The Historical Jesus
THE TEACHING COMPANY ®
Bart Ehrman, Ph.D.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Bart Ehrman is the Bowman and Gordon Gray Professor of Religious Studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With degrees from Wheaton College (B.A.) and Princeton Theological Seminary (M.Div. and Ph.D., magna cum laude), he taught at Rutgers for four years before moving to UNC in 1988. During his tenure at UNC, he has garnered numerous awards and prizes, including the Students’ Undergraduate Teaching Award (1993), the Ruth and Philip Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement (1994), and now the Bowman and Gordon Gray Award for excellence in teaching (1998).
With a focus on early Christianity in its Greco-Roman environment and a special expertise in textual criticism of the New Testament, Professor Ehrman has published dozens of book reviews and over twenty scholarly articles for academic journals. He has authored or edited eight books, including Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford University Press, 1999); The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Oxford, 1997; 2nd ed., 1999); After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity (Oxford, 1999); The New Testament and Other Early Christian Writings: A Reader (Oxford 1998); The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (Oxford, 1993); and The Text of the New Testament in Contemporary Research (Eerdmans, 1996). He is currently at work on a new Greek–English edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press).
Professor Ehrman is a popular lecturer, giving numerous talks each year for such groups as the Carolina Speakers Bureau, the UNC Program for the Humanities, the Biblical Archaeology Society, various local groups, and select universities across the nation. He has served as the president of the Society of Biblical Literature, SE Region; book review editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature; editor of the Scholar’s Press Monograph Series The New Testament in the Greek Fathers; and co-editor of the E.J. Brill series New Testament Tools and Studies. Among his administrative responsibilities, Professor Ehrman has served on the executive committee of the Southeast Council for the Study of Religion and has chaired the New Testament textual criticism section of the Society of Biblical Religion, as well as serving as Director of Graduate Studies at the Department of Religious Studies at UNC.
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Table of Contents
The Historical Jesus
Part I
Professor Biography i
Course Scope 1
Lecture One The Many Faces of Jesus 2
Lecture Two One Remarkable Life 5
Lecture Three Scholars Look at the Gospels 8
Lecture Four Fact and Fiction in the Gospels 11
Lecture Five The Birth of the Gospels 15
Lecture Six Some of the Other Gospels 18
Lecture Seven The Coptic Gospel of Thomas 21
Lecture Eight Other Sources 24
Lecture Nine Historical Criteria Getting Back to Jesus 27
Lecture Ten More Historical Criteria 31
Lecture Eleven The Early Life of Jesus 34
Lecture Twelve Jesus in His Context 38
Timeline 43
Glossary 45
Biographical Notes See Part II
Annotated Bibliography See Part II
