Page 147 – The Bart Ehrman Blog

What I’m Thinking about the Afterlife

I became interested in writing this book about the afterlife a couple of years ago, when I realized with unexpected clarity – out of the blue (I don’t know what sparked my thinking) – that the views most people have are not from the Bible. Many people, of course, do not believe in the afterlife at all. But at least in my parts of the world (both where I grew up, and where I have lived my life, first Chicago, then New Jersey, and now for the past 28 years North Carolina) those people who do believe in an afterlife (with a few, but only a very few exceptions), think that your body dies and your soul lives on. In the now traditional Christian idea, your soul goes to heaven or hell. Where did that idea come from? Most of the Bible, of course, is the Old Testament (it’s about 3-4 times as large as the New Testament). And the Old Testament teaches no such thing. Moreover, Jesus himself did not teach any such thing. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:33-04:00March 10th, 2017|Afterlife, Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Does the Afterlife Matter for Other Things?

This past Friday I went up to NYC to meet with my editor, and the marketing team, at my new publisher Simon & Schuster, both to discuss the next book coming out in September AND to talk (with my editor herself) about the possible new book, the one I am tentatively calling The Invention of the Afterlife (dealing with the question of where the widespread views of heaven and hell come from, especially since they are not actually what the Old Testament, Jesus, or the NT writers actually taught). This was kind of a first pitch, to get them interested. They are indeed interested, and so now the next step for me will be to write a prospectus to get them to agree formally and finally. I want to do this now, so I don’t spend months reading about the topic – both ancient writings that deal with the afterlife and modern scholarship on the matter – only to find out that this will *not* be my next book. Just to write the prospectus I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:32-04:00March 8th, 2017|Afterlife, Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Me and Jesus
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Me and Jesus

Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations

Me and Jesus

Yesterday I explained why, in my own opinion, I can no longer consider myself a Christian, and I received a lot of responses: some sympathetic, others not so sympathetic; some seeing the point and others disagreeing. One particular disagreement gets to the heart of what I was trying to say. Several people (OK, lots of people) have commented that if I follow the ethical teachings of Jesus that in that sense I really am a Christian and might as well admit it. Part of me agrees with that – it’s what I’ve long thought – but what I came to realize yesterday during my class lecture is that there is a strong sense in which that is also not true. Here I’ll try to explain. I do indeed try to adhere to the ethical teachings of Jesus as I see them. He himself summarized the entire Torah of Moses by stating two principal commandments. The first was Deuteronomy 6:4-6, that you should love God with all your heart, soul, and being. OK, I don’t follow [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:32-04:00March 7th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Why Do Good People Suffer? A Blast from the Past

I was looking around for an interesting post from a few years ago, and I found this one, from March 2013, which, as it turns out, is relevant to what I am going to want to say in the thread I've just started on views of the afterlife that developed in ancient Israel (leading up to the Christian views that eventually came to be so dominant throughout the West.). The post provides, in a nutshell, three major views about why there is suffering. Why is that relevant? One of my theses I have going into my research for my next book is that views of the afterlife developed originally as a way to explain why there are such inequities in the present life. Here's the post: ************************************************************************ I’m in New York City for a few days. Last night I gave a lecture at NYU; they had asked that I talk about “God, The Bible, and the Problem of Suffering.” That’s the topic of my book God’s Problem, and so I spun off a talk [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:32-04:00March 5th, 2017|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Thinking about Hell

When I search my mind for times in my (distant) past that I thought about hell, I conjure up two very different moments. Today when I think about them it is with a good sense of humor. The first is when I must have been maybe eight or nine. I was at some kind of summer camp, and we had a daily camp meeting where we would sing songs and someone would come talk to us. One day there was a local minister who came and told a story about a person who went first to hell and then heaven. When he went to hell he found that there was an enormous table filled with fantastic food – everything that everyone could imagine wanting. But all the people there had three-foot long forks strapped to their arms, and it was impossible for them to pick up the food and bring it to their mouths. And so they were starving in the midst of plenty. He then went to heaven and again, there was the enormous [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:16-04:00March 3rd, 2017|Afterlife, Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Views of the Afterlife

