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The Prophet Amos

In my previous post I started to give some of the background to the rise of Jewish apocalypticism by talking about the views of the classical Hebrew prophets, focusing, by way of illustration, on arguably the earliest, Amos. Here I continue that discussion: ************************************************************* The Message of Amos The book of Amos begins by addressing nations outside of Israel, indicating that because of their multiple sins, God would enter into judgment with them (chs. 1-2). This is an important beginning: it shows that God is not simply the God of Judah and Israel, he is the God of all nations, and holds all people accountable for their actions. And it shows that national suffering comes not only when one nation mistreats another, but also when God intervenes and rains his judgment down upon them. And so Amos starts by attacking the capital of Syria, Damascus: Thus says the LORD: For three transgressions of Damascus, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment; because they have threshed Gilead with threshing sledges of iron. So [...]

BDEhrman2017-11-16T21:33:25-05:00January 11th, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

Weekly Readers’ Mailbag: January 8, 2016

It is the Weekly Readers’ Mailbag time. Today I take on three very interesting and unusually diverse questions: where we got chapters and verses from in the New Testament; how we know that earliest Christians (before Paul) understood Jesus’ death to be a sacrifice for sins; and whether I get upset that my work is used by Muslims in order to discount Christianity. These are hot topics! QUESTION: When did scribes start dividing NT manuscripts into chapters and verses? As I understand it, early manuscripts did not even have punctuation marks. A related question is: did early Christians always read these texts/books, either by themselves or to a congregation, from beginning to end in one sitting? I imagine it would be very difficult to find specific passages without chapters and verses. RESPONSE: Ah, this is an important question, and one many people have never raised; moreover, those who have raised it often have no way of knowing how to answer it. As to chapters and verses, here is what I have to say on [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:57:05-04:00January 8th, 2016|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Heaven and Hell, Part Two

In my previous post I explained how Jewish thinkers began to develop the idea of an afterlife when they devised the idea of a future resurrection of the dead, an apocalyptic event that explained how God would ultimately make right all that was wrong, rewarding those who had sided with him but punishing those who sided with evil. But how did that idea of a future *bodily* resurrection morph into the Christian teachings of heaven and hell? I try to explain that here in this post, once again as taken from my book Jesus Interrupted. The first two paragraphs are repeated from yesterday’s post, to provide a better context for what I say here. **************************************************************************** Thus, eternal life, for Jesus, Paul, and the earliest Christians, was a life lived in the body, not above in heaven, but down here, where we are now. Paul emphasizes this point strenuously in the book of 1 Corinthians. The fact that Jesus’ body was raised from the dead shows what the future resurrection would involve. It would involve bodies [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:57:17-04:00January 6th, 2016|Afterlife, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Heaven and Hell, Part One

As I have been discussing the topic of resurrection in early Christianity, a number of readers have asked about a related issue, namely, where the Christian teaching of heaven and hell came from. For most Christians, the afterlife seems to be the ongoing existence of the soul. But for the earliest Christians, the afterlife involved the resurrection precisely of the *body*. How did that change, and why? I discussed this issue some years back in my book Jesus Interrupted, and what I say about it there seems to be directly on target for what these readers have asked. And so I include it here. This will take two posts, the first one (today) to explain why “resurrection” came to be believed by Jews and eventually by Christians and the next post to explain how that belief in resurrection came to be transformed into the later idea of heaven and hell that may people today continue to subscribe to. ********************************************************************* Heaven and Hell In some parts of Christendom today, especially the parts that I was [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:57:32-04:00January 5th, 2016|Afterlife, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

The Resurrection in Paul

I have been discussing an apocalyptic understanding of Jesus’ resurrection. For the earliest followers of Jesus, coming to think that Jesus was raised from the dead provided both a confirmation and an elaboration of their understanding of the end times. Prior to Jesus’ death they had come to think that they were living at the end of the age and that God was soon to bring history to a climactic end through a cataclysmic act of judgment; this final event in history would involve a resurrection of all those who had died to face judgment. When these disciples came to think that Jesus himself had been raised, they naturally concluded that the resurrection had begun. Jesus was the first to rise; he had been exalted to heaven; he himself was to return to earth as the powerful Son of Man to raise all people from the dead. All this would happen very soon. As it turns out there were other apocalyptic lessons that could be drawn from Jesus’ resurrection. One of the most interesting – [...]

