Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 348

I am getting close to the point where I can deal directly with Craig Evans’ counter-argument to the position that I take in How Jesus Became God, in which I argue, as you have seen in two previous posts, that it is likely that Jesus was not given a decent burial, as described in the Gospel accounts of Joseph of Arimathea and his request for the body on the afternoon of the crucifixion. Rather, it is more likely that – as was the case virtually every other crucified person in all of Roman anti...

Now that I have devoted two posts to presenting (part of) my argument for why I think Jesus was probably not given a decent burial – the posts were portions of a chapter lifted from How Jesus Became God – I am in a position to begin to respond to the counter-arguments of Craig Evans, my evangelical friend and naysayer, whose essay “Getting the Burial Traditions and Evidences Right” is widely seen – at least by people who have said anything to me about the matter – as the best contribution in...

This is simply a short post to say that even though I’ve just started on my thread on the burial of Jesus, I need to take a two-day hiatus (yesterday and today). Yesterday was completely blocked out because I had to go to Leiden, in the Netherlands, for an editorial board meeting. I’m staying in London for the summer – my wife Sarah is teaching her six-week Duke-in-London theater program (the students discuss a play – after reading it and writing something on it – every morning, and then that...

This is the second of two posts in which I lay out (part of) my case for why I think Jesus was not given a decent burial by Joseph of Arimathea. I am not devoting a post to the second of my three specific arguments – where I talk about typical Roman burial practices for criminals – simply because Craig Evan’s does not do much with it in his counter-argument. But my section on Pontius Pilate is especially important, as you’ll see when I begin to summarize and respond to Craig’s essay.

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The most important thing about this post is – that you need to read yesterday’s post! Here I am including a section from my book How Jesus Became God that deals with the question of whether Jesus was actually given a decent burial by Joseph of Arimathea. In my book I begin by doing a detailed analysis of the biblical accounts in order to show that Paul did not know of any such tradition and that it was probably not in circulation prior to the Gospels, and that even within the NT there are con...

As many of you know, when my book How Jesus Became God appeared in March, a response book appeared, simultaneously, in which a group of evangelical Christian scholars provided their contrary views on many of the topics that I dealt with. They called their book – to no one’s real surprise! – How God Became Jesus. I devoted one post to their book on May 2, and you may want to look at that again if you’re interested.

The five scholars who produced the response each wrote an essay or two on variou...

This will be my last post on the conference dealing with the Life of Brian and the historical Jesus. Here I would like to summarize one paper that I thought was unusually insightful, to give you an idea of the kind of thing that could be done on a topic like this. As it turns out, it was the opening paper of the conference, and it was delivered by Martin Goodman, professor of Jewish Studies at Oxford.

I should begin by saying that scholars have their own internal ranking systems for who the re...

Here is the third and final section of the paper that I read at the Life of Brian conference. The entire paper tried to argue that parody can be an effective historical method. By providing a caricature of a narrative or an alleged historical event, the film was able to highlight some very important historical realia that otherwise are too easy to miss, or that have not been given enough prominence by biblical scholars and historians.

This third part of my paper is the really controversial one...

Here I give the second of three installments of the paper I read at the Life of Brian and the Historical Jesus conference. In this portion I deal with an issue that I have been spending a lot of time reading and thinking about over the past couple of months: the value of eyewitness testimony for establishing what really happened in the past. The reflections here are inspired by the first episode of Brian’s adulthood in the film, where he is present, at a distance, at Jesus’ famous Sermon on...

I have decided to give, in three installments, the paper that I read for the Life of Brian conference. It was written for a general audience, even though scholars were in the crowd as well. It includes some short clips from the movie, which I showed by way of Power point, and which my computer assistant on the Blog, Steve Ray, managed to load up here for us. What I have to say makes better sense with the clips (there is one in this installment and two in the third), so I recommend looking a...