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Mythicists and the Crucified Messiah


In my previous post I explained what ancient Jews who were expecting the messiah were expecting.  I do not want to give the impression (one widely held today) that most Jews *were* expecting a messiah.  My sense is that most ancient Jews didn’t spend much time thinking about the matter, any more than most Jews today do.  But for those who did expect a messiah, there were certain expectations.   In this post I want to explain why those expectations relate to the question about whether Jesus existed. Recall: whatever the specifics of what this, that, or the other Jewish group thought, everyone thought the messiah would be a figure of grandeur and power, one who would be a mighty figure who would rule Israel, the people of God, as a sovereign people under no foreign oppression.  The most popular view was that he would be a mighty military leader and political ruler who would overpower the enemy and set up a kingdom for Israel like that of his ancestor David of old.  Another popular view […]

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November 10, 2016

Does Paul Know that Judas Betrayed Jesus?


  QUESTION: In your list of the things Paul tells us about the historical Jesus (he was born of a woman, he was a Jew, he had brothers, he had twelve disciples, etc.) one thing you seem to have left out was the fact that he was “betrayed” on the night he had the last supper.  1 Corinthians 11:23 says “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread,24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you…” Why haven’t you included the betrayal as part of the tradition about Jesus that Paul knows?   RESPONSE: Ah, good question.  Many years ago when I was first teaching I did include that datum as rather important.  I don’t do so any longer any more for one particular (and, in my books, very good) reason: I think the word “betrayed” is a mistranslation of the Greek of the […]

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November 12, 2016

Lost Gospels: The Greater Questions of Mary. A Blast From the Past


Here is a blast from the past — almost exactly four years ago now —  about one of my all time favorite “lost” Gospels.  If it ever existed.  One very imaginative church father certainly thought it did.  It was a Gospel featuring Mary Magdalene and a rather wild encounter she had with Jesus.  Here is what I said in the post of November 2012. ************************************************************************* I have been discussing some of the Gospels that we know about because they are mentioned, or even quoted, by church fathers, but that no longer survive. Another, particularly intriguing, Gospel like this – one that I desperately wish we had, for reasons that will soon become clear — is known as “The Greater Questions of Mary” (i.e., of Mary Magdalene). My following comments on it are more or less lifted from my Introduction in the recent Apocryphal Gospels volume. One of the “great questions” for scholars is whether such a book ever really did exist. It is mentioned only once in ancient literature, in a highly charged polemical context […]

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November 15, 2016

The Invention of a Crucified Messiah


This is a follow-up to my recent post in which I argued, against the mythicists who maintain that Jesus was not a real person but was invented by his earliest followers who had learned of a cosmic Christ who was crucified by demons in outer space, that it does not make sense, in my judgment, that first century Jews would make up the idea of a human messiah who got crucified.   I received a number of responses to that post, most of which were very positive.  But every now and then I got a response that said something like this:  “I would say inventing a God/man who was crucified *does* make sense in a 1st century context.” It’s an important objection and I want to take it very seriously.  First, recall my argument, the precise nature of which is important.  I am not arguing in a vague way that no one would make up someone who was crucified, or that no one would make up an important person who was crucified, or that no one […]

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November 16, 2016

Jesus the Messiah Before the Resurrection


In my recent posts I have argued, against the Mythicists, that the idea of someone (or lots of someones) inventing Jesus as a crucified messiah does not seem plausible, given the fact that no one expected a messiah to be crucified.  If you were to invent a messiah, it would not be one that was completely different (opposite, actually) to what anyone expected. In response to these posts, several readers have asked why, then, Jesus’ own followers thought he could be the messiah while he was alive: the historical man himself, as reconstructed by contemporary scholars, also does not seem to be like what anyone would have expected the messiah to be.  He too was not a warrior-king, or a cosmic judge coming on the clouds of heaven, or a mighty priest (he was not from the priestly line, for one thing).   So why would anyone think a lower-class itinerant preacher from the rural backwoods of Galilee was the messiah? It’s a great question, and obviously a completely fundamental one.  The followers of Jesus did […]

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November 17, 2016

Why Would Jesus’ Disciples Think He Was The Messiah?


