Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 177

The Original Blog Post!! Misquoting Misquoting Jesus!

As you can see, we have now launched our new version of the blog, very new and much improved.  I’ve decided to start our new life together by returning to the beginning.  Over the next week I will  be posting five of my favorite posts from years past, one from each of the first five years of the blog.

Here is the very first post I made.  Looking back, to me it looks a bit, well, feisty.  I was a bit more cantankerous and, uh, defensive in those days.  Nonetheless, I agree with just about everyth...

Who Would Die for a Lie?

OK, here’s another weird blog coincidence that happened 94 seconds ago.  A few days ago I posted on the issue of why someone would invent a story of women finding the empty tomb (since women were “seen as unreliable”: if you invented a story, wouldn’t it be *men* who found it?).  I got a lot of responses, including several that more or less openly mocked me for thinking the disciples made up the story of the resurrection.  The typical line I got was something like “Yeah, right Ehrman: all those ...

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...