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Scribes Who Injected the Idea of Atonement into Luke’s Gospel
One of the most striking theological features of the Gospel of Luke and its accompanying volume the book of Acts is that they do not portray Jesus’ death as a sacrifice for sins. That seems very strange indeed to people who get their theology from other parts of the New Testament (e.g., Paul, and the other Gospels). But when read on their own, Luke-Acts have a different understanding of the significance of Jesus death. And that may be why scribes altered the words Jesus spoke at his last supper in Luke 22 – the textual variant I began discussing yesterday. I have a very long discussion of the issue in my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture and a much shortened and simplified version in Misquoting Jesus. Here is what I say in the latter. ******************************************************************************* For proto-orthodox Christians, it was important to emphasize that Christ was a real man of flesh and blood because it was precisely the sacrifice of his flesh and the shedding of his blood that brought salvation – not in […]
March 16, 2018
Jesus and My First Girlfriend: A Blast From The Past
Breezing through some old posts today from nearly six years ago, and came across this interesting little anecdote. I’d forgotten I had written about it. A funny personal story about something that actually became important for me. ******************************************************************************* My first serious girlfriend was Lynn, whom I met when we were starting our sophomore year in high school. She was funny, personable, attractive, intelligent, and Jewish. I’m not sure I had ever known a Jewish person before her. I don’t recall that we ever talked about religion, and looking back I suppose it’s a bit surprising. She and her family certainly weren’t observant Jews and my uninformed sense is that they were completely secular. I don’t know if they went to synagogue or kept any of the holidays, but I kind-a doubt it. In any event, at that point in my life religion wasn’t really my main concern when it came to a girlfriend. We were a hot item for months, and then at the end of my sophomore year, disaster struck. Her mom got […]
March 19, 2018
Fresh Air Interview Tuesday March 20
I have just recorded an interview with Terry Gross for Fresh Air — scheduled to air tomorrow, Tuesday March 20. It’s (mainly) on my book The Triumph of Christianity. We recorded for an hour and a half, so hopefully they’ll figure out how to edit out the most boring bits!
The Thinking Atheist Interview: The Triumph of Christianity
On March 20, 2018 I was interviewed by Seth Andrews, host of The Thinking Atheist podcast about my book “The Triumph of Christianity: How A Forbidden Religion Swept the World.” Seth Andrews of The Thinking Atheist defines his media channel: “Religion often tells us that faith is a virtue. We think faith (believing something without evidence) is a poor method for determining what is true, especially in an era when science, reason and evidence continue to provide much more satisfying answers than faith ever has. This is a page that challenges the claims of religion and encourages all to reject faith, to be unfailingly curious, and to keep thinking.” http://www.thethinkingatheist.com/ Here’s the interview. Enjoy! Please adjust gear icon for 1080p High-Definition:
April 10, 2018
The Marvels of Media Attention
My first trade book – that is, book written for a general audience, instead of for fellow scholars (academic monographs) or college students (textbooks) — was 19 years ago now, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. I think it’s safe to say that when I wrote the book, I knew virtually *nothing* about writing a trade book. My editor at Oxford University Press urged me to write it and I reluctantly agreed. I was reluctant because I did not want to write for a general audience. At that time I wanted to spend my life writing scholarship for scholars. But I thought, well, why not – I’ll give it a shot. But it was to be a one-off, not a career. I didn’t really know the difference between trade books and scholarly monographs, except when it came to audience. I realized that I would not be writing for experts like the guy in the office next to me, but for lay folk like the guy across the street. I suppose that was pretty much […]
March 21, 2018
The Miracle of New Life
As most readers of the blog know, I do not believe in miracles. At least in literal miracles as normally understood. I suppose most people think of an actual or literal miracle as an event that cannot be explained through natural causes but requires some kind of supernatural intervention, an act of a divine being who is outside of this nexus of cause and effect, an act of God. I should stress that this does not necessarily mean that we *do* know the natural causes of everything that we do not consider miraculous – only that in principle they are discoverable. I stress that point because most of us have no clue how *most* of what happens happens. I couldn’t explain how my toaster works if my life depended upon it, let alone anything (just about *anything*) having to do with biology, chemistry, or physics, let alone the wonders of the human brain, or the expansion of the universe, or, well, as I said, most things. But that doesn’t mean that I need to appeal […]
March 22, 2018
How Were Books Published in the Ancient World?
