Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 344

New Boxes on Jesus as God in the NT

Here are two more “boxes” that will now appear in the sixth edition of my New Testament textbook. If you’ve read my recent book, How Jesus Became God, you’ll see that both of these boxes are based on views that I develop at length there. One of the tricks in writing a textbook is figuring out how to say something in a way that is succinct and interesting, when there is not much space to cover a topic fully (so, my first box here covers in 326 words what I take an entire chapter to develop in...

New Boxes: Oral traditions and the Dates of the Gospels

For the sixth edition of my New Testament textbook I have written twelve new “boxes.” These are side-line discussions of interesting and relevant (if a bit tangential) issues of some importance for various aspects of the study of the New Testament. I will post several of these, including these two here. If these generate any questions, let me know, and I can follow up on them.

The two are about the Gospels: the first has to do with the ongoing nature of oral traditions (which did not stop with...

What Is Different in My Textbook?

I have nearly finished making all the revisions for the sixth edition of my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. It has taken me a lot longer than I thought it would, much to my chagrin. But it is soon over. I hope to have it sent off next week.

Several readers have asked what I’ve changed this time around. Here is (part of) my new Preface, that explains how I originally imagined the book and what I’ve done differently in this iteration.

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Can My Students Believe in the Inerrancy of the Bible?

QUESTION:

Do you ever get a student in your class who doggedly insists upon the inerrancy of the Bible? If so, and if they write their term papers in support of Biblical inerrancy, is it possible for them to get a passing grade in your class?

RESPONSE:

HA! That’s a great question!

So, part of the deal of teaching in the Bible Belt is that lots of my students – most of them? – have very conservative views about the Bible as the Word of God. A few years ago I used to start my class on the New Testa...

The Bloody Sweat and Historical Plausibility

QUESTION:

The following question was raised by a reader on the blog, based on my discussion of the so-called “bloody sweat” passage of Luke 22:43-44, which I maintained was not originally part of Luke’s Gospel (or any Gospel) but was added by later scribes. Here’s the question

Even if this event of Jesus sweating, as it were, great drops of blood was in the original manuscript, one must wonder how the author knew of it. Luke 22:41 tells us that Jesus left his disciples and went off on his own t...

Introduction to My Introduction (to the NT)

I have decided to add an “Introduction” to my textbook,The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. I is very similar (indeed!) to the introduction that I have now in my Introduction to the entire Bible. The whole idea is to get students to see why taking an academic course on the NT is very important. Here is the new Introduction, in full:

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Introdu...

The Life of Brian & The Apocalyptic Jesus

On the blog some months ago I mentioned the “Jesus and Brian” conference in London this past summer, devoted to exploring the Historical Jesus in light of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. The event was held at the King’s College London, Edmond J Safra Lecture Theatre, King’s Building, Strand, London WC2R 2LS on June 20-22nd, 2014. I gave one of the talks at the conference, and it is provided here thanks to the labors of the audio-video team at Kings College and oursupport person,Steven Ray who...

The New Discussion Forum!!! Soon Up and Running.

A new day is dawning. We have decided to establish a Discussion Forum for the blog. It will be up and running very soon, probably later today. Many thanks to Steven Ray, my assistant in all things technical and technological, for all his hard work in getting this set up.

The forum is designed to provide an outlet for members of the Bart Ehrman Blog (Christianity in Antiquity: The CIA) to have discussions *among themselves* about issues of interest to them. The one major proviso is that these i...

Jesus Sweating Blood: Transcriptional Probabilities

I’ve been discussing the kinds of evidence that textual critics appeal to in order to make a decision concerning what an author originally wrote, when there are two or more different forms of the text – that is, where a verse or passage is worded in different ways in different manuscripts. And I have been using the passage found (only) in (some manuscripts of) Luke of Jesus’ bloody sweat as an example. Yesterday I discussed one kind of “internal” evidence. Remember: external evidence deals wi...

Jesus’ Sweating Blood and “intrinsic” evidence

In yesterday’s post I mentioned some of the kinds of “external” evidence that textual scholars look at when trying to establish the “original” text of a document (that is, the wording of the text as the author originally wrote it) when different manuscripts have different wordings for this or that passage. In this post I’ll talk about one kind of “internal” evidence that is used to assist in making this kind of decision.

There are two kinds of internal evidence that are usually called (1) intr...