Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior

from Devil_llama

Ehrman is, as always, quite readable as he approaches the Gospels through the mirror of memory. How are oral memories transmitted, and is the oral tradition more accurate than our memories today? He delves into the scientific literature on memory, and discovers that there is no reason to assume t...

from stevesmits

As someone once said, history is the means by which we betray the past. I have long been fascinated with how interpretations and analysis of history are influenced by contextual cultural and political factors. Certainly to the extent that reshaping historical accounts when new facts are discovere...

from mldavis2

Ehrman is one of my favorite historians and theologians because he is honest and documents his few opinions copiously. In this book, he takes the position, based on the science of psychology and memory research, that what we have, written down in today's version of the Christian bible, has been m...

from nbmars

Bart D. Ehrman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is an excellent writer who has popularized some of the historical research about early Christianity. His books, while tending to make similar points as more academic ...

from la2bkk

Yet another outstanding work by the preeminent secular New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman. In this book, Dr. Ehrman uses his typically clear and readable style to exexplain how memories of the historical Jesus changed both over time, and among the various Orthodox and non canonical gospels. As alw...