Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 250

Ehrman & Licona: Are the Gospels Historically Reliable? Part 1

A month ago, on February 21 I had a public debate with Mike Licona at the Bailey Performance Center at Kennesaw State University on the topic: Are the Gospels Historically Reliable? Ratio Christi and KSU History Club hosted the event. Moderator was Dr. Brian Swain, a historian of Mediterranean antiquity on the faculty there.

You can probably guess the two sides we took in the debate.  The crowd was largely on his side, which made for a very interesting evening.  As I think you’ll see, even th...

Scribes Who Injected the Idea of Atonement into Luke’s Gospel

One of the most striking theological features of the Gospel of Luke and its accompanying volume the book of Acts is that they do not portray Jesus’ death as a sacrifice for sins.  That seems very strange indeed to people who get their theology from other parts of the New Testament (e.g., Paul, and the other Gospels).  But when read on their own, Luke-Acts have a different understanding of the significance of Jesus death.

And that may be why scribes altered the words Jesus spoke at his last su...

What Happened at the Last Supper? A Textual Problem in Luke

A couple of days ago a reader asked me a question in connection with something I had said about the early second-century Christian text, the Didache, and its instructions about how the Lord’s supper was supposed to be celebrated.  Here is what I said:

“When they celebrate the Eucharist they are first to bless the cup with a prayer that the author provides and then to bless the broken bread, with another set prayer (9:1–4). This way of celebrating the Lord’s Supper by starting with the cup and...

The Golden Rule

After all the background I gave yesterday, I can now give a succinct answer to the question that was raised by a reader.  Here it is again.

 

QUESTION:

I was surprised to see that, in the Didache, the form of the Golden Rule is in the negative. I’ve read that the positive formulation in the Sermon on the Mount may be original to Jesus. If the Didache used Matthew as a source, how does one account for that reversion?

 

RESPONSE:

I think this question has a simple answer.   It is that the Golde...

Once More: The Interesting Text Called the Didache

QUESTION:

I was surprised to see that in the Didache the form of the Golden Rule is in the negative.  I’ve read that the positive formulation in the Sermon on the Mount may be original to Jesus.  If the Didache used Matthew as a source, how does one account for that reversion?

 

RESPONSE

I started writing up a simple answer to this question but then I realized that the answer doesn’t make much sense without some more extended background.  Just a few months ago on the blog – this past December...

A Privileged View of Suffering

I haven’t posted on this topic for a while, and looking through old posts from five years ago, I came across this one.  I’ve edited it a bit from the first time, but my sentiments are pretty much the same now that I’m older and not much wiser…..

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Sometimes people get upset because I deal with the problem of suffering even though I don’t seem to be experiencing any severe pain and misery myself. Here is an example of t...

My Scholarly Project on the Afterlife

Here is the research proposal that I sent in to various funding agencies hoping to get a leave for next year – including the National Humanities Center, which has given me a fellowship . As you’ll see, it is closely tied to the trade book I am working on about the origins of the Christian ideas of heaven and hell, but it deals with a specific issue at considerable depth.   For the fellowship application I called the prospective book “The Invention of Heaven and Hell” – which sounds too much l...

My Upcoming Writing Plans: The Afterlife and the Afterlife

As some of you know, I sometimes try to work on two books at once.  I’ve actually tried *writing* two books at once, but doesn’t work too well.  (Writing part of one one day and part of the other another.  Yuk!)  But I can be doing research and planning two books at once, if they are on a related topic – one a popular book for a general audience and the other a scholarly book for academics.   That’s what I did about ten years ago now for my books Forged (trade book for general readers) and Fo...

Why Women Came to be Silenced

Given what I’ve said before about women in the ancient world, in early Christianity, and in the churches of Paul, I can now explain why women who had originally played a significant role in the early Christian movement came to be silenced, especially in the churches of Paul (as seen, for example, in the Pastoral epistles).  Here is how I discuss the matter in my college-level textbook on the New Testament.

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Our theoretical discussion of the...

The Surprising Understanding of Gender in the Ancient World

Back in January I made three posts on the role of women in the churches of Paul (see the posts of January 16, 17, and 18).  These raised various questions from readers about how and why women went from having a fairly *prominent* role in Paul’s own churches to having thoroughly *diminished* roles in the churches that arose after his day, as embodied for example in the Pastoral epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus (books that claim to be written by Paul but that he did not himself write; they...