If my publisher agrees that my next book can/should be “The Invention of the Afterlife” (or whatever we call it) I will, as you might suspect, be thinking a lot about heaven and hell over the next couple of years. I”ve already been thinking a lot about them over the past six months as I’ve been reading broadly on the topic. I’m NOT, of course, mainly reading about what REALLY happens to us when we die. No one knows that. Or maybe I should rephrase that. There are a lot of people who *think* they know that, but in my opinion no one does. Most of the books I’ve been reading are about what people have *thought* about heaven and hell over the past three thousand years. I’m interested in knowing where current thinking came from – since what is now “common sense” in some circles was never dreamed of for most of human history. There are some people, of course, who argue that their views are not simply common sense – that is, views [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:16-04:00March 1st, 2017|Afterlife, Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Moving to My Next Book

As I mentioned some time ago, I’ve decided to slow down a bit and enjoy life a bit more. Since 1992 – that is, over the past 25 years – I have written or edited thirty books. I’m not going to stop. But I’m thinkin’ it’s time to ease off a bit. Is there a reason I publish a book a year? Not that I can think of. I’ve done it because it’s my passion. Well, one of my passions. I am a bit obsessed with the history of early Christianity and all that it entails. My books have covered a wide range of fields within that broader area. And I have tried to keep up publishing three different kinds of books: scholarly books for the academics; textbooks for the colleges students; and trade books for the general reading public. It’s been hard to balance all that, especially since I’ve tried to publish a new trade book every two years. I’ve had to do the other books in my spare time, such as it is, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:16-04:00February 28th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The First Textual Variant in the Gospel of Mark

I have been talking about some of the textual variants in Mark, and wanted to address the very first one that can be found in our textual witnesses, one that occurs in the first verse of the Gospel. I have decided to do so by showing how a relatively hard-core argument is made by textual scholars. To do that I have copied in my discussion of the passage in my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture. This was not a Barnes & Noble book, but was written for academics. But I think it’s useful to get a sense for that kind of discourse on occasion (OK: rare occasion) on the blog. So here it is. As you’ll see, it presupposes some knowledge of adoptionistic Christologies, the topic of yesterday’s post. (I have eliminated part of the discussion that gets particularly technical, involving the surviving manuscripts that evidence the textual variant) (And apologies for the odd spacing...) ***************************************************************** The vast majority of manuscripts introduce the Gospel of Mark with the words: “The beginning of the Gospel [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:16-04:00February 27th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Christians Who Thought Jesus Was Adopted by God: A Blast From the Past

I have been talking about some of the textual variants in the Gospel of Mark, and I want to discuss the very first one in the Gospel, whether Mark 1:1 calls Jesus the "Son of God" or not. But to make sense of what I want to say about that matter, I need to provide some background that at first sight may not seem all that relevant. But it's highly relevant. It has to do with how some early Christians understood Jesus not to be innately the Son of God, but the Son of God because God "adopted" him, the man Jesus, to be his son at some point of his life. I've covered that issue before on the blog, and so this is a blast from the past: ****************************************************************************** For some posts now I have been talking about “docetic” Christologies in the early church – views of Christ that said he was so much divine that he was not really a human – and about how these influenced proto-orthodox scribes who changed their texts [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:16-04:00February 26th, 2017|Heresy and Orthodoxy, Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

Jesus’ Teaching in Aramaic and the Books of the Canon: Mailbag February 24, 2017

There are two interesting questions in this week’s Readers’ Mailbag: one about Jesus’ teaching in Aramaic and the other about which books did not make it into the New Testament. If you have a question yourself, ask it as a comment and I will add it to the burgeoning list! QUESTION: Even though Christ taught in Aramaic, was there absolutely nothing written down in Aramaic? Is there much of a language translation problem going from Aramaic to Greek? (Again, it’s mind boggling to consider how many opportunities for error to creep in by accident or design) RESPONSE: Yes, I’m afraid that’s right: we don’t have any writings from any early Christians in the language that Jesus spoke, Aramaic. That makes things rather complicated when it comes to deciding what Jesus really said – that is, if we want to have an idea of his exact words. Let me make two points about that. First, there are some passages in the Gospels where the author will preserve an Aramaic word or phrase on Jesus’ [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:16-04:00February 24th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Heresy and Orthodoxy, Historical Jesus, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

