Paul Archives - Page 2 of 6 - The Bart Ehrman Blog

Paul and the Historical Jesus

In this thread I have been talking about what I discussed in my thirty-minute presentation at the Mythicist Milwaukee conference, in my debate with Robert Price. After pointing out a couple of problems with typical Mythicist arguments I devoted the bulk of my time to laying out the positive evidence for my view that whatever else you might want to say about him, Jesus of Nazareth certainly existed as a real human being. In my last post I stressed the value of the Gospels, and their written and oral sources of information. There were lots and lots of sources, from the early days of the Christian movement, some of them coming straight out of Aramaic-speaking Palestine. It is almost impossible to explain how you could have so many independent sources saying similar things about the man Jesus unless he really was a historical figure. But there is much more. Next in my talk I moved to the apostle Paul, obviously a key figure in the debate. There are thirteen letters written in Paul’s name in [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T02:56:24-04:00November 1st, 2016|Bart's Debates, Historical Jesus, Mythicism, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Jesus and Paul on Heaven and Hell

A couple of days ago I indicated on the blog that I am thinking about devoting my next book to the “Invention of the Afterlife” – that is, to the question of where the Christian doctrines of heaven and hell came come. I asked for comments (and I still welcome them) from people about what they would be interested in seeing in a book like that. Many, many thanks to everyone who has (so far!) responded to my request! As some of you know, I have already written a *bit* about the topic in an earlier book, Jesus Interrupted. I thought it might be useful to replay what I said there, just to show where my thinking is at this point (I haven’t developed my thoughts significantly from writing that book, published in 2009) (but I expect they will develop in a big way, once I start working more diligently on the question). Here is the first half of what I said there. The second half will come tomorrow. (For those of you who keep [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:02:17-04:00October 9th, 2016|Afterlife, Book Discussions, Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Does James Contradict Paul?

I have a number of questions that I want to address in my Readers’ Mailbag, but one particularly important one requires a rather long response, and so I dedicate this entire week’s mailbag to answering it. Here it is: QUESTION: Bart, what is your view with regard to Paul and James teaching on the doctrine of justification by faith – are they contradictory? RESPONSE: Ah, this is a perennial question among readers of the New Testament. I deal with it at some length in my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, in a chapter called “Does the Tradition Miscarry,” where I talk about whether Paul saw eye to eye with Jesus, with James, and with later traditions about Paul (e.g. in the Acts of Paul and Thecla). My answer about the letter of James may surprise some readers, who would expect me to find it completely at odds with Paul. Here is what I say in the book: ****************************************************** The most famous passage of [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-29T17:09:56-04:00September 4th, 2016|Catholic Epistles, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

How Did Ancient Writers Use Secretaries? A Blast from the Past

Here is the second of a series of three blasts from the past -- from four years ago when I was dealing with how secretaries were and, especially, were not used in the ancient world by authors when producing their work. Did authors (such as John for the book of Revelation, or Peter for either 1 or 2 Peter) use a secretary to write their books for them? To answer the question with something other than common sense (that is, common guessing), we need to know about secretarial practices in antiquity. As it turns out, we do know some things, as I'll explain in this post and the next. This is what I said four years ago now: ****************************** I have received some comments and emails about my claims about Silvanus as a secretary (or rather, NOT as a secretary) for the book of 1 Peter, and realized it would help if I could give some more detail about what we know about secretaries in the ancient world. The following is from an excursus in [...]

BDEhrman2022-12-01T13:22:31-05:00August 5th, 2016|Catholic Epistles, Forgery in Antiquity, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

The Name of Saul/Paul and the Sources of the Pentateuch: Weekly Mailbag June 26, 2016

Why did Saul change his name to Paul? And what were the sources lying being the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible? Good questions! I’ll deal with them here in the Weekly Reader’s Mailbag QUESTION: What is the meaning of “Paul” that Saul of Tarsus was moved to change to that name upon his conversion? RESPONSE: Ah, right – my students ask me this a lot in my New Testament class. When we all grew up in Sunday School we learned that when Saul of Tarsus converted, he changed his name to Paul, so that Saul was his Jewish name and Paul his Christian name. As it turns out, that’s not quite right. Paul himself never gives any indication that he had another name, Saul. But he is called Saul in the book of Acts. Until he converts. After that he is usually called Paul. But not always! See, e.g., Acts 11:30 and 13:2 (there are other instances). There the Christian Paul is called Saul. What gives with that? Did [...]

