Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 199

Who Was Jesus?

This is a continuation of a soon-to-be-compiled longer post for broader consumption on the New Testament. Now that I have described what the NT is, how it is structured and organized, and how it has come down to us, I get to one of the key issues: what does the New Testament tell us about the historical figure of Jesus himself?

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There can be no doubt that Jesus of Nazareth has been the most influential person in the history of the world. The...

Thanksgiving 2019

Some Thanksgiving ruminations, from where I am here and now.

I love holidays. Not everyone does. When I was younger that was always a mystery to me – what’s not to like? But as I get older (and older and older), I get it. Or at least part of it. So many people hate the holidays and the suffering they bring. Bitter and wrenching loneliness when all those around them are enjoying good times with family and friends and they … are not. Or awful memories of holidays past – ugly family blow-ups or...

Setting Dates for the Gospels

One of the questions I often get asked on the blog is how we know when the Gospels were written. I’ve answer the question at some length before, and thought it might be useful to answer it again. Here’s what I said years ago, and looking at it, I’d say the same thing again. In fact, I will. Here:

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QUESTION:

How are the dates that the Gospels were composed determined? I’ve read that Mark is usually dated to 70 or later...

The Annual Meeting of Biblical Scholars, and ALL Those Books!!

I decided to look back to what I wrote on this day five years ago, and I started to laugh — it’s *exactly* the same think I was thinking just yesterday, about all the trillions of books that get written about the Bible and the scholars who write them. I’ve decided to re-post it, and simply update it to this very moment.

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I’ve had a terrific and interesting first few days at the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting here in San...

Jesus and Sexual Immorality

I began to discuss yesterday the interesting case that NT scholar Scot McKnight advances for thnking that maybe Jesus *does* speak of same-sex relations in the Gospels. The last (group) of his three references are the ones he thinks are the most likely instances:

Matthew 5:32

But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except forsexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

Matthew 15:19

For out of the heart come evil...

Maybe Jesus DOES Talk about “Homosexuality”?

In my recent post I pointed out that Jesus said nothing – nada! – about same sex relations in any of his surviving teachings. One blog member pointed out a post on a different blog by New Testament scholar Scot McKnight arguing that there are there passages in the Gospels where in fact Jesus *may* have been referring to homosexuality, in condemnatory terms. I thought, HUH? THAT’s interesting! I better look. So I did. I don’t think there’s any way this is right, but you can decide for...

Do Textual Variants Actually *Matter* For Much??

In light of my previous post, I thought I should address a question I get asked a lot. Or rather, a rhetorical question that I hear posed a lot — especially by evangelical apologists who want to insist that even though there are hundreds of thousands of differences in our manuscripts, none of them really matters for anything that’s important. (This was a perennial objection to my book Misquoting Jesus.) Is that true? I dealt with it many years ago on the blog, and it’s time to address it...

Introduction to the Manuscripts of the New Testament

This now will be the next portion of my longer blog post that will serve as an Introduction to the New Testament.  The previous section was on how the 27 books came to be collected into “the” New Tesatment; this one is on how the books were copied/transmitted over the centuries.

As with the other sections, I’ve made this one pretty short, because I’m trying to be as concise as I can, with links to other blog posts throughout.  I don’t want the entire article to be massively long.  One could obviously w...

Two More Openings for Blog Dinner in Durham, December 3. Interested?

Blogging friends!   I have learned that two of the participants for the fund-raising blog dinner on December 3 will not be able to come after all.   So there are two seats available.  Here is the original announcement.  If you’re interested, please let me know!  Tempus is fugiting.

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On December 3, at 7:00 pm., I will be holding a new kind of blog event in Durham NC: a fund-raising dinner.  It will be at a nice restaurant to be named later.  We will have a maximum of seven places at the table (along wi...

How Did We Get The 27 Books of the New Testament?

This now is a continuation of my projected longer blog post that will serve as an Introduction to the New Testament (possibly around 5000 – 6000 words or so).  In the first section I discussed the layout and structure of the New Testament; in the second I gave brief descriptions of each of the twenty-seven books.  In this one (spread out over two posts) I deal with the question of how we actually got it: how was it collected together into a “book” and how was it transmitted to us over the centuries?

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H...