Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 178

Jesus in Scholarship and Film

University classes started this past week, and as so many have said, this will be a school year like no other.  I will be teaching both of my classes remotely, a PhD seminar on Early Christian Apocrypha, which I will be discussing in a later post, and my undergraduate course, Jesus in Scholarship and Film.  I’ve taught this latter course on and off for years now, and it is absolutely one of my favorites. The basic idea behind it is to see how Jesus is portrayed in different ways in different ven...

A Podcast of Interest to You! Guest post by Ian Mills and Laura Robinson

If you are interested in learning more about scholarship on the New Testament, but at a lay person’s level, this is the post for you!  It is about a podcast that might be (probably is) right up your alley, set up and run by two graduate students from Duke University who have worked with me over the past few years.

One of the real pleasures of teaching graduate students in New Testament/early Christianity at UNC is that Duke is just ten miles away, with its own graduate program.  The New Testamen...

Did Jesus Think He Would Be the Judge of the Earth?

In order to answer a very specific question about how Matthew uses the phrase “son of man” for Jesus, I have had to discuss what the phrase generally means in the Gospel and whether it is a phrase that Jesus actually used.  I am arguing that he did use it. That one of the ways he used it was to refer to the judge of the earth who was coming from heaven to destroy God’s enemies and set up a kingdom here (down here, on earth).  And here is the big surprise.  My argument is that when he talked abou...

How Do You Know If Jesus Said That?

In this thread I’m discussing whether Jesus ever used the term “Son of Man”‘ and if so, if he used it to refer to a future cosmic judge of the earth; and if so, whether he talked about *himself* as that one.  My answers are  yes, yes, and no.  I answered the first two questions in previous posts.  I will now begin to answer the third, i.e., to show why I don’t think Jesus called or thought of himself as the coming Son of Man who was to arrive from heaven on the day of judgment

To do this I need ...

A Bit of a Shocker: Jesus and the Son of Man

In my previous post I began to talk about the phrase “the Son of Man” in the New Testament, in response to a question about Matthew 16:13-16. (See that post!)  I will get around to answering the question itself eventually, but for now I’m discussing the use of the phrase “Son of man” generally in the Gospels.  Yesterday I pointed out that Jesus uses it a lot, in a variety of ways.

Some scholars have claimed that since prior to Jesus, within Judaism, it was not a “title” for a person (that is, li...

Who Is the Son of Man? From the Blog Readers’ Mailbag

I have received a rather difficult question from a blog member, involving how the Gospels understand and portray Christ in relationship to one another.

Here is the question – or series of tightly interrelated questions – followed by the beginnings of an answer.  This one’s gonna take several posts.

 

QUESTION:

In Mark 8:27-28 Jesus asks his disciples “Who do people say that I am?” and they reply that different people think he is  “John the Baptist, Elijah, or one of the prophets”  Jesus then fol...

The Opening Section of the Gospel of Judas

Here is the first bit of the Gospel of Judas from the translation of my colleague Zlatko Pleše in our book The Other Gospels.  After this bit here, the Gospel gets very strange, at least to most modern readers.   But as you can see, it is really interesting.

The first paragraph is the explanation of where we got the text from; then the translation of the opening scends, and after that I give the bibliography for further reading that we cite in our book.

 

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What is the Gospel of Judas About?

I have said some things about the Gospel of Judas in my previous posts, but not much, really, about what is actually in it.   You can find a translation, done by my colleague Zlatko Pleŝe, in the volume we co-edited and translated: The Other Gospels: Accounts of Jesus from Outside the New Testament.  We also give the following Introduction to the text; I will give the rest of the Introduction and a bibliography, and a bit of the translation itself, in the next post.

 

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Sethian Gnostics and the Gospel of Judas

Soon after scholars had a chance to examine the Gospel of Judas it became clear that it embodied a form of early Christian Gnosticism known as “Sethian.”   Most descriptions that you find of Gnosticism are simplistic and do not actually reflect the mind-boggling complexities of the texts that embody it, to the extent that even if you master the basic descriptions you find, it is very hard to make sense of any of the texts.

That is certainly true of the Sethian writings! To say they are gloriousl...

Will “All Israel” Be Saved? Really? Guest Post by Jason Staples

Here now is the third and final post by Jason Staples connected with his dissertation and now to be published book on what Paul meant that “All Israel will be saved.”  It’s a big issue.  Isn’t Paul the apostles of the “gentiles”?  Doesn’t he attack Jews and Judaism?  Doesn’t he think God rejected them because they rejected him?   What could Paul mean by this?

 

Jason argues that Paul does not mean what scholars have long argued and regular ole lay folk have thought he meant (there are lots of op...