Reflections and Ruminations Archives - Page 28 of 31 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

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|

Capernaum and the “Jesus Boat”

I am typing just now on the third floor of the Scots Hotel in Tiberias, in a room with a glorious view of the Sea of Galilee. In the distance, across are the sea, are clearly visible the Golan Heights, where we spent a day or so, having lunch yesterday just 40 miles from Damascus. All may not be quiet on the Western Front (well, in this case, the Eastern Front) but we are safe and sound, and feel more secure than typically we do even in New York City (!). Yesterday there were two highlights to our trip, for me. Capernaum has always been one of my favorite spots in Israel. It is one of those few places where the archaeological record is interesting and the literary texts are important at one and the same time. In terms of literary texts: according to the Gospels, this is the home town of Peter, Andrew, James, and John, the first disciples of Jesus; and it is the place that Jesus used more or less as his [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:11-04:00May 5th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Historical Jesus, Reflections and Ruminations|

Caesarea Maritima

Many apologies to any- and everyone who has grown accustomed to me posting virtually every day on the blog. I left NC for Israel on Tuesday, flew overnight to Tel Aviv, and have been on the run ever since with scarcely a free minute to call my own. Today is … Saturday (I think), so it must be Tiberias…. I am hoping that from now on I’ll be able to squeeze in some time to do a daily post – but I can make no promises. I am on a tour group with for the UNC General Alumni Association. There are 25 of us; I’m giving a few lectures; and we are hitting some of the real highlights of Israel. We spent a couple of nights in Tel Aviv; spent last night on a kibbutz on the Golan Heights, within view of Lebanon and Syria, and now are in Tiberias on the shores of the Sea of Galilee for two nights. It would take a long time indeed to talk about the highlights of the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:11-04:00May 4th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Reflections and Ruminations|

Off to Israel

I'm off to Israel first thing tomorrow morning, and will be gone for ten days. I’ll be on email most days; I’m not sure how much time I’ll have to blog, but I’ll do my best. So this is an alumni tour for UNC, just over 20 people going (they limited it to that size), along with Sarah and me. It’s a great deal for me. On these things the university will send a faculty member who gives a few lectures, hangs out with the people, answers questions, engages in conversation – and gets a free trip out of it! Things could be worse…. This will be my fourth time in Israel. The first time I went was in 1993, and I remember quite vividly thinking before that that it was not a place I much wanted to visit. That seems weird – and seemed weird to me even at the time – since obviously a good deal of my research has to do with Israel 2000 years ago. But I think that I had [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:11-04:00April 29th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Sorry!

OK, apologies to all 29,475 of you who noticed that I said "astrology" instead of "astronomy" yesterday, and that I dated the earth -- not the universe --at 13.8 billion years old. Mistakes noted! It was a long day: ten hours of writing and editing, and then the blog. Yuk! But, well, at least I know that lots of you were paying attention. I won't post your comments if they simply were making corrections this time around..... I am nearing the finish line with the draft of the book. I've written all ten chapters and the Preface, and edited it all once. Now I'm working on the second time through, editing, adding footnotes, improving style, polishing, and so on. On Monday I'll be sending it to four very sharp colleagues in the field: they've agreed to read it and make comments on everything from substance to style. I HATE this part of it, because I always want anything I write to be perfect, and it never is, and people notice, and I have a thin [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:10-04:00April 26th, 2013|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Back to School: Graduate Studies

Another couple of posts on teaching. As I indicated, I teach one undergraduate and one graduate course a semester. Teaching undergraduates is a passion of mine. I love doing it. These are nineteen year olds who are inquisitive, interested, and interesting. I enjoy lecturing to a crowd like that, figuring out what can make complicated material intriguing and compelling, keeping them attentive, helping them understand such important topics Some of my colleagues find teaching undergraduates a real chore; others find it very difficult. I find it to be a pleasure and it comes naturally to me. So I’m very lucky about that. What is really HARD, though I enjoy it intensely too, is teaching graduate students. The graduate student seminar is a very focused experience. A seminar usually last three hours (meeting once a week) and it involves an intense pouring over texts in the original ancient languages (Greek, for my classes), discussion of heavy-hitting scholarship, critique of students’ work, and so on. FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:10-04:00April 24th, 2013|Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Different Kinds of Colleges and Universities

