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What Is The Meaning of Life? The Book of Ecclesiastes
In my previous post I pointed to the “Wisdom” literature of the Old Testament (usually said to comprise Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes), suggesting that this is a good time for all of us to ingest some wisdom from those who went before. The book of Ecclesiastes has long been my favorite in the Old Testament. It seems so modern in so many ways. Even though written over 2000 years ago, it considers ageless questions about what the *point* of it all is. If you don’t know it, it’s worth reading; it won’t take long. If you do know it, it’s worth reading again. To provide some orientation to the overall theme of the book, here is what I say about it in my book The Bible: A Historical and Literary Introduction, (I begin with the final paragraph from the last post) ******************************************************************** Of the Wisdom books found in the Hebrew Bible, one, the book of Proverbs may be considered a representative of what we might call “positive wisdom.” This is the more typical form of […]
April 19, 2020
Is There Any Point To Life? More on Ecclesiastes
I have been talking about the distinctive views of the book of Ecclesiastes, one of the real gems of the Hebrew Bible, a book that refuses to accept easy answers or blithe truisms about life, but faces reality head on. No matter what we do or how we try to explain it away, life is short. Very very short. The author of course had no conception of what we know now about time in relation to lifespan. What would he say if he knew that the world (what we would call the universe — something about which also he had no knowledge) was not a few thousand years old but 13.8 billion? My guess is that he would say the same thing he already does, but possibly with a few more explanation points. Given how incredibly brief our life is, even if we live to “old” age — what’s the point of it? Is there a point? I think there is. And I find not just value but also hope in his reflections. Here is […]
April 20, 2020
Do We NEED to Suffer? The Argument from Tectonic Plates
I decided to take a stroll down memory lane and look at posts I made at the beginning of the blog, and came upon this one, made almost exactly eight years ago today. Since I’ve been talking about Ecclesiastes and the meaning of life, and, consequently, the meaning of suffering, it is particularly relevant, now more than ever in recent history. It’s ultimately about whether humans *have* to suffer if God created the world and life in it. And weirdly, it involves a connection between Dinesh D’Souza and tectonic plates. ******************************************************************* I have always found it interesting that when I talk about how there can be suffering in the world if there is a good God who is in charge of it, someone will tell me that it is all because of “free will.” I think most of us – not Sam Harris, of course, or some others, but most of us – think that there is such a thing as free will, that our actions are not completely determined for us but to some […]
April 21, 2020
Life after Death in the Bible and Beyond: Webinar with Oxford Press
On April 20, 2020, I did a webinar for Oxford University Press. I have published three textbooks with Oxford and the textbook division has started hosting these events, principally for college and university professors and their students, but anyone is welcome to sign up and join in. When they asked me if I’d be interested, I thought it sounded like a great idea; and when they asked what I’d like to do it on, I told them the afterlife. Of course! It’s what I’ve been thinking about and doing all my research on for the last four years or so — not what *really* happens in the afterlife (for that I would need more experience, and I’m not eager to have it at this stage of existence, since, well, it will be my last experience and I won’t be able to write about it — but about where the ideas of the afterlife came from, especially those that have been prevalent for most of the past 2000 years. They entitled the event “Life after Death […]
Tags: Abyss, afterlife, Bart Ehrman, Christianity, Damnation, Everlasting Life, Gehenna, Hades, heaven, Heaven and Hell, hell, Immortality, Life after Death, Oxford University Press, Paradise, Perdition, Tophet, Underworld
May 3, 2020
Blog-Related Suggestions for Isolation
There is a lot of good advice out there about how not just to handle isolation but how to take advantage of it, to make some parts of your life better rather than worse. But it has occurred to me: people on this blog have some things in common, interests that we share. And I wonder if we can give some suggestions to each other about how blog-related interests can contribute to our mutual and individual well-being while we still plow through this crisis. So after giving a couple of suggestions, I’ll be asking you if you have one or two ideas to share with others. Let me begin by saying that just about everything the sages among us are saying is absolutely right, when it comes to *general* or even *universal* advice. At least it’s all working well for me. I am exercising *more* not less, and have developed a very nice exercise regime that I follow every day. That not only helps me get my mind off my woes and, especially, my woes […]
