Recent Posts

Some Readers’ Questions and Responses

By |July 17th, 2025|Reader’s Questions|0 Comments

Here are some of the intriguing questions I have recently received from blog members.  The first one includes a reply to my response and my response to that reply.  Enjoy!   QUESTION: Have you considered the angle that Jesus may have been a revolutionary Essene?  This would explain his outward orientation instead of inward.  I mean he fits right in with being a disciple of John the Baptist and has a very Essene worldview.  A good amount of his followers were also followers of John the Baptist.  Most of the points he makes, eating with tax collectors and sinners, doing [...]

Paul’s Letter to the Romans “At a Glance,” and Questions for Reflection

By |July 16th, 2025|Paul and His Letters|4 Comments

Now that I have finished this subthread on the letters of Paul in a nutshell, I'd like to provide brief summaries of the various Pauline writings (both "undisputed" and deutero-Pauline).  These posts will be quick and to the point.  In them I reproduce my overviews called "At a Glance" for each letter that I give in my textbook as the final bit of each discussion for each book, along with a couple of questions to reflect on.  If  the summaries don't make immediate sense and/or the questions don't seem to have an obvious question, I'd recommend rereading the relevant posts [...]

The Transformation of Paul’s Teaching: The Apocalypse of Paul

By |July 15th, 2025|Afterlife, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Paul and His Letters|4 Comments

In my previous post I began to discuss the non-canonical Apocalypse of Paul, a legendary tale that describes what Paul saw when he had his vision after being taken up to the “third heaven”  (see 2 Corinthians 12:1-6).  He was actually taken to see what was experienced by the dead in the afterlife.  For some lucky souls, it was fantastic.  For others, well … read on. He first sees two souls being taken to their eternal destiny, one is happy, and the other miserable.  The one is carried by angels before the throne of God to be given an eternal [...]

Fundamentalist Apologists, Christian and Mythicist

By |July 13th, 2025|Bart's Debates|44 Comments

As I’ve been reading in preparation for my course on July 19, “Did Jesus Really Exist” (a freebie!  Check it out at https://courses.bartehrman.com/did-jesus-really-exist. )  another thought occurred to me, about the similarities between “mythicist” writers (those supporting the idea that Jesus of Nazareth never did exist) and conservative Christian apologists.  They seem to have a lot in common, even though they take virtually the opposite views of things. I suppose I noticed that long ago but never delved much into it.  But it was probably 15-20 years ago when I was struck by the fact that the mathematical principle, “Bayes’ [...]

Did Jesus Exist? Why I Don’t Enjoy Reading the Mythicists

By |July 12th, 2025|Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Public Forum|35 Comments

I’ve been doing some reading in preparation for a two-lecture on-line course called “Did Jesus Really Exist” scheduled for July 19.   You can find out about it here: https://courses.bartehrman.com/did-jesus-really-exist.  It’s a freebie, so, well, feel free to get it for free! Even though I'm pumped to do this course, and I don’t really much enjoy reading about it (that is, reading the work books that argue Jesus did not exist).  I once did, back when I wrote my book Did Jesus Exist.  But unlike most issues I deal with, I don’t find it very interesting or intellectually challenging.  Still it’s [...]

July 2025 Gold Q&A

By |July 11th, 2025|Public Forum|4 Comments

Gold & Platinum Members, As you know, one of your membership perks is the ability to submit your questions to Bart for him to answer in a live monthly Q&A. So...what's on your mind? Send in your questions at: [email protected] (Don’t ask them in the comments of this post – they won’t be included!) Remember, short, to-the-point questions will be given preference. We have limited time for Q&A, so do what you can to keep things concise. The July Q&A is scheduled for Sunday July 20th at 1pm EDT. Can't make it live? We've got you covered. We always record [...]

Submit Your Platinum Post Vote!

By |July 11th, 2025|Public Forum|0 Comments

Platinum Members, It’s time once again to cast your vote. One of the great perks of Platinum membership is the chance to shape what the whole blog community reads. Below, you’ll find four thought-provoking guest posts written by fellow Platinum members. Read through, reflect, and choose the one you believe deserves the spotlight. The winning post will be featured on the public blog, reaching thousands of readers and sparking wider conversation. Your vote helps decide which voice gets heard next. To vote, make your selection below and click 'Vote'. Voting will be open through Thursday July 17th. Here are your [...]

Paul’s Vision of Heaven and Hell

By |July 10th, 2025|Afterlife, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Paul and His Letters|15 Comments

I now turn to another non-canonical text connected with Paul, one of the most famous throughout the Middle Ages, an account of his journey to observe the fate of souls in the afterlife, both the glories of the saints in heaven and the torments of the sinners in hell.   This tale is not simply meant to convey factual information about what happened to Paul once.  It is intended to teach a clear lesson.  Isn’t all interesting history like that? Here's how I discuss it in my book Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene (Oxford University Press).  This will take two posts. [...]

Chastity Within Marriage? Paul Taught THAT?

