Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 116

How Do You Get a Book Published??

I am celebrating the tenth year anniversary of the blog, this past April 18, with previous year's April 18 blog posts.  Here's the one from 2016 -- highly relevant to prospective authors.  How can you publish a book you've written? ****************************** I regularly get emails from people who want to break into publishing for the [...]

The post How Do You Get a Book Published?? appeared first on The Bart Ehrman Blog.

You Mean Everyone (Except the Truly Destitute) Needs to Give? But How Much?

The Christians who began to say that (unlike in the Roman world) the rich ought to give to the poor did not come up with the idea themselves.  As we have seen, they were replicating (in a new form) what was found in the Hebrew Bible as taken up, as one would expect, by the [...]

The post You Mean Everyone (Except the Truly Destitute) Needs to Give? But How Much? appeared first on The Bart Ehrman Blog.

A Christian NDE and the Problem with Being Filthy Rich

I have begun to describe the Acts of Thomas, the account of the apostle Thomas’s missionary journey to take Christianity to India.  After the author describes the apostle’s adventures en route to his destination, he gets to the heart of his story – which involves, among other things, an emphasis about what rich folk are [...]

Who Buried Moses? Platinum Guest Post by Lou Suarez

Now *this* is a topic you probably haven't thought much about -- but it's really interesting.  And puzzling!  Platinum member Lou Suarez has written an intriguing assessment of a real conundrum in the Hebrew Bible that, as it turns out, proved signficiant in the Jewish tradition.  It has to do with the death and burial [...]

Thomas’s Trip to India and the Problem of Wealth

Some Christian writers thought having lots of money was a very serious problem – both because it made rich folk focus on something other than spiritual realities and because it was not just or godly for some people to be loaded when others were starving. And so we have ancient Christian authors urging the wealthy [...]

Apologies to Gold/Platinum Members!

I need to apologize for being late on the Gold Q&A this month.   I"ve been in Italy the past two weeks giving lectures for a tour group; I had hoped to be able to squeeze in a recording of the Q&A while there, but the trip had me running from dawn to dark. I've just [...]

The post Apologies to Gold/Platinum Members! appeared first on The Bart Ehrman Blog.

A Lively Interview on my New Book “Journeys”

I've done a number of interviews over the years for my trade books (for general audiences), but almost NEVER for one of my academic books.  But here is one, on my recent book Journeys to Heaven and Hell: Tours of the Afterlife in the Early Christian Tradition.   The book is geared to academics (as you'd see [...]

The post A Lively Interview on my New Book “Journeys” appeared first on The Bart Ehrman Blog.

Concerns for the Poor in the Jewish Tradition

I have begun to contrast the Christian views of wealth and the need for the rich to help the poor with typical pagan views that placed almost no emphasis on helping those in need.  It is impossible to understand the Christian emphasis on almsgiving without situating it in its originating context – the Jewish tradition, [...]

The post Concerns for the Poor in the Jewish Tradition appeared first on The Bart Ehrman Blog.

What the Earliest *Christians* Thought About Wealth

So far I have been discussing why “wealth” was sometimes seen as a problem by moral philosophers in the Greek and Roman worlds.  People who either have or want to have huge amounts of money are neglecting what they really need for ultimate happiness.  And money can corrupt morals, making one greedy, rapacious, and inclined [...]

The post What the Earliest *Christians* Thought About Wealth appeared first on The Bart Ehrman Blog.

Shouldn’t the Upper Classes Help the … Upper Classes?

In my previous post I talked about the widespread sense in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds that the affluent should give away some of their money.   But to whom/what did they give it and for what reasons? The basic answer involves an entire system of giving that is now widely known as “euergetism.”  The [...]

The post Shouldn’t the Upper Classes Help the … Upper Classes? appeared first on The Bart Ehrman Blog.