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Video: The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot Part 1


  This past November I flew to Yelm, Washington, outside of Seattle, to deliver a lecture on the Gospel of Judas Iscariot at the Ramtha School of Enlightenment.  When I had been invited to give the talk the year before, I frankly had never heard of the Ramtha School of Enlightenment.  In fact, when I was invited, I was told that the school was called The Gnostic School of America — and so I naturally thought that it was some kind of college made up of west-coast-modern-day-Gnostics who saw themselves standing in line with the ancient Gnostics.  Such people do exist! But that is not what this school is.  The School of Enlightenment was founded by a woman named JZ Knight, and it is named, obviously, after Ramtha.  In case you don’t remember who that was, let me tell you.  Ramtha was a philosopher-warrior who lived 35,000 years ago, who, with his 2.5 million soldier army, conquered most of the known world at the time, including the island of Atlantis.   JZ  channels him.  (In one of […]

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January 16, 2014

Ramtha Again: The Question-Answer Session


  Here is the second part of my talk at the Ramtha School of Enlightenment.   It is a question-answer session that I had with the attendees, and for my money, it was the best, most interesting part of the evening.   Since we had abundant time — well over an hour — I was able to give the questions full, drawn out answers, virtually mini-lectures in themselves, on an enormous range of issues that came up.   The questions dealt with intriguing topics on the whole.  Many of my answers are not what the questioner wanted to hear.   And it is interesting to see what the crowd reaction to my answers was (usually very positive — effusive at times; but it is clear that I am the odd-person-out in this group as, well, you would surely expect!).   At some points I get very personal and talk not just about my scholarship but about my beliefs and understandings of the world. In any event, I hope you enjoy listening to this as much as I enjoyed participating in […]

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January 22, 2014

Still a Few Free Memberships for those Who Need Them


  There are still a few free memberships to the blog available to those who need them, thanks to the incredible generosity of others. These have been donated for a single purpose: to allow those who cannot afford the annual membership fee to participate on the blog for a year. I will assign these memberships strictly on the honor system: if you truly cannot afford the membership fee, but very much want to have full access to the blog, then please contact me. Do NOT reply here, on the blog, as a comment. Send me a separate email, privately, at [email protected]. In your email, please:   1) Let me know your situation and;   2) Provide me with the following information: a) Your first and last name. b) Your preferred personal email. c) Your preferred user name (no spaces). d) Your preferred password (should be 8 or more characters, no spaces). The donors will remain anonymous, but here let me sincerely thank them once again for such kind and generous donations to help others in […]

December 27, 2013

Free Memberships All Claimed


I very much regret to report that all the free memberships that have been available by the generous donors who are already members on the blog have already been given out.   So please do not send in a request if you have not received one.  Hopefully we will be able to make more available in the future. Thanks again toall the  donors.  Your response was heartwarming.  And to the recipients, I hope you enjoy the blog!!

December 29, 2013

Back to Aslan’s Thesis. An Alternative View: Jesus the Apocalypticist


I have spent considerable time showing just how problematic Reza Aslan’s view of Jesus is, as he set it forth in his bestselling Zealot. But it is not enough to attack someone else’s position if you don’t agree with it. You also have to have an alternative that is more attractive. So it’s time to move into that realm. As I have repeatedly stated on this blog, the view of Jesus that has dominated scholarship since the classic of Albert Schweitzer in 1906, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (actually, it was in German, with the title, Von Reimarus zu Wrede, which, frankly, is not nearly as catchy….), is that Jesus is best understood to have been – as were many of his contemporaries – a Jewish apocalypticist, one who believed that God was soon to intervene in history in a spectacular and cosmic way to overthrow the forces of evil in a supernatural show of power, and bring in a good kingdom on earth in which there would be no more injustice and oppression […]

