Bart Ehrman on the Historical Jesus

[Belz...]

Well, dejudge said

I know what he said, and meant.

He's arguing that Paul is mythical, now, so I seriously doubt there's anything in the NT that he considers historical.

 

[zugzwang]

It makes sense - even the forgers were themselves forged.

 

[DOC]

Quote:
Why would Oxford professor Thomas Arnold (Author of the 3 volume "History of Rome) basically say he knows of no fact in history (up to that point) that is supported by greater and fuller evidence of every sort than that of the life of Christ?

Well, maybe because he was a Victorian-era Christian preacher and apologist who was unable or unwilling to separate his scholarship from his religion. Perhaps it is best to let Profeesor Arnold speak for himself:

"I take the works of St. John and St. Paul as our foundation, because, in the first place, we find in them the historical basis of Christianity; that is to say, we find the facts of our Lord's miracles, and especially of his resurrection, and the miraculous powers afterwards continued to the church, established by the highest possible evidence. However pure and truly divine the principles taught in the gospel may be, yet we crave to know not only that we were in need of redemption, but that a Redeemer has actually appeared; not only that a resurrection to eternal life is probable, but that such a resurrection has actually taken place. This basis of historical fact, which is one of the great peculiarities of Christianity, is strictly within the cognizance of the understanding; and in the writings of St. John and St. Paul we have that full and perfect evidence of it which the strictest laws of the understanding require"

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13151...-h/13151-h.htm

Can't beat full and perfect evidence. It's even better than genuine, reliable and credible evidence, and miles ahead of Chinese whispers.

It seems he did a pretty good job of separating his scholarship from his religion when he wrote the 3 volume "History of Rome". Check out the book's Table of Contents:

http://books.google.com/books/about/The_History_of_Rome.html?id=gwZCAAAAIAAJ

 

[maximara]

You do realize that it is normal for abnormal things to happen, right? You seem to like television programs as a source. OK. I'll bet there's a daily television program in your market largely devoted to abnormal events that actually happened. It's called "news." Check it out.?

You have CNN (MJ) or FOX (HJ) who is better? Not all news is created equal. Heck withcoming of the 24/7 you have more human interest and opinion then actual news.

Romans would be familiar with ghost stories, normally about those who die violently or whose remains are irregularly handled. Why would they suspect trickery if such stories reached them? They hadn't outsourced the wetwork; they did it themselves. If they did somehow come to suspect trickery, then what do you propose they should have done about it?

You are confusing Roman times with the later Middle Ages. I have Edith Hamilton's Mythology in my personal library and there is one ghost story in it. The person had to descend to the underworld make a blood sacrifice before they could even communicate with ghosts. Outside of a Day of the Dead like celebration for the Manes, Lares, and-or Lemures there isn't much constancy regarding ghosts in Roman writings.

Also remember you have TWO events close together: missing body and reports of this person being seen. Why would the Roman assume it was a disembodied ghost rather then a person that through unknown means faked their death? The 1986 movie The Inquiry briefly touched on this idea. Why would the Romans jump to the more fantastical explanation?

 

[Belz...]

It makes sense - even the forgers were themselves forged.

Forgers all the way down ?

 

[DOC]

Then one has to wonder why Bart Ehrman said Paul's Thessalonians is usually dated 49 CE. He says this in his latest book "Did Jesus Exist" on page 118. So about 19 years after the crucifixion, Paul is writing letters to an already established church.

Here is another quote of Bart Ehrman on page 164 of his latest book "Did Jesus exist?":

"And it is important to remember that Jews were saying that Jesus was the crucified messiah in the early 30s. We can date their claims to at least 32 CE, when Paul began persecuting these Jews. In fact, their claims must have originated even earlier. Paul knew Jesus's right-hand man, Peter, and Jesus's brother James. They are evidence that this belief in the crucified messiah goes all the way back to a short time after Jesus's death."...

You forgot to mention that the same Bart Ehrman admitted the Gospels are forgeries and they are not eyewitness accounts.

Where did Bart Ehrman use the word forgeries or is that your word. Do you have a source where he used that word?

