Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 347

ANT: Methods of Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church

I will return to some possible improvements in the blog (not just in raising money from it) soon. today, though, I want to return to my book After the New Testament. Just yesterday I finished reading the page proofs for it, by working through the 98-page chapter on early Christian apocrypha (selections of non-canonical Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypses: great stuff, but a lot of reading!). I celebrated with a cigar in Wimbledon Park in the late afternoon sunshine. Life could be worse.

A...

Ideas for Raising More Money on the Blog

Many thanks to everyone who responded to my request for comments about how to improve the blog. I am taking all of them under advisement! Here I’d like to flesh out a bit three specific suggestions and give my take on them (I will address a few others in my next post). Please consider each of these and respond if you feel so moved! These are themed: they are all about money and about how to raise more of it – one of my ongoing interests and concerns

1. The Price of the Blog.

Several people sugg...

ANT: More on Women in Early Christianity

I’m nearly finished reading the page proofs for the second edition of After the New Testament. Gods willing, I finish tomorrow – a good thing, because I’m heading out of town (well, I’m already out of town; so I’m heading out of town out of town) to do some hiking. I’ll be able to keep the blog up (let’s hear it for wi-fi!). But proof reading is outta the question! Anyway, yesterday I gave the first half of the Introduction to one of the new sections in the second edition of the book (that I...

After the New Testament: Women in Early Christianity

Among other things, I am spending a chunk of each day just now reading the page proofs for the second edition of my anthology After the New Testament. “Page proofs” are the type-set pages as they are ready to appear in the printed book. This is the last chance an author has to catch mistakes, typos, and so on. The new edition of this book is fairly long– over 550 pages – and reading proofs is one of the very least interesting parts of the job. It’s a serious pain in the neck. The press also (...

Follow-up Apologies for the Post on Dinesh D’Souza

I was completely taken aback when I got up this morning (I’m in London – five hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time) to check my blog and Facebook pages to find that I caused a bit of a firestorm by my comments on Dinesh D’Souza when in yesterday’s post I introduced the video of the debate that I had had with him a couple of years ago. That was not my intention at *all* and I’m non-plussed, surprised, and embarassed. All sides of the political spectrum have reacted strongly – rabid liberals he...

My Debate with Dinesh D’Souza on the Problem of Suffering

A prominent figure in the news lately has been Dinesh D’Souza. Dinesh is best known as a hyper-conservative political commentator. His most recent book is America, and this week it is #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for non-fiction. It has a companion documentary film. If you’re politically very-right-wing conservative and despise Barack Obama and everything he stands for — this is the book for you! Dinesh was a policy analyst in the Reagan White House as a 20-something Wunderkind; h...

About the Blog

I have now finished with my extensive comments on Jesus’ burial. Some of you may be relieved to hear that. I know I am! That was the most intense thread that I’ve done on the blog since its inception over two years ago. It was really more like producing scholarship than anything else I’ve done. And I know that’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

So now I can move on to other things on the blog. If you weren’t really into that more hard-core kind of thing, then I hope that the sorts of things that I’l...

The Skeletal Remains of Yehohanan and Their Significance

I plan to make this the last post responding to Craig Evans’s article, “Getting the Burial Traditions and Evidences Right,” in which he attempts to refute my argument in How Jesus Became God, that Jesus was probably not given a decent burial on the day of his crucifixion. Several readers have asked me interesting questions about this or that thing that I’ve said, and I may try to answer these questions in a few days or, well, eventually; but for now, this will be my last post on it. It think...

Josephus’s Clearest Claim about the Burial of Crucified Victims

We come now, at last, to the best argument in Craig Evans’ arsenal, in his attack on the views of Jesus’ burial that I set forth in in How Jesus Became God. Tomorrow I will deal with the second best – an argument from archaeology. Craig makes a somewhat bigger deal of the second best; in fact he throws off this, his best argument rather quickly. But it’s the most important point of the many (many!) issues he raises. The argument is this. In one passage of Josephus’s writings, in an extremely...

More on Josephus and Jewish Burial Practices

In my previous post I began to deal with the first of two arguments that Craig Evans provides from Josephus. Craig wants to argue that Josephus, a first-century Jewish authority, explicitly indicates that Romans allowed Jews to provide decent burials for their dead. In this first argument Craig provides a concatenation of passages from Josephus that together, Craig argues, indicate that Jews would not leave a corpse (such as that of Jesus) on the cross, but would provide a burial for it. Here...