Reflections and Ruminations Archives - Page 29 of 30 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Why Jesus?

This will be my last post for a while dealing with the question of whether Jesus’ ethics can be translated from his own mythological context of Jewish apocalyptic thought into the modern world that is based (for me at least) on a completely different view of life, meaning, and reality. In my last post I indicated that I thought that it was indeed possible to make this kind of translation if one wants to. But I ended by asking why one – or rather I – would want to. That is, why focus on Jesus in particular? I don’t think I want to do so because I think that Jesus is “the greatest ethical teacher of all time.” I have no idea if this is even a contest that can be won, and even if it is, I am not qualified to evaluate Jesus in relation to other great ethical teachers so as to declare him a winner. So that seems to me to be a dead end. So why Jesus? I don’t have a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:08-04:00January 22nd, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Answer to My Objections on Demythologizing

If the first few paragraphs seem a bit tough-going or uninteresting, just jump to the final two! In my last couple of posts I’ve raised some problems with the idea of demythologizing an ancient set of ethical views, such as those of Jesus. The gist of the problem that I’ve raised is that every ethical injunction – just as every teaching, doctrine, piece of advice, sentence, word, communication of any kind – is not just *framed* within a linguistic, cultural, social, historical context: the context is actually determinative of the meaning of a word, sentence, etc. And if that’s true, then ripping a communication out of its context means necessarily to alter – once could say to destroy – its meaning. That at least has been my objection. And now I have a response to that objection from the other side. It is a two-pronged response. Prong One: I don’t think that it’s fair to say that context is absolutely *everything*. Context is a *lot*, but a communication consists of a sequence of sensible utterances [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:08-04:00January 21st, 2013|Reflections and Ruminations|

More Problems with Demythologizing

In yesterday’s post I questioned whether words, sentences, ideas, teachings can simply be transferred from one context to another, if, in fact, it is precisely the context that is the determining factor for what the words mean. Here I’ll try to illustrate that “if.” My argument here is that words do not have some kind of inherent meaning but mean what they do depending on their social, historical, cultural, and literary context. I think this can be illustrated just on the level of words themselves, in fact, of any word itself. I’ll illustrate with the example that I give to my undergraduate students at Chapel Hill. Take the word “dude.” Like all words, you might think that this word simply *means* something (it must mean *some* thing! No?), even if the meaning gets adopted in different contexts. Right? Well, I’m not so sure it’s right. Dude in its early usage referred to a dandy – that is a city dweller who was cultured and dressed to the nines and went to the opera, and so [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:08-04:00January 20th, 2013|Reflections and Ruminations|

Against Demythologizing the Ethics of Jesus

When I was in high school one of my passions – along with baseball, tennis, and, well, lots of other things that 16 year old boys can be passionate about – was debate. I threw myself into the debate season and worked like crazy at it. One of the most interesting things about debate is that it teaches you to pursue both sides of a point, vehemently arguing the affirmative of a resolution and then an hour later arguing just as vehemently the negative side. Still today I use class debates in my university courses at UNC, and even though students are skeptical, reluctant, and afraid going into the debates, they almost always come away thinking that it they are the best part of the entire semester. Everyone in the class has to participate in one formal debate during the term, arguing affirmative of negative of one of three highly controversial topics, based on doing substantial research with teammates in preparation. The topics that I’ve used most recently are (1) Resolved: Paul and Jesus Represented [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:08-04:00January 19th, 2013|Reflections and Ruminations|

In Favor of Demythologizing the Ethics of Jesus

In previous posts, in answer to the question of whether I think that Jesus was a great moral teacher, I have said that I think the answer is Yes, but that there is a very serious caveat. Jesus’ ethical teaching is based on a view of the world that most of us today no longer hold. Jesus’ ethical teaching – just as all of his teaching – is deeply rooted in a form of Jewish apocalyptic thought that can be dated and localized to his time and place. Jesus thought that the culmination of the history of God’s people, Israel, was soon to come, that the climax of all human history was at hand, that God was soon to intervene in the course of history to overthrow the powers of evil that were in control of this world to bring in his good kingdom, here on earth. People were to live ethically in order to inherit that kingdom; and in fact, they were to begin to model the ethics of that kingdom in the here [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:08-04:00January 18th, 2013|Reflections and Ruminations|

