Reflections and Ruminations Archives - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Bart’s personal comments and reflections.

How Athens Made Me Rethink….
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How Athens Made Me Rethink….

Reflections and Ruminations, Spread of Christianity

How Athens Made Me Rethink….

I am in Athens just now, heading out on a tour giving lectures on ancient Greek philosophers in relation to the teachings of Jesus and Paul. I came over a couple of days before the tour to spend some time looking around on my own, and had a lovely afternoon at the fantastic Acropolis Museum. Every time I come to Athens I think of my first time here, for several reasons, but one in particular. It was when I was struck by a realization about the relationship of the highly cultured, sophisticated Greek world and the rise of earliest Christianity, a realization that led to my book The Triumph of Christianity. In many ways it was a sad realization. I talk about it in the Afterword of the book. This is what I said there. ****************************** The idea for this book struck me twenty years ago during my first trip to Athens. For my trip I was particularly keen to explore the archaeological wonders of the city, and most especially the Agora and the Acropolis. In [...]

BDEhrman2025-05-19T10:59:04-04:00May 20th, 2025|Reflections and Ruminations, Spread of Christianity|

Two Fundamental Questions: How Do You Date a Manuscript and How Do you Know the Meaning of a Word?

Among the interesting questions I've received recently from blog readers, two strike me as especially key for understanding how scholars make the claims they do; one of the questions challenges whether I have grounds to make one of the claims I do! Good questions. Some grounds (say, of coffee) are better than others. Here are the questions and my responses. ****************************** QUESTION What is the process to assign a year to a text? For example, when you say that the earliest text of Matthew that we still have comes from 375 CE where do you get that date? Do the authors of the texts write the year? Thanks! RESPONSE: I don’t think you are asking when the text of Matthew itself was written (which was 80=85 or so) but when this particular manuscript (the earliest one that contains Matthew) was produced. And so that’s what I will answer. There is a discipline called palaeography (literally "ancient writing) that dates manuscripts, mainly on the basis of handwriting analysis. Since everything in antiquity was [...]

BDEhrman2025-03-25T12:29:41-04:00April 2nd, 2025|New Testament Manuscripts, Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

The Flukes of Life: How I Almost Never Became a Professor

This is now my 40th year of teaching at a university, 36 of the years at UNC Chapel Hill and 4 before that at Rutgers as a 28 year old. It very nearly didn't happen at all. Life is so strange. I was on the job market while I was writing my dissertation.. And even though there were job openings, I couldn’t get an interview to save my soul. Part of the problem was that my PhD was from a theological seminary, and a lot of the jobs were at secular institutions – state universities, private colleges, and the like. Most places simply don’t want to take a chance on someone who has been trained in a theological environment. Especially someone like me at the time. I had never set foot in a secular setting since high school! Starting when I was 17, I was at Moody Bible Institute (3 years), (Christian evangelical) Wheaton College (2 years), and then (Presbyterian ministerial training ground) Princeton Theological Seminary (7 years). Yikes! Even theological schools and Christian colleges [...]

BDEhrman2025-01-22T07:13:03-05:00January 22nd, 2025|Reflections and Ruminations|

Rambling Meditations on What It Means to Exist…. What Do You Think?

I sometimes feel like a pestiferous terrier who goes after someone’s ankles and just won’t stop. There are some issues (among the “Big Questions”) that I repeatedly come back to and just can’t let drop. I suppose that’s because they seem both really important and completely incapable of being figured out. Hence my occasional return to them on the blog. I’ve mentioned before that I have a daily meditation practice, which does wonders for my stress levels and mental/emotional/psychological well-being, though it does sometimes leave me puzzled.. This morning I did one of those “go deep into your mind” sessions where you just dig deep into your conscience and try to understand who/what you are as a living being. As often happens when I do that, I once more again came up against the issue of what “I” can possibly be. I feel like “I” am somehow located in my brain. And I don’t think that “I” will exist once my brain (along with the rest of my body) dies, since it’s quite [...]

BDEhrman2025-01-08T14:27:00-05:00January 15th, 2025|Reflections and Ruminations|

Did Jesus Come to Bring Peace?

Was Jesus’ birth meant to bring peace into the world? One of my favorite Christmas carols is Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,[i] which includes among its memorable lines, “Hail the heaven-born Prince of Peace, Hail the Sun of Righteousness.” The carol is celebrating the announcement of Jesus’ birth to the shepherds “in the fields by night” in Luke 2: 13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, 14 “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!” Without saying it, Luke is telling his readers that the birth of Jesus was a fulfillment of prophecy. Throughout Luke’s account of Jesus he alludes to prophecies of Scripture without drawing specific attention to them (unlike Matthew, who is constantly saying that such and such happened “in order to fulfill what the prophet said….”). In this case he is making a clear allusion to Isaiah chapter 9, more familiar to most people today from Handel’s Messiah: 1 The people who walked [...]

