Search
Advanced search
Some Intriguing Questions about Jesus’ Predictions and Mental Health
I’ve gotten a lot of terrific questions over the years on the blog, and looking through old posts, I came upon this one dealing with two of them, both on Jesus and his immediate followers. I thought they were worth addressing again. Both of these, as it turns out, deal with issues related to psychology and the early Christian movement: one has to do with why the followers of Jesus didn’t simply give up and disband when the end-of-the-world-apocalypse they had been anticipating didn’t happen (so that they were proven to be *wrong*) and the other about whether Jesus was, literally, crazy. Interesting questions! If you have one you would like me to address, just ask in a comment on any of my posts. QUESTION I get that when the Apocalypse didn’t happen as the apocalyptic Jesus had predicted that a kind of reinterpretation of events including the resurrection took place. But why? Why didn’t the fledgling fringe then Jesus-Jewish (my term) sect simply die out? RESPONSE Ah, this is a meaty question […]
June 29, 2021
What Kind of Ancient Christian Books Might Be Discovered?
On and off of the past few months I’ve posted on which books from early Christianity — from the time of the New Testament! — I’d love to get my grubby paws on. Here is a related question I received. What are the chances? QUESTION: What do you think are the odds that a really startling discovery like Q or an early Paul letter is still out there and likely to be discovered? RESPONSE: This is a really great question, and like many really great questions, there is no really great answer. It is, of course, impossible to come up with any actual “odds.” The best we can say is “pretty slim indeed.” But let me put some flesh on the bare bones of that answer. The first thing to say is that there are indeed instances in which a modern discovery has been made of a book that we had reason to suspect at one time existed. But that very rarely happens. In virtually every case that it *has* happened, it is not a document […]
June 12, 2021
How Then Do Most Ancient Manuscripts Get Discovered?
I have been discussing documents from early Christianity that I would very much like to have see with my own eyes. In my last post I mentioned the fact that documents that *do* tend to be discovered are either copies of books we already have (the Gospel of John, the book of Revelation, etc.) or of books that we did not previously know existed (the Letter of Diognetus, or most of the writings in the Nag Hammadi library). Here is a related question from a reader of the blog. QUESTION: Are there researchers who systematically attempt to find these ancient documents or when documents come to light is it pretty much by chance? ANSWER: Well, not so much, not these days. For a simple reason: how does one go about trying to discover a manuscript? Do you fly to Egypt, hire a taxi to take you out to the desert, and start digging? There were basically two ways that past researchers tried to discover manuscripts. Sometimes they were spectacularly successful. But one of these ways […]
June 15, 2021
Wanna Go To Northern Italy with Me in September?
Thank the gods, travel is becoming possible again. Stir crazy? How about an amazing culinary trip to North Italy to check out the wine, food, and scenery? It will be September 4-11 (2021!) and it looks like an amazing trip. Check out the brochure in the link below. I’ll be giving lectures on early Christianity in the Roman Empire; it’ll be a small, intimate group (19 people max!), and I’ll be hanging out with any and all the whole time, both shooting the breeze and talking about anything that strikes anyone’s fancy about the New Testament and early Christianity. Why not you and your fancy?! As you’ll see, the trip is sponsored by the General Alumni Association at UNC, BUT you do not have to be a graduate of the school to come: it’s for anyone. If you’re NOT an alum, all you need do is pay $50 ($60 for a couple) to be considered a temporary Tar Heel. Last time I did one of these things, maybe half the people were in that category. […]
May 18, 2021
The Spirit in the Life of Jesus
I have pointed out that the earliest Christians believed they were living at the end of time and that in fulfillment of the promises of Scripture, especially in the Old Testament prophet Joel, they (or at least many of them) believed God had sent his Spirit to guide and direct them in these final days before the Kingdom of God arrived. We find this idea in the letters of Paul (our first Christian author), in the book of Acts (e.g., on the Day of Pentecost in ch. 2), and elsewhere in the New Testament. In this post I want to point out that when later Christians told their stories about Jesus they took this belief that the Spirit had come upon them and applied it to the (earlier) life of Jesus, saying that the Spirit was particularly manifest in his life, since he was the one who inaugurated the end of time. You get some a whiff of that view already in the Gospel of Mark. When Jesus is baptized in the opening chapter, the […]
June 2, 2021
Jesus according to the Christians: A Three-Part Blog Lecture Series
I have decided to do a three-part lecture series as a fundraiser to help defray the expenses of the blog. As the blog continues to grow, it becomes more expensive and I simply refuse to take any money from Membership Fees or Regular Donations to pay for any of the expenses. Every penny you pay to join goes directly to the charities the blog supports (see https://ehrmanblog.org/charities-we-support/). This lecture series will help pay some of the overhead costs so that we don’t have to take a dime out of the fees for overhead. (BTW, in terms of overhead, for what it’s worth: I don’t take a penny from the blog myself.) (But if you want to mail me a number of small unmarked bills, that would be fine.) The lectures will occur over three consecutive Saturdays, starting this week, May 29, and continuing then on June 5 and 12. They will all be at 3:00 pm. On each occasion I will lecture for 45-50 minutes and then take questions for 15 -20 minutes. There will […]
May 25, 2021
You Don’t Want To Blaspheme the Spirit! But What’s It Mean?
