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My Work as a Historian and Paul in Conflict with the Jerusalem Church: Readers’ Mailbag August 20, 2016
Some people (conservative Christians who don’t like my scholarship) maintain that I’m not a historian, a view I find very odd since virtually all of my scholarship (for well over twenty-five years) is historical. I address the question in this week’s Readers’ Mailbag, along with a question that many readers will find more interesting (since it’s more germane to anything), of whether Paul and the Jerusalem church were on the same page theologically or if there were tensions between them. If you have any questions you would like me to address in a future Mailbag, let me know! QUESTION: In a debate online a Fundamentalist friend said you were a textual critic and not an historian. I said you wore both hats. Do you also consider yourself a historian? RESPONSE: Anyone who thinks I’m not a historian simply has never read any of my books – including my books on textual criticism! The vast majority of my books are not even about textual criticism, but about the history of early Christianity (first to […]
Tags: Ebionites, historian, Jerusalem Church, textual criticism
August 20, 2016
How We’re Doing on the Blog
Time to pause and take the pulse of the blog. I’d like your feedback, if you’d be willing to give it (see below). We’ve been at this for four years and five months now, without a stop in the action. Every week for the entire period I’ve posted 5-6 times, normally about a thousand words a pop. In addition, I have posted numerous videos and audio recording. Every week I now devote one post to answer members’ questions, on the Weekly Readers’ Mailbag. On top of that I approve all the comments that come in – normally 20-30 a day – and respond to questions that come in there. So the content continues to come and that’s all to the good. My ultimate goal, as you know, is to raise money for charity, and that too is good: this past (fiscal) year we raised $117,000. Fantastic. That was a sizeable advance over the previous year, which saw a sizeable advance over the previous year, which saw a sizeable advance over the first year. My HOPE […]
August 21, 2016
Different Ways of Describing the Theology of the New Testament
To return to the current thread: I’ve been discussing why most scholars are not equipped, trained, or inclined to write books for a general audience, and that took me, naturally, to the field of scholarship in which I myself was principally trained, biblical studies. My ultimate point is going be a somewhat ironic one, that precisely because my particular interests were in one of the most highly technical, obtuse, mind-numbingly detailed aspects of New Testament studies, this (strangely) made it *more* possible for me to write books for non-specialists. The logic will not be obvious, but I’ll explain it. To get to that I’ve been talking about the two areas most of my peers and colleagues in my PhD program were principally interested in: (1) the exegesis of the New Testament (the matter of interpreting the texts of the New Testament in order to see what they appear to have meant in their original context – not an easy task, given all the work required for it, including an understanding of the Greek language and […]
Tags: new testament theology
August 22, 2016
My Original Passion for the Bible
I have been talking about the areas of New Testament studies that were emphasized in my Masters and PhD programs at Princeton Theological Seminary, back in the late 70s and early to mid 80s. It was a long program, even though I sped through it a couple of years faster than most of my colleagues. The Masters program was three years (that is typical for a masters of divinity degree); my PhD was four years (most of my friends took five to seven). That’s full time work, for all those seven years. It’s a lot! Most of the training that most of my friends/colleagues had was in New Testament exegesis and theology, as I’ve described. My passions lay elsewhere, and my plan is to talk a little about them. But it just occurred to me this morning that my *original* interest in the New Testament was in fact exegesis and theology, even though I would not have used those terms for it. I had been mildly interested in the Bible even as a child. Very […]
Tags: Bible study, conversion
August 24, 2016
Beginning My Study of the Bible
This thread is becoming a tapestry. Its ultimate goal is to explain why, unlike most scholars, I ended up being able to write trade books and not only scholarly books. I’m taking a rather circuitous route to getting there (to change the metaphor). In my last post I discussed how and why I first became interested in the Bible, back as a fifteen year-old born again Christian. At that point I became convinced that only Bible-believing Christians (who were, of course, also born again) were the real Christians and any other people who claimed to be Christian (for example, most of the people who went to my own Episcopal church) were not *really* Christian, except in name only. Again, the reason I thought so is because the born-agains I hung around with all said so, and they seemed to know what they were talking about. Especially the fellow who “led me to Christ,” a mid-20s something fellow named Bruce. Bruce had a winsome personality and strong charisma, and he ran the Campus Life Youth for […]
Tags: Moody Bible Institute
August 25, 2016
Were Jesus and His Followers Armed?
