Page 157 – The Bart Ehrman Blog

The Conversion of Paul

My book on the “Triumph of Christianity” will deal with how and why people converted to the Christian faith. (As I think I’ve said, unlike some scholars I have no problem calling the earliest followers of Jesus who came to believe in his resurrection “Christian.”) The best known and most important conversion was Paul. Seeing how/why he converted is a key for understanding his own subsequent mission to convert gentiles to the faith. Here is my current thinking on the issue To start with, it is impossible to know either what led up to Paul’s conversion or what exactly happened at the time. We do have a narrative description in the book of Acts, and it is this description that provides the popular images of Paul seeing a blinding light on the road to Damascus, falling from his horse, and hearing the voice of Jesus asking “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me” (Acts 9:1-19). The account of Acts 9 is retold by Paul in both chapter 22 and chapter 29. The historical problems it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:41-04:00June 16th, 2016|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

How Paul Persecuted the Christians

How Paul persecuted the Christians. I pointed out in the previous post that prior to his conversion Paul was a persecutor of the church, almost certainly because he objected to what their basic and fundamental message was, that Jesus was the messiah (despite the fact – or rather because of the fact – that he had been crucified). But how exactly did Paul engage in his persecution? He himself says that it was violent persecution. What could that mean? We don’t know exactly how he proceeded. Paul never describes his persecuting activities. The book of Acts indicates that he ravaged the gatherings of Christians and dragged people off to prison (8:3). That’s inherently implausible: we don’t know of anything like Jewish prisons and we can assume that Roman authorities were not inclined to provide cell space for Jewish sectarians who happened to be proclaiming a rather strange message. How Paul Persecuted the Christians So what was he doing to Christians during his persecution of them? There is one intriguing and possibly helpful comment that Paul [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:41-04:00June 14th, 2016|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Some Comments on the Gospel of John: (Based on John Spong’s Book). A Blast from the Past

A couple of people on the blog have suggested that as a feature of the blog, I periodically provide a Blast From the Past -- that is, repost a blog post from a few years ago. I think it's a great idea. My guess is that most people on the blog haven't read everything from then, and if they have, if they're like me, they won't remember them! So I decided to go back from three years ago today (well, tomorrow) and see what I was saying. Here's the post. I don't remember it at *ALL*!!! But I still think now what I did then. ************************************************************************************* John Shelby Spong, former Episcopal bishop of New Jersey and highly controversial author (because of his skeptical views about the New Testament and traditional Christian doctrine) has just published a new book on the Gospel of John, called The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic. I have not read the book, but Spong has written an interesting article on it that appeared in the Huffington Post yesterday, at [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:41-04:00June 12th, 2016|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Religion in the News|

Jesus’ Death and Resurrection for Salvation; Paul’s Collection; and My Sunday Mornings: Readers’ Mailbag June 11, 2016

Did all the early Christian groups agree that Jesus’ death and resurrection brought salvation? Why was Paul gathering money for the Christians in Jerusalem? And, well, what do I myself now do on Sunday mornings since I don’t go to church? This is this Weekly Readers’ Mailbag, with the normal range of unrelated but interesting questions! If you have a question you would like me to address, ask away! QUESTION: To which of the other early variants of Christianity does this creed (1 Cor 15:3-5) apply just as well as to the proto-orthodox? If it applies to most just as well, then Paul could have been the founder of the proto-orthodox variant of Christianity. RESPONSE: Ah, good question! Just to refresh everyone’s memory, this is the passage where Paul indicates that “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures” and that “he was raised from the dead on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.” So the question is: did all early Christians agree that it as the death and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:41-04:00June 11th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Progressive Spirit Interview

On March 27, 2016, I had an interview with John Shuck for the Progressive Spirit Podcast. Progressive Spirit (formerly Religion For Life) is an exciting and intelligent program about Spirituality and Social Justice. The program is a production of KBOO Community Radio in Portland, Oregon. John interviewed me about his new book Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior. In the book as many of you know, I look at research on memory–how it’s formed, how it’s recalled, how it can change when transmitted from person to person, and how it can be remolded based on historical perspective and current events, all in order to helpe us better understand how traditions about Jesus were in circulation in the years before they were written down. Jesus Before the Gospels is available in hardcover, audiobook and for Kindle. Please adjust gear icon for high-definition.

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:23-04:00June 9th, 2016|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Video Media|

I Need Some Suggestions!

