Why didn't Jesus write anything down?

[Frank Merton]

False.

Might I suggest that when you disagree with a post, that you begin your response with something other than, "False." It makes you sound so unreasonable, so ossified, and really ticks your respondent off. About the only worse way to begin is with, "No," although, "You're wrong," and, of course, some comment about your respondent's intelligence are worse.

How about, "Have you considered . . .," or "I don't really think . . .".

Ancient writings are filled with supernatural embellishments**. That doesn't lead us to throw all of it out a priori. And this fact shouldn't surprise skeptics at all, given what we now know about cognitive science.

Well, it seems to me that the instant an author -- any author -- begins to embellish the facts, he or she is instantly disqualified as a reliable historical source. No moral judgement here -- just an admission that I have no crystal ball to discern what is embellishment and what is not.

Some people persuade themselves that they are able to read between the lines. That is their own wishful thinking, and represents, actually, a laughable lack of discipline. The scholar inevitably has some theory and is searching for evidence, and can find none except in an embellished text, and so he persuades himself that what he wants to be true is true even though other parts are not.

 

[Frank Merton]

I'll the same question I put to creationists: what peer reviewed journals has Fitzgerald published in and what degrees does he hold?

Was there something in the Fitzgerald statement that was untrue or questionable? You went after the man's qualifications rather than what he said. There is a Latin name for that particular fallacy, but I will restrain myself.

 

[maximara]

Might I suggest that when you disagree with a post, that you begin your response with something other than, "False." It makes you sound so unreasonable, so ossified, and really ticks your respondent off. About the only worse way to begin is with, "No," although, "You're wrong," and, of course, some comment about your respondent's intelligence are worse.

How about, "Have you considered . . .," or "I don't really think . . .".

Well, it seems to me that the instant an author -- any author -- begins to embellish the facts, he or she is instantly disqualified as a reliable historical source. No moral judgement here -- just an admission that I have no crystal ball to discern what is embellishment and what is not.

Some people persuade themselves that they are able to read between the lines. That is their own wishful thinking, and represents, actually, a laughable lack of discipline. The scholar inevitably has some theory and is searching for evidence, and can find none except in an embellished text, and so he persuades himself that what he wants to be true is true even though other parts are not.

The problem with that view can be seen in Horace Mitchell Miner's bitingly satirical "Body Ritual among the Nacirema" where he showed the very world view of the observer colors their perceptions.

The reality (and I am talking as a specialist in museum science here) is that no historical account is 100% accurate--there are distortions both intentional and unintentional.

More often then not history was used as propaganda where it be about Nero and his involvement in the burning of Rome or Richard III's supposed murdering of Edward V of England and Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York. History was the tool by which rulers justified their existence or that of their culture and so by necessity was bias.

The ancient Egyptians were masters of this with entire reigns of Pharaohs effectively wiped from public records. The Abydos King List is one such example with Akhenaten, Hatshepsut, Smenkhkare, Tutankhamen, and Ay "memory holed" out of existence.

 

[HansMustermann]

@Frank Merton
Well, I'll say it's more nuanced.

The problem is that you'd have to discard most of the historical writings, if you only accepted those which are 100% grounded in reality.

There's also the fact that you would have to discard every single writing that attributes some speech to some historical figure. It's KNOWN that everyone made that up. Not just embellished or redacted to be more impressive or anything, but flat out made it up. Nobody carried a desk and papyrus and ink around for the off chance that the Son Of Man gives an unannounced speech on a hill, to give some New Rules like he's Bill Maher Nor for when Caesar gives a speech to make his veterans re-enlist. So if you're writing a biography of him a century or two later, what DID he say so impressive? Well, you'd just make it up.

(Which incidentally means that even if there WAS a Jesus, you know his speech on the mount and all his dialogues and pointed retorts and all? Made up.)

But anyway, I don't think historians have the leisure of just discarding the whole manuscript because the author makes up stuff.

