Page 132 – The Bart Ehrman Blog

My Book on Literary Forgery

I am in Houston for a few days, giving talks at Rice University on the use of literary forgery in early Christianity. To prepare for the talks I decided to read through my 2013 book Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics. Of all the books I’ve written, I am proudest of this one. It is the very best I can do in terms of real scholarship. I don’t believe I’ve talked about it much on the blog, since it’s not a book for general audiences. But I thought it might be worthwhile to say something about it in a post or two, and there’s no better way to do that than to give the opening few paragraphs. As will be obvious, the study was written for scholars, but there’s nothing too difficult about it, except a couple of unusual words. “Orthonymous” means “written under a correct name” so that an orthonymous writing is one that bears the name of the actual author – as opposed to a “pseudonymous” writing [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:50-04:00April 20th, 2018|Book Discussions, Forgery in Antiquity|

Some Academic Good News

I’d like to take time out to do a post on what is happening in my personal academic life just now, which involves some good news. First, some background. As you probably know, the life of the professional academic is highly unusual – bizarre when you think about it. Here I am, a 62-year old, who organizes his entire life around semesters. Really? Shouldn’t that have stopped, like, 40 years ago? Yeah, well, for most of us. But not us professorial scholar types. In my experience lots of people outside the academy have a bit of trouble understanding what it means to be a research scholar-professor, especially at a major research university. You get the entire summer off from teaching? Your semesters are only 15 weeks long? What do you do with the other 22 weeks? And you teach only two courses a semester? What’s that take, an hour a day? Wish I had a job like that! Right, well, I’ll admit it’s a fantastic job. But it’s not because of all the time off. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:50-04:00April 18th, 2018|Reflections and Ruminations|

My Testier Days: A Response to a Critique of How Jesus Became God

I often look back over all the posts I've made on the blog over the past six years, and one of the things that constantly strikes me, these days, is how testy I frequently was, in those days! Four years ago I expressed some dismay at a review of my book How Jesus Became God. A bit thin-skinned, would you say? Either I'm getting a better sense of humor, or am taking myself less seriously, or am becoming more laid back, or, well, just getting older. Anyway, here is the post. ********************************************************************** The responses to How Jesus Became God are starting to appear, and I must say, I find the harshest ones bordering on the incredible. Do people think that it is acceptable to attack a book that they haven’t read – or at least haven’t had the courtesy to try to understand? Some of the reviewers are known entities, such as the Very Rev. Robert Barron, a Roman Catholic evangelist and commentator who has a wide following. His full response is available at http://wordonfire.org/Written-Word/articles-commentaries/April-2014/Why-Jesus-is-God--A-Response-to-Bart-Ehrman.aspx I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:50-04:00April 17th, 2018|Bart's Critics|

Q&A with Bart on The Heretic Happy Hour

I joined the Heretic Happy Hour Podcast as a call in guest for twenty-five minutes on March 6th, 2018. I was asked a lot of questions on a range of issues (including, but not at all limited to, my book "The Triumph of Christianity: How A Forbidden Religion Swept the World"). It's an interesting podcast in general, and this was a fun one to do. The full program can be heard here: https://heretichappyhour.podbean.com/e/016-is-jesus-god-hotw-bart-ehrman/ Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition:

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:50-04:00April 16th, 2018|Public Forum, Video Media|

Why Should Faith and the Afterlife Matter? Readers’ Mailbag April 15, 2018

I have a very long list of questions in my Readers’ Mailbag. Here’s an interesting one that’s been hanging around for a while. QUESTION: One of the really odd things about Christianity is the emphasis on believing in order to gain admission to heaven. Why is that so critical? RESPONSE I would say that this one really odd thing is actually two really odd things: from the outset of the Christian movement, followers of Jesus emphasized both the centrality of belief and the realities of the afterlife. These are oddities because prior to Christianity (this admittedly seems weird) there weren’t any religions that (a) focused on “having faith” and (b) stressed the afterlife as an incentive to practice religion. Really? Yup, really. People may have trouble believing this (at least my students do), but it’s true. Let me start with the afterlife. For many of my students the afterlife is the one and only reason that anyone would want to be properly religious. If there is no afterlife, why bother? If there are [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:50-04:00April 15th, 2018|Afterlife, Reader’s Questions|