In this week’s Readers’ Mailbag I deal with a question about how books – including the early Christian Gospels – were “published” in the ancient world. How were they “made public” and distributed in a world that didn’t have printing presses and publishers and book stores? Here’s the question and my response. QUESTION Bart, this is a related but separate question–how would Mark’s gospel first have been distributed? I understand that most who read it would be reading copies made by believers (with some adherent errors or in some cases deliberate changes), but at some point there was an original copy. What do we know about how such books got into circulation, so the process of copying and distributing them began? And how would it have differed from, let’s say, the histories of Josephus or Tacitus? RESPONSE This is an interesting and important question, an area of substantial scholarly research that is for the most part not known among the reading public, who for the most part have never thought about the question. […]
March 25, 2018
Forgery Lecture
I will be giving a lecture at Rice University in Houston on Thursday April 19. I had originally thought that it was only for scholars connected with an antiquity seminar there, but I see now that it is open to the public. Here is the description I gave them (aimed obviously at the academics), if anyone is in the area and wants to come: 4/19/18 Bart Ehrman James A. Gray Distinguished Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Literary Deceit in Its Various (Dis)Guises 4:00 pm, Humanities 119 Open to the Public, Registration Required Many scholars of early Christianity express qualms about calling a forgery a forgery – an understandable reluctance when dealing with a book in canonical scripture. An alternative such as “pseudepigraphon” may seem better – more neutral and wissenschaftlich – but it has the drawback of mystification. Who would know it refers to a book written by someone intentionally but falsely claiming to be a famous person? Or that, even in the ancient world, this was considered […]
March 26, 2018
Fresh Air – Christianity’s Path From ‘Forbidden’ To A ‘Triumph’
On March 20, 2018 I had an interview with Terry Gross for her NPR radio program Fresh Air, about my book The Triumph of Christianity: How A Forbidden Religion Swept the World. I believe this is the seventh time I’ve done her program (the first one was for my book Lost Christianities, maybe fifteen years ago). I thought way back then, and I still think now, that she’s the best interviewer on the planet. The show runs for about 45 minutes, but we talked for twice that long . On the upside, that means her editors leave out some of the more idiotic things I say. Enjoy! Transcript of this program: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=595161200 Please adjust gear icon for 720p High-Definition:
April 26, 2018
The Martyrdom of Perpetua
A long time ago now I was pursuing a thread on the development of the Christian views of the afterlife but I got side tracked. And then I got side tracked from my side track. And then … well, it’s been a long time. The thread died. I need to bring it back to life. So I’m hoping now to begin on the afterlife of the thread on the afterlife. Over all these months I have continued to read, think, and sketch my thoughts on where the Christian ideas of the afterlife came from – especially the view so common today that when a person dies, their soul goes to heaven for an eternal reward or hell for eternal punishment. That is not the view of the Old Testament and it is not what the historical Jesus preached. So where did it come from? That is the ultimate issue I will be pursuing in my book. But there are other topics of interest as well, such as where did the idea of “purgatory” come from. […]
March 27, 2018
The Martyr Perpetua and Her Estranged Family
Yesterday I began to talk about the Martyrdom of Perpetua, one of the most interesting and moving texts to come down to us from early Christianity. It is an account of a 23-year old Roman matron who is willing to die a gruesome death for her Christian faith. Among other things, the text shows that her faith is far more important to her than her family. In particular, she is shown in conflict especially with her father (no husband is mentioned, which has led to considerable speculation: Divorced? Widowed? Unwed mother? Something else?). And even though it is with regret, she is willing to leave behind her own infant child by being martyred. Family figures prominently in the two excerpts here. In the first her father begs her to avoid martyrdom, to no avail. In the second (chs. 7-8) we have an account of her dream and intervention on behalf of her dead brother Dinocrates. This is the part that I will be most interested in for the next post. Is it an early adumbration […]
March 28, 2018
The Birth of Purgatory
I am interested in the question of where the idea of purgatory came from. Roughly speaking purgatory is a kind of third place, between heaven and hell. The abject sinners (or those who reject Christ, or whoever you think is destined for punishment) go to hell; the righteous saints go to heaven. But what about those who will ultimately be saved but who have not lived a good (enough) life? They go to purgatory. This has been the standard teaching of the Catholic church since the 12th or 13th century. The classic study of the phenomenon is Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory (1984; an English translation of the 1981 French original). Le Goff was a medieval historian who was interested in the question from a purely historical, rather than theological, perspective (he was not a believer himself). He shows that the term purgatorium was minted only in the 12th century. It referred not to a state of being in the afterlife but to an actual place that people went – most people – […]
March 29, 2018
The First Intimation of Purgatory?
As I said in my last post, the definitive doctrine of Purgatory did not exist before the 12th century, even though the basic *idea* had been around for a long time – the idea that even though Christ’s death brought salvation to the world, most people, except for the most holy saints, such as those who had been martyred for their faith, had still to pay for their sins. By the 13th century Purgatory had become an actual place of torment. Before then it was not so much a place as a condition of suffering to purge away sins. The question is how early this idea existed. How long had Christians maintained that suffering was necessary for the sinner – even the believing Christian sinner – before they would be allowed into their eternal bliss in heaven? The idea is not part of the New Testament, although as we will see in a later post, there are some passages that could be used in support of the view. The first place we find any reference […]
March 30, 2018
An Easter Reflection 2018
It is highly ironic, but relatively easy, for a historian to argue that Jesus himself did not start Christianity. Christianity, at its heart, is the belief that Jesus’ death and resurrection brought about salvation, and that believing in his death and resurrection will make a person right with God, both now and in the afterlife. Historical scholarship since the nineteenth century has marshaled massive evidence that this is not at all what Jesus himself preached. Yes, it is true that in the Gospels themselves Jesus talks about his coming death and resurrection. And in the last of the Gospels written, John, his message is all about how faith in him can bring eternal life (a message oddly missing in the three earlier Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke). These canonical accounts of Jesus’ words were written four, five, or six decades after his death by people who did not know him who were living in different countries, and who were not even speaking his own language. They themselves acquired their accounts of Jesus’ words from […]
April 1, 2018
Did Jesus Teach About Purgatory?
