Page 92 – The Bart Ehrman Blog

Interested in Going to Rome with Me?

As we are all so painfully aware, almost all travel holidays this past year were canceled. But now many tour companies are optimistic that by late spring or early summer, with widespread vaccination internationally, travel will resume. We will know eventually! I have been asked to do a special tour to Rome and Southern Italy, June 4-14, 2021, (THIS June!) to give lectures on the relationship of Christianity and traditional Roman religions and cultures in the early centuries CE: “Christians and Pagans.” I’ve agreed to do it, and will go ahead with it, of course, only if it is completely safe. The tour company, Thalassa, is terrific; it will be a small and intimate group and we will have tons of time to talk, discuss, and hang out together. They are now accepting registrations for the trip. Below is a poster for it, with a link for more information. Here is part of what I say about my lectures. When Christianity arrived on the world stage in the first century AD, Rome and the [...]

FreedomBen2025-09-10T12:57:21-04:00February 19th, 2021|Public Forum|

Does Luke Present Different (Inconsistent!) Views of Christ?

In a recent post I tried to show that the author of Luke-Acts (same person; let's call him Luke) presented an "exaltation" Christology -- that is, that he thought Christ was not originally a divine being but had been exalted to divinity at some point of his existence; but unlike most of our other sources, he affirms *different* moments when this happened: at Jesus' birth, his baptism, and his resurrection. (See the post if this is not ringing a bell: https://ehrmanblog.org/the-oldest-view-of-christ-found-in-only-one-greek-manuscript-of-luke/ ). I ended the post by saying I would explain how Luke could have it all three ways. And as a reader pointed out to me, I never posted the post! So here it is. I dealt with this specific issue on the blog some years ago, and I may be older now, but I'm no wiser, at least as far as this question goes. Here's what I said then and would continue to say now: ******************************** Does Luke present a (strictly speaking) consistent view of Jesus throughout his two-volume work of Luke-Acts? I raise [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:34-04:00February 18th, 2021|Acts of the Apostles, Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine|

Live Lectures this Sunday! Distinctive Messages of Luke and John

This Sunday I will again be giving two live Zoom lectures on the Gospels to anyone who wants to come. They will be recorded for my undergraduate course on the New Testament. There will be a 30-minute Q & A to follow the second one. There is no charge per se, but I would like to ask for a donation to the blog in exchange, if you can see your way clear to do it. If not, that’s fine – we all have our circumstances! But one of the main reasons I’m doing these lectures is to raise money for the Food Bank of North Carolina; as with all food banks right now, it is in desperate need. Your donation is completely tax deductible. Here is the info you need: Time: Sunday, Feb. 21. 1:00 pm first lecture; 2:15 second (EST) Lectures will each last about 50 minutes. First Lecture: The Alternative Perspectives of the Gospel of Luke. This lecture will show how Luke differs in significant ways from both Mark and Matthew, and will [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:48-04:00February 17th, 2021|Public Forum|

How Old Was Jesus ???
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How Old Was Jesus ???

Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions

How Old Was Jesus ???

I received a very interesting question from a blog reader, and it has led to an unexpected answer. QUESTION Is there any significance to the age of Jesus and its relation to the start of his ministry? RESPONSE: I don’t know what the questioner actually means about the “significance” of Jesus’ age, and so I’ve decided to answer a related question. What, in fact, was his age? Well, the matter is … like so much else in our universe … unexpectedly complicated. It turns out I dealt with this years ago on the blog. I know because I just checked. I had forgotten about that post, and even more interesting, I had forgotten my answer, which contains some information that I ALSO FORGOT. In fact, some really interesting information. I bet you didn’t know (as I apparently used to know) that there is a discussion of Jesus’ age in the writings of one of the most important early church fathers, which indicates that Jesus grew to be a relatively old man before he [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:34-04:00February 17th, 2021|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

But Maybe Paul Doesn’t Believe in the Incarnation….