Since I’ve been posting now on the role of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament, I’ve been getting a number of questions about what it means to “blaspheme the Holy Spirit.” In some cases the question is urgent, from someone who fears she or he has committed the sin. That would be a problem. Jesus says that THAT sin is the only one that is unforgivable. Forever. Serious stuff. My view is that anyone who is concerned they’ve committed it almost by definition has not committed it. But that will take a bit of explaining. I looked it up and I have posted on this a couple of times over the years, including just a year ago — but since it keeps reappearing as a question, I thought I should go over the topic again. So here’s the deal. The earliest reference to the idea of the “unforgiveable sin” comes to us in the Gospel of Matthew (it is taken from the so-called Q source): “Therefore I tell you every sin and blasphemy will […]
June 3, 2021
Jesus’ Final Speech in John: A Lead-up to the Coming of the Spirit
I have very much enjoyed doing this mini-thread on the Holy Spirit in the biblical tradition as part of the larger thread on the question of where the Trinity came from. I’ve never written on this before (the biblical views of the Spirit) or even thought about it systematically, though I have, of course, thought about the individual pieces of the puzzle for many years. But putting it all together has been instructive and interesting. I have been talking about the role of the Spirit in Paul, Acts, and the Synoptics (esp. Luke), but all along I’ve thought that a passage in the Gospel of John is in many ways the most significant for understanding how the Spirit became part of the Trinity in later years. The passage occurs in the longest speech of Jesus in the New Testament, the “Farewell Discourse” of John 13-17. This is a flat-out amazing speech that most people do not realize is so remarkable, simply as a speech. As you may know, in the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, […]
June 6, 2021
Why I Wrote my book Did Jesus Exist? Interview with Evangelical Scholar Ben Witherington
Ever since I started publishing books for non-scholars, I’ve been attacked by evangelical Christians for my views of the Bible. Then, somewhat ironically, about nine years ago I came under attack by the nemeses of evangelical Christians, the “mythicists,” who claim that Jesus never existed. And why did they attack me? For my views of the Bible. Isn’t life marvelous? In 2012 published a book arguing that whatever else you say about him, Jesus certainly existed. It drove some of the mythicists to distraction. What was I thinking? I didn’t agree with them! Traitor! Oh boy I didn’t agree with them. And on this point, at least, some evangelicals came to love me. One of the leading New Testament scholars in the evangelical community is Ben Witherington, with whom I’ve been on friendly terms for a very long time. Ben also has a blog, quite different from mine. Soon after the book was published, Ben asked if he could do a multi-part series with me on the book that both of us could post on […]
June 16, 2021
Confusing Messages about Jesus and the Father: John 14
The Gospel of John is extremely important for understanding where the doctrine of the Trinity came from. I should stress: the Trinity does not appear in the Gospel – nowhere does the Gospel say that there are three persons, all distinct from one another, all of them equally God, and yet there is only one God. That, in a nutshell is the doctrine of the Trinity. But even though the Gospel does not express the doctrine (either does any other book of the NT), the book could later be mined by those who wanted to find support for it. To that end, no passage could be more important than John 14. In my previous post I explained a bit about the “Farewell Discourse,” the long five-chapter speech and then prayer of Jesus on his last evening, before his arrest. In chapter 14 Jesus hits on many of the key themes of the entire address (chs. 13-17; the longest speech of Jesus in the Gospels). He prepares his disciples by telling them that he will now […]
June 8, 2021
The Coming of the Holy Spirit in John: A Key to the Trinity
