Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 159

Live Lectures This Sunday, March 28! Teachings of Paul That Are Widely Unknown.

This Sunday, March 28, 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 [...]

More on Marcion’s Theology

Yesterday I mentioned Marcion as one of the prime early Christian thinkers who argued that Jesus was so much divine he was not at all human.  I have decided that I need to provide more background to make sense of the particular way he appears to have come to that conclusion, by discussing in a [...]

Lost Christian Writings I’d Love to Get My Hands On!

I thought it might be fun to intersperse some posts from years ago to break up here and there the thread on the Trinity, for those who have, well, lots of other interests too!  So here's a good option. I did a short thread before the vast majority of you were on the blog (and [...]

A Phantom Jesus: The Teachings of the Second-Century Marcion

In the past couple of posts I have talked about early Christian “docetists,” those who were so convinced that Jesus was completely God that they denied he was a “flesh-and-blood” human being.  In the early Christian centuries, no one advanced that view more than the “arch-heretic” Marcion.   Marcion had a huge following.  In some [...]

The Value of Amulets for Reconstructing the New Testament Text: Guest Post by Brice Jones

Now here is a topic I bet you've never heard of before.  The value of what?  Amulets?  For what?  Really? Yup, really.  Sometimes the most interesting issues are ones you haven't heard of before.  And hey, now you'll be able to talk about it. This is a guest post from Brice Jones, a textual specialist on [...]

Announcing the Ehrman Blog Newsletter – Please Check Your Email!

Today, I'm excited to announce the launch of the Ehrman Blog Newsletter - and want to be sure that you're getting it! The first email went out on Saturday, so if you didn't receive it, please read the following: What is the Ehrman Blog Newsletter? A regular, new email I'll be sending - at least [...]

Two Live Lectures, Sunday March 21: The Death of Jesus and the Life of Paul.

This Sunday, March 21, 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 [...]

Christ as Non-Human (but fully God) in the Early Second Century

On this slow path we are taking to see where the doctrine of the Trinity came from (it may seem slow, but of course a full analysis would take volumes!) I have been trying to show how different understandings of Christ emerged in early Christianity – starting from the original belief of his disciples in [...]

Was Christ So Divine That He Was Not Human? The “Antichrists” of 1 John

Just as there were “adoptionist” Christians in the second century, who maintained that Christ was not really a divine being, but a human being who had been “adopted” to be divine by God (so: not pre-existent; not born of a virgin; not “equal” with God; etc.), so too, on the other end of the spectrum, [...]

How to Make Sense of (or at least Peace with) What’s Strange in the Bible: Guest Post by Kristin Swenson

Three weeks ago we had a guest post by Kristin Swenson about her new book A Most Peculiar Book: The Inherent Strangeness of the Bible.  Here's the link if you haven't read it yet:  https://ehrmanblog.org/an-intriguing-...  Her post raised a lot of interest, and so now we are fortunate to have her back for a second, [...]