Page 203 – The Bart Ehrman Blog

Moving from the Faith

I wrote chapter 7 of How Jesus Became God today, and started with this anecdote that will sound somewhat familiar to those who know my story.... ******************************************************************************************************************** I first began to have serious doubts about my faith when I was in graduate school. After I had graduated from Moody Bible Institute I had gone off to finish my undergraduate degree at Wheaton College, a strongly evangelical liberal arts college and the alma mater for Billy Graham. For me this was a step toward liberalism. I was a very hard core evangelical in those years. But even though the liberal arts did expand my horizons significantly they did not make me particularly liberal. I came to graduate studies at Princeton Theological Seminary firmly convinced that the Bible was without error in any of its teachings and that the doctrines I accepted as a conservative Christian were given by God himself. That began to change the more I studied the Bible. I had taken Greek at Wheaton as my foreign language, to allow me to read the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:56-04:00April 9th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

A Third Forgery in the Name of Peter

As I mentioned in the two previous posts, in my talk at Unity Village the other night, I introduced my discussion of whether there could be forgeries in the New Testament by introducing three forgeries from *outside* the New Testament; the first was the Gospel of Peter with its giant Jesus and walking-talking cross at the resurrection and the second was the letter of Peter to James in which he attacks “the man who is my enemy,” a transparent reference to the apostle Paul. The third is the one I’ll mention here: another book allegedly, but not really, written by Peter, this time an apocalypse, the Apocalypse of Peter. As it turns out we have three “apocalypses” allegedly written by Peter. The one I dealt with in my talk is the most famous of the three, one discovered in 1886, in the same book in which the Gospel of Peter is found. It is a 66-page book that contains four texts. In some ways the Apocalypse of Peter is the most interesting. It is the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:56-04:00April 8th, 2013|Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reflections and Ruminations|

Another Forgery in the Name of Peter

In my talk the other night at Unity Village, called “Are there Forgeries in the New Testament?” (or maybe I called it something even more provocative, like “Is the New Testament Forged?”), I started out, as I indicated in my previous post, by discussing several forgeries that are found *outside* the New Testament, as a way of introducing the audience to what I meant by the term “forgery” (which I use in a strict and technical sense to refer to books whose authors claim to be someone famous, knowing full well they are someone else; this kind of false authorial claim, of course, has little or no bearing on whether anything else found in the writing could or should be considered “true”) and as a way of “easing them into” the idea that there could be forgeries within the New Testament as well. And so I chose three later forgeries, all done in the name of Jesus’ disciple Simon Peter. In my previous post I mentioned the Gospel of Peter, as the first of the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:56-04:00April 7th, 2013|Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity, Fourth-Century Christianity, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Reflections and Ruminations|

Forgery and the Gospel of Peter

So in my talk on forgery last night, I introduced the question of whether there could be forgeries inside the New Testament by talking about forgeries that definitely exist *outside* the New Testament; and to do that I began by speaking of three books that Peter, the disciple of Jesus, allegedly wrote. My definition of forgery is a fairly technical one. When I speak about forgery I’m not talking about books whose contents have been made up or fabricated, and I’m not talking about books whose contents have been falsified and modified over the years. I’m talking purely about authorial claims. A forgery is a book whose author claims to be a (famous) person when in fact he is someone else – and he knows full well he is someone else. If some writes a book claiming to be Paul, but in fact he is not Paul, that’s a forgery. The phenomenon was widely known, widely practiced, and widely condemned in antiquity, as I’ve talked about on this blog before. To read this blog post [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:56-04:00April 6th, 2013|Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha, Forgery in Antiquity, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

Making Things Interesting

I’m traveling hither and yon over the next couple of months giving lectures on a variety of topics. Right now I’m in Kansas City, near my old stompling grounds of Lawrence Kansas, to give two lectures at the annual Lyceum conference at Unity Village. It’s an unusual place, the center of a religious organization (denomination? They debate how to describe themselves apparently; but they are two million strong around the world), known as Unity. The people here are spectacularly friendly and helpful; I would say that their religious views are very, very far to the left of the spectrum; their group began as a New Thought movement in the 1880s, influenced by Transcendentalism among other things, highly spiritual and as far from doctrinally oriented as can be. For anyone interested, here is their website: http://www.unity.org/ In any event, Unity Village is a beautiful campus in a rural setting. The Lyceum is their annual conference which is put on every five years. I was a speaker at their first Lyceum in 2008, and they asked me [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:56-04:00April 4th, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations, Teaching Christianity|

Our One-Year Anniversary!