You forgot to mention that Bart Ehrman admitted the NT accounts of Jesus are riddled with historical problems, discrepancies and events that could not have happened...

Nothing really major, that affects major church doctrine. When there are over 5000 manuscripts out there, there is bound to be some minor copying errors. And since there are so many manuscripts out there the original writings can be known very accurately by comparing them. In fact we don't even need the original manuscripts because the early church fathers quoted the New Testament books so many times in their own writings that we can recreate the whole NT just from their quotes of it (except for a few sentences.)

The Geisler book goes into much more detail about all of this on pages 225 - 227

https://play.google.com/store/books...SEM&utm_campaign=PLA&pcampaignid=MKTAD0930BO1

 

[Belz...]

Nothing really major, that affects major church doctrine. When there are over 5000 manuscripts out there, there is bound to be some minor copying errors

So, no divine inspiration ?

 

[Craig B]

Where did Bart Ehrman use the word forgeries or is that your word. Do you have a source where he used that word?

dejudge presumably means that none of the gospels is believed to have been written by the person whose name it bears. Ehrman certainly takes this view also. To dejudge that makes them forgeries, even though the texts of the gospels contain no indication of authorship, so that a reasonable person would call this misattribution and not forgery.

But in fact dejudge is being naughty again. In his opinion the whole of the NT, not merely the gospels, is a real forgery - not merely a misattribution - concocted for purposes of deception, centuries later. Bart Ehrman has never suggested anything of the sort. So for dejudge to invoke the support of Bart Ehrman is more than a little unjustified and misleading.

 

[eight bits]

max

You are confusing Roman times with the later Middle Ages. I have Edith Hamilton's Mythology in my personal library and there is one ghost story in it.

I read Hamilton's Mythology in seventh grade. That was a while ago. Now I read big boy books. There's lots of stuff in them that Ms Hamilton omitted.

The person had to descend to the underworld make a blood sacrifice before they could even communicate with ghosts.

We seem to have fast-reversed past Roman times all the way back to the Odyssey. Great book, but not the sort of ghost story we're talking about. Try Pliny's letter to Sura

http://www.bartleby.com/9/4/1083.html

It's about the same vintage as John's usual dating, and so has some relevance to our deliberations.

Also remember you have TWO events close together: missing body and reports of this person being seen.

Three, really, the first being a violent death. I've already said that those three things go together nicely. Why would I need to remember something which I just discussed?

Why would the Roman assume it was a disembodied ghost rather then a person that through unknown means faked their death?

I don't recall any Romans being said to have seen the ghost. Why would any Roman think some subject people's spook story was evidence that anybody had faked their death? How? "Unknown means," according to the story, would include Roman soldiers failing to kill a guy they'd already beaten half to death. Not that that isn't exceptionally possible, but a ghost story isn't much reason to believe it happened in any particular case.

But OK, suppose they did think of the spook story that way. Now what? Issue an Amber Alert for Jesus?

 

[dejudge]

dejudge presumably means that none of the gospels is believed to have been written by the person whose name it bears. Ehrman certainly takes this view also. To dejudge that makes them forgeries, even though the texts of the gospels contain no indication of authorship, so that a reasonable person would call this misattribution and not forgery.

You don't know what forgery means.

At page 181-182 of "Did Jesus Exist?" Bart Ehrman argues that there are many books of the NT, not only the Gospels, that are either mis-attributed or forged.

At page 182 of "Did Jesus Exist?" Bart Ehrman specifically stated that the Gospels were not written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

The Gospels in the NT Canon are forgeries.

But in fact dejudge is being naughty again. In his opinion the whole of the NT, not merely the gospels, is a real forgery - not merely a misattribution - concocted for purposes of deception, centuries later. Bart Ehrman has never suggested anything of the sort. So for dejudge to invoke the support of Bart Ehrman is more than a little unjustified and misleading.

Why are you embarrassing yourself? You obviously have not read "Did Jesus Exist?"

Ehrman did state that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John did not write the Gospels.

 

[dejudge]

.... When there are over 5000 manuscripts out there, there is bound to be some minor copying errors. And since there are so many manuscripts out there the original writings can be known very accurately by comparing them. In fact we don't even need the original manuscripts because the early church fathers quoted the New Testament books so many times in their own writings that we can recreate the whole NT just from their quotes of it (except for a few sentences.)

