Page 162 – The Bart Ehrman Blog

On the Accuracy of Oral Traditions

I have announced on the blog that my new book, Jesus Before the Gospels, will be available March 1. The book is about how the stories of Jesus were passed along by word of mouth for several decades before being written, and about how modern studies of both memory and oral cultures can help us understand what probably happened to the traditions as they circulated orally from one person to another over all those years. In reaction to a previous post on the topic, a reader made the following interesting comment: COMMENT: The Iliad [of Homer] exists today in its modern form because of oral tradition. We can be pretty sure that the story did not happen as it’s told to us, even if you leave out the part about kibbitzing gods (and we can be pretty sure that it wasn’t originally meant to be a literal recounting of the Trojan War, literalism never being the mission statement of poetry). But inspired by it, Schliemann did go out and find Troy. Which we wouldn’t [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:18-04:00February 10th, 2016|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Are “Group Hallucinations” Possible? The Case of Mary.

Several people have asked me about my claim that “group hallucinations” are possible. That is, a “vision” can be seen by many people at once. It seems counter-intuitive: aren’t hallucinations by definition the inner workings of a person’s mind? How can more than one person have the same hallucination at the same time? Well, I’m not sure how that works, psychologically. My guess is that there is a strong sociological component as well. For example, if something weird is seen by a number of people, one of the persons in the group interprets it, and the rest agree that yes, that is indeed what they saw. But that’s just my guess. Maybe some of the trained psychologists on the blog can tell us. But in any event, it is a well-documented phenomenon. Here is the query from one of the people who asked the question, specifically with respect to the modern-day appearances of Jesus’ mother, Mary, followed by a brief discussion of the phenomenon taken from my book How Jesus Became God. Group Hallucinations - [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:18-04:00February 9th, 2016|Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Upcoming Debate!

This coming weekend, Feb. 12-13, I will be holding a debate at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary on the topic "How Did Jesus Become God?" They are calling it a "Dialogue," but that's just because they're being nice. It's actually a great group of people, even though, as you might imagine, we agree on very little when it comes to matters of faith. My worthy opponent is Michael Bird. You may have heard of him. He is the author of The New Testament in Its World, and Introducing Paul: The Man, His Mission and His Message, among other books. Back when I published How Jesus Became God, he was the one who edited the response book that came out the same day, How God Became Jesus. He wrote one of the articles in the book. We will both be staking out our claims on Friday night. The next day are papers delivered by scholars we have hand-chosen for the event, two each: mine are my good friends Jennifer Knust (Boston University) and Dale Martin [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:18-04:00February 8th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Weekly Readers’ Mailbag: February 7, 2016

Time for my weekly mailbag. Before dealing with two rather more direct questions that have come to me – one about eyewitness testimony and the other about whether I hope to get on Fresh Air and Colbert with the new book – I thought I would include an item that did not come to me from the blog, but on my Facebook page. It’s a brief exchange I had with some anonymous figure. I seem to have a lot of these. Please excuse his/her (lack of) syntax; grammar is evidently not a strong suit. But I think you get the idea of the question. At least I thought I did. FACEBOOK EXCHANGE: bart you said on npr that you feel as that the eye witness all had visions or hallucinations.that jesus didn`t rise from the tomb.do you really expect serious students of the word to accept that,do you know that the expert on the resurrection gary habermas of liberty university called your explanation total nonsense.the ration that over 500 people all experiencing the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:18-04:00February 7th, 2016|Memory Studies, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Q & A about Jesus Before the Gospels, Part 1

Steven pointed out to me that the first part of the Q&A also got obliterated and sent into the stratosphere during our recent technological nightmare. So I need to re-post it. Here it is! I have received a number of interesting questions about the book, raised by these three segments of Q&A. If you have any you would like me to address on the blog, let me know! Here is the original post: ****************************************************************************** As I have already indicated, my book Jesus Before the Gospels will be published in a month, on March 1. As part of the promotion and marketing of the book, I have written out a few answers to questions that my publicist presented to me, as a kind of Q&A that she can use for her work of getting the word out there. I answered twelve questions related to the book, and will post my responses here on the blog in three bite-size chunks. Here is chunk #1. *************************************************************************** What is it that drives your fascination with how Jesus [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:18-04:00February 5th, 2016|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Memory Studies, Public Forum|

