Page 95 – The Bart Ehrman Blog

Christmas from a Historical Point of View

We are barreling down on Christmas! For the blog this year, that means: seasonal Posts! I thought it would be a good idea to talk about what we know about the birth of Jesus, and don't know, based on the Gospels and our knowledge of the history of the period. It's amazing what we don't know. In fact, we know almost nothing, apart from the fact that Jesus was born to a poor Jewish couple who were probably named Joseph and Mary around, what?, 4 or 5 BCE? I'll try to explain what we do know and probably don't know in various posts. As it turns out, that was the topic of the first Christmas post on the blog, done almost exactly eight years ago. Here it is slightly edited! So, from 2012: *********************** Right now I have the Christmas on my mind -- as makes sense this time of year. But I have some other reasons. First, I have agreed to write a brief (2000-word) article for Newsweek this week, to be published in [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:51:41-04:00December 16th, 2020|Historical Jesus|

A Holiday Season Request!

As we are all keenly aware: ‘Tis the Season to be giving! For many of us, in terms of giving at least, mid December is the best of times and the worst of times. It is best because we can show our love and gratitude to those close to us by choosing things to give them during the holidays; it is the worst because the commercialism that overwhelms our world often makes it such an obligatory drudgery. It would be so nice if we could just freely give to those we love without worrying about what and how much, and just be joyfully generous. But, of course, we are humans and even giving a gift can be fraught with complications. And this time of year often is. There is also a less humane and uplifting reason for giving just now, a rather cold and hard one that any of us who pays taxes knows full well. We’re near the end of the year. Ugh. On the other hand, I think most of us would agree, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:51:58-04:00December 15th, 2020|Public Forum|

An Apocryphal Story of Mary’s Conception of Jesus

In my previous post I introduced the seventh-century Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, one of the most popular Christian writings of the Middle Ages. It tells an expanded version of the events leading up to Jesus’ birth, and then yet more legendary tales of what happened afterward. I continue here with another intriguing portion of the account: the events surrounding Mary conceiving Jesus, even though she was a virgin, and the reactions of Joseph when he realizes she is pregnant, and then – something completely missing from the New Testament – the religious “test” inflicted on her by others to see if she was telling the truth. Again, this is taken from the translation in my book The Other Gospels, produced with my colleague Zlatko Pleše. The Annunciation 9 1 On the next day while Mary was standing beside the fountain to fill her small pitcher, an angel appeared to her and said, “You are blessed, Mary, for you have prepared a dwelling place for God in your spirit. Behold, a light will come from heaven [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:51:41-04:00December 15th, 2020|Canonical Gospels, Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

A Different Account of Joseph and Mary!

As we move to the Christmas season, I thought it would be interesting to post some extracts on one of the most popular Gospels in the Middle Ages, an account of Jesus’ birth – and before that, his mother Mary’s birth – and what happened in the aftermath. It is called the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, because modern scholars once thought that it had claimed to be written by Matthew (the author of the first canonical Gospel); but in fact, as you will see, it claims to be written by Jesus’ brother James. The Gospel comes to us in Latin and was probably produced in the early 7th century. Some of you may know, from the blog or elsewhere, a Greek Gospel of this description from the 2nd century, the Proto-Gospel of James. This later Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew is a kind of reworking and expansion of the Proto-Gospel, with some parts removed, lots more added, and others simply altered. It may be that its unknown author wanted to propagate the stories of the Proto-Gospel in the [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:51:40-04:00December 13th, 2020|Canonical Gospels, Christian Apocrypha, Early Christian Writings (100-400 CE)|

Is Suffering a Problem for Those Who Suffer?

I started this thread on the problem of suffering because I wanted to respond to a specific question from a member. My original idea was simply to give the question and then write the response – and do it all in one post. When I started writing it, I realized it wouldn’t be possible, that it would require several posts, and that in fact, it would make the best sense not to give the question in the first post but in the last. Here now is the question I received, and my response. QUESTION: Faith-wise, why is the problem of suffering a breaking point for you, Bart, but not for Nick Vujicic? RESPONSE: When I first received this question I had an immediate reaction, and started to write a simple email in response, saying only that I had never heard of Nick Vujicic and didn’t know what is views were, and so couldn’t explain why he didn’t think so much suffering in the world should be an obstacle to faith. I do know what lots and [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:51:40-04:00December 12th, 2020|Reflections and Ruminations|

How Then Can We Believe?

