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Buying David Lambert’s Book at Discount


Dear Ehrman Blogging Crowd, I just received the following from David Lambert, hopefully of some interest to you!  Here is what he says: A couple of comments on the Facebook page complained about the price of the book. I received a code from Oxford that would allow people to purchase the book for a bit less if they were interested. I checked, and it looks like they’re still honoring it. Do you think it might be possible to post that in some fashion in connection to my posts? The link for the book is: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/how-repentance-became-biblical-9780190212247?q=david%20lambert&lang=en&cc=us . The code that needs to be entered to receive the 30% discount is: AAFLYG6.  

January 28, 2016

Weekly Readers’ Mailbag: January 30, 2016


In this installment of the Weekly Readers’ Mailbag, I’ll address two questions, one about the Jewishness of Jesus the other about my personal (bad) experience with editors.  If you have a question, either send it via a comment here or zap me an email.   QUESTION: What is it in the NT portrayal of Jesus that tends to obscure the centrality of his Jewishness?   RESPONSE: The person who asked this question mentioned the fact that it is only in fairly recent times, since the second half of the twentieth century, that scholars have emphasized that Jesus was thoroughly Jewish.  Prior to that, Jesus’ Jewishness was commonly downplayed.  So the question is, what about the New Testament led scholars away from recognizing how thoroughly Jewish he was? I have three things to say in response to this very good question.  First, my sense is that in no small measure, the earlier scholars who did not see Jesus’ Jewishness were living and doing research in an environment that was itself anti-Jewish.  Christianity, as we long know, […]

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January 31, 2016

Q & A about Jesus Before the Gospels, Part 3


Here is the third and last installment of the Q&A that I did with my publisher, HarperOne, about my new book Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Early Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior. (The final sentence of the final answer is, I think, the longest I’ve written in my life!!) I’m getting excited about the book and its release on March 1. If you have any questions you would like to ask me about the book or its topic – how knowing about the workings of human memory can help us understand what was happening to the oral traditions about Jesus in the years before they were written down – please comment and ask! I’m happy to talk about the book now in the weeks before it is released! *********************************************************** 1. In the book you share fascinating examples of how ‘false’ memories are formed (in particular, research psychologists collected following September 11, and following the 1992 plane crash in Bijlmermeer, Amsterdam). What can these studies tell us about the historical […]

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February 3, 2016

Q & A about Jesus Before the Gospels: Part 2


I have started to post the Q&A that I have done for my publisher (HarperOne) on my new book (due out one month from today! March 1, 2016), Jesus Before the Gospels. I’m really excited about its release. In many ways it is very different from anything I’ve published before, even though it is dealing with the reliability of the Gospels. Here is the second of three installments of the questions and answers. **************************************************************** 1. In the book, you look at anthropological studies undertaken in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Ghana, and other places of oral culture. What do these studies reveal about the oral traditions of Jesus’ time? It is surprising to me that scholars of the New Testament – who frequently refer to the high accuracy of traditions passed along in oral cultures – have so rarely bothered to see what we actually know about oral cultures and their means of preserving their traditions. Since two Harvard scholars named Milman Parry and Albert Lord began to study the passing on of oral traditions in Yugoslavia in […]

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February 2, 2016

Technical Problems on the Blog


Dear Bart Ehrman Blog Members, We have been having technical problems on the blog for the past couple of days.  A real pain in the wazoo.  Some wacko in St. Petersburg Russia (really!) managed to muck things up, so that my past two posts (erg…) did not appear, all the comments you made since Jan. 30  *disappeared*, and  I was blocked from accessing the blog myself.   That’s all that it was – nothing else.  But a big flippin’ pain. Through his Herculean efforts, Steven has gotten it all back in shape, EXCEPT that (1) I have to repost my posts that I already posted that got trashed (I’ll do that this morning) AND, more important for you, (2) any comments that you made since Jan. 30 have been dissolved into the stratosphere and no longer exist.   So I don’t know what you said in your comments and cannot (re-)post them or reply to them. So sorry about that.  If you remember what your comments were, go ahead and re-comment.  If you don’t, well, make something […]

