Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 284

A Different Interpretation of the Mischievous Boy, Jesus

I have decided that I can’t simply post yesterday’s blast from the past about the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and leave it at that, since the way we today tend to read the account (where Jesus seems, to our eyes, to be a Super-Brat) may not be the way it was read in antiquity (believe it or not!). So here is the post that I wrote to explain that, when I first dealt with the matter three years ago.

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I had a great time giv...

Jesus the Superboy: A Blast From the Past

As is my wont, this time of year, I’ve been thinking about the stories of Jesus’ birth and early life for a few days now. And just this instant I was looking at some old posts on the blog, from years ago — and this one turned up from 2013. A matter of ongoing interest: if Jesus was the miracle working Son of God as an adult, what was he like as a kid? We have stories about that from the early church. Here’s the post, occasioned by some lectures I was giving:

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Free Memberships for those Who Need Them!

Thanks to the incredible generosity of members of the blog, I am happy to announce that there are a limited number of free one-year memberships available. These have been donated for a single purpose: to allow those who cannot afford the annual membership fee to participate on the blog for a year. I will assign these memberships strictly on the honor system: if you truly cannot afford the membership fee, but very much want to have full access to the blog, then please contact me.

Do NOT reply...

A Personal Transition

A week ago today I finally sent off the very last and final version of The Triumph of Christianity to my editor. It is done, as good as I can make it. Now it will go to a copy-editor who will go over it line by line, word by word to make sure the grammar, punctuation, and even spelling is all correct, and to make suggestions for writing style as needed. Depending on the copy-editor, sometimes there are tons of these stylistic suggestions, sometimes hardly any.

As an author, I much prefer the...

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’...