My Problem with Fundamentalism

QUESTION: You note that fundamentalism is dangerous and harmful. How do you define fundamentalism and why do you think it’s dangerous? RESPONSE: There are of course actual definitions of “fundamentalism” that you can find in scholarship on religion, but I sense that you’re asking more for a rough-and-ready description. Years ago I started defining fundamentalism as “No fun, too much damn, and not enough mental. When I was a fundamentalist myself (yet to be described) I understood it in a positive way. Originally, in Christian circles, it referred to believers who held on to the “fundamentals” of the faith, which for us included such things as the inspiration of Scripture, the full deity of Christ, the Trinity, the virgin birth, the physical resurrection, and, well, probably a collection of other doctrines. Fundamentalism, for us, was to be differentiated from liberalism, which had sacrificed these basic fundamental doctrines to the gods of modernity. And we would have nothing of it. FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click here for [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:08-04:00January 15th, 2013|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

An Agnostic Teaching the Bible

Question about an Agnostic teaching the Bible: I have recently wondered how you can truly enjoy (and endure) your line of work with your loss of faith. It would seem to me that the mental dissonance would lead to great frustration and personal anguish in studying and teaching about something which you know is not historically true and has led you away from your faith. Not to mention all of the flack you must have to dodge from the average person on a daily basis, including your beginning students, knowing that you will never change the minds of your most rigid fundamentalist critics. How do you deal with it…with any enthusiasm? I left church work because of that….what’s your secret? Response: It’s a good question, but there’s an easy answer, I think. It would probably be a real problem for me if I were teaching in a seminary or divinity school, or even a Christian college; in that scenario, I think I would be completely torn and agonizing the whole time, training ministers or teaching [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:07-04:00January 9th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

When Will The End Come?

COMMENT: All the Christians I hear from around here say, “But we don’t know the hour and the day!” I don’t know if he is supposed to appear to everybody at once or if they will hear about it in the news. Those who believe in the rapture would be disappointed if they heard about it in the news. When I was a Fundy, I don’t remember being clear on this even though I tried. RESPONSE: Actually, this comment brings to mind something that I was planning on posting on anyway (this relates to “no one knows the day or the hour” when the end will come as Jesus says in the apocalyptic discourse in the Gospels). I mentioned earlier that in the 1970s, I and my fundamentalist friends were all fairly well convinced that Jesus would be returning from heaven soon – and in particular, before the end of the 1980s. That was in no small measure because we were devotees of the views set forth by Hal Lindsey in his blockbuster hit [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:54-04:00January 7th, 2013|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Mayan Calendar, Y2K, and the Letter of Barnabas

You may have noticed that the world didn’t end two weeks ago, despite widespread anticipation. Sometimes things just don’t go as planned. It’s a strange phenomenon this expectation that the world is soon going to end; and if Christian fundamentalists and Mayan enthusiasts can’t get it right, who can? When I was a fundamentalist back in the mid 70s, I – and all my friends – were sure that the end was going to come, with the reappearance of Jesus, before the end of the 1980s. We had sure-fire biblical proof of it. I’ll give you the logic in some other post, down the line. For now all I want to say is that we were not alone in our views. Every generation of Christians from the beginning of the Christian religion until now has known fervent believers who maintained that there’s was the final generation on earth, that the end would come in their own day. As I have frequently noted, all of these die-hard prognosticators have had two things in common: every one [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:54-04:00January 3rd, 2013|Christian Apocrypha, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers, Reflections and Ruminations, Religion in the News|

End of the Year Reflections on the Blog

So, it’s the last day of the year, and I thought I would take a moment to reflect on life, meaning, and the state of the blog. Mainly, for now, the state of the blog. Some statistics would be useful, both of what I wanted to accomplish before the year was out (which will be in five and a half hours, my time) and what we did accomplish. So, to start with, my plan at the outset. I really didn’t know how the blog would go, whether it would have any success at all or be a complete dud. My computer guru for the site, Steven Ray, and I worked for months getting it set up. Well, actually, he worked for several months. I dilly-dallied and told him what to do. He had earlier designed my website, www.bartdehrman.com , which I liked very much (and still do like), and so I asked him to set up the blog. He did almost all the work, and I still think it looks fantastic and works great. Any [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:53-04:00December 31st, 2012|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Responses to Reactions (on “Christmas Longings”)

