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Seriously off topic….

OK, this is comletely irrelevant to anything related to the blog – especially early Christology, my current topic. But I thought it was too funny to pass up. A fellow who lived in my neighborhood, but whom I never knew (to my regret: he sounds like he was a remarkably interesting guy), beloved chemistry professor Dr. James Bonk died Friday at the age of 82, ending his 53-year career at Duke University. According to the local newspaper: Bonk’s classes were such a staple that Duke introductory chemistry classes became known as “Bonkistry” classes, which approximately 30,000 students attended. He was nationally known for comical incidents with students, one rumored to have taken place in the 1960s. The Bonk joke is that the weekend before a final exam, four students decided to visit the University of Virginia for the weekend and let off some steam. They were due back Sunday in time for their exam Monday morning, but were too hung over to travel. When they arrived back at Duke late, they told Bonk that they [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-31T23:30:24-05:00March 17th, 2013|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Biblical Views of Suffering

On something different from Christology! I’m in New York City for a few days. Last night I gave a lecture at NYU; they had asked that I talk about “God, The Bible, and the Problem of Suffering.” That’s the topic of my book God’s Problem, and so I spun off a talk from there. Part of the point of the book is that the Bible has a large number of views about why people – especially the people of God – suffer, many of these views are at odds with one another, and most of them are different from what people, even highly religious people, even highly religious people who think they based their views on the Bible, tend to think. The lecture was only to be 50 minutes so I couldn’t spend much time on this that or the other view, and in fact could not deal with most of the biblical perspectives. I didn’t talk about Job, for example (which, in the judgment of most biblical scholars, is made up of the work [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-31T23:37:04-05:00March 8th, 2013|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Public Forum|

What Kind of a Text is the King James Bible?

Introduction: On January 24, 2013, the traveling exhibition Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible opened at the William H. Hannon Library at Loyola Marymount University. The keynote talk for the opening: "What Kind of a Text is the King James Bible? Manuscripts, Translation, and the Legacy of the KJV" was presented by Dr. Bart Ehrman, James A. Grey Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at UNC Chapel Hill and New York Times bestselling author. In this lecture by Dr. Bart Ehrman, a leading authority on the New Testament and New York Times bestselling author, you will hear why the KJV has received such praise and adoration over the centuries, and then turn to consider aspects of the translation that also need to be considered when assessing its greatness and value: the archaic language that at times can confuse modern readers; the inferior ancient manuscripts on which the translation was based; and the theological biases that occasionally led the translators to make the biblical text say something other than it originally meant. [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-31T23:42:48-05:00February 26th, 2013|New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum, Video Media|

A Brief Break from Christology

With this post I want to take a brief break from what I’ve been doing on the blog to assess how it’s going. A couple of weeks ago now I decided to start posting on my current book project, How Jesus Became God. My idea was that this would allow me to “think through” some issues out loud, as it were, as I put thoughts on screen, and it would allow people on the blog to see where I’m going with the book. And so I’ve posted about a dozen or so posts on the topic, virtually without stop (well, there have one or two other things). On the whole I would characterize these posts as relatively heavy-hitting as far as posts go: I’ve been trying to write for the blog members, (you!), who as a rule are not scholars but are highly intelligent lay people who may not have all the jargon and background of professional biblical folk, but who are interested in topics related to NT and early Christianity, and don’t mind seeing [...]

BDEhrman2013-02-15T22:47:43-05:00February 15th, 2013|Public Forum|

How Jesus Became God: My Change of Direction

Over the course of my last three posts I have indicated what my original idea was for the book How Jesus Became God. When I first started writing the proposal for the book (as you have seen it) I had planned to write it with Oxford University Press. But about three or four years ago I made a career decision. At that point I had published three trade books with HarperOne (an imprint of Harper Collins, the branch that publishes in religious studies). All three of them had made it onto the New York Times Bestseller list. That had never happened to me before. A lot of that is luck, but it takes a *ton* of work from the publisher to make it even possible. I think Oxford is an absolutely terrific press. In my opinion they are absolutely among the best press in the world at publishing scholarly monographs and *are* the best at publishing college level textbooks in religious studies. But they are not as geared toward trade books. With Harper, on the [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T18:49:42-04:00February 5th, 2013|Book Discussions, Early Christian Doctrine, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Posts by Outsiders

