Page 130 – The Bart Ehrman Blog

Taking the Temperature of the Blog: June 2018

I thought this would be a good time to take stock of the blog briefly, and get a sense of how you, the user and raison d’etre of the project, are feeling about it. To do this I have several issues, concerns, and/or questions I’d like to raise. The BIG issue comes at the end, so skip there if you must [points (6) and (7)] Do you like the directions the blog is going? I’m wondering if the topics I cover and the way I cover them are generally satisfactory and pleasing. Or not. The pattern I’ve fallen into is to make a post on one thing or another – often in response to a question – and watching that lead into a short thread, as the post generates interesting responses by readers which lead to posts on related issues which lead to other posts on yet other related issues, and so on. Is that OK, good? The posts tend to be 1000 words or just over. Is that OK still? Sometimes (often?) the posts [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:24-04:00June 11th, 2018|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Would I Call Myself Both an Agnostic and an Atheist? A Blast from the Past

My personal beliefs came up in my debate with Dinesh D’Souza that I posted last week, and I received several questions about how I classify myself: agnostic or atheist? I’ve talked about that on the blog a couple of times, but as I am constantly reminded, many of the people who are on the blog now were not on it a year or two ago, as there is turnover and our numbers continue to grow. And certainly no one (well, almost no one) goes back and reads everything from, say five years ago! So I thought it would be fine to repost my earlier comments. It was in response to a question I received back then, very similar to the questions I’ve received over the past week. ****************************************************** QUESTION: If you don't think God exists, why do you refer to yourself as an agnostic? If this is your perspective, why not refer to yourself as an atheist? Could it be that you don't believe the Christian God exists, but are open to the possibility [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:24-04:00June 10th, 2018|Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Two Rather Bizarre Accounts of How Judas Died

In my experience, most people don’t realize that there are two different accounts of Judas’s death in the New Testament, let alone that these two are very difficult indeed to reconcile with one another. Virtually impossible, I would say. But even more people don’t know that there are accounts of Judas’s death from *outside* the New Testament in other sources. One of these two almost *nobody* knows about, except for a few specialist scholars. The first account comes to us from Papias, a proto-orthodox church author who wrote a five- volume book called An Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord in about 120-130 CE (it is hard to know exactly when) This must have been a very large book indeed (five volumes!) and to our very great regret, it has been lost. We don’t have it. All we have are snippets of quotations from it by later church fathers, starting with Irenaeus (around 180 CE) and especially the church historian Eusebius (early fourth century). We aren’t sure why exactly the book was not copied [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:24-04:00June 8th, 2018|Christian Apocrypha, Historical Jesus|

Can We Know Anything Historically About How Judas Iscariot Died?

In this post I continue with the New Testament accounts of the death of Judas Iscariot. In my previous post I talked about the first account, found in Matthew. Now I look at the second (and only other) one, found in the early part of the book of Acts, written by the same author as the Gospel of Luke. This post comes in two parts, both taken from my book The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot. In the first part I discuss the speech allegedly given by the apostle Peter to the other disciples in Acts 1, where he describes Judas’s death – in terms very different indeed from those found in Matthew. Are these reconcilable? In the second part I ask whether we can say anything *historically* about how Judas actually died. ********************************************************************* In his speech, Peter describes Judas’s death in graphic terms: Now this one [Judas] purchased a field with the wages of his unrighteous act [the betrayal] and falling headlong he burst forth in the middle and all his intestines spilled out. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:23-04:00June 7th, 2018|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

The Death of Judas in Matthew

My recent post on Judas Iscariot has raised a number of questions among readers of the blog. Here is one of them, about Judas’s death. QUESTION: Do you have any sense of how Judas met his end after the betrayal? Matthew's version seems at least somewhat plausible, but Act's doesn't. Or maybe he just took the money and moved elsewhere. RESPONSE This is an interesting question for a number of reasons. For one thing, the only writers who thought that Judas’s demise was important enough to deal with were Matthew and Luke – Mark, John, Paul, and all the others are silent on the matter. As far as we would know from the Gospels of Mark and John, Judas would have lived to be an old man. They just don’t say. And Luke doesn’t give an account in his Gospel, but only later in the book of Acts. Moreover, the account in Acts certainly seems to stand at odds with what Matthew says in his Gospel. To make sense of it all [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:23-04:00June 5th, 2018|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

