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Jesus as a Healer: “First: Do No Harm” Platinum Guest Post by Douglas Wadeson
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August 18, 2021
My Syllabus for “The Birth of Christianity”
Classes have now started at UNC, and I’m back in the classroom. Last year it was all remote teaching (NOT fun for anyone, though my classes were terrific); this year we are starting out live, and desperately hoping we will be able to continue that way. For me, the most exciting part of the semester is that I”m teaching a course that I literally have not taught in 25 years. There’s lots of reasons for that — among other things, I ended up having to teach other things and other colleagues came into the department who could and wanted to teach it. But the course is more closely related to my research over these past 25 years than even my New Testament classes: this one deals with Christianity in the second and third centuries, and it is called “The Birth of Christianity.” Here is the syllabus for it! Reli 208 The Birth of Christianity Fall 2021 Instructor: Bart Ehrman Teaching Assistants: Benjamin Sheppard and Thomas Waldrupe Course Description and Objectives For most […]
August 31, 2021
Pop Quiz on Early Christianity
For just about all of my undergraduate classes, I begin the semester, on the first day, after explaining the course, by giving students a pop quiz. In my New Testament classes, students are often surprised at how little they know. “Hey, I went to Sunday School my entire life! Why don’t I know this stuff?” Yeah, good question. But this semester, as I indicated in my previous post, I’m teaching a course on “The Birth of Christianity,” which focuses on the period just after the New Testament up through Constantine. For *this* class students come in *knowing* that they don’t know much of anything. No matter: I give them a quiz anyway! (It’s not graded.) Since I haven’t taught the class in 25 years, I had to come up with a new quiz (having no idea if I even did one before) . Here it is. How well can you do? I’ll be discussing answers in subsequent posts (I give the quiz, in part, to discuss the answers with students as a way of introducing […]
September 1, 2021
Platinum Members! Vote for your Favorite Platinum Post to Go To the Blog!
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August 19, 2021
Was Paul Really at Odds with Peter and James? Guest Post by Richard Fellows
Those of you who read the comments on my posts know that my thread on Cephas and Peter elicited some very interesting responses. One person in particular who who took me on leveled some very learned and detailed critiques. It made my day(s)! Richard Fellows is an unusual person, not to mention blog member. He is trained in a different field (Physics at Cambridge university) and works as an engineer, but he has published a number of articles in academic journals on the New Testament. Now THAT doesn’t happen very often. In fact, I don’t think I know of anyone else who has pulled it off (though I know a lot who have tried and a lot more who have wanted to). Academic journals are very demanding, whatever field you’re in, and without training, well…. But Richard has done it and is still doing it (he has another article coming out). His special interests are the apostle Paul and those associated with him, including Peter (whom he, like most other sentient beings, except me on […]
September 2, 2021
When / If you have a blog problem!
I regularly get comments on one of my posts from a member who is having some kind of technical problem — for example, only part of the post shows up for them, or they can’t seem to access something etc. (Other people have problems with what I actually *say*, but that’s a different matter….). Sometimes there are indeed technological problems that arise. What to do? The VERY BEST thing is to contact our help staff. I won’t get to your comment a day or so later, and the problem is almost always individual, not system wide. So there’s not much I can do to help in response to a comment, even if I did have the wherewithall to deal with the technological details. (As Groucho once said, Why a four-year–old child could understand this …! Run out and find me a four-year–old child, I can’t make head or tail of it.”) So, are you haveing a problem? Click on HELP and contact support. Someone will get in touch and figure it out for you. If there are even […]
August 20, 2021
Student Papers for “The Birth of Christianity”
If you checked out my syllabus for my undergraduate course this semester, you will have noticed that every week each student is to write a two-page “position paper” on an assigned topic, something of intrigue that, for this class, will involve texts and issues they have probably never addressed or even heard of, even though if they were raised as church-going Christians. I certainly hadn’t when I was their age…. Here are the instructions I give for the papers; you obviously couldn’t do the papers without reading the assignments, but you can get an idea here what they would be studying. (The abbreviation ANT is for their textbook, the reader I edited called After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity 100-300 CE). INSTRUCTIONS FOR POSITION PAPERS Welcome to instructions for your weekly bit of recitation fun: the position papers! For basic instructions, otherwise known as absolute sine qua non (purpose, length, grading, etc.), see the syllabus. But do remember: these are to be two-pages, double-spaced, and turned in before the recitation itself. […]
September 4, 2021
MORE Assignments on the Birth of Christianity
Here now are the other position paper assignments for “The Birth of Christianity.” See which of them you’d like to take on in your spare time! Recitation Six: Perpetua and Felicitas Read carefully the account of the Martyrdom of Perpectua and Felicitas (ANT 47-55), several times, until you can remember the significant incidents in good detail. For the recitation, you should think about ALL of the following issues. For your position paper you are to discuss just ONE of them, whichever one you find most intriguing. From an outsider’s perspective it may seem very strange, unsettling, and perplexing that such a brilliant, insightful, apparently wealthy, young mother would be so eager to leave this world through a violent death. How can you explain it, from Perpetua’s own perspective? Is this world really such a terrible place (for her)? Discuss Perpetua’s treatment of her father. Do you see him as a sympathetic figure? Does she seem rude and uncaring to him? How do you explain that? Choose either the vision of Perpetua in ch. 4 […]
September 5, 2021
Fund Raiser for Afghanistan: This Sunday!
