My evening with Bart Ehrman.

Bart Ehrman gave a talk at Fresno City College on his book "How Jesus became God." He comes across in person, as he does in his debates and books, as personable, self-effacing, knowledgeable and winsome. His talk is a bit cliche for anyone who has seem him previously. ( I was able to predict when he would do the "I went to Moody Bible Institute where "Bible"is our middle name" gag.)

In the course of his talk he asserted his position as a historian is that the Resurrection appearances probably did not happen since (a) grieving, emotional people have hallucinations of dead loved ones ("1 in 8 of us will have that experience.") and (b) Jesus's appearances to groups of people was another well-known phenomenon of mass hallucination. On the latter, Bart said that he debates "conservative Evangelicals" and he points out that Protestants are not going to accept the evidence of apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary and, QED, if those apparitions are hallucinations. then how can his opponents argue that the the appearances of Jesus to groups of people were NOT hallucinations as well.

Knowing Chuckle from the audience. Case proved.

In Q&A, I asked the following:

"Returning to the issue of mass appearances, in your first debate you said that you had studies concerning mass shared hallucinations. In your second debate, you made the argument that since Protestants don't believe in apparitions of the Virgin Mary, the same skepticism can be applied to the mass appearances of Jesus to the disciples. My questions are: (1) do you have studies of mass appearances and (2) what is your argument if you are not arguing with a Protestant."

The gist of Bart's response was stunned and stunning. Basically, he said " I've debated against anyone who was not a conservative Evangelical. You're right....that argument wouldn't work against a Catholic because they would say that we believe in apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I haven't thought about it. I guess I wold have to come up with some other example."

At which point, someone yelled out "The angel Moroni" as if an alleged appearance of the angel Moroni to three people in a forest - two of whom may or may not have recanted later and then recanted their recantation - is the same kind of phenomenon as 50,000 people seeing the same thing on a clear day.

Bart also said that he had studies and that they were in his book.

The Q&A moved on at that point, but here are my observations.

First, the only thing about "mass hallucinations" in his book is a reference to a book done by a Catholic scholar who concludes that the apparitions are real. Apparently, the fact that this is a Catholic phenomenon is enough in Bart's mind to be self-disproving.

So, Bart is left - still - with no evidence to support the claim he made to Mike Licona years ago that mass hallucinations are a well studied phenomenon.

Second, he trots out the same argument that "the appearances of Jesus to the disciples must be false because no one believes that the apparitions of Mary really happen in his book."

Seriously, he wrote a book without considering that some of his readers might be Catholic and might not simply waive off apparitions of Mary as obvious nonsense...and this despite the rigorous investigation that the Catholic Church does before accepting some apparitions as veridical and saying that others are not....or come from somewhere other than God, to put it mildly.

Bart was a fundamentalist Protestant. He still seems to be a literalist...or he plays one for effect. He teaches in the Bible Belt. It is astounding that such a well-read man with such an audience can't step outside of his cultural boundaries.

Nonetheless, let me reiterate that he came across as a gracious, congenial, knowledgeable and patient man. His final pitch was to get people to sign up for membership on his blog, where he raised $117,000 for charity for the poor last year. That is an admirable achievement no matter how much I question his logic and rhetorical problems.

Here is my review of Ehrman's "Did Jesus Exist?"

More Bartisms -

Ehrman responds to Father Robert Barron:

If The Very Reverend Robert Barron does find my book threatening, it is either because he has not read it closely enough or because he holds to fundamentalist views that have somehow or other managed to work their way into the hearts and minds of the Catholic clergy.   Or both.

Typical Bart Erhman - anyone who disagrees with him must be a fundamentalist. From my review of "Did Jesus Exist?":

Bart Ehrman has two goals in "Did Jesus Exist?" The first is responding to and rebutting the claim of "mythicists" that a person named Jesus who was the basis of the Christian movement never existed, i.e., that "Jesus" was a fictional character invented out of bits and pieces of the world's folklore. The second goal is to respond to the mythicist argument while still maintaining his prior positions that the contemporary view of Jesus held by "very conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Christians" (p. 72) aka "fundamentalist Christians" (p. 74) aka "well funded conservative Christians" (p. 142)aka "fundamentalists and very conservative evangelicals (p. 231) - I made a game of noting the various times Ehrman "poisoned the well" and "strawmanned" opponents who were not "critical scholars" by labeling them with some variant of "conservative" - has no basis in the history of the "real" Jesus.