Now that we are well into our fifth year of the blog, I want to pause and ask for some suggestions. As always, I’m happy to hear your suggestions in general, but I have a problem in particular that I’d like to address. First, in general. Our goal, of course, is to increase membership on the blog, since the ultimate goal is to raise money for charities dealing with hunger and homelessness, through membership fees and donations. Did I mention donations? I am completely gratified and humbled by the donations that come in. Please think about making a donation yourself, large or small. You will earn my eternal gratitude. But as to general suggestions: if you can think of anything that is simple to do, that doesn’t take much time, and that can attract new members to the blog, please let me know. The blog has evolved in lots of ways over the years. It’s hard to see because the changes happen one at a time, and we get accustomed to them. But they happen. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:24-04:00June 8th, 2016|Public Forum|

Paul, Jesus, and the Messiah

My current thread on the blog is less like a thread and more like a tapestry. Ultimately it is all related to the book I’m now working on, The Triumph of Christianity, which is interested in the question of how the Christian movement that started with just a couple of dozen people after Jesus’ death (i.e., those who almost right away, soon thereafter, came to believe he had been raised from the dead) came to be a prominent religion by the early fourth century and the official religion of the Roman state by the end of the fourth century. Good questions! I just hope I can give some good answers! Scholars have long worked on the problem, of course, and there are many parts to the overall picture. Which is why this thread is a tapestry. At present (on the blog) I am wrestling with the importance of the apostle Paul, and am ruminating on his significance for the early Christian movement. And the first thing that I noted about him is that before he [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:24-04:00June 7th, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Paul’s Own (and Only) Gospel

What does Paul mean in his letter to the Galatians when he says that he did not receive his gospel from humans but direct from God through a revelation of Jesus? Does he mean that he was the one (through direct divine inspiration) who came up with the idea that it was the death and resurrection of Jesus, rather than, say, Jesus’ life and teachings, that brings salvation? And if so, doesn’t that mean that Paul himself would be the founder and creator of Christianity, since Christianity is not the religion of Jesus himself, but the religion about Jesus, rooted in faith in his death and resurrection? It may seem like that’s the case, but it’s not. Not at all. In my previous post, I showed that the belief in Jesus’ death and resurrection were around before Paul and that Paul inherited this belief from Christians who were before him. But then what would Paul mean when he explicitly says in Galatians 1:11-12 “For I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel that was [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:24-04:00June 5th, 2016|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Were Jesus’ Followers Crazy? Was He? Mailbag June 4, 2016
Gallery
Were Jesus’ Followers Crazy? Was He? Mailbag June 4, 2016

Historical Jesus, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum

Were Jesus’ Followers Crazy? Was He? Mailbag June 4, 2016

I’ll be dealing with two questions in this week’s Readers Mailbag, both dealing, as it turns out, with issues related to psychology and the early Christian movement: one has to do with why the followers of Jesus didn’t simply give up and disband when the end-of-the-world-apocalypse they had been anticipating didn’t happen (so that they were proven to be *wrong*) and the other about whether Jesus was, literally, crazy. Interesting questions! If you have one you would like me to address, just ask in a comment on any of my posts. QUESTION I get that when the Apocalypse didn’t happen as the apocalyptic Jesus had predicted that a kind of reinterpretation of events including the resurrection took place. But why? Why didn’t the fledgling fringe then Jesus-Jewish (my term) sect simply die out? RESPONSE Ah, this is a meaty question that someone could write a book about. In fact, people have written books about it! I won’t give a definitive answer here, but will instead mention just one book – now a classic [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:24-04:00June 4th, 2016|Historical Jesus, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum|

The Core of Paul’s Gospel

A lot of people (at least in my experience) think that Paul is the one who should be considered the “founder” of Christianity – that he is the one who took Jesus’ simple preaching about the coming kingdom of God and altered and expanded it into a complicated doctrine of sin and redemption, being the first of Jesus’ followers to maintain that it was the death and resurrection of Jesus that brought about salvation. In my previous post I tried to show that this can’t be the case, because Paul was persecuting Christians already before he had converted, and these were certainly people who believed in Jesus’ death and resurrection. There is a second reason for thinking that Paul is not the one who invented the idea that Jesus’ death was some kind of atoning sacrifice for sins. That’s because Paul explicitly tells us that he learned it from others. Those of you who are Bible Quiz Whizzes may be thinking about a passage in Galatians where Paul seems to say the opposite, that he [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:24-04:00June 2nd, 2016|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Paul as a Persecutor of the Church

