Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 174

What Happens When Your Beliefs Contradict What You Have To Teach? Readers’ Mailbag

I’ve received an intriguing question about professors of religious studies and the relationship between what we teach and personal religious beliefs.

 

QUESTION:

Dr. Ehrman, do your colleagues who have strong religious beliefs sometimes get conflicted when teaching some aspects of early Christianity?

 

RESPONSE:

Now that’s a very interesting question, and to unpack it, and give a response, I need to provide a bit of background of what (I assume) lies behind it.  I’ll start with my personal situa...

A Major Blog Announcement!!

I am exceedingly happy to make a major blog announcement.  Very soon – probably next week – we will be launching the new blog site.  It will be vastly improved, with all the best features of what we have now but with a new look, higher quality, and more member options.  If you like it the way it is, very little will change except the appearance of the blog.  If you want more, you’re in luck.

My assistant Steven Ray has designed and constructed the new site to replace the one that he originally b...

John, the Bedbugs, and Miracles that Convert

This week in my graduate seminar we discussed the Apocryphal Acts of John, one of the five surviving (lengthy) accounts of an apostle engaged in missionary activities after the resurrection of Jesus.  These accounts are highly legendary, with almost no historical information in them, but they are fantastic books – entertaining early Christian fiction, even though, probably, the people who read them assumed they were descriptions of what really happened.

The five surviving accounts are the Acts o...

Who Would *Invent* the Idea that Women (?!) Discovered Jesus’ Empty Tomb?

 

Back to Christian apologists for a minute (from my post a few days ago).  One common argument that the resurrection stories must be historical is that no one would invent the idea that the first witnesses to the resurrection were women; therefore the tomb really was empty (i.e. since no one would have made up the story that way).  I get asked about that probably once every four or five months.  I dealt with it on the blog — in fact exactly eight years ago.  Here is the question I was asked abo...

A Celebratory Moment for the Blog

I love serendipity, but I have to admit, this one strikes me as very weird.

As some of you know, today is my 65th birthday.  It’s an oddly important one for me.  When I was a young teenager, for some reason (that now I have trouble understanding), I had the notion that anyone who could make it to 65 had done pretty well for him/herself and that it was a reasonable time to pass off this mortal coil (not that I had read Hamlet yet).  At least it would mean not dying  young.  So I thought that it w...

Hard Evidence that the Book of Acts was Written by an Eyewitness?

Here is an interesting question I received about a Christian apologist’s argument that the book of Acts must be written by an eyewitness, a view that I think is completely wrong.  It’s one of those arguments that has no bearing on anything when you actually think about it, but until someone points out the flaw, it’s hard to see it — or I assume so since so many people get taken in by this sort of thing.

It comes in a book called I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, a title which, I have t...

Why Believe in God?

This post will not be about the history and/or literature of earliest Christianity per se, but on a more explicitly religious issue.  In fact, the religious issue.

Let me preface it by stating two rather obvious things about myself, specifically what I am not.  At least the first is obvious to me, and the second is, I’m sure, obvious to everyone who will be reading this.

The first is, I am not a missionary for my particular religious views.  I have no particular difficulty with people who *do* w...

The Roman Standards Worship Jesus? From the Gospel of Nicodemus

Yesterday I said a few things about the Gospel of Nicodemus; here is the opening section of it.  As you’ll see the author does his best to convince his readers that this is an authentic account (even though it was written over three centuries after Nicodemus would have been dead).  And then comes one of its intriguing passages: despite everyone’s best efforts, the Roman standards (bearing the emblem of the emperor himself – thought, of course, to be a god) bow down to Jesus during his trial.   T...

A Gospel of Nicodemus?

This week in my graduate seminar we discussed one of my favorite-of-all-time-non-canonical Gospels, the Gospel of Nicodemus.  I am devoting an entire chapter to one of its episodes in the book I’m working on now (on “otherworldly journeys” in early Christianity), which describes Jesus’ “descent into Hades” between his death and resurrection, the most famous “Harrowing of Hell” narrative in the early Christian tradition (Jesus descends in order to save people who had died before his crucifixion)....

Another Important Evangelical Charity: Guest Post by Robin Jones

Most of you will remember a couple of months ago I asked my old friend Robin Jones, from my conservative evangelical days (classmate at Moody Bible Institute!), to write some guest posts for the blog.  Robin is active in and knowledgeable about the kinds of social work some evangelical organizations and the evangelical Christians connected with them engage in.  Most of us are blithely ignorant of such things, knowing evangelicals only by reputation and bad press (understandably).  But in fact so...