Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 311

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...

Desmond Tutu, True Christians, and Christmas

As often happens at this time of year, I have been thinking about how much I have in common with people who consider themselves committed Christians. A couple of events have recently happened that have made me more reflective about the common values I share with progressive people of faith (I’m leaving fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals out of the equation just now). I’ll talk about one of them here. It happened during my recent trip to South Africa (which ended just yesterday).

Sa...

Christians, Muslims, and God: Wheaton College in the News

I am sure that many of you have heard of the recent incident involving Christianity and Islam at Wheaton College, my alma mater, an evangelical liberal arts college outside of Chicago. Several readers have asked me about it. Here is a typical query:

QUERY:

Wheaton College was in the news this past week. Apparently one of the professors was suspended because she claimed that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Also, she wore a hijab to show solidarity with Muslims. You can read more a...

Jesus the Suffering Messiah

In a previous post I tried to show how the belief in Jesus’ resurrection completely altered the disciples’ perspective on who Jesus was. During his lifetime they thought he would be the future king of Israel; when he was crucified they realized they were wrong; when they then came to believe he had been raised they realized that they had been right, but in a way they did not at the time think. Jesus, for them, now that they believed he was raised, was far more than a human king. He was a divi...

Readers’ Mailbag December 18, 2015

It is time for my weekly Readers’ Mailbag. If you too have a question you would like me to address – on much of anything at all! – let me know, either by sending me an email or by commenting on this post. I’ll be dealing with two questions today, one on dealing with where apocalyptic views came from, the other with my personal experience as a born-again Christian who had been raised Episcopalian.

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QU...

The Resurrection of the Son of God

I’m in the midst of the most entangled thread I have yet produced in my well-over-three-years of doing the blog. It started with orthodox scribes who were altering their texts of Scripture (specifically Luke 22; this was part of a thread I began in April! I’ll get back to it….) and it has now managed by a number of intricate twists, turns, and interweavings to end up at the resurrection of Jesus.

I have been arguing that the resurrection radically changed the disciple’ understanding of the be...