Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 245

Do We Know Why Jesus Went to Jerusalem?

Browsing through my blog posts I came across this one from exactly six years ago today.  Amazingly, I still agree with it!  It deals with an unusually important question, one that, in a sense, involves a decision that changed the entire history of our world.

 

QUESTION

Just what did the historical Jesus think he was doing that last week in Jerusalem? It looks to me like he was working as hard as he could to get himself killed. If that’s what he was doing, then why was he doing it?

 

RESPONSE

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The Tricks of Writing for a General Audience

Yesterday I mentioned how hard it is for academics to learn how to write for a general audience.   In graduate school we are trained to write for fellow scholars – learning the jargon and mastering the background knowledge that everyone in the field shares.  That’s because scholarly writing is a kind of short hand for insiders.  If you had to explain every term, every concept, every assumption then what you could say in an article for insiders would literally require a book.

And so you learn...

How a Book Gets Written

Once I decide what I want to write the next book on, the fun begins.  Or rather, the work begins.  I’m not sure I’d classify any part of the whole process as “fun.”  There are certainly enjoyable elements, but I think what drives me is wanting to have the very best end product possible.   Having *done* a book is fun; doing the book is less fun.  If I had to label it as anything I guess I’d say it’s intense.

The work goes through a number of distinct stages, each of them challenging in differe...

Back in Business!

Many apologies to all for the hiatus on the blog.  I wish I had a sob-story to tell to justify it (well, not really), but as I indicated yesterday, it was rather a bit of good fortune with a downside.  Every year for nineteen years now my wife Sarah and I have come to the beach with our friend Dale Martin, the New Testament scholar who introduced us just six years before that (he taught at the time at Duke; he moved on to Yale; he just retired this past year).

We are very boring at the beach....

How I Write a Trade Book for a General Audience

I am at a good place in my progress toward writing my book on the afterlife, and thought I could devote a few posts to explaining the whole process.  This is in response to questions I sometimes get from blog members who would like to know what steps I actually take in going from the idea of a book to the final product.

First off: how do I decide what books to write?   Different scholars have different ways of making this kind of (very big) decision.   In my case it is a little complicated by...

Technology Challenge at the Beach

Dear Blog Members,

Many apologies for taking a few days off from posting on the blog.  It’s not been intentional!  I’ve been at the beach for a few days (poor soul….) and the Internet is down.  I can get email, but no access to the web.  So even though I’ve been writing posts, I can’t get them up to the blog.  I hope to have the problem resolved soon — hopefully today!

– Bart

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My Life! An Interview with Frank Statio on “The State of Things”

On March 5 I had a radio interview at the local NPR station with Frank Stasio, host of “The State of Things.”   Most of the interview had to do with my religious journey from Christian fundamentalist to atheist; by the end we got to the ostensible reason for my being there, my then new book “The Triumph of Christianity: How A Forbidden Religion Swept the World.”

Frank is one of the very best interviewers anywhere, extremely good, as you’ll hear.  He really knows how to get to the heart of an...

Does Paul Condemn Slavery? The Case of Philemon and Onesimus.

I received an interesting question this week about Paul’s letter to Philemon.  And hey, how often do you get a question about Philemon?!?   This is the shortest of Paul’s letter (it’s a one-pager) where he is writing to his convert Philemon, a rich slave owner, asking him to receive back into his good graces his run-away slave Onesimus.

So what was *that* all about?  Here is the question and my response.

 

QUESTION :

A question on an atheist discussion group, “Why did Paul send Onesimus back?”...

A Different First-Century Mark? An Interesting Piece of Sleuth Work

One of the many pleasures of doing this blog is that there are some highly trained scholars who are members who interact with the posts on occasion.  One of them is Brent Nongbri, whom I first knew when he was a graduate student at Yale (PhD 2008) and who for several years was an Honorary Research Fellow at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.  One of his fields of expertise is papyrology, the study of ancient papyrus manuscripts.

Brent was interested in my posts on the alleged first-ce...

Why Would It Matter If There Were a First-Century Copy of Mark?

After making my post yesterday about the bogus apologetic claims being made about the existence of a copy of Mark from the first century, I remembered I had posted on the matter some years ago on the blog.  I looked it up, and found a set of reflections on a closely related topic: what difference *would* a first century copy of Mark make, if it doesn’t make the difference these breathless apologists are making?   Here is what I said at the time, at the beginning of 2015 (I’ve edited the post...