So I started this short thread on teaching by saying that I wanted to reflect on the different kinds of institutions of higher learning there are in this country. What prompted the thread (I thought it would take all of one post, but this is #4 and some more may be coming) was my experience at two very fine liberal arts colleges over the past ten days, Colorado College in Colorado Springs and Centre College in Danville KY. These two schools are very different from one another in fundamental ways, but they are both small colleges (I forget the numbers; I think Colorado College is maybe around 2000 students and Centre around 1200) that focus on the liberal arts. I teach at a state research university with about 29,000 students. It’s a big difference. And I’m struck by it whenever I give a lecture at a small liberal arts college. Let me say yet again, I absolutely love teaching at UNC and don’t want to trade it for anything else. But there are pluses and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:10-04:00April 22nd, 2013|Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

My Start in Teaching

I’ve mentioned briefly what it’s like to teach at a major research university, with large undergraduate classes. I’ll have more to say about that soon. For now, I should get to the point of why I raised it in the first place. But it’ll take a couple of posts; my starting and ending point for these posts was / will be to contrast my teaching situation with others that I could have found myself in, but didn’t. And to get to that I need to provide more background. When I was doing my PhD at Princeton Theological Seminary, my one and only goal was to teach (and, of course, do research). I had three kinds of schools in mind that I might want to teach at, in this order: a Christian seminary, a Christian college, a secular school. I had been trained my entire academic career (all twelve years of it after high school! Five years in college; three in a Masters of Divinity program; and four in my PhD) in Christian schools: Moody Bible [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:10-04:00April 21st, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Teaching Religion in the South

So, as I was saying in the previous post, I love teaching undergraduate students at Carolina. My “bread-and-butter” course is an Introduction to the New Testament. I teach it every spring semester. Usually the enrollment is around 300; I’ve had it as large as 420, and as small as 180. As I indicated yesterday, the size depends on the number of graduate student teaching assistants available to co-teach it with me by running the weekly recitations sections. One reason I like teaching such large classes is simply that I enjoy being in front of a large crowd of people talking about important things. Another reason is related – with a big class it is possible to reach more people – and what can be more important for people in our culture than understanding the roots of our civilization and the history and literature lying behind the most important book in the Western world? (OK, there are probably things more important: but this is pretty important). If I had classes of, say, 25 students, then over [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:10-04:00April 19th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Teaching at Carolina

It is always interesting for me to travel around the country giving lectures at different colleges and universities. This past week I have been struck with just now different institutions of higher education can be from one another. Let me preface my remarks by saying – in this post -- that I absolutely love my university. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is always ranked very near the top of state research universities in the country, and for very good reason. The faculty are on the whole absolutely stellar. Just within my own Department of Religious Studies we have eighteen full time tenured or tenure-track faculty, not counting adjuncts and emeriti, and every single one of them has a national reputation in his or her field, and several have international reputations. We all write books, articles, book reviews, essays, and so on. Many are absolutely at the top of their fields. It would be hard to assemble a more impressive faculty if you tried. I would stack us up against any faculty of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:10-04:00April 18th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Explaining myself….

This post will be on something different for a change. So my current reality is that every day of the week, for several weeks now, I have either been travelling or working on How Jesus Became God. Neither activity is conducive to writing posts for the blog. When I write on the book – as I did yesterday – it usually means going at it intensely all day long, until I’m brain dead, which luckily tends to coincide with the end of a chapter. Yesterday I did chapter 8, which deals with the Christological controversies of the second and third centuries, as some Christians insisted that Jesus was human but not divine (e..g, the Ebionites and the Roman Adoptionists), others maintained that he was divine but not human (the opponents of 1 John and Ignatius, and then Marcion), others claimed he was two entities, a human Jesus who was temporarily inhabited by a divine being from the heavenly realm (the Gnostics), and others who claimed he was just one entity who was both divine and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:21:10-04:00April 17th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Moving from the Faith

I wrote chapter 7 of How Jesus Became God today, and started with this anecdote that will sound somewhat familiar to those who know my story.... ******************************************************************************************************************** I first began to have serious doubts about my faith when I was in graduate school. After I had graduated from Moody Bible Institute I had gone off to finish my undergraduate degree at Wheaton College, a strongly evangelical liberal arts college and the alma mater for Billy Graham. For me this was a step toward liberalism. I was a very hard core evangelical in those years. But even though the liberal arts did expand my horizons significantly they did not make me particularly liberal. I came to graduate studies at Princeton Theological Seminary firmly convinced that the Bible was without error in any of its teachings and that the doctrines I accepted as a conservative Christian were given by God himself. That began to change the more I studied the Bible. I had taken Greek at Wheaton as my foreign language, to allow me to read the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:56-04:00April 9th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

