Reflections and Ruminations Archives - Page 5 of 30 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

My Pet Peeve: Simplistic Answers to Explain Suffering

In my last post I discussed two things that get under my skin in professional contexts, making me blow my top (to mix the metaphor): ignorance posing as expertise (not just in biblical studies but generally) and facile answers, by “experts,” to the biggest personal/philosophical/religious problem people have to face, why there is suffering in the world if there is an all powerful and loving God in charge of it. As I pointed out, I have no problem with people in general not knowing lots of things. I don’t know massive amounts of things. But I at least acknowledge it and try not to pretend to be an expert in something I have only a casual knowledge of. And I have no objection to people having answers that make sense to them, explaining why they themselves, or those they love, or the millions of people they don’t know experience such misery and pain, suffering in extremis. I do object when people who claim to be experts spread simplistic answers to difficult questions without bothering to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:56:22-04:00January 5th, 2022|Bart's Debates, Reflections and Ruminations|

Bart Behaving Badly: Podcasts on the Problem of Suffering

I’m getting much more mellow and much less feisty the older I get, but, well, I still have my moments. I’ve always loved a good argument and for most of my life I could get pretty intense when having one – even when it was about something that really was quite immaterial. These days, though, I pretty much have a live and let live attitude. In part I imagine that’s because I realize that all of us are probably wrong about lots of things (most?) and usually it doesn't much really matter, as long as being wrong doesn’t do anyone much harm. Let the one without error be the first to cast a stone. But I’ve had a couple of bad experiences in the past month on podcasts I’ve done, when I wasn’t my usual affable self and I’ve been trying to figure out what set me off, making me rather hyper-confrontational and – can you believe it? – possibly (probably) pretty rude. As I’ve thought about it I’ve come to realize (or at least [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:56:22-04:00January 2nd, 2022|Bart's Debates, Reflections and Ruminations|

What I’m Reading These Days. You?

Before Christmas this year I read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. It’s a great story. (Novella? It’s about a hundred pages in my edition.) I used to read it every year. In my first marriage, for a number of years, my wife and I read it out loud to each other on Christmas Eve. Just about everyone knows the story but almost always from the movies and stage productions. Most of those are just fine, some are actually pretty good. BUT, there is nothing like the book. It’s extraordinarily moving, and even beyond that, the writing is fantastic. For about thirty years now I’ve read high quality fiction, by which I mean fiction that is thoughtful and thought provoking and written by people who really know how to write. Most novels aren’t written particularly well, but when you read one that is, you just sit back and admire. My GOD that’s a fantastic sentence! I wish *I* could write a sentence like that! For my money, Dickens is one of the best of all time. In [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:56:22-04:00December 29th, 2021|Reflections and Ruminations|

Which King of the Jews Do You Prefer? Christmas Message, 2021

Over the years I’ve said a lot about the New Testament, usually showing its manifold and various problems. But at most that’s half the story, and probably a lot less. There is something far more important: once you realize there are problems with a literal or historical reading, there is still the STORY. And the story can be quite powerful. Like all good stories, those of the New Testament can and should make us think and reflect. These are, at any rate, some of the most famous, influential, and life-changing stories in the world, not necessarily because they are historical (some are, some aren’t) but because they have a message to convey. One of the most powerful and paradoxical stories involves Jesus’ birth in Matthew 2. He is born in Bethlehem and wisemen astrologers from the East realize that something of cosmic significance has happened. It is proclaimed in the heavens. They follow a star to where the King of the Jews has been born and come to Jerusalem to make inquiries. The Great King [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:56:22-04:00December 25th, 2021|Canonical Gospels, Reflections and Ruminations|

How I’ve Changed My Approach To Writing

In a previous email I mentioned that I had started writing my trade book on Revelation, tentatively titled Expecting Armaggedon. Over the past couple of months I have been reflecting on how my approach to writing books like this has changed over time. I talked about my basic procedure a few years ago on the blog: https://ehrmanblog.org/how-i-write-the-crucial-phase/ The basic line is that I typically spend a couple of years doing the research and making very detailed outlines of the book, chapter by chapter, and then a short amount of time writing it. The process I described there still holds for the most part (it’s a process that I’ve tried to convince every single graduate student I’ve ever had to follow, and every single one of them has decided not to!) (to their advantage, often...) But I've changed my approach to the writing itself. As I recently mentioned, my first trade book was Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. Once that was finished, I decided (again) to move back to hard-core scholarly writing. But a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:55:53-04:00November 4th, 2021|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why I Prefer the NRSV