By |July 9th, 2025|Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Paul and His Letters, Sex and Sexuality in the Bible|28 Comments

In my previous post I summarized the legendary account of Paul and his most famous female disciple Thecla, and ended by quoting the “gospel message” that he preaches in the tale.  It’s not at all what you would expect.  He says no word about believing in Christ’s death and resurrection.  It is all about remaining sexually chaste, even when married.  No sex.  That’s what God is most interested in.  Here are some snippets by way of reminders. Blessed are those who have kept the flesh chaste, for they will become a temple of God. Blessed are those who are self-controlled, [...]

Paul and His Most Famous Woman Disciple

By |July 8th, 2025|Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Paul and His Letters|18 Comments

I have now finished my summaries and discussions of each of the thirteen Pauline letters, "In a Nutshell."  In this long thread we have now covered 18 of the New Testament's 27 books, which, by my math, means we are two-thirds of the way through this thread.  Nine more gems to go. I'd like to pause at this stage and provide a few other posts on Paul and his writings, specifically by talking a bit about Paul as found in early Christian writings outside the New Testament.  I have a fuller discussion of the historical and legendary tales about Paul in [...]

Should We Keep “Slaves” in the New Testament?

By |July 6th, 2025|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|44 Comments

I’ve been talking about Paul’s view of slavery, in light of the book of Philemon; this seems to be a good time to talk about a very big issue connected with translating the New Testament from Greek into English.  It may seem fairly straightforward, but in fact it is incredibly thorny:  what English word is best to use for the Greek word that refers to a person who is owned by another and compelled (on every level) to do what the owner requires?  It’s “slave,” right?  How can it be complicated?  Let me put it in a bigger picture. [...]

Paul’s Letter to Philemon: For Further Reading

By |July 5th, 2025|Public Forum|7 Comments

Here is a list of readings on Philemon, all of which are relevant to all the undisputed Pauline epistles, with a couple of commentaries specifically on this significant, short letter.  One benefit of serious commentaries is that they always begin by discussing major critical issues in understanding a book: authorship, date, historical context, major themes, disputed issues, and so on.  ****************************** Aune, David. The New Testament in Its Literary Environment. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1987. Includes a superb discussion of the practices of letter writing in Greco-Roman antiquity as the social context for Paul’s epistles. Beker, J. Christiaan. Paul the Apostle: [...]

Reader Survey Webinar Registration

By |July 4th, 2025|Public Forum|3 Comments

As part of our ongoing effort to improve the Ehrman Blog (including a major redesign to enhance the site and user experience) we recently invited members to participate in a comprehensive reader survey. If you completed the survey, we have a special thank-you just for you: You’re invited to attend a live webinar with Bart on Sunday, July 13 at 1pm Eastern. Bart will give a brand-new lecture titled: What I’ve Learned After 4,000 Blog Posts: Why the Bible Still Surprises Me, followed by a Q&A with attendees. To attend, you must register in advance using the same [...]

Philemon and the Morality of Slavery

By |July 3rd, 2025|Paul and His Letters|25 Comments

Here are a few more comments about the short letter of Paul to Philemon, whose major themes and emphases I discussed yesterday.   It may indeed seem a rather peripheral letter – it’s a private letter about a slave returning to his master, not about Paul’s great theological views or highly informative discussions of his life.  But even so, this brief one-pager can provide us with some important insights into Paul’s view of his apostolic ministry, and even more about the role of social justice in his ministry (specifically: does he condone slavery?). One thing to observe is Paul’s [...]

The Letter to Philemon in a Nutshell

By |July 2nd, 2025|Public Forum|10 Comments

I come now to the final Pauline letter of the New Testament, Philemon.  If you recall, Paul’s letters are ordered by length; this is by far the shortest, a real one-pager.  Given it’s brevity, I’ll be dealing with its major themes and emphases and the questions of Who, When and Why in just this one post. First, a 50-word summary: Paul’s letter to his former convert Philemon concerns Philemon’s slave Onesimus, who has fled from his master, possibly with stolen goods, found Paul in prison, converted, and begged him to intervene on his behalf-- which Paul does by urging Philemon [...]

The Evolution of Jewish Monotheism–Platinum Post By Daniel Kohanski

By |July 1st, 2025|Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|13 Comments

Every time we receive four guest contributions from our Platinum members (available to Platinum members only), we open up the floor for Platinum members to vote on one to share with the entire blog community. It’s our way of spotlighting the thoughtful, high-quality work being done by members and inviting wider discussion. We recently caught up on a backlog of Platinum submissions (thank you to all who voted!), and we’re excited to present the winning post from the first round of voting. In this post, Dan Kohanski tackles a foundational question in the study of ancient Judaism: Were the Israelites [...]

Another Puzzling Figure in the Hebrew Bible: Woman Wisdom?

By |June 29th, 2025|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|10 Comments

Here is another tidbit from the Hebrew Bible section of first edition of my textbook that covered Genesis to Revelation, book-by-book, now being edited for a third edition with Joel Baden. ****************************** Box 1.2: Woman Wisdom as God’s Consort? We have seen that in ancient Israel Yahweh was sometimes thought to have a divine consort, his “Asherah”  (Note: if you're interested in this topic, we have just published a one-lecture course on it by Dan McClellan: The Israelite Goddess Asherah.) This was never accepted by the strict henotheists who wrote the historical and prophetic books of the Hebrew [...]