There are ways around it, though, e.g., look for independent confirmation. If two contemporary guys tell you that Alexander the Great did something, well, he may well have done that. Mind you, we don't have the primary sources any more for Alexander, but we have secondary sources that quote them. And the same applies. If two guys quote the same paragraph from a book we don't have, it might actually have said that.

It's not perfect. By the same criterion, more than one author quotes the same from the Necronomicon, so I guess it might have actually existed and actually said, "That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons death itself may die." Still, it's better than just trusting one book.

And there are other criteria, like liking hostile accounts more than propaganda writings. (Which is what the NT is.) Propaganda writings even about real people tended to exaggerate the number of enemies in a battle by up to 10 times for example. See Herodotus about Thermopylae, or Caesar's own account of some of his battles in Gaul which just isn't supported by archaeology or by how much of a population could those places support.

And I still like Carrier's idea of using Bayes there. Because while almost all historical documents do contain embellishments and standard miraculous stuff, they're not all equal in which stuff and how much of it. E.g., having some divine ancestry or even a virgin birth isn't really all that much of a problem as background, since it's just as much associated with real historical people as with mythical ones. But going overboard and making one's whole biography a collection of miracles and symbolic enacting stuff, hmm, we can be pretty sure that biographies of real people were nothing like that.

And of course, I still think we can apply degrees of confidence. If a source just uses some of the standard miraculous garnishes (magical sword, divine ancestry, yada, yada) but otherwise recounts mundane stuff (e.g., Caesar builds a bridge, not cross a major river by walking on water) it might not be all THAT bad. On the other hand if everything you can verify or have an informed guess about is a lie (see, the gospels), well, maybe you shouldn't trust the parts you can't verify.

 

[Frank Merton]

One can say that all writers have their cultural biases and their personal agendas, and still read them and get things from them.

But when an author invents a star leading the Wise Men to Bethlehem so they can worship him, nothing that writer tells me can be believed.

 

[eight bits]

Epiphanius of Salamis in his Panarion, part 29, "Against the Nazoreans" says point blank that Jesus was a nazirite, at 4:2.

No, that's James, the one whom Paul calls "the brother of Jesus," who is, in Epiphanius' belief, the first son of Joseph by an earlier wife than Mary.

 

[Gregoire]

To be entirely fair, as David Fitzgerald points out, while you're usually told that no, see, historians are sure Jesus existed... it actually turns out that most historians won't touch it with a ten foot pole. It's mostly the theologians and bible studies guys who pretend to speak for all historians, and frankly most of those have just some minimal training as historians, if at all.

E.g., while everyone will tell you to listen to Dr Ehrman and not to Dr Carrier, because, see, Ehrman is the real historian... funny thing is, it's kinda the other way around. Carrier actually has a Ph.D. in ancient history. Ehrman has one in bible studies, from a theology seminary, where he studied under a theologian and bible scholar. And while I enormously appreciate and respect his expertise in what various bible manuscripts say, as a historian he's largely just about a self-taught wannabe. If he hadn't become the 'look, we even have an agnostic who says Jesus existed!!!' poster child, well, he'd still be a distinguished and respected scholar of bible studies, but nobody would cite him as a historian.

Was there something in the Fitzgerald statement that was untrue or questionable? You went after the man's qualifications rather than what he said. There is a Latin name for that particular fallacy, but I will restrain myself.

No I was directly responding to your attack on Ehrman's qualifications. You brought it up first. Ehrman is an actual historian. Sorry, it will take a lot more evidence than a random statement to convince me otherwise. And keep in mind, even Richard Carrier (whom I do respect) hasn't made this claim.

To give more evidence, Ehrman has been teaching courses about this for years. Consisider this:

http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=643

That course directly discusses the scholarship on the historicity of Jesus.


(Not that you care, but for the record I actually took the above course in several years ago and found Ehrman's arguments to be very carefully reasoned. When I read Nailed, I didn't find nearly the same level of scholarship. So Fitzgerald's statement that real historians don't touch the subject sounds incredibly implausible and in this instance having actual credentials would certainly help him to make his case.)