In my various posts recently I've talked about problems I have with the NRSV; some people have asked why, then, it is my preferred translation. And even more commonly (a few times a month) I get asked if there are ANY translations out there that try to give the original form of the text instead of the one(s) altered by scribes. I've dealt with both questions in the past, and here will, in short order, explain my overall strong preference for the NRSV, all things considered. This is a post from aeons ago. ****************************** A number of people have responded to some of my recent comments by asking what my preferred Bible translation is. I get asked the question a lot – especially since my book Misquoting Jesus, where I talk about the changes scribes made in the manuscripts they copied over the years. A number of readers were alarmed and wondered whether I should let scholars know about these problems. In every case I responded that yes, indeed, scholars – all scholars of the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:55:39-04:00November 2nd, 2021|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Must Jesus Divide Families? Platinum Guest Post by Douglas Wadeson

Platinum members! As you know, one of the perks of your esteemed status is that you are allowed to write blog posts for other platinum members to read and interact with. Do you have anything you'd like to talk about, any views you'd like to put out there for feedback?? Send me a post! It can be any size up to 1400 words or so. On any topic we deal with on the blog. And if you choose (but only if you choose) it can become a candidate (chosen by Platinum members) to be posted to the entire Blog. So why not? Get your views out there. Send me a post! The following is the first of two posts by Douglas Wadeson on a controversial topic that most people don't know is controversial. Did Jesus actually believe in "family values" the way they are defined today -- and the way that many Christians simply assume? A close look at the Gospels can be very revealing. Here Doug begins to provide it. Your views/comments? Send them [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:55:52-04:00October 21st, 2021|Historical Jesus, Platinums, Reflections and Ruminations|

Starting My New Trade Book on Revelation

I started writing my book on the Apocalypse of John a couple of weeks ago and have been using the occasion to reflect on my how my approach to writing has changed over the past few years. My first trade book – that is, a book for a general audience -- was Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. That came out in 1999 so I suppose I started working on it in 1997. Up to that point I had published three scholarly books – (Didymus the Blind and the Text of the Gospels; The Text of the Fourth Gospel in the Writings of Origen; and The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture) and most recently my New Testament textbook (The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings). The first two of these written for were for a very small group of ancient New Testament manuscript nerds (like me) in the world; the third for a wider range of scholars; and fourth for 18- to 20-year-olds who knew nothing about the New Testament. The [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:55:38-04:00October 21st, 2021|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Then Who WAS the First Bishop of Rome (if not Peter)?

In my previous post I addressed question from a reader whether Peter was really the first bishop in Rome (that is, the first Pope). I guess I could have just answered the question with one word: no. But it took a post to explain. Now I want to move to the obvious corollary. If not Peter, then who?? The ancient traditions about the leadership of the church of Rome is a bit confused. According to the second-century Irenaeus, the first leader known by name (after the apostles) was a man named Linus, who was appointed to the office by Peter and Paul (Against Heresies 3, 3, 3). In one place the father of church history, Eusebius, appears to agree with this, to some extent, when he says that “the first to be called bishop after the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul was Linus” (Church History, 3, 2); but here Linus is appointed not by Peter, but by someone else, after Peter’s death. And to confuse things even further, just a few paragraphs later Eusebius phrases [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:55:22-04:00September 19th, 2021|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reflections and Ruminations|

Weird (But Common) Ways To Read the Bible

It constantly amazes me that so many people who believe the Bible never read it. My undergraduate students (to this day) have read the Harry Potter books. But when I ask if they have read the entire Bible, the answer is almost always no. And yet most of them will say the Bible comes from God. So I ask them: “I can understand why you’d want to read a book by J. K. Rowling, but if GOD wrote a book wouldn’t you want to see what he had to say?” My puzzlement is old news to long-term blog members – I've talked about it before. But here’s something else that I find puzzling: Why do people who do read the Bible read it in such an unusual way? If I want to read a short story by Mark Twain, O. Henry, or (to pick one of my modern favorites) William Trevor, I do so after having some idea of where he was from and when he was writing, and then I start with the first [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:55:07-04:00September 7th, 2021|Reflections and Ruminations|

