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The Book of Acts: An Overview


Now that I have explained at some length how the debates work in my Introduction to the New Testament class, I can talk a bit about the debate that I staged in front of the class.   The class debates that the students themselves will participate in start next week – one a week for three weeks.   I’ve always thought that for students to see how a debate is supposed to work, they need to observe one in action.  So I like to have a debate in front of the entire class to give them an idea.  The problem is that most years (well, virtually every year) it is hard to find someone who is willing to debate me.  And so, I debate myself. The topic that I usually debate has to do with the NT book of Acts and whether it can be trusted to give a historically reliable account of the work of Paul and the other apostles after the death of Jesus.  The specific resolution is this:  “Resolved: The Book of Acts is […]

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March 22, 2016

HNN News Story on Jesus Before the Gospels


Below is an article that I published for the History News Network, based on my recent book Jesus Before the Gospels.  Enjoy!! ******************************************************************************** Historians/History article featured on HNN (History News Network) posted 3-18-16: Are the Stories in the Bible About the Last Days and Hours of Jesus True? by Bart D. Ehrman The season of Lent has come upon us, the time when Christians focus their devotional attention on the last days and hours of Jesus. Even though we devote more social (and media) space to Jesus’ birth, historically the Christian church has paid far more attention to his death. That is certainly the case with the New Testament itself. The Gospel of John, the perennial favorite of believers, after spending eleven chapters on the three years of Jesus’ public ministry, devotes fully ten chapters to his final week and its aftermath. It says not a word about his birth. The stories of Jesus’ last days – his Triumphal entry into Jerusalem, his cleansing of the temple, his last supper, his betrayal by Judas Iscariot, his […]

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April 3, 2016

The Literary Artistry of the Book of Acts


I am in the middle of a thread dealing with the New Testament book of Acts, the first account that we have of the history of the Christian church at its very beginnings – starting with the events happening right after the resurrection of Jesus and covering the spread of the Christian faith through the Roman world up until the time Paul reached the city of Rome, presumably in the early 60s CE.   And so this is an account of the first three decades of Christianity.   It’s the only one we have of this period.   That’s one reason it is so important to know if it’s historically reliable or not – if it’s not, we have very restricted access to what was happening in these most critical years of the early Christian movement. Before I discuss the issue of Acts’ historically reliability (the subject of my debate with myself in front of my class two weeks ago), I need to provide a bit more background.   In my textbook on the New Testament I provide two […]

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March 22, 2016

Major Themes in the Book of Acts


The debate over the historical accuracy of the book of Acts is important, in no small measure because – as I have pointed out already – it provides us our one and only narrative of what was happening among the followers of Jesus in the years immediately after his death.  This is the key, formative period in the formation of Christianity.  How did it start as a religion?  Acts is our only surviving historical account.  But is it an accurate history? The first thing to stress is that Acts – like all histories – is highly restrictive in what it talks about.   It is not a comprehensive history and makes no pretense of being a comprehensive history.   The title “The Acts of the Apostles” was given it by later readers and scribes.   The author himself (whoever he was) does not give it a title.   And this particular title is not particularly apt, for one very important reason: most of the apostles do not figure in the account at all.   This is a narrative of some […]

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March 23, 2016

Is Acts Historically Reliable? The Affirmative Argument


I am ready now to explain how I did the debate with myself in front of my undergraduate class on the resolution, Resolved: The Book of Acts is Historically Reliable. As always happens in a debate, the Affirmative side goes first and gives a prepared speech. In arguing for the affirmative, I made the following points. (Note: I’m not saying I personally agree with these points, just as I’m not going to be saying that I agreed with the Negative points. I’m simply making the best case I can for both positions.) THE REST OF THIS POST IS FOR MEMBERS ONLY. If you don’t belong yet, JOIN!

