Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 157

Two More Live Lectures this Sunday!

This Sunday, April 18, I will be giving TWO live Zoom lectures for anyone who wants to come.  They will be recorded for my undergraduate course on the New Testament and there will be a 30-minute Q & A to follow the second one. There is no charge per se, but I would like to ask [...]

Fifty Ways to Forge a Gospel

      You may already know New Testament scholar and blog member James McGrath.  James is the Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University, with many academic interests similar to mine.  Six years ago we were both at a conference at York University (Toronto) that was dealing with [...]

Was Marcion a Gnostic?

A number of readers have asked the same question based on my posts on Marcion:  Was Marcion a Gnostic?   Here’s one reader’s way of asking it, and my response.   QUESTION: Marcion’s “previously unknown God” of Jesus vs Israel’s creator sounds a bit like some of the gnostic beliefs particularly Jesus coming from the realm [...]

The Earliest Views of the Trinity (Long after the New Testament)

In the previous post we saw how two important church fathers attacked the “modalist” view of the relationship between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit, which claimed they were *one* person who relates to creation and humans in three different ways, with three modes of existence.  God is both the Father [...]

How Can the Father and the Son Be the SAME? Can Your Father Also Be Your Son?

In my previous post I summarized the view that God the Father and God the Son and God the Spirit were actually one and the same – that they were three ways of God relating to the creation and the people who inhabit it – just as I am only one person but am both [...]

Are God and Christ the SAME Person?

In this thread on where the Trinity came from, I have been focusing on early Christology – the understandings of who Christ was.  My reason for that is simple.  The issue of the Trinity arose only because Christians said more than one being was God but that there was only one God.  The “other” being [...]

Two Live Lectures This Sunday, On Hot Topics

This Sunday, April 11, I will be giving TWO live Zoom lectures for anyone who wants to come.  They will be recorded for my undergraduate course on the New Testament and there will be a 30-minute Q & A to follow the second one. There is no charge per se, but I would like to ask [...]

The Importance of What Is Lost: Paul’s Letters

In a previous post I began to answer the question of which lost books of early Christianity I would most like to have discovered, and I started my answer with the earliest writings of which we are familiar, the letters of Paul, most of which (presumably) have been lost.  I would love for us to [...]

What Is “When Belief Dies” (by Sam Devis): Guest Post by … Sam Devis!

My previous post was an interview with Sam Devis for his podcast "When Belief Dies."  Sam is an active volunteer on the blog and has an interesting background.  I thought it would be interesting to have him write up an explanation of why he does this podcast, where it comes from, and how he personally [...]

Did the Disciples See Jesus Raised from the Dead?

On this Easter Sunday I would like to explain what I think led to the belief that Jesus was raised from the dead.  A lot of readers over the years have not liked my answer (readers on wide ends of the spectrum):  I think some (a few) of the disciples had visions of Jesus.  That [...]