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Why Differences and Discrepancies Matter Theologically/Religiously


On Wednesday I will be having a public debate with Mike Licona at Kennesaw State University on the topic: “Are the Gospels Historically Reliable.”  This is something I’ve thought long and hard about for my entire adult life, and so has he.  But we disagree, heartily.  It should be a lively and interesting debate. Just now I was looking through the ancient history of the blog, and I ran across this post where I discuss the issue from a different perspective (different from what I usually say) — one in which I claim that it is *helpful* for Christians to realize that the Gospels have discrepancies.   Interesting thought, I think, and think I thought! – Mike Licona is the author of The Resurrection of Jesus, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels and Evidence for God. ***************************************************************************** In my two previous posts I’ve been trying to explain that the historical-critical view of the Gospels, in which they are recognized not always to represent historically accurate information about Jesus, is not necessarily a view that “trashes” them.  […]

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February 16, 2018

Why Discrepancies Matter for Interpretation


In the last post I pointed out that Mark and Luke have very (very!) different portrayals of Jesus going to his death.  In this post I want to explain why that ultimately matters for understanding each of the Gospels: without understanding this difference, you will misunderstand *both* Gospels. *********************************************************************** I have argued that the two portrayals of Jesus going to his death in Mark and Luke are radically different, and that recognizing this radical difference is of utmost importance for understanding what each author is trying to say.   The in-shock, silent Jesus of Mark, who is betrayed, denied, abandoned, and mocked by everyone, who wonders at the very end why God himself has forsaken him, simply is not the same as the calm confident Jesus of Luke, who knows God is on his side, who understands what is happening to him, and who knows what will happen to him after it happens to him: he will wake up in paradise. A deeper understanding of each Gospel seeks to understand the portrayal of Jesus found in […]

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February 18, 2018

The Increasing Innocence of Pilate in the Death of Jesus


QUESTION: How is it that all four gospels portray Pilate as recognizing the innocence of Jesus and being extremely reluctant to order his execution?   RESPONSE: What is most intriguing (and enlightening) is that over time in the Christian tradition – both inside the New Testament and outside of it – Pilate becomes more and more innocent in the death of Jesus with the passing of time.   You can see this clearly simply by lining up the Gospels chronologically and seeing how they portray Pilate at the trial of Jesus. Our earliest Gospel is Mark (15:1-15).  There Pilate is somewhat reluctant to do what the Jewish leaders ask him to do – crucify Jesus – and he seems a bit bewildered.  He has a custom of releasing a prisoner during Passover and suggests Jesus.  But the crowd, stirred up by the chief priests, wants Barabbas instead.  And so, after a very brief trial Pilate, does what they ask.  Here Pilate is simply complying with the Jews’ wishes; he puts up some resistance, but not a […]

February 19, 2018

The Ironies of Jesus’ Trial


In yesterday’s post I mentioned that fact that John’s Gospel has a very different portrayal of Jesus’ trial before Pilate than any of the other Gospels.   It is longer, more involved, and highly intriguing. Unlike the other Gospels, it is not a short trial where Jesus says only two words (in Mark, Pilate asks Jesus if he is the king of the Jews and Jesus replies: “You say so” – in Greek SU LEGEIS).  There are numerous back and forths, including, at one point, Pilate’s famous question “What is truth?” To make sense of the scene it is important to realize that John is going to have Jesus die on a different day from the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.  In those earlier Gospels, the day before Jesus’ death his disciples ask him where he wants them to “prepare the Passover meal” (Mark 14:12).  He gives them instructions how and where to prepare the meal and they do so.  That evening (which, in Jewish reckoning, is the beginning of the next day) they […]

February 20, 2018

My Interview with Michael Shermer


On Sunday, February 18, 2018, I did a podcast interview with Michael B. Shermer, a well known author on issues related to science and religion (the one I most recently read: The Science of Good and Evil), based on my new book: The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World. The interview is part of the Science Salon series, number eighteen. Dialogues are hosted by Michael Shermer and presented by The Skeptics Society, in California. Dr. Michael B. Shermer holds a graduate degree in experimental psychology. He is a historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society, and editor-in-chief of its magazine Skeptic, which is largely devoted to investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. Shermer engages in debates on topics pertaining to pseudoscience and religion in which he emphasizes scientific skepticism Among other things in this interview we discuss the modern atheism movement, religion and politics, the intractable problem of evil, the early understandings of Jesus (how could he be both man and God?), the beliefs of ancient pagans about the gods and […]