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March 24, 2016

My Book Sales and the “Relatives” of Paul: Weekly Reader’s Mailbag March 25, 2016


For this week’s Readers Mailbag I have two questions, one about the sales of my new book and one about the apostle Paul (the meaning of a particularly important verse).  If you have a question you would like me to address, simply ask it here! ********************************************************* QUESTION: Are you pleased with how Jesus Before the Gospels is selling? The reviews are great. I’m enjoying reading it, myself.   RESPONSE: Thanks for asking!  Yes, there are some reviewers who seem to “get” what the book is, and who appreciate it.  I’m always grateful for that! Am I happy with the sales so far?  Unfortunately, the answer is “not really”!   I have to admit I’m a bit spoiled on the book sales front.  This is the seventh book I’ve published with HarperOne.   Of the other six, one was a book that none of us thought would be a huge sales success, Did Jesus Exist? (In fact, our original idea was to publish it simply as an e-book, because we knew it had such a limited market.  At […]

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March 25, 2016

For Anyone Who Still Needs a Free Membership!


I’m happy to say that thanks to the incredible generosity of members of the blog, I am still able to provide a limited number of free one-year memberships available.   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, let me know your situation (why you would like to take advantage of this offer) and provide me with the following information: 1)      Your first and last name. 2)      Your preferred personal email. 3)      Your preferred user name (no spaces). 4)      Your preferred password (should be 8 or more characters, no spaces).   The donors will remain anonymous, but here let me publicly extend my […]

March 29, 2016

Is the Book of Acts Historically Reliable? Smoke and Mirrors.


In my next post I will be staking stake out the “negative” side on the debate I had with myself in class, arguing against the resolution, Resolved: The Book of Acts is Historically Reliable.  I have already made the affirmative case; in the negative I will argue that the book is not reliable (that first speech was a set speech, prepared without reference to anything the affirmative side said).  I will then give a negative refutation of the affirmative’s first speech, and I will end with an affirmative rebuttal of the negative’s two speeches. Before I do all that, however, I need to take a time-out and explain one negative counter-argument that would take too much space if it were simply part of a longer post laying out the negative position. The affirmative side in the debate argued that based on archaeological evidence Luke can be shown to have presented accurately the laws, custom, and geography mentioned or alluded to in the book of Acts:  there really was an Areopagus where philosophers gathered, as mentioned […]

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Is the Book of Acts Historically Reliable? The Negative Case.


This post will lay out the Negative case, arguing against the resolution, Resolved: The Book of Acts if Historically Reliable.   Again, I am not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing with this argument; I’m giving it as I would in a debate. ********************************************************** The New Testament book of Acts is not historically reliable.  Before showing that to be the case, I want to make two preliminary remarks, both of them related to the question of what it means for an ostensibly historical account (a narrative of what allegedly happened in the past) to be reliable. First, when readers today want to know whether the book of Acts is reliable, they mean that they want to know whether the events that it narrates actually happened in the way it describes.  Or not.  Readers are not primarily interested in knowing if he wrote his account the way other authors in his day would have done.  They are mainly interested in knowing whether his narrative happened the way he says it did. Second, it is indeed important to know whether […]

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March 30, 2016

Video of How Jesus Became God, Part 1 (of 3)


On January 29-31, 2016, I gave three talks at Coral Gables Congregational Church in (surprise) Coral Gables, Florida, on my book, “How Jesus Became God.”  I will post all three talks periodically here on teh blog.  Here’s the first!  Rev. Megan Smith opened each session for me. Please adjust gear icon for 1080p High-Definition. How Jesus Became God -UCC Part 1 of 3: If you’re not a member of the blog, JOIN!  It doesn’t cost much and you get lots of stuff!  And all the money goes to good causes, other than to line my pockets!

