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The Coming Apocalypse and U.S. Foreign Policy on Israel
One section of new book Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says About the End explains some of the socio-political consequences of the belief that “the end is near. Here’s a consequence that I bet is not widely known: U.S. Foreign Policy on Israel. In my book I emphatically state that I am not taking a stand on U.S. policy per se and certainly not on the Israeli-Palestinian issue itself. I am interested purely in the historical question: why has the U.S. been (and still is) so invested in supporting Israel in particular? This is how I explain it in the book (this will take two posts). ****************************** Modern Israel in Ancient Prophecy? Many people – possibly most – hold some beliefs without knowing quite why. Because of our upbringing, environment, and news sources, certain ideas just seem like common sense. Those raised in families, communities, and churches that believe the United States needs to provide substantial support for Israel usually know some of the reasons: we need to promote stability in the Middle East, […]
March 29, 2023
Biblical Prophecy and the Coming Destruction of the Dome of the Rock
I continue here my post from yesterday, explaining the Christian background to U.S. Support of Israel, taken from my recently-published book Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says About the End ****************************** It is important to stress that evangelicals think God is faithful to Israel even if Jews are not faithful to God. He has fulfilled and will continue to fulfill his promises that Israel will have the Promised Land. But Jews who reject his messiah cannot possibly be saved. That is not God’s fault. He is not the one who broke the eternal covenant. Jews did when they rejected their own messiah. Therefore, they will be punished. To evangelical readers that is clear from the book of Revelation, which describes “the End” as standing in straight continuity with and in fulfillment of “the Beginning.” As we have seen, according to Revelation, the only inhabitants of the earth who will be saved are those who refuse the mark of the beast and instead receive the seal of God. In Revelation 7 the two groups of these […]
March 30, 2023
The Apocalypse and the Situation in Ukraine: Interview with a Ukrainian Christian Scholar
A couple of months ago I was contacted by a Ukrainian scholar, Mikhail Abakumov. Mikhail had been forced to flee Donetsk because of the Russian invasion. He is now in Poland continuing his theological studies (a thesis on Dietrich Bonhoeffer), doing charity in a work with Ukrainian refugees, and running a podcast. Mikhail had heard about my book Armageddon and wanted to do an interview with me about it. In the course of the interview he gave some information about how the book is understood among many Christians in the Ukrainian community, and it ain’t at all like it’s understood among Americans! The interview was so interesting that I asked Mikhail to return the favor, and I’ve interviewed him for my Misquoting Jesus podcast; in that one I get to ask the questions and hear the unusually interesting answers. That one will post in a few weeks. But for now, here is the one Mikhail hosted and has now published on his turf.
March 28, 2023
The Martyrdom of Perpetua and the Rise of Purgatory
I was recently asked about “purgatory, a concept misunderstood by most people I’ve ever met, including nearly every Protestant (!) but also some lifelong Catholics. I had done a series of posts on the issue years ago, while I was doing research for my book on Heaven and Hell. I had just read an interesting book that dealt with the “Rise and Function” of the idea of “Purgatory” by Adreas Merkt, Das Fegefeuer: Entstehung und Funktion einer Idee. Purgatory itself did not become as solid idea until the 12th and 13th centuries, but there were antecedents to it in much earlier times, including in one of the most intriguing accounts of a Christian martyrdom from the early 3rd century. That is how I started my thread: ****************************** Purgatory never made it big in Protestant Christian circles. But it is an age-old doctrine, the idea that a person needs to suffer for their sins before allowing into heaven for a blessed eternity. It is kind of a temporary hell. No one can get off scot-free. But […]
April 1, 2023
Dreaming of Purgatory
Yesterday I began to talk about the Martyrdom of Perpetua, one of the most interesting and moving texts to come down to us from early Christianity. It is an account of a 23-year old Roman matron who is willing to die a gruesome death for her Christian faith. Among other things, the text shows that her faith is far more important to her than her family. In particular, she is shown in conflict especially with her father (no husband is mentioned, which has led to considerable speculation: Divorced? Widowed? Unwed mother? Something else?). And even though it is with regret, she is willing to leave behind her own infant child by being martyred. Family figures prominently in the two excerpts here. In the first her father begs her to avoid martyrdom, to no avail. In the second (chs. 7-8) we have an account of her dream and intervention on behalf of her dead brother Dinocrates. This is the part that I will be most interested in for the next post. Is it an early adumbration […]
April 2, 2023
The Origins of Purgatory
