Page 175 – The Bart Ehrman Blog

Gospel of the Savior

I’ve decided today to take a brief break from my discussions of early Christology to post on something else (tomorrow I’m back to Christology, if all goes according to plan). As I think I have mentioned, my colleague Zlatko Plese and I are in the process of publishing an English-only version of our book The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations. That is, we are not including the Greek, Latin, and Coptic texts, but only the English translations. I have adjusted the Introductions for a lay-audience. We are adding a couple of texts that we did not include in the quadri-lingual edition, most notably “The Gospel of the Savior.” This text is not well known outside the ranks of scholars of the early Christian apocrypha, and so I thought I would mention it here. The following, in fact, is a draft of my Introduction (which will include bibliography as well): ***************************************************************************** The Gospel of the Savior is one of the most recent Gospels to become available to public view, having been first announced in the mid [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:49:02-04:00February 10th, 2013|Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha, Heresy and Orthodoxy, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Exaltation Christology in an Early Creed

So far in this series of posts dealing with How Jesus Became God, I have maintained that in the very early years of Christianity, soon after the disciples came to believe in the resurrection, there were two forms of Christology that emerged. And I have discussed only one of these two forms, one that considered Jesus to be a full flesh and blood human being(as he considered himself!), and nothing more than a man, until at some point God exalted him and made him his son, the ruler of all, the messiah, the Lord. I am calling this kind of “low” Christology (low because it stresses that Jesus started out as a human and not divine) a Christology “from below” or an “exaltation” Christology. I have also argued that this kind of Christology can be found in some of the earliest materials in the New Testament, that in fact it is imbedded in quotations of earlier pre-literary sources found in various writings of the NT. In my previous post I talked about how scholars have [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:49:11-04:00February 8th, 2013|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters|

Exaltation Christology: Some Background

Yesterday I posted the first in what will be a series of reflections on the earliest Christian Christologies (understandings of Christ), a in this post I would like to provide some necessary background information that will allow that post to make even better sense. In that post I began to outline what I take to be the earliest Christology of all. Jesus and his followers, I maintained, saw him(self) as a man and nothing more than a man (who was a great teacher, a prophet, and the future messiah of the coming kingdom – but human through and through, nothing else). But once these followers came to believe that he had been raised from the dead, they altered their view to begin to think that God had exalted him to heaven and made him his specially anointed one, his Son, who would indeed be the future messiah and who would bring in that Kingdom himself when he returned from heaven as the Son of Man. And so, why do I think that this Christological view [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:49:18-04:00February 7th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine|

The Earliest Christology

When I earlier said that I thought my older view of the development of Christology was problematic, in that I had been imagining a more or less straight line of development from low to high Christology, I did not mean to say (as I may have mistakenly been understood as saying) that I have now given up the idea of a line of development. What I’ve given up on is the idea that there was basically ONE form of Christology that developed from low to high. I now think that all Christologies ultimately go back to TWO different forms, that originated separately from each other, with one being earlier than the other, and both developing separately from each other, until they were finally fused together. I realize I’m more or less giving away my book at this point, but I’ll just sketch out the basic idea and leave its full exposition for the print version. Here I’ll say something about the oldest Christology, as I understand it. This was what I earlier called a “low” [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:49:26-04:00February 6th, 2013|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine, Historical Jesus|

How Jesus Became God: More Questions

In yesterday’s post I began to explain some of the problems that I had started to have with my original way of imagining this book, How Jesus Became God (I give the original prospectus in the three posts preceding that one). The problem I mentioned yesterday was a big one: I came to think that the proposal did not take into account fully enough the variety of Christological expressions that one finds at the same time in early Christianity, but seemed to assume that there was some kind of straight line, linear progression from a low Christology to a high one. To some extent I still think that there was a progression. It is clear, at any rate, that the Christology embraced at the Council of Nicea was MUCH “higher” than the one found in the Gospel of Mark. You’d have to be blind not to see the difference. But something has to account for the fact that in our earliest source – Paul – we appear to get some kind of high Christology already, [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:49:36-04:00February 5th, 2013|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture|

