Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 286

Why Was the Emperor Worshiped?

This will be my last post about the worship of the Roman emperor as a god. I have been trying to make several major points in this thread. So let me begin by summarizing them:

The reason worshiping the man who ruled the empire would not have seemed bizarre to ancient people was that there was not thought to be an enormous chasm between the divine and human realms (as there is for most people today). There were some gods who were beyond our imagination, and others that were far less powerful...

Faith and History: A Blast From the Past

Here is a post that I made exactly four years ago today, on a topic of perennial interest: the relationship between theological belief and historical study:

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I receiveda number of responses to my post yesterday about faith and history – some on the blog itself and some via emails (I prefer questions/comments on the blog itself, by the way, as I can deal with them more efficiently. In case anyone should ask you which I prefer

Debate with a Mythicist! And the Book of Revelation. Readers’ Mailbag September 25, 2016

In this week’s Mailbag I’ll be addressing two questions, one about me personally – my preparations for the upcoming debate with Robert Price on the question of whether Jesus even existed as a human being – and the other about the book of Revelation. If you have a question you would like me to address on the Mailbag, simply ask it in a comment on this post or any other.

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QUESTION

It seems the debate between yourself and R...

The God Julius Caesar

I mentioned in a previous post the scarcely-remembered-these-days Diogenes Poliorcetes (Diogenes, the Conqueror of Cities), who was acclaimed as a divine being by a hymn-writer (and others) in Athens because he liberated them from their Macedonian overlords. I should point out that this great accomplishment paled with time, and he did some other things that the Athenians did not find so useful or approve of, and the rescinded their adoration of him.

My point was that sometimes military men/po...

Rulers as Gods: The Context of Ancient Religion

Why did ancient people in the Greek and Roman worlds sometimes consider political leaders as gods? That’s the question I’m dealing with in this series of posts. And I think now, after a good bit of background, I’m able to begin to answer it.

The gods in Greek and Roman thought were considered to be superhuman. Unlike, say, the (animal-shaped) gods of Egypt, the Greek and Roman gods were literally in human form. When they appeared here on earth to humans they were often “bigger than life,” but...

When Men Became Gods: My Lecture in Denmark

As I indicated earlier, I am in Denmark this week giving talks. I’m staying in Copenhagen, a fabulous city, but two of my talks are in Odense, an hour and a half (very pleasant) train ride from here. I am being sponsored by the University of Southern Denmark, which invited me almost a year ago now to give a lecture to students and faculty on the relationship between the Roman Imperial cult (the worship of the Roman emperor as a divine being) and the rise of Christology (the understanding of C...

Bart Ehrman vs. Michael Brown on Suffering

In my post on Saturday I discussed the issue of death and laid out briefly my view that this life is all there is. That does not mean, however, that I think we should just party-hard since there is no life to come. I have long been intrigued by the “problem of suffering,” and I have never, in fact, taken it to be just an intellectual problem. I think as human beings we need to deal with suffering if we want to lead life to its fullest. But I’m still intrigued with the problem: how can there c...

Fear of Dying etc.: Weekly Readers Mailbag, September 18, 2016

What is my personal feeling toward death? That’s the first of two questions in this weeks’ Readers’ Mailbag!

QUESTION:

How do you feel about dying? Is that not in some part terrifying? And us losing our loved ones forever? How do you get over that?

RESPONSE:

Ah, how do I feel about dying? In general, I’m against it.

The Divine Realm in Antiquity

I have started a thread on my current interest, the relationship of the imperial cult (the Roman worship of the emperors) to the rise of Christology (the understandings of Christ). Both Caesars (especially deceased ones, but in some parts of the empire, also the living one) and Christ (by most of his followers, now that he too was deceased) were thought of and called “Savior,” “Lord,” “Son of God,” and even “God.”

Most people would know that was true of Christ. But why was it true of the Roma...

The Rise of the Roman Empire

I want to suspend for a time – not cancel altogether! – the thread I have been pursuing on how I came to be interested in the textual criticism of the New Testament, which itself is a spin-off (using roughly similar metaphors) of the bigger thread that I started, which at the time of inception I anticipated would be all of two posts long, of why I ended up being equipped to write trade books more than most of my colleagues who were doing research that, on the surface, seemed to be far more am...