Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 343

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...

A New Box on Why A (Christian) Author Would Lie About Who He Was

This will be the last of my posts giving new “boxes” from the recently finished (and now sent to the publisher) edition of my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. This box tries to explain how there could be “forgeries” in the NT, that is, books whose authors claimed to be a famous person, knowing full well they were someone else. In the ancient world, these books were called “lies” (pseudoi) or “books inscribed with a lie” (pseudepigrapha)....

Who Changed the Bible and Why? Diane Rehm Show

When my book Misquoting Jesuscame out, I had a number of radio and television interviews, including this — one of my favorites, on theThe Diane Rehm Show (December 5, 2005). The showis produced at WAMU 88.5 and distributed by National Public Radio, NPR Worldwide, and SIRIUS satellite radio. This episode was called “Who Changed the Bible and Why?”

In the interview I talk about howscribes copying the NT made both mistakes and intentional changes, and how some of these changesinvolvewidely held b...

Why I’m To Be Pitied for Having Been the Wrong Kind of Fundamentalist

Several readers of this blog have pointed me to an article in the conservative journal First Things; the article (a review of a book by the evangelical scholar Craig Blomberg) was written by Louis Markos, an English professor at Houston Baptist University. The title is called “Ehrman Errant.” I must say, that did not sound like a promising beginning.

I had never heard of Louis Markos before – had certainly never met him, talked with him about myself or my life, shared with him my views of impo...

New Boxes Related to Literary Forgery and the NT

Here are two more new boxes in my new edition of The New Testatment: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. Both of these deal with issues that I cover in my book Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics and, to a lesser extent, in my trade book, Forged.

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Box 25.2 Another Glimpse Into the Past

The Secretary Hypothesis

For a very long time there have been scholars who have...

New Boxes on Problematic Social Values in the New Testament

I have been posting some of the new “boxes” that will appear in the sixth edition of my textbook. These boxes are meant either to raise interesting historical issues that are somewhat tangential to the main discussion or to broach complex issues without easy solution that are meant to force students to think for themselves. I include two such boxes here in this post – the first is a new one for the sixth edition, but I thought it would be interesting to pair it with a somewhat related topic d...