Jesus as God in the Synoptics: A Blast From the Past

I sometimes get asked how my research in one book or another has led me to change my views about something important. Here is a post from four years ago today, where I explain how I changed my mind about something rather significant in the Gospels. Do Matthew, Mark, Luke consider Jesus to be God? I always thought the answer was a decided no (unlike the Gospel of John). In doing my research for my book How Jesus Became God, I ended up realizing I was probably wrong. Here's how I explained it all back then. ******************************************************************************** This, I believe, will be my final post on an issue that changed my mind about while doing the research for How Jesus Became God. This last one is a big one – for me, at least. And it’s not one that I develop at length in the book in any one place, since it covers a span of material. Here’s the deal: Until a year ago I would have said – and frequently did say, in the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:50-04:00April 13th, 2018|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels|

Blog Lunch in Houston Thursday April 19?

I will be in Houston next week to give a couple of lectures at Rice University, and have discovered that I'll be free for lunch on Thursday April 19. Is anyone interested in joining me? The invitation is open to all blog members. All you would need to do is show up, hang out with us, and pay for your meal. I can accommodate anywhere from two to six blogging souls. If you're interested, please zap me an email at [email protected]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:50-04:00April 13th, 2018|Public Forum|

Is There a Time and Place for Heaven and Hell?

A recent Pew research poll produced interesting results on Americans’ beliefs about the afterlife. 72% of Americans say they believe in heaven — defined as a place “where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded,” and 58% of U.S. adults also believe in hell — a place “where people who have led bad lives and die without being sorry are eternally punished.” (See http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/10/most-americans-believe-in-heaven-and-hell/) So that’s a lot. Nearly three quarters of all Americans believe in a literal heaven and well over half believe in a literal hell. The afterlife is bigtime. In my book on the afterlife I will not be doing something completely crazy, like claiming I know for sure whether there is a heaven and/or hell. What do I know? I may state my *opinion* on the matter, but since I’m an atheist, it should be pretty clear what I think anyway. Still, it is interesting to know/think where the ideas of heaven and hell came from, and that’s what most of the book will be. The issue returned to [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:50-04:00April 11th, 2018|Afterlife, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Thinking Atheist Interview: The Triumph of Christianity

On March 20, 2018 I was interviewed by Seth Andrews, host of The Thinking Atheist podcast about my book "The Triumph of Christianity: How A Forbidden Religion Swept the World." Seth Andrews of The Thinking Atheist defines his media channel: "Religion often tells us that faith is a virtue. We think faith (believing something without evidence) is a poor method for determining what is true, especially in an era when science, reason and evidence continue to provide much more satisfying answers than faith ever has. This is a page that challenges the claims of religion and encourages all to reject faith, to be unfailingly curious, and to keep thinking." http://www.thethinkingatheist.com/ Here's the interview. Enjoy! Please adjust gear icon for 1080p High-Definition:

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:35-04:00April 10th, 2018|Book Discussions, Public Forum, Video Media|

Degrees of Punishment and Purgatory

Christians have always had a wide variety of beliefs about the afterlife, and just about everyone (who chooses) is able to find biblical support for their views. The Bible itself has an enormous range of views. Among other things, there have always been Christians who have thought that there must be varying levels of punishment for sinners in the afterlife. The guy on the street who does his best but is not always a very good father surely doesn’t get punished to the same degree as Hitler. Among such believers who are convinced that there are different levels of punishment I would certainly class those who believe in purgatory. Even though it is a view almost universally rejected by Protestants, purgatory can make a lot of sense even to some of them. The afterlife is not just black and white, one thing or the other, either/or – it is not either eternal bliss for all the saints and eternal torment for all the sinners. There must be gradations, right? And purgatory is a way of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:50-04:00April 9th, 2018|Afterlife, Historical Jesus|

Who Invented the Idea of a Suffering Messiah?

