Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 191

Did Jesus Sweat Blood? “Intrinsic” Evidence for Textual Variants

In yesterday’s post I mentioned some of the kinds of “external” evidence that textual scholars look at when trying to establish the “original” text of a document (that is, the wording of the text as the author originally wrote it) when different manuscripts have different wordings for this or that passage. In this post I’ll talk about one kind of “internal” evidence that is used to assist in making this kind of decision. With internal evidence, instead of looking at what the *attestation* of...

How Manuscripts Matter for Knowing What an Author Wrote

In this thread I am addressing the question several readers have asked me about: if I think that the Christ poem of Philippians 2:6-10 is not something Paul himself wrote (as I have argued; see for example https://ehrmanblog.org/how-ancient-is-the-idea-of-christs-incarnation/), but has been quoted by him from some other text, why not just think a scribe inserted it into Philippians? That is, maybe it wasn’t in the letter in the first place; why not thing a scribe stuck it in after the letter...

Intimate Relationships: Nonbelievers and Believers

Over the past couple of months I’ve received maybe seven or eight emails from readers – some on the blog and others not – about marriage (two in the past 24 hours). Not about what the New Testament says about marriage, but about what these emailers should do with *their* marriage. Each of these was married to someone who was a faithful, committed, religiously conservative Christian of one kind or another (evangelical, Catholic, Mormon), but the emailer had, a while back, moved away from their...

What Did Ancient People Think (a) God Was?

A number of people have asked me how anyone could imagine a human being or becoming God in the ancient world, based on my claims that for Paul and other early Christian writers Jesus was a divine human. But if he was human, how could he be God? To answer that I have to stress a point I made repeatedly in my book How Jesus Became God. Anyone who wants to say that “Jesus is God” according to an early Christian text, has to explain “in what *sense*” is he God?

Now is a good time for me to lay...

How Can You Tell If the Text Has Been CHANGED?

There are some passages in the New Testament that have been either added or omitted by scribes in the process of copying them. This is not some kind of “opinion.” It is a fact. In know full well that there are always readers who have said: “Scribes would never do that! This was the Word of God for them!” The logic in this objection is that anyone who held the Bible to be a holy book would not change it. Hey, think about the Jewish scribes in the Middle Ages with the Torah, or the Muslim...

Maybe the Passage wasn’t “Original”!!

How do we know if a passage in the New Testament was “originally” in the New Testament? Scholars are widely agreed, for example (there is not a whole lot of serious debate about the matter) that the appearances of Jesus after his resurrection at the end of Mark’s Gospel (the last twelve verses of Mark 16) were not originally there. The Gospel ends with the announcement that he has been raised and will meet his disciples in Galilee (so that, contrary to what a lot of people say – there...

Paul’s Incredibly High Christology

I have been trying to explain the unusually important statement about Christ in Paul’s “Christ Poem” in Phil. 2:6-10. It’s an extremely high Christology. Christ is a divine being before coming into the world; and at his exaltation he was made *equal* with God. Wow. Just 20 years earlier Jesus was a virtually unknown peasant with a few followers in a remote part of rural Galilee. Now he’s equal to the Lord God Almighty?? How did *that* happen???

That, of course, is the topic of my book How...

Authors and the Fiasco of Book Tours

With the advent of social media, author book tours have more or less gone the way of the stegosaurus. Some authors do them, but mainly only the celebrities, Hilary or David Sedaris. And you might be surprised to know that most authors think their demise is a very good thing. A book tour sounds exotic – at least it always did to me: “An Eleven-City National Book Tour!!!” How good can it get? Well, actually, it can get a lot better…

Let me preface this by saying that right now is an absolutely...

A Fuller Exposition of the Christ Poem in Philippians

I’ve been talking about the Christ poem in Philippians 2:6-10, and given some keys to it’s interpretation. If you are new to the discussion, here is the poem itself, about “Jesus Christ….

Who, although he was in the form of God

Did not regard being equal with God

Something to be grasped after.

But he emptied himself

Taking on the form of a slave,

And coming in the likeness of humans.

And being found in appearance as a human

He humbled himself

Becoming obedient unto death – even death on a...

Brief Video Promotion of Heaven and Hell

I finally have my grubby paws on a copy of my new bookHeaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife. Looks great, I’m really pleased. It will not be available publicly until the publication date of March 31. But in preparation, my publisher Simon & Schuster has had me do a brief video promotion of it, taped in their studio in New York. In it they ask me five key questions that I address in the book (among the many many!) — just to give a taste of the sorts of things I deal with there.

Here is...