The Later De-apocalypticizing of Jesus


Yesterday I started mounting the case that rather than being a zealot interested in a military overthrow of the Romans to reclaim the land for God, Jesus was an apocalypticist who believed that God himself would intervene in history to destroy the forces of evil (presumably including the Romans; and certainly including the Jews who were not “on the right side”) to set up his kingdom. It is worth re-emphasizing that all over the map in our early sources Jesus speaks about the Kingdom of God. He does not speak about the Kingdom of Israel, or about the use of military force (I’ll get to the scattered exceptions eventually), or about “retaking the land.” This is a key point because Aslan thinks that for Jesus it was all about getting rid of the Romans and taking the land back; but Jesus doesn’t talk about that in our earliest sources – even the ones that Aslan cites (as I showed in earlier posts: unlike zealots, Jesus told his followers that they *should* pay taxes to Rome!). […]

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More Evidence that Jesus was an Apocalypticist


I am not going to belabor the point much longer, that Jesus is best understood as a Jewish apocalypticist who anticipated that God was soon to enter into history to destroy the forces of evil and bring in his good kingdom; he was not a lestes, one who supported a military uprising against the Roman forces.  Rather than subscribing to the idea of military violence, Jesus believed that the Son of Man was coming in judgment and that he would destroy all that was aligned against God.   I’ll be giving more evidence for why Jesus was not a lestes later.  For now, it is enough to stress that an alternative understanding accounts much better for the evidence that survives. I have already given fairly compelling reasons for thinking that Jesus was an apocalypticist.  In this post I’ll give another kind of argument, which to me has always seemed like a slam dunk. In a nutshell, the argument is that we know beyond any reasonable doubt what happened at the very beginning of Jesus’ public ministry […]

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December 31, 2013

End of the Year Blog Reflection


  Here at the end of the year, on this New Year’s Eve, I’m reflecting on the blog and how it has gone over the past 12 months.   I’d say this has been a fantastic year.   Every now and then (like, every ten minutes) I wonder if it is really worth all the time and effort.  I’ve continued to post five or six times a week (usually six), and each post is about 1000 words long.   But in addition, I need to approve all the comments that come in, and respond to the ones that have asked for a response.  Altogether it takes about an hour of my day.  On one hand, that doesn’t seem like much – hey, it’s only an hour!   On the other hand, I already don’t have enough hours in the day.   We need longer days and more days in the week!  I’ve often wished there could be some kind of trade-off system, where people who are bored with nothing to do, for whom the hours and days drag on and […]

January 1, 2014

Looking Ahead to 2014 on the Blog


I’d like to take the opportunity of the New Year to look ahead with you on matters related to the blog.   My idea for this post is to tell you what my goals for the coming year are and what challenges we are (or that I am) facing, and then to ask a couple of questions from you, the members, about how best to proceed. Goals and Challenges I have several different goals for the blog this coming year. Financial.   This past year, as I indicated in my past post, we pulled in $61,000.   That is a significant increase over the previous year.   I would like to keep the increase going, and have as a target $70,000 for 2014.   This will obviously mean acquiring significantly more members; keeping the members we have; and hopefully increasing the number of donations from people who are already members.  On that final point, there are some people who generously give everything from $25 and up.  I appreciate more than I can say, from each and every one of your […]

January 2, 2014

Jesus and the Temple


Back to Aslan’s Zealot. I will not be going on forever, but I do want to make a few final posts. So far I have shown that the book is filled with mistakes, some of them important, about the ancient world, about the New Testament, and about early Christianity. These are simply errors, things (I tried to show) that Aslan just got wrong. After that I tried to show why the thesis itself was highly problematic by taking on his lead chapter and showing just why the claims he makes don’t “work” historically. And then, most recently, I’ve shown why scholars have widely opted for a solution that differs from Aslan’s view that Jesus is best seen as one totally zealous for the law and the land of Israel to the extent that he favored a military overthrow of the Roman empire as foreign occupiers. The alternative is that Jesus instead was a preacher of apocalyptic doom. It was not by military force that the enemy would be defeated, but by an act of God, […]