How Jesus Became God: My Change of Direction

Over the course of my last three posts I have indicated what my original idea was for the book How Jesus Became God. When I first started writing the proposal for the book (as you have seen it) I had planned to write it with Oxford University Press. But about three or four years ago I made a career decision. At that point I had published three trade books with HarperOne (an imprint of Harper Collins, the branch that publishes in religious studies). All three of them had made it onto the New York Times Bestseller list. That had never happened to me before. A lot of that is luck, but it takes a *ton* of work from the publisher to make it even possible. I think Oxford is an absolutely terrific press. In my opinion they are absolutely among the best press in the world at publishing scholarly monographs and *are* the best at publishing college level textbooks in religious studies. But they are not as geared toward trade books. With Harper, on the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:49:42-04:00February 5th, 2013|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

How Jesus Became God: The “Original” Idea, Part 3

This is the third installment of the thread. For those who didn’t read the first two installments, I repeat the introduction I gave to them: *** Several people have asked about the book I’m working on this term, How Jesus Became God, in particular in relation to what I mentioned in my earlier post, how I’ve learned a lot doing my research and changed my views on important issues related to the book. Explaining all that is a bit complicated, and I thought one good way to do it would be to show what I had *originally* planned to do with this book when I first proposed it to a publisher maybe seven or eight years ago, and then explain how the book now will be different, both in the way I’ll set it up and in what I think now about the topic. So for these posts I will reproduce my original book proposal. REALIZE, please, that this is what I was ORIGINALLY planning. In lots of ways it still makes sense, but I’ve [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:49:51-04:00February 3rd, 2013|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine|

How Jesus Became God: The “Original” Idea, Part 2

This is the second installment of the thread. For those who didn’t read the first installment from yesterday’s post, I repeat the introduction I gave to it there (though this post will make better sense if you read that one first): *** Several people have asked about the book I’m working on this term, How Jesus Became God, in particular in relation to what I mentioned in my earlier post, how I’ve learned a lot doing my research and changed my views on important issues related to the book. Explaining all that is a bit complicated, and I thought one good way to do it would be to show what I had *originally* planned to do with this book when I first proposed it to a publisher maybe seven or eight years ago, and then explain how the book now will be different, both in the way I’ll set it up and in what I think now about the topic. So for this post and the next two I will reproduce my original book proposal. [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:01:02-04:00February 1st, 2013|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine|

How Jesus Became God: The Original Idea

Several people have asked about the book I’m working on this term, How Jesus Became God, in particular in relation to what I mentioned in yesterday’s post, how I’ve learned a lot doing my research and changed my views on important issues related to the book. Explaining all that is a bit complicated, and I thought one good way to do it would be to show what I had *originally* planned to do with this book when I first proposed it to a publisher maybe seven or eight years ago, and then explain how the book now will be different, both in the way I’ll set it up and in what I think now about the topic. So for this post and the next two I will reproduce my original book proposal. REALIZE, please, that this is what I was ORIGINALLY planning. In lots of ways it still makes sense, but I’ve changed it now, and to make sense of the changes, you have to see what the original looked like. So here’s part 1 [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:01:09-04:00January 31st, 2013|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine|

During my Leave…

I have received several responses to my post yesterday about my being on leave; most of them can be summed up in two questions: What am I doing during my leave (besides spending my days watching soaps and eating bon-bons)? And will I keep my blog going after I’m done with the leave and return to teaching? I’ll answer the second question first. Yes, my plan is to keep the blog going. I started it while I was teaching last Spring (though it was a the tail end of the term; but the planning had been going on for months), and I intend to keep it up once I’m back in the classroom in the Fall. I won’t lie: it’s a lot of work. Posting an average of six times a week is a bit hard sometimes. But I’m blessed with the ability to write fast, and doing this blog has made me even faster! I have to budget at least 45 minutes a day to focus on the blog (not to mention the time [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:01:17-04:00January 30th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Being on Leave

As I may have mentioned on the blog already, I am on academic leave this entire year. Most places call that a sabbatical, but in North Carolina sabbatical is a four-letter word. The idea here is that since we are state-employees and, well, other state-employees don’t get time off from their day job to do their research – so why should professors? Interesting point. But of course for professors at research universities, it is all about the research. When I was in my PhD program, my plan was to teach in a Christian seminary or divinity school, hopefully one like Princeton Theological Seminary, where in addition to training future ministers, faculty have a chance to train PhD students – who will themselves go out to teach and train future ministers. I got into the Bible business as a seventeen-year old eager to learn all I could about the Bible since I believed it was the word of God (more about that, possibly, in a future post); I eventually changed my views about the Bible (as, [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:01:24-04:00January 29th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