I continue now with the amazing and disturbing chapter “Rebellion” from the Brothers Karamazov, which significantly affected my view of suffering. If you did not read yesterday’s post, you will probably want to do so before launching into this one. ****************************** Ivan’s stories are not just about wartime atrocities. They involve the everyday. And what is frightening is that they ring true to real life experiences. He is obsessed with the torture of young children, even among well educated “civilized” people living in Europe: They have a great love of torturing children, they even love children in that sense. It is precisely the defenselessness of these creatures that tempts the torturers, the angelic trustfulness of the child, who has nowhere to turn and no one to turn to – that is what enflames the vile blood of the torturer. He tells then the story of a five-year-old girl who was tormented by her parents and severely punished for wetting her bed (this is a story that Dostoevsky based on an actual court case): "These educated [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:51:40-04:00December 10th, 2020|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Facing the Problem of Suffering Head-on

I have started a short thread on why suffering is such a problem for many people when trying to understand the Christian faith – or many of the other faiths. If God is one who is active in the world, helping people, answering prayer, doing what is best for them – how can we explain the heart-wrenching pain and agony so many people experience, even those who believe deeply in God? We are not talking about pain being experienced by, say, a hundred people in the world. We’re talking in terms of millions. Billions. How do we explain that? People do have explanations, and I do not want to discount any of them. All of us have to come to a resolution of the “Big Questions” in our own minds. And when it comes to matters of faith, it is very much a personal decision – and even inclination – of what seems right and natural to you. In my next couple of posts I try to address the issue head on in what is [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:51:40-04:00December 9th, 2020|Reflections and Ruminations|

Are You Interested in a Platinum Membership?

As you know, you have several choices for your membership on the blog – from the most popular Bronze level, where you can read all my posts with archives going back to 2012; to Silver, where you can do all that plus make and read members’ comments and questions, and my responses; to Gold, where you can do all that plus get audio versions of the posts; and up to Platinum. The Platinum has some unusual benefits; I thought it might be helpful for me to spell them out, just in case you might be interested. Here is how I described it recently in an email to those who have already taken the plunge. . ****************************** Hello Platinum Blog Members! Now that the dust has settled a bit on the launch of the new blog site, we are able to start moving ahead with some of our new initiatives – including the Platinum Premiums. Here is the summary provided on the JOIN pages, with which you are no doubt familiar. In this note I will [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:51:40-04:00December 8th, 2020|Public Forum|

Human Suffering and the Christian Faith

I've started a short thread on the issue of how the problem of human suffering affected my Christian faith. To explain the matter further, here I quote from a section of my book God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer our Most Important Question: Why We Suffer. The book is mainly about the variety of answers you can find in the Bible about why God allows or even causes suffering. But I begin the book by talking about why it has long been such an important issue to me personally Human Suffering and How It Impacted My Christian Faith Eventually, I felt compelled to leave Christianity. I did not go easily. On the contrary, I left kicking and screaming, wanting desperately to hold on to the faith I had known from childhood and had come to know intimately from my teenage years onward. But I came to a point where I could no longer believe. It’s a very long story, but the short version is this: I realized that I could no longer reconcile [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:51:40-04:00December 6th, 2020|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

My Struggle With Why There Is Suffering

As many blog members know, I left the Christian faith because of the problem I had with understanding why there could be so much suffering in the world if there was an all-powerful and truly-loving God in control of it. I have sometimes received questions about that, and will deal with one of them soon in a separate post. But before doing so I want to provide a bit of personal background. In this post I want to make it clear that – as I’ve said a number of times on the blog before -- I did not leave the Christian faith because of my scholarship on the Bible or on the history of early Christianity. On the contrary, virtually everything I know and think based on my scholarship on the Bible is known and thought by many, many biblical scholars, who continue to be committed Christians. Including friends who serve as pastors of churches. BUT, they are obviously not fundamentalists or evangelicals. Far from it. They moved on from that long ago, and have [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:51:40-04:00December 5th, 2020|Reflections and Ruminations|

Paul Dictated His Letters: How Does That Complicate Finding an Original?