Also, Ehrman has never strayed very far from his fundamentalist anti-Catholic roots.

Also, what is with the repetition of "The Very Reverend" title?

I've often thought that Ehrman waives his hand at fundamentalist stereotypes of Catholicism in order to "Catholic-bait."  I wrote this in my review:

On the whole, Ehrman's characterizations concerning the "Catholic" position on the perpetual virginity of Mary are intellectually disturbing. Ehrman ought to have a more informed position inasmuch as he has taught the sub-Apostolic Father, including the Proto-Evangelium of James, for the Teaching Company. It's hard to tell with Ehrman whether his claim is just "Catholic-baiting." He may be so used to teaching to "conservative evangelicals" for whom associating anything with Catholicism makes it by definition weird and suspect that his default mode for persuasion is to make such an association with positions he wants to undermine. Alternatively, it may be as I've said, his fundamentalist assumptions still working their ways through his thought.

There is a fundie in the discussion, but it's not Father Barron.

Bart Ehrman - Super Scholar

Is Bart for real? Can he not read? Or is this just his normal disingenuous style?

He writes:

OK, so I’m a bit testy. But what really has sent me over the edge is his claim that my view is simply a re-hashing of Hugh Schonfield’s Passover Plot. Is he SERIOUS? Maybe he forgot what the thesis of the Passover Plot is. Or maybe he doesn’t care, but simply wants to tarnish me by association with an absurd thesis that someone else advanced, which in fact has nothing to do with mine//

But here's Baron's comment:

When I was a teenager, I read British Biblical scholar Hugh Schonfield’s Passover Plot, which lays out the same narrative, and just a few months ago, I read Reza Aslan’s Zealot, which pursues a very similar line, and I’m sure next Christmas or Easter I will read still another iteration of the theory. //

Barron was comparing Aslan to Schonfeld as an example of how anti-Christian arguments get recycled.

He was not comparing Ehrman to Schonfeld.

This is pretty typical, actually, of Ehrman's scholarship.

Academic Malpractice - Celebrity Academics

This seems to explain Bart Ehrman, who is winsome and entertaining, but as intellectually dishonest as they come.

When you look up "projection" in the dictionary, you will find this book.

Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth
by Bart D. Ehrman

Please go here and give my review a "helpful" vote.


Bart Ehrman has two goals in "Did Jesus Exist?" The first is responding to and rebutting the claim of "mythicists" that a person named Jesus who was the basis of the Christian movement never existed, i.e., that "Jesus" was a fictional character invented out of bits and pieces of the world's folklore. The second goal is to respond to the mythicist argument while still maintaining his prior positions that the contemporary view of Jesus held by "very conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Christians" (p. 72) aka "fundamentalist Christians" (p. 74) aka "well funded conservative Christians" (p. 142)aka "fundamentalists and very conservative evangelicals (p. 231) - I made a game of noting the various times Ehrman "poisoned the well" and "strawmanned" opponents who were not "critical scholars" by labeling them with some variant of "conservative" - has no basis in the history of the "real" Jesus.

Ehrman's self-referential style invites us to ponder the psychology of his two goals. Ehrman is constantly posing the various issues involved in "Did Jesus Exist?" as if they mattered insofar as they reflected on Ehrman's status as a professional scholar or as a bit of autobiographical detail. For example, we learn that he was induced to take up the issue of "mythicism" because he received the Religious Liberty Award from the American Humanists Association. (p. 332) These were nice people, according to Ehrman, but many of them believed in something that as a scholar he knew to be errant nonsense, namely that Christianity was based root and branch on the myth of Jesus' existence. (p. 334.) Ehrman thinks the mythicist strategy of denying the existence of Jesus is a bad tactic because it is contradicted by scholarship , it consists of an exercise in theology, and not history, and it is unnecessary. (p. 338.)It is unnecessary because, according to Ehrman, the historical Jesus isn't the Jesus of conservative Evangelicals. The historical Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, who was wrong "about a lot of things." (p. 336.) Ehrman is sympathetic to the social goals of the humanists and of mythers in opposing the "religious right," but Ehrman believes that ideology shouldn't trump history, which is convenient for Ehrman because of his conclusion that that the Jesus of history is not the Jesus of the religious right. (p. 338 - 339.)