Thanks to all for your feedback on my “Christmas Longings” (yesterday’s post). It was/is interesting indeed to see the enormous range of reactions. I’ve not seen anything like that for any other post over the blog’s nine-months of existence. I will not respond at any great length to any of them here – or even make comments on all of them in the comment section – though I will respond there to a few of them that seem to me to require comment. But I appreciate all the feedback, one way or the other. After this short post, I will get back to the business at hand: Christianity in Antiquity (I’m working on an English edition of the Other Gospels just now, and have some things I want to post about it, starting tomorrow). But by way of shorthand, in brief response to the responses, I can say the following. For those who have wondered: No, I am not planning on going back to church regularly or to become a Christian. Don’t see how I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:53-04:00December 28th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

Christmas Longings

So we have managed to make our way through another Christmas season. I had a number of posts leading up to the big day, and now I’d like to make a couple of others looking back upon it from this side. But first let me say that I hope all of you – whether fundamentalist (not too many of *you* on this blog!!), liberal Christian, Jew, Muslim, agnostic, atheist, or none of the above – had a very nice, relaxing, rejuvenating, and fulfilling holiday. I did. In the opening chapter of my book God’s Problem, I talked about going to church on Christmas Eve in 2006 with my wife Sarah and brother-in-law Simon, in Saffron-Walden, a market town in England where Simon lives, not far from Cambridge. It was a somber but moving Christmas Eve service, and yet one that had the opposite of the intended effect on me. It made me realize just how estranged I was from the Christian faith, from the notion that with Christ God entered into the world and took [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:53-04:00December 27th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Reflections on the Season

I will need to take a break from posting to the blog for a few days. I am in London and the next few days will be visiting family; I will be incommunicado until the day after Boxing Day (as they call it here). For those of you who don’t know, my wife Sarah is a Brit, and her family is all here. We have a flat in London (Wimbledon, actually) and we spend 2-3 months out of the year here. This time of year there is a lot of seeing family. It’s not *exactly* the twelve days of Christmas, but sometimes it feels like it – opening presents with one part of the family, then another, then another. This really is one of my favorite times of the year. When I was a kid, as is true for a lot of kids, Christmas was a big deal for me. I loved all the trappings: Christmas trees, Christmas shopping, Christmas lights, Christmas presents. And as a kid I very much appreciated the religious aspects of it as [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:53-04:00December 24th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Luke’s First Edition

In my previous post, ostensibly on the genealogy of Luke, I pointed out that there are good reasons for thinking that the Gospel originally was published – in a kind of “first edition” – without what are now the first two chapters, so that the very beginning was what is now 3:1 (this is many centuries, of course, before anyone started using chapters and verses.) If that’s the case, Luke was originally a Gospel like Mark’s that did not have a birth and infancy narratives. These were added later, in a second edition (either by the same author or by someone else). If that’s the case then the Gospel began with John the Baptist and his baptism of Jesus, followed by the genealogy which makes better sense here, at the beginning, than it does in the third chapter once the first two are added. But is there any hard evidence that a first edition began without the first two chapters? One of the reasons it is so hard to say is because we simply don’t [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:53-04:00December 23rd, 2012|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, History of Christianity (100-300CE), New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

An Agnostic Reflects on Christmas

I suppose a lot of people have the birth of Jesus on their minds these days. Hard not to. It occurred to me that it might be interesting to do a series of posts on what ancient Gospels – mainly the two of the New Testament, but also some of the others outside – say about it. When I indicate that there are two in the NT that talk about it, it is because Matthew and Luke are the only ones that say anything about the birth of Jesus. I think what I’ll do in these posts is talk about features of each one separately and then talk about the two of them together, with a few posts here at the beginning to provide different angles to introduce to the matter. But I’ll also talk about other Gospels, like the Proto-Gospel of James (which in the Middle Ages was in some places at least as popular as the NT Gospels) and the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. One of the reasons this is on my mind just [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:38-04:00December 5th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Thanksgiving