April 24, 2020
Misquoting Misquoting Jesus
Misquoting Jesus is my most widely read book. And I continue to be a bit amazed and dismayed at how widely it is misunderstood. The book was meant to deal with one very specific issue connected with the New Testament, and people who have read it – let alone the people who have not – often assume it’s about some *other* issue, or rather, some other very broad issue, normally something that it is decidedly not about. One of the problems is that people who are specialists in a field make very fine distinctions that seem absolutely OBVIOUS to them, when the distinctions are very fuzzy indeed to anyone who is an outsider. It’s true of every field of expertise. When a scholar of medieval English literature whom I know very well is at a cocktail party with non-academics, she will frequently talk to people who, to keep the conversation going, ask about anything from the life of Charlemagne to, say, Beowulf, on the assumption that those are what her research is about. Uh, no. […]
April 26, 2020
What I Do Argue in Misquoting Jesus
In my previous post I pointed out that lots of people — friends and foes — misconstrue what I say in Misquoting Jesus. It’s a particular problem with people who want to attack my views, often without seeing what I actually say. Sometimes when someone tells me what they object to in my book I ask them if they’ve read it. “Well, no, but I heard about it.” Sigh…. Even scholars — including scholars I’m friends with — have said things about my views that are absolutely not true (e.g., a common one, that I became an agnostic once I realized how many differences there were among the manuscripts of the NT. Good grief. Where do they get such ideas from?? I knew about massive differences in the manuscripts when I was a *fundamentalist*!!) Anyway, what do I talk about in the book, and why have people found it objectionable? Here are some reflections I had on the issues when I thought about them some years ago. ********************************************** One of the most interesting things in […]
April 28, 2020
Reading the New Testament Letters in CONTEXT
OK, we return now to some of the books in the New Testament attributed to “John.” I have talked at some length about the Gospel of John and the community that appears to lie behind it. I now move to the three epistles of John, found among the “catholic” or “general” epistles near the end of the New Testament. (When I was at Princeton Seminary, one day I went into the men’s room and over the three urinals, in sequence, someone had written, as graffiti, 1 John; 2 John; 3 John. I guess it was a seminary joke….). All of this is in preparation for a series of blog posts being written for us by my colleague Hugo Mendez, in which he will argue *against* the idea of a Johannine community. (!) Before talking directly about these three letters, I need to explain one of the most common ways scholars analyze epistolary literature in the NT (i.e. the books that started out as actual *letters* — written by a Christian author to a community or […]
What Are The Epistles of John?
I can now describe and explain the letters of 1, 2, and 3 John. 1 John has always been one of my favorite books of the New Testament, and only takes a few minutes to read; the final two are incredibly short, less than a page each. Think about reading them! The author never gives us his name. But because the books aer so similar in theme and writing style to the Fourth Gospel – whose author from antiquity was thought to be Jesus’ disciple John — these letters were also assigned to him. Critical scholars today almost entirely think that the author was not the *same* person as the author of the Gospel, and was almost certainly not John the Son of Zebedee. he probably was, though, an author living in the same community, at a later time, with a similar point of view. Here is how I explain what these letters are by situating them in a historical context in light of what was happening in the author’s community. Again, this is taken […]
April 29, 2020
The Johannine Letters in Sum
This will be the final post in my thread on the Gospel and Letters of John. Here I will reflect further on what we can about the epistles and the context out of which they emerged. If you want to read more, check out my chapter in The New Testament: A Historical Introduction…. In that chapter I explain how views similar to those found in these Johannine writings eventually contributed to what we now call Gnosticism. (That, of course, is a whole *other* story.) As always, at the end of the chapter in my book, I give suggestions for further reading. ******************************************************** At this stage you may have recognized one of the difficulties of this kind of contextual analysis [i.e. that I explained in the previous chapter] It is very hard for the historian to know for a fact that the Johannine secessionists actually taught that it was unimportant to love one another and to keep God’s commandments. The problem is that the only source we have for the secessionists’ views is the author of […]
May 1, 2020
Take A Final Exam on the New Testament!
