Reflections and Ruminations Archives - Page 27 of 31 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

The Historical Accuracy of Acts

I am circling around the ultimate question of this thread, whether Luke the gentile physician, the companion of Paul, wrote the Gospel of Luke. The first step was to show that Paul never *mentions* Luke as a gentile physician in any of his undisputed letters. The second step involves asking the question of whether *any* companion of Paul – whether Luke or someone else – wrote the books of Luke and Acts. The argument that one did is based on the “we-passages” that I mentioned in the previous post. Now I want to advance the argument by saying that I don’t think the we-passages indicate that a companion of Paul wrote Acts (or, by inference, Luke) because I think there is good counter-evidence to indicate that Acts (and Luke) were decidedly NOT written by someone who was familiar, personally with Paul. Here I’ll reproduce my comments on it from my college-level textbook, more accessible than some of my other posts recently. The basic point I’m making at this stage is that the book of Acts [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:25-04:00September 4th, 2013|Acts of the Apostles, Reflections and Ruminations|

Who Wrote Luke and Acts?

In this thread I have been discussing whether Luke, the gentile physician, the traveling companion of Paul, wrote the Third Gospel. The first point I’ve made, over a couple of posts, is that the idea that Paul *had* a gentile physician as a traveling companion is dubious. That notion is derived from the mention of Luke in the book of Colossians, but Paul almost certainly did not *write* Colossians. Paul does mention a companion named Luke in the book of Philemon, but he does not say anything at all about him (not, for example, that he was a gentile or that he was a physician). Still, one could argue – and many have! – that whatever his name, it was a companion of Paul who wrote the books of Luke and Acts. The main argument in favor of that thesis – with which I heartily disagree – is the presence of the “we-passages” in Acts, that I mentioned previously. My view is that these passages do NOT demonstrate that the author was Paul’s traveling companion. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:25-04:00September 3rd, 2013|Acts of the Apostles, Canonical Gospels, Reflections and Ruminations|

Not for the Faint of Heart (Authorship of Colossians)

As I was writing up my post yesterday on the evidence that speaks against Paul having written Colossians, it occurred to me (as I indicated at the time) that it might be instructive to show the difference between how I might present that case to a lay audience and how I might present it to fellow scholars. The following is how I cover the same material in Forgery and Counterforgery . (All of this is related to the larger thread I have going on just now on whether the Third Gospel was written by Luke the Gentile physician, traveling companion of Paul; see yesterday’s post on the connection. In my next post I’ll return to that thread and point out other problems with the “logic” that says Luke wrote the Gospel. This current post will not be to everyone’s taste. If not, just sample it – or spit it out!) ************************************************************************************ As with every instance of forgery, the case of Colossians is cumulative, involving multiple factors. None has proved more decisive over the past thirty [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:25-04:00September 2nd, 2013|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters, Reflections and Ruminations|

Problems with Luke as the Author of Luke

In my previous post I gave the logic that can be adduced for thinking that the Third Gospel was probably written by Luke, the gentile physician who was a companion of Paul for part of his missionary journeys. The short story, in sum: the author of Luke also wrote the book of Acts; the book of Acts in four places talks about what “we” (companions with Paul) were doing; both books were therefore written by one of Paul’s companions; Acts and Luke appear to have a gentile bias; only three of Paul’s companions were known to be gentiles (Colossians 4:7-14); Luke there is a gentile physician; Luke-Acts appears to have an enhanced interest in medical terminology; therefore Luke the gentile physician was probably its author. Now, for a couple of posts or so, I’ll try to explain why, in my opinion, this logic is flawed. In this post and the next (at least) I’ll deal with a lynchpin of the argument, that we know that Luke the gentile physician was a travelling companion of Paul. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:25-04:00September 1st, 2013|Canonical Gospels, Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters, Reflections and Ruminations|

More on My Quiz

OK, back to my quiz, which most of you failed miserably. (OK, OK, many of you missed just one question). So the deal is that I use the quiz as a way to break the ice with the class, have some fun with them, get them to see that even if they’ve been through Sunday School their entire lives they probably don’t know even the most basic things about the NT, and then use the quiz as an opportunity to teach some rather important things. The following are the answers. Most of you got them. I do have to say that when I challenged you to pick the question that everyone was missing, there were some *very* interesting suggestions based on nuanced readings. But, as many of you correctly perceived, I had in mind #12. As you’ll see below. here are both the answers and the things that I try to teach the students based on the answers, here on the first day of class. How many books are in the NT? 27. I tell [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:25-04:00August 28th, 2013|Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Back To School! My Jesus Syllabus

