Yesterday I received this interesting comment on my most recent post. It embodies a view that a lot of other members of the Blog have, and so I thought I should respond to it. It is about whether there can be meaningful myths in the Bible. Here is what the reader says.
Imaginative stories by definition are false. To say something is myth and by extension imaginative, is asserting that it is false. For us to say something is ...
Continue Reading →When I came to see that there are mistakes in the Bible, I did not jettison it all as a waste of time. Not at all. On the contrary, I continued to value and cherish it, as a book that could reveal truths about God. Yes it had discrepancies, contradictions, historical errors, glaring scientific mistakes, and so on. Of course it did. But that for me was not the ultimate point. The Bible It was a product of its own ...
Continue Reading →Five years ago today I received and answered this question on the blog. I thought it would make a nice break from my current discussion of my change of faith, a topic to which I’ll return tomorrow. For now, here’s a blast from the past.
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QUESTION
One of the major points of your work (if I understand correctly) is that the contents of the New Testament are at a vast remove in time, place, and source from any ...
Continue Reading →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 ...
Continue Reading →In this week’s Readers’ Mailbag I will deal with three questions, all of them having to do with the historical Jesus: how has memory studies affected my understanding of Jesus; whether the claim that the Gospels are based eyewitnesses is a new or an ancient attempt to “guarantee” their accuracy; and whether Jesus can be relevant today if his basic apocalyptic view was proven to be wrong.
Good questions, all of them! If you have any questions about anything involving the ...
Continue Reading →OK, to start off with, I have to admit that my skin is not as thick as I would like it to be. And because of that, I really should not read reviews of my books on Amazon. It is, to say the least, highly aggravating. As on the Internet generally, people can say what they want and there is no mechanism (well, no effective mechanism) for making sure they say things that are true, right, or responsible. So why ...
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Time for the weekly mailbag. This week I’m dealing with only one question; I want to give a more elaborate answer than usual since it relates so closely to my forthcoming book Jesus Before the Gospels. Here’s the question:
QUESTION:
Dr. Ehrman, as you mention we tend to remember events that carry a large emotional impact (e.g. 9/11, Kennedy assassination, etc.) but, in turn, we tend to easily forget the more banal and mundane events in life (e.g. what we ate for ...
Continue Reading →Time for my weekly mailbag. Before dealing with two rather more direct questions that have come to me – one about eyewitness testimony and the other about whether I hope to get on Fresh Air and Colbert with the new book – I thought I would include an item that did not come to me from the blog, but on my Facebook page. It’s a brief exchange I had with some anonymous figure. I seem to have a lot of ...
Continue Reading →Steven pointed out to me that the first part of the Q&A also got obliterated and sent into the stratosphere during our recent technological nightmare. So I need to re-post it. Here it is!
I have received a number of interesting questions about the book, raised by these three segments of Q&A. If you have any you would like me to address on the blog, let me know! Here is the original post:
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As I have already indicated, ...
Continue Reading →Here is the third and last installment of the Q&A that I did with my publisher, HarperOne, about my new book Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Early Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior. (The final sentence of the final answer is, I think, the longest I’ve written in my life!!)
I’m getting excited about the book and its release on March 1. If you have any questions you would like to ask me about the book ...
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