Now that we’ve seen a couple of posts by Jeff Siker (the author of Jesus, Sin, and Perfection in Early Christianity and Homosexuality in the Church) – taking a position quite different from my own on a question of broad importance – and some of the comments that have come back on it, and his reply at length to one of them, I think we are in a position to sit back and see how that “worked” for the blog. My sense is that it worked very well. If you think otherwise, please let me know. I do not want to do this sort of thing every week – but I’m thinking once every three or four weeks might be interesting. I have received several suggestions for the kinds of things people would like to see, as follows: A Hebrew Bible scholar talking about the historical problems with the Hebrew Bible comparable to those we deal with on this blog for the New Testament; An archaeologist to discuss the evidence that Nazareth really did exist; [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-24T13:00:08-04:00January 28th, 2013|Public Forum|

Something New on the Blog

I have received a number of suggestions about how to improve this blog, and so far the one I like best is for me to have an occasional guest make a contribution that people could interact with -- that is, someone who is, like me, a scholar of NT or early Christianity who has a different thing or two to say. I think it's a great idea. And I'm going to implement it for the first time tomorrow. Here is a question I have recently been asked: You've mention that most of your past/present fellow colleagues, friends, loved ones etc... agree with you when it comes to historical understanding of the bible and Christianity, but remain believers. I also understand the problem of suffering was the real reason for your loss of faith and not completely historical understanding. I guess my question is this: What keeps them believing in the very human invention of Christianity? Is it because they have a very liberal understanding and are more like Crossan and Borg, reinventing Christianity to make [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-24T12:35:38-04:00January 24th, 2013|Public Forum|

Why Jesus?

This will be my last post for a while dealing with the question of whether Jesus’ ethics can be translated from his own mythological context of Jewish apocalyptic thought into the modern world that is based (for me at least) on a completely different view of life, meaning, and reality. In my last post I indicated that I thought that it was indeed possible to make this kind of translation if one wants to. But I ended by asking why one – or rather I – would want to. That is, why focus on Jesus in particular? I don’t think I want to do so because I think that Jesus is “the greatest ethical teacher of all time.” I have no idea if this is even a contest that can be won, and even if it is, I am not qualified to evaluate Jesus in relation to other great ethical teachers so as to declare him a winner. So that seems to me to be a dead end. So why Jesus? I don’t have a [...]

BDEhrman2018-01-01T00:22:00-05:00January 22nd, 2013|Bart’s Biography, Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

New Reference Tool

I’m pleased to be able to announce (and only a month after the fact) that after years of labor, the thirteen-volume Encyclopedia of Ancient History, ed. by Roger Bagnall, Kai Bodersen, Craige Champion, Andrew Erskine, and Sabine Hueber has now appeared, published by Wiley-Blackwell. It’s not exactly an affordable reference tool for everyone’s library. The list price is $1995.00! But you can save $354 on Amazon, if you’re loaded and looking for the most authoritative and up-to-date reference on all things ancient (Western world, roughly the ancient Mediterranean, including Egypt and the ancient Near East), from the Bronze Age up to the seventh century CE. There were twenty-two of us who were “area editors.” The areas include such things as “Classical Greece,” ”Jewish History,” “Late Antiquity,” “Religion,” “Roman Military History,” and “Science.” I was responsible for the area of “Christianity.” In that capacity, I chose 195 topics that needed articles to be written, ranging from 500 to 2500 words; I solicited scholars to contribute articles; I edited all the articles once they were written; and [...]

BDEhrman2018-01-01T00:32:48-05:00January 6th, 2013|Public Forum, Teaching Christianity|

End of the Year Reflections on the Blog

So, it’s the last day of the year, and I thought I would take a moment to reflect on life, meaning, and the state of the blog. Mainly, for now, the state of the blog. Some statistics would be useful, both of what I wanted to accomplish before the year was out (which will be in five and a half hours, my time) and what we did accomplish. So, to start with, my plan at the outset. I really didn’t know how the blog would go, whether it would have any success at all or be a complete dud. My computer guru for the site, Steven Ray, and I worked for months getting it set up. Well, actually, he worked for several months. I dilly-dallied and told him what to do. He had earlier designed my website, www.bartdehrman.com , which I liked very much (and still do like), and so I asked him to set up the blog. He did almost all the work, and I still think it looks fantastic and works great. Any [...]