Self-Reflection on The Process of Writing a Book

Every author has different parts of the research and writing process that they enjoy the most. Which means there are other parts they enjoy the least. And it really varies from one author to the next. My wife, a Shakespeare scholar, especially loves the reading she does in preparation for a book. There are lots of others like her, people who just want to read, read, read, and then read some more. I have to admit, this is not the most enjoyable part of my work, for me personally. I do enjoy reading – which is a good thing, since I spend so many waking hours doing it; but reading for research can often be very hard, even grueling work. That’s because serious scholarship is itself hard. It’s not an easy read. It’s not like reading your favorite novel. And when you’re reading research for a book you have to read closely and intensely. The first step, as I’ve said before, is knowing how closely and intensely: is this a book or article that I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:23-04:00June 4th, 2018|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Did Judas Iscariot Betray Jesus?

In this edition of the Readers’ Mailbag I address an interesting and perplexing question about Judas Iscariot: QUESTION You may have mentioned this (I cannot recall) but why did Judas go to the authorities in the first place? RESPONSE I wrestled with this question long and hard while writing my book The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot, which includes a section on what we can know about the historical Judas. In the book I argue that there are some things that we can know with relative certainty about Judas (he was one of the Twelve and was the one who actually betrayed Jesus); other things we can profitably surmise based on our evidence (e.g. what it is Judas betrayed to the authorities – not just Jesus’ whereabouts, I argue); and other things that are almost entirely in the realm of speculation. Among the latter I would include the reasons Judas *wanted* to betray Jesus. Scholars have offered numerous suggestions over the years. You may have your own favored view. Here is what [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:23-04:00June 3rd, 2018|Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Past and Present: One of My Debates with Dinesh D’Souza

As you all know, Dinesh D'Souza is in the national news again; he's one controversial fellow! As you may not know/remember, I had three public debates with Dinesh some years ago, not on campaign finance laws but on the problem of suffering, an issue he was long interested in as a committed evangelical Christian who believed he had (has) a reasonable answer or set of answers to the question of why there is so much pain and misery in the world if God is in charge of it. I was digging around and I found the following post from four years ago, giving one of our debates. Here is my intro to it and the debate itself. (WHEN I talk about him "being in the news" -- this, again, is from four years ago) - Dinesh D'Souza is the author of What's So Great About Christianity, and What's So Great About God, among others. ********************************************************************************************* A prominent figure in the news lately has been Dinesh D'Souza. Dinesh is best known as a hyper-conservative [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:23-04:00June 2nd, 2018|Bart's Debates, Video Media|

Did the Gospels Originally Have Titles?

I have received a number of questions from readers about my blog post that tried to explain why the Gospel writers wrote their books anonymously; some of the questions have concerned the titles of the Gospels: if they books were not *written* by named authors (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) why do the titles *indicate* they were, and could the titles be original to the books? My view is that the books did not originally have titles, but – for reasons I explained in a different post (https://ehrmanblog.org/why-are-the-gospels-called-matthew-mark-luke-and-john/) – were given titles naming their authors years after they had been circulating anonymously. I explain why I think that the Gospels were originally without titles in a couple of my books; here are a couple of extracts (slightly edited) taken from Jesus Interrupted and Forged that marshal some of the arguments that are often adduced. There is some overlap between the two sets of comments, but together they pretty much make the point. ************************************************************* In our surviving manuscripts of the Gospels they are always [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:23-04:00May 31st, 2018|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

Non-Disclosure Agreements

Several people have made comments or raised questions about Non-disclosure Agreements with respect to Dan Wallace and the so-called (but no longer) First Century Mark. For many years Dan refused to explain what he was talking about when he mentioned in the public debate with me in February 2012 a new discovery of a Gospel of Mark that dated to the first century. In a later post I may say something about why I was immediately skeptical about it (he apparently is going on record now for saying that my reaction of disbelief was inappropriate; I don’t think he liked my humor at the time. But, well, I was incredulous). But here let me say something about NDA’s. I myself signed a NDA once connected with the discovery of an ancient Christian manuscript, so I have some limited experience with the matter – although my direct knowledge comes from just this one instance. Otherwise what I know has been picked up just by paying attention. My case involved the newly discovered Gospel of Judas. I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:23-04:00May 30th, 2018|New Testament Manuscripts, Reflections and Ruminations|

