Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 334

New Manuscripts and the Destruction of Antiquities

As many of you know, in 2012 I had a public debate in Chapel Hill with Dan Wallace, professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary, on the question of whether we have the original New Testament or not. During the debate he dropped a bombshell, on me and all of us. He mysteriously claimed that now we have a first-century copy of the Gospel of Mark. This would be a copy well over a century older than any other that exists, and would give us a copy that is very close in date to the or...

Whom Do We Admit into our Graduate Program?

So, now finally to get to the question I was asked, which led me into a discussion of what our graduate program entails. Here was the original question

QUESTION: Can you write something about the background of your PhD students, how you selected them, what makes a prospective doctoral candidate stand out against the pack, whether there is a huge academic gulf between knowledge and argumentative skills of your undergraduates and research students.

RESPONSE: Like all good graduate programs, ours...

Public Reactions to Muslim Extremists

I have never used this Blog as a platform for my particular political views (even though I suppose they are easily enough seen by a careful reader) or to convert anyone to them. And I’m not about to start now. But I do have a category of comment on the blog, not used very often, on “Religion in the News.” And a couple of news items appeared this past week that are “close to home” for me – one involving Duke University, which is literally close to home (less than a mile from where I live, move...

New Testament Programs and Ancient Med.

Teaching graduate students in the field of Ancient Mediterranean Religions – even if one’s subfield is the New Testament and early Christianity – can be very different from teaching the same field in a divinity school, as I began to indicate last time. At least it is very different from the field as it was taught at Princeton Theological Seminary, where I went. New Testament faculty there principally taught courses on exegesis – that is the interpretation of Scripture. These courses did have...

Ancient Mediterranean Religions?!?

Being trained in a PhD program in a seminary or divinity school is very different from being trained in a secular research university. I know this full well, because my PhD was from Princeton Theological Seminary, but my graduate teaching has all been at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

I sometimes find it amusing that some of my critics attack my credentials for interpreting the New Testament because – they say – I was principally trained to be a textual critic, that is, not a...

Departments of Religious Studies

In my previous post I began to address the question of what we look for when students apply to enter into our PhD program. To make sense of what I have to say about that, I need to give yet more background into what our program *is*. In my previous post I started discussing how programs of religious studies in secular colleges and universities began to appear after WWII.

My department has always claimed to be the first full-fledged Department of Religious Studies in any state university in the...

The Graduate Program in Religious Studies

QUESTION: Can you write something about the background of your PhD students, how you selected them, what makes a prospective doctoral candidate stand out against the pack, whether there is a huge academic gulf between knowledge and argumentative skills of your undergraduates and research students.

RESPONSE: Ah, this is an interesting question, and as I’ve thought about it I’ve realized that there are lots of things that I take for granted about the process of admitting students into our gradua...

Defending Myself

Several times a week I get emails from people who ask what it’s like to be the subject of such vitriolic attack by those who don’t agree with my views. Or they express regret and sorrow that I am so often or viciously attacked. Or they want me to stand up for myself and reply to my attackers. Almost always, when I get one of these emails, I think to myself: Am I being attacked by someone??? Huh. *That’s* interesting.

The reality is that for the most part I’m blissfully unaware of assaults on m...

My Forgery Seminar (Syllabus)

The academic semester, alas, has begun, as of this past Wednesday. As usual, I’ll be teaching two courses. My undergraduate class, as is true every spring, is “Introduction to the New Testament.” My PhD seminar, this term, is “Literary Forgery in the Early Christian Tradition.” I’ve taught this class twice before, but now I have my book (Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literacy Deceit in Early Christian Polemics) to structure the course. I’ve never had one of my books as the focus of...

Matthew’s “Filling Full” of Scripture

In the last post I indicated one way that Matthew understood Jesus to have fulfilled Scripture – a prophet predicted something about the messiah (to be born of a virgin; to be born in Bethlehem, etc.) and Jesus did or experienced what was predicted. There’s a second way as well, one with considerable implications for understanding Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus. Here’s how I talk about it in my textbook on the New Testament

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The sec...