Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 350

Argument Against Jesus’ Burial in HJBG, Part 1

The most important thing about this post is – that you need to read yesterday’s post! Here I am including a section from my book How Jesus Became God that deals with the question of whether Jesus was actually given a decent burial by Joseph of Arimathea. In my book I begin by doing a detailed analysis of the biblical accounts in order to show that Paul did not know of any such tradition and that it was probably not in circulation prior to the Gospels, and that even within the NT there are con...

New Thread on the Burial of Jesus

As many of you know, when my book How Jesus Became God appeared in March, a response book appeared, simultaneously, in which a group of evangelical Christian scholars provided their contrary views on many of the topics that I dealt with. They called their book – to no one’s real surprise! – How God Became Jesus. I devoted one post to their book on May 2, and you may want to look at that again if you’re interested.

The five scholars who produced the response each wrote an essay or two on variou...

Violent Opposition to the Romans in the Days of Jesus (or Brian)?

This will be my last post on the conference dealing with the Life of Brian and the historical Jesus. Here I would like to summarize one paper that I thought was unusually insightful, to give you an idea of the kind of thing that could be done on a topic like this. As it turns out, it was the opening paper of the conference, and it was delivered by Martin Goodman, professor of Jewish Studies at Oxford.

I should begin by saying that scholars have their own internal ranking systems for who the re...

Brian and the Apocalyptic Jesus Part 3

Here is the third and final section of the paper that I read at the Life of Brian conference. The entire paper tried to argue that parody can be an effective historical method. By providing a caricature of a narrative or an alleged historical event, the film was able to highlight some very important historical realia that otherwise are too easy to miss, or that have not been given enough prominence by biblical scholars and historians.

This third part of my paper is the really controversial one...

Brian and the Apocalyptic Jesus Part 2

Here I give the second of three installments of the paper I read at the Life of Brian and the Historical Jesus conference. In this portion I deal with an issue that I have been spending a lot of time reading and thinking about over the past couple of months: the value of eyewitness testimony for establishing what really happened in the past. The reflections here are inspired by the first episode of Brian’s adulthood in the film, where he is present, at a distance, at Jesus’ famous Sermon on...

Brian and the Apocalyptic Jesus Parts 1

I have decided to give, in three installments, the paper that I read for the Life of Brian conference. It was written for a general audience, even though scholars were in the crowd as well. It includes some short clips from the movie, which I showed by way of Power point, and which my computer assistant on the Blog, Steve Ray, managed to load up here for us. What I have to say makes better sense with the clips (there is one in this installment and two in the third), so I recommend looking a...

Day Two of Jesus and Brian

I continue this coverage of the Life of Brian and the Historical Jesus conference with the second-day post by Mark Goodacre.

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Jesus and Brian Conference, Day 2

William Telford and Mark Goodacre

After a wonderfulfirst day, the Jesus and Brian conference began again on Saturday morning with a paper from one of the real gurus of Jesus films, William Telford. He had a superb series of reflections on the ways in which theLife of Brianparodies th...

Day One of Jesus and Brian

As indicated yesterday, I will now give a couple of play-by-play accounts of the Life of Brian Conference held this past weekend in London. Luckily, I do not need to write up an account myself. My friend and colleague from Duke, Mark Goodacre, also attended the conference and produced a very useful two-part account, the first of which I give here. I have taken this from Mark’s blog, with his permission: http://ntweblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/jesus-and-brian-conference-day-1.html So, these are...

The Life of Brian Conference

I need to take a hiatus from my thread on textual alterations of the NT (you may be relieved to know!) in order to make some posts on the Life of Brian Conference, called “Jesus and Brian” that was held this past weekend at Kings College London. I will not be giving my personal blow-by-blow account. One of the attendees, Mark Goodacre, a friend and colleague who teaches New Testament at cross-town rival Duke, who has been a huge fan of Monty Python as well as the genre of the “Jesus film” for...

Radio Debate with Pete Williams on Textual Variants

I’m in the midst of a thread on the textual variants of the New Testament, and whether they matter, and thought that it might be good to give an alternative perspective. On January 3rd, 2009, Peter J. Williams and I appeared as guests on the radio show “Unbelievable,” a weekly program on UK Premier Christian Radio, moderated by Justin Brierley. For this show we discussed my book “Misquoting Jesus” (In the UK the book, for some reason,is titled is “Whose Word Is It?”). Pete Williams is a Briti...