Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 291

My Original Interest in Textual Criticism

As I have indicated, my interest in textual criticism – the scholarly attempt to reconstruct what the authors of the New Testament actually wrote, given the fact we don’t have the originals but only altered copies – did not originate with my going to Princeton Theological Seminary to study with Bruce Metzger. On the contrary, I went to study with him precisely because that had been an area of fascination for me starting in my first year of college, as an eighteen year old.

I mentioned already...

Becoming a Textual Critic

Back to my narrative of how I got interested in biblical studies, and specifically textual criticism. I was just thinking last night about how people (on the blog or elsewhere) sometimes report to me that they have heard my conservative evangelical critics say that I’m not a biblical interpreter (exegete) or a historian, but I’m a textual critic (someone who studies the manuscripts of the New Testament). And I started thinking about all my training in the Bible and the history of early Christ...

Does James Contradict Paul?

I have a number of questions that I want to address in my Readers’ Mailbag, but one particularly important one requires a rather long response, and so I dedicate this entire week’s mailbag to answering it. Here it is:

QUESTION:

Bart, what is your view with regard to Paul and James teaching on the doctrine of justification by faith – are they contradictory?

RESPONSE:

Ah, this is a perennial question among readers of the New Testament. I deal with it at some length in my textbook, The New Te...

How You Can Help!

Last week I asked you what you really liked about the blog and what you would recommend we change. I was gratified to hear lots of things people like and even more gratified to hear relatively few things that people don’t! I have taken all of your comments to heart and will keep doing things that seem to be working and try to change things that are not.

My big concern in sending out my request for feedback was that our fundraising is not keeping pace with last year, at a time when I want to b...

Where Did the Trinity Come From? Video Lecture.

Here is the third of my three talks that I gave last year atCoral Gables Congregational Church in (suprise) Coral Gables, Florida, on my book, “How Jesus Became God.” This lecture deals with one of the most important questions in Christian thinking: where did the idea and doctrine of the Trinity come from? Good question! I try to answer it in this video. Enjoy!

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How Jesus Became God -UCC Part 3 of 3:

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How I Discovered Textual Criticism

It was at Moody Bible Institute that I first became interested in the textual criticism of the New Testament. Let me stress a definitional point that some readers on the blog have not gotten or understood (I’ve said it a lot, so apologies for those who have gotten it! But even though I keep saying this, some people still don’t get it). Textual criticism is NOT the study of texts to see what they mean. For the last time (well, probably not): it is not the interpretation of texts. Textual criti...

Learning to Teach at Moody

I will not be continuing this autobiographical thread (thread within a thread) for much longer (you may be glad to know), but I do want to get to the ultimate point (for the thread outside the thread), which is why by a couple of quirks/flukes I ended up better equipped to write books for general audiences than most of my colleagues in my PhD program. The first has to do with what happened with me back in my days at Moody when I was learning tons about what was actually in the Bible (and the...

Moody Bible Boot Camp

Back to my narrative about becoming trained in the Bible (as a prelude to what I started talking about — why my later technical training actually made me better prepared for writing books for general audiences than my peers who were not at all interested in the technical side of things). So, I went to Moody Bible Institute – and took that entrance Bible exam – when I was all of seventeen years old. And it was during my first semester that I decided what I wanted to do with my life.

I really,...

Am I A Better Person as an Agnostic? A Blast from the Past

I have started re-posting some of my posts from three or four years ago on occasion, at the suggestion of several people on the blog. Frankly, I don’t remember even writing most of them! Here is one from four years ago, a response to the question of how losing my faith affected me — did it make me a better (or worse) person?

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QUESTION:

Dr. Ehrman, I am still reading your book (God’s problem) which seems to be very i...

Were Jesus and His Followers Armed?

Were Jesus and his followers armed? That’s the question for this week’s Readers’ Mailbag. I had started to address the question when I realized that I had already said what I have to say as well as I could say it in my recent book Jesus Before the Gospels. And so I will give that discussion here. So, here’s the question and my response

QUESTION :

What is the scholarly view on this subject: did Jesus himself, his movement and then early Christians walk around with weapons (swords, e.g.) to pro...