February 4, 2016

Q & A about Jesus Before the Gospels, Part 1


Steven pointed out to me that the first part of the Q&A also got obliterated and sent into the stratosphere during our recent technological nightmare.   So I need to re-post it.  Here it is! I have received a number of interesting questions about the book, raised by these three segments of Q&A.  If you have any you would like me to address on the blog, let me know!   Here is the original post: ****************************************************************************** As I have already indicated, my book Jesus Before the Gospels will be published in a month, on March 1.   As part of the promotion and marketing of the book, I have written out a few answers to questions that my publicist presented to me, as a kind of Q&A that she can use for her work of getting the word out there.   I answered twelve questions related to the book, and will post my responses here on the blog in three bite-size chunks.  Here is chunk #1. *************************************************************************** What is it that drives your fascination with how Jesus […]

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February 5, 2016

Weekly Readers’ Mailbag: February 7, 2016


Time for my weekly mailbag.   Before dealing with two rather more direct questions that have come to me – one about eyewitness testimony and the other about whether I hope to get on Fresh Air and Colbert with the new book – I thought I would include an item that did not come to me from the blog, but on my Facebook page.  It’s a brief exchange I had with some anonymous figure.  I seem to have a lot of these.    Please excuse his/her (lack of) syntax; grammar is evidently not a strong suit.  But I think you get the idea of the question.  At least I thought I did.   FACEBOOK EXCHANGE:   bart you said on npr that you feel as that the eye witness all had visions or hallucinations.that jesus didn`t rise from the tomb.do you really expect serious students of the word to accept that,do you know that the expert on the resurrection gary habermas of liberty university called your explanation total nonsense.the ration that over 500 people all experiencing the […]

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February 7, 2016

Upcoming Debate!


This coming weekend, Feb. 12-13, I will be holding a debate at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary on the topic “How Did Jesus Become God?”   They are calling it a “Dialogue,” but that’s just because they’re being nice.  It’s actually a great group of people, even though, as you might imagine, we agree on very little when it comes to matters of faith.   My worthy opponent is Michael Bird. You may have heard of him. He is the author of The New Testament in Its World, and Introducing Paul: The Man, His Mission and His Message, among other books.  Back when I published How Jesus Became God, he was the one who edited the response book that came out the same day, How God Became Jesus.  He wrote one of the articles in the book.  We will both be staking out our claims on Friday night.  The next day are papers delivered by scholars we have hand-chosen for the event, two each: mine are my good friends Jennifer Knust (Boston University) and Dale Martin […]

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February 8, 2016

Are “Group Hallucinations” Possible? The Case of Mary.


Several people have asked me about my claim that “group hallucinations” are possible. That is, a “vision” can be seen by many people at once.  It seems counter-intuitive: aren’t hallucinations by definition the inner workings of a person’s mind?  How can more than one person have the same hallucination at the same time? Well, I’m not sure how that works, psychologically.  My guess is that there is a strong sociological component as well. For example, if something weird is seen by a number of people, one of the persons in the group interprets it, and the rest agree that yes, that is indeed what they saw.  But that’s just my guess.  Maybe some of the trained psychologists on the blog can tell us. But in any event, it is a well-documented phenomenon.  Here is the query from one of the people who asked the question, specifically with respect to the modern-day appearances of Jesus’ mother, Mary, followed by a brief discussion of the phenomenon taken from my book How Jesus Became God. Group Hallucinations – […]

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February 9, 2016

On the Accuracy of Oral Traditions


I have announced on the blog that my new book, Jesus Before the Gospels, will be available March 1.  The book is about how the stories of Jesus were passed along by word of mouth for several decades before being written, and about how modern studies of both memory and oral cultures can help us understand what probably happened to the traditions as they circulated orally from one person to another over all those years. In reaction to a previous post on the topic, a reader made the following interesting comment:   COMMENT: The Iliad [of Homer] exists today in its modern form because of oral tradition.  We can be pretty sure that the story did not happen as it’s told to us, even if you leave out the part about kibbitzing gods (and we can be pretty sure that it wasn’t originally meant to be a literal recounting of the Trojan War, literalism never being the mission statement of poetry).  But inspired by it, Schliemann did go out and find Troy. Which we wouldn’t […]

