Two months ago I did a three-part lecture series on Zoom as a fundraiser to help defray the expenses of the blog.  I recorded the lectures and have now decided to make them available -- still as a fundraiser -- to anyone who would wants to hear them.  For details how to get access to them, see further below. The lectures all discussed stories involving Jesus that are not widely known to the world at large.  Or to *Christians* at large.  Or to *Blog Members* at large.   I'm pretty sure you didn't hear *these* growing up....  Want to hear them?  These  are the titles and topics:   Lecture One.  Jesus and the Other Divine Men Jesus may be the only miracle-working Son of God people know about today, but in antiquity there were others – “Divine men” who were miraculously born, who could do miracles, and then, at the end of life, ascended to heaven to live with the gods.  How could anyone think such things of mere mortals?  And is there anything that makes [...]

In this post I would like to address some questions I have received about blog “comments” and in so doing reaffirm the blog’s policies and procedures. As all of you know, blog members at the Silver, Gold, or Platinum level are allowed to make comments on posts and respond to comments of others.  The limit is 200 words for a comment and only two per day are allowed.  These limits are designed to help commenters keep their remarks direct and on point, and to make the entire enterprise manageable for the one person who manages them (yours truly). A lot of the comments the posts invoke involve a question for me and I try to respond to each and every one.   Since we began the blog in 2012 we have had over 112,000 comments and I have written some 37,000 responses.  Ouch. Most of the time, commenters give a remark or reflection on a particular post.  You can ALWAYS do so on an old post, no problem.  I’ll post it/answer it no matter how old [...]

If you're a blog member and are either in or able to get to London just now:  are you interested in getting together for a blog dinner?  If we can get 3-4 (or more!) people together, I'd be happy to do it. It would need to be one of the evenings of Sunday July 11 to Thursday July 15. In either central London or Wimbledon (where I reside when over here). No obligations other than: Being a blog member Showing up Talking Paying for your meal. If you're interested, do NOT reply here as a comment.  Send me an email at [email protected] If you're not around here just now, hey, our day may come!

Now *this* isn't the kind of interview I get asked to do every day!  Hanny Seylim is a former Muslim who split his time growing up between Egypt and Ireland (a parent from each) and now lives in Melbourne.  For his podcast, Critical Faculty, he interviews all sorts of critical thinkers in numerous different fields (physics to NT!).  Hanny knows a *lot* about early Christianity and wanted to interview me about my work.  I think this one is unusually good.  Enjoy!  

This Saturday at 3:00 p.m. I will be giving a live lecture (via Zoom) on an intriguing topic that very few people I"ve ever met (including New Testament scholars) have ever delved into:  What did early Christians think Jesus was doing between the time of his death and his resurrection. This is the third and last lecture in my series on Jesus according to the Christians.  You do not have to have been at either of the others to come or to understand this one -- it is a stand alone lecture, with a good ole Aristotelian beginning, middle, and end. All the funds we bring in will go to help pay for blog expenses, so we can continue to give every dime of membership fees and regular donations to the charities we support.  The fee for the lecture, if you have not already paid for it, is $10.  We accept more than the requested fee of course! This week's event will last for about 75 minutes.  I will lecture for 45-50 minutes and then [...]

I’ve been talking about Jesus’ “Farewell Discourse,” the long five-chapter discourse that is Jesus’ last speech (virtually a monologue) in the Gospel of John.  In the previous post we saw that in the speech Jesus discusses how he relates to the Father: he is in the Father and the Father is in him, so that even though the Father “is greater” than he, when someone sees him he sees the Father.  They are “one.” That doesn’t mean they are the same person/thing; it’s more like when you tell a colleague or friend “you and I are completely unified in this” or “you and I are at one on this.”  There is no distance between you.  For Jesus it means that he has been given the authority of the Father and that his words are the ones the Father has given him to speak so that whatever he does and says has the full authority of the Father behind it.  There is no distance between him and the Father.  Not because they are the same but [...]

Last month I did a long and detailed interview with Derek Lambert, the person who started and runs an interesting podcast called MythVision Podcast.   Derek is unusually well informed about the New Testament and he has deep and penetrating questions about my positions/views in some of my popular books, especially in light of what a very conservative evangelical apologist John McLatchie has been saying about my, well, sloppy ignorance.  I had never heard of McLatchie before, but that's not unusual.  There are over two billion Christians in the world and I've never heard of most of them.  Still, not that many of them assault my intelligence without telling me  directly (e.g. in an email) that I'm an idiot. Still, maybe he's right about everything.  That's the nice thing about human intelligence.  You yourself have it, and you can make up your own mind.   In any event, here's the interview.  The bit with McLatchie kicks in part way through, but the whole thing is about important topics that I"ve dealt with in my writings.    