Technical Problems on the Blog

Dear Bart Ehrman Blog Members, We have been having technical problems on the blog for the past couple of days. A real pain in the wazoo. Some wacko in St. Petersburg Russia (really!) managed to muck things up, so that my past two posts (erg…) did not appear, all the comments you made since Jan. 30 *disappeared*, and I was blocked from accessing the blog myself. That’s all that it was – nothing else. But a big flippin’ pain. Through his Herculean efforts, Steven has gotten it all back in shape, EXCEPT that (1) I have to repost my posts that I already posted that got trashed (I’ll do that this morning) AND, more important for you, (2) any comments that you made since Jan. 30 have been dissolved into the stratosphere and no longer exist. So I don’t know what you said in your comments and cannot (re-)post them or reply to them. So sorry about that. If you remember what your comments were, go ahead and re-comment. If you don’t, well, make something [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:18-04:00February 4th, 2016|Public Forum|

Q & A about Jesus Before the Gospels, Part 3

Here is the third and last installment of the Q&A that I did with my publisher, HarperOne, about my new book Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Early Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior. (The final sentence of the final answer is, I think, the longest I’ve written in my life!!) I’m getting excited about the book and its release on March 1. If you have any questions you would like to ask me about the book or its topic – how knowing about the workings of human memory can help us understand what was happening to the oral traditions about Jesus in the years before they were written down – please comment and ask! I’m happy to talk about the book now in the weeks before it is released! *********************************************************** 1. In the book you share fascinating examples of how ‘false’ memories are formed (in particular, research psychologists collected following September 11, and following the 1992 plane crash in Bijlmermeer, Amsterdam). What can these studies tell us about the historical [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:02-04:00February 3rd, 2016|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Memory Studies, Public Forum|

Q & A about Jesus Before the Gospels: Part 2

I have started to post the Q&A that I have done for my publisher (HarperOne) on my new book (due out one month from today! March 1, 2016), Jesus Before the Gospels. I’m really excited about its release. In many ways it is very different from anything I’ve published before, even though it is dealing with the reliability of the Gospels. Here is the second of three installments of the questions and answers. **************************************************************** 1. In the book, you look at anthropological studies undertaken in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Ghana, and other places of oral culture. What do these studies reveal about the oral traditions of Jesus’ time? It is surprising to me that scholars of the New Testament – who frequently refer to the high accuracy of traditions passed along in oral cultures – have so rarely bothered to see what we actually know about oral cultures and their means of preserving their traditions. Since two Harvard scholars named Milman Parry and Albert Lord began to study the passing on of oral traditions in Yugoslavia in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:02-04:00February 2nd, 2016|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Memory Studies, Public Forum|

Weekly Readers’ Mailbag: January 30, 2016

In this installment of the Weekly Readers’ Mailbag, I’ll address two questions, one about the Jewishness of Jesus the other about my personal (bad) experience with editors. If you have a question, either send it via a comment here or zap me an email. QUESTION: What is it in the NT portrayal of Jesus that tends to obscure the centrality of his Jewishness? RESPONSE: The person who asked this question mentioned the fact that it is only in fairly recent times, since the second half of the twentieth century, that scholars have emphasized that Jesus was thoroughly Jewish. Prior to that, Jesus’ Jewishness was commonly downplayed. So the question is, what about the New Testament led scholars away from recognizing how thoroughly Jewish he was? I have three things to say in response to this very good question. First, my sense is that in no small measure, the earlier scholars who did not see Jesus’ Jewishness were living and doing research in an environment that was itself anti-Jewish. Christianity, as we long know, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:02-04:00January 31st, 2016|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Early Judaism, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Do I Have the Expertise Needed for My Book?

QUESTION: You have criticized other scholars for writing on subjects outside their fields of expertise – Reza Aslan, for instance, for his book on the historical Jesus when he is a sociologist, not a historian of religion. Have you considered editing a work with experts in the various fields that speak to the eyewitness to tradition to textual pipeline? Would such a collaboration likely be any more informative to a general audience? RESPONSE: Ah, great question! I’m going to answer what I take to be the underlying issue: why am I not following my own advice, but am publishing a book (next month!) that involves expertise other than my own? (In answer to the specific question: no, I haven’t really thought about editing a volume of other experts on memory! I have so many projects of my own that I have to do that… I haven’t even considered it, I’m afraid. There’s simply not enough time in life!) As to what I take to be the underlying issue: My criticism of Aslan was [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:02-04:00January 28th, 2016|Book Discussions, Memory Studies, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Buying David Lambert’s Book at Discount