 

[Gregoire]

Historians have a number of ways in which they assess the value of their sources, and first on this list is that the source does not narrate supernatural stuff.
The only exception made to this rule is the Bible. Here the traditional historians bend over backward to allow this source in, in spite of all the miracles and so on.

If we are to take Matthew has history, why shouldn't we similarly take Homer?

Might I suggest that when you disagree with a post, that you begin your response with something other than, "False." It makes you sound so unreasonable, so ossified, and really ticks your respondent off. About the only worse way to begin is with, "No," although, "You're wrong," and, of course, some comment about your respondent's intelligence are worse.

How about, "Have you considered . . .," or "I don't really think . . .".

Well, it seems to me that the instant an author -- any author -- begins to embellish the facts, he or she is instantly disqualified as a reliable historical source. No moral judgement here -- just an admission that I have no crystal ball to discern what is embellishment and what is not.

Some people persuade themselves that they are able to read between the lines. That is their own wishful thinking, and represents, actually, a laughable lack of discipline. The scholar inevitably has some theory and is searching for evidence, and can find none except in an embellished text, and so he persuades himself that what he wants to be true is true even though other parts are not.

Fair point, I shouldn't have just said "false" to begin a post. (I was more resonding to what I saw as an unfair attack against Ehrman. I apologize.)

Getting to the point, now you personally might think that embellishments are grounds for throwing everything out, and that is fine. That is your choice. But historians do not. They fully understand every "source" has a bias and that misinterpretations are common. People in the ancient world were prone to such things. But the whole point of the historical critical method is to overcome this and still try to figure out what probably happened.

So unless you can cite historians who throw out Herodotus specifically because of his supernatural accounts, for example, you can't make the case that historians are treating Matthew differently.

 

[Gregoire]

One can say that all writers have their cultural biases and their personal agendas, and still read them and get things from them.

But when an author invents a star leading the Wise Men to Bethlehem so they can worship him, nothing that writer tells me can be believed.

I can understand your point. But to put it in perspective, here are some things Carrier cites as supernatural events Herodotus relates "without a hint of doubt".:

The temple of Delphi magically defended itself with animated ornaments, lightening bolts and collapsing cliffs.

The sacred olive tree of Athens, though burned by the Persians, grew a new shoot an arm's length in a single day.

a miraculous flood-tide wiped out an entire Persian contingent after they desecrated an image of Posseidon.

a horse gave birth to a rabbit.

a whole town witnessed a mass resurrection of cooked fish.**

Still, ancient world historians respect Herodotus. They obviously don't believe everything he says, but they still use him as a "source".


**This is all discussed in the source I listed previously. I have not read Herodotus, so I am only quoting Carrier here.

 

[HansMustermann]

No I was directly responding to your attack on Ehrman's qualifications. You brought it up first. Ehrman is an actual historian. Sorry, it will take a lot more evidence than a random statement to convince me otherwise. And keep in mind, even Richard Carrier (whom I do respect) hasn't made this claim.

It was my "attack", not his.

And Ehrman's qualifications are public record. It doesn't take any sleuth work to find out that he graduated stuff like the Moody Bible Institute or the Princeton Theological Seminary, and in fact his Ph.D. is from the latter. Or that he studied under Bruce M. Metzger, a bible scholar and theologian. At a seminary.

I mean, WTH, you don't need Fitzgerald or I for that. You can hit even Wikipedia. It's literally that much out in the open.

No, that doesn't make him an authority on history, or not to the extent that he can literally say in interviews you should listen to him about history because he's a professor. I don't give a flip that he's a professor, if it's in the wrong field.

He can, of course, still present his arguments and reasoning, and he may even be right, but the whole pretense that you should only listen to guys like him because they have the professor degree... well, no. Just no. His Ph.D. and the course he teaches qualify him as an authority on what the bible or its various manuscripts and apocrypha say, but he's no more an authority on ancient history than an English literature professor is an authority on 16-17'th century history because he teaches Shakespeare.

