Reflections and Ruminations Archives - Page 8 of 30 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

A Plea for Humility in the Face of the Universe

In this week’s Readers’ Mailbag we move away from the academic study of the New Testament to much broader and more important questions of relevance to us all, involving how we relate to others and live in the world. The question is about attitudes and responses to suffering. The question came in a comment about an earlier post I had done. QUESTION: You said ‘My ultimate view is that even if suffering may lead us away from a belief in God, as it did for me, it should at the same time lead us toward humility in the face of the universe and toward a more caring, loving attitude toward those who suffer.’ I guess I didn’t see in your article a clear explanation for why suffering should lead towards the things you mention. I do not think you are wrong, but it would be good to have it rationed out, as I think this is the only place you make a claim without any evidence. RESPONSE: Ah, I can see how my [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:49:47-04:00June 19th, 2020|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Two Ancient Jesuses and the Current Crises

One of the most important discoveries of critical Biblical scholarship over the past two hundred years – arguably the single most important discovery – is that the Bible does not have a single message about virtually anything. The Bible is an extremely diverse, multi-faceted book, written over many centuries by many different authors with many different views. The fact that these sixty-six books were all gathered together and called “Scripture” does not change the fact that the author of one of the books may well have a very different view of a particular matter, even an extremely important matter than another. Let’s take the question of how we are to treat those who are not like us. People who aren’t from our same nation; who don’t look like us; who are of different ancestry; who are not from our own cultural background; who do not share our political views or religious beliefs; who are of a different gender or sexual orientation or race. How do we treat such people? Depends whom you ask within the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:49:26-04:00June 7th, 2020|Reflections and Ruminations|

Views of Suffering Among Those Who Suffer

There is always a lot of suffering going on around us, if not in our neighborhood then certainly in our country, not to mention our world. Now more then ever. And more obviously than ever. But the "ever" itself is really very bad, when you think of the millions being slaughtered in civil war and unrest, driven from their homes, starving, dying of curable disease for want of medicine or from lack of clean water, etc. etc. etc. But it's on our minds right now more than ever, between a worldwide pandemic and a national recognition of deeply rooted and massive racial violence and injustice. Suffering is always there, but now it is all we are talking about. I was browsing through old posts on the blog and came across this one I wrote eight years ago. As some of you know, one of my books, God's Problem, deals with the problem of why there is suffering. In it I examine what different biblical authors have to say about it to show that they represent many [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:49:26-04:00June 3rd, 2020|Bart's Debates, Reflections and Ruminations|

Getting a PhD in New Testament Studies

I was breezing through ancient blog posts this morning and came across this one from exactly eight years ago. It involves a question I get a lot (got it last week!), from people interested in doing graduate work in the field of New Testament or early Christianity. What is it like and what does it take? Here is what I said back then, which is pretty much what I would still say today! **************************************** I sometimes get asked what it takes to become a professional scholar in the field of New Testament/early Christian studies. The answer, in short, is the same as for any academic discipline. It takes years of intense training. My own training in the field of New Testament studies was nothing at all unusual, but rather was fairly typical for someone in the field. What is unusual is that I knew that I wanted to pursue this kind of study already when I was in college. I started taking courses in New Testament as a 17-year old. For my foreign language requirement [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:49:09-04:00May 13th, 2020|Bart’s Biography, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Blog-Related Suggestions for Isolation

There is a lot of good advice out there about how not just to handle isolation but how to take advantage of it, to make some parts of your life better rather than worse. But it has occurred to me: people on this blog have some things in common, interests that we share. And I wonder if we can give some suggestions to each other about how blog-related interests can contribute to our mutual and individual well-being while we still plow through this crisis. So after giving a couple of suggestions, I’ll be asking you if you have one or two ideas to share with others. Let me begin by saying that just about everything the sages among us are saying is absolutely right, when it comes to *general* or even *universal* advice. At least it’s all working well for me. I am exercising *more* not less, and have developed a very nice exercise regime that I follow every day. That not only helps me get my mind off my woes and, especially, my woes [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:48:52-04:00April 24th, 2020|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Do We NEED to Suffer? The Argument from Tectonic Plates