There is a whole lot more that could be said about the Christ-poem in Philippians 2. You could literally write an entire book on just this passage. In fact, people *have* written books on just this passage. The most important one, a classic in the field, is by Ralph Martin, A Hymn of Christ (which in earlier editions was called Carmen Christi) (which is a Latin phrase that, unsurprisingly, means A Hymn of Christ :-) ). This passage has had more ink spilled over it by scholars over the last century than almost any other in the entire Bible (with the exception of John 1:1-18). In any event, to make sense of what I want to say here, it would help, if you haven’t done so, to read the other posts I’ve made on it. Here I just want to mention briefly an interpretation that is sometimes floated for the passage which takes it in a very different way indeed, as not being about incarnation at all. In this alternative interpretation, the passage is not [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:34-04:00February 16th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters|

Was Christ actually God in the Flesh?
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Was Christ actually God in the Flesh?

Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine

Was Christ actually God in the Flesh?

We now move from Paul's Christology that *combined* an incarnational view with an exaltation view, to a Christology that is incarnational through and through -- still in the New Testament, in the final Gospel to be written (possibly 30 years or so after Paul's death?) In it we find what is arguably the best known and most influential passage dealing with Christology in the New Testament: the Prologue of the Gospel of John, 1:1-18. It is also probably the most studied and discussed passage – even more than the Christ poem in Philippians 2:6-11. The first eighteen verses of John are typically called the “Prologue” because they are clearly set apart from the rest of the Gospel as a kind of celebration of the main character of the book; these verses are written in a different writing style from the rest of the Gospel (lofty poetry), they contain key concepts not found in the rest of the Gospel (Christ as “the Word” made flesh), and yet they introduce well some of the most important views [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:34-04:00February 16th, 2021|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine|

Reminder! A Live Chance to “Ask Bart Anything” (ABA) this Wednesday 2/17/2021

This Wednesday (2/17/21) 7:00-8:15 pm I will be holding a live ABA (“Ask Bart Anything”). It will be over Zoom and will be open to anyone on the planet who wants to come. The format: I will take live questions both orally and through chats. The questions can be on ANY topic that anyone is interested in. If it is something I don’t know anything about (quantum physics or the Ming Dynasty) or that I would rather not talk about (that little incident when I was 16….) I’ll just say so. I will get through as many questions as I can, answering easy ones briefly and taking as long as I need to deal with more complicated ones. My only request will be that questions are direct questions, not lectures, sermons, admonitions, condemnations, expositions of one’s favorite views, or statements of one’s opinions so the rest of the world can hear and convert. Interested? There is no need to register, no obligation of any kind. And not cost. Free to all. BUT: If you you [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:48-04:00February 13th, 2021|Public Forum|

One of the Weird Events in My Life that Led Me To Be A Research Scholar

Everyone has significant events that shape their lives and lots of people have rather strange ones. This morning I was thinking of three weird events that contributed to my becoming a research scholar. They all happened over a four-year period, from ages 14-17. There were: getting bored with 9th grade Latin; getting hepatitis; and going to a fundamentalist Bible college. First, the Latin. In grade school we all took Spanish. I wasn’t any good at it and I didn’t much like it. I had no particular interest in languages, at all. Then in 9th grade we had to take a language and the choices, as I recall, were Spanish, German, French, and Latin. I was the kind of kid who liked to do things differently from everyone else; most kids were heading to Spanish, but I knew I didn’t do well there. German and French – kind of the same thing, modern languages I wasn’t interested in. I thought, well, Latin’s a bit unusual: maybe I’ll do that. I rather enjoyed it, but as it [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:33-04:00February 13th, 2021|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum|

Blog Announcement! The Full Implementation of our New Tier Membership System

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BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:51:59-04:00February 12th, 2021|Public Forum|

The Essence of Religious Literacy: A Christian Perspective. Platinum Guest Post by Fredrick Ackun