Were Jesus and his followers armed? That’s the question for this week’s Readers’ Mailbag. I had started to address the question when I realized that I had already said what I have to say as well as I could say it in my recent book Jesus Before the Gospels. And so I will give that discussion here. So, here’s the question and my response QUESTION: What is the scholarly view on this subject: did Jesus himself, his movement and then early Christians walk around with weapons (swords, e.g.) to protect themselves, despite preaching the love for enemies? Do we have any historical evidence of how things looked like in this matter? RESPONSE: (Taken from Jesus Before the Gospels) In all four Gospels, at least one of Jesus’ followers is armed when he is arrested. In the Synoptics, this unnamed follower draws his sword and strikes the slave of the high priest, cutting off his ear (see Mark 14:47). In John’s Gospel we learn that the sword-bearing disciple was Peter (John 18: 10). Jesus […]
Tags: gethsemane, pacifism, sword
August 26, 2016
Am I A Better Person as an Agnostic? A Blast from the Past
I have started re-posting some of my posts from three or four years ago on occasion, at the suggestion of several people on the blog. Frankly, I don’t remember even writing most of them! Here is one from four years ago, a response to the question of how losing my faith affected me — did it make me a better (or worse) person? ***************************************************************************** QUESTION: Dr. Ehrman, I am still reading your book (God’s problem) which seems to be very interesting since you are not interesting to gain any approval from anybody but only to communicate what you believe and where you are today. Congratulations for that…. Did you became a better human being after losing your faith? RESPONSE: Great question! Most people have assumed the opposite, that anyone who loses his or her faith must become a worse person. The logic seems to be that without a belief in God, there would be no grounds for morals and that people left to their own unconstrained devices would have no reason to avoid living […]
Tags: agnosticism, empathy, faith transitions
August 28, 2016
Moody Bible Boot Camp
Back to my narrative about becoming trained in the Bible (as a prelude to what I started talking about — why my later technical training actually made me better prepared for writing books for general audiences than my peers who were not at all interested in the technical side of things). So, I went to Moody Bible Institute – and took that entrance Bible exam – when I was all of seventeen years old. And it was during my first semester that I decided what I wanted to do with my life. I really, really, really do not advise doing that. For 99.999% of the human race, it would be a very bad idea indeed to decide how to spend the rest of your life when you’re all of seventeen and can’t even yet order a beer (drinking age back then, in the Pleistocene age, was eighteen) (and anyway, we weren’t allowed to drink beer at Moody) (or smoke, play cards, dance, or go to movies) (really) (and there was a dress code). But I’m […]
Tags: Marvin Meyer, Moody Bible Institute
August 29, 2016
Learning to Teach at Moody
I will not be continuing this autobiographical thread (thread within a thread) for much longer (you may be glad to know), but I do want to get to the ultimate point (for the thread outside the thread), which is why by a couple of quirks/flukes I ended up better equipped to write books for general audiences than most of my colleagues in my PhD program. The first has to do with what happened with me back in my days at Moody when I was learning tons about what was actually in the Bible (and the fundamentalist way of interpreting it all) (which, at the time, of course, I thought was the *only* correct way to interpret it). At Moody, every semester we were required to engage in some kind of formal ministry (“Practical Christian Experience”). Everyone at Moody had to do one semester of “door-to-door evangelism,” where we were taken to one neighborhood or another somewhere in a suburb of Chicago, and literally knocked on doors to talk to people to try to convert them. […]
Tags: Moody Bible Institute, teaching Christianity
August 30, 2016
Drew Marshall Show – Jesus Before The Gospels
I was a guest on the The Drew Marshall Show on March 12, 2016 for an interview about my book Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Early Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior. The broadcast was recorded from the studio of CJYE based in Oakville, Ontario Canada. Like the book, the interview discusses both what we know about the phenomenon of memory, based on research done in the fields of psychology, anthropology, and sociology, and how this research can be applied to the Gospel stories of Jesus. Did the followers of Jesus — both those who knew him and those who heard the stories told and retold about him in the decades before our accounts were actually written — remember accurately what they heard? Did the stories about Jesus change as memories failed and as story-tellers molded their tales for their audiences? Obviously what is involved is the historical accuracy of the Gospels, the way we read and think about them, and how we view history. Please adjust gear icon for […]
Tags: historical jesus, memory
February 5, 2017
How I Discovered Textual Criticism
It was at Moody Bible Institute that I first became interested in the textual criticism of the New Testament. Let me stress a definitional point that some readers on the blog have not gotten or understood (I’ve said it a lot, so apologies for those who have gotten it! But even though I keep saying this, some people still don’t get it). Textual criticism is NOT the study of texts to see what they mean. For the last time (well, probably not): it is not the interpretation of texts. Textual criticism, instead, is the attempt to determine what an author actually wrote if we do not have his one and only original copy. It is independent of the question of what the author might have actually *meant* by what he wrote. Textual criticism is done on all texts – even modern ones. There are textual critics who work on Wordsworth. They try to determine if it’s possible to know the actual words of his original poems (given the fact that we have different editions and […]
Tags: original new testament, textual criticism
August 31, 2016
How You Can Help!
