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Q and the Passion Narrative
This, I think (!), will be my last post for now on the Q source apparently used by Matthew and Luke for many of their sayings materials, a source that must at one time have existed (since Matthew and Luke appear both to have had access to it), that was written in Greek (otherwise Matthew and Luke could not agree word-for-word in places – in Greek — in their non-Markan sayings material), and that contained almost exclusively (or exclusively) sayings of Jesus. There are many other issues that we could discuss about Q, but for now I would like to end by mentioning just one. It is regularly and routinely maintained by New Testament scholars that one of the striking features of Q is that it contains a list of Jesus’ sayings and no passion narrative – no account of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Scholars then draw a conclusion: the death of Jesus was not important to the community that produced the Q document. I have to admit, I’m not completely convinced of this claim, […]
Tags: passion narratives, Q
March 20, 2015
About the Blog: Charities and Improvements
This post is about the blog itself, dealing with the question of which charities it supports (in reply to numerous requests) mentioning several of improvements we have made in response to requests that I have received. First, philanthropy. As I think everyone on the blog knows, all the member fees and all the donations (which you should feel free to begin or continue to make!) go to charity. I don’t keep a dime for myself and I pay for the upkeep, maintenance, and support for the blog (it’s not as cheap as one might imagine….) (or at least as I did) out of my own pocket. But I’m happy to do it – it’s a fantastic cause. Several people have pointed out to me that my *explanation* about the charity aspect of the blog on the Philanthropy page on is fairly pathetic. It doesn’t even indicate which charities the blog supports. That’s a problem. And so it’s time to rectify it. All the moneys collected by the blog go into the Bart Ehrman Foundation, and […]
Tags: Doctors without Borders, The Urban Ministries of Durham
March 22, 2015
Lost Letters of Paul’s Opponents
I’m back now to my thread on the lost writings of the early Christians that I would love to have discovered. Onr bunch that would be absolutely fantastic to have would be the letters of Paul’s *opponents.* I get asked all the time if I think that Paul is the true founder of Christianity and whether we should call it Paulinanity instead of Christianity (and related questions). My answer is decidedly NO. For two main reasons. The first is the most obvious: Paul did not himself invent Christianity. He inherited it. It is difficult to establish a firm chronology of Paul’s life. There are scholars who have devoted many years just to this topic. It’s messy and complicated. My colleague from Duke, Douglas Campbell, has just written an-over-400-page book dealing just with the chronology of Paul’s *letters*, Framing Paul: An Epistolary Biography. It is about how to situate the surviving letters of Paul (Douglas accepts ten of the thirteen as authentic – all but 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus) chronologically in relation to one […]
Tags: circumcision, Galatians, Paul
March 24, 2015
Trip to Turkey?
This coming June I will be going on a tour sponsored by the UNC Alumni Association to Turkey for two weeks, giving lectures on the apostle Paul (who established churches there). (Actually I’ll be there three weeks, since there is an “extension” of the tour that some folks are going on to Cappadocia, a truly amazing place.) It is a very small tour — only 26 people, and a fantastic itinerary. Someone has cancelled out from going, and so there is a spot for a couple (two people of any sort who want to share a bed). You would not need to be a UNC alum (they charge some token amount to “count” you as an alum). Is anyone interested? If so, send me a direct email at [email protected] Information about the trip — costs, itinerary, etc. — can be found here: http://bit.ly/1N7OU1D
March 23, 2015
Paul’s Christian Enemies: Galatians
In my previous post I indicated that among the lost writings of early Christianity, one batch that I would especially like to see discovered would be those produced by Paul’s enemies among the Christians. I don’t know how many of his opponents were writing-literate, but possibly some of them were, and their own attacks on him and defenses of their own positions would be fascinating and eye-opening. Among these, I would especially love to see what his opponents in Galatia had to say for themselves. My hunch is that they were every bit as aggressive and confident in their views as Paul was in his. I’ve always found the letter to the Galatians to be one of the most forceful, intriguing, and difficult letters of Paul. I’ve studied it for over forty years, and there are still verses that I don’t understand. My view is that most scholars don’t understand them either — even the scholars who think they do! It is a packed and theologically dense letter in places. But the basic point is […]
Tags: circumcision, Galatians
March 24, 2015
Is Paul at Odds with Matthew?