So, how does Ehrman do on his twin tasks?

With respect to the first task of rebutting the "mythicists," quite well, but then that is akin to shooting fish in the barrel because, as Ehrman points out repeatedly, virtually no scholar of any repute has ever denied the historical existence of Jesus. In fact, according to Ehrman, the idea that Jesus did not exist is a modern notion that was made up in the 18th Century. (p. 96.) Rather, the real action has always been how much of the story of Jesus is either historical or a mythical/fantastic overlay.

Ehrman rolls up his sleeves and approaches his first task with the methodology of his profession. He marshals the documentary evidence for the existence of Jesus and then marshals the "historiography" of the mythicist position.

Concerning the former, Ehrman reviews the non-Christian sources - Pliny, Tacitus, Josephus, etc. - and finds them inconclusive. They attest to the existence of a Christian movement, but obviously do not provide a first hand account of Jesus. Ehrman then moves into the Christian sources, including the Gospels and the letters of Paul. Surprisingly for those acquainted with Ehrman's popular activities, and it is undoubtedly where mythicists feel themselves most betrayed by Ehrman, Ehrman supports the accuracy of the Christian sources as to the existence of Jesus. He finds in the gospels multiple independent "oral traditions" that tend to establish a confidence in the historicity of various events. Thus, in the gospel of Matthew, Ehrman finds the following independent sources: a source from the gospel of Mark, a source in the hypothetical Q text and a source unique to Matthew. Other gospels likewise have a provenance tracing to multiple independent sources.

Ehrman also does something which he normally criticizes as being "unhistorical": he harmonizes discordant texts so as to find a trustworthy historical "heart". Thus, with respect to the death of Judas, he discerns from the irreconcilable accounts of Judas' death in Matthew and Acts that there is a historical tradition that "a field in Jerusalem was connected in some way with money Judas was paid to betray Jesus." (p. 108.)

This is a remarkable approach for Ehrman in that, in his debates and prior printed works, his rhetorical position has been that any discrepancy between two accounts renders both accounts worthless as evidence. One of his typical examples is that because Matthew says Jesus' died at "3 pm" and John says "noon" demonstrates that the Gospels are unreliable. This approach has always seemed to be too cute to accept, and it seems that Ehrman only used this approach as a "debating point," unless he has some buried double standard he's relying on.

Another remarkable thing - for Ehrman that is - that Ehrman does is to argue that we don't need the original texts of the New Testament in order to know what those texts said. He also argues that we don't have to worry about scribal errors. Yet, Ehrman is famous for harping on the "400,000 scribal errors" in the New Testament, and in his debates, Ehrman has gone so far as to deny that the concept of "original texts" has any meaning. But in this book, where he wants to prove a historical proposition, rather than befuddle other people who want to prove a historical proposition, Ehrman has no problem in making the common-sense assumption that not all texts can be wrong and that we can discern the "original intent" from copies. *Sheesh* That's a relief to know.

Ultimately, Ehrman concludes that the most important facts supporting the existence of Jesus were that Paul, Peter and James, the brother of Jesus, actually existed, and that Paul confirms in writing that he knew Peter and James, and Peter and James knew Jesus, and Paul met with Peter and James within two or three years after the crucifixion, then we have solid evidence for believing that Jesus' existence, or at least as solid evidence as we have for believing anything that we didn't personally witness.

QED.

Ehrman next marshals the accounts of "mythicists" and invariably concludes that the mythicists are just making things too complicated by positing a conspiracy or a graduate student level knowledge of comparative religion. Mythicism also goes wrong by uncritically accepting bogus parallel "saviors" or go too far in pushing similarities between Jesus and the alleged "pagan saviors." Ehrman unqualifiedly points out that the mainstay of internet atheists and mythicists, Kersy Graves' 1875 "The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors" is bogus:

"Possibly the most striking thing about all of these amazing parallels to the Christian claims about Jesus is the equally amazing fact that Graves provides not a single piece of documentation for any of them. They are all asserted, on his own authority." (p. 211.)

