For several months now I have been posting Guest Posts that were generoulsly provided by others in honor of the blog's tenth anniversary.  These posts have been wide-ranging in their content and the intriguing , each pbased on the posters' unique backgrounds and expertise.  This now is the final one in the series, the second of two posts by Michael Shermer, to continue what he was saying in his post of Sept. 3. This one is particularly significant.  Why is it in conservative Christians' (and everyone else's) own best interest to accept evolution as a reality of the past?   He makes some compelling points.  Read and see! ************************* To counter the doubts I mentioned in my previous post, I argue that, in fact, Christians and conservatives should accept the theory of evolution for at least eight reasons (again, for brevity, truncated here): Evolution happened. The theory describing how evolution happened is one of the most well-founded in all of science. Christians and conservatives embrace the value of truth-seeking as much as non-Christians and liberals do, [...]

I am thinking about starting a Podcast and would like your opinion.  This would be *different* from the Ehrman Blog podcast that we’ve had for years (and is now in hiatus as we redesign it) and, of course, from the audio versions of the blog already made available to gold and platinum members.  It would not be connected with the blog per se – though hopefully it would draw attention to and attract new members to the blog  It would instead be my own thing for the Bart Ehrman Professional Services, the site where I host my online courses, push my books, and offer consultation services (www.bartehrman.com)  But I mention it to you, my blog readers, because among the members of the human race, you are the ones who most follow my work, and I would welcome your advice. For years people have urged me to do a Podcast, and I’ve always thought – Whoa!  Way too much work!   But now I’m thinkin’: Hey, why not join the 21st century?  If the goals of my [...]

I have been publishing guest posts in celebration of the blog's tenth anniversary, and am pleased to conclude the series now with two posts by Michael Shermer, whom many of you will know from his writings and media appearances discussing (especially) religion and science.  Michael was a one-time committed fundamentalist turned outspoken skeptic.   Here is the first of his two-parter, on an issue of particular cultural and religious importance. US public acceptance of evolution is growing but is still low compared to other countries. Why? Religion and politics. Here's why that need not be. As a career-long student of the century-long evolution-creationism debate I was encouraged to read the results of a new study on “Public Acceptance and Rejection of Evolution in the United States, 1985-2020” by Jon Miller, Eugenie Scott, Mark Ackerman, and Belén Laspra, published in the journal Public Understanding of Science. “Using data from a series of national surveys collected over the last 35 years, we find that the level of public acceptance of evolution has increased in the last decade after [...]

WE NEED BLOG VOLUNTEERS! You may know – but probably don’t! – that we have a dozen or so people who volunteer to do various things that have to be done for our blog to work (e.g., help with finances/taxes/etc; read audio posts for Gold members; run the Bart Ehrman Blog Podcast; run the Blog Forum; do social media; and more). Now some new needs have arisen, and I need some more volunteers.  Interested?  Do you have a few hours a week (amount TBD) to pitch in to help us as we grow, develop, and (we hope) improve? Here are the three tasks we need help with:   Re-categorizing Posts As you know, the blog has been going for over ten years now; I post five times a week (counting those by guest scholars) and have done so for our entire history.  We currently have over 3000 posts, all of them available in our archives. It is relatively easy to search the archives for posts, either by looking up each category and going through the [...]

I continue here with my string of guest posts written by scholars in honor of the blog's tenth anniversary.  Here is a post from Kurt Jaros, an evangelical Christian theologian and apologist, in which he explains how apologetics -- the intellectual defense of the claims of the Christian faith -- has grown and changed over the years, to represent something different today from, well, when I was involved with it in my younger days. I imagine the post will elicit a response!  Kurt will be happy to address your comments. ****************************** The Growing Landscape of Christian Apologetics   When did Jesus cleanse the Temple? In the Synoptics, this event occurs toward the end of his ministry (Matthew 21:12-13, Mark 11:15-17, Luke 19: 45-46), and serves as a catalyst for his enemies to have him arrested (Matthew 21:15, 23, & 45, Mark 11:18, Luke 19:47-48). In the Gospel of John, the event occurs early on in Jesus’s ministry (John 2:14). One common approach to answering the question is to harmonize the two descriptions into a fuller, [...]

Interested in coming to hear me give a talk/book reading?  It’s next Tuesday, August 23, in Waynesville NC.  All proceeds go to the local Indie, Blue Ridge Books, a terrific bookstore that managed to survive the crisis.  I hope you can come!  