Back to School. I am the only one I know who actually liked the (Rodney Dangerfield) movie.... Anyway, school starts for me on Monday. I'm teaching two seminars (they meet for three hours each, once a week). My undergraduate course is for first-year students only, and deals with how Jesus is portrayed in ancient Gospels, in modern scholarship, and in film. Here, for your reading pleasure, is the syllabus. ********************************************************************************************************************** Jesus in Scholarship and Film First Year Seminar, Reli 070 Fall 2013 Prof. Bart D. Ehrman COURSE DESCRIPTION Jesus of Nazareth left an indelible mark on Western Civilization. The religion that was founded in his name ‑‑ beginning as the faith of a mere handful of his Jewish followers ‑‑ within three centuries had become a major religion in the Mediterranean. By the end of the fourth century, it was the official religion of the Roman Empire. Ever since, the Christian church has been a major political, socio‑economic, and cultural force. Ultimately, it is a church rooted in a belief in Jesus. How did Jesus' [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:24-04:00August 24th, 2013|Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Who Cares?

Several people – on the blog and off of it – have asked me about the broader significance of my research on the Patristic citations of the NT, specifically the quotations of the Gospels in the writings of Didymus. Did this research contribute to my loss of faith? Did it lead me away from evangelical Christianity? Did it affect my understanding of any Christian doctrine – my view of God, my view of Christ, my view of salvation? Did it affect my understanding of Scripture as the inspired Word of God? Did it change anything that I thought about anything apart from the Patristic evidence for the text of the New Testament? The answers are clear and straightforward: no, no, no, no, and no! The follow-up question (when asked; you possibly have the same question) has always been: why did you do it then? My answer to *that* is also straightforward. I did it because I’m a scholar who is committed to scholarship and who thinks scholarly research is important. And this kind of textual [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:24-04:00August 23rd, 2013|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Doing a TV Interview

On a side note, or no relevance to any of the recent threads or to much of anything, I just now got back from a rather grueling interview for a two-hour National Geographic Channel documentary dealing with -- ready for this? -- Jesus. It’s amazing how many of these things get made. People love them, they sell well, the film company and its employees, the TV channel, everyone concerned (well, except the persons being interviewed!) make money, they spread knowledge (sometimes), so they’re all to the good. This is the second one I’ve done in three weeks. (I’ve been in London for a month; this particular crew is based in the U.K.; the other flew over for the interview.) Anyway, I enjoy doing these things, and they’re always a challenge. Off camera, the interviewer asks a question, and you have to come up with about a 20-second answer, in which you give a complete answer with beginning, middle, and end. You can’t just say something like, “Yes, that’s right, because….” since the audience watching the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:09-04:00August 7th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Jesus and Film, Reflections and Ruminations|

Suffering and My Blog

For over a week now I’ve been dealing with a question concerning my views on suffering. I could go on for days and days, weeks and weeks, about how the problem of suffering is discussed by the writers of the Bible and how I see it from my own perspective. But it’s not the most cheerful of subjects and I need/want to move on to other things. I’ve said enough to make my basic points, I think (if anyone wants more on any specific related topic, just let me know and I can squeeze it in): suffering is a real problem for anyone who stands firmly within the Judeo-Christian tradition, where God is understood to be the all-powerful Creator of all there is and Sovereign over what he created, and yet there is horrible suffering going on around us all the time – and has been since time immemorial. How does one explain that? The biblical authors have many different ways of explaining it. The prophets have one way, the prose author of Job another [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:22:08-04:00July 25th, 2013|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Personal Response to Suffering?

QUESTION: I would like to know more about your personal beliefs regarding the god issue and human suffering in all of it’s forms…all forms…war, poverty, governmental responsibility in suffering, population explosion, church persecutions and tortures…everything. I’m not just referring to your book on the history of the problem of suffering (God’s Problem) but your personal thoughts about it and how you are involved to help alleviate suffering and what you think the future of humanity is since there seems to be no stop to suffering. Suffering (not just people but animals) is of great concern to me and I see no solution…ever. REPLY: For the past week or ten days I’ve been answering questions one at a time, one post per question. This is the kind of question that makes me feel a whole series of posts coming on, a real thread. We’ll see. The first thing to say is that God’s Problem is not really about the history of the problem of suffering, or the history of the discussion of the problem of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:55-04:00July 15th, 2013|Book Discussions, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

On the Cutting Room Floor: Part 5 and Final!

