Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 119

Controversial Me….

I am having a ten-week long celebration of our ten-year anniversary, from this past April 18, by reposting all the previous April 18 posts, one a week.  Many of them I'd forgotten about.  This one is about how weird it is to me that people think I'm controversial....  (As usual, I'm a bit tetchy about [...]

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Did Paul Write “Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians”?

Here's an important question I received recently from a blog member: Someone told me that “I should never listen to you” because you say Paul did not write six letters of the New Testament, even though the letters start with the claim he did:  "Paul, an Apostle of Christ to the Church at ….."  This [...]

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An Even More Unusual Story of What Happens to the Rich…

In my last post I began to discuss Jesus’ parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus from Luke 16) and I mentioned there is a very similar tale in ancient Egyptian lore, about a man named Setne and his adult son Si-Osire. In the story the two of them are looking out the window of [...]

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Lazarus and the Rich Man: What To Do with Wealth

I’ve been thinking a good bit about the problem of wealth in the teachings of Jesus.  Among the passages that are obviously relevant is the famous parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man.  I talked about the story in my book Heaven and Hell (Simon and Schuster, 2020).  The following is a revised version of [...]

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Free Webinar on June 12! Did Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John Actually Write Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?

Interested in a free lecture on who wrote the Gospels? As you may know, I’ve started doing some online courses on the Bible (and related topics) as part of my new venture, the Bart Ehrman Professional Services (= BEPS).  This venture is not connected with the blog, but I do like to announce what is [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]