Last week I asked you what you really liked about the blog and what you would recommend we change. I was gratified to hear lots of things people like and even more gratified to hear relatively few things that people don’t! I have taken all of your comments to heart and will keep doing things that seem to be working and try to change things that are not. My big concern in sending out my request for feedback was that our fundraising is not keeping pace with last year, at a time when I want to be doing *better* than last year! I did get a number of suggestions that were very helpful, and I thank you all for them. On my part, one of the things I will start doing (in addition to incorporating other changes that have been suggested) is saying more about the charities the blog supports. I think there is just a general, vague sense that “all the money goes to charity.” It would be useful, as readers have pointed out, […]
September 3, 2016
Does James Contradict Paul?
I have a number of questions that I want to address in my Readers’ Mailbag, but one particularly important one requires a rather long response, and so I dedicate this entire week’s mailbag to answering it. Here it is: QUESTION: Bart, what is your view with regard to Paul and James teaching on the doctrine of justification by faith – are they contradictory? RESPONSE: Ah, this is a perennial question among readers of the New Testament. I deal with it at some length in my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, in a chapter called “Does the Tradition Miscarry,” where I talk about whether Paul saw eye to eye with Jesus, with James, and with later traditions about Paul (e.g. in the Acts of Paul and Thecla). My answer about the letter of James may surprise some readers, who would expect me to find it completely at odds with Paul. Here is what I say in the book: ****************************************************** The most famous passage of […]
Tags: James, justification by faith, justification by works, Paul
September 4, 2016
Becoming a Textual Critic
Back to my narrative of how I got interested in biblical studies, and specifically textual criticism. I was just thinking last night about how people (on the blog or elsewhere) sometimes report to me that they have heard my conservative evangelical critics say that I’m not a biblical interpreter (exegete) or a historian, but I’m a textual critic (someone who studies the manuscripts of the New Testament). And I started thinking about all my training in the Bible and the history of early Christianity. I did three years at Moody studying mainly Bible and theology; I did a two year completion degree at Wheaton majoring in English; I then did a three-year Master’s of Divinity degree at Princeton Theological Seminary; and finally a four-year PhD in New Testament also at Princeton Seminary. Over the course of all those years I must have taken, what? 70 or 75 courses? How many of those courses were on textual criticism? I had one class at Moody that was maybe ¼ devoted to the topic. And one class in […]
Tags: Bruce Metzger, original new testament, textual criticism
September 6, 2016
My Original Interest in Textual Criticism
As I have indicated, my interest in textual criticism – the scholarly attempt to reconstruct what the authors of the New Testament actually wrote, given the fact we don’t have the originals but only altered copies – did not originate with my going to Princeton Theological Seminary to study with Bruce Metzger. On the contrary, I went to study with him precisely because that had been an area of fascination for me starting in my first year of college, as an eighteen year old. I mentioned already that I had a course at Moody Bible Institute that dealt with the questions of biblical inspiration (how God had inspired the biblical writers to say what they did), the formation of the canon (how God had ensured that we got the right twenty-seven books), and the problem of the text (the fact we don’t have the copies produced by the authors themselves). I was deeply interested in all three areas, but was especially intrigued by the third, for a couple of reasons. One reason was theological. I […]
Tags: original new testament, textual criticism
September 7, 2016
Do Most Manuscripts Have the Original Text?