What the New Fragment of Mark’s Gospel Looks like (the so-called First-Century Mark)

Like many of you I have many questions about the bizarre way the discussion of the so-called “First-Century Gospel of Mark” unfolded. I was intimately connected with the first announcement of the discovery, which was made precisely in order to trump me in a public debate. As it turns out the announcement was based on false information acquired through hearsay. But that’s the past, and Dan Wallace has apologized, so that is that. There are still questions about how the affair unfolded, but I’m not going to go into that here. What there is now no longer any doubt about is the manuscript fragment that is involved. It is not from the first century but from the late second or early third. That’s not nearly as impressive but it is still mighty impressive. Until now we had only one manuscript of Mark that dated that early. Now we have two. The other one is P45 (P means “Papyrus” manuscript and 45 means it is the 45th papyrus ms. discovered and published) which is highly fragmentary, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:08-04:00May 28th, 2018|New Testament Manuscripts|

Did Jesus Do “Signs” To Prove Who He Was? A Blast from the Past

Rummaging through old blog posts, I came across this one from a few years ago. It is on a topic that I continue to be fascinated by, the significant differences between the Gospel of John and the "Synoptic" Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. These three have numerous differences among themselves, of course. But the differences of the three over against John are really quite striking. Here is one key instance of that, on a major issue connected with the life of Jesus. Did he try to prove that he was the messiah, or not? ********************************************************************************* For many decades now there have been scholars who have been convinced that the Gospel of John is based, in large part, on written, but no-longer surviving, sources. It is much debated whether John relied on the Synoptic Gospels for any of its stories, or whether in fact its author had ever read (or even heard of) Matthew, Mark, and Luke. There are very few verbatim overlaps between John and the others, and outside of the Passion narrative there [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:08-04:00May 27th, 2018|Canonical Gospels|

Doing Research for a Trade Book

Before getting side-tracked on other things, I had started to say that I was at a good place on my book on The Invention of the Afterlife and to lay out how I actually write a book like this. I explained how I choose what book to write next, and I talked about how writing a trade book is very different from writing an academic one. I’d like to pick up there since I am at the end of a major phase in my preparation for the book, and would like to explain how I typically proceed. Once you know what book you want to write next, what do you do next? How do you proceed? Of course any trade book that I decide to write is on a topic that I’ve thought about for many years – almost always for thirty or forty years, on and off. Most of the time my trade books are on topics that I’ve taught about in undergraduate and graduate courses since the 1980s. So I already have done [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:08-04:00May 25th, 2018|Book Discussions|

We Do NOT Have a First-Century Copy of the Gospel of Mark

As most of us have suspected for years now, there is in fact no first-century copy of the Gospel of Mark. If fortune smiles upon us, maybe one will eventually be discovered. But it hasn’t been yet. Dan Wallace, our lone public source for the existence of such a thing (announced with some flair at a public debate I had with him in 2012) has finally provided the necessary information: his claim that such a copy existed was based on bad information. He lays it all out here. https://danielbwallace.com/2018/05/23/first-century-mark-fragment-update/ . I’ve copied the post here, below. He is gracious to apologize to me, and I understand about non-disclosure agreements. But at the same time, I have lots of questions about the entire affair. You may have some too. If so, let me know. I’ll answer the ones I can and ask the ones I can’t. Daniel Wallace's most popular books are Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament and Reinventing Jesus. Here is Dan's Post: ************************************************************************************************** First-Century Mark Fragment Update ON 23 MAY 2018 BY DANIEL B. WALLACEIN CONTEMPORARY [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:07-04:00May 24th, 2018|Bart's Debates, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Why Didn’t the Gospel Writers Tell Us Who They Were?

Yesterday I dealt with the issue of anonymous writings in antiquity, what we know about them in general. Today I deal directly with the question about why the Gospels of the New Testament were all written anonymously, with the authors giving us no indication of who they were. I have a theory about that, a theory that I’ve never heard or seen before. Here is how I lay it out in my trade book Forged. ***************************************************************** It is always interesting to ask why an author chose to remain anonymous, never more so than with the Gospels of the New Testament. In some instances an ancient author did not need to name himself because his readers knew perfectly well who he was and did not need to be told. That is almost certainly the case with the letters of 1, 2, and 3 John. These are private letters sent from someone who calls himself “the elder” to a church in another location. It is safe to assume that the recipients of the letters knew who he [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:07-04:00May 23rd, 2018|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

Why Would an Ancient Author Write a Book Anonymously?