Whatever our political positions, most of us are distraught about the situation in Afghanistan. It will almost certainly get worse. As a result of the crisis, relief agencies there are under enormous pressure, more than in a very long time. One of the charities supported by the blog is Doctors Without Borders, one of the truly great organizations in our world. They are staying in Afghanistan for now (and hopefully for a long time) and their hands are incredibly full. Naturally, they are desperate for additional resources (just look them up in relation to the situation there, and you can get some reports). We will be doing a blog fund-raiser for Afghanistan relief, this Sunday. I will be giving a lecture and we will be taking voluntary donations of any amount, in hopes of raising substantial funds. Every donation will go in toto directly to Doctors without Borders. The lecture is blog-related rather than crisis-related, since that is what I know about and is also why most of you are here. It’s an intriguing topic, […]
August 23, 2021
Weird (But Common) Ways To Read the Bible
It constantly amazes me that so many people who believe the Bible never read it. My undergraduate students (to this day) have read the Harry Potter books. But when I ask if they have read the entire Bible, the answer is almost always no. And yet most of them will say the Bible comes from God. So I ask them: “I can understand why you’d want to read a book by J. K. Rowling, but if GOD wrote a book wouldn’t you want to see what he had to say?” My puzzlement is old news to long-term blog members – I’ve talked about it before. But here’s something else that I find puzzling: Why do people who do read the Bible read it in such an unusual way? If I want to read a short story by Mark Twain, O. Henry, or (to pick one of my modern favorites) William Trevor, I do so after having some idea of where he was from and when he was writing, and then I start with the first […]
September 7, 2021
Reminder: Fund Raiser for Afghanistan on Sunday
In case you didn’t notice or inadvertently dropped it from memory or … whatever: I’d like to remind you about the fundraiser this Sunday (August 29). I hope you can come! Here’s the announcement: ********************* Whatever our political positions, most of us are distraught about the situation in Afghanistan. It will almost certainly get worse. As a result of the crisis, relief agencies there are under enormous pressure, more than in a very long time. One of the charities supported by the blog is Doctors Without Borders, one of the truly great organizations in our world. They are staying in Afghanistan for now (and hopefully for a long time) and their hands are incredibly full. Naturally, they are desperate for additional resources (just look them up in relation to the situation there, and you can get some reports). We will be doing a blog fund-raiser for Afghanistan relief, this Sunday. I will be giving a lecture and we will be taking voluntary donations of any amount, in hopes of raising substantial funds. Every donation will […]
August 26, 2021
Bruce Metzger and My Strange Dissertation Defense
Here I continue with another reminiscence of my interactions and relationship with my mentor, the great textual scholar Bruce Metzger. This one has always struck me as a bit humorous. *************************** In almost (but not absolutely) all PhD programs in this country, the doctoral candidate has do an “oral defense” of the dissertation. If s/he successfully defends, the PhD is then granted. Here at UNC, the defense is conducted in front of the five-person dissertation committee, all of them experts on one or another aspect of the work. Everyone on the committee has carefully read the dissertation, and the defense is designed to see if, well, the thesis is defensible. In other words, faculty members do not hold back but probe deeply into the work to see if there are any flaws in it. If a student fails the defense, s/he has to revise the dissertation and try again. Even if it is considered passable, revisions of some sort are often considered necessary.