BDEhrman2017-11-06T21:20:02-05:00June 26th, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Paul and His Letters, Reader’s Questions|

Paul’s Converted Vision of Himself

To make sense of how Paul’s conversion affected his actual life, not just his theology, it is important to recall what I said about how it did affect his theology. I repeat the key paragraph from yesterday’s post before drawing the further even more far-reaching conclusion. To be members of God’s covenantal people, it is not necessary for gentiles to become Jews. They do not need to be circumcised, observe the Sabbath, keep kosher, or any of the rest. They need to believe in the death and resurrection of the messiah Jesus. This was an earth-shattering realization for Paul. Prior to this, the followers of Jesus – the first Christians – were of course Jews who understood that he was the messiah who had died and been raised from the dead. But they knew this as the act of the Jewish God given to the Jewish people. Certainly gentiles could find this salvation as well. But first they had to be Jewish. Not for Paul. Jew or gentile, it didn’t matter. What mattered was faith [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:33:15-04:00June 20th, 2016|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

What Paul’s Conversion Meant

In my previous posts I talked about Paul’s life up to his conversion and the conversion experience itself. Now, for two posts, I want to talk about what the conversion actually *meant* to Paul, particularly in terms of how it affected both his thinking and his life (which, for Paul, were very closely related to one another). His thinking involved his theology and his subsequent life involved missionary work as the newly minted apostle of Jesus with a distinctive message. It is easiest to understand Paul’s subsequent missionary activities and evangelistic message by realizing how an appearance of the living Jesus would force him from “fact” to “implications.” (I’ve discussed some of this on the blog before, but indulge me for a bit: I’m trying to clarify in my own mind exactly how I’m imagining all this…) For him the “fact” was that Jesus was alive again (it was a “fact” for him because he had seen Jesus alive three years after he had died). And from that fact Paul started reasoning backwards. This backward [...]

BDEhrman2017-11-06T21:22:37-05:00June 19th, 2016|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

The Conversion of Paul

My book on the “Triumph of Christianity” will deal with how and why people converted to the Christian faith. (As I think I’ve said, unlike some scholars I have no problem calling the earliest followers of Jesus who came to believe in his resurrection “Christian.”) The best known and most important conversion was Paul. Seeing how/why he converted is a key for understanding his own subsequent mission to convert gentiles to the faith. Here is my current thinking on the issue To start with, it is impossible to know either what led up to Paul’s conversion or what exactly happened at the time. We do have a narrative description in the book of Acts, and it is this description that provides the popular images of Paul seeing a blinding light on the road to Damascus, falling from his horse, and hearing the voice of Jesus asking “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me” (Acts 9:1-19). The account of Acts 9 is retold by Paul in both chapter 22 and chapter 29. The historical problems it [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:33:31-04:00June 16th, 2016|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

How Paul Persecuted the Christians

How Paul persecuted the Christians. I pointed out in the previous post that prior to his conversion Paul was a persecutor of the church, almost certainly because he objected to what their basic and fundamental message was, that Jesus was the messiah (despite the fact – or rather because of the fact – that he had been crucified). But how exactly did Paul engage in his persecution? He himself says that it was violent persecution. What could that mean? We don’t know exactly how he proceeded. Paul never describes his persecuting activities. The book of Acts indicates that he ravaged the gatherings of Christians and dragged people off to prison (8:3). That’s inherently implausible: we don’t know of anything like Jewish prisons and we can assume that Roman authorities were not inclined to provide cell space for Jewish sectarians who happened to be proclaiming a rather strange message. How Paul Persecuted the Christians So what was he doing to Christians during his persecution of them? There is one intriguing and possibly helpful comment that Paul [...]

BDEhrman2022-06-19T20:40:19-04:00June 14th, 2016|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Jesus’ Death and Resurrection for Salvation; Paul’s Collection; and My Sunday Mornings: Readers’ Mailbag June 11, 2016

Did all the early Christian groups agree that Jesus’ death and resurrection brought salvation? Why was Paul gathering money for the Christians in Jerusalem? And, well, what do I myself now do on Sunday mornings since I don’t go to church? This is this Weekly Readers’ Mailbag, with the normal range of unrelated but interesting questions! If you have a question you would like me to address, ask away! QUESTION: To which of the other early variants of Christianity does this creed (1 Cor 15:3-5) apply just as well as to the proto-orthodox? If it applies to most just as well, then Paul could have been the founder of the proto-orthodox variant of Christianity. RESPONSE: Ah, good question! Just to refresh everyone’s memory, this is the passage where Paul indicates that “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures” and that “he was raised from the dead on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.” So the question is: did all early Christians agree that it as the death and [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:36:12-04:00June 11th, 2016|Bart’s Biography, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Paul, Jesus, and the Messiah

