Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 113

If Jesus’ Death Was Not an Atonement: Why Did He Die??

I have been dealing with the question of Jesus’ death in the Gospel of Luke and have been arguing that Luke does not appear to have understood Jesus’ death to be an atonement for sins.   He has eliminated the several indications from his source, the Gospel of Mark, that Jesus’ death was an atonement, and [...]

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Does Luke Get Rid of the Atonement?

In my previous post I tried to argue that the longer version of the account of Jesus’ Last Supper in Luke could have been created by a scribe who wanted to make the passage sound more like what is familiar from Matthew, Mark, and John, and to stress the point made in those other accounts [...]

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How Do You Decide What an Author Actually Wrote? The Last Supper

In my previous post I started to discuss a textual variant that I covered in my book The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, a very important variant for understanding Luke’s account of Jesus’ last days, for grasping Luke’s view of the importance of Jesus’ death, and for seeing how scribes occasionally modified their texts for theological reasons. [...]

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What Did Jesus Say at the Last Supper?

Here is a seemingly simple but inordinately complicated question I received from a read on the blog:   QUESTION: Although the gospel of Luke doesn’t have an atonement message, what are your thoughts about Acts 20:28: “Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, [...]

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Which James in Galatians? Platinum Guest Post by Gregory Hartzler-Miller

I'm pleased to publish this guest post by Platinum member Gregory Hartzler-Miller. It is dealing with a tricky issue with broad implications. Is there more than one James active in the early Jerusalem church? Which one is Paul concerned about? Check it out and see! ***************************** Which Mary? Which James? 8 theses for distinguishing two [...]

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What’s the Point? Hey, *IS* There a Point? The Book of Ecclesiastes

In my previous post I began talking about the distinctive views of the book of Ecclesiastes, one of the real gems of the Hebrew Bible, a book that refuses to accept easy answers or blithe truisms about life, but faces reality head on.   No matter what we do or how we try to explain it [...]

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Digging Deep into Afterlife Journeys

I don't recall *ever* having a podcast interview in which I was asked to go down seriously into the weeds of my scholarship as found in one of my scholarly books.  But that happened in this interview, done on June 14, for the Christian Humanist Podcast.  It's a serious podcast, where the perspective is Christian [...]

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Blog Dinner. London. Tuesday, July 12. Interested?

We had to cancel the last proposed London blog dinner because of the rail strike, but now I'd like to make a second go of it, if anyone's interested.   Possibly a pint in advance.  Are you in the vicinity?  Interested?    If we can get 3-4 (and no more than 7) people together, I'd be [...]

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A Skeptical View of Life … From the Bible!

To celebrate the tenth-year anniversary of the blog on this past April 18, I've been posting all the previous April 18 posts.  This one is from 2020; in it I discuss one of my favorite books of the Bible, Ecclesiastes.  The post was originally part of a series of posts on "Wisdom Literature" in the [...]

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Yeah, Those Are Contradictions. My Response to Firth.

Matthew Firth came up with interesting responses to my examples of contradictions in the Gospels (in the previous post); here now I try to show how his explanations simply don't work. ****************************** Thanks, Matt, for your thoughtful comments on the four contradictions I discussed in my opening post.  I agree – this form of debate [...]

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