Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 304

On the Accuracy of Oral Traditions

I have announced on the blog that my new book, Jesus Before the Gospels, will be available March 1. The book is about how the stories of Jesus were passed along by word of mouth for several decades before being written, and about how modern studies of both memory and oral cultures can help us understand what probably happened to the traditions as they circulated orally from one person to another over all those years.

In reaction to a previous post on the topic, a reader made the following int...

Are “Group Hallucinations” Possible? The Case of Mary.

Several people have asked me about my claim that “group hallucinations” are possible – that is, that a “vision” can be seen by many people at once. It seems counter-intuitive: aren’t hallucinations by definition the inner workings of a person’s mind? How can more than one person have the same hallucination at the same time?

Well, I’m not sure how that works, psychologically. My guess is that there is a strong sociological component as well – i.e., that something weird is seen by a number of p...

Upcoming Debate!

This coming weekend, Feb. 12-13, I will be holding a debate at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary on the topic “How Did Jesus Become God?” They are calling it a “Dialogue,” but that’s just because they’re being nice. It’s actually a great group of people, even though, as you might imagine, we agree on very little when it comes to matters of faith. My worthy opponent is Michael Bird. You may have heard of him. Back when I publishedHow Jesus Became God, he was the one who edited the res...

Weekly Readers’ Mailbag: February 7, 2016

Time for my weekly mailbag. Before dealing with two rather more direct questions that have come to me – one about eyewitness testimony and the other about whether I hope to get on Fresh Air and Colbert with the new book – I thought I would include an item that did not come to me from the blog, but on my Facebook page. It’s a brief exchange I had with some anonymous figure. I seem to have a lot of these. Please excuse his/her (lack of) syntax; grammar is evidently not a strong suit. But I thin...

Q & A about Jesus Before the Gospels, Part 1

Steven pointed out to me that the first part of the Q&A also got obliterated and sent into the stratosphere during our recent technological nightmare. So I need to re-post it. Here it is!

I have received a number of interesting questions about the book, raised by these three segments of Q&A. If you have any you would like me to address on the blog, let me know! Here is the original post:

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As I have already indicat...

Technical Problems on the Blog

Dear Bart Ehrman Blog Members,

We have been having technical problems on the blog for the past couple of days. A real pain in the wazoo. Some wacko in St. Petersburg Russia (really!) managed to muck things up, so that my past two posts (erg…) did not appear, all the comments you made since Jan. 30 *disappeared*, and I was blocked from accessing the blog myself. That’s all that it was – nothing else. But a big flippin’ pain.

Through his Herculean efforts, Steven has gotten it all back in shape...

Q & A about Jesus Before the Gospels, Part 3

Here is the third and last installment of the Q&A that I did with my publisher, HarperOne, about my new book Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Early Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior. (The final sentence of the final answer is, I think, the longest I’ve written in my life!!)

I’m getting excited about the book and its release on March 1. If you have any questions you would like to ask me about the book or its topic – how knowing about the workings of huma...

Q & A about Jesus Before the Gospels: Part 2

I have started to post the Q&A that I have done for my publisher (Harperone) on my new book (due out one month from today! March 1, 2016), Jesus Before the Gospels. I’m really excited about its release. In many ways it is very different from anything I’ve published before, even though it is dealing with the reliability of the Gospels.

Here is the second of three installments of the questions and answers.

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In the book, you look a...

Q & A on Jesus Before the Gospels, Part 1

As I have already indicated, my book Jesus Before the Gospels will be published in a month, on March 1. As part of the promotion and marketing of the book, I have written out a few answers to questions that my publicist presented to me, as a kind of Q&A that she can use for her work of getting the word out there. I answered twelve questions related to the book, and will post my responses here on the blog in three bite-size chunks. Here is chunk #1.

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Weekly Readers’ Mailbag: January 30, 2016

In this installment of the Weekly Readers’ Mailbag, I’ll address two questions, one about the Jewishness of Jesus the other about my personal (bad) experience with editors. If you have a question, either send it via a comment here or zap me an email.

QUESTION:

What is it in the NT portrayal of Jesus that tends to obscure the centrality of his Jewishness?

RESPONSE:

The person who asked this question mentioned the fact that it is only in fairly recent times, since the second half of the twent...