I am pleased to present now a very thoughtful guest post by Platinum member Fredrick Ackun! To respond, simply make a comment, and he will be able to reply. I am looking for more contributions! Feel free to send one along, on any topic! *************************** In this post, I wish to share and elaborate a bit on some personal realizations I have made in my faith journey. They are some of the main reasons why I am of the view that studying and acquiring knowledge about what we believe in is imperative. A faith system solely premised on theological presuppositions with no recourse to historical information can rub away context that would have otherwise provided a deeper appreciation of its narratives. The two keywords here are History and Theology; hence, it may be important to spell out a fundamental difference between these two terms in relation to the faith journey. History is an attempt to reconstruct events in the past based on evidence and plausibilities. Theology, on the other hand, is interpreting history through [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:48-04:00February 11th, 2021|Reflections and Ruminations|

Interview about My Writing with the North Carolina Writers’ Network

I recently did an interview for spring issue of the North Carolina Writers' Network’s newsletter The Writers' Network News (Spring, 2021). If you are interested in learning more about their organization, this is their website: www.ncwriters.org. Some of the questions in the interview were about my most recent book Heaven and Hell, others were on my approach to writing. Eight questions overall, with brief answers. The issue was published just yesterday, so I have permission now to post it here as well on the blog. Many thanks to Charles Fiore from the NCWN, who set up and conducted the interview. Q&A for NCWN Writers Literary portrayals of the afterlife are full of spectacle. For example, who can forget the circles in Dante's "Inferno"? ("Purgatorio" was unnerving enough...) Are we somehow drawn to terrible spectacle, even though we also fear it? The first chapter of my book Heaven and Hell deals with early Christian tours of the afterlife. These are the earliest forerunners of Dante, and he was familiar with one of them. Unlike the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:17-04:00February 11th, 2021|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Live Lecture This Sunday! Do Christians Need to Be Jews? Understanding the Gospel of Matthew.

I am now getting in the habit of doing Zoom lectures on the New Testament on Sunday afternoons; these are being recorded for my undergraduate course on the New Testament. But all of you are invited to come this week, but because of UNC’s schedule, it will be one lecture instead of two, with Q & A to follow. There is no charge per se, but I would like to ask for a donation to the blog in exchange, if you can see your way clear to do it. If not, that’s fine – we all have our circumstances! But one of the main reasons I’m doing these lectures is to raise money for the Food Bank of North Carolina; as with all food banks right now, it is in desperate need. Your donation is completely tax deductible. Here is the info you need: Time: Sunday, Feb. 14. 1:00 pm EST. Lecture will last about 50 minutes, followed by the 30 minutes of Q&A. Topic: Jesus the Jewish Messiah: Understanding the Gospel of Matthew. This [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:47-04:00February 10th, 2021|Public Forum|

More Comments on Paul’s Rather Astounding Christ Poem

My last couple of posts have been on the "Christ Poem" found in Philippians 2:6-10. Many years ago when I talked about the poem and argued that it was in fact a poem, a reader (who apparently knew Greek!) objected that the poetic lines I suggested don't actually work. I answered that question before moving on to showing just how amazing the poem is: it ends by giving the resurrected Jesus the authority of God Almighty himself. That may not seem surprising to Christians who already think it's true. But just imagine how it would resonate with someone living in the first century who knew that Jesus was publicly executed for crimes against the state. It might help if you imagine how you would feel if someone made a claim like this for someone who was condemned as an enemy of the of the state for insurrection against the United States who suffered the death penalty -- and someone claimed he had become God, the Lord of the universe. Uh, really? Yup, that's what Paul's [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:33-04:00February 10th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters|

One of the Most Important Passages of the NT: Paul’s Christ Poem

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BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:33-04:00February 9th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters|

An Alternative Christology: God Became Human

In my posts on Christology so far I have argued that different Christians in the early decades of the Christian movement maintained that Jesus had been exalted to a divine status at some point of his existence – at his resurrection, at his baptism, at his birth. I have called this a christology from below, or an “exaltation” christology; it is sometimes called a low christology because it understands Jesus to have started out as a human (down here with us) and to have been raised to a divine status. In this view he was not God from eternity past or a pre-existent being. He was a human being who was taken up to the level of divinity at some point (or, in the case of the Virgin Birth, that he came into existence at a point in time as a person who was partially human partially divine). But there was another kind of Christology which was also very early – earlier, in fact, than our earliest surviving Christian writer, Paul. This is the view [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:33-04:00February 7th, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters|

