Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 308

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...

Buying David Lambert’s Book at Discount

Dear CIA Blogging Crowd,

I just received the following from David Lambert, hopefully of some interest to you! Here is what he says:

A couple of comments on the Facebook page complained about the price of the book. I received a code from Oxford that would allow people to purchase the book for a bit less if they were interested. I checked, and it looks like they’re still honoring it. Do you think it might be possible to post that in some fashion in connection to my posts? The link for the book...

Do I Have the Expertise Needed for My Book?

QUESTION:

You have criticized other scholars for writing on subjects outside their fields of expertise – Reza Aslan, for instance, for his book on the historical Jesus when he is a sociologist, not a historian of religion. Have you considered editing a work with experts in the various fields that speak to the eyewitness to tradition to textual pipeline? Would such a collaboration likely be any more informative to a general audience?

RESPONSE:

Ah, great question! I’m going to answer what I...

Did Jesus Urge People to Repent?

Below is the third guest post by my colleague David Lambert, connected to his book How Repentance Became Biblical. For many readers of the blog, this will be the most important and interesting of them all. It deals with the historical Jesus. Did Jesus tell people that they needed to repent? You might think the answer is obvious….

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Did Jesus Preach Repentance?

In my past two posts, I argued that the concept of repentance, as we...

Press Release! Jesus Before the Gospels

In just over a month now, my new book, Jesus Before the Gospels, will be published. As avid readers of the blog know, for a couple of years I was obsessed with issues related to human memory and oral tradition, especially as these relate to the question of how the stories about Jesus were being transmitted, shaped, altered, and invented as they were told year after year, decade after decade, before the Gospels were written. It was these remembered/ altered / invented stories that the Gospel w...

Weekly Readers’ Mailbag: January 24, 2016

A day late, here is this (past) week’s Readers Mailbag. I will be dealing with two questions this time, one on why Mark includes Aramaic words in his accounts of Jesus’ sayings and the other on where someone might find English versions of the surviving Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. If you too have a question, simply ask it here as a comment, or send me an email, and I will add it to the list!

QUESTION:

Why is Mark sometimes quoting Jesus in Aramaic? I know, that Jesus cry on cross...