Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 3

Scheduled Blog Maintenance – Monday Sept. 8th

If you've been following along with the blog the last few years, you've probably heard various rumblings about a new blog platform. You might have even have periodically wondered, "Is that project still happening? What's the latest?"  We're excited to let you know that the first phase of the new platform we've been working on [...]

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Questions: Did Paul state that Jesus was put in a tomb? Is Jesus like Pagan gods? Is the hope for a messiah like the belief in Santa?

Here some more of the excellent questions I have received from readers, and my responses.   QUESTION: Dale Allison has said that the word for buried in 1 Corinthians 15 means to be buried in a mass grave, tomb or stone cave but it does not mean in a shallow grave where bird eat the [...]

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1 Thessalonians at a Glance, and Questions for Reflection

I now provide a bullet point list that summarizes "at a glance" Paul's very first surviving letter (and therefore the earliest Christian writing of any kind that we have!), along with some questions to reflect on based on this very interesting text.  It's a short but fascinating letter; if you don't remember it very well, [...]

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Paul’s Letter to the Galatians “At a Glance” and Questions for Reflection

I see that I have fallen behind in this series on the “New Testament in a Nutshell” in my posts that provide a bullet-point overview of each book (“at a glance”) and the kinds of questions I ask my students to reflect on after they have studied the text.  Catch-up time!  Here I deal with [...]

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The Birth of Christianity (My Other Class): Check Out the Writing Assignments!

I am (also) this semester teaching one of my favorite undergraduate courses, The Birth of Christianity, which more or less covers the history and literature of Christianity from just after the New Testament period up to the mid to end of the 4th century, focusing mainly on issues of the second and third centuries.  For [...]

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The Bible and Suffering: My NEW Course at UNC This Term

For the first time since roughly the Pleistocene Age, I am teaching a new and different undergraduate course at UNC this semester.  It's a course I taught in a very different form when I was just starting out at Rutgers, in probably 1986 or so; I haven't taught it since, and actually don't remember how [...]

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So Did Secretaries Write the Apostles’ Letters for Them?

Here is my second post on the use of secretaries in the ancient world, in which I discuss the issue of whether illiterate people (like Simon Peter, or John the son of Zebedee) could have had someone else write their books for them – so that 1 Peter *could* in some sense actually be by [...]

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Couldn’t 1 and 2 Peter Have Been Written By Peter’s Secretaries?

Over the 13+ years of this blog, every time I have talked about whether Peter (or any of Jesus's other disciples) probably did or even could write one of the books attributed to him, since he (and they) were Aramaic speakers who were almost certainly uneducated and illiterate, but the books are written in highly [...]

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For Further Reading on James, 1 Peter, and 2 Peter

Now that I’ve devoted several posts to summarizing the themes, emphases, authors, and occasions of the three Catholic epistles, I can provide some suggestions for further reading: important works written by scholars for non-scholars.  I have given brief annotations for each book to give you a sense of what it’s about and so help you [...]

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2 Peter: Who Wrote It, When, and Why?

Now that I have provided a summary of the major themes and emphases of the letter of 2 Peter, I can move to the question of who actually wrote it.  It claims, of course, to be written by Simeon (i.e. Simon) Peter, Jesus disciple.  But it is widely thought in fact to be pseudonymous, more [...]

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