Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 339

The Year’s Society of Biblical Literature Meeting

This coming week, on Thursday, I head off to the annual Society of Biblical Literature, which this year is being held in San Diego. I’m not sure if I’ve discussed the meeting on the blog before. It is the main professional meeting that I go to every year; it’s always held the weekend before Thanksgiving (well, Saturday through Tuesday). I go on Thursday evenings because I always have a commitment there first thing Friday morning.

The SBL is a learned society for all professors of biblical stud...

Did the Beloved Disciple Write the Gospel of John?

I have started a series of posts dealing with the authorship of the Gospels – specifically, why they were eventually named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. My first point, in my previous post and in this one, is that the books are completely anonymous. Their authors never divulge their names. Eventually I may want to address the question of why that is. But for now, my point is that despite what people might commonly think, the books are anonymous.

I pointed out yesterday that even though the au...

Our Anonymous Gospels, Starting with Luke

Over the past few weeks I’ve had several people ask me about why the Gospels of the New Testament are attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It’s a great question, and one that I want to do some more intense thinking and reading about myself. So I thought I would lay out some of the basics here in a series of posts, and think aloud a bit about why I think the Gospels got the names they did.

To begin with, it’s important to recognize that the Gospels themselves are completely anonymous. N...

A Newly Discovered Gospel? Was Jesus Married with Children???

I have been repeatedly asked about the brand new news story, that a new Gospel has been discovered that shows that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and that they had children. If this sounds like (bad) fiction to you (think Da Vinci Code) (or for movies: think “Last Temptation of Christ”), it is. The claim is completely bogus. This “new” Gospel is not a Gospel, but a text that scholars have known for roughly forever. It’s not a Christian text (ostensibly). It’s about Joseph (as in the Old...

Some Other Gnostics

As I was indicating last week, I have rewritten the section in my New Testament textbook that discusses early Christian Gnostics. I have already devoted two posts on the matter, and here will be my third and final one. This one deals with another famous group of Gnostics, the Valentinians; it also gives two of the “boxes” that I will be including in the chapter, taken over from the earlier edition, on interesting side issues (my view in general is that the “boxes” in my chapters are the most...

A Better Kind of Fundamentalist

In today’s post I’d like to go back to that intriguing little article by Louis Markos in the journal First Things, which he entitled “Errant Ehrman.” If you’ll recall from my post last week, Markos starts the article by indicating that he felt “great pity” for me because I was the wrong kind of fundamentalist back when I was a conservative Christian. My problem, he indicates, is that I applied modern standards to decide whether the Bible was inerrant. Here are his words:

He [Ehrman] was taught...

My New Summary of Gnosticism

Yesterday I mentioned on the blog that I had rewritten my description of early Christian Gnosticism for the new edition of my textbook. Here is what the major part of that discussion now looks like. The first part tries to give a general overview of what different groups of Gnostics had in common; the second part describes the views of one of the most prominent Gnostic Groupsl

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Major Views of Various Gnostic Groups

Despite the many...

My New Discussion of Gnosticism: Introduction

One other major change that I have made in my textbook on the New Testament is that I have completely rewritten my description of early Christian Gnosticism. I’ll be presenting in a few posts what the section now looks like, and will explain why I made the changes. To make sense of the new portion, I first need to give the introductory discussion (dealing with our sources of information, including the Nag Hammadi Library), which I did not change drastically from the earlier version. Here it i...

Discussion Forum (Please read to the end)

I am happy to say that the membership forum – where people can interact with each others’ ideas, thoughts, claims, arguments, and perspectives directly, without any interference from me – is going very well. We started off slowing, with just a couple of people posting questions, comments, and responses. It slowly has been building. And it is getting to be more and more every day. I want to encourage you to consider contributing – and to telling others about it as a way to increase membership...

Why Would Christian Authors Write Forgeries?

In my previous post I cited the box in the new edition of my textbook that explained how Christian authors may have justified themselves in writing “literary deceits,” that is, books that claimed to be written by someone else, for example, a famous apostle such as Peter and Paul (as is almost certainly true of Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, and 1 and 2 Peter, e.g.). Several readers have asked me, though, why a Christian author would *do* such a thing as commit...