Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 149

How I Take Notes When Doing Research for a Book

  A couple of weeks ago when I first talking about my work on the next book dealing with Revelation, I was asked how I actually go about doing the research -- in particular, how I take notes on what I read.  It's a big deal for any author: how does one keep track of [...]

Apocalypse (the genre) and Apocalypticism (the worldview)

I have started to give some background on the book of Revelation, to help set the stage for my new understanding of it as it has developed over the past year.  Much of what I think now is what I've thought for 45 years.  But the deeper I've dug, the more I've seen and the [...]

The Book of Revelation and the END. Starting at the Beginning.

The Book of Revelation!  I am ready now to start a new thread on my thoughts on the book, as I get serious about writing about it for a general audience.  I mentioned a couple of weeks ago (see blog for June 20) that I had changed my mind rather radically about what my book [...]

Memories of Bruce Metzger: When I First Realized I Couldn’t Write

In my last post I started to resume my recollections of my mentor, the great textual scholar Bruce Metzger.   In this post I recall when he first showed me I was a lousy writer. In graduate school different professors have different approaches to evaluating and grading term papers. Some professors are completely anal about it [...]

My Mentor Bruce Metzger

Many years ago on the blog I was asked about my relationship with my mentor Bruce Metzger, an internationally famous scholar of the New Testament who is generally acknowledged as the greatest expert on biblical manuscripts in America, ever.  He was also a devout Christian, an ordained Presbyterian minister.  I, obviously, am not.  (Though I [...]

Was Jesus Like One of the Pagan Fertility Gods?

Lots of people (esp. on the Internet!) say that the stories of Jesus' death and resurrection were modeled on widespread beliefs in the pagan world of "fertility" gods, whose life-cycle dictates the fertility of the earth.  They are born (spring); they become productive as the earth becomes fertile (summer); they become ripe for harvest (autumn); [...]

Blog Dinner in London?

If you're a blog member and are either in or able to get to London just now:  are you interested in getting together for a blog dinner?  If we can get 3-4 (or more!) people together, I'd be happy to do it. It would need to be one of the evenings of Sunday July 11 [...]

Other Gods Who Died and Rose from the Dead?

Here I continue with the Q&A I had years ago with evangelical New Testament scholar Ben Witherington, focused on my book Did Jesus Exist.   I think I can say with relative confidence that this is the ONE book of mine that evangelicals on the whole were (mainly) pleased with.  A nice change!  And why do they [...]

Some Intriguing Questions about Jesus’ Predictions and Mental Health

I've gotten a lot of terrific questions over the years on the blog, and looking through old posts, I came upon this one dealing with two of them, both on Jesus and his immediate followers.  I thought they were worth addressing again. Both of these, as it turns out, deal with issues related to psychology [...]

An Unusual Interview with an Ex-Muslim, Informed, Atheist

Now *this* isn't the kind of interview I get asked to do every day!  Hanny Seylim is a former Muslim who split his time growing up between Egypt and Ireland (a parent from each) and now lives in Melbourne.  For his podcast, Critical Faculty, he interviews all sorts of critical thinkers in numerous different fields [...]