Bruce Metzger and Me: Reminiscences on my Dissertation

I have been enjoying reposting these reminiscences of my relationship with Bruce Metzger, widely seen as the most learned and important textual scholar in North America in the 20th century. I was privileged to study with him and honored to be his final student. Here I reflect on his supervision of my dissertation. Different dissertation advisors have different approaches to supervising a dissertation. Some are extremely hands on, to the point of working over every thought and every sentence. Not too many are like that, because if they were, they would never do anything else with their life. Plus, the idea is for the student to figure it out and get good at it. That takes some trial and error. Other advisors go for the big picture and like to talk over the big ideas. Others basically don’t give a rip how the dissertation is coming along – they want to see it at the end, and when it’s done, they’ll tell the student whether it’s good enough or not. Others … well, there are [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:53-04:00August 28th, 2021|New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Essence of Religious Literacy: A Christian Perspective. Guest Post by Fredrick Ackun

As you probably know, Platinum members of the blog receive several additional perks -- a quarterly webinar with me, a chance to provide a "guest post" for Platinum members only, and so on. After several of the guest posts have been posted, the Platinum members vote on one of them to be posted on the entire blog for all blog members to read. Would you be interested in getting in on that action? Check out the membership tiers and see what it (and each of the tiers) involves. Just click Join Now and you'll see them. Here is the latest Platinum post winner, Frederick Ackun, who provides us with an unusually interesting set of reflections on issues related to faith, knowledge, and how to read the Bible -- important matters for anyone interested in our blog. Here is Frederick's post. Enjoy! ****************************** In this post, I wish to share and elaborate a bit on some personal realizations I have made in my faith journey. They are some of the main reasons why I am of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:52-04:00August 17th, 2021|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Is This a God You Want to Worship? Some Horrors of Scripture.

Parts of the Hebrew Bible insist on the absolute purity of the Israelites – they are to have no contact with outside influences that might compromise their devotion to Yahweh, the God of Israel, in any way whatsoever. If they do come to be influenced by outsiders, God punishes them severely; and sometimes, as a further response, he orders the slaughter of the outsiders. This is the wrath of God in its most severe and unbending form, evidently against people who didn’t even know he existed. Nowhere is this theme shown more graphically than in the case of Moses and the Midianites, as found in Numbers 25 and 31, passages that I would venture to say very few people on the blog or otherwise have ever read or at least paid much attention to. But they are among the most horrifying narratives of the entire Hebrew Bible. The account begins with a group of outsiders, the Moabites (inhabitants of the land of Moab). While Israel is still in the wilderness during their 40 year wandering, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:52-04:00August 15th, 2021|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reflections and Ruminations|

Finally: Cephas and Peter. What Do I Really Think?

I have recently finished republishing a series of posts from years ago that explored the tradition that Peter and Cephas were in fact two different people. Anyone who is not interested in the Bible would care, of course, but then again, no one like that would be on the blog! For those who are both interested and familiar with the New Testament, the idea is unusual and odd – a bit of a bombshell, actually, since it is normally assumed that these are two names for the same disciple of Jesus, Simon son of Jonah, nicknamed “Cephas” (an Aramaic term that means “rock”) by Jesus. When the term “Rock” was translated into Greek by later story tellers, they simply used the Greek term “Petros,” which gets transliterated into English as “Peter.” No problem, right? Well for 99.99% of the readers of the NT over the centuries, right. No problem. But for roughly .01% of us there is a problem, as I have outlined in the previous posts. I showed that there was in fact an [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:52-04:00August 10th, 2021|Canonical Gospels, Paul and His Letters, Reflections and Ruminations|

Cephas and Peter: Final Arguments, Summary, and Implications

Here I give my last supporting arguments that Cephas may have been someone other than Peter, despite widespread assumptions and views that go back at least to the time of the New Testament, e.g., John 1:42, where they are explicitly identified as one and the same! But were they? It's an intriguing question rarely asked. Below is the final bit of my article on the topic, written for a scholarly audience but obviously with a view toward what non-scholars would be interested in. At the end I provide a summary and draw out the implications. In the next post I will discuss whether now -- all these years later, when I'm older and wiser (or at least older) -- I still buy the argument. (!) ****************************** What now of Paul's other references to Cephas? Here the one thing that cannot be overlooked is that, taken at least on face value, they appear to stand somewhat at odds with what we "know" about Peter's role in the early Christian church, at least as Paul describes it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:37-04:00August 4th, 2021|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