September 8, 2021
On Giving. Platinum Guest Post by Judith Coyle
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August 26, 2021
Jesus’s Apocalyptic View of Destruction
In my book on Revelation I am planning to contrast the violence and wrath of God there with what we find in the teachings of Jesus. It would be easy but too simplistic to paint an obvious contrast: unlike John (the author of Revelation) Jesus believed in love and so was opposed to violence. It is certainly true that he was, at least on one level (as we’ll see). Jesus did not only think his followers should not be violent against one another, but also not against their enemies, not even the Romans. But the same can probably be said about the book of Revelation. It also does not urge the followers of Jesus to engage in violence. The massive destructions that take place on earth in the book are sent from heaven. And Jesus too thought a massive destruction was to be sent from heaven. So, well, what’s the difference? That will be the complicated issue. To understand the views of destruction of both Jesus and the prophet John, I need to situate them […]
September 9, 2021
The Horrible Fate of Sinners: Jesus’ Teaching on Gehenna
I continue now with my reflections on Jesus’ view of the coming destruction and the very bad fate coming to those who are not rightly aligned from God. In this post I deal specifically with his teaching on Gehenna, and the devastation that will happen there. Spoiler alert: it is not the place you want to go, but Jesus is not talking about “hell.”
September 11, 2021
On the Flipside: The Glorious Salvation of Saints in the Teachings of Jesus
In my previous two posts I’ve talked about Jesus’ view of the coming destruction of sinners. My goal is to compare and contrast his views with those of the book of Revelation. For both Jesus and the prophet John (author of Revelation) the future will not only bring very nasty destruction for some people on earth, but also an amazing salvation for others. Here is how I talk about the future rewards of the righteous in my book Heaven and Hell (Simon & Schuster, 2020). ****************************** It is easier to document Jesus’ words about the dreaded fate of sinners in Gehenna than about the blessings of the saved in the Kingdom of God. Even so, we have seen one teaching that is repeated in the Gospels: the coming Kingdom will entail a fantastic banquet where the redeemed eat and drink at leisure with the greats of Jewish past, the Patriarchs. This is a paradisal image of great joy. Another key passage involves Jesus’ discussion of what life will be like once the resurrection has […]
September 12, 2021
Recording of our Platinum Webinar: History of Biblical Scholarship
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August 29, 2021
Platinum apologies: the LINK for the webinar
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August 31, 2021
Jesus and the Coming Destruction: Who, Why, and How?
In my book on Revelation, one of my goals (once I start to write it) will be to contrast its view of judgment with that of Jesus himself. I think the differences are stark and telling. BUT, that is not because I think Jesus imagined that God was simply a God of love who would forgive everyone in the end. I wish he did think that, but alas. He was a Jewish apocalypticist who firmly believed the judgment of God was coming on the earth. So did the prophet John, seventy years later, writing the Apocalypse. But for me the important issue is the object and reason for destruction. Here they differ significantly, in ways that make me think John the prophet is not preaching the gospel of Jesus. Nowhere, in my view, can Jesus’ understanding of the coming judgment be seen more clearly than in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats (Matthew 25:31-46). I have talked about this passage several times on the blog before. In order to explain the contrast with […]
September 14, 2021
Jesus’ View of Salvation: Who Can Have Eternal Life?
Jesus believed that destruction was coming for some people, and salvation for others. So did the author of Revelation. So what’s the difference? Big difference. In modern terms, Jesus’ views of who would be saved were non-discriminatory. That is, they were not based on who a person was, but what she did. It did not matter if she was a she or a he; if she was a Jew or a gentile; if she believed one set of things or another; if she came from one nation/nationality or another. What mattered was how she lived. Other Jews at the time probably had similar views, but they are striking on the lips of Jesus. Salvation does not come necessarily to Jews by virtue of being the chosen ones. It comes to anyone who lives a life of love, caring for others, especially those in need. To see this, consider two passages from the Gospel of Luke. First note
September 15, 2021