In response to yesterday’s post, I received a seemingly simple question that is both intriguing and complex. I will devote two posts to giving an answer QUESTION: Why were the gospels written anonymously? Was this the usual practice with this type of account in those times? RESPONSE: It’s a bit surprising that more attention hasn’t been paid to this question by scholars, who, as a rule, are *far* more interested in proving that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written by the people named in their (current) titles than in exploring the issue of why the authors never named themselves. In this post I’ll deal with the phenomenon of anonymous writings *generally* in the ancient world; in the following post I’ll elaborate a suggestion I make here, but do not develop at any length, about the Gospels in particular. The following has been drawn from my discussion in my scholarly book Forgery and Counterforgery. But apart ********************************************************************************************** There are far fewer anonymous writings from antiquity – and from Christian antiquity – than of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:07-04:00May 22nd, 2018|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

Do We Know Why Jesus Went to Jerusalem?

Browsing through my blog posts I came across this one from exactly six years ago today. Amazingly, I still agree with it! It deals with an unusually important question, one that, in a sense, involves a decision that changed the entire history of our world. QUESTION Just what did the historical Jesus think he was doing that last week in Jerusalem? It looks to me like he was working as hard as he could to get himself killed. If that's what he was doing, then why was he doing it? RESPONSE Interesting question! There have been scholars, of course, who have argued that this is precisely what Jesus was doing, that he went to Jerusalem in order to be crucified. It is interesting that those who take that view cover as wide a range of ideology and theology as you could possibly imagine. Conservative Christian thinkers (from protestant fundamentalists to Roman Catholic theologians to … well, take your pick) have long thought that the point of the Jerusalem trip was in fact the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:07-04:00May 19th, 2018|Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

The Tricks of Writing for a General Audience

Yesterday I mentioned how hard it is for academics to learn how to write for a general audience. In graduate school we are trained to write for fellow scholars – learning the jargon and mastering the background knowledge that everyone in the field shares. That’s because scholarly writing is a kind of short hand for insiders. If you had to explain every term, every concept, every assumption then what you could say in an article for insiders would literally require a book. And so you learn which assumptions, perspectives, ideas, terms, and knowledge are widely shared by those for whom you are writing. Some of us are fortunate enough to teach in PhD programs, and we can see how a student starts to acquire this kind of information and insight into what can and needs to be assumed by their scholarly audience, and what cannot. It is very, very easy to read a piece by someone and know whether they are an “insider” or not. In fact, it is very easy to read an article [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:07-04:00May 18th, 2018|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

How a Book Gets Written

Once I decide what I want to write the next book on, the fun begins. Or rather, the work begins. I’m not sure I’d classify any part of the whole process as “fun.” There are certainly enjoyable elements, but I think what drives me is wanting to have the very best end product possible. Having *done* a book is fun; doing the book is less fun. If I had to label it as anything I guess I’d say it’s intense. The work goes through a number of distinct stages, each of them challenging in different ways and requiring different skills. I think that’s why it’s so hard to write a good book and why so few authors are able to pull it off. There are various skill-sets required, not one. And if you’re deficient in any of them, the book simply isn’t going to be very good. Even before you start you have to decide what is the heart and soul of what you want to accomplish in your book. That involves knowing what your [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:07-04:00May 17th, 2018|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Back in Business!

Many apologies to all for the hiatus on the blog. I wish I had a sob-story to tell to justify it (well, not really), but as I indicated yesterday, it was rather a bit of good fortune with a downside. Every year for nineteen years now my wife Sarah and I have come to the beach with our friend Dale Martin, the New Testament scholar who introduced us just six years before that (he taught at the time at Duke; he moved on to Yale; he just retired this past year). We are very boring at the beach. We rent the same house (right on the beach; we often see dolphins from the deck). We all bring our books and work all day (I get up at 6:30 and have at it!), then take a five mile walk on the beach; come home to do drinks and dinner; go to bed, and repeat every day for two weeks. For us it's fantastic. We all get tons done. No distractions. No departmental or student obligations or [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:41:07-04:00May 16th, 2018|Public Forum|

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