Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 249

A Welcome Review of The Triumph of Christianity

It is every author’s dream to have a book reviewed in the Sunday New York Times Book Review.   I’ve never had that happen before.   Until now.   This Sunday The Triumph of Christianity will be reviewed by Tom Bissell, whose writings some of you may know.

Most reviews in the NYT bring out both the outstanding features and the shortcomings of the book under consideration.   A damning review can be devastating.  Rarely is a review all praise.   I would say this one is extremely generous and exce...

Being Blindstruck by Triumph

O frabjous day, callouh, callay.   My book was published, just today!

The Triumph of Christianity was, in some senses, many years in the making.  Here is how I talk about how the idea for it first blindsided me, two decades ago.

 

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The idea for this book struck me twenty years ago during my first trip to Athens.  I was keen to explore the archaeological wonders of the city, and most especially the Agora and the Acropolis.  The Ago...

The Conversion of Constantine

My book comes out tomorrow and I’m very excited!  Here is a foretaste of what is in it.   This is how I begin Chapter 1, which focuses on the conversion of Constantine.

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Few events in the history of civilization have proved more transformative than the conversion of the emperor Constantine to Christianity in the year 312 CE.  Later historians would sometimes question whether the conversion was genuine.  But to Constantine himself and to spi...

Beginning the Triumph of Christianity

I’m in Washington D.C., where I just now gave my first “book talk,” a reading from part of my new book The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World, at the wonderful bookstore, “Politics and Prose.”   The book is officially published on Tuesday!   And for those interested, this is how I begin the Preface, on a personal note before getting to the matter at hand.

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In my junior year of college I took a course in English...

How Was Jesus *Really* Born? The Proto-Gospel of James

In my last post I mentioned the Proto-Gospel of James in relation to a textual variant (in Luke) that indicates that Mary gave birth not *in* Bethlehem but *en route* there.   That made me think it would be a good time to say something about what else is in this intriguing book.  You can find my recent translation of it in the collection of non-canonical Gospels that I edited, translated, and introduced with my colleague Zlatko Plese, called The Other Gospels.   Here is what I said about the...

Small Differences that Make a Difference

Here is something different on the significance of textual variants for understanding the Greek New Testament.   Most of the hundreds of thousands of variations are completely insignificant in the big overall scheme of things (e.g., misspelled words and slips of the pen); others involve enormous differences that matter a lot (the story of the woman taken in adultery).  Lots of others are between the two, small differences that are interesting for how they might change the meaning of a passage...

Jesus Kissing Mary Magdalene: A Blast From the Past

Now for something *completely* different.  Here is a question that was asked and answered almost exactly four years ago, of ongoing intrigue!

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QUESTION:

I know that the “Gospel of Philip does not have much if any real historical veracity to it about Jesus’ life, but does the references about Jesus and Mary Magdalene being lovers and the holes in the papyrus ‘kissing’ verse (verses 32 and 55 in your “Lost Scriptures” book), help...

Do We KNOW the Original Words of the NT?

A final post on the conservative evangelical critics of my book Misquoting Jesus.   One of the most common views they express is that we are virtually certain about what the authors of the New Testament wrote.  We have thousands of manuscripts, and are better informed about the text of the New Testament than for any other book from the ancient world.

By way of response, to begin with, I completely agree (of course!) that we have thousands of New Testament manuscripts of the New Testament and...

On Being Controversial

I woke up this morning thinking I’d like to start finishing out this little mini-thread on Misquoting Jesus by talking about how I never thought of anything in the book being particularly controversial, even though it struck a lot of people that way.  I was going to call the post “On Being Controversial.”  And then I thought Wait a minute: That sounds familiar!  And I checked it out, and I wrote almost exactly that post some three years ago.   So, rather than reinventing the wheel, I give it...

Do the Differences in Our Manuscripts Matter?

The final two arguments that conservative critics of Misquoting Jesus have made, time and time again, are that (a) none of the variations in our manuscripts is particularly significant and (b) at the end of the day, we really do know what the original words of the New Testament were – far better than for any other book from the ancient world.  These are two points that my old friend and debate opponent Dan Wallace makes emphatically every time he hears a whiff of my name.

On the matter of sig...