Posts by Outsiders

Now that we’ve seen a couple of posts by Jeff Siker (the author of Jesus, Sin, and Perfection in Early Christianity and Homosexuality in the Church) – taking a position quite different from my own on a question of broad importance – and some of the comments that have come back on it, and his reply at length to one of them, I think we are in a position to sit back and see how that “worked” for the blog. My sense is that it worked very well. If you think otherwise, please let me know. I do not want to do this sort of thing every week – but I’m thinking once every three or four weeks might be interesting. I have received several suggestions for the kinds of things people would like to see, as follows: A Hebrew Bible scholar talking about the historical problems with the Hebrew Bible comparable to those we deal with on this blog for the New Testament; An archaeologist to discuss the evidence that Nazareth really did exist; [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-24T13:00:08-04:00January 28th, 2013|Public Forum|

From Jeff Siker: A Response to Comments

Jeff Siker’s posts have elicited some very interesting responses. I don’t think he can reply to everything, but I did ask him to take one of the questions and give it his best shot. So, see here below. After this one I’ll ask him just to respond to comments in the comment section of the blog (rather than as separate posts) as/if he sees fit. Tomorrow you’re stuck back with me again…. Jeff Siker is the author of Jesus, Sin, and Perfection in Early Christianity, Liquid Scripture: The Bible in the Digital World and Homosexuality and Religion: An Encyclopedia. ****************************************************************************************************** QUESTION: Dr.Siker: Thanks so much. I certainly understand your remarkable description about how coming from a moderate background, rather than a fundamentalist background, may lead one to feel less betrayed and angry about what one was taught after one is jolted by studying the historical-critical approach to the Bible, but it still does not quite sort out for me. Maybe, this would help. How exactly would you explain your theology and how you got there [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-25T12:28:19-04:00January 27th, 2013|Reader’s Questions|

Jeff Siker Part 2: Why I am a Christian (and yet a New Testament scholar)

This is a part 2-continuation of Jeff Siker’s reflections on why he is a Christian still, even though he knows and believes what I do about the New Testament from a historical perspective. To make fullest sense of this post, you should read it in conjunction with the one from yesterday. He and I will welcome comments and interactions. Jeff Siker is the author of Jesus, Sin, and Perfection in Early Christianity, Liquid Scripture: The Bible in the Digital World and Homosexuality and Religion: An Encyclopedia. ****************************************************************************************************************** Like Bart I became interested in pursuing an academic career, but with some grounding in the life of the church. And so after my BA and MA (Religious Studies) at Indiana University, I went off to Yale Divinity School. And so my trajectory from Young Life in high school to Indiana to Yale was rather different from Bart’s trajectory from Moody to Wheaton to Princeton. Whereas much of Bart’s education involved the study and practice of Christian apologetics (being able to defend one’s faith and challenge others – [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-25T12:25:42-04:00January 25th, 2013|Reflections and Ruminations|

Guest Post: Jeff Siker — Why I Am Still a Christian (and a NT Scholar)

I mentioned yesterday that I would have a guest post to the blog; this is Jeffrey Siker, an ordained Presbyterian minister and New Testament scholar. Jeff is senior professor of New Testament at Loyola Marymount University. He and I have been friends for over thirty years; he was two years behind me in my PhD program at Princeton Theological Seminary. I have asked him to explain why he is still a Christian, even though he knows and agrees with most of what I think, from a historical perspective, about the New Testament. I have cut his answer into two parts to make them fit the format of the blog. Part 2, where he gets most directly to the question, will be in tomorrow’s post. He, and I, welcome any feedback (which, of course, can be more informed after tomorrow’s post). The following are his words. - Jeffrey Siker is the author of Jesus, Sin, and Perfection in Early Christianity and Homosexuality in the Church. ****************************** When I first went to Princeton Theological Seminary to [...]