An Interesting Scribal Change at the Beginning of Mark

Since I’ve started saying something about how scribes altered the Gospel of Mark over the years as they copied it (yesterday I mentioned eight changes made by scribes in just the five verses, Mark 14:27-31) I would like to pursue this theme a bit, and talk about some of the more interesting changes. In this post I’ll pick just one that occurs right at the beginning of the Gospel. It’s an interesting change because scribes appear to have made it in order to eliminate a possible contradiction that was originally found in the Gospel – already in verse 2! The first verse of Mark’s Gospel is often understood to be a kind of title for the entire account: “The Beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” To that opening statement, most manuscripts add the words “the Son of God.” I’ll talk about that textual variant in my next post, because it is complicated and interesting too – were those additional words originally found in v. 1 or not? And why would it matter? It turns [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:16-04:00February 22nd, 2017|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

How Variant Readings are Noted in the Greek New Testament

In this post I’m going to try to do something I’ve never done before: actually explain by way of example the extent and kind of variations you find in our surviving Greek manuscripts. In doing so I hope to show: (a) there are lots of variations and (b) most of them involve nuances of meaning but rarely anything of huge significance (and lots of them don’t affect the meaning at all). By way of introduction: I have previously indicated that virtually all translators use the Greek text established by an international committee of scholars for the United Bible Societies. I have also mentioned that this form of the text comes in two published versions. One is for translators around the world who are translating the NT into various languages into which it has not yet appeared. This is the kind of “student” edition that many first year Greek students use. That one is called the United Bible Societies Greek New Testament, and it is now in its fifth edition. That’s the one I’ve been describing. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:16-04:00February 21st, 2017|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

A Text That Doesn’t Exist! What Do NT Translators Actually Translate?

In my previous post I began to explain that virtually all translators of the New Testament – except fundamentalists who continue to appeal to the Textus Receptus (the inferior form of the Greek text based on the original publication of Erasmus back in 1516, which does not take into account, obviously, discoveries of newer manuscripts) – rely on the form of the Greek text established by an international group of scholars from 1955-1965. This edition has been revised since then, but not significantly. The text is pretty much the same now as then, with a few changes here and there. Two points I would like to stress about this United Bible Societies text of the New Testament. The first point is in response to a question I received, by someone who asked with understandable incredulity: do you mean every translator simply takes the committee’s word for it? Do they simply translate what others have decided was the original text? The answer to that question is both yes and no. It’s actually not quite that simple. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:16-04:00February 20th, 2017|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

How Do We Know When the Gospels Were Written: A Mailbag Blast from the Past

I occasionally get asked how we know when the Gospels were written. Why do scholars date them when they do? I answered that question here on the blog over four years ago now. Most of you weren't on the blog then. And if you were, and you're like me, you'll have no recollection at all about what was said four years ago! So here is the post I made back in May 2012. **************************************************************************** QUESTION: How are the dates that the Gospels were composed determined? I've read that Mark is usually dated to 70 or later because of the reference to the destruction of the temple. Is this the only factor that leads scholars to conclude that it was composed in 70 CE or later or are there other factors? I've heard that Luke and Matthew are likewise dated aroun 80-85 CE to give time for Mark to have been in circulation enough to be a source for them. Is this accurate? How is John usually dated to around 95 CE (or whatever the correct [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:16-04:00February 19th, 2017|Canonical Gospels, Reader’s Questions|

