Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 298

I Need Some Suggestions!

Now that we are well into our fifth year of the blog, I want to pause and ask for some suggestions. As always, I’m happy to hear your suggestions in general, but I have a problem in particular that I’d like to address.

First, in general. Our goal, of course, is to increase membership on the blog, since the ultimate goal is to raise money for charities dealing with hunger and homelessness, through membership fees and donations.

Did I mention donations? I am completely gratified and humbled by...

Paul, Jesus, and the Messiah

My current thread on the blog is less like a thread and more like a tapestry. Ultimately it is all related to the book I’m now working on, The Triumph of Christianity, which is interested in the question of how the Christian movement that started with just a couple of dozen people after Jesus’ death (i.e., those who almost right away, soon thereafter, came to believe he had been raised from the dead) came to be a prominent religion by the early fourth century and the official religion of the...

Paul’s Own (and Only) Gospel

What does Paul mean in his letter to the Galatians when he says that he did not receive his gospel from humans but direct from God through a revelation of Jesus? Does he mean that he was the one (through direct divine inspiration) who came up with the idea that it was the death and resurrection of Jesus, rather than, say, Jesus’ life and teachings, that brings salvation? And if so, doesn’t that mean that Paul himself would be the founder and creator of Christianity, since Christianity is not...

Were Jesus’ Followers Crazy? Was He? Mailbag June 4, 2016

I’ll be dealing with two questions in this week’s Readers Mailbag, both dealing, as it turns out, with issues related to psychology and the early Christian movement: one has to do with why the followers of Jesus didn’t simply give up and disband when the end-of-the-world-apocalypse they had been anticipating didn’t happen (so that they were proven to be *wrong*) and the other about whether Jesus was, literally, crazy. Interesting questions! If you have one you would like me to address, just a...

The Core of Paul’s Gospel

A lot of people (at least in my experience) think that Paul is the one who should be considered the “founder” of Christianity – that he is the one who took Jesus’ simple preaching about the coming kingdom of God and altered and expanded it into a complicated doctrine of sin and redemption, being the first of Jesus’ followers to maintain that it was the death and resurrection of Jesus that brought about salvation. In my previous post I tried to show that this can’t be the case, because Paul wa...

Was Paul the Founder of Christianity?

It is often claimed that the Founder of Christianity was the apostle Paul – or at least that he was the co-Founder, along with Jesus. The idea behind this claim is that Christianity is not really about the historical Jesus. Yes, his words are hugely important, and yes it is also important to know that he did all those miraculous deeds. But his public ministry is not the core of Christian belief. Instead, the core of Christianity is the belief in his death and resurrection. And this is what Pa...

Paul as a Persecutor of the Church

The questions of what early Christianity originally *was* and of how it got *started* are closely related to one another. Both questions are also closely tied to the life, beliefs, and writings of Paul, for one very good reason: Paul is the first Christian author whose writings survive. Any discussion of Christianity before his time needs to consider at some length what he has to say. I should point out as well that a lot of modern people (including some scholars) claim that it was Paul himse...

A Personal Note and a Bit of a Bummer

This post is on a personal note and will be a bit self-indulgent, so if you’re looking for some information about the history or literature of early Christianity, this won’t the right time or place.

As many of you know from earlier blog posts, I was supposed to go off on a research trip to Greece (Athens), Egypt (Alexandria), and Italy (Rome), in connection with my work on my current project, The Triumph of Christianity (or whatever we call it) dealing with the Christianization of the Roman E...

Jesus’ Death; Good Scholars; and Writing the First Book: Readers’ Mailbag May 28, 2016

I have three rather wide ranging questions to deal with in this week’s Readers’ Mailbag: one on the understanding of Christ’s death as a sacrifice (or not); one on whom I like to read among NT scholars; and one on how to publish a scholarly book.

This should be fun! If you have a question you’d like me to address, simply ask it in any comment on any post (whether it’s relevant to the post or not).

QUESTION:

Would you agree with the statement of scholars like Marcus Borg that Jesus died BECAU...

The Resurrection and the Beginning of the Church

In my book on the Christianization of the Empire, I probably will not be talking about *how*, exactly, Christianity started. That’s a very thorny issue and not directly germane to what I want to do in the book. And I’ve talked about it a bit in a couple of my other books, especially How Jesus Became God and Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene.

In the former book my main interest was precisely what the title indicates. There I argued that the key event that made the followers of Jesus come to thin...