Dear Ehrman Blogging Crowd, I just received the following from David Lambert, hopefully of some interest to you! Here is what he says: A couple of comments on the Facebook page complained about the price of the book. I received a code from Oxford that would allow people to purchase the book for a bit less if they were interested. I checked, and it looks like they’re still honoring it. Do you think it might be possible to post that in some fashion in connection to my posts? The link for the book is: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/how-repentance-became-biblical-9780190212247?q=david%20lambert&lang=en&cc=us . The code that needs to be entered to receive the 30% discount is: AAFLYG6.

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:02-04:00January 28th, 2016|Public Forum|

Did Jesus Urge People to Repent?

Below is the third guest post by my colleague David Lambert, connected to his book How Repentance Became Biblical. For many readers of the blog, this will be the most important and interesting of them all. It deals with the historical Jesus. Did Jesus tell people that they needed to repent? You might think the answer is obvious…. ****************************************************************** Did Jesus Preach Repentance? In my past two posts, I argued that the concept of repentance, as we use it today and as it first developed within Judaism and Christianity, was not originally found in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Now, it’s possible that you might be tempted by this argument to draw the conclusion that repentance is a specifically Christian concept. It’s important, however, to keep in mind that, even though repentance became very important to Christianity, it actually first developed in the context of late Second Temple Judaism shortly before the advent of Christianity. The concept, for instance, is alive and well in the writings of Ben Sira (also known as Ecclesiasticus) a text that [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:02-04:00January 27th, 2016|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus|

Press Release! Jesus Before the Gospels

In just over a month now, my new book, Jesus Before the Gospels, will be published. As avid readers of the blog know, for a couple of years I was obsessed with issues related to human memory and oral tradition, especially as these relate to the question of how the stories about Jesus were being transmitted, shaped, altered, and invented as they were told year after year, decade after decade, before the Gospels were written. It was these remembered/ altered / invented stories that the Gospel writers themselves inherited and then edited (and thus changed) when they wrote them down when producing our Gospels. What does knowing about the processes of memory, and about oral cultures who transmit their traditions by word of mouth, tell us about the nature of the Gospels, the communities that stood behind them, and the historicity of the traditions they relate? These are all questions I deal with in the book, reaching some conclusions that many readers will not suspect. Please note: you can buy the book at discount already [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:02-04:00January 25th, 2016|Book Discussions, Historical Jesus|

Weekly Readers’ Mailbag: January 24, 2016

A day late, here is this (past) week’s Readers Mailbag. I will be dealing with two questions this time, one on why Mark includes Aramaic words in his accounts of Jesus’ sayings and the other on where someone might find English versions of the surviving Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. If you too have a question, simply ask it here as a comment, or send me an email, and I will add it to the list! QUESTION: Why is Mark sometimes quoting Jesus in Aramaic? I know, that Jesus cry on cross is possibly reference to the psalms, but why is Mark spicing his gospel with Aramaic much more than other gospel authors? Is it sign of a oral/written source used by Mark? RESPONSE: Ah, good question. It’s true that Mark on occasion does record some of the words of Jesus in Aramaic. For example, in chapter 5 Jesus is told that a young girl (daughter of Jairus) has died; he goes to her in her room, and taking her by the hand [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:02-04:00January 24th, 2016|Canonical Gospels, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

What Is Repentance in the Bible? Is there Repentance in the Bible?

Many of you responded to my colleague David Lambert’s provocative post a couple of days ago on whether the idea of “repentance” could be found in the Bible. He has replied to your comments, but has wanted to provide a follow up post. It keeps getting more interesting. This is an intriguing reflection on “repentance” in the Bible, one that totally turns on its head what many of us have always thought. See what you think. - David Lambert is the author of How Repentance Became Biblical. ********************************************************************* “The Meaning(s) of Repentance in the Bible” A lot of the comments that I received on my first post (https://ehrmanblog.org/is-repentance-a-biblical-idea-interview-with-david-lambertb/) had to do with the definition of “repentance” that I’m using in my new study, How Repentance Became Biblical: Judaism, Christianity, and the Interpretation of Scripture. Just to review my main claim, I contend, after careful examination, that there are a lot of biblical passages and practices that we’ve understood in connection with repentance that don’t really have much to do with the concept. I claim [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:02-04:00January 22nd, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Jesus and the Son of Man