Similarly, Ehrman categorically explains that there is no evidence of any "dying and rising gods" being worshipped in antiquity. (p. 226 - 227.) There were gods who died but don't return, and there were gods that disappear without dying and then return, but none of them die and return. (p. 229.) Ehrman writes:

"The majority of scholars agree with the views of Smith and Smith: there is no unambiguous evidence that any pagans prior to Christianity believed in dying and rising gods, let alone that it was a widespread view held by lots of pagans in lots of times and places." (p. 230.)

At the end of the day, it appears that there is simply no "there there" to the mythicist claim. There is historical evidence in favor of Jesus' existence and mythicists rely on, well, myths about myths.

But what about Ehrman's other project, that of making sure that there is a lot of daylight between himself and those whom he calls "fundamentalists Christians"?

Well, that's where I had my real problems with "Did Jesus Exist?" Let's take a few examples.

First, it seems that pushing mythical parallels without authority is a bad thing. But you know who does that? Bart Ehrman routinely does that with his story about Apollonius of Tyana. (p. 208.) Ehrman has been telling the Apollonius of Tyana story to generations of college students and has used it repeatedly in debates as a way of getting people to get past what he considers to be the mythical embellishments of the New Testament. The problem is that he does what he criticizes the mythers of doing. Put aside the fact that the Apollonius story has no historical provenance whatsoever, Ehrman's recounting of the story makes the same kind of false parallels he properly disdains when mythicists use the same tactic. For example, Ehrman claims that "after he left this world, he returned to meet his followers in order to convince them that he was not really dead but lived on in a heavenly realm." One problem with Ehrman's summary of Philostratus is that it wasn't plural "followers," it was a single follower who saw Apollonius in a dream, and maybe when he awoke. No one else present with that follower could see Apollonius. Also, Apollonius says nothing about living on in a "heavenly realm."

Ehrman doesn't share that, but if you have a mania for questioning things in books written by experts, you can - with the benefit of the internet - look it up for yourself, something that wasn't possible when Ehrman first started teaching.

Is the precedent set by Ehrman in making tendentious parallels perhaps a reason for the fact that he found so many mythicists among the Humanists?

Another example is Ehrman's insistence that idea of Jesus' divinity was a later development and that the first Christians considered Jesus to have been merely human in his earthly existence, although Jesus may have been "adopted" as the Son of God by God at the time of his resurrection. There are certainly texts that gesture at adoptionism, but the problem for Ehrman is found in Philippians 2:6 - 12, which the majority of scholars have identified as an early creedal/liturgical hymn - going back to within a few years of the crucifixion - which confesses that Jesus pre-existed his earthly life. After reviewing this text through a very wooden, fundamentalist filter - attempting to impose a literal construction on the clause by asking how Christ could be "exalted" any more than he was if he started as God? - and pointing out that a lot of ink has been spilled over Phil. 2, Ehrman then concludes:

"If this interpretation is correct, then the beginning of the passage is describing Christ not as a pre-existing divine being but as very much as a human being. But even if it is not correct, the passage begins by describing Christ, not as God, but as a being in the form of God. Another option is that this is describing Christ as a preexistent angelic being." (p. 237.)

Two points:

First, like the mythicists he criticizes, Ehrman is doing "theology," not "history." From a historical standpoint, the question is not what is theologically possible, but what a person in position of Paul or any First Century Christian would probably have thought in their historical context.

There are by the way, theological answers to these questions; Ehrman is not the first person to raise these issues. He just doesn't bother sharing what those answers are.

And that incidentally is another complaint about Ehrman. He disingenuously responds to criticisms that he is simply telling readers what "people already knew" by asking why he should be criticized for sharing with the masses what scholars know. (p. 70.) But that isn't the burden of the complaint. The burden of the complaint is that there is a response to what he is sharing, and Ehrman never bothers to share the fact that there is a response because the questions he raises are two-thousand years old! (Ehrman compounds his disingenuity by responding to students' complaint that he doesn't present the "other side" by asking which "other side" - the Feminist other side? The Marxist other side? (p. 297 - 298) - as if he doesn't know what his students - who he admits are "conservative evangelicals" in bible-belt North Carolina - have in mind. *Sheesh* Talk about passive-aggressive.)

