Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 307

Readers’ Weekly Mailbag: January 2, 2016

It is weekly Readers’ Mailbag time again. If you have a question you would like me to address in a future post, just comment here, or send me a private email. Today there are three questions, on three very different topics: the goddess Sophia, the rise of non-apocalyptic Christianity, and the evidence for John the Baptist.

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QUESTION: In your debate with Justin Bass, you mention the divinity of Sophia. I googled “Sophia” and can...

Blog Year in Review 2015

The year is now fading away (or blasting out, depending on your perspective), and I want to take a few minutes to reflect on how the Blog has been doing since last year at this time. We started this venture in April 2012, so by one way of calculating, 2015 was our fourth year of operation. By most standards and criteria it was our most successful year yet, possibly by a large margin.

When I started the blog one of my main concerns was that I would run out of things to talk about in a year or...

Jesus’ Resurrection as an Apocalyptic Event

In my previous post I started to discuss the eschatological implications drawn by Jesus’ followers once they became convinced that he had been raised from the dead. I pointed out that the very fact that they interpreted their visions of him as evidence of “resurrection” shows that they must have been apocalyptic Jews prior to his death (as I have argued on other grounds ad nauseum on the blog!). And I also suggested two of the key conclusions they drew with respect to eschatology (their under...

Jesus’ Return to Life as a Resurrection

So far I have talked about the significance of the belief in Jesus’ resurrection for both Christology (the understanding of who Jesus was) and soteriology (the understanding of how salvation works). It also was significant for eschatology (the understanding of what would happen at the end of time).

Christologically, the resurrection proved that Jesus really was the favored one of God, appearances notwithstanding. It may have *seemed* like the crucifixion would show that Jesus was not God’s so...

The Death of the Messiah for Salvation

In a previous post I argued that Christians invented the idea of a suffering messiah. Because Jesus was (for them) the messiah, and because he suffered, therefore the messiah *had* to suffer. That was clear and straightforward for the Christians. They backed up their newly devised theology by appealing to Scripture, finding passages of the Bible where a righteous person suffered but was then vindicated by God, passages such as Isaiah 53, Psalm 22, Psalm 69 and so on. They reinterpreted these...

End of Year Giving

December 31 is fast coming upon us, and many of us have very clear and certain reasons (involving nasty little inconveniences like annual taxes) to make end-of-the-year contributions to charities. Please consider giving a gift to the Bart Ehrman Foundation. Donations are 100% tax-deductible. Give any amount you want or can – tens of dollars, hundreds of dollars, thousands, millions. To pull it off, simply go to the bottom of this page, click “Donate,” and go from there. Every penny you give...

Readers’ Mailbag: December 27, 2015

QUESTION: [Bart has said:] “Jesus must have been called the messiah during his lifetime, or it makes no sense that he would be called messiah after his death”: [Comment:] By this line of reasoning, then surely one would conclude that Jesus was considered divine during his lifetime, else it makes no sense he would be considered divine after his death?

RESPONSE: The first line in the question is a quotation of a view I have elaborated on the blog. The logic, in short (see the posts for a fulle...

A Christmas Reflection

Yesterday I posted an article that I wrote that provided one view of Christmas, one that is informed more by my scholarship than anything else. But Christmas is about a LOT more than scholarship! I have a personal sentimental attachment to the season, as I explain in this other article I wrote some ten years ago, and that I posted early on in the history of the blog. Here it is again, a more upbeat assessment of the season:

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Growing...

The Myth of the First Christmas

Over the years I’ve been asked to write short articles on the meaning of Christmas for various news magazines. Looking back at some of these articles makes me realize how many different views of the season seem to be competing with each other inside my head. Or maybe I’ve just been in different moods!

I thought I would reproduce a couple of these articles on the blog. The following is one I wrote a few years ago for the British journal The New Statesman. I called it “The Myth of the First Chr...

Holiday Presents!

I still have a few free one-year blog memberships to give out, thanks to the impressive generosity of many of you, who graciously donated funds so that others who cannot afford membership could be given a year subscription. Do you know anyone who would love to be on the blog but simply can’t afford it? We can give them a great present for the holiday season. All they have to do is write me and explain why they can’t afford the dues (they don’t have to give all the gory details! Just enough...