Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 127

The Messages of Jesus and Paul: Basically the Same or Fundamentally Different?

I have been talking about the relationship of Jesus’ proclamation of the coming Kingdom of God to Paul’s preaching about the importance of the death and resurrection of Jesus. In the previous post I argued that the fundamental concerns, interests, perspectives, and theologies of these two were different. In this post I’d like to give, [...]

Jesus and Paul: Are They on the Same Page?

I spent several posts explicating Paul’s understanding of his gospel, that by Christ’s death and resurrection a person is put into a restored relationship with God. He had several ways of explaining how it worked (the “judicial” model; the “participationist” model; and the other models I described). But in all of these ways, it was [...]

Would Anyone *Invent* the Story of the Women at the Tomb?

I received a question in the comments recently that I've gotten a lot before.  Wouldn't the Gospel story about women being the first to realize Jesus had been raised be contrary to what Christians would have *wanted* to say, possibly even embarrassing?  If so, isn't it likely that no one made it up but that [...]

(Re)Thinking Everything. Guest Post by Glenn Siepert

As you probably know,  a number of volunteers work for the blog, graciously giving their time and talents to promote the work we're doing.  As one of the perks, volunteers who have published a book of relevance to what we do here on the blog can write a post on it for us.  I did [...]

My Response to A Book That Responded To My Book: How Jesus Became God

I was browsing through some blog posts from many years ago and came upon this one, which I had completely forgotten about.   It gets a bit feisty at the end,  and that's because it was written back when I was ... feistier.   Even so, it makes an overarching point I still agree with.  It's  about  [...]

The Heart of Jesus’ Message

To this point in the thread I have been talking about Paul’s “religion” – specifically, what he thought was important in a person’s relationship with God. He expressed his views in a variety of ways – I have talked about his judicial and his participationist understandings of salvation, and have made brief comments on yet [...]

Preface to My Book on Revelation: Expecting Armageddon

I have sent my book manuscript off to my editor.  She will work it over, ask for edits, and we'll go from there.  The preface to the book, as it now stands, explains what the book is about and what I try to argue for in it.  I thought I'd pass it by you to [...]

Still Other Models of Salvation in Paul

I have been discussing various ways that Paul understands the importance of the death and resurrection of Jesus for salvation, and have focused on the judicial and participationist models – mainly because these are the two that Paul most frequently appeals to (without calling them the judicial and participationist models!).   I need to clarify a [...]

Paul’s Models of Salvation: Contradictory or Complementary?

I’ve been discussing how Paul understands the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection for salvation, and have done so by laying out as concisely as I could his two principal “models” of how salvation worked, the judicial and the participationist model. In this post I’ll make some brief concluding comments about the two models, in [...]

The “Common Era”: Invented to Stop Speculations About the End of the World. Platinum Guest Post by Daniel Kohanski

I'm pleased to publish this Platinum guest post by Dan Kohanski.  I think I can *guarantee* that most of you will not have heard this information before!  And it's really interesting, the kind of thing you might wonder about but not know who to ask. Dan will be happy to respond to your comments and [...]