As I indicated in my previous two posts on the Martyrdom of Perpetua, I’m interested in the question of where the idea of purgatory came from. Ths idea of purgatory is *widely* misunderstood today; in fact, just about everyone who mentions it to me (including two days ago), doesn’t know what it actually is — including friends who have been Catholic for the entire 70 years of their lives! (Not to mention the Protestants…) This is how I discussed the issue some years ago when I was working on my book Heaven and Hell: ****************************** Roughly speaking purgatory is a kind of third place, between heaven and hell. The abject sinners (or those who reject Christ, or whoever you think is destined for punishment) go to hell; the righteous saints go to heaven. But what about those who will ultimately be saved but who have not lived a good (enough) life? They go to purgatory. This has been the standard teaching of the Catholic church since the 12th or 13th century. The classic study of the […]
April 4, 2023
Purgatory Before There Was a Purgatory
As I said in my last post, the definitive doctrine of Purgatory did not exist before the 12th century, even though the basic *idea* had been around for a long time – the idea that even though Christ’s death brought salvation to the world, most people, except for the most holy saints, such as those who had been martyred for their faith, had still to pay for their sins. By the 13th century Purgatory had become an actual place of torment. Before then it was not so much a place as a condition of suffering to purge away sins. The question is how early this idea existed. How long had Christians maintained that suffering was necessary for the sinner – even the believing Christian sinner – before they would be allowed into their eternal bliss in heaven? The idea is not part of the New Testament, although as we will see in a later post, there are some passages that could be used in support of the view. The first place we find any reference […]
April 5, 2023
Did Jesus Believe in Purgatory?
The topic I’m dealing with on this destined-to-be-a-very-long thread seems to me to be particularly important. Most of my scholarship is of interest mainly to people concerned about the life and teachings of Jesus, the New Testament, the history of Christianity, and so on; but this is of interest to *all* of us. What happens when we die? Or more specifically, what happens to *me* when I die? My current discussion of purgatory may be of little interest to people, until they think about it for a second. Do most people have to go through horrible suffering after death, even if they are not destined for the eternal flames of hell? I for one don’t look forward to getting a tooth ache or ending up in the hospital. What if there are years, decades, centuries of physical torment ahead for me? Shouldn’t I want to know about that and, well, make some preparations? But it’s a topic most of us don’t think about. Those of us raised in a Protestant tradition simply don’t buy it […]
April 6, 2023
What If I Commit the Unforgivable Sin? Can It Be Purged in Purgatory?
In my previous post I discussed one of the passages of the New Testament that has traditionally been used to support the idea of Purgatory, the place that most of the “saved” go after death to be purged of their sins (Matt 5:26 “you won’t get out of there until you have paid the last penny”). In my judgment this passage is not talking about what happens in the afterlife, even though it has been read that way. With another passage, the matter is not quite so clear. In a famous passage, again in Matthew, Jesus talks about the “unforgivable sin”: “Therefore I tell you every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven; and whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit it will not be forgiven, either in this age or the ages to come.” As you might imagine, over the Christian centuries there have been numerous interpretations of what that […]
April 8, 2023
Why Purgatory Makes Sense
Christians have always had a wide variety of beliefs about the afterlife, and just about everyone (who chooses) is able to find biblical support for their views. The Bible itself has an enormous range of views. Among other things, there have always been Christians who have thought that there must be varying levels of punishment for sinners in the afterlife. The guy on the street who does his best but is not always a very good father surely doesn’t get punished to the same degree as Hitler. Among believers who are convinced that there are different levels of punishment I would certainly class those who believe in purgatory. Even though it is a view almost universally rejected by Protestants, purgatory can make a lot of sense even to some of them. The afterlife is not just black and white, one thing or the other, either/or – it is not either eternal bliss for all the saints and eternal torment for all the sinners. There must be gradations, right? And purgatory is a way of implementing […]
April 11, 2023
The First Actual Account of the Resurrection (Hint: It’s Not in the New Testament)
On this Easter Sunday I thought it would be appropriate to repost a blog from several years ago on a Gospel not in the New Testament — a Gospel that gives us an actual narrative of the resurrection. I often say that there is no story of Jesus’ resurrection in the the New Testament — and people think I’m nuts. Of *course* there is! No, there’s not. In the New Testament, Jesus is buried on a late Friday afternoon. The action picks up, then, on the third day when the women arrive at the tomb, only to find it empty. The resurrection happened *between* these two events. It is never narrated. We have no account of Jesus being revived and coming out of the tomb. But we do from *outside* the New Testament, in a book that some early Christians considered canonical Scripture, the Gospel of Peter. This was an account that was lost for many, many centuries. It deals not just with Jesus’ resurrection (though that is clearly the highlight), but with his trial […]
April 9, 2023
What Does God Think of Surrogacy? Platinum Guestpost by Imran M. Usmani
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March 31, 2023
Do Scholars Ever Forge Gospels?
