Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 298

Bart Ehrman vs Richard Bauckham – Round 1

This is a debate I had on April 9,2016 with Richard J. Bauckham, a well-known and influential British scholar who has written extensively on many of the areas of my own interest, the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the non-canonical literature. He is a fine scholar, and a conservative Christian, and I disagree with him on, well, so many things!

This was the first of a two-part debate that was hosted by Justin Brierley on his weekly radio show “Unbelievable,” aired on UK Premier Chri...

The Fear of Hell, Good Debaters, and the Name of God: Mailbag April 22, 2016

For this week’s readers’ mailbag I have chosen three unusually unrelated questions, one on whether we should be afraid of going to hell, one on how I prepare for public debates, and one on how we got the name Jehovah from the Hebrew name of God, YHWH. This shows just how wide ranging your questions can be on this blog! If you one you would like me to address in the future, let me know.

QUESTION:

What would you say to someone who is scared of going to hell?

RESPONSE:

I suppose the first thing...

Older Explanations for Why Christianity Succeeded

In yesterday’s post I indicated some of the major issues involved with the question of how Christianity managed to take over the Roman Empire, as spelled out in the Prospectus that I wrote in hopes of finding a publisher interested in signing up my book In this post I’ll give another excerpt from the Prospectus, in which I discuss some of the common answers one can find in books and articles about the matter. How have scholars in the modern world explained the amazing success of the Christian...

The Triumph of Christianity: The Ultimate Question

I have begun now a new thread, which I anticipate will be a rather long one, on the book I am currently working on, which I have tentatively titled (recognizing that my tentative titles rarely actually become the title!) The Triumph of Christianity. I indicated in my previous post that I wrote up a prospectus to give to publishers in order to see if they were interested in offering a contract for the book. The prospectus ended up being about 17 pages long (double-spaced). As I mentioned alrea...

The New Book: The Triumph of Christianity

When my agent Roger and I decided that we might want to explore the possibility of going with a different publisher, the first step was to come up with a book proposal to shop around. For ten years or so I had been wanting to write a particular book, but had always put it off because it had seemed like such a MAJOR undertaking. I came to think that this was the perfect time to pursue it, to propose doing a new book on a completely new topic with a new publisher as a new beginning.

The book wa...

Getting a Literary Agent

I am now ready to talk about how I switched trade publishers, so that now I have a two-book contract with Simon & Schuster, after being with Harper for some thirteen years. As I mentioned in a previous note, I had a particularly close and productive relationship with my editor at Harper, Roger. A couple of years ago, when I was just starting to work on the book that just came out (Jesus Before the Gospels), Roger called me and left a message that he had some bad news and needed to talk with m...

New Archaeological Discoveries and the Bible! Readers Mailbag April 16, 2016

Today I address two interesting questions on the weekly mailbag, one about the new archaeological discovery in Israel and the other on whether in my last book I violated my own advice about requiring only experts to write for popular audiences. If you have a question you would like me to address, let me know!

QUESTION:

Does the latest information on the discovery of written texts from before the removal of the Israelite’s to Babylon indicating a wider level of literacy in 7th century BCE ch...

Getting a First Book Published

I regularly get emails from people who want to break into publishing for the first time, who ask me “How can I get my book published?” As I indicated in my previous posts, almost always what they have in mind is not a work of scholarship for scholars but a trade book for a general audience. And so here is a weird fact about me: even though I have been publishing trade books for eighteen years, I’m not completely sure of the answer. But I know some things, and in this post I’ll indicate what t...

Who Should Write Trade Books?

Most people who contact me about a book they would like to write – or that they have written – are not talking about a work of scholarship (though some are); they are talking about a book that they would like to publish that “reaches the masses.” They have some ideas about early Christianity, the historical Jesus, the life and writings of Paul, the Gospels, the entire Bible, or some related topic, and they would like to publish a book to make their views known.

I never encourage them.

This wi...

Being Qualified to Write a Scholarly Book

The goal of this thread is to talk about the book that I’m working on now, which I hope to have written (gods willing) by the end of this calendar year. We’ll see. To get to that I felt like I needed to talk about how I had changed publishers, and now that I’m talking about that, it occurs to me that I should talk about how one goes about getting a book published.

One of the emails I get *all* the time is from authors who have written a book, or hope to write a book, who want to know how they...