More Hints that Cephas Was Not Peter

I have received a number of emails asking me about the Cephas and Peter article I started giving a couple of posts ago, and most of the questions, as it turns out, are answered in the *second* half of the article, which I had originally planned not to provide here on the blog. So now I’ve decided, well—why not? And over the next two posts I'll provide the rest of the argument for anyone who is interested. As with the rest of the article, I have not included any of the footnotes, where I give some of the logic and evidence for my sundry points. But here are is some of the argument itself. If you don't buy it, fair enough. If you do, fairer still! ****************************** The evidence of Paul has not been exhausted by this consideration of Gal 2:7-9. There remain the other references to Cephas in Paul's letters, references that provide other points of interest. Indeed what is striking is that in virtually every instance, Paul's references to Cephas contain something that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:37-04:00August 3rd, 2021|Paul and His Letters, Reflections and Ruminations|

More On Bruce Metzger and Me: How I Got Interested in my Dissertation Topic

THIS POST RESUMES MY RECOLLECTIONS OF MY INTERACTIONS WITH BRUCE METZGER, MY MENTOR. Remember: when I say "textual criticism" in this post, I am NOT referring simply to the "study of texts." Textual criticism is the technical term used by scholars (in all fields) to refer to how we establish what an author wrote if we don't have his/her original writing itself. For the New Testament that involves studying ancient Greek manuscripts and other sources; since all the surviving sources word the NT in different ways -- usually completely insignificant ways, but sometimes important -- we need to figure out what the "originals" said and how scribes changed them. That's "textual criticism." ****************************** When I entered my PhD program at Princeton Theological Seminary, I knew already that I wanted to specialize in the study of the Greek manuscript tradition of the New Testament. As I indicated in my earlier posts, that’s why I went there, because Metzger was the country’s leading expert in this field, and one could argue the leading expert in the world [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:37-04:00August 1st, 2021|Bart’s Biography, New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

Some Evidence that Cephas and Peter WERE Two Different People

In my previous post I gave the evidence that in the early church there were writers who maintained that Cephas and Peter were *not* the same person, despite what is explicitly said in John 1:42. As some readers have noted to me, later authors *may* have differentiated between the two (saying they were not the same person, even though they were) for a very clear and certain reason: in Galatians 2 Paul confronts “Cephas” and blasts him for not understanding the Gospel. Could there have been a major rift between the two most important apostles of early Christianity (Paul and *Peter*)? Surely the apostles were more unified than *that*! Well, if Cephas was not the same person as Peter, it is a much, much smaller problem. So maybe that is what was driving early Christians to claim there were in fact two figures, the apostle Peter and the other person Cephas. That post came from a scholarly article I wrote on the topic many years ago. I’ve decided not to give the entire article here [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:36-04:00July 31st, 2021|Paul and His Letters, Reflections and Ruminations|

Were Cephas and Peter Two Different People? A Blast from the Past

Five years ago on the blog I started a thread that I never quite finished, for reasons long forgotten, but I sometimes get asked about it. It involved an issue that the vast majority of avid Bible readers -- including professional scholars -- have never even considered. I staked out a position on the issue and then later indicated that I was not completely satisfied with my answer. My plan had been to explain my doubts more fully, but for some odd reason I never posted the explanation. So let's consider it a five-year cliff-hanger. Even today, I haven't decided! I've decided to repeat the three relevant posts from 2016, and then go ahead and try to complete the thread. Here's the first. QUESTION: I remember your saying that you once – wrongly – entertained a theory about “Cephas” and “Peter” being two different people. I *don’t* remember your explaining why you’d thought that, and what convinced you the theory was wrong. I’d still like to know! RESPONSE: I get asked this question [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:36-04:00July 29th, 2021|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reflections and Ruminations|

Bruce Metzger and the “Favor” He Did Me On My PhD Exams

I have been posting some reminiscences of my relationship with my mentor, Bruce Metzger, one of the great New Testament textual scholars of the twentieth century. Here I talk about one of my direct involvements with him as his student. Metzger directed my PhD exams, and was responsible for writing the questions for one of them. To explain that situation requires a good bit of background. In a typical PhD program, at the end of two years of taking seminars (usually three a semester, for four semesters), a student takes the PhD exams. These go by different names: “Comprehensive exams” (that’s what we called them at Princeton Seminary); “Preliminary Exams” (i.e. preliminary to writing a dissertation); “Qualifying exams” (i.e. that qualify you to move on to the dissertation stage) – all of these refer to the same battery of exams. In most respects the way it was set up at Princeton was fairly typical – it is the way we also have it set up in the PhD program that I teach in at UNC. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:54:36-04:00July 28th, 2021|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

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