Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 19

If Mark was the first Gospel written, as  I tried to explain in my previous post, and it was used by both Matthew and Luke, how do we explain that there are many places in Matthew and Luke that agree with each but are not in Mark.? They didn’t get these passages from Mark, but [...]

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Materialism, Personal Identity, and Resurrection: Part 2 In part 1 of this post, I explored the link between a specific individual and the idea of the resurrection of that individual.  I contrasted the Hebrew notion of the resurrection of the body and the Greek notion of the immortal soul. I found both to be rooted [...]

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I've begun blogging on the "Synoptic Problem," the problem of why Matthew, Mark, and Luke are so similar in so many ways (many of the exact same stories, often told in the same sequence, and even in the very same words), and yet so different (often in wording, sometimes in sequence, etc.).  The solution virtually [...]

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In my previous post I indicated that one of the reasons for thinking that Matthew copied Mark instead of the other way around is that there are passages in Mark that can be read in ways (or maybe even were meant in ways) that could be seen as problematic -- they might be worded in [...]

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In this two-part post I’ll explore the link between a biological reality (the human body), the identity of a specific individual, and what resurrection of that person might mean. In Part 1, I explore the link between personal identity and resurrection. In Part 2, I attempt to relate the notion of resurrection to modern thought, [...]

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Why couldn't Matthew, Mark, and Luke just have the same stories?  Why do we have to assume someone was copying someone else's? In yesterday’s post,  I simply stated that copying must have been going on to explain the literary relationship among Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the Synoptic Gospels, since they have so many similarities: they [...]

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Why are Matthew, Mark, and Luke are so similar to each other and yet have so many differences, lots of them minor but some of them significant? In my previous posts I’ve given “Nutshell” explanations of each of these Gospels.  Before moving on to John – which is remarkably different in many ways from these [...]

The post The Synoptic Problem: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Who’s Zoomin Who? appeared first on The Bart Ehrman Blog.

A while back blog member Kevin Grant and I did a recorded interview on the teachings of Jesus about the coming apocalypse.  Did he really mean it?  Are we supposed to take it literally?  How can readers understand the dire predictions?   Here is the video! Kevin is the author of What the Hell is Hell?  [...]

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If Luke is the most "gentile" Gospel, is it also "anti-Jewish"? In my earlier post on "The Gospel of Luke in a Nutshell," I argued that Luke, more than the other Gospels, went out of its way to portray Jesus as a great prophet (like Samuel, like Elijah, etc.).  In part, in Luke’s understanding, that [...]

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Now that I’ve devoted two posts to the major sine qua non of Luke's Gospel – one that lays out its major themes and emphases, the other that deals with who wrote it, when, and why, I can provide some suggestions for further reading, important works written by scholars for non-scholars.   I have given brief [...]

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