Hearty apologies to anyone (if there is anyone! :-) ) who has come to expect daily posts from me. As with so many other people on the planet (well, in America) this has been an inordinately busy time for me, and I just haven’t had the spare 45 minutes that I daily try to devote to the blog. Right on the heels of the packed Society of Biblical Literature meeting in Chicago (starting the next day) was the Thanksgiving preparations and with family coming in from literally all over the country, it’s been hectic. The frenetic pace is starting to die down now, and tomorrow I return to my normal ways and go on a very serious diet…. On Thanksgiving. It’s my favorite holiday. Christmas I love as well, even though, obviously, I do not celebrate it as a Christian. But I celebrate it and love Christmas trees and Christmas music, of all sorts, and giving presents (not buying them; that’s a pain. But I love giving them!), and being with family and eating and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:37-04:00November 26th, 2012|Reflections and Ruminations|

The SBL Meeting

I’m just back from the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting, which took place, this year, in Chicago. This is a professional meeting that always occurs the week before Thanksgiving, where professors of biblical studies from around the country (and less-so, around the world) come together for about four days to give and hear academic papers on an enormous range of topics related to biblical studies. Maybe 5000 or 6000 of them/us? The vast majority of people in that camp are themselves religiously committed in one way or the other (mainly Christian, fewer Jews); some of us are not believers but are simply interested in the Bible for historical, cultural, or literary reasons – although even most of us in that boat started out in our academic lives as believers. I read two papers at the conference. One was actually at a meeting going on in conjunction with it, rather than part of it, the Biblical Archaeology Society Fest – where they bring in twenty scholars, most of the archaeologists, to discuss with the lay [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:37-04:00November 21st, 2012|History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Sense of an Ending

I am today taking executive privilege and allowing myself a hiatus in my discussions of various things academic in this post. I still have several posts I want to make about editing the edition of the apostolic fathers – especially about translating them – and I want to get back to what I was writing about before all that, as I do more and more reading of relevance to the topic of belief in Jesus’ resurrection. And I want to talk about the two book ideas that I have been floating to my publisher. But all that can wait. I want to talk about an amazing novel I just finished. So, as background information that you didn’t ask for. This past New Years I made some resolutions and oddly enough, in a rare event of history, I’ve actually been keeping them. I vowed to lose 15 pounds (I did, and still want to lose 5 more; but it ain’t easy!) (my daughter, years ago, suggested that if I wanted to lose my beer gut I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:19:22-04:00November 1st, 2012|Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

More on Faith and History

I have decided that one way to deal with all the comments that I get on the blog is to respond more directly, right away, and at length here by way of a new post rather than by (a) responding quickly in a comment on the comment in the comment section or (b) adding the comment to my long and getting longer list of comments and questions that I slowly work through one at a time to form the basis of some of my posts. So I got a number of responses to my post yesterday about faith and history – some on the blog itself and some via emails (I prefer questions/comments on the blog itself, by the way, as I can deal with them more efficiently. In case anyone should ask you which I prefer :) . Some of these comments were all heading in the same direction, and were made, I think, because (can you imagine it?) I was not as clear as I could be in what I was trying to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:54-04:00September 26th, 2012|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

How My Loss of Faith Affected My Scholarship

As I was making the long series of posts about my relationship with Bruce Metzger, in response to a question of how he reacted to my loss of faith, I got a number of interesting questions from readers. One that particularly struck me – as it caused me to think for a bit – was about how my loss of faith affected my scholarship. That’s a really good question. And now that I’ve thought it over a bit, I think the answer is a little surprising. To my knowledge, my loss of faith has had almost ZERO effect on my scholarship. That seems weird, since my scholarship is on the New Testament and the history of early Christianity, and you would think that if I were no longer a believer, that it would certainly change how I look at both the NT and the history of the early church. But in fact, I don’t think I have had any change of scholarly views at all to accompany my loss of faith. FOR THE REST OF [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:18:53-04:00September 17th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

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