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February 23, 2018

Pilate’s *Own* Account of Why He Crucified Jesus


I have been talking about how Pontius Pilate becomes increasingly innocent over time in Christian accounts of the death of Jesus.  One of my arguments is that the motive behind this exoneration of the Roman governor is an attempt to blame “the Jews” for killing their own messiah.  This exoneration increases over time and after a while stops being at all subtle. Check out this non-canonical account that allegedly gives Pilate’s own version of the matter.  This is in an apocryphal text called the Anaphora Pilati (= The Report of Pilate – a report he allegedly sent to the emperor Tiberius).  You can find this text in the book I co-edited with my colleague Zlatko Pleše, The Other Gospels.   Here is the introduction taken from there and my translation of the text itself (it’s preserved in Greek) *********************************************** Introduction   The “Report” of Pontius Pilate to the Emperor Tiberius (the “Anaphora Pilati”) relates the events of Jesus’ trial, death, and resurrection from the perspective of the Roman governor.  We learn that despite his many divine […]

February 22, 2018

The Legend of Peter’s Martyrdom


QUESTION: Can you do a post on what we know about the deaths of the Apostles from the early sources and include your opinions? RESPONSE: Many, MANY Christians have argued that Jesus must have been raised from the dead, because “all the apostles” died for their faith, and “no one would die for a lie.”  The latter of course, is not true, as people die for lies all the time (for example, in war); but that’s not really the point.   The point is (or rather the points are): (a) Just because the disciples believed Jesus was raised from the dead doesn’t mean that he was raised from the dead; (b) They could have been wrong about him being raised without lying about it.  They may, for example, have heard that some of their numbers had “seen” Jesus alive, and they genuinely believed it to be true. (c) And *most* important, we actually don’t know how most of the apostles died. This last point is really significant, and not widely known.  It is widely assumed (I […]

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February 25, 2018

Do We Know How Paul Died?


In response to a question about what we know about the deaths of the apostles yesterday (short answer: almost nothing!) I talked about the hints about Peter’s death in the NT, and the later legend about it in the apocryphal Acts of Peter.  Today I can talk about what we know about the legends about the martyrdom of Paul, from the equally apocryphal Acts of Paul.  Here is what I say about it in my book Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene.   ************************************************************ The Martyrdom of Paul We do not have any contemporary accounts of Paul’s death, although traditions from several decades afterwards indicate that he was martyred.   The earliest reference comes in the letter from the church of Rome to the church of Corinth known as 1 Clement, written around 95 CE, some thirty years after Paul’s death.  This anonymous author refers to the “pillars” of the Christian faith who were persecuted for their faith, “even to death.”  He refers especially to the apostles Peter and Paul.  About Paul, he states: Because of jealousy […]

February 26, 2018

What Did Jesus Look Like?


I recently read an intriguing short article by my friend and colleague at King’s College London, Joan Taylor, on what Jesus probably looked like.  Good question.  I’ve always thought: how would we know?  But in fact, there are some things to be said.  I zapped her a note and she agreed to write up something for the blog.   The original piece was published in The Irish Times, here:  <https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/what-did-jesus-really-look-like-as-a-jew-in-1st-century-judaea-1.3385334>.  She has slightly edited it for us.  Here is what she says.   ****************************************************************  What Did Jesus Look Like Joan Taylor   Everyone knows how to recognize Jesus. He is portrayed in art, film and literature in much the same way. His image is found repeatedly in countless churches and Christian buildings. He is usually somewhat European: a man with nut-brown hair (sometimes blond) and light brown or blue eyes. He has a long face and nose, and long hair and a beard. His clothes are also long: a tunic down to the ground, with wide baggy sleeves, and a large mantle. He is fairly well-tended […]

