Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 354

Last weekend I gave a talk at the Freedom from Religion Foundation convention in Raleigh. This is a group of agnostics, atheists, and skeptics who are intent on preserving intact the complete separation of church and state. At the convention I was given “The Emperor Has No Clothes Award” — including an amusing statue of the emperor who in fact has no clothes — for my writings on the NT and early Christianity. My lecture was called “Writing about Religion: Some Agnostic Reflections,” in which...

Last weekend I gave a talk at the Freedom from Religion Foundation convention in Raleigh. This is a group of agnostics, atheists, and skeptics who are intent on preserving intact the complete separation of church and state. At the convention I was given “The Emperor Has No Clothes Award” — including an amusing statue of the emperor who in fact has no clothes — for my writings on the NT and early Christianity. My lecture was called “Writing about Religion: Some Agnostic Reflections,” in which...

In my last post I began to enumerate the things that Paul said about Jesus. *Most* of what he says about Jesus has to do with the significance of his death and resurrection. But what if we wanted to know about the *life* of Jesus – the things that Jesus said, did, and experienced between his birth and his death? Paul doesn’t tell us aton, as has frequently been noted. But he does tell us some. In addition to what I laid out in the previous post, there are the following bits of information, ag...

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I have been approaching the relationship of Jesus and Paul from only one angle, to this point – viz., did they represent fundamentally the same religion or not? But there is a second, equally interesting question. How much did Paul actuallyknowabout the historical Jesus? In an earlier iteration of my Introduction to the NT class, this was what I had my students debate. I never could figure out a good way to word the resolution, but most of the time I gave it as this: “Resolved: Paul Knew Next...

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I have been talking about the relationship of Jesus’ proclamation of the coming Kingdom of God to Paul’s preaching about the importance of the death and resurrection of Jesus. In the previous post I argued that the fundamental concerns, interests, perspectives, and theologies of these two were different. In this post I’d like to give, in summary fashion, what strikes me as very similar and very different about their two messages.

Again, in my view it is way too much to say that Paul is the “Fo...

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I spent several posts explicating Paul’s understanding of his gospel, that by Christ’s death and resurrection a person is put into a restored relationship with God. He had several ways of explaining how it worked (the “judicial” model; the “participationist” model; and the other models I described). But in all of these ways, it was Jesus’ death and resurrection that mattered. It was not keeping the Jewish law. It was not knowing or following Jesus’ teaching. It was not Jesus’ miracles. It was...

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