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Baptism and the Macbeth Effect. Platinum post by Douglas Wadeson MD
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Tags: Platinum
April 14, 2023
Blog Volunteer Needed!!
As you may know, a number of Volunteers devote their time and talents to the blog, making it work, succeed, thrive, and grow. And an important position has now opened up. We have a special need for someone who is skilled in social media of all kinds. For some time now we have been highly fortunate to have a skilled volunteer taking on this task,, more or less behind the scenes. She needs now to move on to other things. Life calls! And now the blog is calling in response. We need to expand our blog horizons and develop our potential, with the goal of significantly increasing our membership so as to achieve our dual objectives of spreading expert knowledge about the New Testament and Early Christianity to a wider world and, concomitantly, raising more funds for charity. Our ideal volunteer would be someone experienced, skilled, and creative in posting to social media: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and more! Among other things, the ability to create short clips from existing videos and post to Reels would […]
April 6, 2023
Could the Mysterious “Secret Gospel of Mark” Be Authentic?
In my previous posts I discussed how Morton Smith claimed he discovered a copy of an ancient letter of Clement of Alexandria (ca. 200 CE), written in the back of a 17th century book, by a scribe of the 18th century, in which Clement described a mysterious “Secret Gospel” – an intriguing and possibly scandalous longer version of the Gospel of Mark. In yesterday’s post I indicated how Smith went about trying to authenticate the discovery. Here I pick up at that point, again, as recounted in my book Lost Christianities. ****************************** A key question was whether the copyist who put the alleged letter of Clement of Alexandria that Smith mound into the bak of a book was copying an actualy letter of Clement of Alexandria. There is no difficulty believing that a scribe of the eighteenth century might have had a fragmentary copy of an ancient letter at his disposal – possibly a loose sheet in the ancient library, known for its famous ancient texts – and that rather than simply discard it, he […]
April 23, 2023
The Naked Man of Mark 14:51-52, the Secret Gospel, and a Pressing Question: Did Jesus Engage in Homoerotic Behavior?
I am providing here a thread of posts on Morton Smith’s discovery, in 1958, of the “Secret Gospel of Mark,” a longer version of Mark’s Gospel in a letter allegedly written by Clement of Alexandria who attacks a group of nefarious Gnostics. Smith argued this really was an authentic letter, that the Secret Gospel really did exist in antiquity, and, yet more intriguing, that IT was the older form of the Gospel of Mark. Our Gospel of Mark *today* is an abbreviated version, edited to rid the Gospel of a couple of potentially scandalous passages. Whoa. Could that be right? Here’s a summary of Smith’s argument: ****************************** There are some interesting features of the shorter version – the one found in the New Testament – that can be explained if the longer version were the original, and this is some of the evidence that Smith and others have adduced for their view. To take the second quotation first. Clement indicates that it appeared after the first part of Mark 10:46: “And they came to Jericho; […]
April 20, 2023
How Does An Author Write a Bestseller?
Almost everyone has the wrong idea about how a book becomes a bestseller. In the crowd I run around with, the term “bestseller” tends to have a technical meaning: a book on the New York Times Bestseller List. Every week the NY Times receives data from all the major book-selling outlets – from Amazon to Indies – and crunches the numbers for their various lists (Fiction Hardbacks, Non-Fiction Hardbacks, paperback fiction, etc.). There are 25 books in each category that make the list, but they *print* only the top 15. To put that list in a bit of perspective, there are about 700 – 800 new books published in the U.S. every day (not counting self-published books). To make the top 25 in a given week is … well, not easy. As many of you know, a non-fiction “trade book” is one written for a broad, general audience rather than for scholars in a field of study (an “academic” book or a “monograph”) or for classroom use for students (a textbook). Normally, the point of […]
April 10, 2023
My Best Best-Selling Fluke
A couple of weeks ago I published a post about how an author writes a bestseller (she doesn’t! It becomes one or not for reasons other than the author’s intent or writing…) I remembered I had posted something on the topic years ago, based on a blog member’s question about my personal best-selling book, Misquoting Jesus, and why it did so well. In some ways it’s a real puzzle. The book is about Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. HUH??? A bestselling book? What??? (That, at least, is what all my friends said!) But the answer relates to my previous post. Here is the Q and then the A. QUESTION: In your previous answer to me you indicated that what makes a bestseller, in the end of the day, is massive media attention. My question now is what sparks this attention. In other words, why, out of all your books, did Misquoting Jesus receive a great attention from the media? RESPONSE: Ha! It’s a great question. I’ll start by saying that if there were […]
April 26, 2023
Don’t Wanna Be Left Behind? An Upcoming Lecture on the Rapture!