My current thread on the blog is less like a thread and more like a tapestry. Ultimately it is all related to the book I’m now working on, The Triumph of Christianity, which is interested in the question of how the Christian movement that started with just a couple of dozen people after Jesus’ death (i.e., those who almost right away, soon thereafter, came to believe he had been raised from the dead) came to be a prominent religion by the early fourth century and the official religion of the Roman state by the end of the fourth century. Good questions! I just hope I can give some good answers! Scholars have long worked on the problem, of course, and there are many parts to the overall picture. Which is why this thread is a tapestry. At present (on the blog) I am wrestling with the importance of the apostle Paul, and am ruminating on his significance for the early Christian movement. And the first thing that I noted about him is that before he [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:36:33-04:00June 7th, 2016|Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Historical Jesus, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Paul’s Own (and Only) Gospel

What does Paul mean in his letter to the Galatians when he says that he did not receive his gospel from humans but direct from God through a revelation of Jesus? Does he mean that he was the one (through direct divine inspiration) who came up with the idea that it was the death and resurrection of Jesus, rather than, say, Jesus’ life and teachings, that brings salvation? And if so, doesn’t that mean that Paul himself would be the founder and creator of Christianity, since Christianity is not the religion of Jesus himself, but the religion about Jesus, rooted in faith in his death and resurrection? It may seem like that’s the case, but it’s not. Not at all. In my previous post, I showed that the belief in Jesus’ death and resurrection were around before Paul and that Paul inherited this belief from Christians who were before him. But then what would Paul mean when he explicitly says in Galatians 1:11-12 “For I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel that was [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:36:41-04:00June 5th, 2016|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

The Core of Paul’s Gospel

A lot of people (at least in my experience) think that Paul is the one who should be considered the “founder” of Christianity – that he is the one who took Jesus’ simple preaching about the coming kingdom of God and altered and expanded it into a complicated doctrine of sin and redemption, being the first of Jesus’ followers to maintain that it was the death and resurrection of Jesus that brought about salvation. In my previous post I tried to show that this can’t be the case, because Paul was persecuting Christians already before he had converted, and these were certainly people who believed in Jesus’ death and resurrection. There is a second reason for thinking that Paul is not the one who invented the idea that Jesus’ death was some kind of atoning sacrifice for sins. That’s because Paul explicitly tells us that he learned it from others. Those of you who are Bible Quiz Whizzes may be thinking about a passage in Galatians where Paul seems to say the opposite, that he [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:36:50-04:00June 2nd, 2016|Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Paul as a Persecutor of the Church

The questions of what early Christianity originally *was* and of how it got *started* are closely related to one another. Both questions are also closely tied to the life, beliefs, and writings of Paul, for one very good reason: Paul is the first Christian author whose writings survive. Any discussion of Christianity before his time needs to consider at some length what he has to say. I should point out as well that a lot of modern people (including some scholars) claim that it was Paul himself who started Christianity. I think that is going too far, in fact maybe way too far, for reasons that will become apparent in this post and the next. Occasionally Paul will give us some clues about pre-Pauline Christianity. One of the most important passages is in Galatians 1, where he discusses his own “about face,” when he turned from being a persecutor of the faith to being its great apostle. In Gal. 1:13 Paul reminds his readers that they know what he was like before he had come [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:37:09-04:00May 30th, 2016|History of Christianity (100-300CE), Paul and His Letters, Public Forum|

Paul in a Nutshell and NT Views of Crucifixion: Readers Mailbag May 13, 2016

In this week’s Readers Mailbag I will deal with two rather massively significant questions, one on the life and message of Paul and the other on the different understandings of Jesus crucifixion in the New Testament. If you have any question(s) you would like me to address in the future, let me know! ******************************************************************* QUESTION: I am wondering what you would consider the most important things to know about the Apostle Paul. Sometimes when I am forced to give a succinct answer to a question, it can have a lot of value. So while I will be going into some depth in the Sunday School class, including referencing some of your work, I would love to hear your expertise on Paul distilled into a brief summary (if at all possible). RESPONSE: Right! Obviously some scholars have written very long books on Paul’s life, message, and mission. So, let me give here the very basic essentials, as I see them, in bullet point form. Paul started life as a highly religious Jew, zealous to [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-03T03:39:20-04:00May 13th, 2016|Canonical Gospels, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