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January 4, 2014

Jesus’ Crucifixion as King of the Jews


It is often said that one of the best pieces of evidence that Jesus is to be understood as a political insurgent who favored the overthrow of the Roman empire by means of (human) force is that he was crucified on charges of political insurgency. If he was charged with insurgency, he was probably an insurgent. There is, of course, a powerful logic to this view, but it has its flaws, and an alternative explanation actually works better. In terms of flaws, it needs to be noted and emphasized that in our sources the other two people crucified with Jesus were called lestai (sometimes translate “robbers” – but Josephus uses it to refer to someone engaged in guerrilla warfare against the ruling authorities, an armed insurgent). So too in the Gospel of John, Barabbas – the one the crowds preferred to Jesus – is also called a lestes. But – here’s the *big* point: Jesus is NOT called a lestes in these accounts. Ever. And he is not condemned to death –as are these others […]

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January 6, 2014

Final Loose Threads on the Zealot Hypothesis


I think I’ve gone on about Aslan’s Zealot long enough. Maybe more than long enough, many of you may think. My plan is to make this the last post. Let me reiterate that I think it is an exceptionally well-written, engaging book, and we can all be thankful to Aslan for bringing important historical issues about Jesus to the public attention. I may think that he’s wrong about his central thesis, and I may recognize a lot of errors in his book (about history, about the NT, about early Christianity). But I appreciate very much that he has gotten people talking about Jesus from a historical perspective – something that I think is of utmost importance, especially in our American context where Jesus typically is only spoken of by believers who do not appreciate the importance of history for knowing, well, about the past! In this final post I want to speak about a couple of threads, loose traditions that are sometimes used to argue that Jesus was most likely a zealot, someone who was […]

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January 8, 2014

My New Testament Syllabus


  The new semester started today.   Here I am, 58 years old, and still organizing my life around semesters…. In any event, I’m teaching my regular two-course load this semester.  My undergraduate class is the Introduction to the New Testament that I teach every Spring, with 240 students; my graduate seminar is a graduate level course basically about the same thing, covering (at a graduate level) the major issues in New Testament studies and the history of the discipline, all with an eye toward pedagogy (i.e., how to teach this material to undergraduates).  It will have about ten students. I’ll have more to say about each course anon.  For now, here is my syllabus for the undergraduate class, for your amusement and reading pleasure. INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT    Reli 104   Spring, 2014 Instructor:  Dr. Bart D. Ehrman Teaching Assistants: Candace Buckner, Brian Coussens, Shaily Patel, Nathan Schradle Course Description This course is designed to help you (a) learn about the New Testament writings and the history of earliest Christianity and (b) develop […]

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January 9, 2014

My New Testament Pop Quiz


  Last semester I posted here on the blog the pop quiz I gave on the first day of the semester to my class on Jesus in Scholarship and Film.   As you may have noticed in my post yesterday, I also give a quiz to begin my New Testament class, which I started teaching yesterday.   If you were on the blog five months ago, and have a very good memory, the quiz will look very familiar.  About half the questions are the same. I give a quiz on the first day – before I’ve taught the students anything – both in order to break the ice while having some fun together and in order to teach a few things, as I give the answers after they have taken a stab at them.   I’ll say a few things about what I try to accomplish with that in my next post. I told the students yesterday that if anyone got at least nine of the eleven answers correct, I would buy them dinner at the Armadillo Grill.   […]

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January 10, 2014

Followup on the NT Quiz


So, about my quiz on the New Testament. Most of you who sent me answers failed miserably. I think you should buy *me* dinner…. I did this already with my other quiz, but I’ll do it again here – explaining what I try to accomplish by the various questions.   FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. Click here for membership options. If you don’t belong yet, JOIN NOW, OR YOU MAY NEVER KNOW!! 27 books in the NT (when you think NT, you should think God; then think trinity; and what is 27?  3x3x3)   (It’s a miracle).   I ask this question not only because it’s basic information, but also because I want them to start thinking about why we have these books and not others – the subject of my first lecture on Monday. Written in Greek.   I want them to know the importance of Alexander the Great’s conquest and the Hellenization of the Mediterranean for early Christianity – and that Jesus’ teachings in Aramaic come to us by […]