In yesterday’s post I indicated that I really very much wish that we could have some of the writings produced by Paul’s opponents in Galatia. They believed that in order to be a follower of Jesus, a person had to accept and follow the Law of Moses as laid out in the Jewish Scriptures. Men were to be circumcised to join the people of God; men and women were, evidently, to adopt a Jewish lifestyle. Presumably that meant keeping kosher, observing the Sabbath, and so on. Anyone who didn’t do this was not really a member of the people of God, since to be one of God’s people meant following the law that God had given. Paul was incensed at this interpretation of the faith and insisted with extraordinary vehemence that it was completely wrong. The gentile followers of Jesus were not, absolutely not, supposed to become Jewish. Anyone who thought so rendered the death of Jesus worthless. It was only that death, and the resurrection, that made a person right with God. Nothing else. […]
Tags: Jewish Law, matthew, Paul
March 25, 2015
Jesus, Matthew, and the Law
In my previous post I discussed the differences – what strike me, at least, as the differences – between the Gospel of Matthew and Paul’s letter to the Galatians and with respect to whether the followers of Jesus are to follow the law or not. Matthew’s Gospel indicates that the law will not cease to be in force until the heavens and earth pass away, and that Jesus’ followers need to follow the law to the limit, to follow it even better than the scribes and Pharisees do. Paul, on the other hand, insists that the followers of Jesus must not think that they have to follow the law. Any gentile who thinks he has to be circumcised, or to follow other aspects of the Jewish law, is in danger of losing salvation. I would like to clarify one point about my view and explain one of its complications. Clarification: in my post I was not discussing whether Paul saw eye-to-eye with Jesus about this issue. My post was about the Gospel of Matthew. I […]
Tags: Jewish Law, matthew, Paul
March 27, 2015
My New Project on Memory
I am going to take a break from my thread that has been dealing with which books from Christian antiquity I would most like to have discovered. I haven’t gotten very deep into the thread: basically my answers so far have been: the lost letters of Paul, the letters of Paul’s opponents, and Q. There are a lot more that I’d like to discuss, and will discuss relatively soon. But for now I’m going to break off into something else, because I am at a crucial point of my research/writing and I want to deal with that for a while. As many of you know, I have spent almost all my research time for more than a year now working on issues of memory. I have now read all that I need to read for my next book, a trade book for a general audience, on how Jesus was “remembered” by early Christians in the decades before any of the Gospels were written. My plan is to start writing on Tuesday. Gods willing, I’ll have […]
Tags: memory studies
March 29, 2015
Why I Shifted My Research Plans
In my last post I started explaining how I came to work on issues of memory. My plan had been something else, to write a detailed commentary on the Gospel of Peter and other early Greek Gospel fragments. I had been committed to do this for years, with a book contract with Fortress Press for their commentary series that is called Hermeneia. Just by way of background: when I was just out of graduate school, I vowed to myself that there were three kinds of books I would never, ever write. I would never write a textbook. I would never write a book on the historical Jesus. And I would never write a commentary. The reason for each was that there simply were too many of each kind of book out there already, and I simply didn’t want to tread where so many others had trod. So much for my vows. I did end up writing a textbook on the NT. That wasn’t my idea; my publisher twisted my arm and I agreed, and I […]
Tags: Gospel of Peter, Hermeneia, memory
March 30, 2015
My Original Interest in Memory
When I decided no longer to do a commentary on the Gospel of Peter and other early Greek Gospel fragments it was not only because I realized that I was not up for two or three years of that particular kind of laborious detailed work. It was also because there was another area of research that I was really, really interested in but that I knew very little about. That was the study of memory. I was 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 […]
Tags: memory, memory studies
April 1, 2015
Different Kinds of Memory
I indicated in the last post that I got interested in the study of memory for both personal and professional reasons. Professionally, I had long been interested in the question of how eyewitnesses would have remembered the life of Jesus, and how the stories about Jesus may have been shifted and altered and invented in later times based on faulty or even false memories. That led me to be interested in memory more broadly. Memory is an enormous field of research, just within cognitive psychology. I spent 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 you might mistake one photo for another, but basically it is all in there in […]
Tags: memory studies
Sketch of My Memory Book
Please read to the end of this post if you want to learn about a highly unusual opportunity. I started writing my book on memory and the oral traditions about Jesus this week. My plan was to have an intense week at it. I’m teaching my regular two classes this term: a three-hour PhD seminar on the use of literary forgery in the early Christian tradition, and an undergraduate lecture course, Introduction to the New Testament. So I had to do those this week as well, in addition to departmental meetings and meetings with grad students, and so on. But even so, I planned to write the book every free minute I had, and I did. I started Tuesday morning and by yesterday afternoon I had three of the six major chapters written. I celebrated with a very big cigar, and am taking today more or less off! Here I would like to say a few words about what the book is and what it will cover. The tentative title I have for it is […]
Tags: How Jesus Became God
April 4, 2015
How I’m Writing This Book
I have been asked about how I am actually writing my book just now. Here are some reflections. One of the things you figure out pretty quickly when writing a book is that it never goes as planned. Things (usually) take longer than you thought they would; or they (rarely) go faster. For most authors, the structure of the book changes as they start writing it, and they realize that they really have to say more about this and they really probably should say less about that. They realize that, contrary to what they thought, they need to devote an entire chapter to something that they had planned to cover in a few paragraphs. Key (verbal) illustrations that they planned to use don’t actually work that well. And they come up with new ideas in the process of writing. Different authors have remarkably different approaches to writing. My wife Sarah and I are about as different as they come. In large measure, I think, that’s because our brains work so differently. Sarah is drop-dead brilliant. […]
