Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 42

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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Would It Matter if We DID Have a First-Century Manuscript of Mark?

I will continue here with select reposts of the first-century copy of Mark fiasco, in light of my recent interview in the topic and my now renewed interest in the issues involved.  (See the previous posts if you're not aware of the claims from 12 years ago that one had been discovered.) I personally think [...]

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More on the Initial Debacle on First-Century Mark (in relation to the Dead Sea Scrolls)

In my previous post -- originally put up on the blog in April 2012 -- I explained how in a debate I had in February of that year, evangelical New Testament scholar and textual critic Dan Wallace to my surprise (shock!) announced that now for the first time we actually have a copy of the [...]

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The Parables! Have You Signed up for the Course? (This weekend!)

No time to wait!  If you haven't signed up for the course on Jesus' Parables, you should maybe reflect a bit on Matthew 25:1-13. Well, not exactly.  If you don't come live, you can purchase the course as a recording.  But if you do come live you'll get the recording for life, and why not [...]

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The Debacle Over the First-Century Copy of Mark

This morning I had a long interview with BBC4 (radio) in London about a new book that is coming out by renowned expert in ancient manuscripts (mainly classical) Roberta Mazza, that deals at length with the debacle over the alleged first-century copy of the Gospel of Mark.  It was a debacle because it was based [...]

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