Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 30

An Imagined Dialogue for the Dispute Between Paul & Barnabas in Acts Part 2 by Angus Nisbet

Here Angus Nisbet continues his discussion of Paul and Barnabas and the dispute they had, where he gets into more fascinating issues, involving what might lie behind the dispute and how non-canonical writings that did not make it into the NT might help us figure it out.  There are some controversial views here.  What do [...]

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A Particular Problem with a Crucified Messiah

In my previous post I started to show that most Jews rejected Christian claims about Jesus because Jesus was just the *opposite* of what the messiah was expected to be.  The messiah was to be a figure of grandeur and power who would overthrow God’s enemies and set up a new kingdom on earth in [...]

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Paul and the Crucified Messiah in 1 Corinthians

Historians usually have reasons for what they say; that is, when they make a historical claim, it is almost always based on a close reading of the surviving sources.  When it’s not, they’re just blowin’ smoke.  But if they’re reputable scholars AND are blowin’ smoke – that is, taking a guess –they’ll usually tell you.  [...]

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Why Would A Christian Author Lie About Who He Was?

In my previous post I said a bit about “forgeries” in the NT, that is, books whose authors claimed to be a famous person (Peter, Paul, James, Jude), knowing full well they were someone else.  In the ancient world, these books were called “lies” (pseudoi) or “books inscribed with a lie” (pseudepigrapha).  But why would [...]

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Blog Etiquette in These Troubling Times!

In these massively troubling times (no need for me to itemize the issues) and the incredibly disturbing bifurcation of opinions, views, and perspectives, where very few people have even the slightest interest in listening to someone on "the other side," there is at least one thing that virtually everyone agrees on:  these are massively troubling [...]

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An Imagined Dialogue for the Dispute Between Paul & Barnabas in Acts Part I by Angus Nisbet

Here is the first of a four-post thread for Platinum members by long-standing Platinum member Angus Nisbet.  It is a terrifically imaginative discussion of Paul and Barnabas (focused on the book of Acts) that touches on a wide range of issues that we deal with a lot on the blog -- Paul's conflict wiht other [...]

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Forged Books, Anonymous Books, and The Use of Secretaries as Authors in the NT

My books Forged, for normal human beings, and Forgery and Counterforgery, for abnormal scholars, both deal with issues of the authorship of the writings of the New Testament (and other books in early Christianity) and with why there are good reasons for thinking that some of them were forgeries (written in the name of famous people like Paul [...]

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Unexpected Social Agendas in the New Testament. Who Woulda Thought?

Most Christians turn to the Bible to some degree or another for guidance on their ethical views and perspectives on social agendas.  For those who read it closely, the Bible can be problematic ethically.  Most people realize there is a problem with the endorsement of slavery in the Bible (both Old and New Testaments); few [...]

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Jesus as God in the New Testament

One of my personal favorite books (of mine!) is How Jesus Became God.  In my New Testament textbook, The New Testament: A Historical  Introduction, now in its eighth edition with Hugo Mendez, we include a couple of brief discussions of the topic in two of the sidebars.  One of the tricks in writing a textbook [...]

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Oral Traditions and the Dates of Our Gospels

As many of you know, this past year I published the 8th edition of my textbook The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the New Testament (Oxford University Press, 2024), but this time, rather than doing it myself, I asked my colleague Hugo Mendez to join me in editing / updating it, and truth be told, [...]

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