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August 12, 2016

Is Acts Reliable? The Negative Rebuttal


What follows is the “negative rebuttal” of the speech given by the “first affirmative” in its support of the resolution, “Resolved: The Book of Acts is Historically Reliable.”  If you need to refresh yourself on what the affirmative team argued, you can find it on the March 24 post, here: https://ehrmanblog.org/is-acts-historically-reliable-affirmative-argument/    In the first negative speech (yesterday’s post) the negative team argued its case, without direct reference to the affirmative side.  This, now, is the negative response to what the affirmative said (the next post in the thread will be the affirmative rebuttal to the negative side) (recall: this was a debate I staged with myself in front of my New Testament class earlier this semester.  I didn’t read this speech: I winged it.  But this is the essence of what I argued, on the negative side against the affirmative) *************************************************************** If you choose to go point by point through the affirmative team’s case that the book of Acts is historically reliable, you will find that they have advanced their views on very thin grounds.   […]

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March 31, 2016

The Letters of Paul: Mailbag April 1, 2016


In today’s Readers’ Mailbag, I will be answering questions connected with the writings of Paul: what is the earliest manuscript of his letters; did the author of Acts know Paul’s letters; and is Paul described as a heretic in the Dead Sea Scrolls. ******************************************************************************************* QUESTION Bart, early in your book Misquoting Jesus (p. 4) you wrote a sudden, shocking surprise (to many born-again Christians) when you said “As we learned at Moody in one of the first courses in the curriculum, we don’t actually have the original writings of the New Testament.” I’ve witnessed my own neighbor’s disbelief and visible anger when I pointed this out to him. … My interest is your response to my question “How old are the earliest copies we have of Paul’s letters 1 Corinthians and 1 Thessalonians.” … As you know, these books describe, in part, the resurrection of Jesus.   RESPONSE It is a little difficult for me to know the question behind this question, so first let me answer the direct question and then to respond to […]

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April 1, 2016

Our Fourth Anniversary!


Yesterday marked the fourth anniversary of our blog.   We began this little venture back on April 3, 2012.   Happy anniversary to us! In thinking back on the past four years, I have lots of things to reflect on, as this blog is a rather complicated affair. For every single week over these four years I have made 5-6 posts, on average 1000 words in length; I have read and added comments made by readers (I post almost all the comments, deleting only those that are not related to the concerns or the blog, or inappropriate for one reason or another) (very few are overly snarky, but on occasion there will be one) (I try to keep the tone of the discussion on the blog at a high level – not an easy thing to do on the internet) (and I try to limit the number of parenthetic comments that I make) (obviously that is not easy either). I also answer every direct question I get – obviously not at any great length, since, as with most […]

April 4, 2016

Is Acts Historically Reliable? The Affirmative Rebuttal


I have been (intermittently) discussing the debate that I had with myself in front of my New Testament class on the resolution, Resolved: The Book of Acts is Historically Reliable.  So far I have indicated what the Affirmative side argued in favor of the resolution; what the Negative side argued against the resolution; and what the Negative side said in its rebuttal to the first Affirmative speech.  NOW, at last, I can indicate what the Affirmative side said in its rebuttal to the two Negative speeches.   Recall: in this post I’m not indicating what I really thing; I’m indicating what I would argue if this were the side I was required to argue (and what I did argue in class that day).  Here it is: ******************************************************** Despite what the negative side has maintained, we remain convinced that the New Testament book of Acts is historically reliable. The first point to stress is that it is of utmost importance that we not impose modern standards of historical accuracy on an ancient text.  Of course the author […]

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April 5, 2016

Evaluating My Debate on the Book of Acts


I have now completed my posts on the debate I had with myself in front of my New Testament class on the question of whether the New Testament book of Acts is historically reliable.   If you want to see the whole debate, just read the posts in sequence: the affirmative speech arguing Acts is indeed reliable; the negative speech arguing that it is not; the negative rebuttal of what the affirmative side said; and finally the affirmative rebuttal of what the negative side said.   In class I delivered the speeches one after the other.   When “affirmative” I was wearing a sport coat, but no cap; when “negative” I was wearing a baseball cap but no sport coat – just so students would realize that it was a “different” speaker speaking. I have pointed out on the blog before that even though I do a lot of public debates, I often find them more than a little frustrating and frequently (in fact, almost always) ask myself, in the course of the debate, why I’m doing this […]