The topic I’m dealing with on this destined-to-be-a-very-long thread seems to me to be particularly important. Most of my scholarship is of interest mainly to people concerned about the life and teachings of Jesus, the New Testament, the history of Christianity, and so on; but this is of interest to *all* of us. What happens when we die? Or more specifically, what happens to *me* when I die? My current discussion of purgatory may be of little interest to people, until they think about it for a second. Do most people have to go through horrible suffering after death, even if they are not destined for the eternal flames of hell? I for one don’t look forward to getting a tooth ache or ending up in the hospital. What if there are years, decades, centuries of physical torment ahead for me? Shouldn’t I want to know about that and, well, make some preparations? But it’s a topic most of us don’t think about. Those of us raised in a Protestant tradition simply don’t buy it […]
April 2, 2018
Making the Bestseller List
As many of you know, I made an appearance on “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross a couple of weeks ago. I had mentioned in an earlier post that the only way it is humanly possible for a book to become a bestseller is by having some media attention paid to it – a herculean task, especially these days, over the past two years, when the national media wants to talk about nothing but That One Thing. Fresh Air has millions of listeners, though, and I was very fortunate to be on it. The results were fantastic, as I’ve indicated before. And a new indication has just appeared. Triumph of Christianity has made it on the New York Times Bestseller this week, coming in at #11 on the list of Hardback Non-Fiction. That’s a big deal for me. There are something like 600 books that get published every day. To be on this list is special. I don’t expect the book to stay on for more than a week, but still, it is a milestone. There […]
April 3, 2018
The Sixth Anniversary of the Blog!
Today marks the sixth-year anniversary of the blog. It’s hard to believe, but, well, it’s been six years today. Time to look back and see how we’re doing and look forward to figure out what we can do better. So, first, to start in terms of raw numbers. In terms of posts, I’ve added them up and it turns out I have made 275 over the past year. That’s about 5.3 per week – so basically five with some extras thrown in now and then. That’s the pace that feels about right to me. It gives people a lot of bang for their buck, but it gives me a couple of days a week when I can luxuriate in knowing I don’t need to work on the blog. Good all around. Total numbers since starting six years ago: 1739 blog posts. That’s 5.6+ per week, so I’ve slowed down a bit, but I don’t plan on slowing down any more. Some of those 1739 are repeats: over the past couple of years I’ve started reposting […]
April 4, 2018
The Unforgivable Sin and Purgatory
In my previous post I discussed one of the passages of the New Testament that has traditionally been used to support the idea of Purgatory, the place that most of the “saved” go after death to be purged of their sins (Matt 5:26 “you won’t get out of there until you have paid the last penny”). In my judgment this passage is not talking about what happens in the afterlife, even though it has been read that way. With another passage, the matter is not quite so clear. In a famous passage, again in Matthew, Jesus talks about the “unforgiveable sin”: “Therefore I tell you every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven; and whoever speaks a word against the Son of man, it will be forgiven; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit it will not be forgiven, either in this age or the ages to come.” As you might imagine, over the Christian centuries there have been numerous interpretations of what that […]
April 6, 2018
Who Invented the Idea of a Suffering Messiah?
For this week’s readers’ mailbag I give a very interesting and important question. QUESTION: Where did the idea of a Jewish messiah dying for the sins of mankind originate from? OT? Did Jews prior to Jesus’ existence believe this notion of the messiah dying for other’s sins? RESPONSE: I deal with this issue in a couple of my books. Christians often point to messianic prophecy about Jesus in the Old Testament and suppose the suffering messiah was “right in front of the Jews’ faces” all along. In fact, it wasn’t. Here is one of my fuller discussion from Did Jesus Exist?, where I talk about the issue in connection with the question of why Paul originally opposed Christians before converting to the faith. ***************************************************************** Why, as a highly religious Jew, did Paul originally persecute the Christians before he himself joined their ranks? It appears to have been for one reason only: the Christians were saying that Jesus was God’s special chosen one, his beloved son, the messiah. But for the pre-Christian Paul it […]
April 8, 2018
Degrees of Punishment and Purgatory
Christians have always had a wide variety of beliefs about the afterlife, and just about everyone (who chooses) is able to find biblical support for their views. The Bible itself has an enormous range of views. Among other things, there have always been Christians who have thought that there must be varying levels of punishment for sinners in the afterlife. The guy on the street who does his best but is not always a very good father surely doesn’t get punished to the same degree as Hitler. Among such believers who are convinced that there are different levels of punishment I would certainly class those who believe in purgatory. Even though it is a view almost universally rejected by Protestants, purgatory can make a lot of sense even to some of them. The afterlife is not just black and white, one thing or the other, either/or – it is not either eternal bliss for all the saints and eternal torment for all the sinners. There must be gradations, right? And purgatory is a way of […]
April 9, 2018