Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 61

I’m Lecturing on a Cruise this Summer. Interested in coming?

Everyone is traveling these days.  I’m traveling these days.  Hey, wanna travel with me? This summer I’m doing a tour (and giving lectures) on a cruise to historic coastal cities and religious sites of Western Europe, from Amsterdam to Lisbon, July 30 - August 10.  This is gonna be an unusually good trip, with awe-inspiring [...]

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The Miracles of the Emperor Vespasian. A Platinum Post by Ryan Fleming

Here is a provocative and intriguing post on a topic not widely known outside the realm of Roman historians: the miracles attributed to the Emperor Vespasian (which sure sound a lot like the miracles attribued to Jesus, written in Gospels produced just at the time of or after his reign.) The post is by Platinum [...]

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Is There Any Sarcasm in the New Testament?

Every now and then someone asks me if there is any sarcasm used in the New Testament.  You would think the answer would be fairly obviously, No.  But, well, I've dealt with the issue before, and my response was Yes. Let me start by giving a definition of sarcasm.  You can find various definitions just [...]

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Was Joseph the Actual Father of Jesus? Announcing a Special Online Christmas Course

I'm pleased to announce that I will be doing a special event this Christmas season, a two-lecture online course called Jesus:  The Actual Son of Joseph: Evidence From the New Testament Itself.   This is a topic I have long thought about casually but never really dug into until recently.  And when I dug, I started [...]

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Do You Want to Take the Final Exam for My Course: “Birth of Christianity”?

I'm teaching  The Birth of Christianity this semester, a course that deals with the history of Christianity from right after the New Testament up to about the conversion of Constantine.  Want to take my Final Exam?   Well, I ain't gonna grade it if you do.  But here are the instructions I gave to the class [...]

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An Intriguing and Unusual Demonstration of Early Christian Differences…

Nine years ago when I was discussing on the blog the topic of the current thread -- the wide diversity of early Christianity -- I took the occasion to mention a book that I had just read and found to be unusually interesting and enlightening.   It is by two Italian scholars, married to each other, [...]

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How Paul’s Own Writings Show the Earliest Church Was Split Over “Orthodoxy” and “Heresy”

Are Christian "heresy" (that is, "false belief") and "orthodoxy" ("right belief") products of developments within Christianity after the New Testament? Or can they be detected in the New Testament itself? I'm not asking if the New Testament literally has false teachings. As per my definitions, I'm asking whether it contains views that disagree with [...]

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How the Canon Itself Tames the Diversity of the New Testament

The writings of the New Testament do not provide good evidence that Christianity started out as an original unity, only to come to be fragmented with the passage of time into the second and third Christian centuries -- so I argued in the previous post.  Quite the contrary.  And yet having them all in the [...]

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But Your Own Teacher Bruce Metzger Didn’t Think That!

In my previous post, and a number of times elsewhere, I mentioned my mentor at Princeton Theological Seminary, Bruce Metzger.  Over the years I've been asked a number of times why, if he was my teacher, I don't agree with him on so many things.  Usually this comes as an accusation more than as a genuine [...]

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Wasn’t Early Christianity Basically Unified? Why Fret About Occasional Diversity?

I have spent three posts talking about the terms “orthodoxy” and “heresy” and why they are problematic; in doing so I have been explaining both the traditional view of the relationship of orthodoxy and heresy (as found, for example, in the writings of Eusebius) and the view set forth, in opposition, by Walter Bauer.   So, [...]

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