I’ve been talking about Jesus’ “Farewell Discourse,” the long five-chapter discourse that is Jesus’ last speech (virtually a monologue) in the Gospel of John. In the previous post we saw that in the speech Jesus discusses how he relates to the Father: he is in the Father and the Father is in him, so that even though the Father “is greater” than he, when someone sees him he sees the Father. They are “one.” That doesn’t mean they are the same person/thing; it’s more like when you tell a colleague or friend “you and I are completely unified in this” or “you and I are at one on this.” There is no distance between you. For Jesus it means that he has been given the authority of the Father and that his words are the ones the Father has given him to speak so that whatever he does and says has the full authority of the Father behind it. There is no distance between him and the Father. Not because they are the same but […]
June 9, 2021
Platinum Webinar for August!
You are unauthorized to view this page. Username Password Remember Me Forgot Password
Tags: Platinum
August 11, 2021
The Trinity! A Final Summation
I would now like to wrap up this rather long thread on where the Trinity came from. When I started the thread, sometime back in the 19th century, I had imagined it would take three or four posts. But then I realized that it would give me an opportunity to talk about all sorts of important things: the early Christian idea of God, the divinity of Christ in relation to the Father, the Holy Spirit in the New Testament, and so on. But now I will try a one-post synopsis. The earliest Christians inherited a strict monotheism from Judaism. Not all Jews were monotheists. Over history, some worshiped other gods; others worshiped the one God of Israel but acknowledged other gods existed (making them henotheists or monolatrists) ; others said there was only one God and the other gods simply didn’t exist. Most Christians came to take that view – or at least to say that the other gods, if they existed, were demons. Jesus himself appears to have been a strict monotheist. As were […]
June 10, 2021
Blog Zoom Lecture This Saturday: Jesus as a Young Boy!
This Saturday at 3:00 I will be giving a fund-raising lecture for the blog on Gospel stories about Jesus as a boy, both as found in the New Testament (there’s not much said about it there) and from outside in the terrifically interesting “Infancy Gospels.” Now here are accounts you didn’t hear in Sunday School. This is the second in a three-part series on Jesus according to the Christians. You do not have to have been at the first one either to come or to understand this one — it is a stand alone lecture, with a good ole Aristotelian beginning, middle, and end. All the funds we bring in will go to help pay for blog expenses, so we can continue to give every dime of membership fees and regular donations to the charities we support. The fee for the lecture, if you have not already paid for it, is $10; or if you are paying for both this one and the one the following week, the fee is $19 total. We accept more […]
June 2, 2021
Evidence for Jesus Outside the New Testament: Part 2 of My Exchange with Ben Witherington
Nine years ago, Ben Witherington, a conservative evangelical Christian New Testament scholar, asked me to respond to a number of questions about my book Did Jesus Exist, especially in light of criticism I have received for it (not, for the most part, from committed Christians!). I am reposting the interview, since it’s on such an important topic. Ben’s blog is widely read by conservative evangelicals, and he has agreed to post the questions and my answers without editing, to give his readers a sense of why I wrote the book, what I hoped to accomplish by it, and what I would like them to know about it. He has graciously agreed to allow me to post my responses here on my blog, which, if I’m not mistaken, has a very different readership (although there is undoubtedly some overlap). It’s a rather long set of questions and answers – over 10,000 words. So I will post them in bits and pieces so as not to overwhelm anyone. The Q’s are obviously his, the A’s mine. Some […]
June 17, 2021
What About Other References to Jesus Outside the New Testament?
