Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 335

On Debating a Fundamentalist

READER COMMENT:

I just came across a post by Kyle Butt regarding your debate with him in 2014:

http://www.apologeticspress.org/APContent.aspx?category=12&article=4844

He accuses you of “deception” and dishonesty. He says it is not credible that you spent much time writing books and going to debates, if it weren’t for the motive of convincing and persuading people that the Christian God doesn’t exist. He names you as someone who “has done as much or more than any single individual in modern times...

The Book of Revelation and the Apocalypse Genre

I’m devoting a thread to the book of Revelation and its interpretation. This began by my raising the issue of what 666 stands for, which led me to say a few things about the symbolism of the book, which occasioned several comments from readers wanting to know what my broader take is on how to interpret it.

Yesterday I began to stress the importance of knowing what an “apocalypse” is before trying to interpret any one particular apocalypse. Today I pursue that a bit more, by talking about this...

Apocalypticism and Apocalypses

In the just finished thread I discussed the number of the Beast, 666, in the context of the book of Revelation and its broader symbolism. In response, several readers asked me to say some more about Revelation (which by the ways does NOT have an “s” on the end!! That’s one of my pet pieves. It’s not the book of Revelations but the book of Revelation). So I think I’ll do two or three posts on it. It is the one book my students are *most* interested in. The book is so weird, so unlike anything...

666: The Number of the Beast

This post will be the culmination of my thread that deals with ancient numerology, especially as it is based on the fact that ancient languages used letters of the alphabets for their numbers, making it possible to add up the numerical equivalent of any word. In this post I will explain how that relates to one of the great mysteries of the Bible, the identification of the Antichrist in the book of Revelation, whose number was 666.

Yesterday’s post was meant as background to this brief discussi...

Symbolism in the Book of Revelation

I will soon conclude this thread dealing with the ancient use of letters of the alphabet for numerals by discussing the most famous instance of them all, the “number of the beast” in the Book of Revelation: 666. What is this number referring to?

I’ve decided that to make sense of this intriguing number, I need first to say a brief word about how the symbolism of the book works more generally. My students usually think of the book of Revelation as an amazing one-of-a-kind book, unlike anything...

Creative Uses of Numbers in Scripture

Here I resume my interrupted thread on the use of letters as numbers in ancient languages. As I had indicated earlier, Greek and Hebrew did not use a different system for their alphabets and their numerals, but the letters of the alphabet played double duty, so that each letter had a numerical value. One pay-off of that system was that every word had a numerical value, discovered simply by adding up the letters. In Greek, for example, the six letters in the name Jesus, Ιησους , add up to 888....

Debates For A Price

QUESTION:

Robert M. Price posted on his FB wall a few weeks ago that he was considering starting a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to debate Ehrman. Looks like things might be going ahead? Ehrman said on ‘The Skeptic Fence’ podcast a few months back that he’d be OK with debating Price. Reading between the lines, it looks like that they may made some sort of verbal agreement? Dr. Ehrman, are you aware of this challenge??

RESPONSE:

Ha! No, I’m afraid we haven’t made any kind of arrangement – B...

Three Murders in Chapel Hill

As probably all of you know, we have experienced a heart-wrenching tragedy here in Chapel Hill, as three young, happy, and good Muslim students were murdered on Tuesday, point-blank, in their home. The issue is tangential to the topics I normally deal with on the blog, but I did want to take time out to reflect a bit on what has happened.

On Wednesday I did something that I’ve never done before in my 30 years of university teaching. I blew off the lecture for the day and discussed the issue wi...

More on Greek Numerals

A member of the blog, Douglas Harder, was inspired by yesterday’s post on how to make numbers in Greek, to come up with a full description and chart of how it works. He sent it to me and gave me his approval to post it. I think it is very clear and interesting. So here is what he has come up with. (In my next couple of posts I’ll talk about how knowing this information matters for understanding some early Christian texts, including a curious passage in the letter of Barnabas and, then, the 6...

How To Make Greek Numbers (!)

QUESTION:

Listening to your Great Courses lesson on Greatest Controversies: you say Alpha and Omega adds up to 801. How? Your lessons also refer to the meaning of 666, etc. Could you post something sometime about how the Greek alphabet was used numerically? I get Alpha as 1, but Omega as 800? Some lessons on Biblical numerology would be interesting.

RESPONSE

Ah, good question! And the answer is not one that is widely known. So it works like this.

In English, we have different alphabetic and numer...