February 27, 2018

Early Christology: How I Changed My Mind


It seems like every time I write a book, based on the research I do I change my mind about one thing or another that I’ve thought for a long time.  Some people (including some fellow scholars) think that’s a weakness or a problem.   I think of it as one of my charming personality traits.  🙂 OK, seriously, I think more scholars ought to be willing to change their minds — instead of being intransigent and thinking they are always right.  If intense research gives you new and different insights, that’s a *good* thing, not a problem. I think about this a lot every time I’m in the midst of doing research for a book (such as now) (well, OK, such as almost always), and just now I was looking through old blog posts , and I ran across one (almost exactly five years ago today!) where I talk about a big change of mind involving the early understandings of Jesus as a divine being, in connection with the book I eventually published, How Jesus […]

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March 2, 2018

Reading The Triumph of Christianity at Quail Ridge Books


On Tuesday February 13, 2018 at 7:00pm, I had a book reading based on my new book “The Triumph of Christianity: How A Forbidden Religion Swept the World” at Quail Ridge Books located in Raleigh, North Carolina.    I read excerpts for about 30 minutes, then took questions. Here it is, for your viewing pleasure or amusement! Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition: To see all my posts, 5-6 times a week, join the blog!  It doesn’t cost much, gives a lot, and raises money for charity.  So why not?

March 4, 2018

The Surprising Understanding of Gender in the Ancient World


Back in January I made three posts on the role of women in the churches of Paul (see the posts of January 16, 17, and 18).  These raised various questions from readers about how and why women went from having a fairly *prominent* role in Paul’s own churches to having thoroughly *diminished* roles in the churches that arose after his day, as embodied for example in the Pastoral epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus (books that claim to be written by Paul but that he did not himself write; they were produced by a later author who, among other things, opposed the role of women in the church). I’d like to answer these questions by discussing a matter that most modern readers of the Bible (or of other ancient texts) simply are unaware of: how ancient people understood the relationship of the genders.   We ourselves have a “common sense” of what the differences between male and female are, and we naturally assume that our common sense has been the common sense of everyone […]

March 5, 2018

Why Women Came to be Silenced


Given what I’ve said before about women in the ancient world, in early Christianity, and in the churches of Paul, I can now explain why women who had originally played a significant role in the early Christian movement came to be silenced, especially in the churches of Paul (as seen, for example, in the Pastoral epistles).  Here is how I discuss the matter in my college-level textbook on the New Testament. ***************************************************** Our theoretical discussion of the ideology of gender in the Roman world, that is, of the way that people mentally and socially constructed sexual difference, gives us a backdrop for reconsidering the progressive oppression of women in the Pauline churches. Women may have been disproportionately represented in the earliest Christian communities. This at least was a constant claim made by the opponents of Christianity in the second century, who saw the inordinate number of women believers as a fault; remarkably, the defenders of the faith never denied it. The large number of women followers is not surprising given the circumstance that the earliest […]

March 6, 2018

Ehrman & Licona: Are the Gospels Historically Reliable? Part 1


A month ago, on February 21 I had a public debate with Mike Licona at the Bailey Performance Center at Kennesaw State University on the topic: Are the Gospels Historically Reliable? Ratio Christi and KSU History Club hosted the event. Moderator was Dr. Brian Swain, a historian of Mediterranean antiquity on the faculty there. You can probably guess the two sides we took in the debate.  The crowd was largely on his side, which made for a very interesting evening.  As I think you’ll see, even though Mike and I disagree on most things, we have a good, friendly relationship. It was a long evening — lots of back and forth, with a Q & A with the audience to follow.  At times it got, well, animated.  Here is part 1.  I’ll post the second part next week. Part 1: Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition. – Mike Licona is the author of The Resurrection of Jesus, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels and Evidence for God.