BDEhrman2017-11-16T21:35:46-05:00January 3rd, 2016|Afterlife, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Readers’ Weekly Mailbag: January 2, 2016

It is weekly Readers’ Mailbag time again. If you have a question you would like me to address in a future post, just comment here, or send me a private email. Today there are three questions, on three very different topics: the goddess Sophia, the rise of non-apocalyptic Christianity, and the evidence for John the Baptist. ****************************************************************** QUESTION: In your debate with Justin Bass, you mention the divinity of Sophia. I googled “Sophia” and can’t quite figure this out. Could you educate us about Sophia? RESPONSE: Ah, this will be tough to do in a short answer! Sophia” is the Greek word for “wisdom” (we get a number of English words from it, for example “sophisticated” and “sophistry”). In ancient religious circles, both pagan and Jewish, “Sophia” came to be thought of as not simply a divine attribute (God is “wise”) but as a kind of divine emanation (“wisdom” actually “comes from” or “derives from” God) and then as an actual divine hypostasis. The term “hypostasis” does not have an easy English equivalent. It refers [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:57:41-04:00January 2nd, 2016|Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Blog Year in Review 2015

The year is now fading away (or blasting out, depending on your perspective), and I want to take a few minutes to reflect on how the Blog has been doing since last year at this time. We started this venture in April 2012, so by one way of calculating, 2015 was our fourth year of operation. By most standards and criteria it was our most successful year yet, possibly by a large margin. When I started the blog one of my main concerns was that I would run out of things to talk about in a year or so. It hasn’t happened yet. I do find on occasion that I write up a post and it occurs to me, “Hey, haven’t I written on this already?” When that happens, I’ll check (it’s easy to search the blog for past posts, btw: just click on the magnifying glass in the upper right hand of your screen for the search function, and go from there) and sometimes I’m right! If the two posts are sufficiently different, [...]

BDEhrman2015-12-31T09:38:00-05:00December 31st, 2015|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Jesus’ Resurrection as an Apocalyptic Event

In my previous post I started to discuss the eschatological implications drawn by Jesus’ followers once they became convinced that he had been raised from the dead. I pointed out that the very fact that they interpreted their visions of him as evidence of “resurrection” shows that they must have been apocalyptic Jews prior to his death (as I have argued on other grounds ad nauseum on the blog!). And I also suggested two of the key conclusions they drew with respect to eschatology (their understanding of what would happen at the end): they came to conclude that Jesus himself was the Son of Man that he had been proclaiming as the future judge of the earth, and they came to believe that they were living at the very end of time. In this post I am not going to talk about Jesus as the Son of Man – that will require several posts that I will take up soon. But I do want to talk about this business of Christians thinking that they were [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:57:47-04:00December 30th, 2015|Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

Jesus’ Return to Life as a Resurrection

So far I have talked about the significance of the belief in Jesus’ resurrection for both Christology (the understanding of who Jesus was) and soteriology (the understanding of how salvation works). It also was significant for eschatology (the understanding of what would happen at the end of time). Christologically, the resurrection proved that Jesus really was the favored one of God, appearances notwithstanding. It may have *seemed* like the crucifixion would show that Jesus was not God’s son, and certainly not the messiah; but the resurrection (for those who came to believe in it) showed that in fact he was. He was the son of God in an even more exalted sense than anyone had thought – he actually had been made into a divine being. So too he was the messiah in a more exalted sense than had been expected – he was not a mere human king but the divine King of all. Soteriologically, the resurrection showed that the death of Jesus had not been a mere miscarriage of justice or the unfortunate [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:58:00-04:00December 29th, 2015|Afterlife, Early Judaism, Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

The Death of the Messiah for Salvation

In a previous post I argued that Christians invented the idea of a suffering messiah. Because Jesus was (for them) the messiah, and because he suffered, therefore the messiah *had* to suffer. That was clear and straightforward for the Christians. They backed up their newly devised theology by appealing to Scripture, finding passages of the Bible where a righteous person suffered but was then vindicated by God, passages such as Isaiah 53, Psalm 22, Psalm 69 and so on. They reinterpreted these passages (where the messiah is never mentioned) in a messianic way, and they were massively successful in their reinterpretations. Many Christians today cannot read these passages without thinking (knowing!) that they refer to Jesus, the suffering messiah. But why would the messiah have to suffer? Yes, for Christians, it was because it was “predicted.” But why would God predict it? That is, why would he want his messiah to suffer? This is where Christians came up with yet another innovation, the idea that the death of the messiah brought about the salvation of [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:58:08-04:00December 28th, 2015|Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