The big question to emerge from my previous post is: If Jesus’ disciples (or at least some of them) believed he was the messiah before he died (as I tried to show they must have done) then what would have led them to think so? I think there are two possibilities, one of which strikes me as implausible.  The implausible one, in my opinion, is that Jesus did things that the messiah was expected to do, and because of that, his followers thought he was the messiah.  My reason for not being drawn to this interpretation is precisely that Jesus in fact did not do any of the things that the messiah was expected or supposed to do. Some of my Christian students don’t get this.   Doesn’t the Bible predict that… The Rest of this Post is for Members Only.  It doesn’t cost much to join — about a Starbuck’s coffee a month (NOT a decaf caramel macchiato or whatever crazy other thing people drink — just a coffee!) .  And the blog will keep […]

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November 18, 2016

The Apocalyptic Background to Jesus’ Messiahship


To make sense of my claim that Jesus himself told the disciples that he thought he was the messiah, I have to set his teachings generally in a wider context.  As I have repeatedly argued on the blog, Jesus’ teachings are best understood as apocalyptic in nature, and to understand any of them it is important to remember what the world view we call Jewish apocalypticism entailed.  This is essential background to the question I’m pursuing, since I will be maintaining that Jesus did indeed consider himself the messiah, and said so to his disciples, but he meant this in a completely apocalyptic sense. So, to set the stage for my consideration of the messianic self-teaching of Jesus, I need to provide a quick refresher course on Jewish apocalypticism.  Here is what I said in an earlier post on the matter. ****************************************************************** Jewish apocalypticism was a very common view in Jesus’ day – it was the view of the Essenes who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, of the Pharisees, of John the Baptist, later of […]

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November 20, 2016

Jesus’ Private Teachings about the King of the Jews


In this thread I am discussing whether Jesus considered himself the messiah prior to his death.   So far I have made one major argument for that view, involving his death itself.  All of our sources report Jesus was executed by the Romans specifically for calling himself the King of the Jews.  They do not report that the Roman governor Pontius Pilate ordered him crucified for raising an army, or for causing a disturbance in the temple, or for being a pain in the neck for the Sadducees, Pharisees, or anyone else.  They report that the charge was for calling himself the Jewish king. This seems almost certainly historical, because it is not a report Christians would have made up.  The title “King of the Jews” appears in the Gospels only in connection with Jesus’ trial and crucifixion.  It is not a title that Christians ever (so far as we can tell) used of Jesus.  And so it’s unlikely they invented it for the occasion of his death. Moreover, I think it is fair to say […]

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November 23, 2016

Personal Thoughts on Thanksgiving, 2016


I have been thinking, as is my wont, about giving thanks, on this Thanksgiving.   Many of my thoughts have been about all the things I am so incredibly thankful for, as is appropriate for the day.  But another line of thinking has hit me as well, involving the ironies of giving thanks. Some background, from my personal life.  As much as I love my live, the older I get, the more I realize just how weird this of mine life has been, as a scholar of religion who is not himself religious, an expert on Jesus and the New Testament who does not believe in Jesus or the New Testament, an academic obsessed with the history of Christianity who is not personally connected with Christianity.   As many of you know, the weirdness in part comes from the fact that when I started out I was completely committed religiously, as a believer in Jesus, the Bible, and all things Christian.   When I was seventeen, I was not just your run-of-the-mill-go-to-church-on-Sunday kind of Christian.  I was a […]

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November 24, 2016

Improving the Blog 2016


I would like some ideas for making this blog better.  Do you have any? As you know, the blog really has two functions.  On one hand, the idea behind it is to disseminate as widely as possible the views, perspectives, evidence, arguments, and conclusions of scholars who devote their lives to the study of the New Testament and the history of early Christianity. As the disseminator-of-such-things-in-chief, I think we are doing a pretty good job with that.  The blog covers lots and lots of topics:  the historical Jesus; the New Testament Gospels; the life, theology, and writings of Paul; the other writings of the New Testament; the Apostolic Fathers; the early Christian apocrypha (books that did not make it into the New Tesament); the formation of the Christian canon; heresy and orthodoxy in early Christianity; persecution and martyrdom of Christians;  early Jewish Christian relations; the conversion and life of Constantine; and … and lots of other things.   We basically cover everything that I know anything about, and the only things we don’t cover are (a) […]