I have decided to do a three-part lecture series as a fundraiser to help defray the expenses of the blog.  As the blog continues to grow, it becomes more expensive and I simply refuse to take any money from Membership Fees or Regular Donations to pay for any of the expenses.  Every penny you pay to join goes directly to the charities the blog supports (see https://ehrmanblog.org/charities-we-support/).   This lecture series will help pay some of the overhead costs so that we don't have to take a dime out of the fees for overhead.  (BTW, in terms of overhead, for what it's worth:  I don't take a penny from the blog myself.)  (But if you want to mail me a number of small unmarked bills, that would be fine.) The lectures will occur over three consecutive Saturdays, starting this week, May 29, and continuing then on June 5 and 12.  They will all be at 3:00 pm.  On each occasion I will lecture for 45-50 minutes and then take questions for 15 -20 minutes.  There will [...]

Thank the gods, travel is becoming possible again.  Stir crazy?  How about an amazing culinary trip to North Italy to check out the wine, food, and scenery?   It will be September 4-11 (2021!) and it looks like an amazing trip.  Check out the brochure in the link below.  I'll be giving lectures on early Christianity in the Roman Empire; it'll be a small, intimate group (19 people max!), and I'll be hanging out with any and all the whole time, both shooting the breeze and talking about anything that strikes anyone's fancy about the New Testament and early Christianity.  Why not you and your fancy?! As you'll see, the trip is sponsored by the General Alumni Association at UNC, BUT you do not have to be a graduate of the school to come: it's for anyone.  If  you're NOT an alum, all you need do is pay $50 ($60 for a couple) to be considered a temporary Tar Heel.  Last time I did one of these things, maybe half the people were in that category.  [...]

A key to understanding the central role of the Holy Spirit in the early Christian communities is to realize that the earliest Christians did not think there was going to be on ongoing Christian community.  I discussed that a bit in my previous post and here I can continue the thought The apostle Paul is our earliest Christian author, and it appears that on this particular point he was in agreement with his predecessors, the very first followers of Jesus who came to believe he had been raised from the dead.  They thought that the messiah’s resurrection demonstrated that the resurrection had already begun, and they expected, then, that it would be completed right away. It is clear this this is what Paul thought.  Just consider the earliest of his letters that still survives, 1 Thessalonians.  Scholars usually date the letter to 49-50 CE or so, just some 20 years after Jesus’ death.  Paul had earlier brought his missionary zeal to Thessalonica, and while there he converted a number of people.  Based on what he [...]

I am now nearly finished talking about the “Documentary Hypothesis” devised by scholars of the Hebrew Bible to account for the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible.  I have already discussed the traditional view developed in the nineteenth century, especially as it was laid out by Julius Wellhausen (the JEDP hypothesis).  But that was a long time ago.  What do scholars say today?  As one might expect, the discussions have not gotten simpler but more complicated.  Here is what I say, briefly, about that in my undergraduate textbook on the Bible.  It’s about as much as most beginning students (and most people in general) need to know.   ******************************   The Scholarly View Today It is impossible to speak about a single scholarly opinion about the Documentary Hypothesis today.  Some scholars reject the idea that J and E were separate sources; some think that there were far more sources than the four; some propose radically different dates for the various sources (for example, one increasingly popular proposal is that the earliest sources [...]

I have been discussing the sources of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy), sometimes also called the Torah or the Law of Moses.  So far I have explained the kinds of literary problems that led scholars to realize that these books were not the writing of a single author, but represented a combination of earlier written accounts.  The traditional “documentary hypothesis,” as it is called, was most famously formulated by the nineteenth-century German scholar, Julius Wellhausen, who, along with some of his predecessors, called the sources J E D and P. This was the standard view of the matter back when I was doing my PhD in biblical studies way back when.  Here is how the hypothesis worked, in nuce.  (Again, this is taken from my textbook on the Bible). ****************************** The J source was the first source to be written. From it comes a number of the stories in Genesis and Exodus, including, for example the second creation account and the story of Adam [...]

Do you know about the Smithsonian Associates?  It's a great organization that, among other things, puts on lectures and day-long seminars by scholars and experts in all sorts of areas, including religion.  For years and years they were live events in Washington D.C. as part of the Smithsonian (on the Mall); for the past year or so they have been remote Zoom events.  In some ways, these Zoom events are even better: you can come without flying to D.C.! I will be doing an event this Saturday, May 1.  It's an all-day affair with four hour-long lectures and Q&A after each.   The topic is "Four Controversies in Early Christianity." Are you interested in getting a ticket?  Check it out.  Below is a description of my talks -- three of which I've never given before and a fourth that I've never given publicly before! And here is the link to the registration page, to purchase tickets and register: https://smithsonianassociates.org/ticketing/tickets/more-great-controversies-in-early-christianity-bart-ehrman-ponders-four-new-questions   Another Four Controversies in Early Christianity Bart D. Ehrman   Numerous significant issues were debated by [...]