End of Year Giving

December 31 is fast coming upon us, and many of us have very clear and certain reasons (involving nasty little inconveniences like annual taxes) to make end-of-the-year contributions to charities. Please consider giving a gift to the Bart Ehrman Foundation. Donations are 100% tax-deductible. Give any amount you want or can – tens of dollars, hundreds of dollars, thousands, millions. To pull it off, simply go to the bottom of this page, click “Donate,” and go from there. Every penny you give goes to good causes, fighting hunger and homelessness. Those causes may sound abstract, but in fact they are searingly concrete. We are providing food and shelter for real people, one at a time, people who do not have enough food to eat and do not have shelter or a bed. The needs are real, and the blog is set up to help meet them. We have raised a lot of money in the past, and for that I am very grateful. But we have a long way to go before we reach [...]

BDEhrman2015-12-27T10:28:45-05:00December 27th, 2015|Public Forum|

Readers’ Mailbag: December 27, 2015

QUESTION: [Bart has said:] “Jesus must have been called the messiah during his lifetime, or it makes no sense that he would be called messiah after his death”: [Comment:] By this line of reasoning, then surely one would conclude that Jesus was considered divine during his lifetime, else it makes no sense he would be considered divine after his death? RESPONSE: The first line in the question is a quotation of a view I have elaborated on the blog. The logic, in short (see the posts for a fuller explanation) is that no one on the planet expected that the messiah would die and rise again. And so even someone who came to believe in Jesus’ resurrection would never conclude: OH! He must be the messiah? That’s because that is not what the messiah was supposed to do. The questioner then is arguing that the same thing applies to the question of Jesus’ divinity, that the resurrection would not make anyone think Jesus is divine. My view is that this is precisely wrong. It [...]

BDEhrman2017-11-16T21:47:46-05:00December 27th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

A Christmas Reflection

Yesterday I posted an article that I wrote that provided one view of Christmas, one that is informed more by my scholarship than anything else. But Christmas is about a LOT more than scholarship! I have a personal sentimental attachment to the season, as I explain in this other article I wrote some ten years ago, and that I posted early on in the history of the blog. Here it is again, a more upbeat assessment of the season: ************************************************************ Growing up as a church-going Episcopalian in Kansas, my favorite time of year was always Christmas. Nothing could match the romance of the season: the cold weather, the falling of snow, the expectations leading up to the Big Day. I always loved the presents -- giving as well as receiving -- the music, the food, the tree. Especially the tree. It had to be real -- freshly cut if possible; loaded with lights, the more the better; draped with ornaments, each of them full of meaning. There was nothing better than darkening the room and [...]

BDEhrman2017-11-16T21:48:06-05:00December 24th, 2015|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Myth of the First Christmas

Over the years I’ve been asked to write short articles on the meaning of Christmas for various news magazines. Looking back at some of these articles makes me realize how many different views of the season seem to be competing with each other inside my head. Or maybe I’ve just been in different moods! I thought I would reproduce a couple of these articles on the blog. The following is one I wrote a few years ago for the British journal The New Statesman. I called it “The Myth of the First Christmas.” (Apologies to those with better memories than mine: I just checked after posting this article and see that I did so earlier -- three years ago! But no matter, I didn't remember what was in it, and so probably you won't either!) ****************************************************************** Once more the season is come upon us. At its heart stands a tale of two-thousand year vintage, the Christmas story. Or perhaps we should say the Christmas myth. When Post-Enlightenment scholars turned their critical tools on the tales [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:58:18-04:00December 23rd, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Holiday Presents!

I still have a few free one-year blog memberships to give out, thanks to the impressive generosity of many of you, who graciously donated funds so that others who cannot afford membership could be given a year subscription. Do you know anyone who would love to be on the blog but simply can't afford it? We can give them a great present for the holiday season. All they have to do is write me and explain why they can't afford the dues (they don't have to give all the gory details! Just enough to make me understand why they would like to take advantage of the opportunity). Please do not reply here, on the blog, as a comment. Instead, ask your friend, acquaintance, family member, neighbor, pastor, or rabbi to send me a separate email, privately, at [email protected]. In their email, in addition to letting me know their situation they should and provide me with the following information: 1) First and last name. 2) Preferred personal email. 3) [...]