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February 10, 2016

Upcoming Speaking Engagements 2016


  A couple of people have asked me about my upcoming speaking schedule, so I thought I would post it here.   I have broken it down into two separate lists.  The first are my book readings to promote Jesus Before the Gospels, the book being published on March 1.   Most authors no longer do big book tours, since they rarely generate much by way of sales; and most authors are oh so glad not to be doing these any more (they sound glamorous, but they oh-so-are-not).   So my book readings involve just the local Independent book shops.  But if you’re in the area, come to one of them.  I think they’re great fun.  Here they are.   Tues, March 1 @ 7 pm Quail Ridge Books and Music (Raleigh) – Wed, March 2 @ 7 pm Flyleaf Books (Chapel Hill) – Tues, March 8 @ 7 pm Regulator Bookshop (Durham) – Wed, March 9 @ 3 pm Bull’s Head Bookshop at UNC (Chapel Hill) – Sat, March 12 @ 11 am McIntyre’s Books (Pittsboro) – […]

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February 11, 2016

Weekly Readers Mailbag: February 13, 2016


  Time for the weekly mailbag.  This week I’m dealing with only one question; I want to give a more elaborate answer than usual since it relates so closely to my forthcoming book Jesus Before the Gospels.   Here’s the question:   QUESTION:  Dr. Ehrman, as you mention we tend to remember events that carry a large emotional impact (e.g. 9/11, Kennedy assassination, etc.) but, in turn, we tend to easily forget the more banal and mundane events in life (e.g. what we ate for breakfast three days ago, the name of our waiter from last night, etc.). In fact, when researchers give test subjects stress-reducing drugs, such as betablockers, they find that the subjects are much less likely to remember an event.  So I’m wondering whether you support or dismiss various gospel events based on this human inclination to remember. For example, the disciples would have been far more likely to remember how Jesus was arrested (highly emotional) versus how they met Jesus (rather less emotional).   RESPONSE: I would like to deal with just […]

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February 13, 2016

My Debate This Past Weekend


I just returned yesterday from a two-day event in New Orleans involving a public debate with an Australian New Testament scholar named Michael Bird, who is the author of The New Testament in Its World: An Introduction to the History, Literature, and Theology of the First Christians, and Introducing Paul: The Man, His Mission and His Message.  To explain the situation, I need to give some background.   As most readers on the blog know, a couple of years ago I published my book How Jesus Became God.  This was my attempt to show how it is that the man Jesus, an apocalyptic preacher from a remote area of rural Galilee, came to be considered the second member of the Trinity, God the creator, who had always existed, who was fully equal with the God of the universe, who was in fact of the same “essence” as him.  How’d that happen exactly? Also as many of you know, a group of evangelical scholars learned I was writing the book, and decided, even before they had seen it […]

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February 15, 2016

The Son of God, the Council of Nicea, and the Da Vinci Code


In my main lecture during the debate this past weekend, I decided to develop in short order the case that I make in my book How Jesus Became God for how, well, Jesus became God.  (!)   But I chose to do it differently from how I do it in the book, at least in terms of rhetorical strategy.  I chose to start at the *end* of the development (it’s actually nowhere near the end – since Christological arguments continued on for centuries – but it was one sensible ending points), with the controversies over Christ’s divinity in the early fourth century, controversies between Arius and his detractors. I’m afraid many people today (most?) get their knowledge of Arius, the Arian Controversy, and the Council of Nicea from that inestimable authority, Dan Brown, who wrote about it at length in that great work of historical realism, The Da Vinci Code.   I tell my students at Chapel Hill that if they want to learn about the history of the Middle Ages, the way to do that is […]

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February 16, 2016

The Controversies about Christ: Arius and Alexander


As I mentioned in the last post, in my debate this past Friday at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, I was trying to sketch out how it was that the early Christians came to think that Christ was God.   I decided in the debate *not* to start at the beginning, for example, with the teachings of Jesus, his understandings of himself, the views of his disciples and so on.  Instead, in order to set up a key contrast, I started at the end (well, one of the ends) of the Christological conflicts and discussions of Christianity’s first three hundred years, the conflict specifically between the famous Christian teacher of Alexandria Egypt, Arius, and his bishop, Alexander. It was this controversy that led to the famous Council of Nicaea, called by the emperor Constantine (who had converted to Christianity just thirteen years earlier) in the year 325 CE.   The controversy is widely misunderstood by people today, who frequently hear completely erroneous things about it – for example, that Arius thought that Christ was human, not […]

