Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 83

More on Secret Mark as a Forgery (by Morton Smith?)

Here now is the second of my two posts on reasons for suspecting that Morton Smith himself may have been the one who forged the “letter of Clement” that discusses the “Secret Gospel of Mark” (see my post from yesterday). Again taken from my article,   “Hedrick’s Consensus on the Secret Gospel of Mark,” Journal of [...]

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Did Morton Smith Forge the Secret Gospel of Mark?

Last month (April 2023) I published a thread of blog posts on the intriguing and controversial Secret Gospel of Mark, allegedly discovered by Columbia University scholar Morton Smith in the library of the Greek orthodox monastery Mar Saba twelve miles southeast of Jerusalem.  He did not actually discover the Gospel itself, but (allegedly) discovered a [...]

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Blog Dinner in London on Monday June 12. Interested?

I'm heading over the pond this week, for most of the summer, and would like to do a blog dinner  on  Monday,  June 12, 2023.   Possibly a pint in advance.  Somewhere in central London. You interested?    If we can get 3-4 folk, and no more than 7, people together, I'd be happy to do [...]

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Was Jesus a Simplistic Person or an Extraordinary One? A Platinum Post by Omar Abur-Robb

  ****************************** Was Jesus a simplistic person or an extraordinary one? Omar Abur-Robb omr-mhmd.yolasite.com   Suppose you were in a hill overseeing a large lake, and suddenly you noticed a wave propagating quickly outward. You will instinctively realize that this wave has originated from its center, and you can probably pinpoint this center with ease [...]

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Are *Groups* of Story Tellers (Think: Ancient Followers of Jesus) More Likely to Preserve Traditions Accurately than Individuals?

This post will conclude my mini-thread trying to show that modern practices of story telling in the Middle East, during a community ritual called the haflar samar, in which groups of knowledgeable people ensure that stories are never significantly changed, has no bearing on the question of whether ancient stories told about Jesus were preserved [...]

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Back in the Saddle Again…

I am now, alas, back from my two-weeks in Galapagos.   Whoa.... And I'm getting back to business on the blog.  Before leaving I placed a number of posts in queue and these have been published promptly.  I'm now starting to deal with the comments that came in during my absence.  This'll take a couple of [...]

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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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