BDEhrman2022-04-04T13:48:15-04:00January 24th, 2013|Reflections and Ruminations|

Something New on the Blog

I have received a number of suggestions about how to improve this blog, and so far the one I like best is for me to have an occasional guest make a contribution that people could interact with -- that is, someone who is, like me, a scholar of NT or early Christianity who has a different thing or two to say. I think it's a great idea. And I'm going to implement it for the first time tomorrow. Here is a question I have recently been asked: You've mention that most of your past/present fellow colleagues, friends, loved ones etc... agree with you when it comes to historical understanding of the bible and Christianity, but remain believers. I also understand the problem of suffering was the real reason for your loss of faith and not completely historical understanding. I guess my question is this: What keeps them believing in the very human invention of Christianity? Is it because they have a very liberal understanding and are more like Crossan and Borg, reinventing Christianity to make [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-24T12:35:38-04:00January 24th, 2013|Public Forum|

Why Jesus?

This will be my last post for a while dealing with the question of whether Jesus’ ethics can be translated from his own mythological context of Jewish apocalyptic thought into the modern world that is based (for me at least) on a completely different view of life, meaning, and reality. In my last post I indicated that I thought that it was indeed possible to make this kind of translation if one wants to. But I ended by asking why one – or rather I – would want to. That is, why focus on Jesus in particular? I don’t think I want to do so because I think that Jesus is “the greatest ethical teacher of all time.” I have no idea if this is even a contest that can be won, and even if it is, I am not qualified to evaluate Jesus in relation to other great ethical teachers so as to declare him a winner. So that seems to me to be a dead end. So why Jesus? I don’t have a [...]

BDEhrman2018-01-01T00:22:00-05:00January 22nd, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Answer to My Objections on Demythologizing

If the first few paragraphs seem a bit tough-going or uninteresting, just jump to the final two! In my last couple of posts I’ve raised some problems with the idea of demythologizing an ancient set of ethical views, such as those of Jesus. The gist of the problem that I’ve raised is that every ethical injunction – just as every teaching, doctrine, piece of advice, sentence, word, communication of any kind – is not just *framed* within a linguistic, cultural, social, historical context: the context is actually determinative of the meaning of a word, sentence, etc. And if that’s true, then ripping a communication out of its context means necessarily to alter – once could say to destroy – its meaning. That at least has been my objection. And now I have a response to that objection from the other side. It is a two-pronged response. Prong One: I don’t think that it’s fair to say that context is absolutely *everything*. Context is a *lot*, but a communication consists of a sequence of sensible utterances [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:01:56-04:00January 21st, 2013|Reflections and Ruminations|

More Problems with Demythologizing

In yesterday’s post I questioned whether words, sentences, ideas, teachings can simply be transferred from one context to another, if, in fact, it is precisely the context that is the determining factor for what the words mean. Here I’ll try to illustrate that “if.” My argument here is that words do not have some kind of inherent meaning but mean what they do depending on their social, historical, cultural, and literary context. I think this can be illustrated just on the level of words themselves, in fact, of any word itself. I’ll illustrate with the example that I give to my undergraduate students at Chapel Hill. Take the word “dude.” Like all words, you might think that this word simply *means* something (it must mean *some* thing! No?), even if the meaning gets adopted in different contexts. Right? Well, I’m not so sure it’s right. Dude in its early usage referred to a dandy – that is a city dweller who was cultured and dressed to the nines and went to the opera, and so [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:02:05-04:00January 20th, 2013|Reflections and Ruminations|

Against Demythologizing the Ethics of Jesus

When I was in high school one of my passions – along with baseball, tennis, and, well, lots of other things that 16 year old boys can be passionate about – was debate. I threw myself into the debate season and worked like crazy at it. One of the most interesting things about debate is that it teaches you to pursue both sides of a point, vehemently arguing the affirmative of a resolution and then an hour later arguing just as vehemently the negative side. Still today I use class debates in my university courses at UNC, and even though students are skeptical, reluctant, and afraid going into the debates, they almost always come away thinking that it they are the best part of the entire semester. Everyone in the class has to participate in one formal debate during the term, arguing affirmative of negative of one of three highly controversial topics, based on doing substantial research with teammates in preparation. The topics that I’ve used most recently are (1) Resolved: Paul and Jesus Represented [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T19:02:11-04:00January 19th, 2013|Reflections and Ruminations|

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