A Third Forgery in the Name of Peter

As I mentioned in the two previous posts, in my talk at Unity Village the other night, I introduced my discussion of whether there could be forgeries in the New Testament by introducing three forgeries from *outside* the New Testament; the first was the Gospel of Peter with its giant Jesus and walking-talking cross at the resurrection and the second was the letter of Peter to James in which he attacks “the man who is my enemy,” a transparent reference to the apostle Paul. The third is the one I’ll mention here: another book allegedly, but not really, written by Peter, this time an apocalypse, the Apocalypse of Peter. As it turns out we have three “apocalypses” allegedly written by Peter. The one I dealt with in my talk is the most famous of the three, one discovered in 1886, in the same book in which the Gospel of Peter is found. It is a 66-page book that contains four texts. In some ways the Apocalypse of Peter is the most interesting. It is the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:56-04:00April 8th, 2013|Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reflections and Ruminations|

Another Forgery in the Name of Peter

In my talk the other night at Unity Village, called “Are there Forgeries in the New Testament?” (or maybe I called it something even more provocative, like “Is the New Testament Forged?”), I started out, as I indicated in my previous post, by discussing several forgeries that are found *outside* the New Testament, as a way of introducing the audience to what I meant by the term “forgery” (which I use in a strict and technical sense to refer to books whose authors claim to be someone famous, knowing full well they are someone else; this kind of false authorial claim, of course, has little or no bearing on whether anything else found in the writing could or should be considered “true”) and as a way of “easing them into” the idea that there could be forgeries within the New Testament as well. And so I chose three later forgeries, all done in the name of Jesus’ disciple Simon Peter. In my previous post I mentioned the Gospel of Peter, as the first of the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:56-04:00April 7th, 2013|Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity, Fourth-Century Christianity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reflections and Ruminations|

Making Things Interesting

I’m traveling hither and yon over the next couple of months giving lectures on a variety of topics. Right now I’m in Kansas City, near my old stompling grounds of Lawrence Kansas, to give two lectures at the annual Lyceum conference at Unity Village. It’s an unusual place, the center of a religious organization (denomination? They debate how to describe themselves apparently; but they are two million strong around the world), known as Unity. The people here are spectacularly friendly and helpful; I would say that their religious views are very, very far to the left of the spectrum; their group began as a New Thought movement in the 1880s, influenced by Transcendentalism among other things, highly spiritual and as far from doctrinally oriented as can be. For anyone interested, here is their website: http://www.unity.org/ In any event, Unity Village is a beautiful campus in a rural setting. The Lyceum is their annual conference which is put on every five years. I was a speaker at their first Lyceum in 2008, and they asked me [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:56-04:00April 4th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Seriously off topic….

OK, this is comletely irrelevant to anything related to the blog – especially early Christology, my current topic. But I thought it was too funny to pass up. A fellow who lived in my neighborhood, but whom I never knew (to my regret: he sounds like he was a remarkably interesting guy), beloved chemistry professor Dr. James Bonk died Friday at the age of 82, ending his 53-year career at Duke University. According to the local newspaper: Bonk’s classes were such a staple that Duke introductory chemistry classes became known as “Bonkistry” classes, which approximately 30,000 students attended. He was nationally known for comical incidents with students, one rumored to have taken place in the 1960s. The Bonk joke is that the weekend before a final exam, four students decided to visit the University of Virginia for the weekend and let off some steam. They were due back Sunday in time for their exam Monday morning, but were too hung over to travel. When they arrived back at Duke late, they told Bonk that they [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:40-04:00March 17th, 2013|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Jesus and My First Girlfriend

Just a short anecdote today. Not sure if I’ll use it in the book. My first serious girlfriend was Linda, whom I met when we were starting our sophomore year in high school. She was funny, personable, attractive, intelligent, and Jewish. I’m not sure I had ever known a Jewish person before her. I don’t recall that we ever talked about religion, and looking back I suppose it’s a bit surprising. They certainly weren’t observant Jews and my uninformed sense is that they were completely secular. I don’t know if they went to synagogue or kept any of the holidays, but I kind-a doubt it. In any event, at that point in my life religion wasn’t really my main concern when it came to a girlfriend. We were a hot item for months, and then at the end of my sophomore year, disaster struck. Her mom got a new job in another town, which was only about 20 miles away but seemed like light years. I got along great with her mom, but she (the [...]

BDEhrman2026-06-15T11:32:21-04:00March 15th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

Previous 1···272829···31 Next