introduction to the New Testament Archives

Take A Final Exam on the New Testament!

The semester is over at my university, but since I'm on leave, it hasn't affected me much. But I was thinking about it this morning -- final exams, grading, wrapping up the term -- and I remembered that some years ago on the blog I posted the final exam I gave to my Introduction to the New Testament course, to see how you'd do! I thought it would be fun and interesting to repost it. Check it out. Can you nail it? So, classes are officially over here at UNC, and we are in the Final Exam period. Today I gave my final for the Introduction to the New Testament class. As some of you may recall, back in January 2014 I posted on the blog the pop quiz I give the first day of class for this course. It is here, in case you're interested: https://ehrmanblog.org/new-testament-pop-quiz/ When I give this quiz on the first day, I tell the students that even if they bomb it (which most of them do), it's nothing [...]

BDEhrman2020-05-04T09:09:57-04:00May 4th, 2020|Public Forum, Teaching Christianity|

My Final Exam for NT

So, classes are officially over here at UNC, and we are in the Final Exam period. Today I gave my final for the Introduction to the New Testament class. As some of you may recall, back in January 2014 I posted on the blog the pop quiz I give the first day of class for this course. It is here, in case you're interested: https://ehrmanblog.org/new-testament-pop-quiz/ When I give this quiz on the first day, I tell the students that even if they bomb it (which most of them do), it's nothing compared to what they're going to be learning in the class over the course of the semester. Looking at the Final Exam in comparison with this introductory pop quiz pretty much shows it. Anyway, comparisons or not, I thought you might be interested in the exam, to see how you would do. And so I give it below in its entirety For the i.d.s, anything they've read or heard during the semester is fair game. I don't give them [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-09T08:25:40-05:00May 1st, 2015|Teaching Christianity|

My Pop Quiz For First-Year Students

It’s been a very long day of teaching (six hours of talking!), so something substantive for the blog will need to wait for another day. Instead, I’ll say something about what happened today. As some of you have seen by examining my syllabus, I begin my class on Jesus by giving a pop quiz. I did that this morning. The class has 24 students in it, all first-year students, most of them 18 and 19. (One swallows hard to think of it, but that means the incoming class was born in 1995. Ai yai yai….) I begin most of my undergraduate classes with a pop quiz, both to see how much knowledge the students already have about very basic issues related to the NT and to have an opportunity to teach them some very basic issues (such as dates of important events in antiquity, the use of the abbreviations CE and BCE, the diversity of early Christianity, some basic Gospel facts,), to stress some others (Jesus was a Jew, not a Christian), and to have [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-31T19:27:04-05:00August 26th, 2013|Public Forum, Teaching Christianity|

Undergraduate Courses (2): Introduction to the New Testament (Part 2)

Once students have come to see what the contents, characteristics, and emphases of each of the Gospels are, and have recognized that the Gospels cannot be taken as historically reliable accounts of what “really” happened in the life of Jesus, both because of their many discrepancies and because of historical implausibilities (as just two examples: Luke’s “census” that gets Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem; or the Triumphal Entry, where Jesus is publicly acclaimed messiah by the massive crowds and the authorities do nothing about it) – once students have recognized this, they are in a position to consider the criteria that scholars use to ferret out from sources such as these bona fide historical information. I stress with my students that the literary questions one brings to the Gospels are different from historical questions. The literary questions are the ones we ask about the Gospels as works of literature: what they want to teach and what message they want to convey. The historical questions are ones we ask about the Gospels as sources: what they [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-25T12:23:10-05:00May 22nd, 2012|Historical Jesus, Public Forum, Teaching Christianity|

Undergraduate Courses (1): Introduction to the New Testament (Part 1)

In my post on The Work of a Professional Scholar I gave a brief overview of the sorts of courses that I teach at UNC. There is nothing particularly unusual about the courses I teach. I have hundreds of friends and colleagues who teach classes on the New Testament and on Early Christianity around the country, and most of them have courses very similar to the ones I teach – so long as they are not teaching in a fundamentalist or conservative evangelical environment. One difference among my friends and colleagues has to do with the teaching load. At major research institutions such as UNC, the normal teaching load is relatively light – two courses a semester (for me that translates into one undergraduate lecture course and one PhD seminar each term; the seminars are much smaller, but they are also way, way more work!). At smaller colleges the load may be as many as four or five courses each term. Obviously the research expectations in that setting are much lower, just as the expectations [...]

BDEhrman2017-12-25T12:25:18-05:00May 20th, 2012|Canonical Gospels, Public Forum, Teaching Christianity|

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Take A Final Exam on the New Testament!

My Final Exam for NT

My Pop Quiz For First-Year Students

Undergraduate Courses (2): Introduction to the New Testament (Part 2)

Undergraduate Courses (1): Introduction to the New Testament (Part 1)