Do modern scholars ever produce “ancient” forgeries? In particular, have experts in the New Testament and early Christianity ever gone out on a limb and forged a Gospel, claiming to have discovered it, and tried then to convince others that it is ancient and authentic? Yup. I’ve discussed some examples in earlier posts on the blog – e.g., just last year: https://ehrmanblog.org/teeth-will-be-provided/ But I don’t believe I have ever devoted any attention to the most famous instance, a “discovery” of an ancient text by a renowned scholar, a text that some other scholars claim he himself forged. Others very much think it really is authentic. The debate focuses on a brilliant academic named Morton Smith, and his alleged (or real) discovery of “The Secret Gospel of Mark.” I devoted an entire discussion to Smith and the Secret Gospel twenty years ago in my book Lost Christianities; the book is about different kinds of early Christianity (Gnostics, Marcionites, Jewish Christians, etc.), and is particularly interested in the kinds of books they claimed provided “apostolic” support for […]
April 12, 2023
The Discovery of a Lifetime: A Secret Gospel of Mark?
In this thread I am discussing the discovery of the Secret Gospel of Mark in 1958. Or was it the forgery of the Secret Gospel of Mark? Entire books have been written on the topic. My first foray into the fields was in my book Lost Christianities (Oxford Press, 2003). Here is how I begin to talk about the matter there: ******************************* The Discovery We need to begin with the tale of the discovery, as recounted by Morton Smith himself in his sundry publications on the “Secret Gospel of Mark,” especially the two books published fifteen years after the discovery – one for a general audience, a beautifully written piece that reads like a detective novel, and one for scholars, a detailed linguistic and philological analysis of the text and its significance.[1] In 1941, as a twenty-six year old graduate student, Smith had gone to the Holy Land on a traveling fellowship from Harvard Divinity School. Unfortunately, the Mediterranean was closed by the war, and he was stuck in Jerusalem. While there he became acquainted […]
April 13, 2023
Interview with Michael Shermer
Many of you will know Michael Shermer, from his publications and podcast. He writes about the history of science from the perspective of religious skepticism, and is the editor-in-chief of Skeptic Magazine. Like me, he converted to evangelical Christianity as a teenager, went to a conservative Christian college, and ended up leaving the faith. Michael and I had an unusually interesting discussion about my book Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End for his podcast, and he has agreed to allow me to share it with y’all here. Enjoy!
April 19, 2023
A Scandalous Discovery of a Scandalous Gospel?
Later scholars have sometimes claimed Morton Smith forged the Secret Gospel of Mark; he claimed he *discovered* it. Which is it? Here I continue with my account of how he said it all happened. In my previous post I indicated that in 1958 Smith was catagaloguing the books of the library of the monastery of Mar Saba near Jerusalem, when he found a book that had a text written into its final (blank) pages. It was allegedly a letter of Clement of Alexandria, a famous theologian and ethicist who lived and wrote around 200 CE. Smith immediately recognized that it was a letter we did not have before. And here is how I discuss what he did next, in my book Lost Christianities (Oxford University Press, 2003). ****************************** On the spot, Smith decided to photograph the three pages that contained the handwritten copy of Clement’s letter, but chose to hold off translating the entire text until later, reasoning that if some such treasure had turned up, there might be more where that came from; given […]
April 25, 2023
How Do You Prove an Ancient Manuscript is Ancient? The Secret Gospel of Mark
In my previous posts I explained how American scholar of early Christianity, Morton Smith, claimed to have discovered the Secret Gospel of Mark in 1958. Now I’ll discuss how, once he discovered it (assuming he did – some scholars think he actually forged it…), how he went about trying to find out if it was actually an ancient Gospel. Again, from my book Lost Christianities: Authenticating and Interpreting the Letter Morton Smith devoted much of his research for the next fifteen years studying this find. Roughly speaking, the work involved establishing the authenticity of the letter and determining the meaning of the passages quoted from the Secret Gospel. In 1973, Smith published the results of his labors in two books, one a popular account for general audiences, full of interesting anecdotes and still worth reading, The Secret Gospel: The Discovery and Interpretation of the the Secret Gospel According to Mark, the other an erudite report on his investigations for scholars in the field, an amazing book of scholarship but inaccessible for the most part to […]
April 22, 2023
April Gold Q&A: Submit your questions!
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April 3, 2023
Yahweh and Moses. Platinum Guest Post by Omar Abur-Robb
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April 7, 2023
The Quest for the Legendary Jesus. Platinum Guest Post by Robert Droney
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April 10, 2023