Early on in my study of textual criticism I came to realize one of the major issues confronting scholars in the field – an issue that scholars have been contending with since the eighteenth century. For the past hundred years or so the vast majority of experts have been convinced by a solution to the problem, but the solution was slow in coming, for all sorts of reasons. But when I was first introduced to the problem I learned there were two sides that were being taken, and I wrote a paper about it (my first year in college). I continued to be interested in the problem for a long time, and it ended up being the subject of the Masters’ thesis I wrote under the direction of Bruce Metzger. The problem is this. We have thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament – at last count, somewhere around 5600 manuscripts in Greek alone (that includes everything from small fragments the size of a credit card with just a few letters written on them to […]
Tags: original new testament, textual criticism
September 8, 2016
The Charities We Support
This week’s Reader’s Mailbag is not about a specific question I have been asked once but about a general question I get asked a lot. People have indicated several times they would like to have more information about the charities we support on the blog, and so I thought it was time to explain that again (I’ve done it only a couple of times over the years.) So when I started the blog in 2012, I set up a non-profit foundation, The Bart Ehrman Foundation, whose sole purpose is to collect the moneys raised by the blog and distribute the moneys to charity. Any donations to the blog are fully tax deductible. When I set the Foundation up, I expected we would raise something like $20,000 a year. Woops. Bad estimate. To date we have distributed $339,000 in funds to charities. Each year (until, alas, this one it appears! L) we have raised significantly more than the year previous. Last year (my fiscal year runs April 1-March 31, because of when I started the blog) […]
Tags: Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina., Urban Ministries of Durham
September 9, 2016
Why Textual Criticism is “Safe” for Conservative Christians
It is probably not an accident that when I was a very conservative evangelical Christian who wanted to get a PhD in New Testament studies, I chose to focus, in particular, on textual criticism, the study of manuscripts in order to establish the wording of the original text. That was, and is, a fairly common “track” for evangelicals who want to be biblical scholars. Maybe it’s not as common now as it used to be. But it used to be common. As it turns out, most of the scholars who work in the field of New Testament textual criticism in North America either are or used to be committed evangelical Christians. You might think that the findings of textual criticism would drive evangelicals away from their faith. But just the opposite is the case. I know very few people who have found their faith challenged by their knowledge of the textual problems of the New Testament. Very few indeed. I was a bit of an oddball that way. (I’ll say more about that in a […]
Tags: evangelicalism, original new testament, textual criticism
September 11, 2016
Bruce Metzger Beliefs, My Loss of Faith: A Blast from the Past
I mentioned my mentor, Bruce Metzger, in a recent post. In this blast from the past, I reprint a post I did almost exactly four years ago, in response to a question that I was then asked about how Metzger, a devoted Christian and minister of the church, responded to the fact that I (one of his closest students) lost my faith. The question generated a series of posts on related topics, but here is the one where I actually answer the question: Bruce Metzger Beliefs I have come now, by an unusually circuitous route, to answer the question that got me started in talking about my relationship with Bruce Metzger, my work for the NRSV Bible translation committee, my view of the NRSV as a translation, the textual problems of Luke 22:19-20 and 22:43-44 and, well sundry other things. The reader’s question was how Metzger responded to my loss of faith. When I first got to know him, I was a strong evangelical Christian. In the years before he died, I had become […]
Tags: Bruce Metzger, faith, Misquoting Jesus
September 12, 2016
Arguments, Evidence, and Changing Your Mind
In this series of posts on how I got interested in textual criticism, I’ve had a number of people indicate that they don’t see how the problems posed by our manuscripts did not absolutely destroy my evangelical faith. By implication, I think, they are wondering why evangelicals broadly, to a person, don’t see these problems and realize that they don’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to their belief in the Bible. The logic these commenters are applying is one that I discuss in my book Misquoting Jesus. If the evangelical belief is rooted in the sense that the Bible contains the very words that God inspired, and if a study of our manuscripts reveals that there are thousands – hundreds of thousands – of places where these words were changed, so that there are some places where we cannot know what the authors actually wrote, then isn’t that an insurmountable problem? Why would God inspire the words of Scripture (that would take a mighty miracle!) if he did not make sure […]
September 14, 2016