Interested in the “rapture”? Want to be sure you’re not “left behind” when the Antichrist arises and all hell breaks out on earth? Then come to my lecture: April 15, 3:00 pm: “Will You Be Left Behind? A History of The Rapture” Check it out here. Will You Be Left Behind? » Powered by ThriveCart If you don’t know about the rapture, this is the lecture for you. It’s believed by many millions of Christians in our world. If you do know about the rapture, this lecture is even more for you. I bet you don’t know where the idea came from! (Well, some of you maybe might.) Please note: this lecture is not connected with blog per se; it is part of my enterprise of online lectures and courses for the Bart Ehrman Professional Services (BEPS; you can learn about it at my personal website: http://www.bartehrman.com) BUT: blog members can get a nice discount. Enter the code BLOG5 for $5.00 off the purchase price ($14.95). If you can’t come to the lecture itself, you can still […]
April 10, 2023
Gold Q&A LIVE! (And Recorded) Tuesday April 11
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“Death is nothing to us.” What Do YOU Think?
I quote: “You need to realize that death is nothing to us. Everything that is good and bad in our lives comes from the experiences of our senses. But death brings an end to our senses/experiences. And so having the right understanding – that death is nothing to us – makes our mortality enjoyable, not because we will live forever but because we don’t pointlessly long to live forever. For there are no terrors in life for the one who fully understands that there are no terrors in not living. It is absurd for people who fear death — not because it is afflicting them now but because they expect it will be horrible when it comes. For this allegedly most awful thing – death — is actually nothing to us: when we exist, we are not dead, but when we are dead, we no longer exist. And so death is completely irrelevant – both to those who are living and to those who are dead. Those who are living are not experiencing it and […]
April 27, 2023
Wanna Take My Final Exam In New Testament?
I was browsing through some old posts from years ago and came across this one, a copy of my final exam for my undergraduate course, Introduction to the New Testament. Check it out. How would you do? The students have some idea of what the exam will entail in advance. For the identifications, anything they’ve read or heard during the semester is fair game. I don’t give them a list of terms ahead of time to study. They have to know every term covered in the reading and that I’ve given in class. For the essays: two weeks ahead of time I gave them fourteen possible essay questions for the exam, and told them I would choose two of the fourteen for the final. I decided to give them some choice, as you’ll see, so they could have some leeway about which essay to write. I won’t be able to correct your wrong answers or even to tell you the right ones, since each identification could take up to 50 words, and the essays took […]
April 30, 2023
And Here’s My Final Exam on The Birth of Christianity
Yesterday I posted an old final exam for my course Introduction to the New Testament. And for your amusement, here is an exam for my course that I taught this semester, called the Birth of Christianity, which covered the developments within Christianity after the New Testament up through the conversion of Constantine. See how you do! And again, I wish I could grade your answers, but, alas…. The Birth of Christianity, Reli 208 Final Exam This is exam is in three sections; you have three hours to complete it. We suggest you spend no more than an hour on each section. Section One: Short Identification. Write short answers up to 50 words on ten (and no more than ten) of the following. Make your answers as detailed and informative as you can. Ebionites The Gospel of Peter Arius Apologists Theodosius I Tertullian The Great Persecution Thecla Donatism Asceticism Incarnation Christology Infancy Gospel of Thomas Section Two: First Essay. Write an essay on the following topic. Make it as detailed and […]
May 2, 2023
My Forgotten Book on Memory
Of all the books I’ve written for a general audience, the one that I think got (by far) less attention than it deserved — well, OK, less attention that I wanted and hoped (!) — was Jesus Before the Gospels. I’ve long thought I gave it a very bad title. The book is really about memory — what we know about how memory works and doesn’t work, and how that affects our understanding of the Gospel stories about Jesus, which are based on memories of Jesus and usually among people who were remembering stories about him rather than things they observed themselves. I did some posts on the book many years ago, and thought it would be worthwhile to revisit them, and the book, since it really is crucially important for understanding the Gospels themselves and the problems with knowing about the historical Jesus. The book discusses psychological understandings of memories and false memories, the value of eyewitness testimony, anthropological studies of oral cultures, and other things of relevance to New Testament scholars even though the vast […]
May 3, 2023
When I Got Seriously Interested in Memory (at least insofar as I remember)
(Recall: this post came from the past, when I was working on my book about Jesus and Memory, badly titled Jesus Before the Gospels. I had forgotten about the post till just now!) As I indicated in my previous post, I have long been interested in memory for both personal and professional reasons. On the personal level, I have known people very close to me who have experienced serious memory problems, for example through strokes. Depending on what part of the brain is affected, different memory functions are damaged. For example, someone may remember perfectly well what happened in an event 20 years ago, but forget a conversation they just had. I have often wondered why and how that is.. And then there was my own memory. For some things I have a terrific memory. And for lots of things I have an absolutely terrible memory. I especially have a terrible “episodic” memory (as psychologists call it), a memory for things that happen in your life and you experience. Let me give an example. About […]
May 4, 2023
Remembering Columbus, Remembering Christ
In my previous post on Abraham Lincoln I discussed how the collective “memory” of important persons from the past can be distorted. We as a society “remember” things in certain ways — e.g., Vietnam; Civil Rights Movement; Elvis; 9/11), — different groups differently and not always accurately . Here I give another example, not to be a definitive demonstration of my point so much as to help us think about the issue. What about our memories of Christopher Columbus? And, well, how about the early Christians’ memory of Jesus? Again, this comes from the early part of my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** Remembering Columbus Much the same can be said about most of the historical figures that we revere, from Caesar Augustus to Joan of Arc to Christopher Columbus. Columbus is an interesting example. He is not always remembered today in the same glowing terms that we remembered him when I was a child growing up in the 50s and 60s. In those days, we remembered Columbus as one of the great […]
May 7, 2023
How Do We “Remember” Lincoln?