Over the past few weeks, as I have been talking about the rise of Jewish apocalypticism, in relation to the historical Jesus, a number of readers have asked me to explain what I think about the “Son of Man” in the sayings of Jesus Jesus. Did Jesus call himself the son of man? If so, what did he mean? And if not, what did he mean? As it turns out, these are some of the most complex, convoluted, and confounding questions confronting scholars of the historical Jesus. Many books, some of them big and dense, have been written on the issue. There are lots of opinions about it. Here I’ll try to explain my view, and try to justify it. The following is taken from my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium ***************************************************************** The Coming Son of Man Among the most heated, and least enlightening, debates among New Testament scholars has been the question of the origins of the phrase “the Son of Man” in the teachings of Jesus. Everyone agrees -- since [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:02-04:00January 21st, 2016|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Am I Converting to Islam?

READER COMMENT: I received a message on Facebook a couple of weeks ago from a person who has been proselytizing to me about the Muslim faith. This has happened a few times with others on your FB page. I guess that's what they do. Anyway, the other day I asked him if he was on your blog. He responded with a yes. Then he said that we (the members) were going to get a surprise from you soon. I asked him how so, and he said that you would be reverting to the Muslim faith. Apparently, reverting is something like converting according to him. I asked him how he knew this information, and he said a friend of his (a friend that he only knows through FB) that is a neighbor of yours said you were very impressed with the Quran and that you haven't made it public about reverting, but you would be soon. It took me a couple of days to find out the name of this person who is supposedly your friend, [...]

Diane2025-09-10T13:07:14-04:00January 20th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Is Repentance a Biblical Idea? Interview with David Lambert

My colleague David Lambert, who teaches Hebrew Bible in my department, has recently published and interesting and important book with Oxford University Press, on the question of when the idea of “repentance” entered into the biblical tradition. His answer is quite novel and surprising. I have asked David to post some of his views on the blog. The following is an initial foray into that, by way of an interview that he has done. If you have questions or comments about the interview, please make them! David is on the blog now and will respond, either in replies or by following up with new posts. Here is the interview. - David Lambert is the author of How Repentance Became Biblical. *************************************************************************** Many people assume that repentance is and always has been a substantial part of the Bible, but that has not always been the case. In the following interview between Luke Drake, a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and David Lambert, an assistant professor of Religious Studies at [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:02-04:00January 19th, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

The Rise of Apocalypticism

Now, with all the background out of the way, I am able to explain where the apocalyptic worldview came from. I am maintaining that it emerged out of the classical view of the Hebrew prophets, as historical circumstances forced thinkers in Israel to re-evaluate what the prophets had said. Here is the simple version of the story, as I lay it out in my textbook on the Bible ********************************************************************** The Prophetic Perspective We have seen that the classical prophets of the Hebrew Bible differed from one another in a number of ways, in the historical contexts that they addressed, in their manner of addressing them, and in the specifics of their messages. But there are certain common features that tie all the prophets together, especially with respect to their understanding of God, his reaction to Israel’s failure to do his will, and the coming disasters that will occur as a result. If you were to ask a prophet like Amos, Isaiah, or Jeremiah why it is the people of God suffer, they would have a [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:01-04:00January 18th, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

Weekly Readers’ Mailbag: January 16, 2016

It is time for the weekly mailbag. This week there are only two questions, but the first has two parts: why (many) Christians are so pro-Israel and how can they be pro-Jewish and still worship Jesus. The second question involves how we know which letters of Paul were actually written by him. If you would like me to address any question you have, just add a comment here or at any other time on the blog, or send me an email ********************************************************************** QUESTION: Why are Christians so Pro Israel? Seems like to me if they agree with Judaism they couldn't be a Christian. Because of the first commandment. RESPONSE: I’ll answer the second part of the question first. What the reader is saying (I think) is that since the first commandment is “You shall have no other gods before me,” then Christians cannot be pro-Jewish because they also worship Jesus – therefore two gods. I have two responses to that. The first is that the commandment is *not* that: “You must believe that I [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:32:01-04:00January 16th, 2016|Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

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