BDEhrman2024-12-28T11:25:50-05:00December 30th, 2024|Reflections and Ruminations|

Being Consistently Critical (In the Good Sense)

In my previous post I discussed the difference between approaching the Bible theologically and using it historically. It is often hard to explain to people to that doing "critical" scholarship does not mean being a pain in the neck by criticizing everything. It means using "critical judgment" in order to to establish what is true. That's another way of simply saying that you don't accept everything you hear or read, but evaluate it to see if it's right or not. My sense is that most people exercise critical judgment about something things and not other things -- for example, these days in particular, when they believe flippin' everything they hear from one news source but reject everything they hear from another. (From whatever side of the social/political spectrum). But I'm not here to talk politics (thank god): I'm interested for now in history. How do we know that a written account or oral report of something that happened in the past actually happened? Or happened in the way it was related? We [...]

BDEhrman2024-12-25T10:43:23-05:00December 28th, 2024|Canonical Gospels, Reflections and Ruminations|

How to be Content with Life Even When It’s Rotten: The Stoic View
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How to be Content with Life Even When It’s Rotten: The Stoic View

Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, Reflections and Ruminations

How to be Content with Life Even When It’s Rotten: The Stoic View

How can you be satisfied and content with life? Even when it seems rotten on the whole? With this post I conclude my thread on the ancient Stoic view of life and how to live it. Thus, Stoics understood that the way to live – and to live with eudaimonia (recall: that means a kind of “happiness,” in the sense of a full satisfaction and contentment about how one’s life) – was to focus on personal choice, freedom, and avoidance, choosing not to be disturbed by things we cannot control, even if everyone around us thinks that hardship, pain, and suffering create ultimate misery. They don’t. Or at least they don’t need to. In the end, they are not the things that matter. We need to train ourselves to be “indifferent” to them. And indifference cuts both ways – we should not be wrought by things we can’t avoid and we should not be desperate to obtain what we don’t have. One of the key terms among Stoics was adiaphora, literally “things that make no [...]

BDEhrman2024-11-20T16:46:50-05:00November 26th, 2024|Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, Reflections and Ruminations|

How Not To Be Bothered When Bad Things Happen: The Stoics

Here I continue trying to explain the ancient philosophy of Stoicism, and to show how it related to their views of ethics – especially with respect to questions of altruism. It is a little difficult for many moderns to get their minds around the Stoic idea that “reason” is a divine quality that infuses the world; it is possibly even harder to understand how this divine quality relates to the gods. Do they “have” it in greater quantity than us? Is Reason itself actually a distinct divine being of some kind? The problem is exacerbated by the Stoic writings themselves, since often an author, say Epictetus, will speak of “Reason” and sometimes of “Zeus” (the head of the gods) and sometimes of the “gods” -- and in each instance appear to be referring to the same thing. The “Reason/Logos” that infuses the world can be thought of as the sensibility of the world; it can be “the reason” something is or happens as it does; it can be “human reason”; and it can be personalized [...]

BDEhrman2024-11-15T16:07:54-05:00November 24th, 2024|Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, Reflections and Ruminations|

Isn’t It Good Enough to Help Family, Friends, and Community?

I’ve been discussing Aristotle (really, it’s interesting!) and what he thought it took to be “happy” – not the giddy fleeting emotion but have a satisfying sense of contentment and fulfillment in life. For him, it means having the most “excellent” life you can and that requires being the most “excellent” person you can and that means having full amounts of the various kinds of human “excellences.” In English translations of Aristotle, "excellences" are usually rendered "virtues" (that's because our English equivalent of the Greek word he uses comes to us from Latin rather than the Greek, and the word "VIR" in Latin means "man." The excellences of a VIR are his VIRtues). For Aristotle, “virtues” require a good life in community with others. So the virtues involved how to make life good in the socio-political context one inhabits, which for Aristotle was the “polis” – the Greek term for the city (since there were not empires or national governments connected with Greece; it was ruled city states). And that means that virtues [...]

BDEhrman2024-11-15T16:38:22-05:00November 20th, 2024|Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, Reflections and Ruminations|

How Can We Be Happy? An Age-Old Question.

In my previous post I began explaining why I’m calling the teachings of Jesus the “origins of altruism.” Aren’t people naturally altruistic to some extent? Didn’t ancient Greek (and then Roman) cultures – the context in which Christianity emerged -- understand how we ought to behave to others, and insist people needed to be “good to others”? I started to answer by discussing Aristotle (don’t worry, it’s not boring), and his point (if you have trouble buying this, read the post!) that what people *ultimately* want is not good friends and family, wealth, meaningful employment, material possessions, or a really good blog; in the end, all of these things are simply means to our ultimate desire, to be “happy.” If Aristotle is right on this point (I happen to think he is), the clear implication is that we need, each of us, to figure out how we should live in the world, what we should do, and how we should be in order to attain that state of “happiness.” Not in the simplistic, surface sense [...]

