Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 281

Finding Meaning in the Bible: More Responses to my Christmas Article

In the previous post I indicated some of the initial reactions, four years ago, to my Newsweek article on the Gospel stories about Christmas. I received yet more reaction after that old post, and so posted again, dealing this time with people who thought I was too kindly disposed to anyone who found the stories meaningful. Here is what I said at the time. (I still stick by it, for what it’s worth!)

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When the editor at News...

Is the New Testament Authentic? Readers’ Mailbag December 4, 2016

QUESTION

Dr Ehrman, I found this attack against you:

Bart likes to deceive his listener by claiming more variations and more copies give birth to less authenticity. Actually flip that and you’ll begin to “see the light”. The Bible manuscripts were transmitted not in a linear way, as in “Chinese whispers” but geometrically as in 1 produced by 5 others which in turn then produced, say 20, etc.

I think you already dealt with this claim, but I am unable to find your post.

RESPONSE

I have to admi...

Response to my Newsweek Article on Christmas

Earlier this week I posted my Newsweek article on Christmas from four years ago, and several people have asked me what kind of reaction I received. I made two posts about that at the time. Here’s the first. I find this post rather humorous now, years later, since I was obviously being wildly defensive (halfway through the response) before denying I was defensive at all (at the end)! What funny people we can be….

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My Newsweek article this...

Gift Subscriptions, 2016!!

It is now December (can any of us believe it?) and we are blasting from one holiday to the next. For the occasion, I want to open up a holiday giving option that can help out people who really want to be on the blog but cannot afford the membership fees.

As many of you know, for the past three of years, thanks to a number of generous donors, we pulled this off in a big way. It has happened in two stages. It started off when two anonymous donors proposed that they provide some funds to pay for...

Newsweek Article on Christmas: Part 2

Yesterday I gave Part 1 of my Newsweek article on Christmas, published in 2012. Here is Part 2!

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Most modern readers who are not already familiar with these stories [in the apocryphal Gospels such as the Proto-Gospel of James] tend to find them far-fetched. That’s almost always the case with miraculous accounts that we have never heard before – they sound implausible and “obviously” made up, as legends and fabrications. Rarely do...

Newsweek Article on Christmas: Part 1

In my last post I made an off-the-cuff comment about an article about Christmas that I wrote for Newsweek four years ago (2012). Someone asked for more information, and I see now that I never posted the article on the blog. So I’ll post it here in two parts. Here is the first half:

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This past September, Harvard University professor Karen King unveiled a newly discovered Gospel fragment that she entitled “The Gospel of Jesus’...

Looking Ahead to Christmas: A Blast from the Past

With the passing of Thanksgiving, Christmas season has now officially arrived (whether that brings you joy, despair, or indifference!). Here is a post that I made exactly four years, prompted in part by my decision to publish an edition of “other” Gospels (that did not make it into the New Testament, including some that deal with the birth of Jesus.

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Right now I have the “other” Gospels on my mind. It’s true, I often have them on my mind,...

Improving the Blog 2016

I would like some ideas for making this blog better. Do you have any?

As you know, the blog really has two functions. On one hand, the idea behind it is to disseminate as widely as possible the views, perspectives, evidence, arguments, and conclusions of scholars who devote their lives to the study of the New Testament and the history of early Christianity.

As the disseminator-of-such-things-in-chief, I think we are doing a pretty good job with that. The blog covers lots and lots of topics: t...

Personal Thoughts on Thanksgiving, 2016

I have been thinking, as is my wont, about giving thanks, on this Thanksgiving. Many of my thoughts have been about all the things I am so incredibly thankful for, as is appropriate for the day. But another line of thinking has hit me as well, involving the ironies of giving thanks.

Some background, from my personal life. As much as I love my live, the older I get, the more I realize just how weird this of mine life has been, as a scholar of religion who is not himself religious, an expert on...

Jesus’ Private Teachings about the King of the Jews

In this thread I am discussing whether Jesus considered himself the messiah prior to his death. So far I have made one major argument for that view, involving his death itself. All of our sources report Jesus was executed by the Romans specifically for calling himself the King of the Jews. They do not report that the Roman governor Pontius Pilate ordered him crucified for raising an army, or for causing a disturbance in the temple, or for being a pain in the neck for the Sadducees, Pharisees,...