to spend some time exploring it some time. It is filled with gorgeous canals, there are old parts of the city, and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:48-04:00July 5th, 2014|Reflections and Ruminations|

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