I decided to take a stroll down memory lane and look at posts I made at the beginning of the blog, and came upon this one, made almost exactly eight years ago today. Since I've been talking about Ecclesiastes and the meaning of life, and, consequently, the meaning of suffering, it is particularly relevant, now more than ever in recent history. It's ultimately about whether humans *have* to suffer if God created the world and life in it. And weirdly, it involves a connection between Dinesh D'Souza and tectonic plates. ******************************************************************* I have always found it interesting that when I talk about how there can be suffering in the world if there is a good God who is in charge of it, someone will tell me that it is all because of “free will.” I think most of us – not Sam Harris, of course, or some others, but most of us – think that there is such a thing as free will, that our actions are not completely determined for us but to some [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:48:51-04:00April 21st, 2020|Bart's Debates, Reflections and Ruminations|

A Good Time for Wisdom!

We are living in a time of virtually unparalleled crisis, and it is forcing us not only to cope with tragedy -- either our own or that of so many millions of others -- but also to make sense of it and figure it out. It is easy to come up with simple Pollyanna views that don't take seriously the trauma, and to cite religious mantras that try to make it sound like it is all right, when in fact it is not. And the reality is, most people very much *don't* want to go down the rabbit hole of deep reflection. I certainly, absolutely, do not think this is a time for despair and complete despondency. But I do think it is a time for thoughtful reflection, on the state of the world, on our values and priorities as a human race, a nation, a locality, and individuals. Being in isolation for a couple of months can certainly provide us some opportunity to think about our world, our lives, our own goals and objectives, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:48:51-04:00April 15th, 2020|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reflections and Ruminations|

Easter Reflection 2020

By all counts, this is the strangest Easter in memory – one of the two most important holy days in the year for over two and a half billion people in the world, the vast majority of whom cannot celebrate it together for the first time in their lives. Even so, for many of these Christians this particular Easter, with the message it brings, could not have come at a better time. And even for those of who are not Christian, the season brings a powerful message, worth reflecting on. Even as a committed Christian, I always had a surprisingly ambivalent relation to Easter. For the first thirty years of my life, I was very active in the Church; as a young adult I was not just a faithful attender of church who was engaged in worship and Sunday School, I became actively involved in church ministry as a youth pastor, head of Christian education, assistant pastor, and pastor (of the Princeton Baptist Church). But I was never as joyful at Easter as everyone else [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:48:51-04:00April 12th, 2020|Reflections and Ruminations|

You Lost Me On Hello. A Plea for Expertise

For the past several weeks we have seen more than ever why we need experts. It is absolutely fine to have uninformed opinions. We all have thousands of them. But we should no mistake our uninformed opinions for knowledge. And real knowledge takes expertise, and expertise takes years and years of training and hard work. It doesn’t come from watching the news or reading a few articles and then making up your mind. Since we ourselves cannot be expert in everything, we have to decide whether to trust those who are experts or to persist in our contrary views. And as we are seeing now, in some areas expertise is a matter of life and death. In other pressing areas (climate), it may mean the survival of the human race and the planet. Most areas of expertise are not that significant in terms of history or human life. But the same principles apply. My view is that pPeople really shouldn’t work desperately hard to convince others about something that they really don’t know anything about. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:48:35-04:00March 15th, 2020|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Intimate Relationships: Nonbelievers and Believers

Over the past couple of months I’ve received maybe seven or eight emails from readers – some on the blog and others not – about marriage (two in the past 24 hours). Not about what the New Testament says about marriage, but about what these emailers should do with *their* marriage. Each of these was married to someone who was a faithful, committed, religiously conservative Christian of one kind or another (evangelical, Catholic, Mormon), but the emailer had, a while back, moved away from their earlier faith commitments, and now considered themselves agnostic or atheist or both, and weren’t sure how to handle it the marriage situation. In some cases the question was: should I tell my spouse? In others it was: how can this work? In others it was: how can I convince them that their views are full of problems and help them see the truth? I am not a marriage counsellor, as some of you may have noticed. But I do have a lot of experience with questions like this, and have [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:48:20-04:00March 8th, 2020|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Authors and the Fiasco of Book Tours