I have been talking about the problems in knowing what the “original” text of Philippians is. Even with the following brief review, the comments I will be making in this post will, frankly, probably not make much sense if you do not refresh your memory from my previous two posts. Here I will be picking up where I left off there. We have seen that knowing what the original of Philippians is is complicated by the facts that: 1) The letter appears originally to have been two letters, so that it’s hard to know whether the original of each separate letter is to be the original or if the final edited version which Paul himself did not produce is the original; 2) Paul dictated his letters, and the scribe who wrote down his dictation would typically have made a fresh copy of the letter after Paul had made a few corrections – so which is the original: what the scribe originally wrote or the fresh copy he made after the corrections? 3) And if Paul [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:51:40-04:00December 3rd, 2020|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters|

Why Finding an “Original” Text is So Unexpectedly Complicated

I have been asked to comment on whether we can get back to the “original” text of Paul’s letter to the Philippians, and I have begun to discuss the problems not just of getting *back* to the original, but also of knowing even what the original *was*. In my previous post I pointed out the problems posed by the fact that Philippians appears to be two letters later spliced together into one. And so the first problem is this: is the “original” copy the spliced together copy that Paul himself did not create? Or is the “original” the product that Paul himself produced – the two letters that are not transmitted to us in manuscript form any longer, to which, therefore, we have no access (except through the version edited by someone else)? But there are more problems. Here I’ll detail them, in sequence as they occur to me. In what I am going to be saying now, I will simplify things by assuming that – contrary to what I’ve been arguing – Philippians is [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:51:39-04:00December 2nd, 2020|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters|

What Does It Even Mean to Have an “Original” of An Ancient Writing?

I have begun to answer a series of questions asked by a reader about the textual history of Paul’s letter to the Philippians. In my previous post I explained why some critical scholars maintain that the letter was originally two separate letters that have been spliced together. That obviously makes the next question the reader asked a bit more complicated than one might otherwise imagine. And it’s not the only complication. Here is the reader’s next question: QUESTION: Do you agree that the first copy of the letter written by Paul to the Philippians was also an original? RESPONSE: First off, my initial reaction that I gave a couple of posts ago still holds. I’m not exactly sure what the reader is asking. If he’s asking whether a copy of the original letter to Philippians is itself an original of Philippians, then the answer is no. It is not the original. It is a copy of the original. Big difference. But what if this copy was exactly like the original in every single respect – [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:51:39-04:00December 1st, 2020|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters|

Could Paul’s Letter to the Philippians be TWO Letters?

In my previous post I answered, in short order, a series of questions that a reader had about the “original” text of Paul’s letter to the Philippians. I will now take several posts in order to address some of the questions at greater length. Here was the first one: QUESTION: Would you agree that the letter written to the Philippians was an original writing of Paul? The short answer is Yes – it is one of the undisputed Pauline letters. The longer answer is, well, complicated. Scholars have long adduced reasons for thinking that this letter of Paul was originally *two* letters (or parts of two letters) that were later spliced together into the one letter we have today. I explain the reasons for thinking so in my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. Here is what I say there. (If you want to follow the argument particularly well, I’d recommend reading the short letter of Philippians, and then reading what follows by looking up the passages referred [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:51:24-04:00November 29th, 2020|Paul and His Letters|

A Fund-Raising Webinar: What Can We Really Know about the Birth of Jesus??

I have decided to hold a small and intimate webinar in order to raise money for the Bart Ehrman Blog. Every penny that the webinar brings in will go directly to two of the blog’s charities, The Food Bank of Central/Eastern North Carolina and Doctors without Borders, split equally between them. It will be held on Tuesday December 15 at 7:00 pm EST. It will last for an hour and fifteen minutes. The topic of the seminar will be “What Can We Really Know about the Birth of Jesus?” Among the topics to be covered will be: What do the Gospels say about Jesus' birth? Can they be right? Why do two of the Gospels not say anything about it? Why is Jesus' birth not mentioned anywhere else in the New Testament? Are the accounts we have consistent with one another? Are they consistent with what we know from ancient Jewish and Roman history? Can we decide when Jesus was actually born -- year and day? Or where? How do we explain the idea of [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:51:40-04:00November 27th, 2020|Public Forum|

Do We Have Paul’s Original Letter to the Philippians?