The questions of what early Christianity originally *was* and of how it got *started* are closely related to one another. Both questions are also closely tied to the life, beliefs, and writings of Paul, for one very good reason: Paul is the first Christian author whose writings survive. Any discussion of Christianity before his time needs to consider at some length what he has to say. I should point out as well that a lot of modern people (including some scholars) claim that it was Paul himself who started Christianity. I think that is going too far, in fact maybe way too far, for reasons that will become apparent in this post and the next. Occasionally Paul will give us some clues about pre-Pauline Christianity. One of the most important passages is in Galatians 1, where he discusses his own “about face,” when he turned from being a persecutor of the faith to being its great apostle. In Gal. 1:13 Paul reminds his readers that they know what he was like before he had come [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:23-04:00May 30th, 2016|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

A Personal Note and a Bit of a Bummer

This post is on a personal note and will be a bit self-indulgent, so if you’re looking for some information about the history or literature of early Christianity, this won’t the right time or place. As many of you know from earlier blog posts, I was supposed to go off on a research trip to Greece (Athens), Egypt (Alexandria), and Italy (Rome), in connection with my work on my current project, The Triumph of Christianity (or whatever we call it) dealing with the Christianization of the Roman Empire. My idea was to go to these places to see formerly “pagan” sites that were lost, changed, “converted” or destroyed by Christians in the fourth and later centuries (e.g., destroyed temples; shrines converted into churches; and so on). I was supposed to go today. But I have had to cancel the trip. Yesterday while starting to do some preliminary packing I bent over to pick up a bag of books, and my back went out. Bad. Not “Call-911-and-the-Morgue” bad, but bad enough. I had done something similar [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:23-04:00May 29th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Jesus’ Death; Good Scholars; and Writing the First Book: Readers’ Mailbag May 28, 2016

I have three rather wide ranging questions to deal with in this week’s Readers’ Mailbag: one on the understanding of Christ’s death as a sacrifice (or not); one on whom I like to read among NT scholars; and one on how to publish a scholarly book. This should be fun! If you have a question you’d like me to address, simply ask it in any comment on any post (whether it’s relevant to the post or not). QUESTION: Would you agree with the statement of scholars like Marcus Borg that Jesus died BECAUSE of the sins of the world and not FOR the sins of the world? Scholars like Borg are quite emphatic that the death of Jesus is not a sacrifice in the way that most (i.e. fundamentalist) Christians understand it: Jesus died for our sins and by believing in Jesus we gain eternal life. Rather, Jesus’ death is understood as a WAY to God: That by following the life of Jesus and offering up our suffering to God we walk in the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:23-04:00May 28th, 2016|History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

The Resurrection and the Beginning of the Church

In my book on the Christianization of the Empire, I probably will not be talking about *how*, exactly, Christianity started. That’s a very thorny issue and not directly germane to what I want to do in the book. And I’ve talked about it a bit in a couple of my other books, especially How Jesus Became God and Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene. In the former book my main interest was precisely what the title indicates. There I argued that the key event that made the followers of Jesus come to think that he was a divine being was their experience of the resurrection. Looked at from another angle, though, that moment can be considered the key not only to later Christian views of Jesus, but also to the question of when Christianity started as a distinct set of beliefs and practices. Before the resurrection-belief, there was nothing about Jesus followers that would differentiate them in any truly significant way from other Jews. After the belief there was. That may, of course, be granting too [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:23-04:00May 27th, 2016|Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

How Did Christianity Start?

I wish we knew how many people “started” Christianity. Before I reflect on this issue, let me say some things about definitions and terms, specifically the terms “Christianity” and “Christian.” A lot of scholars object to using the term “Christianity” for the first followers of Jesus who came to believe that he got raised from the dead. Once they believed this, these scholars say, these people didn’t actually become “Christian.” They were still fully Jews, Jews who believed that Jesus was the messiah. “Christianity,” in this opinion, is a later development when these believers in Jesus developed their own religion that was distinct from Judaism. Christianity doesn’t exist, in this view, until you have some kind of set of distinctive Christian beliefs and practices (such as baptism, eucharist, weekly meetings, and so on). And so often scholars will talk about the “Jesus Movement” during the early years and decades after Jesus’ death. I see the force of this view, but I have to admit that for my part, I’ve never had qualms about calling the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:23-04:00May 26th, 2016|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

How Many Christians Could Read?