With the advent of social media, author book tours have more or less gone the way of the stegosaurus. Some authors do them, but mainly only the celebrities, Hilary or David Sedaris. And you might be surprised to know that most authors think their demise is a very good thing. A book tour sounds exotic – at least it always did to me: “An Eleven-City National Book Tour!!!” How good can it get? Well, actually, it can get a lot better… Let me preface this by saying that right now is an absolutely awful time to be publishing a book, the worst time in recorded history (well, OK, in my recorded history). The only way to sell a book seriously is to get serious media attention. That means TV, radio, and front covers. But at this stage of human evolution, if your name is not Donald, Bernie, or Corona, it just ain’t gonna happen. The media can’t squeeze it all in, and books are at the bottom of the heap. Even if your book is [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:48:19-04:00March 1st, 2020|Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

How Do I Get To Know What Is In the Bible?

There are a lot of people, billions, actually, who are interested in the Bible -- either because of their personal beliefs or because they they realize its historical and cultural importance -- but don’t actually know what it’s about. The broader interest makes a good deal of sense, and not just for committed Jews and Christians. After all, a good deal of the history of the West is tied closely to the Christian tradition rooted in the Bible. And how can one understand Western culture without it? Think about the history of art, music, and literature, for example. Still, most people really don’t know the Bible. By that I don’t mean they don’t know what scholars have come to learn about the Bible (that virtually goes without saying!); I just mean they don’t know what’s actually in the Bible. One reason, of course, is that most people don’t read the Bible. But an even more important one is that those who do read the Bible do not do so in order to learn what it’s [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:48:02-04:00February 14th, 2020|Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

What About Accurately Preserved Oral Traditions?

Yesterday I talked about arguments Muslims and Christians sometimes make about their written texts – that the only way to explain the preservation of the “originals” is that it was a divine miracle, with the corollary argument that for that reason, these writings really do contain the truth. It is a very, very bad argument, for reasons I explained. A number of religious traditions also boast of the unbelievable accuracy of the oral traditions of their religion. In this case, the claim is usually not made in order to prove that the tradition must have a divine origin, but to show that what is said in sacred texts found in writing today is exactly what was said back *before* there were any written texts, that the religion hasn’t changed an iota over all these centuries. I am always entirely skeptical of these claims. Then again, historians are always skeptical of claims and ask for evidence. If there’s good evidence, then there’s no reason to be skeptical on principle. But if historians simply accepted what “everyone [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:48:02-04:00February 10th, 2020|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Do Smart People Make Stupid Arguments?

I’m always puzzled about why smart people make (and believe) such stupid arguments. We see this all the time, of course, in political discourse and family disagreements, not to mention department meetings, but since my field is religious studies I hear it the most in connection with the great religions of the world. Actually, I guess I find it less puzzling than aggravating. A lot of conservative Christians get upset with me when I push them for evidence for their views, and so I thought I should devote this post to give equal share time to other religions whose self-appointed representatives send me proofs of the superiority of their views, based on hard “evidence.” It is really difficult to believe that someone can actually be persuaded by these claims. Let me stress, I am NOT (repeat NOT) saying anything negative about any of these religions – in this case Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. I’m decidedly not. I’m saying something negative about very bad arguments used to “prove” their inherent superiority to one another. I will [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:48:02-04:00February 9th, 2020|Bart's Critics, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Jesus, the Supernatural, and the Historian: Guest Post 2 by James Tabor

Here is the second half of James Tabor’s guest post; for the first, see yesterday! I think you will agree, the two parts are very stimulating. If you want to hear more of James’s thoughts on all sorts of topics connected to the New Testament and Early Christianity, he too has a very helpful blog where he discusses all sorts of relevant topics. Give it a look! It’s at https://jamestabor.com/ James will be happy to address questions you have in your comments. Please keep them short and to the point, if possible! Happy reading. James Tabor's most popular books are The Jesus Dynasty and Paul and Jesus, among others. ******************************************************* The public has been geared to think of the suppression of evidence, usually with the Roman Catholic church being the culprit, but such grand “conspiratorial” theories have little basis in fact. What is most characteristic of early Christianity, or more properly, “Christianites,” is a competing diversity of “parties and politics,” each propagating its own vision of the significance of the life and teachings of Jesus [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:45-04:00January 21st, 2020|Historical Jesus, Reflections and Ruminations|

