Bart D. Ehrman's Blog, page 367

The post Mary Magdalene as a Prostitute? (For Members) appeared first on Christianity in Antiquity (CIA): The Bart Ehrman Blog.

QUESTION: Forgive me if this has already been asked several times, but where did the origin of Mary Magdalene as an escort/ sex worker come from?

RESPONSE: Ah, great question. It’s kind of a complicated story, so I’ve decided simply to reprint what I have to say about it in my discussion of Mary Magdalene in my bookPeter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene. In that book I devote six chapters to each of these important Christian figures, in each case explaining what we can know about them historically an...

QUESTION: Forgive me if this has already been asked several times, but where did the origin of Mary Magdalene as an escort/ sex worker come from?

RESPONSE: Ah, great question. It’s kind of a complicated story, so I’ve decided simply to reprint what I have to say about it in my discussion of Mary Magdalene in my book Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene. In that book I devote six chapters to each of these important Christian figures, in each case explaining what we can know about them historically a...

A few more thoughts on why it might matter whether Jesus was married. I must admit, for me one of the most useful outcomes of such a discovery (which, alas, I’m afraid will never be made since I doubt he was married) would be that it would show that Jesus was a sexual being, and not some kind of divine automaton walking the dusty paths of Galilee. As Mark Jordan said during our public discussion in Las Vegas – I’m paraphrasing since I can’t remember how he put it exactly, except that it was m...

The post Jesus and Sexuality (For members) appeared first on Christianity in Antiquity (CIA): The Bart Ehrman Blog.

So, I’ve written a few posts on the question of whether Jesus was married. Short answer: I don’t think so. I’m surprised at how many people on the blog apparentlydothink so, and I don’t recall that anyone has actually presented any evidence for it. :-) But, well, maybe he was! (I should stress though, that since history is a matter of probabilities, “maybes” don’t as a rule go very far.) Anyway, some readers do think Jesus was married, and fair enough. But does it actually matter?

I have joki...

The post A Married Jesus and Celibate Priests (For Members) appeared first on Christianity in Antiquity (CIA): The Bart Ehrman Blog.

So far I have pointed out that it is flat-out wrong to say that every Jewish man in the first century was married and was expected to be married. It is not only demographically impossible (there were not enough women to go around) but we know of Jewish men from the time of Jesus who were not married and were proud of it. Strikingly, they, like him, were apocalyptically minded Jews – such as the Essenes and the apostle Paul. I have also argued that whatever Mary Magdalene was to Jesus, she was...

The post Jesus and Marriage: An Actual Argument! (For Members) appeared first on Christianity in Antiquity (CIA): The Bart Ehrman Blog.

I pointed out in my last post that most people simply assume that Jesus was not married because there is no mention of his wife in any of our sources, or any mention that he ever had a wife. And so it is assumed that he did not have one. As Karen King pointed out in our discussion the other night at the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, that is an argument from silence, and as such is not a very strong one – since, among other things, none of these sources indica...