BDEhrman2013-11-07T17:19:27-05:00December 31st, 2012|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Christmas Longings

So we have managed to make our way through another Christmas season. I had a number of posts leading up to the big day, and now I’d like to make a couple of others looking back upon it from this side. But first let me say that I hope all of you – whether fundamentalist (not too many of *you* on this blog!!), liberal Christian, Jew, Muslim, agnostic, atheist, or none of the above – had a very nice, relaxing, rejuvenating, and fulfilling holiday. I did. In the opening chapter of my book God’s Problem, I talked about going to church on Christmas Eve in 2006 with my wife Sarah and brother-in-law Simon, in Saffron-Walden, a market town in England where Simon lives, not far from Cambridge. It was a somber but moving Christmas Eve service, and yet one that had the opposite of the intended effect on me. It made me realize just how estranged I was from the Christian faith, from the notion that with Christ God entered into the world and took [...]

BDEhrman2018-01-01T01:17:08-05:00December 27th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Reflections on the Season

I will need to take a break from posting to the blog for a few days. I am in London and the next few days will be visiting family; I will be incommunicado until the day after Boxing Day (as they call it here). For those of you who don’t know, my wife Sarah is a Brit, and her family is all here. We have a flat in London (Wimbledon, actually) and we spend 2-3 months out of the year here. This time of year there is a lot of seeing family. It’s not *exactly* the twelve days of Christmas, but sometimes it feels like it – opening presents with one part of the family, then another, then another. This really is one of my favorite times of the year. When I was a kid, as is true for a lot of kids, Christmas was a big deal for me. I loved all the trappings: Christmas trees, Christmas shopping, Christmas lights, Christmas presents. And as a kid I very much appreciated the religious aspects of it as [...]

BDEhrman2018-01-01T01:17:35-05:00December 24th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Responses to my Newsweek Article

My Newsweek article this week has generated a lot of response. I have no idea what kind of comments they typically get for their stories, but so far, as of now, there have been 559 on mine; and most of them are negative – to no one’s surprise – written by people (conservative evangelicals and fundamenalists for the most part, from what I can tell) who think that the Gospels are perfectly accurate in what they have to say about Jesus – not just at his birth but for his entire life. A lot of these respondents think that anyone who thinks that the New Testament contains discrepancies is too smart for his or her own good and blind at the same time (not sure how it can go both ways, but there it is). I’ve also been getting a lot of email from incensed readers, including a sixteen-year old girl who tells me that she is a Pentecostal Christian who has read the Bible 160 times and is now starting her 161st; she was [...]

BDEhrman2018-01-01T01:26:12-05:00December 14th, 2012|Bart's Critics, Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Religion in the News|

An Agnostic Reflects on Christmas

I suppose a lot of people have the birth of Jesus on their minds these days. Hard not to. It occurred to me that it might be interesting to do a series of posts on what ancient Gospels – mainly the two of the New Testament, but also some of the others outside – say about it. When I indicate that there are two in the NT that talk about it, it is because Matthew and Luke are the only ones that say anything about the birth of Jesus. I think what I’ll do in these posts is talk about features of each one separately and then talk about the two of them together, with a few posts here at the beginning to provide different angles to introduce to the matter. But I’ll also talk about other Gospels, like the Proto-Gospel of James (which in the Middle Ages was in some places at least as popular as the NT Gospels) and the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. One of the reasons this is on my mind just [...]

BDEhrman2018-01-01T01:31:24-05:00December 5th, 2012|Bart’s Biography, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Melito and arly Christian Anti-Judaism

I AM IN THE PROCESS OF MAKING THE PENULTIMATE EDITS ON MY MY BIBLE INTRODUCTION. TODAY I HAD TO REVIEW AN EXCURSUS ON EARLY JEWISH-CHRISTIAN RELATIONS IN WHICH I DISCUSS THE RISE OF ANTI-JUDAISM IN THE EARLY CHURCH, IN CLUDING THIS BIT ON MELITO OF SARDIS. I THOUGHT IT MIGHT BE WORTH POSTING HERE. ******************************************************************************************************************** Melito was a bishop of the city of Sardis in Asia Mino in the mid to late second century. Today he is best known for a sermon he wrote that lambasts the Jews for the role they played in the death of Jesus. In it we find the first instance of a Christian author claiming that since the Jews killed Jesus, and since Jesus was God, the Jews are guilty of deicide – the murder of God. This charge was used, of course, to justify all sorts of hateful acts of violence against Jews over the centuries. In part, the rhetorical eloquence with which the charge was sometimes leveled has contributed ot the emotional reaction that it produced. Consider Melito’s [...]

