Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 187

Blog-Related Suggestions for Isolation

There is a lot of good advice out there about how not just to handle isolation but how to take advantage of it, to make some parts of your life better rather than worse.   But it has occurred to me: people on this blog have some things in common, interests that we share.   And I wonder if we can give some suggestions to each other about how blog-related interests can contribute to our mutual and individual well-being while we still plow through this crisis.  So after giving a couple of...

The Not Old Better Show – Heaven and Hell Book Interview

On April 1 I did a podcast interview with Paul Vogelzang, the host of Smithsonian Associates The Not Old Better Show, aired on Soundcloud (Washington DC). The podcast focuses on the issues or particular relevance to the 50+ crowd (nence its name) but obviously lots of the topics it hits are on the minds of everyone else as well.

The interview was on my new book on Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife.   I read an excerpt from the book int he interview but mostly its question and...

Do We NEED to Suffer? The Argument from Tectonic Plates

I decided to take a stroll down memory lane and look at posts I made at the beginning of the blog, and came upon this one, made almost exactly eight years ago today.  Since Ive been talking about Ecclesiastes and the meaning of life, and, consequently, the meaning of suffering, it is particularly relevant, now more than ever in recent history.   Its ultimately about whether humans *have* to suffer if God created the world and life in it.  And weirdly, it involves a connection between Dinesh D...

Is There Any Point To Life? More on Ecclesiastes

I have been talking about the distinctive views of the book of Ecclesiastes, one of the real gems of the Hebrew Bible, a book that refuses to accept easy answers or blithe truisms about life, but faces reality head on.   No matter what we do or how we try to explain it away, life is short.  Very very short.  The author of course had no conception of what we know now about time in relation to lifespan.  What would he say if he knew that the world (what we would call the universe something...

What Is The Meaning of Life? The Book of Ecclesiastes

In my previous post I pointed to the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament (usually said to comprise Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes), suggesting that this is a good time for all of us to ingest some wisdom from those who went before.  The book of Ecclesiastes has long been my favorite in the Old Testament.  It seems so modern in so many ways.  Even though written over 2000 years ago, it considers ageless questions about what the *point* of it all is.

If you dont know it, its worth reading;...

Interested in a Webinar on My Book?

For all who are interested!    This coming Monday, 2:00-3:00 pm, I will be leading a one-hour webinar hosted by Oxford University Press.  It is free and open to everyone.

The webinar will focus on the history of the ideas of heaven and hell, the subject of my recent book with Simon & Schuster.  So *thats* a bit strange.  An Oxford event focusing on a book I wrote for someone else???   Ill explain below.

FIRST, about the event.  I will start by giving a fifteen-minute talk, and that will be...

A Good Time for Wisdom!

We are living in a time of virtually unparalleled crisis, and it is forcing us not only to cope with tragedy either our own or that of so many millions of others but also to make sense of it and figure it out.  It is easy to come up with simple Pollyanna views that dont take seriously the trauma, and to cite religious mantras that try to make it sound like it is all right, when in fact it is not.  And the reality is, most people very much *dont* want to go down the rabbit hole of deep...

Q&A on Heaven and Hell

The following is a Q&A that I have done with my publisher Simon & Schuster for the History in Five page.  You should check it out.  You will get a free ebook!   Heres the site:  https://www.simonandschuster.com/p/hi...    Youll see, its an impressive array of authors with intriguing answers to questions about their books.

Heres what mine looks like.

Why write about the afterlife? What drew you toward the subject of heaven and hell?

I was raised as in a Christian household and...

More of the History Behind the Gospel of John

In the last post I began to discuss what we can know about the history of the community that produced (or that produced someone who produced) the Gospel of John.  My argument is that you can use hints in the Gospel to reconstruct what appears to have happened in the community in which and for which it was produced, and reconstructing what these events were can help make sense of how and why the distinctive views of the Gospel developed (or rather, the *various* views, some found in one of its...

Easter Reflection 2020

By all counts, this is the strangest Easter in memory one of the two most important holy days in the year for over two and a half billion people in the world, the vast majority of whom cannot celebrate it together for the first time in their lives.

Even so, for many of these Christians this particular Easter, with the message it brings, could not have come at a better time.  And even for those of who are not Christian, the season brings a powerful message, worth reflecting on.

Even as a...