In my last post, I mentioned a phenomenon known as “collective” memory. It’s how groups of people “remember” something in the past. This isn’t quite the same as how you remember what you did on your last vacation. It’s more like how past events or figures are constructed in the broader “memory” of a society. Sociologists have long studied this problem, and their findings can help us think differently about how later Christian societies (groups of people) “remembered” Jesus. Here’s an example I cite in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** Remembering Lincoln In 2014 a poll was taken of 162 members of the American Political Science Association, asking them to rank all the past presidents of the United States, from best to worst.[1] Probably to no one’s great surprise, the top-ranked president was Abraham Lincoln. Most of us – though certainly not all of us – remember Lincoln as a truly great and noble man who did remarkable things for his country. But he was not always thought of in that […]
May 6, 2023
Is 2 Thessalonians a Forgery? From 132 CE? Platinum Guest Post by Omar Robb
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Tags: Platinum
April 28, 2023
Was Matthew Attacking Paul?
On my podcast this past week (Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman) someone asked me if I thought any of the Gospels of the NT were influenced by Paul. It’s an interesting question that I should post on (my view: Mark, maybe; Luke, unexpectedly and oddly not; John, I doubt it; Matthew?) Ah, Matthew. As it turns out, I think Matthew shows a rather obvious and ironic connection with Paul. Did he know Paul’s writings? I have no idea. Did he know about Paul? Same, no idea. Did he oppose a major feature of Paul’s gospel message? Sure looks like it!! (I’m trying to say that he could be opposed to Paul’s views without necessarily knowing Paul’s writings; the views may have been more widely spread than just by Paul. In fact, they almost certainly were. Here’s how I’ve discussed the matter once when I was reflecting at greater length in the issue: Paul certainly had opponents in his lifetime: “Judaizers,” as scholars call them — that is, Christian teachers who maintained that followers of Jesus […]
May 9, 2023
Does Understanding “Memory” Have Any Bearing on the Study of the Historical Jesus?
In my earlier posts I began to discuss my book, Jesus Before the Gospels, which deals with how understanding how “memory” works can contribute to our assessment of the Gospels stories about Jesus. Long before starting the book I had been intrigued the question of how eyewitnesses would have remembered the Jesus’ life, and how the stories about Jesus may have been shifted and altered and invented in later times based on faulty or even false memories. Those questions led me to be interested in memory more broadly. Memory is an enormous field of research, just within cognitive psychology. I spent many months doing nothing but reading important studies, dozens and dozens of books and articles. It is really interesting stuff. Memory is not at all what I started out thinking it was. Like most people I had this vague notion in my head that memory worked kind of like a camera. You see or experience something and take a photo of it and store it in your head. Sometimes the photo might fade, or […]
May 10, 2023
In What Sense is a Made-Up Story about Jesus a False *Memory*??
In the past, when I’ve said that the Gospels sometimes contain “false memories” of Jesus people have objected: these may not be memories at all, but simply stories the Gospel writers made up for their own reasons. In that case Jesus isn’t being “remembered” in these ways. Someone’s just making up stuff. In response to that view, let me make two points. The second will be the most important, but first things first: in most cases I don’t think there is any way to know whether a non-historical tradition in the Gospels is something that the Gospel writer inherited from others before him or invented himself. Take Luke’s story of how Jesus came to be born in Bethlehem. In Luke, and only in Luke we have a specific explanation of how it is that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, if – as evidently everyone knew – he actually came from Nazareth. It is that when Mary was full-term pregnant, she took a trip to Bethlehem with her espoused Joseph in order to register for a […]
May 13, 2023
How Can We “Remember” Someone (say, Jesus) We Never Knew?
A number of readers on the blog have objected to my understanding of memory, specifically to what a memory is, that is, to what constitutes a memory. As a rule, these readers have argued – some with considerable force and conviction! – that a “memory” is a mental recollection of something that one has personally experienced. Let me cite one of the more closely reasoned expressions of this alternative view by one of my respondents, before explaining my view and why I have it. COMMENT: Bart, I think people might be confused by your definition of false memories. In the medical, psychological and legal literature, false memories are defined as BELIEVED-IN MEMORIES OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCES that are false or are falsely remembered by specific persons. Beliefs ,stories, narratives, myths, folklore and conspiracies that are false but are circulating in a community or culture are not considered false memories by memory experts since these are not claimed to be first-hand memories of personal experiences. For example, a false memory can be created in the mind of […]
May 14, 2023