Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Great news for the blog. A Significant Milestone by Bart Ehrman I've got some exciting news about how we're doing on the blog this year with respect to funds raised and in connection with a series of posts I did last year.
[00:00:15] The funds, as you'll see below, are significant to this point in terms of the monies we've gotten to our charities, this is our best year yet of the 14 we've had running this show.
[00:00:26] First, let me explain a long term project that ended up making a big difference.
[00:00:31] As lots of you know or will remember, I did that New Testament in a NutShell series in 2025, producing usually three or four posts on each book of the New Testament in canonical sequence from Matthew to Revelation. You can still see them all easily enough. Just do a word search for Nutshell and you'll see them.
[00:00:49] The first post gave a 50 word, exactly 50 word. So summary of the book and then a longer exposition of its major themes and emphases.
[00:00:58] A second post discussed who wrote it, when and why, and then a third post discussed one of the more interesting features of the book at greater length.
[00:01:07] Sometimes I added another post or two for good measure. Occasionally I could basically do what I needed to do in just two posts.
[00:01:16] When it was all over and done, Jen suggested that we package the whole thing together as an ebook for fundraising purposes.
[00:01:23] Maybe we could sell some to blog members and even outsiders. Great idea. She then created the ebook and she showed it to me and I was a bit flabbergasted. It was the size of an actual book and I had no idea. I was just writing blog posts and it cohered as a book and so I thought, I wonder if we could raise even more funds with this thing by selling it as a book.
[00:01:46] This was happening at the time when I was considering taking my next book to a new publisher.
[00:01:51] I have absolutely loved working with Simon and Schuster. Their team is phenomenal and it's one of the truly great publishing houses in the solar system.
[00:01:59] But I had an idea for a different book that I thought might work better for a different publisher. And when talking to my agent I, or rather we decided that we could try to work out a two book deal. One would be the Nutshell Book, heavily edited and made into a real book instead of a set of blog posts.
[00:02:18] Basically that will mean editing, not rewriting, and then the other will be my book on the formation of the New Testament canon.
[00:02:26] We took the idea to Norton Publishers and they became very excited about it. And so that's what's happening after I'm done with the current book on Jesus and economics and I'm thinking right now this will change 29 times, no doubt of calling it banking on Jesus. Then I will move into editing the Nutshell Book. And at this time we are considering calling it a Field Guide to the New Testament.
[00:02:50] For books like this, with a trade publisher as opposed to an academic book, there is normally as part of the contract an advance against royalties, meaning that they pay the author a negotiated amount in advance of producing the book. On the assumption, rightly or wrongly, that the book will earn at least that much once it's written, produced and sold.
[00:03:10] We arranged with Norton that the Field Guidebook would have the advance paid not to me directly, but but to the Bart Ehrman Foundation.
[00:03:18] The foundation is the venue through which we make our donations to our charities that come from membership fees for the blog and private donations to the blog.
[00:03:28] So we're at the stage now where the advance has been paid and we are making our distributions to the charities as we speak. And I am extremely happy to let you know that this has all contributed to make this the best year yet by far on the Blog in terms of funds raised, we have a lot more that we want to raise this year, but as of the end of September, we have distributed $429,000 to our charities.
[00:03:53] That's significantly more than our best year so far, 2024, when we reached 375,000. Up to this point, we raised a total of 580,000 by the end of that year. And we are oh so eager to top that final amount here in 2026.
[00:04:10] The vast bulk of that, of course, comes from you and your membership fees. So thanks so much for joining the blog. It's making a big difference in our world. Over the course of our existence as a blog, we have raised over 3.8 million for our charities.
[00:04:25] Three final things to be said about that in addition to our never ending gratitude for your participation.
[00:04:32] Number one, if you find it in your heart and will to make a separate donation to the blog, please feel free to do so.
[00:04:39] Every penny will go to our charities. We take out precisely zero overhead for expenses. Just go to the blog homepage, navigate to the bottom and hit donate.
[00:04:50] If you'd like to be reminded of what our charities are, you can find out more about them if you follow the link. Charities We Support and One of the truly significant things that you can do to help us to succeed in our charitable work is to spread the word about the blog.
[00:05:05] As you know, you get five substantial posts a week on issues of real interest and importance to anyone wondering about most anything connected with the New Testament, the historical Jesus, the rise of Christianity, the Hebrew Bible, and lots of other related topics.
[00:05:23] And that for what is still a small membership fee starting at 58 cents a week, tell your family, your friends, your neighbors, your teachers, your dentists, your rabbis. It.
