Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 41

Misquoting Jesus and My Fall From Fundamentalism

Is the Bible the inerrant Word of God or a very human book with all the problems that normally entails?  For me, realizing that we don’t have the Bible in its original form was important to my thinking as I moved away believing the Bible had come straight to us from God. I’ve been talking [...]

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How Scholarship Changed My Life

I continue now with the backstory of why I wrote my book Misquoting Jesus; up to this point I’ve explained how I became an evangelical Christian and, after high school, made a bee-line for Moody Bible Institute and became interested in understanding how  we got the New Testament – not in the original writings, which [...]

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Why I Wrote Misquoting Jesus

My book Misquoting Jesus was the biggest surprise of my career.  No one thought (as colleague scholars frequently told me, somewhat emphatically, in advance) that a book like this would go *anywhere*.  A discussion of changes made by scribes while copying the manuscripts of the New Testament?  What?  Even New Testament experts were and are [...]

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Interested in Textual Criticism? Probably My Most Useful (Edited) Book

Many people on the blog are interested in textual criticism, the field that exams our surviving manuscripts of the New Testament to figure out what the authors originally wrote and to see how and why their writings came to be changed by later scribes.  One of the most important books I've published was one I [...]

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Women and Gender: Early Christianity in a Patriarchal World

Jesus and his earliest followers, including Paul, may have been unusually open  to women playing an important role in the community of the faithful, but it was not long until women's voices and activities came to be suppressed.  It is interesting to see both how that happened, historically, and how some women found alternative ways [...]

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August Gold Q&A–Get Your Qs In!

I'll be recording another Q&A for all Gold & Platinum members soon, so here's your chance to take advantage of this perk. Send me whatever question has been nagging at you (blog-related, of course!). Short, to-the-point questions of general interest are most likely to get answered. Send an email to Diane at ehrmanblog@gmail.com, and she'll [...]

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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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