Tags: How Jesus Became God, writing process
April 6, 2015
Bart Ehrman on Problem of Suffering – UCB
My thoughts on the problem of suffering. On April 17th, 2008 I appeared on a show called “Conversations with History” with host Harry Kreisler, sponsored by the Institute of International Studies, Regents of the University of California at Berkeley. The show was called “Biblical Insights into the Problem of Suffering,” and was based on my then recently published book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question — Why We Suffer.” Harry Kreisler is the creator, executive producer, and host of the Conversations with History series. Conceived in 1982 by Mr. Kreisler as a way to capture and preserve through conversation and technology the intellectual ferment of our times, Conversations with History includes over 500 interviews. Harry Kreisler was the Executive Director of the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley (1974-2014). In that role, he shaped, administers, and implements interdisciplinary academic and public affairs programs that analyze global issues. Below, beneath the interview, were some thoughts on the book that I wrote up at the time. […]
Tags: Harry Kreisler, Suffering, theodicy
February 28, 2016
My Memory Book, chs. 1-2
So, as I mentioned in the previous post, I did not start writing my current book until I had a very full outline already in place. With a massive outline that covers everything you want to say, the book pretty much writes itself. Well, that’s what I tell people. It’s not true, of course; but I have found that once all the hard work of research and outlining is finished, the writing – just for me, of course – is the very, very different chore of putting into clear and compelling words the ideas that I already know that I want to express. It’s a completely different kind of task. I won’t reproduce here the outline of my book (for which you should be glad since, as I mentioned, it’s 42 pages long….). But I will say something about the six main chapters to give you an idea of how it will flow. Here I’ll summarize the first two chapters. In the following posts I’ll cover the other four. Chapter One is tentatively entitled “Oral […]
Tags: Birger Gerhardsson, oral traditions
April 8, 2015
My Memory Book, ch. 3
In my previous post I started to summarize what I will be covering in my new book, which hopefully will be published next spring, possibly under the title Jesus Before the Gospels. After devoting the first chapter to a demonstration that everyone agrees that some early Christians were inventing stories about Jesus (as seen in the apocryphal Gospels; it should be stressed – those who read and thought about these Gospels “remembered” Jesus in light of the stories they told),and a second chapter to showing how critical scholars, for as long as there have been critical scholars (late 18th century) have argued that also in the NT there are “invented” traditions that also affected how Jesus was remembered, I move on in the next chapter as follows. (My original plan for this thread was to summarize all six major chapters of my book in one post; then it was to summarize two chapters per post; but I want to devote an entire post to this chapter! And so it goes….) Chapter three is tentatively entitled, […]
My Memory Book, Ch. 4a
Chapter four of my book, tentatively entitled “False Memories and the Death of Jesus,” is where I address head-on the psychology of memory. My principal interest, at the end of the day, involves the problems of memory, of how memories for things we experience or hear about can be frail, faulty, and even false. That’s not to deny that most of the time our memories are pretty decent. If they weren’t we wouldn’t be able to function, either as individuals or a society. And so of course most of what we remember is what really happened. At the same time, we often (more than we usually admit — even to ourselves) forget things and, more interesting and important, misremember things. That obviously creates a big problem for historians. If our access to the past is mainly through sources that have themselves remembered what happened – either because they were there or because they heard it from others (who possibly heard it from others who heard it from others, and so on) – and memories can […]
Tags: forgetting, memory, memory studies
April 10, 2015
Can A Made-Up Story Be A False Memory?
It has become clear to me, in seeing a number of responses to my posts on memory, that I’m not quite explaining myself clearly enough to get my point across to everyone. So, well, what else is new? When I have mentioned “false memories” in the Gospels – that is, recollections of Jesus that are not true to what really happened – some readers have pointed out that these may not be memories at all, but they may simply be what 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 one of which is the the most relevant and important. The first, though, is that 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 […]
Tags: false memory
Ramblings on Charity and Religion
QUESTION: Don’t you think that being raised in Christianity makes it more likely that you will make decent contributions to others like you do with your charity contributions? I know that one does not have to be Christian to be decent, but it seems, for many of us, to help increase the odds of being decent at least some of the time. RESPONSE: This is a really interesting question. And maybe unanswerable! Why are those of us who are concerned deeply about others and their welfare so … concerned? Is it because we are religious? Or, as in my case, because we used to be religious? In one of my public debates with Dinesh D’Souza a few years ago, this came out as a point of disagreement. Dinesh believes that only Christianity drives people to be concerned about others who are in need. For him, it is not religion in general, but Christianity in particular, that makes people want to be charitable. In the debate, I found that view to be a bit outrageous. Really? […]
Tags: charitable, charity, Christianity
April 11, 2015
What Is A Memory?
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 […]
Tags: Episodic memory, memory, Semantic memory, “procedural” memory
April 13, 2015