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February 18, 2016

Weekly Readers’ Mailbag: February 18, 2016


  Here is the weekly Readers’ Mailbag, three questions this time – one about my  alleged “support of Islam against Christianity,” one about why we think the NT Gospels were originally written in Greek, and one about what I mean when I talk about the views held by the majority of “critical” scholars (as opposed to what other kind of scholar?)? Feel free to ask questions you have; some I will not be able to get to (either because I don’t know the answer or because the answer is a one-liner instead of a two-paragrapher or for some other reason); and the list is always growing (making it harder and harder to answer them all).  But give it a shot!  I love to hear your questions.   COMMENT:  [After pointing out that whoever said I was about ready to convert to Islam was obviously makin’ in up, or influenced by someone else who was makin’ it up, this Muslim reader commented as follows:]  Anyways, that won’t stop us from using your awesome arguments against Christianity. […]

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February 19, 2016

My Debate with Michael Bird Feb. 12 , 2016


As many of you know, this past weekend (February 12-13, 2016) I met with Australian New Testament scholar Michael F. Bird at the 2016 Greer-Heard Point Counter Point Forum on for a two part debate. The event was held at the Leavell College Chapel at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. A question and answer session followed the debate. The subject of the debate was focused on my book. How Jesus Became God. Michael was the editor of the “response” book, produced by a group of evangelical scholars, called How God Became Jesus. Michael F. Bird, BMin, BA (Hons), PhD taught New Testament at the Highland Theological College in Scotland (2005-9) before joining Crossway College in Brisbane as lecturer in Theology (2010-12). He joined the faculty at Ridley as lecturer in Theology in 2013. As an industrious researcher, Michael has written and edited over twenty books in the fields of Septuagint, Historical Jesus, Gospels, St. Paul, Biblical Theology, and Systematic Theology. Michael Bird’s most popular books are The New Testament in Its World: An Introduction to the History, Literature, […]

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February 20, 2016

Christ as Son of God in Mark’s Gospel


In my previous post I indicated that by the early fourth century, the debates over Christ’s divine nature had become extraordinarily sophisticated and complex (though not as sophisticated and complex as in the two centuries to follow!).  At the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE the question was over whether Christ, the God who created the world, was a subordinate divinity to God the Father, one who came into being at some point in time, or if, instead, he was just as eternal, just as powerful, and just as glorious as the Father, completely “one” with him, even in his essence.  It was this latter view that won the day. One of the things that I contend in my book How Jesus Became God, and in the debate, I had in New Orleans with Michael Bird (as many of you will know by now) was that these issues were not at *all* what the earliest Christians were debating and arguing about, either with one another or with non-believers. Michael Bird’s most popular books are The […]

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February 21, 2016

A Less Weighty, Personal Matter


A lot of people have noticed that I’ve lost a good bit of weight, and have asked if I’m OK.  So, this is obviously of limited interest to people on the blog!  But instead of answering each query, I thought I would waste a blog post and say something more broadly.  Or less broadly. The short answer is that I’m more than OK:  I’m in the best shape I’ve been in for probably thirty years! So here’s the deal, for those who want to know, and even for those who don’t.   This past April I went in for my annual physical and my blood tests came back: pre-diabetic.  I thought there must be a mistake.  Pre-diabetic?!?  I didn’t have the typical indications: no history in the family, no high blood pressure, and so on.   Well, I was a little overweight.  OK, maybe you think more than a little, but still.  I had been working out regularly, sleeping well, and was in good cardio-shape.  But, well, I did have a bit of a beer gut.  Years […]

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February 23, 2016

What the Resurrection of Jesus MEANT


In my previous post I indicated that I was a bit disappointed at my public debate with Michael Bird at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary that he did not propose an alternative solution to “How Jesus Became God,” some other sense of how it happened different from the one I proposed.  If he disagrees with my scenario, what scenario does he himself imagine?  I’m not sure. Part of the problem is that he himself said during the debate that Jesus did not go around during his public ministry saying something like “Hello – I’m God, the Second Member of the Trinity.”  That’s exactly right, he certainly didn’t.  But later Christians were saying that about him. So how do we get from point A to point B? I don’t see any viable alternative to the one I mapped out (I’ll point out in a second where Michael does disagree with it, even if he doesn’t propose an option).   It is clear as day from Mark’s Gospel that… The Rest of this Post is for MEMBERS ONLY. […]

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February 24, 2016