For this week’s readers’ mailbag I give a very interesting and important question. QUESTION: Where did the idea of a Jewish messiah dying for the sins of mankind originate from? OT? Did Jews prior to Jesus’ existence believe this notion of the messiah dying for other’s sins? RESPONSE: I deal with this issue in a couple of my books. Christians often point to messianic prophecy about Jesus in the Old Testament and suppose the suffering messiah was "right in front of the Jews' faces" all along. In fact, it wasn't. Here is one of my fuller discussion from Did Jesus Exist?, where I talk about the issue in connection with the question of why Paul originally opposed Christians before converting to the faith. ***************************************************************** Why, as a highly religious Jew, did Paul originally persecute the Christians before he himself joined their ranks? It appears to have been for one reason only: the Christians were saying that Jesus was God’s special chosen one, his beloved son, the messiah. But for the pre-Christian Paul it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:50-04:00April 8th, 2018|Early Christian Doctrine, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

The Unforgivable Sin and Purgatory

In my previous post I discussed one of the passages of the New Testament that has traditionally been used to support the idea of Purgatory, the place that most of the “saved” go after death to be purged of their sins (Matt 5:26 “you won’t get out of there until you have paid the last penny”). In my judgment this passage is not talking about what happens in the afterlife, even though it has been read that way. With another passage, the matter is not quite so clear. In a famous passage, again in Matthew, Jesus talks about the “unforgiveable sin”: “Therefore I tell you every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven; and whoever speaks a word against the Son of man, it will be forgiven; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit it will not be forgiven, either in this age or the ages to come.” As you might imagine, over the Christian centuries there have been numerous interpretations of what that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:50-04:00April 6th, 2018|Afterlife, Historical Jesus|

The Sixth Anniversary of the Blog!

Today marks the sixth-year anniversary of the blog. It’s hard to believe, but, well, it’s been six years today. Time to look back and see how we’re doing and look forward to figure out what we can do better. So, first, to start in terms of raw numbers. In terms of posts, I’ve added them up and it turns out I have made 275 over the past year. That’s about 5.3 per week – so basically five with some extras thrown in now and then. That’s the pace that feels about right to me. It gives people a lot of bang for their buck, but it gives me a couple of days a week when I can luxuriate in knowing I don’t need to work on the blog. Good all around. Total numbers since starting six years ago: 1739 blog posts. That’s 5.6+ per week, so I’ve slowed down a bit, but I don’t plan on slowing down any more. Some of those 1739 are repeats: over the past couple of years I’ve started reposting [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:36-04:00April 4th, 2018|Public Forum|

Making the Bestseller List

As many of you know, I made an appearance on “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross a couple of weeks ago. I had mentioned in an earlier post that the only way it is humanly possible for a book to become a bestseller is by having some media attention paid to it – a herculean task, especially these days, over the past two years, when the national media wants to talk about nothing but That One Thing. Fresh Air has millions of listeners, though, and I was very fortunate to be on it. The results were fantastic, as I’ve indicated before. And a new indication has just appeared. Triumph of Christianity has made it on the New York Times Bestseller this week, coming in at #11 on the list of Hardback Non-Fiction. That’s a big deal for me. There are something like 600 books that get published every day. To be on this list is special. I don’t expect the book to stay on for more than a week, but still, it is a milestone. There [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:36-04:00April 3rd, 2018|Book Discussions, Public Forum, Spread of Christianity|

Did Jesus Teach About Purgatory?

The topic I’m dealing with on this destined-to-be-a-very-long thread seems to me to be particularly important. Most of my scholarship is of interest mainly to people concerned about the life and teachings of Jesus, the New Testament, the history of Christianity, and so on; but this is of interest to *all* of us. What happens when we die? Or more specifically, what happens to *me* when I die? My current discussion of purgatory may be of little interest to people, until they think about it for a second. Do most people have to go through horrible suffering after death, even if they are not destined for the eternal flames of hell? I for one don’t look forward to getting a tooth ache or ending up in the hospital. What if there are years, decades, centuries of physical torment ahead for me? Shouldn’t I want to know about that and, well, make some preparations? But it’s a topic most of us don’t think about. Those of us raised in a Protestant tradition simply don’t buy it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:36-04:00April 2nd, 2018|Afterlife, Historical Jesus|

