Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 62

The Revolutionary Understanding of Orthodoxy and Heresy: An Evaluation of Bauer’s Views

In my last two posts I talked about the relationship of orthodoxy and heresy in early Christianity.   The standard view, held for many many centuries, goes back to the Church History  of the fourth-century church father Eusebius, who argued that orthodoxy represented the original views of Jesus and his disciples, and heresies were corruptions of [...]

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Does God Have Chromosomes? Platinum Post by Douglas Wadeson, MD

What happens when a modern physician starts asking difficult questions of familiar biblical stories?  Here is one answer:  an intriguing post covering a topic that will not have occurred to most of us.  Let's think about how a Virgin Birth works when (now, unlike antiquity) we have a pretty good idea of how Births work [...]

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November Gold Q&A Video

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The Most Significant Study of Christian “Heresy” in Modern Times

In my last post I started discussing the terms “orthodoxy” and “heresy,” pointing out that their traditional/etymological meanings are not very helpful for historians.   “Orthodoxy” literally means the “right belief” about God, Christ, the world and so on.  That means it is a theological term about religious truth.  But historians are not theologians who can [...]

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Vote for Your Favorite Platinum Post

   

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A Fundamental Issue: Heresy and Orthodoxy in Early Christianity

I have been talking about various forms of Gnosticism and that now has led me to move into a broader discussion about early Christian "heresy" in general.  I've talked a lot about non-canonical books, and various forms of Christian belief and practice, and so on over the years, but to my surprise it's been a [...]

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What’s the Best Way to Read a Non-Fiction Book?

I sometimes get asked what the best way is to read a work of non-fiction.  Well, who knows? All I can say is what I do. I've dealt with the question here on the blog a number of times. But since I'm nearing the tail end of research on my next book dealing with [...]

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How Exactly Could the Virgin-Born Jesus Have a Twin Brother?

I have mentioned in passing that there were some early Christians who thought that one of Jesus’ brothers, Jude (or Judas: both are translations of the same Greek word), was actually a twin. Not just of anyone, but of Jesus himself. Some readers have expressed surprise in the most succinct way possible, by asking: “Huh??” [...]

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Could the Gospel of Thomas Be Q? Could it Be Older Than the NT Gospels?

A number of blog members over the years have asked about Thomas’s relation to the Synoptic Gospels and the famous Q source --  that is, the lost source that both Matthew and Luke used for many of their sayings of Jesus not found in Mark (called Q from the German word Quelle, which means “source”).  [...]

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What Is the Gospel of Thomas All About? And Did the Author Use the New Testament Gospels?

What is the Gospel of Thomas trying to teach?  In my previous post I gave a basic overview of the book; here I go into some more depth (not a huge amount) about what it's all about, what it's trying to teach, and whether it depended on Matthew, Mark, and Luke for its sayings. [...]

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