Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 272

Ecclesiastes and the Meaning of Life

As I have been arguing, *most* of the authors of the Hebrew Bible who have anything to say about life after death believe that people go to Sheol – whether they are good or wicked, faithful or unfaithful.  It is the fate of all.  Different authors may have different views of what Sheol entails, but nowhere is it a place or reward or punishment for what one does (or believes) in this life.

A major exception seems to be the book of Ecclesiastes, which does not subscribe to an afterlife of any k...

Life After Death According to Samuel

 

Before getting sidetracked with other things, I was discussing the intriguing story of 1 Samuel 28, where the king of Israel, Saul, illicitly consults a medium in an attempt to communicate with his now-dead advisor and predecessor, the prophet Samuel.  This is the only case of necromancy in the entire Bible.   In this post I want to consider what the author of the passage seems to think about those who go to Sheol after death.

Recall the story: Saul is experiencing both internal turmoil (hi...

Our Fifth Year Anniversary!

Today is a huge day for us: the fifth anniversary of the blog!  Hard to believe.  But we’ve come through five years.  And it’s been one busy lustrum.

I just added up some numbers.   Here they are.

Since April 3, 2012: I have made 1462 posts. That comes to 5.6 per week.  I have not missed a week so far in the entire stretch.  To my *knowledge* (I may be wrong about this, and given the sharp readers we have, I’m sure someone will let me know in no uncertain terms if I am; but to my knowledge…,...

Is Mark’s Gospel Unsophisticated?

I’ll be be dealing with just one question in this week’s Readers’ Mailbag, since the response will require some explaining.  I has to do with the literary artistry of the Gospel of Mark – is it a fairly unsophisticated account of Jesus’ life and death?

The question itself will require a bit of set-up and explanation.  In an earlier post I argued that Mark’s Gospel almost certainly ended in chapter sixteen at verse 8.   Jesus has been crucified, dead, and buried.  On the third day some women g...

Recent Manuscript Discoveries: A Blast from the Past

As we are nearing the five-year anniversary of the Blog, I have been looking back over some past postings, and this one caught my eye, from 3/30/13 (*four* years ago….).   It’s still of interest.  Two things to say about it: “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” is now recognized by everyone to be a modern forgery (it has been proved) (see, e.g., https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/... and the fragment of Mark’s Gospel allegedly from the first...

Returning from the Dead in the Hebrew Bible

In thinking about Sheol and death in the Hebrew Bible, it is worth reflecting on passages where the dead come back to life or are contacted by the living.  This does not happen much at all – a couple of instances of resuscitation and one of necromancy.

Probably the most famous resuscitation – the bringing back to life of a dead person – involves the prophet Elijah in 1 Kings 17:17-24.   Elijah has been helping an unnamed widow from the town of Zarephath, miraculously providing her and her son...

The Afterlife in the Hebrew Bible: Sheol

When trying to figure out where the Christian ideas of heaven and hell came from, an obvious place to start is with the Hebrew Bible.  Jesus himself held to the authority of the Hebrew Scriptures.   To be sure, there was not a completely fixed canon in his day, which all Jews everywhere agreed to.  But virtually all Jews we know of ascribed to the high authority (and Mosaic authorship) of the Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy); and most Jews  – including Jesus – also...

Eternal Life and Damnation

In my summaries of the Apocalypse of Peter and the Apocalypse of Paul, as a couple of readers noticed, there was a striking difference in emphasis.  Both of these early Christian texts (the first from the second century, the other from the fourth or possibly the fifth?) narrate guided tours of the realms of the blessed and of the damned, and both seem more interested in describing the torments of the lost than the ecstasies of the saved.

The former focuses on moral sins that lead to eternal p...

Bart Ehrman & Robert Price Debate – Did Jesus Exist?

As many of you know, this past October I had a public debate with Robert Price on the question of whether Jesus actually existed.  To my knowledge Robert is the only “mythicist” (one who thinks Jesus is a complete myth) who actually has a PhD in the relevant field of New Testament studies.   For years I’ve been asked by people to debate a mythicist; I’ve always resisted, in part because I’ve thought that by doing so I would lend credibility to their view, which, in my judgment, is not credibl...

Questions on the Resurrection and My Personal Spiritual Experiences: Readers’ Mailbag

I’ll address two questions on this week’s readers’ mailbag, one about what we can say about the resurrection of Jesus (a specific question about it) and one about whether my (one-time) faith was based on the Bible or on spiritual experiences I had.  (The answer is apparently not what the questioner expected.)

 

QUESTION:

How do you separate the fact from fiction on the risen Jesus?  You accept, as historical, that the disciples believed they had visions of the risen Jesus – so how do you reje...