Well, we know quite accurately how Christians described the conception and birth of Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus was born after his virgin mother became pregnant by a Holy Ghost.

The NT is a compilation of myth fables about the Son of a Holy Ghost, the Son of God, the Logos and God Creator.

There are hundreds of recovered manuscripts which corroborate the Myth Fables of antiquity that were believed and accepted as historical accounts of their Son of God.

In order for the new Jesus cult to be a successful competing religion they presented a God to people of antiquity not a known actual criminal who blasphemed and was therefore guilty of death.

The NT only makes theological sense if Jesus was NOT a man.

The NT only makes theological sense if Jesus was a story about God's Only Begotten Son.

The NT only makes theological sense if the story was about God Incarnate.

The story in the NT is that the Jews Killed or caused the death of God's only Begotten Son and God destroyed the Jews, the Temple, abolished his own Laws for Remission of Sins.

The NT Jesus story is obviously a myth fable which made theological sense just like all other mythological Gods and Sons of Gods in antiquity.

 

[Belz...]

You don't know what forgery means.

Apparently it's a synonym for "everything", now.

 

[pakeha]

OK then let me be the first to reply that it's POSSIBLE that the Jesus belief started from not-a-man. But that it's the problem here. The problem is that, assuming we want to reach a conclusion at all ("I don't know" is perfectly acceptable), which of the alternatives is more probable ? Dejudge likes to remind us that I said the evidence is terrible. How about MJ with its zero evidence ?

A not-a-man or any of the other possiblities.
'The MJ' is something I don't think exists outside of HJ advocates' desire to have a specific adversary to spar. Perhaps not-HJ meets the case more accurately than MJ.

...Rather, HJ is arrived at via a combination of arguments, e.g. multiple sources, parsimony, extra-biblical references, references to Jesus' earthly life in various NT documents, and so on.

There are also counter-arguments to various opposing arguments to HJ, e.g. the argument from silence, the lack of contemporary references, the possibility of a 'celestial Jesus sect', and so on.

So it is quite a complex cluster of arguments and counter-arguments.

Parsimony? Extra-biblical references? Multiple sources?
Could you explain these in the context of an HJ, please?

How convenient? Everybody in the boat had the same illusion. ...

Actually, mass witnessing to the supernatural is something we know happens. Fatima's the classic example.

...6) The best argument the HJ side seems to have is minimize Jesus actual presence to just above nil...

And of course, there's a brand of MJ advocacy which claims that same thing.

... When there are over 5000 manuscripts out there, there is bound to be some minor copying errors. ...

DOC, have you forgotten that argument the '5000 manuscripts out there' has been utterly cast down and debunked?
Why repeat it?

 

[Belz...]

A not-a-man or any of the other possiblities.
'The MJ' is something I don't think exists outside of HJ advocates' desire to have a specific adversary to spar.

Does ANY version of MJ have evidence going for it ? If so, let's make that distinction, then.

 

[IanS]

Actually, mass witnessing to the supernatural is something we know happens. Fatima's the classic example.

A rather important difference is that in the miracle of Fatima, people thought they had seen the sun make strange impossible movements in the sky.

But the Sun is 150-million kilometres away from Earth. Whereas in the miracle of Jesus walking on the water, Jesus was not only close enough to the disciples in the boat to tell them not to be afraid because he is not a ghost, but he actually climbs into the same small boat with them!

You might just mistake things about a light in the sky 150-million kilometres away. But you would not have numerous disciples all mistaken about Jesus climbing into the same small boat with them after just telling them face-to-face that they should not be afraid to see him walking on the water because he was not a ghost but their holy messiah instead.

 

[Craig B]

At page 182 of "Did Jesus Exist?" Bart Ehrman specifically stated that the Gospels were not written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

The Gospels in the NT Canon are forgeries.

Quite so. Just as I said.

dejudge presumably means that none of the gospels is believed to have been written by the person whose name it bears. Ehrman certainly takes this view also. To dejudge that makes them forgeries, even though the texts of the gospels contain no indication of authorship, so that a reasonable person would call this misattribution and not forgery.