This first paragraph is repeated from my earlier posts: I have now finished with my final edits for my book How Jesus Became God. In the process of doing these final edits, I have cut out large sections of my Preface and the Introductions of four of my chapters and replaced them with other, hopefully better, sections. But I really like the old ones as well. So, since they won’t appear in print, I decided to post them here as a record of what almost was. The all involve anecdotes about my past. In most instances (the Introductions to the four chapters), these were narratives related to my “deconversion” from Christianity. My editor and I agreed that the reading public has heard enough about all that, and there’s only so much more that could still be interesting to them. And so I have replaced those anecdotes with other things. But I will present them here, anyway, for your reading pleasure or displeasure. The following is drawn from my old chapter 9. This will be the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:39-04:00June 22nd, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

On the Cutting Room Floor: Part 4

This first paragraph is repeated from yesterday’s post: I have now finished with my final edits for my book How Jesus Became God. In the process of doing these final edits, I have cut out large sections of my Preface and the Introductions of four of my chapters and replaced them with other, hopefully better, sections. But I really like the old ones as well. So, since they won’t appear in print, I decided to post them here as a record of what almost was. The all involve anecdotes about my past. In most instances (the Introductions to the four chapters), these were narratives related to my “deconversion” from Christianity. My editor and I agreed that the reading public has heard enough about all that, and there’s only so much more that could still be interesting to them. And so I have replaced those anecdotes with other things. But I will present them here, anyway, for your reading pleasure or displeasure. The following is drawn from my old chapter 8. ***************************************************************************** It is always interesting [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:39-04:00June 21st, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

On the Cutting Room Floor: Part 3

This first paragraph is repeated from yesterday’s post: I have now finished with my final edits for my book How Jesus Became God. In the process of doing these final edits, I have cut out large sections of my Preface and the Introductions of four of my chapters and replaced them with other, hopefully better, sections. But I really like the old ones as well. So, since they won’t appear in print, I decided to post them here as a record of what almost was. The all involve anecdotes about my past. In most instances (the Introductions to the four chapters), these were narratives related to my “deconversion” from Christianity. My editor and I agreed that the reading public has heard enough about all that, and there’s only so much more that could still be interesting to them. And so I have replaced those anecdotes with other things. But I will present them here, anyway, for your reading pleasure or displeasure. The following is drawn from my old chapter 7. ***************************************************************************** I first began to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:39-04:00June 20th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

On the Cutting Room Floor: Part 2

This first paragraph is repeated from yesterday’s post: I have now finished with my final edits for my book How Jesus Became God. In the process of doing these final edits, I have cut out large sections of my Preface and the Introductions of four of my chapters and replaced them with other, hopefully better, sections. But I really like the old ones as well. So, since they won’t appear in print, I decided to post them here as a record of what almost was. The all involve anecdotes about my past. In most instances (the Introductions to the four chapters), these were narratives related to my “deconversion” from Christianity. My editor and I agreed that the reading public has heard enough about all that, and there’s only so much more that could still be interesting to them. And so I have replaced those anecdotes with other things. But I will present them here, anyway, for your reading pleasure or displeasure. The following is drawn from my old chapter 4. ***************************************************************************** I was raised in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:38-04:00June 16th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

On the Cutting Room Floor: Part 1

I have now finished with my final edits for my book How Jesus Became God. IN the process of doing these final edits, I have cut out large sections of my Preface and the Introductions of four of my chapters and replaced them with other, hopefully better, sections. But I really like the old ones as well. So, since they won’t appear in print, I decided to post them here as a record of what almost was. The all involve anecdotes about my past. In most instances (the Introductions to the four chapters), these were narratives related to my “deconversion” from Christianity. My editor and I agreed that the reading public has heard enough about all that, and there’s only so much more that could still be interesting to them. And so I have replaced those anecdotes with other things. But I will present them here, anyway, for your reading pleasure or displeasure. The following is from what was originally going to be my Preface; it is the opening gambit. ************************************************************************* The issue that lies [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:38-04:00June 15th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Agnostic or Atheist?