Second, Ehrman is being disingenuous and misleading his lay readers into thinking that his speculation has as much weight as the position held by most scholars, "conservative" or "critical." I've read a lot of scholarship on early Christian theology and I have never heard anyone claim that Phil. 2:6 did not involve a pre-existence theology. Philip Carey lecturing for the Teaching Company - just like Ehrman - says that Phil. 2: 6 - 12 - the kenosis hymn - involves Christ's pre-existence, as does Richard Bauckham. Even John Dominic Crossan refers to Phil. 2: 6 - 12 as a "pre-existence myth." I'm no scholar so I decided to read one of Ehrman's scant sources for this section of the book. I purchased and read Ralph P. Martin's A Hymn of Christ: Philippians 2:5-11 in Recent Interpretation & in the Setting of Early Christian Worship and true to everything else I've read there is no indication in that "large book" (p. 233) to anything other than a virtual consensus that Phil. 2: 6 - 12 is talking about Christ's pre-existence as a heavenly being prior to his earthly life.

This leads to my next point, which is that Ehrman's strategy for dealing with the theological/non-historical claims, such as Jesus' miracles and resurrection, is by "bracketing" them for a later book. (p. 231.) An attentive reader might wonder why, if there are multiple sources attesting to Jesus' life, we can't look at those multiple sources to reach some judgment on miracles, resurrection or other points. Erhman's answer is "wait for my next book."

But if I were a mythicist, I think that I would find the "bracketing strategy" to be an evasion. Mythicists say that there is no good evidence for Jesus' existence because the sources that Ehrman relies on are untrustworthy and that they are untrustworthy because of the material that he is "bracketing out" of the discussion.

As unsympathetic as I am with the mythicist position, that's not an entirely unfair argument. If I found out that all of my witnesses were describing fantastic events because they were high on LSD at the same time when some event happened - and that they all knew each other - I'm not sure I'd go to court on their testimony.

So, how dependable are the gospels in Ehrman's estimation? It seems not very because he is at bottom as much of a mythicist as the mythicists. Ehrman traces a slender thread from us to Paul to the events of the life of Jesus, but for the most part he seems to buy into the notion that there was a tremendous disconnect between the Christians of 33 AD and 90 AD, as if they never talked to each other except to embellish their stories. It seems that when we get to the "far out" stuff, all of that harmonization to get to the "heart" of the story goes out the window.

In reading Ehrman over the years, I've often been put in mind of how he remains a "fundamentalist." The way that he construes the biblical text is literal in the extreme - see the point about when Jesus "died." His understanding of the ecclesiology of the early Christians owes far more to the evangelical framework of his youth, than to a liturgically-oriented structure that a Catholic, Jew or Orthodox might be used to.

Likewise, there is an anti-Catholicism that seems latent in his writings, a hang-over from his evangelical days perhaps, which seems to color his assumptions. This particularly struck me in his discussion of the issue of James," the Brother of Jesus." Ehrman dismisses the "Roman Catholic" view of the perpetual virginity of Mary as follows:

"But in the Roman Catholic view, Jesus' brothers were not related to Jesus by blood because they were not the children of his mother, Mary. The reasons that the Catholic Church claimed this, however, were not historical or based on a close examination of the New Testament texts. Instead the reasoning involved a peculiar doctrine that had developed in the Catholic Church dating all the way back to the fourth Christian century...In no small measure this doctrine is rooted in the view that sexual relations necessarily involved sinful activities. " (p. 146 - 147.)

You can't get much closer to a very traditional Protestant bit of "Catholic-baiting" than that. I make this charge for the following reasons.

First, the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary didn't develop in the Fourth Century; it is a feature of the Proto-Evangelium of James, which is dated to the Second Century.

Second, it is not a "Catholic" doctrine. It is a doctrine shared by the various Orthodox Churches with the Catholic Church.

Third, it is anomalous that Ehrman refers to "Catholic" in this passage. His usual tactic is to refer to Christian orthodox doctrines from this early period as "proto-orthodox" as a way of suggesting that the teachings of orthodox Christianity were just one of many options available for developing Christianity.

