Reflections and Ruminations Archives - Page 25 of 30 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

The Religion of a Sixteen-Year-Old

I just got home from spending a week in Lawrence Kansas, my home town. As I’ve done now for years, I took my mom fishing in the Ozarks for a few days. She’s 87, and on a walker, but still able to reel them in! I go back to Lawrence probably three or four times a year, and each time it is like going down memory lane. I left there to go to Moody Bible Institute in 1973, when I was all of 17 years old; I still called it home for years, but never lived there full time, not even in the summers usually. I was married and very much on my own only four years later. So my memories of the place are entirely of childhood through high school. I can’t help reflecting on this, that, and the other thing in my past as I drive around town, remembering doing this thing here, that thing there, and so on. This time, for some reason, there was an unusually high concentration of “religious” recollections, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:25:28-04:00June 2nd, 2014|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why I’m Obsessed with Jesus

There is a relatively new online journal, “On Faith,” that is top-of-the line and very interesting. A couple of days ago they published a short article that I wrote, in connection with How Jesus Became God; I called the article “Why I Am Obsessed with Jesus.” It contains some views you will have seen from me before, and some others. Here is the article as I sent it to them. (The full link to the online version in the journal comes at the end). ********************************************************** I finally figured out why I’m so obsessed with Jesus. It makes sense that Jesus mattered to me when I was young. I was raised in a Christian household, we went to church, we revered the Bible, and Jesus was God. It makes sense that Jesus mattered to me as a late teenager, when I had a born-again experience and became a conservative evangelical. (What I converted from to “become a Christian” continues to puzzle me.) At that point Jesus became not only my Lord and Savior, but also my [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:47-04:00April 8th, 2014|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Reflections and Ruminations|

Scholars and Popular Audiences

On the heels of the publication of How Jesus Became God, written for a broad, general audience, rather than for scholars, and in light of my previous post in which I indicated that some scholars are very sniffy about this kind of publication and think that it is “only” a popular kind of book, I was going to devote this post to my view of scholars in relationship to popular, trade books. As I was outlining my points in my head, I realized, Wait a second! I’ve said all this before. Not on the blog. But in a very different context indeed. In 2011 at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature there was a very large session devoted to such things. The panel presenting papers was John Dominic Crossan, Amy Jill Levine, N. T. Wright, and me. The audience was all biblical scholars, maybe a thousand of them? The following is what I said in my talk about scholars publishing for a popular audience. ****************************************************************** We as biblical scholars need to be [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:24:46-04:00March 29th, 2014|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Need for Testimonies!

I’m on the road this week, giving lectures in Richmond Virginia – one at the Women’s Club of Richmond (1500 members!) (they all don’t show up for a talk, of course) on “Misquoting Jesus,” and the other at the University of Richmond, where my former student Stephanie Cobb teaches New Testament, on “What Can Historians Say About the Resurrection of Jesus” (some of you might think that will be a very short lecture J. But not so!!). She is also the author of Dying to Be Men and Divine Deliverance. On Wednesday I fly to Las Vegas to do a panel discussion on if it matters whether or not Jesus was married (at the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV). So I’m a bit harried just now and can’t do a full post. Instead, I have a request! A few weeks ago I indicated that I was going to introduce a couple of new features on the blog. One is a Testimonies page, where I give some comments by current members about what they most like about [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:56-04:00January 20th, 2014|Reflections and Ruminations|

Trying Again: More on Ramtha

SORRY 'BOUT THIS. MY ORIGINAL POST FOR MEMBERS ONLY ON "MORE ON RAMTHA" WAS NOT SHOWING UP (FOR SOME WEIRD REASON) AS A POST YOU COULD ACCESS. SO HERE IT IS A SECOND TIME. I’m a little surprised (OK, really surprised) that when I posted the video of my lecture on the Gospel of Judas Iscariot two days ago it didn’t generate more (a lot more) discussion on the blog. Not because of the lecture, but because of where I gave it, the Ramtha School of Enlightenment. I expected that to spark a lively response. It didn’t. And the most common response that I did receive (on the blog or privately) was some surprise that I would lend my name to such an institution to give them greater credibility. So I should say something about that. To start: a number of people asked me if I would have given the talk if had known that it was not the American School of Gnosticism but was, what it was, the Ramtha School of Enlightenment. I think [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:56-04:00January 19th, 2014|Christian Apocrypha, Reflections and Ruminations, Video Media|

