Category Archives: Jesus Tradition

Morality and Unbelief: Bart Ehrman’s New Blog

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I just discovered today that Bart Ehrman has a new blog (which may be old news, but it is new to me).  If you are not familiar with Ehrman, he is a NT Prof at UNC-Chapel Hill, specialist in early Christian texts, former evangelical, outspoken critics of evangelical Christianity, and author of many bestselling books.  Ehrman promises quite a few interesting things on this blog: to present his latest ideas, interact with reviewers and critics, and to continue discussions that have begun in his public debates.  All that sounds great.  But, here’s the catch:  you have to pay to join the site.  Of course, the blog makes it very clear …

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Isn’t it Ironic…Ehrman attacked by Scholars on the Left

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For most of his academic career, Bart Ehrman has busied himself with attacking the beliefs of evangelical Christians.  Having come out of an evangelical background, Ehrman seems bent on fixing what he sees as the major theological, historical and biblical problems in the evangelical world. I have reviewed some of his books, here, here, and here.  However, after the publication of his most recent book, Did Jesus Exist?, Ehrman has begun to experience something that I would imagine is entirely new to him—attacks from scholars on the left.  Indeed, Ehrman is now the recipient of scholarly attacks from those more radical than himself.   As Ehrman defends …

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10 Misconceptions about the NT Canon: #2: “Nothing in Early Christianity Dictated That There Would be a Canon”

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Note: This is the second installment of a new blog series announced here.

Contemporary challenges to the New Testament canon have taken a number of different forms over the years.  For generations, scholars have mainly focused upon the problem of the boundaries of the New Testament. The perennial question has usually been “How do we know we have the right books?”  But, in recent years, a new challenge has begun to take center stage (though it is really not new at all).  While the validity of the canon’s boundaries is still an area of concern, the attention has shifted to the validity of the canon’s very existence.  The …

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Early Jesus Notebooks as Aides-Mémoire

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Michael Bird has recently posted a very helpful analysis of the interplay between written and oral traditions in early Christianity.  Unfortunately, modern scholars often pit these two modes of transmission against one another, as if early Christians could only have used one or the other.  But, we have every reason to think that both would have been used–and would have interfaced with one another–from the very start. Written notebooks/codices would have been aides-mémoire for recalling oral tradition.  Moreover, as eyewitnesses (the “living voice”) began to die out, early Christians would have wanted to preserve their voice for later generations.  Thus, written traditions did not exist in opposition to oral tradition, …

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