Reflections and Ruminations Archives - Page 9 of 30 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Why Would an Agnostic-Atheist Be A Bible Scholar??

Five years ago I received this question. I still hear it! And I would still answer it the same way. A question that makes a lot of sense in one way actually doesn't make a lot of sense looked at in another way. I suppose a lot of our questions are like that.... Here is the question and response. QUESTION: The one thing that I do not understand about you is that you have stated you have lost your faith. That being said, how do you continue to work in your field? Have you ever wanted to redirect your academic career to study other subjects? RESPONSE: I get this question a lot. On one level I understand it: if I don’t believe in the Bible, why would I dedicate my life to studying it, researching about it, writing about it, and teaching about it? From the perspective of someone who has strong feelings about the Bible – for example, as a believer who holds that the Bible is the word of God or as [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:24-04:00December 13th, 2019|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Update on My Next Book: The Joys of Academic Writing

Last weekend I escaped from all the distractions of daily life in Durham to our mountain retreat in order to write. I’m here in solitude, Sarah is in London for the holidays. I’ll be joining her next week. I have all the amenities of modern life here: but no TV, no neighbors, no noise, no traffic. Writing is very hard under the best of circumstances. But oh boy is it easier in the best of circumstances. Most scholars find it literally impossible to write during the semester. Just can’t do it. You have classes. Class preparation. Students to meet. Departmental meetings. Committee meetings. University commitments. If you have a graduate program there is a constant flow of work: advising, scheduling, working with students on exams, directing master’s theses and PhD dissertations, helping students with pedagogy, counselling them about professionalization, reading their prospective conference papers and articles for publication, oral defenses, reading groups. It’s a lot. Then if you have an active speaking schedule or do other local service commitments… well not much writing gets done. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:24-04:00December 12th, 2019|Reflections and Ruminations|

Does the New Testament Condemn “Homosexuals”?

It is commonly argued that the Bible condemns sexual “perversion” such as gay or lesbian sex. In earlier posts I discussed the relevant passages of the Old Testament, to show that they simply cannot be used in these modern debates, since their very understandings of the phenomena are completely at odds with what people think today (including, most emphatically, the people who appeal to those passages in support of their views). See, for example: https://ehrmanblog.org/are-same-sex-relations-condemned-in-the-old-testament/?highlight=homosexual I should stress there are lots of other activities that are condemned in the Bible all over the map, and these are never a particular emphasis of modern ethical discussion, whether in Christian circles or in society at large. You may be able to deprive gays and lesbians of their civil rights or deny them the ability to serve in the church, based on a couple of passages (almost always misinterpreted) scattered here and there throughout the very large Bible; but what about doing the same for people who are greedy, who get angry, who disobey their parents, who eat [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:24-04:00December 8th, 2019|Paul and His Letters, Reflections and Ruminations, Sex and Sexuality in the Bible|

Final Tribute To Larry Hurtado

I am sorry to report that my colleague Larry Hurtado, a well-known scholar of the New Testament, author of several influential books, and prominent blogger, has died. Back in July I indicated on the blog that he had become very ill. At the time we thought he had only a few weeks to live. But he soldiered on, and passed away last Monday, November 25. There is a very nice tribute to him by one of his former students at: https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2019/november/died-larry-hurtado-new-testament-early-christian-worship.html I decided to repost here what I said in July, both as a tribute to him and to suggest several of his books that you might be interested in reading. Larry was about ten years ahead of me in the field, and had very similar interests to mine, from textual criticism (studying ancient Greek manuscripts) to Christology (understanding how Jesus came to be worshiped as God). A couple of his books are highly technical (as I indicate below); others are completely accessible to the non-academic. You may want to check them out. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:23-04:00December 3rd, 2019|History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Don’t You Just Believe?

The following post is for anyone interested. You interested? Join the blog. You get five posts a week, each and every week of the year, on all sorts of intriguing topics connected with the New Testament and Early Christianity. QUESTION: What do you have to lose by having faith and believing that Christ was born supernaturally as a result of a virgin birth to Mary, that Christ performed miracles, that Christ died by crucifixion and came back to life from the dead, and that Christ went back into heaven in a supernatural ascension into heaven? I don't see any downside. RESPONSE: I get this kind of question on occasion. Usually when someone asks it they tie it to “Pascal’s Wager.” In case you’re not familiar with it, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662 CE), mathematician that he was, thought in terms of percentages and odds. And he applied it in a famous way to the question of belief – in an age when lots of intellectuals in Europe, and people they influenced, were having doubts about [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:07-04:00December 1st, 2019|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Thanksgiving 2019