A few days ago I answered a question about whether someone in the very earliest church who was reading one of the Christian writings to his congregation in the church -- say, one of the Gospels or one of Paul's letters -- might have *changed* it in places orally so that the people who were listening to him (most of whom wouldn't be able to read themselves) might have heard something other than what was written. Great question. In this and the following posts I want to deal with an equally vexed question. Stick with that same situation. That writing the person is reading (unless he is living in the same town as the author and this is just a little while later) is presumably a copy of the original writing, or, more likely, even if it's just a few years after the original, a copy of a copy. What are the chances that that copy was different in places from the original, and if it was, do we now, today, actually have the original. [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:51:23-04:00November 27th, 2020|New Testament Manuscripts, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Thanksgiving 2020

As long-term members of the blog will know, I have always said that Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I have to admit, as I get older (and older), many of the holidays that were once a significant part of my life – even as an adult – have more or less faded away for me: Fourth of July; Columbus Day; Halloween. I do continue to love Christmas. It’s a period of joy for me still: I love the season as a whole, there’s still an excitement about it, and I’m unusually fond of many things connected with it: Christmas trees, lights, and carols. I especially enjoy the stories and myths of the season, and find the weeks leading up to it very moving. Christmas is increasingly complicated though. The commercialism and greed and lust for useless things just drives me nuts. The absolute need to buy things that others don’t really want or need but expect. Still, despite all that, I try to focus on the good parts. Thanksgiving on the other hand, for me, [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:51:23-04:00November 26th, 2020|Reflections and Ruminations|

Christian Manuscripts Used for Magic?

Very few biblical scholars are interested in studying the actual manuscripts of the New Testament. It's an unusually rigorous and technical field, and most are interested instead in how to interpret the New Testament. That's true of most fields. The vast majority of Shakespeare scholars are interested in figuring out what the plays *mean*, not in examining the quarto and folio editions to see in detail how they differ from each other. So too with scholars of Homer, Plato, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Wordsworth, and and and. As a result most NT scholars -- really! most of them -- do not know a lot about the actual manuscripts. It's a bit of a pity, because there are a lot of very interesting things about them, unrelated to interpretation of the text. Here's one thing that almost no one knows about, even PhDs in the field (and, as it turns out, even many (most?) scholars who do specialize in studying the manuscripts): the use of manuscripts in later Christian circles for purposes of magic. To explain what [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:51:23-04:00November 25th, 2020|New Testament Manuscripts|

What Really Happened at Jesus’ Trial Before Pilate?

An important question I’ve received from another scholar who is interested in New Testament studies but is an expert in a different field. QUESTION: Have you ever encountered the argument that the Gospels’ portrayal of Pilate giving in to the crowd’s call for Jesus’ death could be possible in as much as Pilate would have wanted to avoid a riot and so acquiesced for that reason? I am wondering whether this is an old apologist argument of some sort? RESPONSE: It is a great question and it has an easy answer. Yes I have indeed. This is a standard argument made by people, including scholars, who think that the Gospel accounts are entirely reasonable and probably accurate. It’s the view I myself had for years. The idea behind it is pretty simple, and works in easily delineated stages: Jesus was exceedingly controversial among the crowds in Jerusalem. His trial was a major public event. The Jewish leaders were intent on having him executed, and they stirred up the crowd by having them shout [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:51:23-04:00November 23rd, 2020|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Reader’s Questions|

Some Feedback on the New Blog ??

This is a good time for some feedback from you, the members of the blog! We are very pleased with the roll-out of the new blog site, and hope you are as well. The user experience appears to be much improved (or so it seems to us, and that is what we are hearing from you as well). And yet it is still the same approach and format, with posts on a wide range of topics dealing with the New Testament and Early Christianity appearing five times a week, and readers (at the silver level and above) able to make comments and receive replies. On Jan. 1 we will move from our crisis-inspired-trial offer of giving all bronze memberships privileges of silver. At whatever level you are now, when your current subscription ends, you can choose to move to whichever level most suits you and your needs. We received excellent feedback at the outset of the launch and have been able to tweak lots of things as a result. There are still things we are [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:51:40-04:00November 22nd, 2020|Public Forum|

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