The Gospel Truth: Sometimes A Little Hazy

One of my all-time favorite interviewers is Terry Gross, the host and co-executive producer of Fresh Air on NPR. I have done her show six times over the years for various books I've written, and it has been a terrific experience each time. She is an amazing interviewer. She asks really perceptive questions and knows how to get to what is especially interesting about a guest's work. If you've listened to her show, you'll know that it always sounds like she is in the same radio studio with the person she is interviewing, talking to them face to face. That's not how it is. The person being interviewed is physically somewhere else, in a radio studio in their own location, and the interview is happening over headphones and cable hookups. It certainly never seems that way! But I've never met her face to face. Here is an interview I did with her on March 4th, 2009 about my book "Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don't Know About Them)." [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:15-04:00February 16th, 2017|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Video Media|

The Standard Greek New Testament Today

All of these threads within threads are connected with the question that I started with a long while ago: when translators today produce a version of the Bible in English (or any other modern language) what is it that they are translating? One of the manuscripts? Several of the manuscripts? Something else? The answer, in virtually every instance, is the same. They are translating an edition of the Greek New Testament published since 1965 (with revisions since then) produced by a small but international team of textual scholars assembled and commissioned by the United Bible Societies (various countries have a Bible Society – an organization devoted to the distribution of Bibles and the promotion of knowledge about the Bible: there is one in America, one in Britain, one in Germany, one in the Netherlands, etc; the “United” Bible Societies is the overarching organization with representatives of each country). The team was assembled in 1955 in order to produce a standard edition of the Greek New Testament, based on an intense study of the available Greek [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:16-04:00February 15th, 2017|History of Biblical Scholarship, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

What We Now Know about the Manuscripts of the New Testament

I have talked about how the Greek New Testament was first published by Erasmus in 1516, and about how scholars began to realize, soon after that, just how many differences there were in our surviving manuscripts, with a key moment coming in 1707 with the publication of John Mill’s Greek New Testament, which noted 30,000 places where the manuscripts Mill had examined had alternative readings. I should stress, Mill did not cite every place he found a difference in the manuscripts. Only the differences he thought were significant. Really. So where do we stand today? Here is my summary of the modern textual situation, over three hundred years later, as drawn from my book Misquoting Jesus. ****************************************************** Whereas Mill knew of or examined some 100 Greek manuscripts to uncover his 30,000 variations, today we know of far, far more. At last count there have been over 5700 Greek manuscripts discovered and catalogued. That’s fifty-seven times as many as Mill knew about in 1707. These 5700 include everything from the smallest fragments of manuscripts – the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:15-04:00February 14th, 2017|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Free Memberships: Still Available!

I still have a few free memberships to the blog available to give out to those who need them, thanks to the incredible generosity of several members of the blog. These have been donated for a single purpose: to allow those who cannot afford the annual membership fee to participate on the blog for a year. I will assign these memberships strictly on the honor system: if you truly cannot afford the membership fee, but very much want to have full access to the blog, then please contact me. Do NOT reply here, on the blog, as a comment. Send me a separate email, privately, at [email protected]. In your email, let me know your situation (why you would like to take advantage of this offer) and then provide me with the following information: 1) Your first and last name. 2) Your preferred personal email. 3) Your preferred user name (no spaces). 4) Your preferred password (should be 8 or more characters, no spaces). The donors will remain anonymous, but here let me publicly extend my [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:15-04:00February 13th, 2017|Public Forum|

My Work Habits the Letter allegedly by Jesus’ Own Brother: Mailbag 2/12/2017

I will be addressing two quite disparate questions in this week’s Readers’ Mailbag: one about my work habits and one about the New Testament epistle of James: how do we know that the author expected his readers to think (or know) that he was actually the brother of Jesus himself? If you have questions you’d like me to address in a future Mailbag, send them along! QUESTION: I notice you seem to get quite a bit done in a day (more than most people I know,) and that you have been doing that from a fairly young age (at one point you even experimented with decreasing your sleeping hours, If memory serves). The biggest hindrance to productivity for me is procrastination (like right now for example). How do you deal with it? You must feel it too sometimes. Did you always have an easier time concentrating than other folks? Did you learn it early in life (maybe by watching your parents)? If so, what techniques do you employ to deal with it? RESPONSE: [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:36:15-04:00February 12th, 2017|Bart’s Biography, Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

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