 

[Belz...]

At page 182 of "Did Jesus Exist?" Bart Ehrman specifically stated that the Gospels were not written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

The Gospels in the NT Canon are forgeries.

The first sentence does not support the second.

 

[Foster Zygote]

My fundamental argument is that you have no evidence for your HJ [the assumed obscure criminal].

And you are completely wrong. There are many reasons to conclude that an historical Jesus probably existed. Continually repeating the falsehood that there isn't any evidence doesn't make it true.

My argument is that there is an ON-GOING Search for HJ for hundreds of years without success and that this is the THIRD attempt to find an HJ.

An ongoing search for something doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. There is an ongoing search for the chemical processes that lead to the formation of simple, self-replicating polymers that are the origin of life. The fact that biologists are still searching does not mean that chemical abiogenesis is a dead end idea. And there are many things in the remote past that happened, but are forever lost to us. It's not a matter of, "It only happened if we can prove it". Historians have to deal with a great deal of uncertainty about the past. Without the ability to say, "Based on the fragmentary evidence that we have available, we think that this is probably what happened", we'd have almost no history at all.

A major part of your problem is that you haven't learned to think rationally. Instead of focusing your attempts on destroying the religion toward which you've become so bitter, maybe you should concentrate on acquiring what it deprived you of by getting an education.

If there was an established HJ there would be no need for a Quest lasting hundreds of years.

That's right. And in the unlikely event that definitive proof of who Jesus was ever comes to light, then the quest for understanding who he was will end. But keep in mind that the quest for understanding electromagnetism went on for centuries as well, and even today, the quest to understand how it relates to all the other physical forces, particularly gravity, is still ongoing and very enigmatic. Science isn't just a bunch of asserted certainties; a bunch of authoritative facts. The whole of human learning is a quest for knowledge passing from generation to generation. What you haven't yet realized is that you are still relying on the argument from authority that claimed supremacy in your religious experience. You mistake "we don't know" for a sign of failure. You still expect to support your new anti-religious ideas with the same assertions of certainty that you formerly used to defend it.

Please, just go and help find evidence your assumed obscure dead criminal.

You may be lucky.

I'll leave it to the experts. Maybe you should as well?

Your obscure dead criminal is NOT Plausible without evidence--that is my argument.

You say that because you don't understand how rational thought works. If something is plausible, it means that it is possible based on known naturalistic causes.

If my wife comes upstairs from the garage and says that her car won't start, my first hypothesis is going to be that the battery is dead. I do not yet have any evidence that this is the case, but it is still a plausible explanation for why the car won't start. If I test the battery and it is reading 350 amps, then I know that I have to move on to the next plausible cause for the car's failure to start.

Both the historical and mythical Jesus hypotheses for the origin of Christianity are plausible. Both are possible based on known naturalistic causes. But from the available evidence, most professional historians specializing in the subject of the origins of Christianity favor the historical Jesus as a more likely explanation of said origin.

 

[Belz...]

If my wife comes upstairs from the garage and says that her car won't start, my first hypothesis is going to be that the battery is dead. I do not yet have any evidence that this is the case, but it is still a plausible explanation for why the car won't start.

QFT.

 

[Foster Zygote]

You don't know what forgery means.

At page 181-182 of "Did Jesus Exist?" Bart Ehrman argues that there are many books of the NT, not only the Gospels, that are either mis-attributed or forged.

At page 182 of "Did Jesus Exist?" Bart Ehrman specifically stated that the Gospels were not written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

The Gospels in the NT Canon are forgeries.



Why are you embarrassing yourself? You obviously have not read "Did Jesus Exist?"

Ehrman did state that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John did not write the Gospels.

Actually, it is you who clearly doesn't know the definition of "forgery".

Writing a letter and signing it "Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ", long after Paul died, in order to give authority to one's own doctrinal views by deceiving readers into thinking that the text was written by Paul, is an act of forgery.

Writing something anonymously, and then having people several generations later attribute it to a past figure due to cultural traditions is not an act of forgery.