BDEhrman2018-01-01T01:33:26-05:00December 2nd, 2012|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, History of Christianity (100-300CE), Proto-Orthodox Writers, Public Forum|

The SBL Meeting

I’m just back from the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting, which took place, this year, in Chicago. This is a professional meeting that always occurs the week before Thanksgiving, where professors of biblical studies from around the country (and less-so, around the world) come together for about four days to give and hear academic papers on an enormous range of topics related to biblical studies. Maybe 5000 or 6000 of them/us? The vast majority of people in that camp are themselves religiously committed in one way or the other (mainly Christian, fewer Jews); some of us are not believers but are simply interested in the Bible for historical, cultural, or literary reasons – although even most of us in that boat started out in our academic lives as believers. I read two papers at the conference. One was actually at a meeting going on in conjunction with it, rather than part of it, the Biblical Archaeology Society Fest – where they bring in twenty scholars, most of the archaeologists, to discuss with the lay [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-08T14:46:44-04:00November 21st, 2012|History of Biblical Scholarship, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

It Has Arrived! Forgery and Counterforgery in Early Christian Polemics.

I have rarely – ever? – been so pleased with the appearance of a publication in my life. Last night when I got home from running some errands, a box was waiting for me, from Oxford University Press. It had my ten author’s copies of Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics. I’m very excited about it, like a kid who has just gotten a fantastic present. In my opinion, this is the best book I’ve ever written, years in the making. As I have said before on this blog, it is written for scholars, although a number of people have commented that it seems, from the quotations I’ve given, to be accessible to laypeople as well (normal people, as opposed to abnormal scholars). I’ll say a bit more about it in the next post, for now, I thought I would simply give you a taste, by quoting the very first, opening, paragraphs (without the footnotes): *********************************************************************************************************************** Arguably the most distinctive feature of the early Christian literature is the degree [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-11T15:37:29-04:00November 13th, 2012|Book Discussions, Forgery in Antiquity, Public Forum|

The Sense of an Ending

I am today taking executive privilege and allowing myself a hiatus in my discussions of various things academic in this post. I still have several posts I want to make about editing the edition of the apostolic fathers – especially about translating them – and I want to get back to what I was writing about before all that, as I do more and more reading of relevance to the topic of belief in Jesus’ resurrection. And I want to talk about the two book ideas that I have been floating to my publisher. But all that can wait. I want to talk about an amazing novel I just finished. So, as background information that you didn’t ask for. This past New Years I made some resolutions and oddly enough, in a rare event of history, I’ve actually been keeping them. I vowed to lose 15 pounds (I did, and still want to lose 5 more; but it ain’t easy!) (my daughter, years ago, suggested that if I wanted to lose my beer gut I [...]

BDEhrman2018-01-01T01:57:16-05:00November 1st, 2012|Book Discussions, Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations|

Blog Preferences

To: Members of the CIA. And potential members of the CIA. And anyone else who wants to be involved. From: The Director of the CIA Re: Overt operations OK, so here’s the deal. A couple of weeks ago I published a post indicating how we were doing now just over five months into this blog. A number of you commented about the number of posts that I’m doing, many of you (not all) indicating that it seemed like a lot, and some (not all) suggesting that fewer might be better. That got me thinking. I wonder if some people are turned off by the blog because there is simply too much information on it, and it’s a drag feeling like one has to plow through it all. That, obviously, would be counterproductive for what I want to achieve (which is maximum subscribers, to raise as much money for charity as I can). And so it occurred to me: maybe I should simply ask you, the readers, what you would prefer. So this is a kind [...]

BDEhrman2012-10-01T03:31:17-04:00October 1st, 2012|Public Forum|

On the Blog Itself

I am taking a moment out from a hectic life (who *doesn’t* have a hectic life?!?) to think a bit about the blog, and how it is going. Here are just a few reflections. We got it up and running at the beginning of April, so we have been at it now for just over five months. My goals at the outset were to disseminate knowledge about the New Testament and early Christianity as much as was within my abilities, and to raise money for charities dealing with hunger and homelessness. As I’ve stated frankly before, it was the charity that drove the idea at the outset, and that keeps me going now as we are well into things. As much as I enjoy answering questions and dealing with hard (and not so hard) historical and literary issues involving early Christianity and its literature, if it weren’t for the charity angle, I simply wouldn’t be doing this. It’s too much work! In terms of the work, I think I’ve been averaging about 6 posts [...]

BDEhrman2012-09-16T21:21:00-04:00September 16th, 2012|Public Forum|

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