Personal Post: My Work Habits

Blog members sometimes ask me about my work habits: I seem to get a lot of writing done in addition to the day job as a university professor and doing the blog and what not. How’s that happen exactly? I should say that it’s not happenin’ too well right now: start of classes – teaching 240 students remotely! – and lots of other things--I ain’t getting twit done on my research…. But normally I do try to pack it in. And how? My usual answer is that I don’t watch a lot of TV. And that’s certainly true. I do watch the news sometimes – I did a lot more, e.g., in election season; but I find televised news both problematic and inefficient, if what you really want is *news*. It’s problematic because most news shows these days do not demarcate between information and opinion (it’s impossible to do that completely, of course; but sometimes you really do just want to know facts); it’s inefficient because the amount of news you can get in an [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:17-04:00February 6th, 2021|Bart’s Biography|

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BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:34-04:00February 4th, 2021|Recent Comments|

The Oldest View of Christ: Found in Only One Greek Manuscript of Luke!
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The Oldest View of Christ: Found in Only One Greek Manuscript of Luke!

Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum

The Oldest View of Christ: Found in Only One Greek Manuscript of Luke!

The oldest view of Christ is found in one Greek Manuscript of Luke. I’d like to address the issue of early Christology from a slightly different angle in this post. So far I have talked about how an “exaltation” Christology, in which Jesus, the man, is made the Son of God. At some point of his existence he can be found in various parts of the New Testament (Rom 1:3-4; speeches in Acts), and how different early Christians located that exaltation to different moments in Jesus’ existence (resurrection, baptism, birth, pre-existence). As it turns out, this view of Christology relates to an important textual variant in the Gospel of Luke. Only One Greek Manuscript of Luke So, by way of background for anyone new to this kind of discussion. We don’t have the original copy of Luke’s Gospel (or of any other NT book or, actually, of any book at all from the ancient world!). What we have are copies made from copies made from copies that were made from copies. We have thousands of copies [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:17-04:00February 4th, 2021|Canonical Gospels, Early Christian Doctrine, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

Ask Bart Anything! Live Zoom Chance for you to Pick My Brain and/or Stump Me

A number of people have suggested that it might be interesting for me to hold a live “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) session. I’ve been told that the term “AMA” is copyrighted (?!) and not open for public use. So we are going to call this an ABA (“Ask Bart Anything”). It will be over Zoom and will be open to anyone on the planet who wants to come. The format: I will take live questions both orally and through chats. The questions can be on ANY topic that anyone is interested in. If it is something I don’t know anything about (quantum physics or the Ming Dynasty) or that I would rather not talk about (that little incident when I was 16….) I’ll just say so. I will get through as many questions as I can, answering easy ones briefly and taking as long as I need to deal with more complicated ones. My only request will be that questions are direct questions, not lectures, sermons, admonitions, condemnations, expositions of one’s favorite views, or statements [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:33-04:00February 3rd, 2021|Public Forum|

When Did Jesus Become Divine?

In this thread on the Trinity I am developing at some length the first major issue: how did someone besides God come to be considered God among people who thought God and this other God were different yet continued to claim they were monotheists? (Later I'll talk about the Spirit, as many have asked; but there frankly is not nearly as much to say there, as we'll see). What I've spelled out so far is not hugely controversial among critical scholars of the New Testament and early Christianity. When the disciples came to believe in the resurrection, they thought that God had exalted Jesus to a unique, divine status. This is the oldest Christology there was. It is attested in such places as the pre-Pauline fragment in Rom. 1:3-4 and in several places, pre-Lukan, incorporated in the speeches of Acts. And then what happened? The Rest of this post tries to show how Christ came to be exalted more and more until his followers claimed he had been God from the beginning. Want to see [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:52:17-04:00February 3rd, 2021|Early Christian Doctrine, History of Christianity (100-300CE)|

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