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Was Christ actually God in the Flesh?
We now move from Paul’s Christology that *combined* an incarnational view with an exaltation view, to a Christology that is incarnational through and through — still in the New Testament, in the final Gospel to be written (possibly 30 years or so after Paul’s death?) In it we find what is arguably the best known and most influential passage dealing with Christology in the New Testament: the Prologue of the Gospel of John, 1:1-18. It is also probably the most studied and discussed passage – even more than the Christ poem in Philippians 2:6-11. The first eighteen verses of John are typically called the “Prologue” because they are clearly set apart from the rest of the Gospel as a kind of celebration of the main character of the book; these verses are written in a different writing style from the rest of the Gospel (lofty poetry), they contain key concepts not found in the rest of the Gospel (Christ as “the Word” made flesh), and yet they introduce well some of the most important views […]
February 16, 2021
How Old Was Jesus ???
I received a very interesting question from a blog reader, and it has led to an unexpected answer. QUESTION Is there any significance to the age of Jesus and its relation to the start of his ministry? RESPONSE: I don’t know what the questioner actually means about the “significance” of Jesus’ age, and so I’ve decided to answer a related question. What, in fact, was his age? Well, the matter is … like so much else in our universe … unexpectedly complicated. It turns out I dealt with this years ago on the blog. I know because I just checked. I had forgotten about that post, and even more interesting, I had forgotten my answer, which contains some information that I ALSO FORGOT. In fact, some really interesting information. I bet you didn’t know (as I apparently used to know) that there is a discussion of Jesus’ age in the writings of one of the most important early church fathers, which indicates that Jesus grew to be a relatively old man before he […]
February 17, 2021
My Interview About Jesus for “The Dagger Squad”
Now HERE is an interesting interview (at least I thought it was). Pretty unusual, in any case. Garfield A. Reid of Dagger Squad is a lively and interesting interviewer, and the call-ins had intriguing questions. The interview was entitled Jesus, New Testament, False Prophecies, and False Doctrines; it happened on Monday, February 8, 2021. See what you think! Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition:
February 23, 2021
Does Luke Present Different (Inconsistent!) Views of Christ?
In a recent post I tried to show that the author of Luke-Acts (same person; let’s call him Luke) presented an “exaltation” Christology — that is, that he thought Christ was not originally a divine being but had been exalted to divinity at some point of his existence; but unlike most of our other sources, he affirms *different* moments when this happened: at Jesus’ birth, his baptism, and his resurrection. (See the post if this is not ringing a bell: https://ehrmanblog.org/the-oldest-view-of-christ-found-in-only-one-greek-manuscript-of-luke/ ). I ended the post by saying I would explain how Luke could have it all three ways. And as a reader pointed out to me, I never posted the post! So here it is. I dealt with this specific issue on the blog some years ago, and I may be older now, but I’m no wiser, at least as far as this question goes. Here’s what I said then and would continue to say now: ******************************** Does Luke present a (strictly speaking) consistent view of Jesus throughout his two-volume work of Luke-Acts? I raise […]
February 18, 2021
A Christian Is Not Necessarily a Disciple (Monthly Platinum Post: Douglas Wadeson)
As many of you know, one of the perqs of being a Platinum member of the blog is that at this level everyone is given the opportunity to make a post of their own, distributed only to Platinum members. For these posts, members can talk about nearly anything they want, so long as it is related to the blog and not grievously snarky. So far, we haven’t had a snark at all. I post one of these a week, and then once a month, I choose one to post on the blog itself for all readers. Or rather, I have the Platinum members themselves vote on which one they think should go public This is our first one. It comes to us from Douglas Wadeson, a long time member of the blog and recently retired (lucky fellow) physician. The post came in two parts: here I will be giving only the first (I won’t be posting the second: the Platinums will be voting on a different set of posts next time.) Feel free to comment […]
February 20, 2021
Live Lecture This Sunday! Do Christians Need to Be Jews? Understanding the Gospel of Matthew.
I am now getting in the habit of doing Zoom lectures on the New Testament on Sunday afternoons; these are being recorded for my undergraduate course on the New Testament. But all of you are invited to come this week, but because of UNC’s schedule, it will be one lecture instead of two, with Q & A to follow. There is no charge per se, but I would like to ask for a donation to the blog in exchange, if you can see your way clear to do it. If not, that’s fine – we all have our circumstances! But one of the main reasons I’m doing these lectures is to raise money for the Food Bank of North Carolina; as with all food banks right now, it is in desperate need. Your donation is completely tax deductible. Here is the info you need: Time: Sunday, Feb. 14. 1:00 pm EST. Lecture will last about 50 minutes, followed by the 30 minutes of Q&A. Topic: Jesus the Jewish Messiah: Understanding the Gospel of Matthew. This […]
February 10, 2021
Is the “Word” (Logos) of God in John the Wisdom (Sophia) of God in Judaism?