November 26, 2016

Looking Ahead to Christmas: A Blast from the Past


With the passing of Thanksgiving, Christmas season has now officially arrived (whether that brings you joy, despair, or indifference!).   Here is a post that I made exactly four years, prompted in part by my decision to publish an edition of “other” Gospels (that did not make it into the New Testament, including some that deal with the birth of Jesus. ****************************************************** Right now I have the “other” Gospels on my mind.   It’s true, I often have them on my mind, since they have been a focus for a good deal of my research over the past few years, and will continue to be for some years to come.  But just now, they are particularly on my mind even though the book I’m currently writing (How Jesus Became God) is about something else. They’re on my mind for three reasons.  First, I’ve agreed with Oxford Press, to produce, along with my colleague Zlatko Plese, an English-only edition of The Apocryphal Gospels, which came out in a Greek/Latin/Coptic-English edition last year; this new edition will include only the […]

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November 27, 2016

Newsweek Article on Christmas: Part 1


    In my last post I made an off-the-cuff comment about an article about Christmas that I wrote for Newsweek four years ago (2012).   Someone asked for more information, and I see now that I never posted the article on the blog.  So I’ll post it here in two parts.  Here is the first half: ******************************************************************* This past September, Harvard University professor Karen King unveiled a newly discovered Gospel fragment that she entitled “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.”  This wisp of a papyrus has stirred up a hornet’s nest and raised anew questions about what we can know about the historical Jesus of Nazareth, and about whether there are other Gospels outside the New Testament that can contribute valuable information. Few questions could be more timely, here in the season that celebrates Jesus’ birth. The fragment is just a scrap – the size of a credit card – written in Coptic, the language of ancient Egypt. It contains only eight broken lines of writing, but in one of these Jesus speaks of “my wife.” […]

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November 28, 2016

Newsweek Article on Christmas: Part 2


Yesterday I gave Part 1 of my Newsweek article on Christmas, published in 2012.  Here is Part 2! *************************************************************** Most modern readers who are not already familiar with these stories [in the apocryphal Gospels such as the Proto-Gospel of James] tend to find them far-fetched.   That’s almost always the case with miraculous accounts that we have never heard before – they sound implausible and “obviously” made up, as legends and fabrications.   Rarely do we have the same reaction to familiar stories known from childhood that are also spectacularly miraculous, and that probably sound just as bizarre to outsiders who hear them for the first time.  Are the stories about Jesus’ birth that are in the New Testament any less far-fetched? It depends whom you ask.   This past November, Pope Benedict XVI published his third book on the life of Jesus, this one focusing on the New Testament accounts of his birth, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives.  Before his ascent to the head of the Catholic Church, Joseph Ratzinger was best known as a leading […]

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November 29, 2016

Gift Subscriptions, 2016!!


It is now December (can any of us believe it?) and we are blasting from one holiday to the next.  For the occasion, I want to open up a holiday giving option that can help out people who really want to be on the blog but cannot afford the membership fees. As many of you know, for the past three of years, thanks to a number of generous donors, we pulled this off in a big way.  It has happened in two stages.   It started off when two anonymous donors proposed that they provide some funds to pay for memberships for a few people who wanted to be on the blog but because of personal circumstances, could not afford the membership fees.   I put out the offer on my Facebook page, asking if anyone was in that boat, and within twenty minutes I had thirty requests –all from people who were eager to join but simply did not have the means to do so.  I had to shut down the offer nearly as soon as […]