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March 18, 2018

My Upcoming Writing Plans: The Afterlife and the Afterlife


As some of you know, I sometimes try to work on two books at once.  I’ve actually tried *writing* two books at once, but doesn’t work too well.  (Writing part of one one day and part of the other another.  Yuk!)  But I can be doing research and planning two books at once, if they are on a related topic – one a popular book for a general audience and the other a scholarly book for academics.   That’s what I did about ten years ago now for my books Forged (trade book for general readers) and Forgery and Counterforgery (hard-hitting scholarship decidedly not for general readers). Last summer I mentioned on the blog that I was thinking about doing that again, and now it’s for real – I’m doing it.  I wasn’t sure if I would because I needed to get a sabbatical from teaching to pull it off.  But I have now learned that I’ve been given a fellowship for all of next year at the National Humanities Center and so I will be […]

March 8, 2018

My Scholarly Project on the Afterlife


Here is the research proposal that I sent in to various funding agencies hoping to get a leave for next year – including the National Humanities Center, which has given me a fellowship . As you’ll see, it is closely tied to the trade book I am working on about the origins of the Christian ideas of heaven and hell, but it deals with a specific issue at considerable depth.   For the fellowship application I called the prospective book “The Invention of Heaven and Hell” – which sounds too much like my trade book (“The Invention of the Afterlife”) but it was all I could come up with at the time.  I wanted to give it a scholarly title, something like “Anabasis Traditions in Early Christianity,” but was strongly advised not to make the title technical.  There’s no telling what it will be called when it eventually gets written, but here is what I say about it when describing in my applications for fellowships. ************************************************************ In the winter season of 1886-87 a French archaeological team […]

March 9, 2018

Ehrman & Licona: Are the Gospels Historically Reliable? Part 2


Here is Part 2 of my debate with Mike Licona on whether the Gospels are historically reliable.  You won’t necessarily have to have seen Part 1 to make sense of this one; a lot of it involves penetrating questions from the audience (trying to trip us up!) which one or the other of us addressed.   Enjoy! Part 2: Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition: – Mike Licona is the author of The Resurrection of Jesus, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels and Evidence for God.   REMEMBER: if you were a member of the blog, you would get interesting posts all related to the New Testament and the history of early Christianity, at least five times a week.  So why not join??

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March 24, 2018

Once More: The Interesting Text Called the Didache


QUESTION: I was surprised to see that in the Didache the form of the Golden Rule is in the negative.  I’ve read that the positive formulation in the Sermon on the Mount may be original to Jesus.  If the Didache used Matthew as a source, how does one account for that reversion?   RESPONSE I started writing up a simple answer to this question but then I realized that the answer doesn’t make much sense without some more extended background.  Just a few months ago on the blog – this past December — I talked about the intriguing early Christian writing known as the Didache.  But everything I said then may not be fresh in everyone’s mind (I know it’s not fresh in *my* mind: I had forgotten I even posted about it!!).  So let me explain again what the book is – not in the same terms as I did as before but by way of a general overview, as I lay it out in my undergraduate textbook on the New Testament.  In my […]

March 12, 2018

The Golden Rule


After all the background I gave yesterday, I can now give a succinct answer to the question that was raised by a reader.  Here it is again. QUESTION: I was surprised to see that, in the Didache, the form of the Golden Rule is in the negative. I’ve read that the positive formulation in the Sermon on the Mount may be original to Jesus. If the Didache used Matthew as a source, how does one account for that reversion? RESPONSE: I think this question has a simple answer.   It is that the Golden Rule, which is known to everyone today mainly by the way Jesus said it, was a common teaching but was almost expressed negatively rather than positively (as I’ll explain below).   When the author of the Didache states the rule he does so in the form that he was most familiar with rather than in the form known to Matthew. It is important to recognize that when one speaks of Matthew as a “source” for the Didache it is not the same thing […]

March 13, 2018

What Happened at the Last Supper? A Textual Problem in Luke


A couple of days ago a reader asked me a question in connection with something I had said about the early second-century Christian text, the Didache, and its instructions about how the Lord’s supper was supposed to be celebrated.  Here is what I said: “When they celebrate the Eucharist they are first to bless the cup with a prayer that the author provides and then to bless the broken bread, with another set prayer (9:1–4). This way of celebrating the Lord’s Supper by starting with the cup and ending with the bread has long puzzled scholars, since the typical practice of the early Christians appears to be reflected in the New Testament accounts of the Last Supper, where Jesus distributes first the bread and then the cup” This led a reader to ask:   QUESTION: Does this relate to Luke 22:17-20 where the author has Jesus take the cup, then take the bread, then take the cup again?   RESPONSE: Ah, it is a good question.   Many readers will not know that there is a […]

March 15, 2018