Guest Post by James Tabor: The Historian and the Supernatural

I am honored to have a guest post provided for us by James D. Tabor, Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at my sibling-school UNC-Charlotte, and longtime friend. Many of you will know James and his work, as he publishes not only for the scholarly crowd but also for broader audiences. If you want to stir up controversy – that’s the way to go! And James is no stranger to it, as becomes clear in this post – or rather these two posts. I’ve decided to split them in half to fit in with the more common length on the blog. So, one today and one tomorrow. James is dealing with a topic we have queried before on the blog before, about the role of miracles/the supernatural in scholarship. But this will be very different from the most recent posts by our firm atheist friends last month. James is not dealing with the difficult question of whether miracles are plausible at all, but with the equally difficult question of whether historians, by the nature [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:45-04:00January 20th, 2020|Historical Jesus, Reflections and Ruminations|

Two Brief Comments on intriguing topics: the unknowability of God and scholarly subterfuge!

First: Several commentors on my post about the imperceptibility of a superior divine being have pointed out that Christians commonly talk about God as beyond our comprehension. Yes indeed!! When I was a fundamentalist we too used to say, all the time, that "God is far beyond anything we can imagine." And then we would go on and list his characteristics and attributes! :-) Second: Several people have pointed out to me an article in the Guardian that deals at length with the fiasco of first-century Mark that I've talked about on the blog (again recently) It really is a fine piece worth your reading: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/jan/09/a-scandal-in-oxford-the-curious-case-of-the-stolen-gospel?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:44-04:00January 13th, 2020|Reflections and Ruminations|

A Revelatory Moment about “God”

I had a “revelatory moment” last week that I think may have changed my view about “God” for a very long time – or at least about the existence of superior beings far beyond what we can imagine. As most of you know, I have long been an agnostic-atheist, and as some of you may recall, I define “atheist” differently from most people, at least in relationship to “agnostic.” The word “agnostic” means “don’t know.” Is there a God? I don’t’ know. How could I possibly know? How could you? I know a lot of you do “know” – or think you know. But my view is that if you’re in that boat you “think” there is a God – really, really think it, deep in your heart, and maybe even deeply “believe” in God – but really, at the end of the day, there’s no way to *know*, at least in the same way you “know” that you have two knees, live in Pennsylvania, or like lasagna. Anyway, I’m not asking you to agree [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:44-04:00January 12th, 2020|Reflections and Ruminations|

Blog Year in Review, 2019!

We are at the end of yet another year and I would like to take the occasion to reflect on the blog, how we’ve been doing and where we’re going, now on the cusp of 2020. (Yikes. Already?) The blog has been doing extremely well. When I started this venture in April 2012, I had no clue what I was getting into, what it would take, and what it would give. It is taking more and giving way more than I anticipated at the time. I have always had two principal goals, very different from each other but both vitally important, the raisons d’être of the blog. The first, of course, is to disseminate serious critical knowledge about the New Testament and early Christianity to a wider public. It is amazing how much bad and simply wrong information is out there on the Internet. Especially on topics pertaining to religion. In particular the religion that most people in the western world – those who subscribe to a religion -- happen to subscribe to. A lot [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:44-04:00December 31st, 2019|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Christmas 2019

For a long time now I’ve had ambivalent feelings toward Christmas. Some of my blog posts from years past on the day and its meaning have very much celebrated its great sides (you can just search for “Christmas” on the blog and you’ll see them). But I’ve long seen the downsides as well, frequently discussed among people we know and know about and more frequently felt even when not discussed. I still see these down sides – one above all -- in some ways more and more every year. But I’ve begun to wonder if at least there might not be *something* good that can come out of them. Or at least a couple of them. The one for which I think there is no real hope is the severe loneliness and depression the season causes for so many people. It is a fraught time, when everyone else seems to be enjoying family, friends, and festivities, but so many have no one and nothing to look forward to, or horrible experiences with the holiday in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:27-04:00December 25th, 2019|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

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