And in fact, it's not just about him, but the whole bible studies domain can jolly well drop that act. An argument from authority is ignorable in any case, but an argument from misleading authority just doesn't hold any water at all, no matter how informal the logic.

To give more evidence, Ehrman has been teaching courses about this for years. Consisider this:

http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=643

That course directly discusses the scholarship on the historicity of Jesus.

Just because I could teach a course in Star Trek scholarship, wouldn't make me an authority in the physics of a phaser. Even though the course would be filled with physics-sounding technobabble about phase rectification, and giga-joules per shot, and adjusting the frequency (e.g., against the Borg), and all that physics(-sounding) stuff.

And I could even tell you the history of Star Trek, from Cochrane to Empress Sela's rise to power in the Romulan Empire, but that doesn't mean any of that actually happened (yet.) Nor make me an authority on actual history.

But anyway, if he wants to play authority on ancient history, he should actually get a degree in that. Otherwise he's just an authority on what bible manuscripts and apocrypha say. Different domain.

Maybe he he studied more than that, or maybe he didn't, but pretty much he can't pull rank and authority on a domain without actually having either on exactly that domain. Not on something that just touches on history.

 

[maximara]

One can say that all writers have their cultural biases and their personal agendas, and still read them and get things from them.

But when an author invents a star leading the Wise Men to Bethlehem so they can worship him, nothing that writer tells me can be believed.

This ignores the fact that more often then until the invention of the printing press history was a largely oral tradition with all that implies. Furthermore there are indicators that the Gospels went through some form of editing before we got the current versions.

As far as the author-editor of Matthew "inventing" the star there are theories that the "Star" of Bethlehem was actually a rare planetary conjunction or other astrological event.

In 1614 German astronomer Johannes Kepler suggested that the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 7 BC (Nov. 12, 6 p.m. to 9:30 p.m local time) could have formed a "nova". And if you use any reasonable astronomical software you do see this clustering of the planets though not the "nova" Kepler believed in.

Other theories are Halley's Comet in 12 BC or a comet-nova (we're not sure which) reported by Chinese and Korean stargazers c5 BC (Jenkins, R.M. (June 2004). "The Star of Bethlehem and the Comet of AD 66". Journal of the British Astronomy Association (114): pp. 336–43.)

So the star may not be an "invention" but the distortion of an actual event that was later woven into the Jesus story.

 

[HansMustermann]

Except that's still just wanting to be gullible and believe it's not a complete lie, even if you have to make up what happened there, in the absence of any evidence that it is so. In fact, if you look at it rationally:

1. Such nova, or a star clustering, and even more so a comet, would not point anyone at a particular house, nor even at Bethlehem, nor for that matter even at Judaea.

Even with modern software you'd get a very fuzzy spot of what's the place where Earth's surface is intersected by a line between that star and the centre of the Earth, i.e., what's "under" it. And even then that point would move at bullet speed (no, literally) over the Earth. In the time it took to come there from Iran, that position would have drawn a circle or more accurately a tight spiral all around the world. The very notion of a star showing you a position even for an hour is nonsense, as in an hour it would have moved the whole width of a timezone, and really, look on the map how big that is.

But the ancients could do no such thing anyway.

2. A planetary alignment even more so, as that would be in the solar system's plane. The Earth's axial tilt is only about 23 degrees. Bethlehem is just a little over 31 degrees north. You do the maths. There's no frikken way that such an alignment EVER was directly overhead in Bethlehem, or for that matter anywhere in Israel at all.

Just because some religious twits want an actual sign in the sky making the story true, doesn't and can't override the fact that it's mathematically impossible for some kinds of a sign to happen over that place.