Have you signed up yet?  See the annoucement below.  I hope you can come! ******************* We will be holding a blog fundraiser, donations voluntary, on Wednesday August 17, 8:00 - 9:15 PM Eastern Time.   It will be an Ask Bart Anything.  Any question on any topic is welcome.  If I am unable to answer, I won't.  I can only think of a few things I'd be unwilling to answer, and I'm not going to tell you what they are. We are raising money for the people suffering in Ukraine, and will split the proceeds between two of our charities: Doctors without Borders and CARE.   We are asking for voluntary donations of $30.  We would LOVE it if you could give more for this worthy cause.  Anyone who comes up with $30,000, I'll buy you a Happy Meal.  But if you can't afford $30, or can't afford anything, we completely understand.  Give what you can, if you can, and come anyway!  All are welcome. I will personally match the amount of donations we bring in up [...]

We will be holding a blog fundraiser, donations voluntary, on Wednesday August 17, 8:00 - 9:15 PM Eastern Time.   It will be an Ask Bart Anything.  Any question on any topic is welcome.  If I am unable to answer, I won't.  I can only think of a few things I'd be unwilling to answer, and I'm not going to tell you what they are. We are raising money for the people suffering in Ukraine, and will split the proceeds between two of our charities: Doctors without Borders and CARE.   We are asking for voluntary donations of $30.  We would LOVE it if you could give more for this worthy cause.  Anyone who comes up with $30,000, I'll buy you a Happy Meal.  But if you can't afford $30, or can't afford anything, we completely understand.  Give what you can, if you can, and come anyway!  All are welcome. I will personally match the amount of donations we bring in up to $5000. Moreover, if there are any individual donations over $1000, I will be happy [...]

Several scholar-friends and colleagues graciously have written guest posts for the blog to celebrate our tenth anniversary.  I am posting one a week and we will gather all of them together down the line to make them available as a group.  This week's contribution comes from James Tabor, retired Professor of Christian Origins and Bible from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (a scholar many of you will know) who has written a large number of popular books, along with serious scholarship, and most recently his own fresh translation of the book of Genesis. This post is especially interesting: James deals with problems of translating the Hebrew Bible that I bet you don't even realize are problems. ****************************** What is the best-known verse in the Bible—one that millions could quote immediately by heart? Christians might say John 3:16—after all, one even sees placards and signs reading “John 3:16” at sporting stadiums! But I think the very first verse of the Bible—Genesis 1:1—most likely would win the universal familiarity content: In the beginning God created the [...]

  In my previous posts I’ve talked about writings that claimed to be written by Peter, the closest disciple to Jesus – a Gospel, and Apocalypse, and an Epistle . These are not the only Petrine writings floating around in the early church.  Among other things, we have two other (different) apocalypses, one of them unusually fascinating that was discovered only in 1945 (a Gnostic writing). None of these was actually written by Peter, and I don’t think there’s a biblical scholar on the planet who seriously thinks it was.  It appears that writing books in the name of Peter was something of a cottage industry in early Christianity. That should give us pause.  There are two books that also claim to be written by Peter that actually are in the New Testament.  If we know that such pseudepigrapha were floating around, on what grounds should we think these two were authentic? Of all the books of the NT that have been thought to be forged – written by an author falsely claiming to be [...]

I have been discussing my thoughts about a future book on the canon of the New Testament for a broad reading audience, a book that explains why we got our 27 books, why other books didn’t get in, who made the decisions, on what grounds, and when.  To introduce some of these issues I’ve already discussed two books that claimed to be written by the apostle Peter (but weren’t), the Apocalypse and the Gospel of Peter.  Neither of them made it into the NT, obviously, but both were thought by some Christian leaders to be bona fide texts of Scripture. That may be true for the third example I’ll be giving here (of a book allegedly written by Peter), but in this case it is difficult to know if anyone took it as inspired Scripture.  Whether they did or not, it never really had much of a chance to make it in.  Even so, it’s a fascinating book whose author almost certainly wanted it to be granted apostolic and canonical authority.  It is a letter [...]

BE Bloggers! I'm going to be in the Asheville NC area (Waynesville, actually) August 9-28 or so.  I'm out there a good bit, but not usually for this amount of time.  If any of you are in the area, let me know: if there are a few of you, maybe we could work out a blog dinner.   It would be for blog members only; each person would pay for him/herself; and we would spend an evening engaged in interesting discourse! Let me know -- not here but on my private email -- and we'll see what, if anything, can happen!  [email protected]     

This is a reminder (or a minder, if you missed it the first time) that I will be doing an eight-lecture online course this coming weekend, four lectures on on Saturday and four on Sunday, with Q&A following each, on the four canonical Gospels. Here was the original announcement from a couple of weeks ago. ******************************   I am pleased to announce that I will be doing another online course, the second in the series: How Scholars Read the Bible.  The first, if you recall, was a six-lecture course on Genesis.  This one will be an eight-lecture course called:  The Unknown Gospels:  Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. As with all the courses I do online, this one will NOT be in connection with the blog per se – it is part of my separate venture (Bart Ehrman Professional Services) that you can find at my personal website http://www.bartehrman.com.   I am announcing it here on the blog because I know some of blog members will be interested (and some would be rather aggravated if I [...]