I apparently threw a few people for a loop yesterday when I referred to myself as an atheist. Several readers responded, wanting to know if I had changed my views, since I have publicly stated that I am an agnostic. I posted on this issue a while back – possibly a long while back – but since I don’t expect everyone to read everything I’ve ever written on this blog (!), I thought maybe I should explain my views again. So – apologies to those of you who have heard this before. When I became an agnostic – 17 or 18 years ago? I’m not even sure any more – I thought that “agnosticism” and “atheism” were two *degrees* of basically the same thing. My sense is that this is what most people think. According to this idea, an agnostic is someone who says that s/he does not *know* whether God exists, and an atheist is someone who makes a definitive statement that God does *not* exist. Agnostics don’t know and atheists are sure. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:25-04:00May 30th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Geza Vermes

Now that I have been posting on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the historical Jesus, I would be remiss not to mention that one of the absolutely great scholars of modern times, one of the world experts on both the Scrolls and Jesus, died several days ago. Geza Vermes was a formidable scholar. Of the three major English translations of the Scrolls, it is his that I typically use and prefer. In the 1970s he began publishing a series of books on Jesus that did more than almost anything to push for the idea that if Jesus is to be understood, he must be understood as a first century Jew. This was something of a novel idea at the time. It has become the standard view that virtually every Jesus scholar on the planet shares. Vermes was a scholar’s scholar. Professor at Oxford, he was an incredible linguist, intimately familiar with every ancient historical source of relevance, a creative thinker. He wrote books for scholars but also books that were accessible to the educated layperson. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:24-04:00May 19th, 2013|History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations, Religion in the News|

Qumran and Masada

As I anticipated, my last day in Israel was the real climax. We did three things of note (and several other things not of note): the ruins of Qumran, Masada, and the Dead Sea itself. I was disappointed with how our tour dealt with Qumran. At the visitors’ center they now have a rather ridiculous little film to introduce the site, but it consists almost entirely of a dramatization, in which an imaginary member of the Essene community describes his experience in the community; much of the description involves a “human interest” element, suggesting that John the Baptist may have been connected with the sect. There is little in the film about the ancient evidence for the Essenes, and almost nothing about the modern discovery of the scrolls themselves, what they contain, why they’re significant, or the substantial debates surrounding the character of the ruins of Qumran (is it the Essenes’ community? A Roman villa? A fort? What are the arguments?) and surrounding the relationship of the scrolls to it (what ties them to the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:11-04:00May 12th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reflections and Ruminations|

Touring Jerusalem

We are in that part of our tour of Israel – getting near the end – when everything more or less melds together and you can’t remember what you did when or where. These trips involve some serious sensory overload. Today we did some amazing things. First we went to the Western Wall, probably the most sacred spot for Jews in Israel. Years ago people referred to it as the Wailing Wall, but no longer. It is what remains of the wall surrounding the Temple compound back in the days of Jesus, the wall constructed at the time of King Herod. It is most sacred because it is the spot that remains that is closest to what was at the time the Holy of Holies within the temple itself (i.e., it is not a wall of the temple, but of the temple complex). The Temple complex was enormous – large enough to fit 25 (American) football fields (which, among other things, makes it very hard indeed to think that Jesus actually shut down the entire [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:11-04:00May 8th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Constantine, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Historical Jesus, Reflections and Ruminations|

On to Jerusalem

Just a quick post because of time constraints. We just got into Jerusalem and I am off to give a lecture in half an hour. We left Tiberias (and the Sea of Galilee) this morning and traveled down to Jerusalem. En route we went to one of the traditional sites of Jesus’ baptism, in the Jordan River; it can’t be the actual site, since it’s way up north and it is clear in our earliest account, Mark’s, that John was baptizing somewhere in walking distance of Jerusalem. But it’s a gorgeous setting, and there are always groups of people getting baptized there – as today. From there we went to Beth Shean, one of the major archaeological sites of (Greek and) Roman ruins in Israel, with terrific colonnaded walk ways, a very nicely preserved theater that seats 8000 (in the Greek style – that is, built into the natural slope of a hill, rather than the Roman style which tended to be “free standing”), some terrific public baths, temples, and lots of other things. We [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:11-04:00May 6th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reflections and Ruminations|

Previous 1···262728···31 Next