Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 285

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.

******************************************************

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,...

Jesus’ Crucifixion as King of the Jews

One of the main reasons I think Jesus called himself the future messiah is that this best explains the best attested event of his entire life: his crucifixion by the Romans.

There are a few things we can say with virtual certainty about Jesus. For example: he was a Jewish preacher from rural Galilee who made a fateful trip to Jerusalem and was crucified by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. There are, of course, lots of other things that we can say, without quite so much certainty (see my boo...

The Apocalyptic Background to Jesus’ Messiahship

To make sense of my claim that Jesus himself told the disciples that he thought he was the messiah, I have to set his teachings generally in a wider context. As I have repeatedly argued on the blog, Jesus’ teachings are best understood as apocalyptic in nature, and to understand any of them it is important to remember what the world view we call Jewish apocalypticism entailed. This is essential background to the question I’m pursuing, since I will be maintaining that Jesus did indeed consider...

Why Would Jesus’ Disciples Think He Was The Messiah?

The big question to emerge from my previous post is: If Jesus’ disciples (or at least some of them) believed he was the messiah before he died (as I tried to show they must have done) then what would have led them to think so?

I think there are two possibilities, one of which strikes me as implausible. The implausible one, in my opinion, is that Jesus did things that the messiah was expected to do, and because of that, his followers thought he was the messiah. My reason for not being drawn to...

Jesus the Messiah Before the Resurrection

In my recent posts I have argued, against the Mythicists, that the idea of someone (or lots of someones) inventing Jesus as a crucified messiah does not seem plausible, given the fact that no one expected a messiah to be crucified. If you were to invent a messiah, it would not be one that was completely different (opposite, actually) to what anyone expected.

In response to these posts, several readers have asked why, then, Jesus’ own followers thought he could be the messiah while he was aliv...

The Invention of a Crucified Messiah

This is a follow-up to my recent post in which I argued, against the mythicists who maintain that Jesus was not a real person but was invented by his earliest followers who had learned of a cosmic Christ who was crucified by demons in outer space, that it does not make sense, in my judgment, that first century Jews would make up the idea of a human messiah who got crucified. I received a number of responses to that post, most of which were very positive. But every now and then I got a respons...

Lost Gospels: The Greater Questions of Mary. A Blast From the Past

Here is a blast from the past — almost exactly four years ago now — about one of my all time favorite “lost” Gospels. If it ever existed. One very imaginative church father certainly thought it did. It was a Gospel featuring Mary Magdalene and a rather wild encounter she had with Jesus. Here is what I said in the post of November 2012.

*************************************************************************

I have been discussing some of the Gospels that we know about because they are mentio...