Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 38

Competing Interpretations of Scripture in the Early Church

Early Christians interpreted their sacred texts in a variety of ways, some of them a bit bizarre to many modern readers, as I pointed out in my previous post.  Here I discuss two different views of the matter, one by a Gnostic Christian named Ptolemy and the other by the most famous opponent of the [...]

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Ancient Ways of Interpreting Scripture

Did the earliest Christians interpret texts the way people do today?  I'm not asking if they always had the same interpretation; I'm asking if their approach to and methods of interpretation were the same.  It's a surprising answer.  In particular, the various ways texts got interpreted may not be expected. I deal with it in [...]

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Does Paul Have Contradictory Views of the Law, Love, and Salvation?

In my post yesterday I began talking about Paul's understanding of salvation coming to gentiles without having to keep the Jewish law.  Now I get to the real problem.  Doesn't Paul contradict his own views of the need to keep the law when he talks about the importance of love?  Here's a fairly rough draft [...]

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Salvation, Love, and the Jewish Law in Paul. Are His Views Internally Coherent?

In my book on Christian ethics I'll naturally be dealing with the views of Paul, which are more complicated that one might suspect.  One of the things I'll try to be showing is that his teachings on Christian "love" in some places seems to stand at odds with his teachings on salvation.  I've drafted up [...]

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Did the Roman Government Become More “Moral” Once it Became Christian?

I'm still drafting away on my book on the difference Jesus' ethics made on the moral conscience of the West, and one thing I'm ruminating on is whether Christian emperors were more ethically conscious (in a way moderns would recognize) than their pagan predecessors.   Here's a first draft of my discussion of the matter. ****************************** [...]

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More Major Issues Confronting the Early Christians.

What were the major issues, concerns, and debates confronting the earliest Christians?  My book After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed, 2015) addresses these issues.  I've explained the book in my two previous posts.  Here is my third, again giving an excerpt from the General Introduction, explaining the rubrics [...]

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Major Issues in the Earliest Christian Centuries (In my Book After the New Testament)

What were the key issues, controversies, developments, and concerns of the Christiani communities of the first three centuries?   These are the topics considered in my book After the New Testament:  A Reader in Early Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed, 2015). In the previous post I explained that the book is a collection of most of [...]

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My Most Helpful Book? After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity

What happened in early Christianity just *after* the period of the New Testament?  It's an unknown period for most people, but of vital importance for anyone interested in the Christian religion.  For the next three posts I'll explain by discussing my book devoted to the topic, After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity [...]

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Not a Game-Changer? Why I’d Still Be Thrilled to Have a First-Century Gospel Fragment

Here again, from years ago, some reflections on the importance of having a first-century manuscript -- even if it DID NOT change much of anything we think or know. ******************** In several posts I have been emphasizing – possibly over-emphasizing – that if a first-century fragment of the Gospel of Mark does ever get published, [...]

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How Would a First-Century Fragment of the Gospels Actually Change What We Know/Think?

Here I give a post from 2015, some three years after it was announced that we now have a first-century fragmentary  copy of Mark.  At this point we still had not SEEN the manuscript and no one would give us any reliable information about it.  And I began to wonder, how much difference would it [...]

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