Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 350

I have begun to answer a series of questions asked by a reader about the textual history of Paul’s letter to the Philippians. In my previous post I explained why some critical scholars maintain that the letter was originally two separate letters that have been spliced together. That obviously makes the next question the reader asked a bit more complicated than one might otherwise imagine. And it’s not the only complication. Here is the reader’s next question:

QUESTION: Do you agree that the fi...

In my previous post I answered, in short order, a series of questions that a reader had about the “original” text of Paul’s letter to the Philippians. I will now take several posts in order to address some of the questions at greater length. Here was the first one:

QUESTION: Would you agree that the letter written to the Philippians was an original writing of Paul?

The short answer is Yes – it is one of the undisputed Pauline letters. The longer answer is, well, complicated. Scholars have long...

QUESTIONS:

Would you agree that the letter written to the Philippians was an original writing of Paul? Do you agree that the first copy of the letter written by Paul to the Philippians was also an original? Assuming there were errors made by the person(s) who copied the original letter of Paul to the Philippians, would you agree that the first copy even with some errors still had the original context of the first letter. If you do agree, then is it totally accurate to say that we don’t have th...

This is a radio debate that I had on January 10th, 2009 with Richard G. Swinburne, a philosopher who teaches at Oxford; Swinburne is a Christian and is well-known in philosophical circles. The debate involved an area we are both interested in, The Problem of Suffering and whether it makes sense to be a theist in light of the pain and misery in the world.

I have to say, this is probably the only radio debate that I’ve ever done where I got genuinely angry at an opponent. Swinburne’s answers to...

This will be my final set of comments on the evaluation of How Jesus Became God by Larry Hurtado, on his blog. His review consisted of a set of positive comments, of things that he appreciated (for which I’m grateful); several misreadings of my positions, in which Larry indicates that my book was asserting a view that, in fact, it was not (he corrected those after our back and forth in a subsequent post); one assertion that I was motivated by an anti-Christian agenda and wanted to convince re...

In this post I continue with my response to Larry Hurtado’s critique of How Jesus Became God. In the previous posts I dealt with factual errors – where he assigned views to me that I do not state and do not have. As I have pointed out, Larry was generous to retract these critiques in a subsequent post on his blog. In this post I want to deal not with a factual mistake but with an assertion he makes about my motive for part of my discussion – an assertion that I take issue with.

One of my major...

This will be my final post in which I indicate places where Larry Hurtado has critiqued How Jesus Became God by attributing to me views that I don’t have and positions that I have never taken. These are the only positions – the ones that I have never taken – that he charges me with in order to show that I am lacking in expertise and, as an outsider to the field of early Christology, simply don’t know in places what I’m talking about. Yesterday I looked at what he had to say about my views abo...

In my previous post I began to discuss Larry Hurtado’s evaluation of How Jesus Became God. For the link to his initial post, see http://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/how-jesus-became-god-per-ehrman/ As I indicated, after I read his comments we had some exchanges on email, and he graciously agreed to correct several of his mistaken comments, in which he attributed views to me that I do not have and never expressed in my book. (These views, which I do not hold, are the reasons he claims...

I have been asked to post the following, and gladly do so! Some of you should try to come!! (What’s a mere plane ride over the pond???)

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The Jesus and Brian conference is nigh. There are still tickets available for this unique, bold and ground-breaking conference on the historical Jesus and his times, looked at via Monty Python’s Life of Brian. It will be taking place at King’s College London, on 20-22 June, and cater...

One of the leading scholars of early “Christology” (i.e., early portrayals/beliefs about Christ) in the English speaking world is Larry Hurtado, emeritus professor of New Testament at the University of Edinburgh. Larry is an established New Testament scholar, with additional expertise in such fields as the Gospel of Mark and textual criticism – the area of his dissertation work in the 1970s. I first came to know Larry in connection with textual criticism. He was probably 10 years ahead of me...