Today is a day of celebration. It was one year ago today that we started what was originally called Christianity in Antiquity (CIA), The Bart Ehrman Blog, now called The Bart Ehrman Blog: The History & Literature of Early Christianity. So Happy Anniversary to us! It has been a busy and successful year. When I started the blog I didn’t know what to expect: whether it would be worth all the time and effort, how many posts a week I could manage to do, and at what length, how often I could review and approve comments, how many questions I could answer, how many people would be interested in joining, how much money could be raised for charity. We now have the answers, and everything is better than I anticipated. I had hoped to get 1000 people to join the blog, either on a trial or yearly basis, during the first year; we’ve done better than that. Over 1300 have joined, and more join every day. Altogether I have made nearly 300 posts (not counting the partical [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:56-04:00April 3rd, 2013|Public Forum|

Fuller Account of Resurrection Discrepancies

Here is the bit that follows the part of my chapter 4 where I broke off yesterday, on the Gospels as sources for what happened at the resurrection event, starting with the same sentence I ended with yesterday. ****************************************************************************************************************** There are other discrepancies, but this is enough. I should stress that some of these differences can scarcely be reconciled unless you want to do a lot of imaginative interpretive gymnastics, of the kind fundamentalists love to do, when reading the texts. For example, what does one do with the fact that the women apparently meet different persons at the tomb? In Mark it is one man, in Luke it is two men, and in Matthew it is one angel. The way this discrepancy is sometimes reconciled,by readers who can’t believe there could be a genuine discrepancy in the text, is by saying that the women actually met two angels at the tomb. Matthew mentions only one of them, but never denies there was a second one; moreover, the angels were in human guise, so Luke [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:55-04:00April 2nd, 2013|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels|

Resurrection Narratives in the Gospels

Back to issues related to my book. In ch. 4 I talk about why the Gospels are problematic as "witnesses" to the resurrection (apart from the question of whether you can have *any* historical "evidence" for a miracle). This is the first part of my short discussion there, again, in rough draft ******************************************************************************************************************** We have already seen why the Gospels of the New Testament – our earliest available narratives of Jesus’ life – are so problematic for historians who want to know what really happened. They are written decades later, not by eyewitnesses, but by authors living in different countries from Jesus and speaking a different language. These authors are basing their accounts on written sources and, especially, oral traditions that had been in circulation year after year, decade after decade, until the authors themselves wrote them down. In this long process of oral transmission, stories about Jesus were changed, embellished, and made up. That in no small measure is why we find so many discrepancies and contradictions in our various Gospel accounts. Story tellers [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:55-04:00April 1st, 2013|Book Discussions, Canonical Gospels|

More on Recent Manuscript Discoveries

As I am taking a break from my Christological posts for a couple of days, I’ve received several inquiries about other things, including the newsworthy manuscript discoveries announced this past year: what has happened to them? Specifically, what about that Gospel of Jesus’ Wife that was named, announced, and published by Karen King back in September, and what about the first-century manuscript of the Gospel of Mark that Dan Wallace announced but would tell us nothing about in the debate that he had with me in Chapel Hill back in February, over a year ago now. As far as I know, in both instances the answer is the same. We have heard nothing new about either one. That’s very disappointing! Both of them would be highly significant if they were actually, authentically, what their discoverers/publishers say they are! FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click here for membership options. If you don't belong yet, JOIN!!! First on the Coptic Gospel of Jesus’ Wife. The vast majority of experts – just [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:55-04:00March 31st, 2013|Book Discussions, Christian Apocrypha, New Testament Manuscripts|