In yesterday’s post I began to discuss the Prologue of the Gospel of John, which contains a poem that celebrates Christ as the Word of God that became human. This Word of God was with God in the beginning of all things, and was himself God; through him the universe was created and in him is life. This word took on flesh to dwell with humans, and that human – the divine word made flesh – was Jesus. Some readers over the years have wondered if this celebration of the Logos of God that becomes flesh owes more to Greek philosophy than to biblical Judaism. It’s a good question, and hard to answer. One thing that can be said is that this Logos idea does find very close parallels with other biblical texts – in particular with texts that speak of the Wisdom (Greek: Sophia) of God. Sophia and Logos are related ideas; both have to do in some respect with “reason.” Sophia is reason that is internal to a person; Logos is that reason […]
February 21, 2021
The Essence of Religious Literacy: A Christian Perspective. Platinum Guest Post by Fredrick Ackun
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Tags: Platinum
February 11, 2021
An Intriguing but Most Peculiar Book! Guest Post by Kristin Swenson
A new book has just come out that many of you will be very interested in. It is called A Most Peculiar Book: The Inherent Strangeness of the Bible (Oxford University Press), by Kristin Swenson. I did not know Kristin until I learned of the book, some months before it was published. The publisher asked if I would write an endorsement for the cover. I usually have to say no to this kind of request, but I read the book and thought it was terrific. Here is what I said in my blurb: Do you think you know the Bible? Wait till you read Kristin Swenson’s new book. What if you don’t know the Bible at all? Even better. A Most Peculiar Book is a deeply informed, completely accessible, and endlessly fascinating explanation of what scholars know about the Bible and lay people, as a rule, do not. Read this book and prepare to learn! I received my copy a couple of weeks ago and contacted Kristin to ask if she’d be interested in writing a […]
February 24, 2021
Reminder! A Live Chance to “Ask Bart Anything” (ABA) this Wednesday 2/17/2021
This Wednesday (2/17/21) 7:00-8:15 pm I will be holding a live ABA (“Ask Bart Anything”). It will be over Zoom and will be open to anyone on the planet who wants to come. The format: I will take live questions both orally and through chats. The questions can be on ANY topic that anyone is interested in. If it is something I don’t know anything about (quantum physics or the Ming Dynasty) or that I would rather not talk about (that little incident when I was 16….) I’ll just say so. I will get through as many questions as I can, answering easy ones briefly and taking as long as I need to deal with more complicated ones. My only request will be that questions are direct questions, not lectures, sermons, admonitions, condemnations, expositions of one’s favorite views, or statements of one’s opinions so the rest of the world can hear and convert. Interested? There is no need to register, no obligation of any kind. And not cost. Free to all. BUT: If you you […]
February 13, 2021
The Stories We Tell: Guest Post by Robin Jones
As many of you know, a few months ago I invited my long time friend and erstwhile fellow-student at Moody Bible Institute, Robin Jones, to write a some posts for the blog. Robin continues to be an evangelical Christian and is deeply committed to important social issues that I think just about all of us are also concerned about: hunger, homelessness, suffering, and justice. Here now is her third and final post. I hope you find it both interesting and inspiring: ************************ Who doesn’t love a good story? Stories embody our humanity in a way few other things do. Some of you may be familiar with the radio commentator Paul Harvey who was famous for telling how an unknown twist of fate catapulted someone into a totally different life story or created a completely unexpected conclusion. After giving the surprise ending, he would famously conclude with “and that’s the rest of the story.” While Paul Harvey was indeed a great storyteller, I propose that the master at that craft was Jesus. He told stories […]
March 2, 2021
What Did Ancient People Think It Meant To Call Someone God?
