Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 35

The Quest for the Historical Paul: Sorting Through Our Sources (Part 2) by Dr. James Tabor

Here we have Part 2 of James Tabor's explanation of how and what we can know about the life and letters of Paul, in anticipation of the upcoming conference, designed for folks like you, non-scholars interested in what lifelong experts in the study of the New Testament say about it.  James will be one of [...]

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The Quest for the Historical Paul: Sorting Through Our Sources (Part 1). Guest Post by James Tabor

As you know, I hope, I will be sponsoring an upcoming conference for non-scholars, on the Apostle Paul soon, Sept. 21-22 (see https://www.bartehrman.com/new-insigh... ).  We will have ten high-level Pauline scholars each give a 50-minute lecture with Q&A, dealing with various issues connected with Pauline studies.   This is gonna be a good'un. In preparation for it, [...]

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The Next Ten Commandments Platinum Guest post by Douglas Wadeson MD

Here's another guest post by Platinum member Doug Wadeson, who once again brings out some startling issue just from what the Bible says that most people don't see, or at least blithely ignore.  What do you think? If you like Doug's work (I do!), he has started a new blog, that he describes as providing [...]

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How Strikingly Few Early Churches Were There? How Amazingly Many Christian Letters?

In his important and stimulating article, “Christian Number and Its Implications,” Roman historian Keith Hopkins next begins to think about the implications about the size of the Christian church at different periods.  One point to emphasize is that there was not simply one church.  There were lots of churches in lots of places, and it [...]

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Were Christians Statistically Insignificant in the First 200 years?

I return now to Roman historian Keith Hopkins’s fascinating and influential article “Christian Number and Its Implications.”   As I pointed out, for the sake of his article, and after checking it out for plausibility, Hopkins accepts the calculations of Rodney Stark that if Christianity started with 1000 believers in the year 40 CE, and ended [...]

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Exaggerating the Numbers of Early Christians

I have started discussing the fascinating article by Keith Hopkins, “Christian Number and Its Implications” (see my last post).   After discussing some of the problems with knowing how to “count” Christians (i.e., who counts as a Christian), he reflects for a bit on the problems presented to us by our sources of information.   The basic [...]

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New Insights into the New Testament 2024: A Conference you DON’T Want to Miss!!

In case you haven't heard, there is a very excieting event coming up that surely *anyone* connected to the blog will be deeply interested in: a two-day remote Bible conference for non-scholars, called “New Insights into the New Testament,” consisting of ten lectures (each with a live Q&A), on the Life and Letters of Paul, [...]

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If You’re Counting Christians, Who Counts as a Christian?

When I first started thinking about the the rise and spread of Christianity, I was particularly struck by an article written by a prominent and deservedly acclaimed British historian, Keith Hopkins, a long-time professor at Cambridge University.  It was called “Christian Number and Its Implication,” and it appeared in the Journal of Early Christian Studies [...]

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How Many Christians Were There in 100 CE? 150? 250? 300?

I've been discussing just how quickly early Christianity appears to have grown in the earlier centuries.  Now the rubber hits the road.  In this excerpt from my book Triumph of Christianity I explain both what the rate of growth must have been and even more interesting -- the main point for me, really -- is [...]

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How Many Early Christians Were There and When? Crunchin’ the Numbers

One scholar (Rodney Stark, mentioned in my previous post) calculated the rate of growth of early Christianity to be about 40% per decade from the very beginning to about the time of the conversion of Constantine.  There is nothing implausible about a religion growing that quickly per se; the Mormon church did for most of [...]

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