The Death of Paul in Acts and Unrelated Topics: Readers’ Mailbag April 29, 2016

I will be dealing with three very different questions this week in my Weekly Readers’ Mailbag: why does the book of Acts not narrate the deaths of Peter and Paul; what is the difference between the Day of Atonement and the Passover; and how I dealt with discrepancies and contradictions when I was an evangelical Christian in college. If you have any questions for me to address, pass them along! QUESTION: If Acts was written after 75 CE why do you think Acts doesn’t contain details of Paul’s and Peter’s deaths? RESPONSE: I get asked this question a lot – maybe five times this month! I’m not sure why. But it’s something people seem to be interested in, and in part that’s because some conservative evangelical scholars want to claim that Acts was written before Paul’s death in around 64 CE (since otherwise the author would “surely” have narrated his death), and that therefore Luke’s Gospel (written by the same author) was written before then, so that both Luke and Acts are nearer [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:45:35-04:00April 29th, 2016|Acts of the Apostles, Early Judaism, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Evaluating My Debate on the Book of Acts

I have now completed my posts on the debate I had with myself in front of my New Testament class on the question of whether the New Testament book of Acts is historically reliable. If you want to see the whole debate, just read the posts in sequence: the affirmative speech arguing Acts is indeed reliable; the negative speech arguing that it is not; the negative rebuttal of what the affirmative side said; and finally the affirmative rebuttal of what the negative side said. In class I delivered the speeches one after the other. When “affirmative” I was wearing a sport coat, but no cap; when “negative” I was wearing a baseball cap but no sport coat – just so students would realize that it was a “different” speaker speaking. I have pointed out on the blog before that even though I do a lot of public debates, I often find them more than a little frustrating and frequently (in fact, almost always) ask myself, in the course of the debate, why I’m doing this [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:20:46-04:00April 6th, 2016|Acts of the Apostles, Bart's Debates, Public Forum|

Is Acts Historically Reliable? The Affirmative Rebuttal

I have been (intermittently) discussing the debate that I had with myself in front of my New Testament class on the resolution, Resolved: The Book of Acts is Historically Reliable. So far I have indicated what the Affirmative side argued in favor of the resolution; what the Negative side argued against the resolution; and what the Negative side said in its rebuttal to the first Affirmative speech. NOW, at last, I can indicate what the Affirmative side said in its rebuttal to the two Negative speeches. Recall: in this post I’m not indicating what I really thing; I’m indicating what I would argue if this were the side I was required to argue (and what I did argue in class that day). Here it is: ******************************************************** Despite what the negative side has maintained, we remain convinced that the New Testament book of Acts is historically reliable. The first point to stress is that it is of utmost importance that we not impose modern standards of historical accuracy on an ancient text. Of course the author [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:19:26-04:00April 5th, 2016|Acts of the Apostles, Bart's Debates, Paul and His Letters|

The Letters of Paul: Mailbag April 1, 2016

In today’s Readers’ Mailbag, I will be answering questions connected with the writings of Paul: what is the earliest manuscript of his letters; did the author of Acts know Paul’s letters; and is Paul described as a heretic in the Dead Sea Scrolls. ******************************************************************************************* QUESTION Bart, early in your book Misquoting Jesus (p. 4) you wrote a sudden, shocking surprise (to many born-again Christians) when you said “As we learned at Moody in one of the first courses in the curriculum, we don’t actually have the original writings of the New Testament.” I’ve witnessed my own neighbor’s disbelief and visible anger when I pointed this out to him. … My interest is your response to my question “How old are the earliest copies we have of Paul’s letters 1 Corinthians and 1 Thessalonians.” … As you know, these books describe, in part, the resurrection of Jesus. RESPONSE It is a little difficult for me to know the question behind this question, so first let me answer the direct question and then to respond to [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:45:02-04:00April 1st, 2016|Acts of the Apostles, Early Judaism, Paul and His Letters, Public Forum, Reader’s Questions|

Is Acts Reliable? The Negative Rebuttal

What follows is the “negative rebuttal” of the speech given by the “first affirmative” in its support of the resolution, “Resolved: The Book of Acts is Historically Reliable.” If you need to refresh yourself on what the affirmative team argued, you can find it on the March 24 post, here: https://ehrmanblog.org/is-acts-historically-reliable-affirmative-argument/ In the first negative speech (yesterday’s post) the negative team argued its case, without direct reference to the affirmative side. This, now, is the negative response to what the affirmative said (the next post in the thread will be the affirmative rebuttal to the negative side) (recall: this was a debate I staged with myself in front of my New Testament class earlier this semester. I didn't read this speech: I winged it. But this is the essence of what I argued, on the negative side against the affirmative) *************************************************************** If you choose to go point by point through the affirmative team’s case that the book of Acts is historically reliable, you will find that they have advanced their views on very thin grounds. [...]

BDEhrman2020-04-17T13:19:01-04:00March 31st, 2016|Acts of the Apostles, Bart's Debates, Public Forum|

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