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April 6, 2016

Publishing with HarperOne


Now that I’m in the deep throes of research for my next book, I thought it would be a good time to devote a thread to it.  It’s what I’ve been thinking about day and night — and reading voraciously on – since this past August!  To explain it all, I need to provide a bit of personal background. The point of this post:  I have decided to change publishers.   The book that just came out last month, Jesus Before the Gospels, is my seventh book with HarperOne, which is an Imprint of HarperCollins, one of the five largest publishing houses in the world.  It has been an absolutely terrific run with Harper’s, an absolute career-changer.  But I’ve decided now – after working with them for twelve years – to move on to something else.  My next two books will be with Simon and Schuster, another one of the “big five,” which is located in New York (HarperOne is in San Francisco). Why I changed is a long story.   First maybe I should say something […]

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April 8, 2016

The New Edition of My Textbook: Reader’s Mailbag April 10, 2016


Here is this week’s Reader’s Mailbag (well, last week’s; I took yesterday off from work) (and it was glorious!).  This time around I will be dealing with just one question, about the new edition of my New Testament textbook   QUESTION: You say you first published your textbook on the New Testament about 20 years ago. I see that it is in its 5th edition (or more?). You’ve studied a lot, published a lot, no doubt learned a lot   RESPONSE: Actually, as it turns out, this past year I published the sixth edition of the book.   Who would-a thought?   To explain what is different about the new book, I need to say a few things about how I imagined the book when I first wrote it, back in the mid 1990s.  And then I can talk about what I changed for this new edition. Let me say before detailing all that that even though the book is meant for college and university students, it could be useful for anyone interested n the study of […]

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April 10, 2016

Why I Have Moved to a New Publisher


In my previous post I began to talk about how I have now changed publishers.  This past book Jesus Before the Gospels, was my last with HarperOne, and now I have a two-book contract, for the next two books (obviously), with Simon and Schuster.   A couple of readers have inferred that I have left Harper because I did not like the way they had handled my most recent book.  That’s not the case at all.  I made the decision before they even *started* handling the book. And let me stress, I have had a wonderful experience with Harper.  They really are one of the truly great publishing houses in the world.  Absolutely.  How could I possibly complain? Since 2005 I have done seven books with them.  One of those seven was a a book that none of us —  not me, not my editor, not my publicist, not anyone in the Harper hierarchy, not anyone on the planet – thought was going to be a big selling book.   This was Did Jesus Exist? We originally […]

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April 11, 2016

Being Qualified to Write a Scholarly Book


The goal of this thread is to talk about the book that I’m working on now, which I hope to have written (gods willing) by the end of this calendar year.  We’ll see.   To get to that I felt like I needed to talk about how I had changed publishers, and now that I’m talking about that, it occurs to me that I should talk about how one goes about getting a book published. One of the emails I get *all* the time is from authors who have written a book, or hope to write a book, who want to know how they can get a publisher to take a look at it.   The short answer: it ain’t easy. So first let me do this autobiographically, how I myself got into the publishing business. The first thing to stress: I had a leg up.  I had a PhD at a reputable school (Princeton Theological Seminary) and a teaching job at another one (Rutgers University).  The reality is that publishers of scholarly books look for authors […]

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April 12, 2016

Bart Ehrman vs Richard Bauckham – Round 1


This is a debate I had on April 9, 2016  with Richard J. Bauckham, a well-known and influential British scholar who has written extensively on many of the areas of my own interest, the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the non-canonical literature.   He is a fine scholar, and a conservative Christian, and I disagree with him on, well, so many things! This was the first of a two-part debate that was hosted by Justin Brierley on his weekly radio show “Unbelievable,”  aired on UK Premier Christian Radio from the London studio. Our topic was “Are the Gospels Based on Eyewitness Testimony?”  My new book, Jesus Before the Gospels, argues that the stories about Jesus would have changed and evolved before they were written down in the Gospels(and that the authors of the Gospels were not eyewitnesses and had no access to the eyewitnesses). Bauckham’s earlier book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, claims that the view that the Gospels were written by those with access to eyewitness testimony of Jesus’ first followers (and that therefore we can trust […]

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April 24, 2016