Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 328

How I’m Writing This Book

I have been asked about how I am actually writing my book just now. Here are some reflections.

One of the things you figure out pretty quickly when writing a book is that it never goes as planned. Things (usually) take longer than you thought they would; or they (rarely) go faster. For most authors, the structure of the book changes as they start writing it, and they realize that they really have to say more about this and they really probably should say less about that. They realize that, co...

Sketch of My Memory Book

Please read to the end of this post if you want to learn about a highly unusual opportunity.

I started writing my book on memory and the oral traditions about Jesus this week. My plan was to have an intense week at it. I’m teaching my regular two classes this term: a three-hour PhD seminar on the use of literary forgery in the early Christian tradition, and an undergraduate lecture course, Introduction to the New Testament. So I had to do those this week as well, in addition to departmental m...

Remembering Lincoln

I thought I would take a post to give you a taste of one of my early chapters in my book on Memory. It is in very rough draft, so don’t expect much. But this passage deals with the topic of my last post, “collective” memory. Here I use the example of how we remember, or misremember, the life and views of Abraham Lincoln.

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In 2014 a poll was taken of 162 members of the American Political Science Association, asking them to rank all...

Different Kinds of Memory

I indicated in the last post that I got interested in the study of memory for both personal and professional reasons. Professionally, I had long been interested in the question of how eyewitnesses would have remembered the life of Jesus, and how the stories about Jesus may have been shifted and altered and invented in later times based on faulty or even false memories. That led me to be interested in memory more broadly.

Memory is an enormous field of research, just within cognitive psycholog...

My Original Interest in Memory

When I decided no longer to do a commentary on the Gospel of Peter and other early Greek Gospel fragments it was not only because I realized that I was not up for two or three years of that particular kind of laborious detailed work. It was also because there was another area of research that I was really, really interested in but that I knew very little about. That was the study of memory.

I was interested in memory for both personal and professional reasons. On the personal level, I have kn...

Why I Shifted My Research Plans

In my last post I started explaining how I came to work on issues of memory. My plan had been something else, to write a detailed commentary on the Gospel of Peter and other early Greek Gospel fragments. I had been committed to do this for years, with a book contract with Fortress Press for their commentary series that is called Hermeneia.

Just by way of background: when I was just out of graduate school, I vowed to myself that there were three kinds of books I would never, ever write. I woul...

My New Project on Memory

I am going to take a break from my thread that has been dealing with which books from Christian antiquity I would most like to have discovered. I haven’t gotten very deep into the thread: basically my answers so far have been: the lost letters of Paul, the letters of Paul’s opponents, and Q. There are a lot more that I’d like to discuss, and will discuss relatively soon. But for now I’m going to break off into something else, because I am at a crucial point of my research/writing and I want t...

Jesus, Matthew, and the Law

In my previous post I discussed the differences – what strike me, at least, as the differences – between the Gospel of Matthew and Paul’s letter to the Galatians and with respect to whether the followers of Jesus are to follow the law or not. Matthew’s Gospel indicates that the law will not cease to be in force until the heavens and earth pass away, and that Jesus’ followers need to follow the law to the limit, to follow it even better than the scribes and Pharisees do. Paul, on the other han...

Is Paul at Odds with Matthew?

In yesterday’s post I indicated that I really very much wish that we could have some of the writings produced by Paul’s opponents in Galatia. They believed that in order to be a follower of Jesus, a person had to accept and follow the Law of Moses as laid out in the Jewish Scriptures. Men were to be circumcised to join the people of God; men and women were, evidently, to adopt a Jewish lifestyle. Presumably that meant keeping kosher, observing the Sabbath, and so on. Anyone who didn’t do this...

Paul’s Christian Enemies: Galatians

In my previous post I indicated that among the lost writings of early Christianity, one batch that I would especially like to see discovered would be those produced by Paul’s enemies among the Christians. I don’t know how many of his opponents were writing-literate, but possibly some of them were, and their own attacks on him and defenses of their own positions would be fascinating and eye-opening. Among these, I would especially love to see what his opponents in Galatia had to say for themse...