More on Ramtha

I’m a little surprised (OK, really surprised) that when I posted the video of my lecture on the Gospel of Judas Iscariot two days ago it didn’t generate more (a lot more) discussion on the blog. Not because of the lecture, but because of where I gave it, the Ramtha School of Enlightenment. I expected that to spark a lively response. It didn’t. And the most common response that I did receive (on the blog or privately) was some surprise that I would lend my name to such an institution to give them greater credibility. So I should say something about that. To start: a number of people asked me if I would have given the talk if had known that it was not the American School of Gnosticism but was, what it was, the Ramtha School of Enlightenment. I think the answer is probably no. I had never heard of the school before, or or Ramtha, or of JZ Knight. But given what is said about it on the internet, I would have said [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:56-04:00January 18th, 2014|Recent Comments, Reflections and Ruminations|

Response to My Holiday Request

I am deeply touched and highly appreciative of the response to my request for donations that would allow readers who very much want to be members of the blog, but who simply cannot afford the membership fees, to have a one-year subscription. The outpouring of support was very gratifying and humbling. We have received $1800 in this appeal – enough for 72 memberships. Fantastic. I am now about to announce the possibility in the public forum of the blog and on my facebook page. It will be very interesting indeed to see how many requests we receive. I will, necessarily, proceed on the honor system, asking people to be honest and tell me what their situation is that does not allow them to join otherwise. I will accept the first 72 applications I receive. And I’ll time the responses, to see how long it takes to reach 72 (if we reach it!). I will give you the full scoop when the data are in. Many, many, many thanks to all of you who donated [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:42-04:00December 24th, 2013|Reflections and Ruminations|

My New Teaching Company Course

This weekend I am heading back up to the Washington D.C. area to do some consulting for my Teaching Company (also known as the Great Courses) course on “How Jesus Became God,” a course more or less based on my book of the same name due to be released at the end of March. I will be taping the course in February, over the course of six days spread over two long weekends. My normal procedure for doing these courses has been to record six lectures a day. That’s a killer, but on the upside, it’s over much faster! This time we couldn’t book the studio for that amount of time each day, so I’ll be doing four lectures a day, over six days. This will be my eighth course for the Teaching Company. Of the other seven, six have been, like this one, twenty-four lectures (each 30 minutes) in length. The other was twelve. By my math, that means I’ve done 156 lectures for them so far; by the end of this course it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:27-04:00December 12th, 2013|Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

SBL and ALL those Books

I had a good and interesting first day at the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting here in Baltimore. This society comprises professors and other scholars of biblical literature mainly from the U.S., but with some attendees from overseas as well. It meets along with the American Academy of Religion, which is the professional society for all professors of religion who are not teachers of biblical studies (so experts in Christianity outside the NT, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, anthropologists of religion, historians of religion, and so on and on). All together it is a very large group. I don’t have the exact numbers, but I think maybe there are 10,000 or 11,000 people here for the meeting. That’s a lot of experts on religion in one place! One of the most important aspects of the conference for me is the book display. Dozens of publishers of books in every field and aspect of religion are here – from major well known pubishers such as Oxford University Press and Princeton University Press to religious publishing houses such [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:26-04:00November 24th, 2013|Reflections and Ruminations|

My SBL Conference

There are two happy events affecting my life today. The first is that I just now have received an author’s copy of my new book, co-edited with my colleague, Zlatko Plese, The Other Gospels: Accounts of Jesus from Outside the New Testament (Oxford University Press). As I’ve earlier indicated, this book is an English-only edition of our Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations, which included the original Greek, Latin, and Coptic along with the English translations. For this new lay-reader edition, we have simplified the introductions, making them more accessible to the non-scholar, and gotten rid of the ancient languages. The other happy event is that I am off, now, to my annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature meeting. This is the professional meeting for all scholars and professors of Biblical literature. It is a highlight of my year. Papers are read by scholars on topics of everything you can imagine by scholars who are presenting the results of their research to other scholars. Papers are short – usually 20-25 minutes in length – [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:26-04:00November 22nd, 2013|Christian Apocrypha, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Fortune Telling with Manuscripts