Some Thanksgiving ruminations, from where I am here and now. I love holidays. Not everyone does. When I was younger that was always a mystery to me – what’s not to like? But as I get older (and older and older), I get it. Or at least part of it. So many people hate the holidays and the suffering they bring. Bitter and wrenching loneliness when all those around them are enjoying good times with family and friends and they … are not. Or awful memories of holidays past – ugly family blow-ups or ill-timed tragedies. Some of us are among the lucky ones: these are not problems. But that itself is a problem. Why should we have such a self-congratulatory happy, restful, fulfilling time when others….? Also, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized just how fraught just about all our holidays actually are, how, often invisibly, they are so closely connected not with things to celebrate but with real human trauma and tragedy. The Fourth of July. The fireworks are supposed to remind us [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:07-04:00November 27th, 2019|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Annual Meeting of Biblical Scholars, and ALL Those Books!!

I decided to look back to what I wrote on this day five years ago, and I started to laugh -- it's *exactly* the same think I was thinking just yesterday, about all the trillions of books that get written about the Bible and the scholars who write them. I've decided to re-post it, and simply update it to this very moment. ****************************************************** I've had a terrific and interesting first few days at the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting here in San Diego. This society comprises professors and other scholars of biblical literature mainly from the U.S., but with attendees from overseas as well. It meets along with the American Academy of Religion, which is the professional society for all professors of religion who are not teachers of biblical studies (so experts in Christianity outside the NT, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, anthropologists of religion, historians of religion, and so on and on). All together it is a very large group. I don’t have the exact numbers, but I think maybe there are 10,000 or 11,000 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:07-04:00November 25th, 2019|Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Jesus and “Homosexuality”

This post is free and available to everyone. Most posts on the blog are for members only. But the good news is that it's extremely easy and inexpensive to join. It costs less than 50 cents a week, for five posts of this substance. You get TONS for your money. And all proceeds to to charity. So why not? Most Christians today who continue to condemn homosexuality, whether in publicly opposing the LGBTQ community or privately assigning people of various sexual identities or non-heterosexual actions to eternal damnation, or at least to God’s bad side, do so on the basis of the New Testament. Yes, they know about the book of Leviticus and it’s condemnation of men having sex with men; but most of the time that is a kind of back-up argument. Since they realize and openly admit that so much else in the book of Leviticus is no longer applicable to Christians (for example, kosher food laws), they realize that the case against same-sex relations, let alone sexual orientation, cannot be water-tight with [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:06-04:00November 15th, 2019|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Reflections and Ruminations, Sex and Sexuality in the Bible|

The Coming Armageddon: I Need Some Suggestions!

As many of you know, my next trade book is tentatively titled: Expecting Armageddon: The book of Revelation and the Imminent End of the World, to be published by Simon & Schuster. I would like some help from interested lay folk in the reading public with a certain aspect of it, and would love to hear your suggestions. First let me say that I have not begun any serious research for it yet. My plan is to get going in a hard-hitting, all-out kind of way in the early summer, depending on how quickly the book I’m working on now (the scholarly monograph on otherworldly journeys) gets written. I simply have too many things on my research-plate just now. Plus, that was the schedule I had originally planned: start on Armageddon in the summer and crunch as hard and for as long as I can and need to before getting down to writing it. Usually it takes me about a year to do the research on these things. BUT, what I always like to do [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:06-04:00November 12th, 2019|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations, Revelation of John|

Are Same-Sex Relations Condemned in the Old Testament?

When people want to show that the Bible condemns same-sex relations – either to justify depriving LGBTQ people of civil rights, to condemn them morally, to preclude them from serving in church offices, or even to participate at all in faith communities (or for any other reason) – there are a few passages that typically get cited, usually with vigor. I should stress that there are only a few passages that get cited, since out of the entire Bible – thirty-nine books in the Old Testament, twenty-seven in the New – there are in fact very few that appear to relate to the matter directly. I stress both the adverb “directly” and the verb “appear.” In terms of “directly: It is possible to take thousands of passage that have nothing to do with same-sex relations and say that they are definitive for them (as in the phrase that was already worn out decades ago: Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve). In terms of “appear”: virtually all of the passages that do seem to deal [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:06-04:00November 11th, 2019|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reflections and Ruminations, Sex and Sexuality in the Bible|

