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Loading...So, as I was saying in the previous post, I love teaching undergraduate students at Carolina. My “bread-and-butter” course is an Introduction to the New Testament. I teach it every spring semester. Usually the enrollment is around 300; I’ve had it as large as 420, and as small as 180. As I indicated yesterday, the size depends on the number of graduate student teaching assistants available to co-teach it with me by running the weekly recitations sections.
One reason I like teaching such large classes is simply that I enjoy being in front of a large crowd of people talking about important things. Another reason is related – with a big class it is possible to reach more people – and what can be more important for people in our culture than understanding the roots of our civilization and the history and literature lying behind the most important book in the Western world? (OK, there are probably things more important: but this is pretty important).
If I had classes of, say, 25 students, then over ten years I would reach 250 students with this crucial kind of information. If I have classes of 300, then I reach 3000. It’s a pretty significant difference.
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I interact with a lot of Christians who take their belief in the Bible seriously, for me I’m more in between. I admit I find it quite dumbfounding that so many people do not find the formation and history of their own belief system fascinating! I see a lot of politics and such in the formation of orthodoxy and find Christology very fun. (I am a history major after all) However often when discussing these things, other people often go to the “divinely inspired” rhetoric. Do your students often fall back on divine inspiration at first?
I have to admit I find it a little ironic given that many of my protestant friends have an attitude that the catholic church is not really Christian, yet are dismissive of the earlier heterodox groups.
I meant, I am a little skeptical of the Book. (when I wrote “in between”, that’s what I meant. ) That said, I am not a postmodernists!
O yes, my students are from the South! Many of them very much hold to a view of inspiration.
So how does that view jive with the revelation of apocrypha and heterodox groups? the councils decided because they were divinely inspired, no politics involved ?
Sorry — I’m not sure what the context of your question is, so I’m not sure what you’re asking.
Do some students have difficulty maintaining the stance of divine inspiration when learning of the various heterodox views of Christology in antiquity?
I mean do many seem to believe that the dominant groups won out because they were right (or divinely inspired) compared to say Arian if using Nicea as an example?
And if so do they recognize the irony of being protestant which dismisses the orthodoxy of the Catholic Church ?
Yes many do think that it was all guided by God. I know scholars who think that too! And they’re not at all phased by the dominance of a religious tradition for most of history that fundamentally disagrees with their own views. But maybe they should be. 🙂
A few days ago, here in my city of Albany, NY, a high school teacher went what I think everyone would agree was too far in pressing students to see that there are “defensible other sides to virtually all questions.” He or she (the teacher hasn’t been identified) demanded tenth-grade students write essays from the point of view of Nazis in Hitler’s Germany, arguing that Jews are evil! Basing their claims on the content of the regime’s propaganda.
Some students refused to do it. And when the incident was publicized, there was seemingly universal condemnation of a teacher’s ordering such a thing. The head of the school apologized for it; the last I heard, they hadn’t decided whether the teacher would be fired, or escape with a lesser penalty. I think that if he or she had any guts, he/she would have come forward, and at least tried to offer a defense! But I don’t think anyone could convince me that it was an appropriate class assignment.
Maybe for older students? College level? I still can’t see it as a mandatory assignment.
Hey Bart,
In the process of teaching students how to think critically…do they sometimes change their viewpoint?
Do some who have only embraced the theological view they’ve been taught at home or in church indeed start out feeling threatened…and then, by the end of the semester, tell you that the historical perspective you presented change their opinions/beliefs?
And if so, how often does this happen?
Yes, it definitely happens! Most students don’t radically change their views, but some do. More often they either put up barriers to learning or become more thoughtful about it all (the last being what I’m looking for). My sense is that a course like this has the greatest impact some years *after* the student has left college and experienced more of the world, and then looks back on it….
Almost 50 years ago , I attended Loyola University in Chicago for a year , later obtaining my degree from a large state university . Purely to fulfill a credit requirement I took an Intro To The Old Testament course fully expecting a review of Heroes Of The Old Testament . What I got instead was the Documentary Hypothesis and a first rate analysis of the literary forms of that incredibly mixed bag taught by a Catholic priest who was a rigorous Old Testament scholar . I will readily admit that I would be hard pressed to recall the content of any of the other courses taken that year , but that Intro course has stayed with me and ” ripened ” over half a century . Simplistic childhood ” faith ” is often too brittle to withstand the inevitable buffeting of the adult years . Clinging to litteralistic reading of Scripture can result in the baby being thrown out with the bath water later on . In the end the truth has to be good enough ; its all we have . Have former students ever made similar remarks to you years later ?
Yes indeed!
Given the numerous sides to approaches and interpretations of the Bible, do you try to present positions with the widest endorsement in the scholarship, and those most discussed by scholars in the past few decades?
Yes, I normally present only views that are widely held by scholars — even though they are views that students have never heard before!
With classes that large I would imagine you don’t get a chance to really get to know your students or engage them in discussions. Do any of your students challenge you during your lectures when you step on their sacred beliefs? How do handle this?
No, they are always extremely well behaved!
Have you experienced numbers of students dropping the intro class in the first few weeks after finding out what it really is ? I would think that for someone whose worldview had been carefully sheltered from critical analysis to have it popped on them their first time away from home might seem very threatening .
No, as it turns out, most students know what to expect from the class before they take it. Word is out!
Okay, well I can see why you do not post after writing a chapter. I was working on a paper at the time I posted that earlier comment, and it shows. I’m going to post an edited version of that comment.
Bart, when teaching from a historical perpective, do you find that the opinion of the authors of the NT being divinely inspired is used often by more religious students?
Absolutely!
Dr. Ehrman: Just wondering when your latest lectures by The Teaching Company will be available. I have all your Teaching Company lectures and want to add your latest to my collection.
In the Summer I think!
it annoys me greatly that students have to go to uni just to learn repetitively standard info about the bible (the gospels names dont represent there authors, the bible hasn’t been copied 100% accurately, some of Pauls letters were forged ect). this stuff should really be coming from their pastors. it just makes it worse when the truth does come out.
Yup, that’s more ore less my point in Jesus Interrupted.
On what do you determine your student’s grades? If the goal is to get students to think critically, how do you gage this?
Mainly on the basis of their essay exams.