Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 358

I won’t be posting every single interview I do for How Jesus Became God (you will be glad to know); but different interviewers are asking different kinds of questions, and so a range of them doesn’t seem to be out of line. The one here is for a podcast called Trinities, hosted and produced by a fellow named Dale Tuggy. Dale is not completely sympathetic with all my views in the book, which makes the interview a bit more interesting from ones that simply lob me softballs. The interview took pl...

I continue here with another post about something that I learned about or changed my mind about while writingHow Jesus Became God. I have to admit, that for many years I was puzzled by the apostle Paul – specifically his Christology. All the various things he said about Christ didn’t seem to add up to a coherent whole to me, even though I thought and thought and thought about it. But I finally found the piece that, when added to the puzzle, made it all fit together. I think now I can make sen...

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In this post I continue discussing some of the issues that I learned about for the first time, or changed my mind about, while writing How Jesus Became God. This post is about an issue that I figured out (for myself) for the first time; I don’t know that other scholars have pointed this out in quite the same way. (Or if they do, I’ve forgotten about it.) It is about the tradition scattered throughout the Gospels that the disciples “doubted” that Jesus was raised even when they had clear evide...

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There is a relatively new online journal, “On Faith,” that is top-of-the line and very interesting. A couple of days ago they published a short article that I wrote, in connection withHow Jesus Became God; I called the article “Why I Am Obsessed with Jesus.” It contains some views you will have seen from me before, and some others. Here is the article as I sent it to them. (The full link to the online version in the journal comes at the end).

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Here is the second part of my radio “debate” (rather, exchange of views) with Simon Gathercole. To refresh your memory (or in case you didn’t see the earlier post with the first part), Simon is a Senior Lecturer in New Testament at Cambridge University. He is a serious and well-known scholar, and also happens to be an evangelical Christian. We disagree on a lot of things, but we are civil about our disagreements, and I respect his opinions even though I disagree heartily with many of them — e...

I mentioned in an earlier post that the only way a trade book begins to sell well is if it gets media attention. It is really, really hard to get media attention, and there’s very little that an author can personally do about it. Authors have publicists (at the publisher) who try to get attention in print, radio, and TV; that’s what they do for a living, they do it all the time, they have the necessary contacts, and the know-how, and the experience, and so on. But at the end of the day, it is...

Here I’ll continue my thread on topics that I changed my mind about or came to see in doing my research for How Jesus Became God. One of the most important things I changed my mind about was the idea that Jesus’ tomb was discovered empty three days after his death.

When I was a Christian, of course I thought that was the case. But even when I had become an agnostic I thought it was probably a historical tradition: it’s found in all four Gospels, for example, and the fact that the stories indic...