How many Christians by near the end of the New Testament period – say, 100 CE – could read and write? In his intriguing article “Christian Number and Its Implications,” Roman historian Keith Hopkins tries to come up with some ball park figures. As you may recall, he is assuming that there were Christian churches in about 100 communities in the world at the time (we have references to about 50 in our surviving texts, and he is supposing that maybe there were twice as many as we have any evidence for); and he agrees that if Christianity started out with about 1000 believers in the year 40 then with a growth rate of 3.4% per year, by the year 100 there would be just over 7000 Christians in the world. That would mean the 100 churches would have an average of 70 believers. (Some of course would be larger – think, Rome – others would be much smaller; we’re talking averages here. And if Rome did have, say 120 believers, they would be meeting [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:23-04:00May 24th, 2016|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum|

The Accuracy of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians

I’m a couple of days behind on my Weekly Readers’ Mailbag. I’ve been so caught up in talking about the conversion of the Roman empire to Christianity that I forgot all about it! So here is last week’s a day late. IN it I deal with one question which turns out to be three questions, all of them related to the the historical accuracy of Paul’s letter to the Galatians.. QUESTION: Bart, quick question that’s bothering me. You often say that we can’t be sure of the gospels’ accuracy (due to intentional and unintentional changes over time and location). The idea is that we can’t know what the original really said (even if it names its author (e.g. 1 Tim, 2, Tim, etc.). You often say there are so many changes that we can’t really know what the original was. I always assume you mean in the small details and that you assume the main sense of the texts are fairly accurate to the original. Anyway, I’ve heard you say emphatically that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:23-04:00May 22nd, 2016|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

How Many Churches? How Many Letters?

In his important and stimulating article, “Christian Number and Its Implications,” Roman historian Keith Hopkins next begins to think about the implications about the size of the Christian church at different periods. One point to emphasize is that there was not simply one church. There were lots of churches in lots of places, and it is a myth to think that they were all one big cohesive bunch. On the contrary, they were often (as we see in our records) often at odds with each other. But even more than that, even within one city – if it was large enough (think Rome or Antioch for example) there would have been more than one church. And why? Because there would have been too many people to meet in one place. The first time we have any evidence of a church “building” – that is, what we today normally think of as a church (the Baptist church on the corner; the Methodist church up the street) – is not until the middle of the third Christian [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:23-04:00May 21st, 2016|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Spread of Christianity|

How Significant Was Early Christianity?

I return now to Roman historian Keith Hopkins’s fascinating and influential article “Christian Number and It’s Implications.” As I pointed out, for the sake of his article, and after checking it out for plausibility, Hopkins accepts the calculations of Rodney Stark that if Christianity started with 1000 believers in the year 40 CE, and ended up being 10% of the empire (60 million believers) by the time of the Emperor Constantine, you would need a growth rate of about 40% per decade, or, as Hopkins prefers putting it 3.4%). Obviously, as I’ve stated, but need to stress again, we cannot be and are not really thinking that there was a steady rate of growth, that every year there was the same percentage of increase. We’re talking big numbers over a long range of time, so the *average* rate of growth is just that, an average. Some years there may have been a loss of numbers, other years a huge spike. So take that as given. But if we *were* talking about a steady rate, there [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:23-04:00May 19th, 2016|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Spread of Christianity|

Whom Do We Consider a Christian?

Who counts as a Christian? When I was a hard-core evangelical at Moody Bible Institute, we had a pretty clear and straightforward answer: if you have not been born again and accepted Christ as your personal Lord and Savior, you were not a Christian. No matter what you believed or where you worshiped or how you lived. This meant, among other things, that most people who called themselves Christian were not really Christian. Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians – most of them were not really Christians. Roman Catholics were certainly not Christians. Greek Orthodox? Not even close. Mormons? You gotta be kidding. At the time I knew people who had an even more rigorous definition: if you did not know the exact day and hour in which you had accepted Christ as your Lord and Savior, then you hadn’t done so, and were not saved. Some were even more strict: you not only had to have accepted Christ, you had to have been baptized by immersion – dunked in the water, as an adult. Anyone who had not [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:33:22-04:00May 18th, 2016|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Previous 1···156157158···218 Next