The semester is over at my university, but since I’m on leave, it hasn’t affected me much. But I was thinking about it this morning — final exams, grading, wrapping up the term — and I remembered that some years ago on the blog I posted the final exam I gave to my Introduction to the New Testament course, to see how you’d do! I thought it would be fun and interesting to repost it. Check it out. Can you nail it? So, classes are officially over here at UNC, and we are in the Final Exam period. Today I gave my final for the Introduction to the New Testament class. As some of you may recall, back in January 2014 I posted on the blog the pop quiz I give the first day of class for this course. It is here, in case you’re interested: https://ehrmanblog.org/new-testament-pop-quiz/ When I give this quiz on the first day, I tell the students that even if they bomb it (which most of them do), it’s nothing […]
Tags: final exam, introduction to the New Testament, pedagogy
May 4, 2020
Live Event on Wednesday Evening, May 6!
Join us for the third in a fascinating six-week series of virtual “book club” discussions! This week join NHC president Robert Newman and scholar Bart D. Ehrman to discuss Ehrman’s book, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife Wednesday, May 6, 2020 at 7:00 pm ET Facebook Live _________________________________________________________________ Where do our ideas about heaven and hell come from, and why do they endure? _________________________________________________________________ In clear and compelling terms, Bart D. Ehrman recounts the long history of the afterlife, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the writings of Augustine, focusing especially on the teachings of Jesus and his early followers. He discusses ancient guided tours of heaven and hell, in which a living person observes the sublime blessings of heaven for those who are saved and the horrifying torments of hell for the damned. As a historian, Ehrman obviously cannot provide a definitive answer to the question of what happens after death, but by helping us reflect on where our ideas of the afterlife come from, he assures us that even if there […]
May 5, 2020
WAS there a Community behind the Gospel and Letters of John? Guest Post by Hugo Mendez
Here we begin a series of posts written by my colleague at UNC, Hugo Mendez. Hugo has had an intriguing and impressive career. He did an MA in Religion at University of Georgia, but then his PhD was in Linguistics, also at Georgia. He went from there onto a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Yale and “retooled” to become a New Testament scholar through some, well, incredibly intense study. He came to UNC as a postdoctoral fellow in 2016 for two years, after which we were fortunate to hire him as an assistant professor on tenure track. Hugo’s skills are remarkably wide-ranging. He knows far more ancient languages than I do (on his CV he lists: Indo-European: Ancient Greek, Latin, Classical Armenian, Gothic, Old Church Slavic, Sanskrit (Classical, Vedic). Aramaic (Biblical Aramaic, Classical Syriac), Classical Hebrew, and Akkadian. Really. OK then. If you’re interested in checking out his C.V. (hey, is this guy qualified? J ), it is here: https://religion.unc.edu/files/2020/05/CV_2020_Mendez_abbr.pdf Hugo has just started his publishing career, and is doing so with a bang. One of […]
Were the Gospels Generally Written for “Communities” of Christians: Guest Post by Hugo Mendez
Here now is Hugo Mendez’s second post in his thread (started yesterday, if you haven’t seen it yet), challenging whether the writings of John all emerge from a specific “community,” as I argued in my previous thread. In this post he points out how scholars have called into question whether the idea of “communities” is helpful at all for understanding the early Gospels. Hugo will be happy to address your questions! Just post yours as a comment to the post. *************************************************************** Challenges to the Idea of “Gospel Communities” As I noted last time, my most recent article questions the existence of the Johannine Community. There’s an early tendency when some hear of my project to confuse it with some other recent attempts to challenge the idea of “gospel communities.” Before discussing the terms of my own proposal, then, I’d like to catch you all up to speed with the current state of that debate over “communities” and where I “fit” into this discussion Today, New Testament scholars seem to fall into one of roughly three […]
May 6, 2020
Readers Mailbag: Does Isaiah 53 Predict the Death and Resurrection of Jesus?
