Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 253

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...

Conservative Reactions to Misquoting Jesus

I don’t think I was prepared for the reaction that my book Misquoting Jesus elicited, especially among conservative evangelical Christians.  I was suddenly transformed from being a competent scholar with whom others might disagree here or there to being a Major Public Enemy.

Conservative scholars said all sorts of bizarre things about me in the wake of the book.  My long-time acquaintance and occasional debate opponent, Craig Evans, wrote, in a book, that I had become an agnostic as soon as I...

Misquoting Jesus and My Fundamentalist Faith

As I was saying in my previous post, when I decided to write Misquoting Jesus my friends thought I was nuts.  Even specialists in the New Testament are not, as a rule, interested in textual criticism, the scholarly endeavor to reconstruct the original Greek text of the New Testament given the fact that we have thousands of manuscripts with hundreds of thousands of minor differences among them, and even some rather major differences.  New Testament scholars know *that* much about the manuscrip...

Jesus and Paul: Similarities and Differences

In my previous post I raised the question of whether Jesus and Paul represent fundamentally the same religion or not.  Here I continue the discussion by pointing out what seem to me to be the main similarities and differences between them, as I spelled it out in a post several years ago:

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I have been talking about the relationship of Jesus’ proclamation of the coming Kingdom of God to Paul’s preaching about the importance of...

What Is My Best Book for a General Audience?

I recently received this question for the Mailbag, dealing, roughly, with my own personal feelings about my “best” work.

 

QUESTION:

A mailbag question that I am not sure I have read your thoughts on; what do you feel is your best published work for lay people and why?  Just curious!

 

RESPONSE:

Ah, this is a difficult question to answer.   The books you write are kind of like your children: you love each and every one of them with every ounce of your being!  And you’re not supposed to have f...

Are Paul and Jesus on the Same Page?

In response to my previous post on the importance of Paul, I have had several people ask me about the relationship between the teachings of Jesus and Paul: are they actually representing the same religion?  I dealt with that question some years ago on the blog.  Here is the first of two posts on the issue.

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I have spent several posts explicating Paul’s understanding of his gospel, that by Christ’s death and resurrection a pers...

Is Paul Given Too Much Credit?

Is the apostle Paul given more credit than he deserves by modern scholars?   Here is what has (recently) raised the question for me.

As many readers of the blog know, the corpus of early Christian writings known as the “Apostolic Fathers” is a collection of ten (or eleven) proto-orthodox authors who were, for the most part, producing their writings just after the New Testament period.  For anyone interested I have a two-volume edition  / translation of these important texts, The Apostolic Fat...

Was Jesus Given Special Treatment?

Every now and then on the Blog I get bored with a topic and simply want nothing more to do with it (for a while).  For some reason I feel like that about this question of whether Jesus was really buried on the afternoon of his death.  It’s an effort to respond even to the comments.  But for some reason I can’t seem ever just to let it die (so to speak).   Still, this is my last post about the matter for the next 29 years.  I think.

I just want to make one major point, which probably has relev...

Pilate, Who Never “Learned His Lesson”

This is the second of my two posts  from over three years ago that try to show that Pilate almost certainly would not have removed Jesus’ body from the cross on the afternoon of his death simply because not to do so would have been in violation of Jewish sensitivities.   (NOTE: Pilate is not said to have done so for the other two who were crucified with Jesus. Are we to think he made an exception in Jesus’ case, since, after all, he was far more important?)

To make the best sense of this post...