Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 330

The Community Behind the Gospel of John: Part 2

In the last post I began to discuss what we can know about the history of the community that produced (or that produced someone who produced) the Gospel of John. The reason for dealing with this question is this: one of the overarching theses of my book on memory and the historical Jesus is that the things we experience in the present affect how we remember the past. They affect which parts of the past we remember (if they something in the past isn’t relevant for something in the present, we...

The Community Behind the Gospel of John

In chapter 6 of my proposed book Jesus Before the Gospels, after I deal with collective memory in theory, I move on to talk about how Jesus was remembered in three different early Christian communities, those behind the Gospels of Mark (our earliest canonical Gospel), John (our latest canonical Gospel), and Thomas (our best known non-canonical Gospel). One thing we have learned from memory studies is that the present affects not only what is remembered about the past, but also how it is remem...

More on Collective Memory

As I discussed in my previous post, the sixth chapter of my proposed book Jesus Before the Gospels will cover the area of “collective memory.” This is a kind of memory that a lot of people don’t seem to be aware of, but it has long been discussed by sociologists. Here is how I summarize the views of the famous scholar who first articulated an understanding of collective memory, Maurice Halbwachs.

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The term “collective memory” was...

My Memory Book, Chapter 6 on “Collective Memory”

The sixth chapter of my book Jesus Before the Gospels is tentatively entitled “Collective Memory and Early Recollections of Jesus.” In it I deal with the phenomenon that sociologists call collective memory. This phenomenon is different from the one we normally think of when we think of memory; most of the time we think of the psychological phenomenon of individual memories – either of things we’ve experienced (“episodic” memories, as they are called, as I have pointed out), or or things we ha...

My Memory Book: False Memories and the Life of Jesus

As I indicated in my previous two posts, the fifth chapter of the book I’m now writing, Jesus Before The Gospels, deals with “False Memories and the Life of Jesus.” The first part of the chapter shows what we know about how traditions are kept alive in oral cultures, as they are told and retold, either by professionals who are experts or by regular ole folk who are not. And so this part of the chapter summarizes the research into oral cultures undertaken by anthropologists.

Of course there ar...

BBC Clip on “The Lost Gospels”

On Tuesday the 21st, September 2010, BBC FOUR aired “The Lost Gospels.” I was one of the talking heads. The presenter was an interesting fellow, an Anglican priest Pete Owen Jones. The show included several on-location discourses. They flew me to Egypt for the taping. Some of it was done near the village of Nag Hammadi, at the spot where the so-called “Nag Hammadi Library” was discovered in 1945. The fourteen books found in a jar in this wilderness area contain 52 tractates, the famous “Gno...

On Being Controversial

In this post I am going to take a bit of time out to do some self-reflection. An issue I’ve been puzzling over for some time is the fact that people keep referring to my work as “controversial.” I hear this all the time. And truth be told, I’ve always found it bit odd and a disconcerting. This past week I’ve had two people tell me that they know that I “like to be controversial.” That’s actually not the case at all. One person told me that she had seen a TV show where someone had said that th...

“The Same” Traditions in Oral Cultures

As I have been discussing my next book Jesus Before the Gospels, I have been trying to summarize the issues I’ll be addressing and the points I’ll be making, without spilling all the beans and stealing my own thunder. My idea is to get people interested in the book without making them think they don’t now need to read it! I’m not sure how successful I’m being at that, but it’s at least the goal.

As I started indicating in the previous post, chapter 5 deals with issues involving oral tradition...

Differences Between Oral and Written Cultures

Chapter 5 of my book Jesus Before the Gospels (tentatively titled) is called “False Memories and the Life of Jesus” (tentatively titled). The first part of the chapter deals with a very common misconception about oral traditions in oral cultures – a misconception I hear all the time from lots of people, including my students who get upset when I discuss how traditions about Jesus appear to have been altered in the process of retelling in the years before the Gospels were written. The misconce...

My Memory Book, Chapter 4 Again: The Death of Jesus

I am in the midst of a thread summarizing my current book project, Jesus Before the Gospels, which I am writing now, even as we speak. The book will have six major chapters and a short conclusion. Yesterday I finished drafting chapter 5, and hope to polish off the final two chapters next week, before revising it and sending it out to readers for comments.

In my previous posts I said some things about chapter 4, “False Memories and the Death of Jesus.” This chapter begins with a short summary...