Progress on My Book

My apologies to anyone and everyone who is not all that interested in Christology and the development of how Jesus came to be seen as God. I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and I’ve been obsessed with it lately, especially here on my blog. The problem is that I’m so focused on my writing for the book, How Jesus Became God, that I don’t have energy to write about anything else at the end of the day. But it anyone has questions about any other topic that they would like me to address – or if you’ve asked me to deal with an issue before that I haven’t dealt with despite my sincere promises – let me know and I’ll do my best. Today I’m taking a break from writing. We have family in from England and so it’s a “blow-off” few days for me. I thought I’d just say something here briefly about the progress I’ve been making on the book and reflect for a minute on the writing process itself. So [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:55-04:00March 29th, 2013|Book Discussions|

Modern Visions of Jesus

The disciples were not, of course, the only ones who had visions of Jesus after he died. People continued to see Jesus alive afterwards. And in fact, he continues to appear in modern times. Here are a couple of interesting examples taken from the draft of ch. 5 of my book, How Jesus Became God: ************************************************************************************************************************ And consider the modern appearances of Jesus. Some of these are documented by Phillip H. Wiebe, in his book Visions of Jesus: Direct Encounters from the New Testament to Today. I should stress that Wiebe is not a religious fanatic on a mission. He is chair of the Philosophy Department at Trinity Western University, which is to be sure, a Christian school, but it is not a place for wackos. And Wiebe is a serious scholar. His book is published by Oxford University Press. Still, at the end of the day, he thinks that something “transcendent” has led to some of the modern visions of Jesus that he recounts. In other words, they – or some of them – [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:55-04:00March 28th, 2013|Book Discussions, Public Forum|

Divine Wisdom

Another passage from my chapter 2, on divine beings in Judaism ****************************************************************************************************************** If you read enough scholarly literature, you will quickly see that scholars tend to use some technical terms for no good reason, other than the fact that they are the technical terms scholars use. This is true even when scholar could talk in language that normal human beings normally use. When I was in graduate school we used to ask, wryly, why we should use a perfectly good English term when we had an obscure Latin or German term we would serve the purpose instead? But there are some rare terms that simply don’t have satisfactory, simple words that adequately express the same thing, and the word “hypostasis” (plural: hypostases) is one of them. Possibly the closest thing to a more common term meaning roughly the same thing would be “personification” – but even that doesn’t quite get it, and it too isn’t a word you normally hear in line at the grocery store. The term hypostasis comes from the Greek, where it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:55-04:00March 26th, 2013|Book Discussions, Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Jesus as the Messiah

Here's a draft of a few paragraphs from ch. 3 of my book How Jesus Became God. Again, it's only in rough draft, but let me know if you see any problems with it. ********************************************************************************************************************* It appears that some Jews who had this expectation of the future messiah saw him in purely political terms: a great and powerful king who would bring about the restored kingdom through military force, taking up the sword to dispose of the enemies. Other Jews – especially of a more apocalyptic bent – anticipated that this future event would be somewhat more miraculous, an act of God when he personally intervened in the course of history to make Israel once more a kingdom ruled through his messiah. Those who were most avidly apocalyptic believed that this future kingdom would be no ordinary run-of-the-mill political system with all its bureaucracies and corruption, but would in fact be the kingdom of God, a utopian state in which there would be no evil, pain, or suffering of any kind. FOR THE REST OF [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:55-04:00March 25th, 2013|Book Discussions, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Historical Jesus|

The Son of Man as Divine

Another bit from my ch. 2 of How Jesus Became God. It's just a draft. I'm interested in feedback if you think there are problems or ambiguities in what I say. It's a very brief treatment, I know.... ********************************************************************************************************************** There are other figures – apart from God himself – who are sometimes described as divine in ancient Jewish sources, both in the Bible and in later writings from near the time of Jesus and his followers. The first is modeled on a figure found in an enigmatic passage of Scripture, Daniel 7, a figure that came to be known as “the Son of Man.” The Son of Man For my purposes here I do not need to provide a thorough summary or analysis of the vision that led to the Son of Man speculations in later times. The ostensible setting of the book of Daniel is in the sixth century BCE – although scholars are convinced that the book was not actually written then, but centuries later in the second century BCE. In this book [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:55-04:00March 24th, 2013|Book Discussions, Early Judaism, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Historical Jesus|