BDEhrman2015-12-22T15:46:15-05:00December 22nd, 2015|Public Forum|

Desmond Tutu, True Christians, and Christmas

As often happens at this time of year, I have been thinking about how much I have in common with people who consider themselves committed Christians. A couple of events have recently happened that have made me more reflective about the common values I share with progressive people of faith (I’m leaving fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals out of the equation just now). I’ll talk about one of them here. It happened during my recent trip to South Africa (which ended just yesterday). Sarah and I decided to take two weeks off to go there, just for fun, no work involved. Incredibly, as much as we travel, we haven’t had two weeks alone together for fifteen years. The trip was amazing, between all of the things to see and do in Cape Town, to the scenic drive through the Garden Route, to the game drives/safaris we took up near Kruger National Park (a game reserve the size of Israel!). A friend of ours helped us set up the trip; she had been to South Africa a [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:58:28-04:00December 22nd, 2015|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Christians, Muslims, and God: Wheaton College in the News

I am sure that many of you have heard of the recent incident involving Christianity and Islam at Wheaton College, my alma mater, an evangelical liberal arts college outside of Chicago. Several readers have asked me about it. Here is a typical query: QUERY: Wheaton College was in the news this past week. Apparently one of the professors was suspended because she claimed that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Also, she wore a hijab to show solidarity with Muslims. You can read more about it at http://thinkprogress.org/education/2015/12/16/3732884/wheaton-suspends-professor-same-god/ I have believed the same, that the Christian God and the Muslim God are one and the same. Could you comment on this? RESPONSE: Let me start by saying that I deeply enjoyed and highly valued the education I received at Wheaton. At the time – and still today, I’m sure – it was considered the premier liberal arts college in the evangelical Christian tradition. Its evangelical credentials were and are completely bona fide. Students there were all to agree to the evangelical doctrinal position [...]

BDEhrman2017-11-16T21:51:46-05:00December 21st, 2015|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations, Religion in the News|

Jesus the Suffering Messiah

In a previous post I tried to show how the belief in Jesus’ resurrection completely altered the disciples’ perspective on who Jesus was. During his lifetime they thought he would be the future king of Israel; when he was crucified they realized they were wrong; when they then came to believe he had been raised they realized that they had been right, but in a way they did not at the time think. Jesus, for them, now that they believed he was raised, was far more than a human king. He was a divine being, the ruler of the world, the king of All. Yes, he would be the ruler of Israel as well. But that was when he came back from heaven as the victorious Son of Man, destroying his enemies and all those who were aligned against God, before bringing in his utopian kingdom. That was to happen very, very soon. The resurrection of Jesus not only made the followers of Jesus rethink their views of who (and what) he was; it also [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:58:38-04:00December 19th, 2015|Historical Jesus, Public Forum|

The Resurrection of the Son of God

I’m in the midst of the most entangled thread I have yet produced in my well-over-three-years of doing the blog. It started with orthodox scribes who were altering their texts of Scripture (specifically Luke 22; this was part of a thread I began in April! I’ll get back to it….) and it has now managed by a number of intricate twists, turns, and interweavings to end up at the resurrection of Jesus. I have been arguing that the resurrection radically changed the disciple’ understanding of the belief that he was the messiah – a belief that he himself had, and that they shared. I have argued that given everything we know about Jewish beliefs at the time, almost certainly anyone hearing that a man (such as Jesus) was the messiah would have thought that this meant that he was (or would become) the king of the Jewish people. That’s certainly how the Roman governor Pontius Pilate took it. It was because Jesus made such a claim that Pilate ordered him crucified. The crucifixion proved beyond [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:04:29-04:00December 16th, 2015|Afterlife, Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Did Some Disciples Not Believe in the Resurrection?

In my previous post I pointed out that we simply don’t know how many of Jesus’ disciples came to believe that he was raised from the dead. In my view there is actually some *evidence* that some of them never did believe it. I lay the evidence out in my book How Jesus Became God. It has to do with the fact that there is such a strong tradition of “doubt” in the resurrection among Jesus’ followers. Here is how I lay out the evidence there. *************************************************************** In considering the significance of the visions of Jesus, a key question immediately comes to the fore that in my judgment has not been given its full due by most scholars investigating the issue. Why do we have such a strong and pervasive tradition that some of the disciples doubted the resurrection, even though Jesus appeared to them? If Jesus came to them, alive, after his death, and held conversations with them – what was there to doubt? The reason this question is so pressing is because, as [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T13:04:36-04:00December 16th, 2015|Canonical Gospels, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

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