One C. S. Lewis Writing I Relate To

When I became an evangelical Christian in high school, my first introduction to “apologetics” was through the works of C. S. Lewis. Apologetics involves establishing reasoned ways to “defend the faith” against intellectual attack and to “demonstrate” the superiority of the faith, intellectually, for inquiring minds, in order to convince people. C. S. Lewis was many things: a brilliant scholar of early modern English at both Oxford and Cambridge (many people don’t know he wrote serious academic scholarship, e.g., on seventeenth-century English); an author of enormously popular children books (Chronicles of Narnia); and a Christian apologist (e.g., Mere Christianity; The Problem of Pain). In evangelical circles at the time – and still today, in places – Lewis was/is revered almost as a demi-god, or at least an angel, if not the fourth member of the Trinity. Not so much in other circles. In graduate school, when I told my Oxford-trained philosophy professor (who was also a Christian theologian) that I was interested in C. S. Lewis, he grimaced and said with some considerable force, “He’s [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:47:05-04:00November 7th, 2019|Reflections and Ruminations|

What Is the New Testament? A Broad Overview

With some very sage outside advice, I have decided to add a new feature to the blog. Once or twice a week (at least that’s the *plan*) I will create a kind of “general introduction” post, dealing with some broad and basic matter connected with the New Testament, the Historical Jesus, the apostle Paul, the role of women in the church, persecution and martyrdom, heresy and orthodoxy, the development of theology, the Christianization of the empire, etc. etc. Broad overviews, of the BIG matters, at the introductory level. The idea is to make, say, three or four related posts on each issue, and then, when they’re completed, edit them all together into one massive post (say 4000-5000) words, and have that post well indexed with lots of links to other posts on the blog. That way, we can maximize its wide availability throughout the internet. When someone googles “What Is The New Testament,” they will find this particular post; the post will link to other posts on the blog. People go to these other posts. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:50-04:00November 5th, 2019|Acts of the Apostles, Canonical Gospels, Catholic Epistles, Paul and His Letters, Reflections and Ruminations|

Sex and Gender in the Ancient World

Most people agree that there are parts of the Bible that are not applicable today. We don't normally execute people for being witches or for disobeying parents anymore (at least in the U.S.). But what about same-sex relations? Are the Bible's injunctions still applicable about *that*? It turns out the issues that are involved are different from those surrounding witches and rowdy kids, and n ways most people wouldn't suspect. It's not as easy to explain why, and so I've been laying the background generally by talking about the Bible's understanding of sex and gender broadly. So far I've talked about the creation of Adam and Eve and what it says about gender and the relationships of male and female (the only gender categories available to the authors), and about how that basic story underlies the insistence by some early Christian authors (1 Timothy 5:11-15, e.g.) that women should be completely submissive to men, and therefore not exercise authority over them or even speak in church (or does it mean generally, unless spoken to?). Now [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:49-04:00November 4th, 2019|Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, Reflections and Ruminations, Sex and Sexuality in the Bible|

Why I’m To Be Pitied for Being the Wrong Kind of Fundamentalist!

I was browsing though old posts from five years ago, and came across this one I had forgotten all about. You'll see I got a bit feisty here, but it sounds like I was having fun. Well, in a way. The whole thing really is a bit aggravating. ***************************************************************** Several readers of this blog have pointed me to an article in the conservative journal First Things; the article (a review of a book by the evangelical scholar Craig Blomberg) was written by Louis Markos, an English professor at Houston Baptist University. The title is called “Ehrman Errant.” I must say, that did not sound like a promising beginning. I had never heard of Louis Markos before – had certainly never met him, talked with him about myself or my life, shared with him my views of important topics, spent time to see how he ticked and to let him see how I do. I don’t know the man, and he doesn’t know me. And so it was with some considerable surprise that I read the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:49-04:00November 3rd, 2019|Bart's Critics, Reflections and Ruminations|

Women Are To Be Silent and Submissive!

Yesterday I started this thread on the understanding of sex and gender in the ancient world by pointing out how the entire Bible starts, with the creation of the world and both men and women, the woman being created “out of” the man – so that she was secondary to him, dependent on him for her existence, and brought into the world both to keep him from being lonely and to help him out. For most feminists, this would not seem like a very good start. The story of women in the Bible is long and complex, and I’m not going to go into every relevant passage. That would take years. But I do want to point out how the creation story from Genesis ended up affecting the later Christian tradition. It is no mystery that Christianity has a very long history of insisting that women should not exercise authority over men, both in the church and in the marriage relationship. That, of course, was, in broad terms, consistent with most social views and policies [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:49-04:00October 30th, 2019|Paul and His Letters, Reflections and Ruminations, Women in Early Christianity|

