Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 80

Do Modern Mideastern Story Tellers Show How the Ancient Traditions of Jesus Were Circulated?

In my previous post I discussed a seemingly-plausible explanation for how modern ways of telling stories in small communities in the Middle East today can show that the Gospels may well represent literal word-for-word depictions of what Jesus said and did.  Here I show why in fact the theory does not work, as laid out [...]

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Did Jesus Believe The End Would Come Within His Lifetime? Platinum Post by Rizwan Ahmed

A post for Platinum members only from Rizwan Ahmed ****************************** “Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened” (Matthew 24:34, Luke 21:32) A little over a century ago, Albert Schweitzer, through his famous book “The Quest of the Historical Jesus”, revolutionized and reshaped our understanding of [...]

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Do Modern Mideastern Customs of Story Telling Show that the Gospels Are Accurate?

I've been discussing modern explanations of how the traditions about Jesus found in the Gospels could in fact be historically accurate even if they were passed on by word of mouth over the years and decades before anyone wrote them down.  The natural suspicion is that stories that get told and retold by different story [...]

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More Problems with Thinking Jesus’ Followers Memorized the Stories about Him

In my previous post I began to explain the problems with the idea that Jesus' followers, like all good students of Rabbis in the Jewish tradition, were trained to memorize what he said and did, so that the Gospels provide us with reliable accounts of his life.  This idea was most forcefully promoted by Swedish [...]

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My New Online Course on Paul and Jesus!

In case you haven't heard, I will be doing a live, eight-lecture online course comparing the theology of Paul and Jesus on May 27-28.  The course is not connected with the blog -- it is part of my separate venture for a series I'm publishing called How Scholars Read the Bible.  But I mention here [...]

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Didn’t the Disciples Memorize Jesus’ Teachings and Accounts of His Life?

I've been talking about how scholars began to realize in the early 20th century that the stories of Jesus in the Gospels were based on oral traditions that the Gospel writers inherited decades earlier.  But is that really a problem?  Here's how I discuss the issue in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016). ****************************** [...]

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Was Jesus Literate or Illiterate? A Platinum Post by Omar Abur-Robb

For Platinum members, from Platinum member Omar Abur-Robb: ****************************** Was Jesus literate or Illiterate omr-mhmd.yolasite.com   Scholars are in difference regarding whether Jesus was literate or not, and I would like to explore this subject. Most of the people who lives in Galilee at the time of Jesus were peasants, and most of the peasants [...]

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Stories of Jesus Passed on By Word of Mouth. When Scholars First Took Oral Traditions Seriously.

I'm discussing how scholars came to realize that Mark our earliest Gospel is not simply a nuts-and-bolts, unembellished, accurate report of what Jesus said and did.  This kind of scholarship reached a kind of climax about a century ago with a group of scholars called "form critics."  To make sense of what they said and [...]

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Does Mark Present the Bare-Bones Facts about Jesus’ Life?

In my previous post I showed how scholars in the 19th century came to think that our shortest and evidently-least-embelished Gospel Mark gave the accurate account of Jesus ' life, so that any reconstruction of what Jesus really said and did simply could simply assume that Mark provides the essential information. But is that right?  [...]

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Was Levi of Alphaeus the “the Beloved Disciple”? Platinum Post by Gregory Hartzler-Miller, MATS

  ****************************** Was Levi of Alphaeus the "the Beloved Disciple"? A Redaction Critical Approach   Since the discovery of the Gospel of Peter, scholars have speculated about the missing words after the mention of "Levi of Alphaeus" in the final sentence, which breaks off. The sentence reads, "But I, Simon Peter, and my brother Andrew, [...]

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