3. The Magi which had the Mesopotamian tradition of astronomy going back 3000 years at that point, would already know that ALL stars rise in the east and set in the west. You know, because of the Earth's rotation, or as they'd think at the time, the firmament's rotation. It would be illogical for them to go east just because a star rose in the east. Unlike dumbasses like Matthew, they'd know that a star doesn't just stay hovering over a point in the east.

4. The Persians, just like the Greeks, were already able to do some adequately accurate plotting of the planets' positions in the sky. See the Antikythera mechanism dating to about 100 BCE. Ok, that's the Greeks, but the Persians had all that knowledge of the skies too. A planetary alignment would not come as a cosmic surprise to either, much less some miracle that marks the coming of the (different religion's) messiah. Which brings me to...

5. The Magi, i.e., Zoroastrian priests would not have explained it as the birth of the Jewish messiah, nor come to worship him. That very notion is as silly as having a group of Christian astronomers go, "hey, look, that new star we found... that's the star of Mohammed, let's go to Mecca and convert!"

6. In fact, the whole episode is more easily explained as symbolic of their messiah expectations. What makes you think that a symbolic piece of fiction had to have a real star, or for that matter any cosmic event, as a backdrop. Why not just invent it too? Do you think Andoria or Qo'noS are a real planets because Star Trek has Andorians and respectively Klingons? Do you think some significant star alignment happened in 1925, just because The Call Of Cthulhu says R'lyeh rose on that year, and Cthulhu woke up (even if fairly briefly before hitting the snooze button and going back to nap another aeon), and that can only happen "when the stars are right"?

7. There's the fact that if that coincided with Jesus's birth, well, we have the problem that each author places that in a different year. Whatever might have happened up there, it didn't happen in 6 AD (Luke) and 4 BC (Matthew) and 8 BC (Epiphanius) and 6 BC (modern harmonizations putting a 2 year gap or so between Jesus's birth and the slaughter of innocents) and so on. Especially tightly clustered planet alignments don't happen every 2 years or they'd be even more mundane things that totally don't warrant buying gifts and going looking for a Messiah.

8. We not only have the problem that the Magi followed the star as accurately as from Jerusalem to Bethlehem (and that's just too fine resolution for that age or even for today, especially since, again, it moves), but apparently followed a star in the EAST to guide them to a city to the SOUTH. Matthew generally doesn't seem to be an authority on celestial phenomena, but there you see he doesn't know geography either. And now we can add a geographical impossibility to the rest of the problems with taking that star episode seriously.

9. We have the same contradiction of being both significant and insignificant that generally plagues Jesus. Whatever is supposed to have happened in the sky is supposed to be significant enough that both the Persians and Jews take it as marking the beginning of the messianic age, i.e., doomsday. Yet no astronomer finds it worthy of any notice. Whether it was some alignment or a comet or whatever, it must have been a pretty unimpressive thing. We find mentions of all sorts of other comets and signs being ascribed significance, but that one? Nope, nobody seems to write about that one as marking anything.

10. By contrast oral traditions are what uneducated, illiterate people did. An astronomer finding something significant about such a cosmic event, see above, he'd just WRITE about it. So we're having some anonymous and unverifiable dumbasses (no, really, even Paul calls his believers stupid) who don't know jack about the sky tell us what happened up there, that all the astronomers somehow missed? Really? Do you actually think any of those were in a position to know if a planet grouping is any different from last year? Do you think some fishermen from Galilee actually tracked down star positions?

And generally, isn't that a bit on par with trusting some schizophrenic hillbilly that there actually was an UFO up there, although all the radars and airport control towers and the airforce somehow missed?

11. Matthew is just not a reliable source on astronomy, or for that matter a source on anything true. We also see him inventing an impossible sun eclipse that's both impossibly long, and plain old impossible because it's on a full moon, for example. Does that sound to you like the kind of guy you'd take astronomy evidence from?

Not to mention such stuff as the great zombie invasion of Jerusalem, and all sorts of nonsense. He just doesn't seem concerned with what's verifiable, and has no problem writing down stuff that anyone could tell him never happened.