Why Women Are To Be Subservient to Men

Why should women be subservient to men? This past Friday I gave a talk at a Pride Event in Chapel Hill, in connection with our Homecoming for alumni interested in LGBTQ issues (we beat Duke the next day in one of the weirdest final five minutes of a football game I’ve ever seen). The title of the talk was “Sex and Gender in the Bible” and the overarching questions were “what does the Bible actually say?” and “how much of it is relevant to a modern situation?” The questions matter because the Bible, in many ways and in many passages, does not actually say what people think it says, and the reason for raising the question of relevance is not exactly what most people imagine (though it’s related). What Does the Bible Say About Women Being Subservient to Men? I had planned for the talk to focus on “homosexuality” and “same-sex relations” (which are the same thing) in the Bible, but I started out by explaining the biblical view(s) of the relationship of the genders, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:49-04:00October 29th, 2019|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Reflections and Ruminations, Women in Early Christianity|

Can My Undergraduate Students Continue Believing the Bible is Inerrant?

Since my conference in Chicago last weekend I've been thinking a lot about the theologically conservative folk who really believe there can be no mistakes in the Bible. And just now browsing through some posts five years ago, I see someone raised a very interesting question about it, in relationship to my teaching at UNC. Here's the question and my response. I would still answer the same way today! QUESTION: Do you ever get a student in your class who doggedly insists upon the inerrancy of the Bible? If so, and if they write their term papers in support of Biblical inerrancy, is it possible for them to get a passing grade in your class? RESPONSE: HA! That’s a great question! So, part of the deal of teaching in the Bible Belt is that lots of my students – most of them? – have very conservative views about the Bible as the Word of God. A few years ago I used to start my class on the New Testament, with something like 300 [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:49-04:00October 24th, 2019|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Modern Evangelical Christian Apologetics

This particular post is open-access. Anyone can read it. I post five times a week on all sorts of topics related to the New Testament and early Christianity. To read these posts, simply join the blog. It doesn't cost much, and every thin dime goes to charities helping those in need. No one loses, everyone wins, so join!! I spent yesterday at a conservative evangelical apologetics conference outside of Chicago and, as you might imagine, I was the odd person out. But I was very well received, people were overwhelmingly gracious and receptive and openly grateful that I had come. There were jokes about being thrown into the lions’ den, but it didn’t really feel like it. It felt like I was speaking to a crowd that wanted to hear, respected what I said, and simply fundamentally disagreed. In particular there was a group of current Moody Bible Institute students there; really interesting, interested, and good humored, and we had a great time together. What I was most interested in was how Christian apologetics [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:49-04:00October 20th, 2019|Bart's Debates, Canonical Gospels, Reflections and Ruminations|

Did God Want Us To Have His Word?

In my previous post I said that, in my opinion, the best way to approach the “original” text of the New Testament – given the fact that we don’t actually *have* it – is to make a working assumption that we are pretty darn close, in most places, most of the time. I openly admit, and always have, that this is an *assumption*. But since it’s one that “works,” well, I think I’ll continue calling it a working assumption! And I’ll show why there are really very good grounds for it. But first I want to affirm strongly that the assumption is contrary to what most people think about the New Testament – both scholars and lay folk. Among virtually everyone else that I’ve ever heard talk about it, there are two views, one the massive consensus and one the tiny minority; and I don’t agree with either one. The consensus view seems to be that we really do *know* what the authors of the New Testament wrote. Deeply committed Christian readers of the Bible [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:31-04:00October 11th, 2019|New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

Modern Defenders of the Faith: Why Not Just Tell the Truth?

Next week I'm off to give a talk at an evangelical Christian conference that is dealing with contradictions in the Gospels; the other speakers will be explaining either why they don't actually exist or why they are completely insignificant or how they can be comfortably explained given ancient writing practices or ... or some other point that will assure their committed Christian audience that there's nothing really to worry about. It will be in Chicago and is called the Defenders Conference. I quite admire the organizers of the conference because they genuinely want to hear the other side from me. As y'all know, I think there are serious contradictions in the Gospel that cannot be reconciled or explained away, and these demonstrate that the Gospels are not historically reliable. I'm not saying (I'm NOT saying) that there is *nothing* reliable in the Gospels. Of course there are lots and lots of reliable materials in the Gospels (the key is figuring out which ones they are). But anyone who thinks they give a fully reliable account [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:46:31-04:00October 7th, 2019|Bart's Debates, Reflections and Ruminations|

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