Who Was the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53?

By |June 28th, 2025|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|54 Comments

Here is another post on the Hebrew Bible from the blog in 2012, written while I was working on the first edition of my Bible Introduction.  It is an excerpt from my first rough draft of a discussion of an unusually important passage in the book of Isaiah. Brief context: at this point I was  discussing Second Isaiah (Isaiah 40-55), almost universally thought by scholars to be written by a different author from chapters 1-39 (themselves written by Isaiah of Jerusalem in the 8th c. BCE). Second Isaiah was writing after the destruction of Judah and Jerusalem (including the temple) [...]

One of the Stranger Stories of Scripture

By |June 26th, 2025|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|25 Comments

Here is another tidbit from the original version of my Bible Introduction.  It may be old news for a lot of you, but it's fun to write this kind of thing up for college students, who have never heard of such a thing! ****************************** One of the most mysterious and even bizarre stories in Genesis happens right at the beginning of the flood narrative, where we are told that the “sons of God” looked down among the human “daughters,” saw that they were beautiful, and came down and had sex with them leading, to the Nephilim.  The word Nephilim means [...]

How We Know the World Was Created in 4004 BCE…

By |June 25th, 2025|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|17 Comments

In my Bible Intro, I included a number of "boxes" that deal with issues that are somewhat tangential to the main discussion, but of related interest or importance. Here's one of the ones in my chapter on Genesis, in connection with interpretations that want to take the book as science or history. For a lot of you, this will be old news. But then again, so is Genesis. ****************************** In 1650 CE, an Irish archbishop and scholar, James Ussher, engaged in a detailed study of when the world began.  Ussher based his calculations on the genealogies of [...]

Understanding the Hebrew Bible: The “Old” Testament in Modern Scholarship

By |June 24th, 2025|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|21 Comments

Would you like some help in understanding the Hebrew Bible?  I have two unofficial announcements to make (official ones are yet to come).  The first is that we are producing a third edition of my texbook:  The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction (Oxford University Press) which provides up-to-date scholarship on the entire Bible from Genesis to Revelation, book-by-book. I say "we" because I've been fortunate to acquire a co-author to edit the portion on the Hebrew Bible, Joel Baden (PhD Harvard, 2007), Professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale University. I love teaching Hebrew Bible (I've taught it at both Rutgers [...]

Acts of the Jewish Christians: Rethinking Their Role in the First Jewish-Roman War – Platinum Post by Rizwan Ahmed

By |June 23rd, 2025|Public Forum|4 Comments

“[T]hey went after the high priests. It was against them that the main rush was made, and they were soon caught and killed. The murderers, standing on their dead bodies, ridiculed Ananus..they threw out the dead bodies without burial.” (Josephus, “The Jewish War”) When the question arises whether early Jewish Christians participated in the First Jewish Revolt against Rome (66–73 CE), the standard answer is typically negative. The tradition, preserved by early Christian sources such as Eusebius, holds that the Jerusalem church fled to Pella in the Transjordan region before the siege began, an act often interpreted as a sign [...]

My Least Favorite Passage of the Pastorals: Those Silent and Submissive Women….

By |June 22nd, 2025|Paul and His Letters, Women in Early Christianity|20 Comments

I'd like to conclude this thread on the Pastoral epistles by discussing at greater length the one passage that I think has done more damage than nearly any other.  It involves women in the church.  The story of women in the entire Bible is long and complex, but it starts in the beginning (Genesis 1-2) and continues all the way through.  The traditional Christian views ultimately derive from the New Testament. In an earlier set of posts I explained why women were actually prominent, important, and authoritative leaders of the Christian church in its earliest days – they were unusually present [...]

The Pastoral Epistles. For Further Reading

By |June 21st, 2025|Paul and His Letters|4 Comments

Here is an annotated list of books on the Pastoral Epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, most of them relevant to all the Deutero-Pauline epistles with a couple of commentaries that deal with 2 Thessalonians.  One benefit of serious commentaries is that they always begin by discussing major critical issues in understanding a book: authorship, date, historical context, major themes, disputed issues, and so on. ****************************** Beker, J. Christiaan. The Heirs of Paul: Paul’s Legacy in the New Testament and in the Church Today. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1991. A clear assessment of the theology of the Deutero-Pauline, [...]

More Evidence That the Pastoral Epistles Were Written After the Days of Paul

By |June 19th, 2025|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters|14 Comments

I now conclude this short thread and who wrote the Pastoral epistles, when, and why by picking up on my previous argument: that aspects of these letters reveal a church situation after Paul’s day when proto-orthodox Christians were appealing to the authorities of the clergy, the creed, and the canon of Scripture to support their views, in contrast to those of “false teachers. The Creed Proto-orthodox Christians of the second and third centuries felt a need to develop a set of doctrines that were to be subscribed to by all true believers. As was the case with the proto-orthodox clergy, [...]

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