I continue here with the re-post of an interview from years ago but of ongoing relevance, about how we can know what we know about Jesus. The interview was with Ben Witherington, a conservative evangelical Christian New Testament scholar, who asked me to respond to a number of questions about my book Did Jesus Exist in light of criticism I received for it (not, for the most part, from committed Christians!). Some of Ben Witherington’s most popular books are The Jesus Quest, and The Problem with Evangelical Theology, among others. – Q. Sometimes you make a distinction between literary evidence and other sorts of written evidence (e.g. records of trials or tax records), and you place especial stress on the former as a way of answering the question of whether or not Jesus existed. Can you explain why you do this? A. Yes, there is a clear distinction to be made between literary and documentary evidence. The only reason I place special evidence on the former, when talking about the historical Jesus, is that […]
June 19, 2021
Some Key Evidence for Jesus
I continue here with the conversation I had some years ago with evangelical New Testament scholar Ben Witherington, based on my book Did Jesus Exist. In this post, we start getting into some of the key evidence we have for Jesus, not only to show that he actually existed (uh, yes he did…) but also to help us know what we can say about him, about what he really said and did. Q (Witherington). In the middle portion of your book, you place a great deal of emphasis on what is usually called the criteria of multiple attestation to demonstrate that Jesus surely existed. Would you explain briefly why historians place so much stock in this criteria, and why it is especially important when dealing with the question of the existence of Jesus. A. Multiple attestation is one of the most important historical criteria for establishing what happened in the past – not just for historical Jesus research, but for any serious historical research. If the sources to a historical person or event are […]
June 22, 2021
How Do We Know If Jesus Did Something?
This post continues my 10-part interview with Ben Witherington dealing with “mythicists,” those who claim that there never actually *was* a man Jesus, but that he is a complete fabrication, a myth. In Did Jesus Exist, I try to show why that is simply not true. But if he did exist, and the Gospels say things about him that probably didn’t happen, how do you separate the fact from the fiction? Here Ben asks me questions related to that idea, and I give some responses. Q. Various mythicists have tried to argue that in fact there is only one source, namely Mark, that provides evidence that Jesus existed and presumably he made up the idea? Why is this not a fair representation of the evidence, and why do you think it is that various of them hardly even deal with the evidence from Paul? A. Most mythicists claim that Paul never mentions the historical Jesus or says anything about him, but that he only speaks of a “mythical Christ” who was not a real human […]
June 23, 2021
Why My Book on Revelation Has Been Different To Write
As many of you know, my next book is on the Revelation of John, to be written not for scholars but for a general audience. I decided I wanted to write the book maybe four years ago, and my ideas about it have changed significantly since I began to think about it. Part of that is because the book is, as Bob Dylan says, “a slow train coming.” My original plan was to have the book finished by now. In fact, that was the publisher’s plan too. This is the first time in my mortal existence that I’ve been seriously behind on a book deadline. Usually, I finish way ahead of time. Not with this one. There are several reasons for that and I won’t bore you with them since virtually everyone I know has had the same problems: Covid burnout, too much work, and too little time. BUT the positive side of it all is that with this book I’m allowing myself time to think and reflect without a definite plan. It’s a new […]
June 20, 2021
Texts and Towns that Allegedly Didn’t Exist (So Did Jesus?)
Here I continue to answer questions from my evangelical colleague in the field, Ben Witherington, as addressed some years ago, These again deal with the claims of “Mythicists,” who insist that there never actually was a man Jesus, but that he is simply made up, a complete myth. One way they support their point is by saying that some passages in the ancient world that mention him in fact are later “interpolations” into the original writings (that is, some nefarious editor stuck references to Jesus into a text that originally didn’t mention him) and that his hometown, Nazareth, actually did not exist at the time. Is either claim credible or, well, supported by any actual *evidence*? Here are Ben’s queries and my responses. Q. Mythicists seems to often uses the interpolation theory to explain away NT texts that are inconvenient to their agendas. Yet it is also true that some NT scholars use interpolation theories to the very same end, even when there is apparently no textual basis for the interpolation theory. Explain how […]
June 24, 2021