Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 301

My Debate with Richard Bauckham – Round 2

Here is round two (two out of two) of my debate with Richard J. Bauckham join onthe radio show “Unbelievable,” a weekly program aired on UK Premier Christian Radio and hosted by Justin Brierley. Richard was in the station’s London studio, I was on the phone. Here we pursue other issues related to whether the Gospels of the NT represent distorted memories or if, for the most part, they can be trusted to be reliable because they are based on eyewitness testimony. Richard and I disagree about t...

The Death of Paul in Acts and Unrelated Topics: Readers’ Mailbag April 29, 2016

I will be dealing with three very different questions this week in my Weekly Readers’ Mailbag: why does the book of Acts not narrate the deaths of Peter and Paul; what is the difference between the Day of Atonement and the Passover; and how I dealt with discrepancies and contradictions when I was an evangelical Christian in college. If you have any questions for me to address, pass them along!

QUESTION:

If Acts was written after 75 CE why do you think Acts doesn’t contain details of Paul’s a...

The Early Growth of Christianity

I continue here the brief overview of the book that I’m now working on, The Triumph of Christianity. To this point I have identified the problem that the book is trying to resolve (how Christianity grew from a small group of illiterate Jewish peasants from Galilee to becoming something like 10% of the entire Roman Empire within 300 years), some of the earlier attempts to solve the problem, and one of the fundamental issues involved, the movement from being a Jewish sect to being a gentile rel...

From Jewish Sect to Gentile Church

I have been discussing and excerpting the Prospectus I wrote this last summer on my book that I have tentatively titled, The Triumph of Christianity. Here I discuss the beginning of the Christian mission, and how “Christianity” went from being a small Jewish sect to being a large number of gentile communities (with special emphasis on the work of Paul).

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From Jew to Gentile: The Rise of Christianity (two chapters)

This...

Roman Religion as the Context for Christianity

I have started to indicate how I laid out my prospectus for my next book The Triumph of Christianity, as I developed the idea this past summer. Remember: the prospectus was designed to get a publisher (or hopefully more than one) interested in publishing the book, and was based on, and presupposed, already a good bit of research. The prospectus was to show what the book was to be about, why it is both interesting and important, and how it would be, tentatively, be laid out.

The qualifier, “te...

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...