Reflections and Ruminations Archives - Page 24 of 31 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Back To the Discovery of Lost Early Christian Writings

I have decided to return to the thread that I unceremoniously cut off nearly two months ago. At the time – in the middle of the thread -- I decided to start discussing my book on memory and the historical Jesus, since I had just finished it and wanted to get some feedback (which was all terrifically helpful, thank you all very much!). I then got onto some personal reflections about Moody Bible Institute and related topics. But now I’m ready, all this time later, to pick up the thread. The thread was dealing with lost writings from early Christianity that I would absolutely love to have (re-)discovered. If I could choose, which books would be on my list? Here by way of review is what I have said so far: In the opening posts of the thread I mentioned three early Christian writings (the first two are collections of writings) that I would love to have discovered. First, I would love to have... THE REST OF THIS POST IS FOR MEMBERS ONLY. If you [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:29-04:00May 22nd, 2015|Reflections and Ruminations|

My Resentment at Moody Bible Institute

OK, I want/need to bring this current thread – or rather, this current tangle of threads – to a close. I started out talking about what, looking back, I thought favorably about my three years at Moody Bible Institute, and what I felt resentful about it. This got me on to other things, which I was happy to do, since ten days ago I was at the end of the semester and the end of a book project (which happened simultaneously) and I was burned out and brain dead, and I couldn’t get up the energy to write anything about serious scholarship on the blog. But I’m recovered now, and can get on to more important things than me and my life. Which, frankly, would be most everything!! But I do need to spend this final post on the original thread to explain in very brief order what I am resentful about when it comes to my education as a 17-21 year old at Moody. There are three things, all of which I could expand [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:28-04:00May 21st, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

How I Moved into Trade Publishing

I have been explaining that I started to write books for a broader audience not because that was some kind of goal in my life – just the opposite! – but because I came to think it would be a good thing to try to communicate scholarship on the New Testament to 19-20 year olds in a college-level textbook. A couple of readers have commented that when my former classmates from Moody have indicated that I wanted (and still want) to write books to become famous, they were not referring to my textbooks but to my trade books for a general (adult) audience. That’s exactly right – that is indeed what they were referring to. The reason I’ve been talking about my first textbook is that this was the beginning of my quest to reach out to a broader swath of people. Here in this post I’ll get to my trade books. After I wrote my first textbook (I’ve now written three, and compiled three anthologies of ancient texts, in good translations, with brief introductions, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:14-04:00May 19th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

On Writing for A College Audience

I have been dealing with some of the criticisms that classmates from my college days at Moody Bible Institute have leveled against me. The reason this thread started is that I had decided to say a few words about my Moody experience here on the blog. I didn’t really finish that, but word got out among my former peers (I’m on a listserv that some of them hang out on) and several people made remarks about it. I’m not sure they knew I was reading their comments. (!) One comment was that I was in danger of judgment on the Last Day. I’ve already said a couple of things about that. Another was that I write my books simply in order to become famous. This post will be the second one on that. The third, which I will also deal with in a couple of posts, is the claim that I have led so many people astray (harming them, the truth, and reality as we know it). First let me finish with the view – [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:13-04:00May 18th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Writing to Become Famous?

I’ve been referring to the reactions that I received from my former classmates at Moody Bible Institute about some of my posts about what my experience was like there. Some of them, as I indicated, warned me of future judgment. Others made some a rather belittling comment: that I have written my books simply because I have wanted to become famous. My sense is that nothing I say would ever change someone’s mind if that’s what they are already inclined to think, but I do want to say something about the matter from my own perspective. When I started out in my publishing career, I had no idea at all of becoming well known and that certainly was not a goal of mine. Very, very far from it. My goal was to be a widely respected scholar among New Testament scholars; I wanted to become a world-class expert on the Greek manuscript tradition of the New Testament. I had no idea at all of reaching out to the general public in anything I wrote. I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:13-04:00May 15th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Threat of Judgment

Since I’ve been making these posts about my experience at Moody Bible Institute, I’ve been getting some reactions from former classmates there. Some of these are in a public forum I’m on. Others have been private communications. A few of these have been kind and heartening. Others … not. Among the latter, some have told me that they pity me because of where I will end up on the day of judgment. Others have suggested that I changed my theological beliefs because that would help me become famous. Some have expressed both sadness and outrage that I have “led so many people astray.” So, dealing with these kinds of comments one-by-one, in one post at a time. First, the day of judgment. Well, none of us knows what will happen on the day of judgment, but I think I’m glad none of my classmates has been appointed to be the judge! That hasn’t stopped them from judging in the present, of course, and one would think they would be a bit wary of that, given [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:13-04:00May 14th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

Education at Moody

In thinking back on my days at Moody Bible Institute, part of my now-ambivalence has to do with not just what I learned (or more important, what I did not) but also about how the thinking process itself was handled. That has both a downside and an upside, and I would like to say something about both. I should start by reiterating that I am simply talking about my own personal experience. Everyone’s experience would have been, and was, different. Still, my strong sense is that my experience was not simply a result of my personality, although it certainly was in part that, but also as a result to how education itself was approached at Moody. How did one get good grades at a school like that? By mastering tons of material. Committing lots of things to memory. Knowing exactly what a teacher taught and being able to reformulate it, without changing its substance, in one’s own words. What was not taught, so much, was how to think for oneself. When one *did* get encouraged [...]

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

My Moody Experience

Here I continue with my reflections on my fundamentalist past. For me, as an inordinately gung-ho evangelical Christian teenager, passionate about learning about the Bible, Moody Bible Institute was the ideal learning environment. More than just about anyone I knew, even there, I thrived on the academic side of the school. Moody at that time did not give a bachelor’s degree. It was a three-year diploma. For a degree, one needed to transfer credits and go to another college. That’s what I did after my three years, when I could transfer two of those years to Wheaton and graduate from there with a degree in English literature. There was no English literature to speak of at Moody. In fact there was no liberal arts curriculum of any kind. It’s not because they rejected the liberal arts as … too liberal. (!) It’s that the school simply wasn’t interested in the humanities, the social sciences, or the hard sciences. Who cares about such things? What matters is the Bible. Hence the name of the school: Moody [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:13-04:00May 12th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Fundamentalist Beginning

Lately I’ve been thinking a good deal about my completely ambivalent relationship to my past, in particular in relation to my education at Moody Bible Institute. In part my thinking has been set off by an email I received from my roommate and best friend at the time, and for years, who was the best man in my wedding and confidante and most closest male friend I had ever had. He has remained a committed evangelical Christian all these years and continues in ministry. We never have contact any more, but he reached out to me to say hey, and I’ve been flooded with memories and thoughts since. There is a very big part of me – probably the most noticeable part – that is deeply resentful toward my time at Moody. But there is another part that occasionally arises to the surface, which realizes that in many ways those three years were very good for me. Without them, I would not be who I have become and what I am. Sometimes I forget that. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:29:13-04:00May 11th, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

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|

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