December 1, 2016

Response to my Newsweek Article on Christmas


Earlier this week I posted my Newsweek article on Christmas from four years ago, and several people have asked me what kind of reaction I received.  I made two posts about that at the time.  Here’s the first.  I find this post rather humorous now, years later, since I was obviously being wildly defensive (halfway through the response) before denying I was defensive at all (at the end)!  What funny people we can be…. ******************************************************** My Newsweek article this week has generated a lot of response.  I have no idea what kind of comments they typically get for their stories, but so far, as of now, there have been 559 on mine; and most of them are negative – to no one’s surprise – written by people (conservative evangelicals and fundamenalists for the most part, from what I can tell) who think that the Gospels are perfectly accurate in what they have to say about Jesus – not just at his birth but for his entire life.  A lot of these respondents think that anyone […]

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December 2, 2016

Is the New Testament Authentic? Readers’ Mailbag December 4, 2016


QUESTION Dr Ehrman, I found this attack against you: Bart likes to deceive his listener by claiming more variations and more copies give birth to less authenticity. Actually flip that and you’ll begin to “see the light”.  The Bible manuscripts were transmitted not in a linear way, as in “Chinese whispers” but geometrically as in 1 produced by 5 others which in turn then produced, say 20, etc. I think you already dealt with this claim, but I am unable to find your post.   RESPONSE I have to admit that I have a hard time responding to this objection because I don’t know what the person is talking about.  Maybe someone else can enlighten me.   For openers, I’m not sure what he means that I “like” to deceive my listeners – I think that must mean I do this a lot.  And the “deception” appears to be that I think lots of variations in the manuscripts of the New Testament make something “less authentic.”  But what does the person mean?   Exactly what is less […]

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December 4, 2016

Finding Meaning in the Bible: More Responses to my Christmas Article


In the previous post I indicated some of the initial reactions, four years ago, to my Newsweek article on the Gospel stories about Christmas.  I received yet more reaction after that old post, and so posted again, dealing this time with people who thought I was too kindly disposed to anyone who found the stories meaningful.  Here is what I said at the time.  (I still stick by it, for what it’s worth!)   ********************************************************************** When the editor at Newsweek ask me if I would be willing to write an article on the birth of Jesus, I was hesitant and wrote him back asking if he was sure he really wanted me to do it.  I told him that I seem to be incapable of writing anything that doesn’t stir up controversy.  It must be in my blood.  Still, he said that they knew about my work and were not afraid of controversy, and they did indeed want an article from me. What’s interesting to me is that I’ve been getting it from all sides.  […]

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December 5, 2016

A Personal Transition


A week ago today I finally sent off the very last and final version of The Triumph of Christianity to my editor.  It is done, as good as I can make it.  Now it will go to a copy-editor who will go over it line by line, word by word to make sure the grammar, punctuation, and even spelling is all correct, and to make suggestions for writing style as needed.   Depending on the copy-editor, sometimes there are tons of these stylistic suggestions, sometimes hardly any. As an author, I much prefer the “hardly any” approach – it’s much easier on me and more, well, affirming of my writing style.  When I do get a lot of suggestions I have to take a deep breath and remind myself that the copy-editor is just doing his/her job and trying to make the prose better.  But I do hate that part. I will then go through the copy-edited manuscript, approve or reject all the suggested changes, and return the book to the editor, for it to go […]

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December 7, 2016

Free Memberships for those Who Need Them!


Thanks to the incredible generosity of members of the blog, I am happy to announce that there are 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 heartfelt thanks for […]

December 8, 2016

Lecture at Fresno City College


Here is a video of a discussion that I had on my book “How Jesus Became God” at Fresno City College, with Professor of Philosophy Wendell Stephenson, on February 18, 2016 at 7:00p.m. After our back and forth the floor was opened opened to Q&A from the audience. News release about event: http://www.therampageonline.com/news/2016/02/23/author-of-how-jesus-became-god-draws-hundreds-to-college-auditorium-2/ Please adjust gear icon for high-definition.   IF YOU DON’T BELONG YET to the blog, JOIN!!!  It doesn’t cost much, and you get unbelievable bang for your buck!  And every buck goes to charities helping the needy.  So join!!!

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December 14, 2016