An interesting new manuscript of the Gospel of John has just been identified. I’ll give some information on it in the next post, but to make sense of it I need to provide some background. This is pretty esoteric stuff (i.e., hardly anyone but hard-core experts knows about it), but it’s pretty interesting. In 1988 my mentor, Bruce Metzger, published an article called “Greek Manuscripts of John’s Gospel With ‘Hermeneia.’ ” In this article he identified five Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of John with an unusual feature. These papyrus manuscripts date from the third (or possibly fourth) to the seventh centuries. The unusual feature in them is that on the bottom of one or more pages (fourteen instances altogether among the five manuscripts) after the portion of the text of John’s Gospel , they have written the Greek word “hermeneia,” which is then followed by some kind of phrase or other. These phrases are such things as “If you believe it will be a joy to you” or “it is a good deliverance” or [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:14-04:00November 5th, 2013|New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

Was Paul Contemplating Suicide?

I will get back to contradictions in my next post. For now, something else has come up. In my two previous posts I’ve mentioned Phil. 1:21, where Paul says, “To live is Christ, to die is gain.” I’ve been asked by several blog-readers about this, and it occurs to me that it might be useful to sketch out one set of reflections on the verse, as I lay it out in one of my side-comments in my textbook on the New Testament. Here is what I say there: ******************************************************************************************************************* In an intriguing book that discusses suicide and martyrdom in the ancient world (A Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom among Christians and Jews in Antiquity. HarperSanFrancisco, 1992) Arthur Droge and James Tabor argue that the modern notion that suicide is a “sin” stems not from the Bible but from the fifth-century Saint Augustine. Prior to Augustine, suicide per se was not condemned by pagans, Jews, and Christians. On the contrary, in certain circumstances it was even advocated as the right and noble thing to do. Indeed, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:13-04:00October 30th, 2013|Paul and His Letters, Reflections and Ruminations|

A Rather Serious Mistake

In my previous post I started answering the question of why there may be contradictions/discrepancies/differences within the works of a single author. Weren’t they careful? Didn’t they see the problem? I mentioned that sometimes it may be that with someone like Paul, since his letters spanned over a decade, maybe he changed his mind about some things. I certainly don’t think all the same things I did ten years ago; and if you contrast what I thought when I was 19 and when I was 29, it was an *extreme* shift. The example I used was Paul’s sense in his early letters that he would be alive when Jesus returned; but in his later letters he seems to have thought that he might well die first. In that context I mentioned the famous passage in Paul, a favorite in funeral and memorial services, 2 Cor. 5:1: “For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:13-04:00October 29th, 2013|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Jesus’ Brothers?!? And the Proto-Gospel of James

One more post on the Proto-Gospel of James. As it turns out, this Gospel was very popular in Eastern, Greek-speaking Christianity throughout the Ages, down to modern times; and a version of it was produced – with serious additions and changes – in Latin, that was even more influential in Western Christianity (a book now known as the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew). In some times and places, these books were the main source of “information” that people had for knowing about Jesus’ birth and family – more so than the NT Gospels. The idea that Joseph was an old man and Mary was a young girl? Comes from the Proto-Gospel (not the NT!). The view that Jesus was born in a cave? Proto-Gospel. The notion that at the nativity there was an ox and a donkey? Pseudo-Matthew. And there were lots of other stories familiar to Christians in the Middle Ages not so familiar to people today, all from these books – for example, a spectacular account (in Pseudo-Matthew) of Jesus as an infant, en [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:59-04:00October 23rd, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

When Time Stood Still

Tomorrow in my graduate seminar on the early Christian apocrypha we finish translating the Proto-Gospel of James (aka: the Protevangelium Jacobi). We have done about five or six chapters a week for each of the past few weeks; next week we begin to translate the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, another really great text. In an earlier post I mentioned one of the most significant passages of the Proto-Gospel, where the midwife Salome doubts that a virgin had given birth (note: she does not doubt whether a virgin could have *conceived* [although no doubt she *would* have doubted it!]; what she doubts is that a woman could give *birth* and still have her hymen intact. That, obviously, would be impossible), and gives Mary a postpartum examination only to find that in fact she really is still a virgin (i.e., “intact”). Immediately before that amazing scene is another that I find at least as entrancing. In it, Joseph himself describes – in the first person – what happened when the Son of God came into the world. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:59-04:00October 21st, 2013|Christian Apocrypha, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Gospel according to Mel