I would like to get back into the practice of devoting one post a week to answering questions raised by blog members. I have a fairly long list of good questions I haven’t been able to get to, so why not just go through them week by week? If you have any pressing questions that are particularly intriguing or perplexing for you about the NT or early Christianity or any related topic, let me know as a comment on a post (any post will do, whether relevant or not). If it’s not something I can address or that I can answer in a line or two, I’ll let you know. Otherwise, I can add it to the list! At the top of my current list is the following. QUESTION: I wonder if you could talk about Isaiah 53 which I think is also a later insert by the scribes trying to justify what they had done to Jesus. RESPONSE: Ah, now *this* is a passage that students bring up every time I teach […]
May 8, 2020
A Powerful Film and Some Raw Emotions
As a rule I don’t watch a lot of films, but during the crisis Sarah and I have reinstated our weekly “movie night,” and on Friday we saw Ethan Hawke’s First Reformed. Have you seen it? I was very reluctant to do so for personal reasons. I thought it would hit to close to home. Oh boy was I right. I’ve always loved Ethan Hawke, from Dead Poet’s Society onward. But this one was a bit hard. The movie itself is brilliant, extremely layered and thoughtful. Hawke plays the role of Rev. Toller, the pastor of a small, historic, but failing church in upstate New York. But he is losing his faith and trying to makes sense of his religion, his world, and the meaning of life. The movie doesn’t hit you over the head with the options, but if you think about what you’ve just seen carefully enough, they are there. The backdrop to the story is that Rev. Toller is on his own, lives by himself, in a rectory connected with the church, […]
May 10, 2020
Was There One Author Behind the Four Johannine Writings? A Community? Guest Post by Hugo Mendez
We continue now with the third of Hugo Mendez’s guest posts on the “community” allegedly behind the Gospel of John, 1, 2, and 3 John. Here he shows why most critical scholars do NOT think (as most other interested human beings on the planet do!) that all four were written by the same person (let alone Jesus’ disciple, John the Son of Zebedee), and why they have argued that instead they all come from like-minded authors from the same community. But when he gets to the end he indicates why there is a flaw in this reasoning. This post is an excellent example of solid scholarship with an unexpected ZINGER at the end! Hugo will be happy to respond to your comments, and he has certainly set up the next post. (If you have time, go ahead and read the three letters; they are very short and it’s a fast read. But they have an importance far beyond what you might expect from their size) Why Scholars Haven’t Given Up on the Johannine Community (Yet) […]
May 11, 2020
Are the Gospel and Epistles of John *Forgeries*?? Guest Post by Hugo Mendez
Whoa! Forgeries? That seems a bit extreme! Right? Forgeries??? Hugo Mendez continues his discussion, and I have to say, it’s pretty convincing. He and I may disagree on a couple of things about the Gospel of John — I haven’t decided yet 🙂 — but on the epistles I’m gettin’ there and am open to persuasion on the entire case. What do you think? The hardest part for most of us is preventing the knee that is jerking from controlling our brain that is judging. So read what he has to say, ponder it, and see what you think — no matter how out of control the knee is. And if you see flaws in what he’s saying, free to tell him (and me, and everyone else!) why. Here’s his fourth post. ***************************************************** The Johannine Texts as Literary Forgeries The primary reason why scholars believe a “Johannine community” once existed is that we possess not only a Johannine Gospel (John) but also three Johannine Epistles/Letters (1, 2, and 3 John). Those letters seem to actually […]
May 12, 2020
Getting a PhD in New Testament Studies
I was breezing through ancient blog posts this morning and came across this one from exactly eight years ago. It involves a question I get a lot (got it last week!), from people interested in doing graduate work in the field of New Testament or early Christianity. What is it like and what does it take? Here is what I said back then, which is pretty much what I would still say today! **************************************** I sometimes get asked what it takes to become a professional scholar in the field of New Testament/early Christian studies. The answer, in short, is the same as for any academic discipline. It takes years of intense training. My own training in the field of New Testament studies was nothing at all unusual, but rather was fairly typical for someone in the field. What is unusual is that I knew that I wanted to pursue this kind of study already when I was in college. I started taking courses in New Testament as a 17-year old. For my foreign language requirement […]
May 13, 2020
Did Paul Know that Judas Betrayed Jesus? Readers’ Mailbag!
QUESTION: Do you think that Paul, without naming him, is referring to Judas in 1 Corinthians 11:23-24? (The verse in the NRSV: “For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”) RESPONSE: Ah, it’s a great question. Paul never explicitly mentions Judas Iscariot or indicates that Jesus was betrayed by one of his own disciples. But couldn’t this verse contain a reference to Judas? It refers to the night on which Jesus was betrayed! One reason the question matters is that Paul says almost *NOTHING* about the events of Jesus’ lifetime. That seems weird to people, but just read all of his letters. Paul never mentions Jesus healing anyone, casting out a demon, doing any other miracle, arguing with Pharisees or other leaders, teaching the multitudes, even speaking a parable, being baptized, being […]
May 15, 2020