BDEhrman2024-11-21T12:08:47-05:00November 19th, 2024|Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, Reflections and Ruminations|

What Do You Really Want in Life? And How is that Related to Altruism?

Some readers have wondered why I’m calling my book “The Origins of Altruism: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West.” (At least I’m calling it that at this point). Are you saying Jesus invented altruism? What?? Hasn’t every ethical teacher from the very beginning stressed that we have to balance “what we want” with “what would be good for another”? And isn’t that always part of religion: behaving well toward others as a kind of divine mandate? Answer: well, yes and no. This will take a few posts to explain. As it turns out, and to the surprise of many moderns, ethics did not play a large role in ancient pagan religions. Worshiping the gods normally did not involve any public recognition of bad social behavior or feelings of guilt for mistreating another with requests for forgiveness. If someone had neglected the god, then apology or confession might be in order; but the gods were not focused on how humans treated one another, not all that concerned about whether you [...]

BDEhrman2024-11-14T10:46:56-05:00November 17th, 2024|Greco-Roman Religions and Culture, Reflections and Ruminations|

Brief Reflections on Time and the Meaning of Life. What Do You Think?

For a long time I’ve thought a lot about time. Usually about how I don’t have enough of it, how I wish I had more of it, how I can use what I have most efficiently, how I can possibly get done what I have to do and … And, over the past couple of years, I’ve begun to think more about how all that (on one level) is nonsense and just creates anxiety and stress. My change began when someone (urgently) recommended me to read Paul Loomans' book Time Surfing (easily available to purchase online). I wasn’t sure about it at first, just lookin’ at the cover. But oh my god. I read it three times and it started a revolution in my brain, that continues and has made the most enormous difference, not so much in how I fill my days, hours, and minutes (in my case, time-obsessive guy that I am, and seconds…) but about my emotional approach and attitude toward what I do and the time I have to do it. [...]

BDEhrman2024-11-11T11:13:28-05:00November 16th, 2024|Reflections and Ruminations|

How Do We Explain Human Moral Codes: So Similar Yet So Different?

Here is another selection from the draft of my book, which, at this still early point, I am calling The Origins of Altruism: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West. This bit is the introduction to my chapter 6, which deals with how the early Christians began to change and soften Jesus' ethical teaching soon after his death.I'm calling the chapter: "Transforming the Ethics of Jesus: Moral Discourse in Early Christianity.' Let me know what you think. ****************************** Many codes of human ethics are widely shared across time periods and cultures and yet so many others are surprisingly disparate. That is hard to explain if we were all granted our moral compass from a power on high, but it makes perfect sense given evolutionary and social pressures. Our overarching “code” has developed over millions of years of evolution; but significant variations occur because humans have evolved in myriad different environments and cultures. The basic code makes sense to nearly all of us because in order to survive in virtually every [...]

BDEhrman2024-11-11T11:10:14-05:00November 14th, 2024|Reflections and Ruminations|

Why CAN’T the Hard Problems Have Simple Answers?
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Why CAN’T the Hard Problems Have Simple Answers?

Reflections and Ruminations

Why CAN’T the Hard Problems Have Simple Answers?

The Bible is not an answer machine to all your questions (despite what billboards on US I-40 tell me); many of our modern questions are not addressed in the Bible (most of them, in fact: think of the issues people are each others' throats about half the time in our country); the Bible often gives a range of answers to various issues; sometimes these contradict one another; and sometimes they simply don't make any sense in our modern context (if you think they do, then look through your closet to see if you have any clothing made out of more then one fabric). These are some of the issues I address toward the tail end of my Introduction in my book God's Problem (HarperOne, 2008), excerpted here. ****************************** It is important, I think, to realize that the Bible has a wide range of answers to the problem of suffering because this realization reveals the problem of thinking that the Bible has one simple answer to every issue. Many people in our world take a smorgasbord approach [...]

BDEhrman2024-10-15T16:43:56-04:00October 22nd, 2024|Reflections and Ruminations|

Suffering. Is It Really Worth Talking About? Doesn’t the Bible Give the Right Answer?

People react lots of different ways when trying to deal with the problem of how there can be so much suffering in a world that is said to be controlled by the almighty God who loves people and wants the best for them. I decided to write my book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Address our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer (HarperOne, 2008) both because many people don’t realize how many different answers the Bible itself gives (some of them at odds about it) and also because in my judgment lots and lots of people (most?) simply don’t take it seriously enough. Here's how I talk about why I think it matters and my approach to it, another excerpt from the book itself. (Recall: the book was published in 2008, so 16 years ago now). ****************************** Based on my experience with the class, I decided at the end of the term that I wanted to write a book about it, a study of suffering and biblical responses to it. [...]