An Easter Reflection 2018

It is highly ironic, but relatively easy, for a historian to argue that Jesus himself did not start Christianity. Christianity, at its heart, is the belief that Jesus’ death and resurrection brought about salvation, and that believing in his death and resurrection will make a person right with God, both now and in the afterlife. Historical scholarship since the nineteenth century has marshaled massive evidence that this is not at all what Jesus himself preached. Yes, it is true that in the Gospels themselves Jesus talks about his coming death and resurrection. And in the last of the Gospels written, John, his message is all about how faith in him can bring eternal life (a message oddly missing in the three earlier Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke). These canonical accounts of Jesus’ words were written four, five, or six decades after his death by people who did not know him who were living in different countries, and who were not even speaking his own language. They themselves acquired their accounts of Jesus’ words from [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:36-04:00April 1st, 2018|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The First Intimation of Purgatory?

As I said in my last post, the definitive doctrine of Purgatory did not exist before the 12th century, even though the basic *idea* had been around for a long time – the idea that even though Christ’s death brought salvation to the world, most people, except for the most holy saints, such as those who had been martyred for their faith, had still to pay for their sins. By the 13th century Purgatory had become an actual place of torment. Before then it was not so much a place as a condition of suffering to purge away sins. The question is how early this idea existed. How long had Christians maintained that suffering was necessary for the sinner – even the believing Christian sinner – before they would be allowed into their eternal bliss in heaven? The idea is not part of the New Testament, although as we will see in a later post, there are some passages that could be used in support of the view. The first place we find any reference [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:36-04:00March 30th, 2018|Afterlife|

The Birth of Purgatory

I am interested in the question of where the idea of purgatory came from. Roughly speaking purgatory is a kind of third place, between heaven and hell. The abject sinners (or those who reject Christ, or whoever you think is destined for punishment) go to hell; the righteous saints go to heaven. But what about those who will ultimately be saved but who have not lived a good (enough) life? They go to purgatory. This has been the standard teaching of the Catholic church since the 12th or 13th century. The classic study of the phenomenon is Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory (1984; an English translation of the 1981 French original). Le Goff was a medieval historian who was interested in the question from a purely historical, rather than theological, perspective (he was not a believer himself). He shows that the term purgatorium was minted only in the 12th century. It referred not to a state of being in the afterlife but to an actual place that people went – most people – [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:36-04:00March 29th, 2018|Afterlife|

The Martyr Perpetua and Her Estranged Family

Yesterday I began to talk about the Martyrdom of Perpetua, one of the most interesting and moving texts to come down to us from early Christianity. It is an account of a 23-year old Roman matron who is willing to die a gruesome death for her Christian faith. Among other things, the text shows that her faith is far more important to her than her family. In particular, she is shown in conflict especially with her father (no husband is mentioned, which has led to considerable speculation: Divorced? Widowed? Unwed mother? Something else?). And even though it is with regret, she is willing to leave behind her own infant child by being martyred. Family figures prominently in the two excerpts here. In the first her father begs her to avoid martyrdom, to no avail. In the second (chs. 7-8) we have an account of her dream and intervention on behalf of her dead brother Dinocrates. This is the part that I will be most interested in for the next post. Is it an early adumbration [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:36-04:00March 28th, 2018|Afterlife, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE), Women in Early Christianity|

The Martyrdom of Perpetua

A long time ago now I was pursuing a thread on the development of the Christian views of the afterlife but I got side tracked. And then I got side tracked from my side track. And then … well, it’s been a long time. The thread died. I need to bring it back to life. So I’m hoping now to begin on the afterlife of the thread on the afterlife. Over all these months I have continued to read, think, and sketch my thoughts on where the Christian ideas of the afterlife came from – especially the view so common today that when a person dies, their soul goes to heaven for an eternal reward or hell for eternal punishment. That is not the view of the Old Testament and it is not what the historical Jesus preached. So where did it come from? That is the ultimate issue I will be pursuing in my book. But there are other topics of interest as well, such as where did the idea of “purgatory” come from. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:40:36-04:00March 27th, 2018|Afterlife, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

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