Etc.

 

[stevea]

oops - ignore.

 

[Brainache]

...
Which is an odd example of Christian charity, but more importantly it brings the question of where the hell do the money go that Paul collects for charity. If his attitude towards the poor is that they should just earn their bread, and even tells his congregation to stay away from those and avoid those... you know, I have trouble imagining him actually giving to any poor, if the one city in his epistles with such a problem just gets told to get to work. If the poor should just get to work, then who IS getting the donation money and for what?

He wasn't collecting for the poor, he was collecting for The Poor with a capital "p". You know, that group of proto-commies in Jerusalem.

Funding a revolt takes a lot of cash. They may have been strict Jewish Fundy Nutjobs, but they were happy to take impure Gentile cash for all those swords and stuff they needed for the big anti-Roman revolt in the late 60s- early 70s.

Maybe...

 

[tsig]

Jesus wrote a lot of stuff down but the Church decided it was heretical.

 

[Craig B]

He wasn't collecting for the poor, he was collecting for The Poor with a capital "p". You know, that group of proto-commies in Jerusalem.

Funding a revolt takes a lot of cash. They may have been strict Jewish Fundy Nutjobs, but they were happy to take impure Gentile cash for all those swords and stuff they needed for the big anti-Roman revolt in the late 60s- early 70s.

Maybe...

But not likely. I can't imagine that Paul was a supporter of the rebels against Rome. His collection appears to coincide with a famine in the area, but who knows how much of his followers' contributions went to relieve the famine in Judaea, and how much was diverted to Paul's personal or sectarian budgets?

 

[maximara]

But not likely. I can't imagine that Paul was a supporter of the rebels against Rome. His collection appears to coincide with a famine in the area, but who knows how much of his followers' contributions went to relieve the famine in Judaea, and how much was diverted to Paul's personal or sectarian budgets?

Given Paul's comments in 2 Corinthians 11:4 it looks like Christianity was showing fragmentation as early as 52-57 CE so you may have contributions to "Christianity" that had nothing to do with Paul.

This early fragmentation is curious if the Gospels were even remotely historically accurate as why didn't anyone write down what Jesus was saying as he was saying it. Even more puzzling no Church father of the 1st century mentions any written Gospels or their contents.

 

[Craig B]

Given Paul's comments in 2 Corinthians 11:4 it looks like Christianity was showing fragmentation as early as 52-57 CE so you may have contributions to "Christianity" that had nothing to do with Paul.

This early fragmentation is curious if the Gospels were even remotely historically accurate as why didn't anyone write down what Jesus was saying as he was saying it. Even more puzzling no Church father of the 1st century mentions any written Gospels or their contents.

I don't think you'll encounter much disagreement about that. However, three of the Gospels were almost certainly in existence during that century, albeit two of them right at the end of the period. They contain some common biographical details and ascription of sayings. The questions are, with what accuracy? And how many are independent sources? And were there other orally transmitted accounts? But presumably these proto-Gospels were not canonised during the first century, and thus were not attended to by most or all early Christians.

 

[maximara]

I don't think you'll encounter much disagreement about that. However, three of the Gospels were almost certainly in existence during that century, albeit two of them right at the end of the period. They contain some common biographical details and ascription of sayings. The questions are, with what accuracy? And how many are independent sources? And were there other orally transmitted accounts? But presumably these proto-Gospels were not canonised during the first century, and thus were not attended to by most or all early Christians.

How is it that three of the Gospels were almost certainly in existence during the 1st century if no Church father even mentions or cites from them at length until c180 CE and that guy is talking about a 50+ year Jesus being crucified under Claudius (no earlier then 41 CE)?

In fact the first attempt as making a Christian canon was Marcion c140 CE with a version of Luke that supposedly had no birth section with some writings of Paul and that was it. It has been argued that Marcion was somewhat antisemitic but if John (which bangs on about how the "The Jews" were the enemies of Jesus) existed c140 CE why didn't Marcion use it?