BDEhrman2024-10-14T16:00:05-04:00October 20th, 2024|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Doesn’t “Free Will” Explain Suffering?

When teaching undergraduate students about the problem of suffering, I have sometimes found it hard to explain to them why it is a “problem” for those who believe in God. Many people do not find it an insurmountable problem; many others do. My concern is far less where someone lines up on that issue than on that they realize it is indeed a huge issue that should not be ignored or swept under a rug. It took a while for some of my students at Rutgers to see the problem years ago when I was teaching about it, as I mentioned in my last post. I continue my reflections here. Again, this is excerpted from my book God’s Problem (HarperOne, 2008), edited a bit. ****************************** Before the semester was over, I think my students got the point. Most of them did learn to grapple with the problem. At the beginning of the course, many of them had thought that whatever problem there was with suffering could be fairly easily solved. The most popular [...]

BDEhrman2024-10-14T15:55:33-04:00October 19th, 2024|Reflections and Ruminations|

The Problem of Suffering? So What’s the Problem?

The “problem of suffering” is especially a problem in the monotheistic religions. In ancient Greek and Roman religions, with their many, many gods, it wasn’t an intellectual puzzle. If there’s suffering, it’s because some or all of the gods are ticked off and out to get you. There are some bad ones up there as well as good ones. Just the way it is. But if there’s only one God, why is there suffering? Many people have very simply solutions and they don’t see a problem. But there is a problem. It just has to be explained. Here I continue by showing why it’s a problem and to motivate some thinking by trying to explain how deep thinkers have expressed the problem and tried to address it. Again, this is excerpted from my book God’s Problem (HarperOne, 2008). Just before this excerpt I was explaining my first time teaching about the issue in a class I did at Rutgers in the mid 1980s. ****************************** For the class I had students do a lot [...]

BDEhrman2024-10-11T12:29:51-04:00October 17th, 2024|Book Discussions, Reflections and Ruminations|

Can We Get Rid of Our Presuppositions?

Here's a set of questions I get asked a lot, expressed here with particular clarity by someone on the blog a while back. QUESTION: What are presuppositions? Why do we all have them? And how do we make sure we have the right ones, or at least good ones. Having come out of Fundamentalist circles I heard so much about “presuppositions”, “worldviews”, “presuppositional apologetics” and so on. Seems the argument goes “Well, we all have presuppositions. No one is free of them. Therefore it is just as valid to come to historical and scientific issues with the presupposition that the claims are all true. Just as unbelievers come to the evidence with the presuppositions that there are no such things as miracles.” And this is my... RESPONSE: This is a huge question (and a very important one), and requires a long answer. I can’t answer it any better than I already tried to do in my book How Jesus Became God. This is what I say there, in response to a particular issue, [...]

BDEhrman2024-09-16T12:35:08-04:00September 19th, 2024|Reader’s Questions, Reflections and Ruminations|

How Strikingly Few Early Churches Were There? How Amazingly Many Christian Letters?

In his important and stimulating article, “Christian Number and Its Implications,” Roman historian Keith Hopkins next begins to think about the implications about the size of the Christian church at different periods. One point to emphasize is that there was not simply one church. There were lots of churches in lots of places, and it is a myth to think that they were all one big cohesive bunch. On the contrary, they were often (as we see in our records) often at odds with each other. But even more than that, even within one city – if it was large enough (think Rome or Antioch for example) there would have been more than one church. And why? Because there would have been too many people to meet in one place. The first time we have any evidence of a church “building” – that is, what we today normally think of as a church (the Baptist church on the corner; the Methodist church up the street) – is not until the middle of the third Christian [...]

BDEhrman2024-08-30T17:27:28-04:00September 5th, 2024|Public Forum, Reflections and Ruminations, Spread of Christianity|

Losing Your Religion: Today and in Antiquity

Many of us have agonized over leaving the faith we held dear and clung on to for long periods of our life. Most of us have never thought about what it would have been like for ancient peoples to leave *their* religions, not to move to agnosticism or atheism, but because a *different* religion was taking over. That is part of what I address in my book The Triumph of Christianity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017). I have been providing posts summarizing the issues I address in my various popular books. I'll continue to do that now with Triumph. This is how I begin the book, not in a place one might expect! But with one of the great poets of doubt in modernity... ****************************** In my junior year of college I took a course in English literature that made me understand for the first time how painful it can be to question your faith. The course introduced me to poets of the nineteenth century who were struggling with religion. Even though I was [...]

BDEhrman2024-08-18T16:11:58-04:00August 22nd, 2024|Bart’s Biography, Reflections and Ruminations|

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