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January 11, 2014

My New Edition of After the New Testament


Several people have asked me what I’m working on these days. Answer: I’m doing a new, second edition of my college-level text-book/reader/anthology of ancient texts, After the New Testament. It is meant to be a topically-arranged collection of primary readings from after the New Testament period up to the time of the Emperor Constantine. Before explaining what I am doing to make the second edition different from the first (I am revising it seriously), I should say something about what the first edition, published in 1999, was all about. To do that I give here the first part of the Introduction to the text. I’ll give the second part anon.   ******************************************************************** Over the past century and a half, archaeological discoveries have played a significant role in our understanding of early Christianity. These include (a) the serendipitous discovery of entire libraries of ancient texts, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, found in the wilderness of Judea, and the library of Gnostic writings uncovered near Nag Hammadi, Egypt; (b) the equally fortuitous unearthing of individual documents, […]

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January 13, 2014

More on After the New Testament


The following is the continuation of my Introduction (chapter 1) of my book After the New Testament. In it I start to explain each of the chapters of the book, all of which deal with a variety of aspects of Christianity in the second and third centuries. I will give the remainder of the Introduction in my next post, since I don’t want to make these too long to be manageable. After that I will talk about what I’m doing new in the second edition that I’m producing now. ************************************************************************ It might be useful to say a word about the nature of the rubrics under which the chapters of the book are organized, and the logic of their sequencing. This need not entail a lengthy discussion: each chapter begins with a sketch of the important historical aspects of the topic, and each individual text is introduced with brief comments concerning its historical context and significance. One of the first things to consider about early Christianity is how it spread so far and wide in its […]

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January 14, 2014

Final Bit of The Introduction to After the New Testament


I have been providing the “Introduction” to my book After the New Testament. Here is the end of it. In this version, I include two additional paragraphs on chapters not found in my first edition (chapter 10 and chapter 14). I’ll explain why I added these chapters (and the reading s in them) along with the other changes that I have made in the book, in a subsequent post. In reading through the new edition of the book – I’m virtually finished and ready to send it in to the publisher – I have been struck by just how significant these early texts that I anthologize are. Second and third century Christianity was a highly intriguing phenomenon, and there was a lot “to it.” As soon as I’m done with all my current writing projects (and the gods know when *that* will be) I am planning on writing a college-level textbook on the period, going from after the period right after the New Testament , around 100 CE, up through the Council of Nicea in […]

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January 15, 2014

The New and Improved After the New Testament


Now that I’ve summarized what happens in the second edition of my reader, After the New Testament, I can say a couple of things about what I’ve changed this time around. First, there were several important texts that neither I nor any other thinking person I know can believe that I left out of the first edition. I’ve included them here in the revision. In addition, as I’ve indicated, I have added two new chapters, one dealing with Women in the Early Church and the other with Early Christian Theories and Practices of Biblical Interpretation. Each has a number of selections of primary source texts connected with it. Moreover, I have expanded the coverage of some of the chapters, by adding a few new texts here and there. Altogether I have about 20 additional texts in this new edition. I have also “switched out” some of the translations – changing to more recent translations (a bunch of these are my own translations published since the first edition – for example of the Apostolic Fathers and […]

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Jesus Writes A Letter!


QUESTION: I only recently bought Eusebius’ “Ecclesiastical History” and have flipped through it. I was shocked to see in Book 1, Chapter 13, a supposed letter from Jesus to King Agbarus! I knew I had to everything Eusebius wrote with a grain of salt, but after this, it made me realise that a grain won’t be enough. No one actually takes this letter seriously, do they? And if not, how much confidence can we place in his other testimonies of letters and documents that we no longer have access to beyond his book? RESPONSE: Yes indeed, this is the famous correspondence between Jesus and King Abgar of Edessa in Syria (well, famous among scholars of early Christianity at least). I have translated it anew for my book The Other Gospels. Here is what I say there about the letters (the one from Abgar to Jesus, then his response); at the end of the post I give my new translations of the two letters. ****************************************************************************************************** Jesus’ Correspondence with Abgar The apocryphal correspondence between Jesus and Abgar […]

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January 18, 2014