Everything points to the Gospels at best being early 2nd century compilations with alteration to make them mach up more then they originally did--sort of what we see with Robin Hood or King Arthur where various anachronistic elements are ignored or glossed over to make them fit together into a whole collection.

 

[Gregoire]

It was my "attack", not his.

And Ehrman's qualifications are public record. It doesn't take any sleuth work to find out that he graduated stuff like the Moody Bible Institute or the Princeton Theological Seminary, and in fact his Ph.D. is from the latter. Or that he studied under Bruce M. Metzger, a bible scholar and theologian. At a seminary.

I mean, WTH, you don't need Fitzgerald or I for that. You can hit even Wikipedia. It's literally that much out in the open.

No, that doesn't make him an authority on history, or not to the extent that he can literally say in interviews you should listen to him about history because he's a professor. I don't give a flip that he's a professor, if it's in the wrong field.

That is your opinion.

I have not heard anyone else argue that he isn't qualified to be talking about this issue. Richard Carrier even said in his review that he was initially looking forward to Ehrman's book on the subject. Why would Carrier say that if Ehrman wasn't qualified?

(Obviously, the two differ have major differences. But again, I would refer you again to my first comment on this thread.)

He can, of course, still present his arguments and reasoning, and he may even be right, but the whole pretense that you should only listen to guys like him because they have the professor degree... well, no. Just no. His Ph.D. and the course he teaches qualify him as an authority on what the bible or its various manuscripts and apocrypha say, but he's no more an authority on ancient history than an English literature professor is an authority on 16-17'th century history because he teaches Shakespeare.

Did I ever say to only listen to guys like him? In my first post on this thread, I actually only quoted Carrier.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=8869300#post8869300

My response on this issue has only been to say Ehrman is indeed qualified. And the point was that it is hard to attack Ehrman for not being qualified when one is emulating Fitzgerald. Again, that is not an attack on Fitzgerald per se, it is just noting the inconsistency in attacking Ehrman's qualifications.

And in fact, it's not just about him, but the whole bible studies domain can jolly well drop that act. An argument from authority is ignorable in any case, but an argument from misleading authority just doesn't hold any water at all, no matter how informal the logic.

Not once have I made an argument from authority. I have just defended Ehrman from the charge that he is not qualified to speak on this issue.

Just because I could teach a course in Star Trek scholarship, wouldn't make me an authority in the physics of a phaser. Even though the course would be filled with physics-sounding technobabble about phase rectification, and giga-joules per shot, and adjusting the frequency (e.g., against the Borg), and all that physics(-sounding) stuff.

I see this as a false analogy. The course in question is directly asking what can we know about the historical person named Jesus in history. If the answer was nothing, then that would the conclusion. The course never assumes Jesus existed. In fact, Ehrman begins up front talking about the paucity of evidence. And he always challenges students to come up with a different interpretation of the evidence.

Furthermore, if you look at the other Great Courses, you will immediately see that the other professors are all experts in their fields. Do you expect me to believe this is the one course where the Great Courses people messed up?

And I could even tell you the history of Star Trek, from Cochrane to Empress Sela's rise to power in the Romulan Empire, but that doesn't mean any of that actually happened (yet.) Nor make me an authority on actual history.

But anyway, if he wants to play authority on ancient history, he should actually get a degree in that. Otherwise he's just an authority on what bible manuscripts and apocrypha say. Different domain.

Maybe he he studied more than that, or maybe he didn't, but pretty much he can't pull rank and authority on a domain without actually having either on exactly that domain. Not on something that just touches on history.

But, if the Great Courses Company picked you out of all the scholars, that would say something.

And again, the course itself does go into why the vast majority of scholars believe Jesus was a real person. But it doesn't do so by a popularity argument; it goes over the actual data to figure out what is most probable. It goes in depth in its discussion about the historical critical method as specifically applied to this question.