In the current threat I am building up to the question of where the Trinity came from. It was not the original Christian teaching. How then did it emerge as the “orthodox” view? I have started with the key issue, which is complicated enough on its own terms. How, why, and when did the followers begin to call Jesus God? That has been the posts up till now. The reason it matters for the thread is that calling Jesus God made Christians try to figure out how he could be God and God could be God yet there be only one God. The Spirit later got thrown into the mix as well, as we will see. But first I want to continue talking about the development of the view of Christ as God — a very important development (THE most important development, one could argue) in early “Christology” (= the understanding of Christ). That is the entire topic of my fuller treatment in my book How Jesus Became God (on which also I made a Great […]
February 27, 2021
In What SENSE is Jesus “God” in Matthew, Mark, and Luke? My Change of Mind
In yesterday’s post I pointed out that if one asks about an early Christian text: “Does it portray Jesus as God,” then almost always if the answer is Yes (which it usually is), it has to be qualified: “Yes, in *some sense*. “ And the question is always, in *what* sense? The reason I stress this point is that for many years – until I dug deep into research for my book How Jesus Became God – I was quite vehement, in person and in print, that the Synoptic Gospels did not portray Jesus as divine, but only the Gospel of John did. It’s true – I still think and, I suspect, always will think – that in the Gospel of John there is little doubt about the divinity of Jesus. As we have seen, the Gospel opens with the amazing poem: “ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came into being through him, and apart from him nothing came into being […]
February 28, 2021
Live Lectures this Sunday! Distinctive Messages of Luke and John
This Sunday I will again be giving two live Zoom lectures on the Gospels to anyone who wants to come. They will be recorded for my undergraduate course on the New Testament. There will be a 30-minute Q & A to follow the second one. There is no charge per se, but I would like to ask for a donation to the blog in exchange, if you can see your way clear to do it. If not, that’s fine – we all have our circumstances! But one of the main reasons I’m doing these lectures is to raise money for the Food Bank of North Carolina; as with all food banks right now, it is in desperate need. Your donation is completely tax deductible. Here is the info you need: Time: Sunday, Feb. 21. 1:00 pm first lecture; 2:15 second (EST) Lectures will each last about 50 minutes. First Lecture: The Alternative Perspectives of the Gospel of Luke. This lecture will show how Luke differs in significant ways from both Mark and Matthew, and will […]
February 17, 2021
The Divine Realm in Antiquity (Appropriately: A Pyramid!)
In my previous posts I have been insisting that if one wants to say that “Jesus is God” according to an early Christian text, one has to ask “in what *sense* is he God? Now is a good time for me to lay out how I understand ancient people understood the divine realm. It was very different from the way most people today – at least the people I run across – imagine the divine realm. As I pointed out earlier, people today think of God as completely Other than us humans. We are mortal and limited in every respect; he is immortal and unlimited. He is all-powerful, all-knowing, and everywhere-present. We are by comparison weak, ignorant, and in one place at a time. He is infinite and eternal; we are finite and temporal. There is an unbridgeable gap between us and God. (Although in Christian theology, it is Jesus who bridges that gap by being a divine being who becomes human; in traditional theology, he did that so that we humans could then become […]
March 3, 2021
God Showing Up a (Apparently) Human in the Hebrew Bible
So far in my posts on Christology I have talked a bit about pagan views of the divine realm and its relationship to the human. There is a lot more that could be said about that – in particular with the various ways that humans could be thought of as in some sense divine in the pagan world. But a lot of readers may be wondering what any of this has to do with Christianity since obviously the original followers of Jesus were Jewish, not Gentile, and their views of divinity in relationship to humanity would have been guided by Jewish traditions, such as those of the Old Testament. Fair enough! So before going any further, I thought I should make some posts about divinity in relationship to humanity in the Christian Old Testament.
March 4, 2021
The Buddhist Scriptures and the Gospel of Luke: Platinum Post by Steve Sutter
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Tags: Platinum
February 23, 2021
More Live Lectures this Sunday: The Gospel of John and Early Christian Gnosticism!
This Sunday I will be giving two more live Zoom lectures on the Gospels to anyone who wants to come. They will be recorded for my undergraduate course on the New Testament. There will be a 30-minute Q & A to follow the second one. There is no charge per se, but I would like to ask for a donation to the blog in exchange, if you can see your way clear to do it. If not, that’s fine – we all have our circumstances! But one of the main reasons I’m doing these lectures is to raise money for the Food Bank of North Carolina; as with all food banks right now, it is in desperate need. Your donation is completely tax deductible. Here is the info you need: Time: Sunday, Feb. 28. 1:00 pm first lecture; 2:15 second (EST) Lectures will each last about 50 minutes. First Lecture: Jesus as a Divine Man in the Gospel of John This lecture goes to the heart of the Gospel John and its distinctive portrayal of […]
February 24, 2021
The Doctrine of the Trinity: Where We Are So Far
I am in the middle of a very long thread dealing with the question of where the doctrine of the Trinity came from. I started the thread on January 7, here: https://ehrmanblog.org/is-the-trinity-in-the-bible/ , and so have been at it for nearly two months, on and off (with a other things thrown in en route, obviously). And I have gotten nowhere near, yet, to answering the question. So it goes in the world of complicated historical questions. (It is obviously a theological question, but I’m answering it historically rather than theologically). We are at a point where it would be a good time to explain where we are, why we have come this way, and where we are going. I need to begin by explaining why I have spent SO much time on the question of what it meant for early Christians to call Jesus God. It’s very simple really. Christians over time developed more and more exalted views of Jesus, from being a human messiah, to being a human sacrificed for the sins of others, […]
March 7, 2021