Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 342

I have one more post to make on this thread, which has taken me off onto a tangent, away from early Christianity per se and onto what it means to be a university professor at a research institution such as UNC. That other post – hopefully tomorrow – will be about why tenure is absolutely essential for this kind of job, even if it is highly unusual anywhere else (unheard of, of course, in the business world). But before then, I want to say one other thing about the tenure process, something th...

In my previous post I discussed what a professor at a research university does with his or her time. I did not go into detail about a lot of the really time consuming obligations, which I may at some point devote a post to. For now I want to deal with one other thing that I mentioned in yesterday’s post: the question of tenure. Most people in the rest of the working world have trouble getting their mind around what university tenure is all about. You mean they guarantee you a job for life? Th...

I sometimes get asked what it is that professors in universities actually do. The question is usually raised when someone realizes that at a major research university, most professors teach two classes a semester. Classes tend to involve three hours of class time per week. But that means a professor is in the classroom only six hours a week. Is this a full time job? Are you serious?? And on top of that you have tenure so that you can, for all practical purposes, never get fired? Hey how can *...

My last post on the discovery of an amulet with passages from the Bible on it brought to mind part of an essay I wrote and recently edited for the second edition of the book that I edited (with Michael Holmes), The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research: Essays on the Status Quaestionis. The book contains essays on every major aspect of NT textual criticism by different authors, all of them internationally known experts in the field, with articles on papyri manuscripts, majuscule...

A new discovery has been made of an ancient amulet, of interest to students of the Bible. It contains some references to both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. An amulet was a kind of lucky charm that a person carried or wore, in order, principally, to ward of evil spirits. I will say more about amulets as they relate to the use of sacred books (esp. the Christian New Testament) in my next post. For now: here’s news of the new discovery in an article by James Maynard, taken from the Tec...

I can now explain how I actually go about writing a trade book (how I do it with a scholarly book is a bit different, mainly because it is a much slower and laborious process). As I’ve indicated, before I start writing at *all*, I have already read everything that I have needed to read (nothing still left! Otherwise it’s a disaster), taken notes on everything, reviewed my notes assiduously, and made detailed and lengthy outlines of each chapter. Then I’m ready to go.

The writing of the book it...

OK, I’m back from my tangent. This thread is about how I go about writing a trade book. So far I’ve discussed how I decide what to write on, how I imagine communicating with a popular audience about it, how I know where to begin reading, how I go about acquiring bibliography once I start, and how I try to read everything of relevance and take notes on it all. Now I can get to the writing process itself.

For years I used to tell my graduate students what, in my opinion, was the best way to go a...

In my previous post I talked about how I go about choosing what to write a trade book on. In some cases I have chosen to write on a topic that involves a well-worked field in biblical studies or early Christianity, that has not, however, been introduced to a wider reading public. I’ve always found it highly unfortunate that scholars as a rule are not interested in communicating with non-scholars. I should be clear about one thing, though: some scholars – or rather, most scholars – simply don’...

In this thread I’ve been talking about how I go about writing a trade book, and I am now dealing with the question of how an author chooses what to write about. I was indicating earlier that some of my graduate students have a difficult time knowing what to focus on in their dissertations. Most of my students come up with amazingly good ideas; but every now and then I have a student who simply can’t decide what to do. It’s hard because the dissertation is their first book, it has to be academ...

As I indicated in a post last week, on October 12-14, 2004 I gave the three Shaffer lectures at Yale University, on“Christ in the Early Christian Tradition: Texts Disputed and Apocryphal.” This is the second of those lectures, dealing with Christ as a Divine man. (Again, the quality is not as high as we have come to expect over the past couple of years, because it was recorded originally on VHS. But it’s been worked over to make it still pretty decent. Enjoy!)

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