Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 237

Finishing my Work on the Afterlife

I am now virtually finished with all my research for my book on the afterlife, and after mopping up a few loose ends, I should be able to start writing next week.  It’s been a two-year adventure so far.

I always find it amazing how much you can learn in two years of intense research on a topic that you already know (or think you know) a good deal about.   The way I can check on how much I’ve progressed is by looking at my early notes on the topic.   Almost always, when I decide I’m going to w...

Traditions About Jesus that Are Probably Not Historical

I have been arguing that there are ways to extract historical information about Jesus from the Gospels – even if they were not written to provide disinterested accounts of what he really said and did but were meant to promote faith in him.

So far I have discussed two positive criteria: independent attestation (if a tradition is found in multiple independent sources then that increases the likelihood that it goes back to the life of Jesus, since none of the sources themselves could have made i...

How a Book Gets Its Title

As I am getting set to start writing my book on the Afterlife (the plan is to begin the first week of August), I am mulling over possible titles.  And just as I have been in the midst of my muddling, I have received this question.

 

QUESTION:

Dr, Ehrman, can you explain a little how you go about choosing a title for your trade books ? Is it a collaborative effort between you and your agent or publisher? Can it be a difficult process where the title can change as the book progresses . And if s...

The Trickiest Criterion for Determining What Happened in the Life of Jesus

Here I continue the thread on how scholars go about establishing which traditions in the Gospels appear to reflect what actually happened in the life of Jesus.   Of all the things I’ve said so far, this is the most controversial.   But after thinking about it for some forty years, I still think it makes good sense, for reasons I try to explain.

 

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What An Odd Thing to Say!  The Criterion of Dissimilarity.

The most controversial crit...

An Important Criterion for Establishing What Actually Happened

I am in the midst of a threat talking about how historians can use sources such as the Gospels to know what actually happened in Jesus’ life.  These books were not *meant* to provide disinterested historical information about the past, but were quite intentinally slanted accounts meant to encourage and shape faith in Jesus.  They nonetheless do contain important historical information.  How does the historian determine what his historical and what is legendary in them?

Yesterday I gave some o...

Rules of Thumb for Reconstructing the History behind the Gospels

In yesterday’s post I laid out the “wish list” historians have when it comes to sources of information about persons and events of the past, and evaluated how well the Gospels stack up against the list.  Now I want to move into the kinds of criteria biblical scholars use when trying to extract historical information from the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life, criteria made necessary by the fact that the Gospel writers were not trying to write objective historical narratives of what really happen...

The Historian’s Wish List

While writing the posts in my thread on the contradictions in the New Testament, I had the impression that some readers thought I considered it virtually impossible to use the New Testament for historical purposes.   That’s actually not the case at all.   I’m going to discuss this issue over a number of posts, focusing on the Gospels.  Oddly enough, it appears I’ve never devoted a sustained thread to this precise end, of explaining how historians go about their business of reconstructing the...

What I Saw at St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai

Yesterday I responded to a reader of the blog who wanted me to repeat a post from a few years ago about my visit to St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai, the famed place where Moses allegedly received the Ten Commandments.   The full story took two posts, and here is now the second, where I explain one of the most memorable experiences of my travels.

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In my last post I began to relate an anecdote about a traveling...

Visiting the Monastery at Mount Sinai: A Blast From the Past

A long-time reader has asked that I re-post one of her favorite bits from the blog archives, about my trip a few years ago to Saint Catherine’s monastery at Mount Sinai.  It was indeed an amazing trip with an interesting tale connected to it, involving one of the greatest biblical manuscript discoveries of the 19th century (or, actually, of all time).  This will take two posts.

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In my previous...

A Key Contradiction in the Birth Narratives

Several readers have asked about my comment that Matthew and Luke appear to contradict each other in their birth narratives, especially when Matthew indicates that Jesus’ family fled to Egypt after his birth but Luke claims they went straight back to Nazareth, a month later.   I’ve posted on this issue several times over the years on the blog, but maybe a refresher would be helpful for those with questions.  Here is how I explain the matter in my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Mil...