The Divine Realm in Antiquity

Here's a draft of another key bit from my chapter 1 of How Jesus Became God ************************************************************************************************************************ From these various examples, we can see a variety of ways that divine beings could be thought to be human and that humans could be though to be divine in the ancient world. I scarcely need to stress again that this way of looking at things stands considerably at odds with how most people understand the relationship of the human and the divine in our world, at least people who stand in the western religious tradition (Jews, Christians, Muslims). As I have noted already, in our world it is widely thought that the divine realm is separated from the human by an immense and unbridgeable chasm. God is one thing. Humans are another thing. And never the twain shall meet. Well, almost never: in the Christian tradition they did meet once, in the person of Jesus. And our question is how that was thought to have happened. At the root of that thought, as I will be arguing, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:34:30-04:00March 22nd, 2013|Book Discussions, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture|

The Jewish King as God

A chunk from my chapter 2, a finding that surprised me very much once I made it (surprising I didn't discover it earlier -- like 30 years ago....) ********************************************************************************************************************* The son of a human is human, just as the son of a dog is a dog and the son of a cat is a cat. And so what is the son of God? As it turns out, to the surprise of many casual readers of the Bible, there are passages where the king of Israel, widely called the son of God (e.g. 2 Sam. 7:14; Ps. 2:7), is actually referred to as divine, as god. The Yale Hebrew Bible scholar John Collins points out that this notion ultimately appears to derive from Egyptian ways of thinking about their king, the Pharaoh, as a divine being. Even in Egypt, where the king was God, it did not mean that the king was on a par with the great gods, any more than the Roman emperor was thought to be on a par with Jupiter or Mars. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:54-04:00March 20th, 2013|Book Discussions, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Who Is Really God?

This is how my chapter 2 of How Jesus Became God starts, in the current draft. ****************************** When I first started my teaching career in the mid 1980s I was offered an adjunct position at Rutgers University. My teaching load was three courses a semester. The tenured faculty taught three courses as well, and were, of course, considered full time. But since I was only an adjunct, my three courses were considered part time. You just have to love university administrations: since I was part time, they did not have to provide a decent salary or benefits. To make ends meet, I worked other jobs, including one at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. There was a long-term project under way there called the Princeton Epigraphy Project. It involved collecting, cataloguing, and entering onto a computer data base all of the inscriptions (writings carved on stone) in major urban centers throughout the ancient Mediterranean. These then were eventually published in separate volumes for each location. I was the research grunt for the person in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:41-04:00March 19th, 2013|Book Discussions, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament|

Gods Who (Apparently) Become Human

I’m happy to say that I began writing my book How Jesus Became God today. Here is a chunk from the first chapter. ************************************************************************************* Christianity arose in the Roman Empire immediately after the death of Jesus around the year 30 CE. This empire was thoroughly infused with Greek culture – so much so that the common language of the empire, the language in fact in which the entire New Testament was written – was Greek. And so to understand the views of the early Christians we need to situate them in their own historical and cultural context, which means in the Greek and Roman worlds. In the next chapter I will show that even though Jews had many distinctive views of their own, in many key respects of immediate concern for our study, they shared (in their own ways) many of the views of their Roman friends and neighbors. This is important to know because Jesus himself was a Jew, as were his immediate followers – including the ones who first proclaimed that he was [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:40-04:00March 18th, 2013|Book Discussions, Greco-Roman Religions and Culture|

Seriously off topic….

OK, this is comletely irrelevant to anything related to the blog – especially early Christology, my current topic. But I thought it was too funny to pass up. A fellow who lived in my neighborhood, but whom I never knew (to my regret: he sounds like he was a remarkably interesting guy), beloved chemistry professor Dr. James Bonk died Friday at the age of 82, ending his 53-year career at Duke University. According to the local newspaper: Bonk’s classes were such a staple that Duke introductory chemistry classes became known as “Bonkistry” classes, which approximately 30,000 students attended. He was nationally known for comical incidents with students, one rumored to have taken place in the 1960s. The Bonk joke is that the weekend before a final exam, four students decided to visit the University of Virginia for the weekend and let off some steam. They were due back Sunday in time for their exam Monday morning, but were too hung over to travel. When they arrived back at Duke late, they told Bonk that they [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:20:40-04:00March 17th, 2013|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Previous 1···202203204···218 Next