I mentioned in my post yesterday that I do not much like Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” Now that I think about it, I don’t think I know a single scholar of the historical Jesus, or of the New Testament, or – well of any academic topic taught at universities whom I’ve ever spoken with – who liked the movie. Most of the objections raised to it have involved its portrayals of Jews and its apparent embrace of the kinds of anti-Semitism that is all too easy to overlook, and therefore re-embrace without thinking. I am completely sympathetic with these objections. But here I’ll talk about other issues. I find the movie problematic (also) because Gibson maintained *both* that he stayed faithful to the accounts of the Gospels *and* that he showed events “as they really were.” Neither is true. First, as to being faithful to the Gospel accounts. The one thing that struck every single person who saw the movie and that kept most everyone else away from seeing it was the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:59-04:00October 18th, 2013|Jesus and Film, Reflections and Ruminations|

Jesus’ Passion in the Movies

So, once my students have done a comparative study of the accounts of Jesus’ trial, death, and resurrection in the four Gospels, we then watch several clips of movies to see what directors do about the problems. How does a director handle the fact that each Gospel tells its own story, that the stories are different in many ways, and that in some instances there are discrepancies between the accounts (as laid out in yesterday’s post)? The short answer is that sometimes directors follow one account instead of the others; and sometimes they create their *own* account out of the four by smashing them together (overlooking their differences) as if they are all saying the same thing. For this exercise I do *not* have my students watch Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, for two reasons: (1) I am showing them only clips of Jesus movies – those portions that present the Passion narratives – whereas Gibson’s movie is *entirely* about the passion; and I have only an hour to show what I do show, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:59-04:00October 17th, 2013|Jesus and Film, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Jesus Class and … Destroying Christianity?

My first-year seminar on “Jesus in Scholarship and Film” is going extremely well. Last week I gave the students an exercise comparable to one I mentioned earlier on the infancy narratives of the Gospels; this one was on the passion narratives. They were to read each of the Gospels accounts of Jesus’ trial, death, and resurrection carefully, several times (Matthew 27-28; Mark 15-16; Luke 23-24; John 18-20). Then they were to choose two of the four, and compare them very carefully, noting all the similarities, all the differences, and any apparent discrepancies that they thought in fact could not be reconciled. As a side note: probably three or four times a week I get an angry note from someone who has read one of my books or heard me give a lecture or listened/watched one of my Great Courses courses, who is upset because I am “trying to destroy Christianity.” I’m always completely baffled by this comment. (I got it yesterday from a retired Episcopalian priest; I would think an Episcopalian cleric would be the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:59-04:00October 16th, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Reflections and Ruminations|

Constantine and Christianity

One of the readers of this blog pointed out to me in a comment a *third* thing that is commonly said about the emperor Constantine and the council of Nicea that is also wrong (the first two being the ones I mentioned: that at the council they [or even he, Constantine!] decided which books would be in the canon of the New Testament and that it was at the council that a vote was taken on whether or not Jesus was to be considered the Son of God. Wrong, wrong, wrong – both of them). It is widely believed (for some inscrutable reason) that Constantine made Christianity the “state religion” of the Roman empire. This too is wrong. So just a very brief bit of background, which will involve another (more or less unrelated) bit of misinformation that is commonly held having to do with the history of Christian persecution up to Constantine’s time. Many people appear to think that Christianity from the very beginning was an illegal religion that was constantly persecuted by the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:58-04:00October 11th, 2013|Constantine, Fourth-Century Christianity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reflections and Ruminations, Spread of Christianity|

More Conspiracy Nonsense

Poor Hercules, trying to fight the Hydra. Once he lops off *one* head…. So I’ve received several emails over the past couple of days about the breathtaking new announcement to be made on October 19 (assuming the world still is functioning after October 17!) in London by “American Biblical scholar” Joseph Atwill (whom – I have to admit – I have never even heard of, to my recollection) In this announcement Mr. (so far as I can tell, from his blog, he is not a “Dr.”; in what sense is he a “scholar”? Is it because he’s read a bunch of book? Hmm….) Atwill will “prove” that “the New Testament was written by first-century Roman aristocrats and that they fabricated the entire story of Jesus Christ.” In other words – brace yourself – Jesus is in fact a myth. Has anyone heard this before? For the full story, go to http://uk.prweb.com/releases/2013/10/prweb11201273.htm Atwill is a different breed from most mythicists. That’s probably good and bad. Good because, well, you wouldn’t like to be like the others. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:58-04:00October 10th, 2013|Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations, Religion in the News|

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