Fourth, the proposition that James was not the physical brother of Jesus, but may have been a cousin is based on paying attention very closely to the New Testament text. Compare Mark 6:2 - 4 with Mark 15:40. For example, isn't it odd that Jude identifies himself as the brother of James but not of Jesus? See Jude 1:1. How Ehrman - who presumably has read Jerome's "Against Helvidius," which clearly pays close attention to scripture - could make this claim is either a result of forgetfulness or bad faith.

Fifth, the high status given to virginity is found in the New Testament. See Matthew 19:12; Rev. 14:4. It seems strange that a bible scholar wouldn't point out that the concern with virginity didn't just spring up in the Fourth Century.

On the whole, Ehrman's characterizations concerning the "Catholic" position on the perpetual virginity of Mary are intellectually disturbing. Ehrman ought to have a more informed position inasmuch as he has taught the sub-Apostolic Father, including the Proto-Evangelium of James, for the Teaching Company. It's hard to tell with Ehrman whether his claim is just "Catholic-baiting." He may be so used to teaching to "conservative evangelicals" for whom associating anything with Catholicism makes it by definition weird and suspect that his default mode for persuasion is to make such an association with positions he wants to undermine. Alternatively, it may be as I've said, his fundamentalist assumptions still working their ways through his thought.

This can be seen in the strange offhand comment that Ehrman makes in discounting the relevance of the Book of Wisdom because it "did not become part of the Jewish scriptures." (P. 246.) But this is a red-herring; Wisdom was part of the Septuagint which Greek-speaking Jews like Paul used, and Wisdom and the deuterocanonical books weren't excluded from the Jewish canon until at least a century after the crucifixion. Again, it seems that Ehrman makes this point because, as a former Protestant, his default mode is that "real" scripture is the Jewish canon because that was the canon he grew up with.

This is a difficult book for me to rate. I think the bottom line is that I don't really trust Ehrman as being in good faith. Where I have checked him out, I find that he often forces his facts, claims and assertions to fit his argument. I don't know how trustworthy his statements are, even when I find them congenial to my position. Should I check out his claim that most scholars deny the reality of dying and rising gods in antiquity? Based I on the questionable support he provides for areas I do know something about I would probably be negligent if I took his word alone for some unverified claim.

I know, however, that after spending $10 and four or five hours reading his book - even one without an index and scant footnotes - I really shouldn't have to fact check him.

On the other hand, fact checking him did open up new avenues of knowledge and analysis, which is good.

I think this is the bottom line - what I see in this book is the psychology of "projection." Throughout this book, Ehrman does things that he has criticized other people for doing. He harmonizes, relies on texts that are copies of copies of copies, and pushes parallels to far, the criteria of dissimilarity is to be used in a positive way (p. 293) until he decides that some story he doesn't like, such as the Last Supper, can't pass the criteria (p. 328), and then it's out, and then he criticizes mythicists. In a paragraph brimming with irony, he writes - probably with complete justification - about mythicist Robert Price:

"The overarching problem is this: Price, as we say earlier, was correct in stressing that historians deal not with certainties but only with probabilities. But he seems to have jettisoned this view when actually making historical judgments."

This from a guy who can write that "the divinity of Christ is a relative latecomer to the scene of Christian theological reflections." (p. 238.) To a layperson, it sounds like Ehrman has "jettisoned" his view that "historians deal not with certainties but only with probabilities" when it comes to "making historical judgments."

So, although I agree with Ehrman that mythicists are nuisance, based on the criteria that Ehrman lays out for others, I have to conclude that this book does not pass those criteria.

Civil War in the leper colony.

Bart Ehrman's book on "Did Jesus Exist?" - which, not to bury the lede, is answered in the affirmative - has kicked off a civil war on the liberal/radical/crazy side of the scholarship/pseudo-scholarship continuum. (This Huffington Post column appears to be the proximate cause of the war.) There are a lot of hurt feelings out there as the "Jesus is a Myth" ("Mythers") go-to guy, Richard Carrier, expresses personal umbrage at the attack on his scholarship. Ehrman has responded in kind. Other folks have weighed in.

Good times, good times.

Apparently, based on his vast knowledge of grasshoppers gleaned from teaching teen-agers at a state school in Morris, Minnesota, P.Z. Myers - best known for using his state-funded gig at the University of Minnisota, Morris to offend Catholics by desecrating the Eucharist - has magisterially weighed in to defend Carrier's scholarly reputation.

This is what Myers has to say:

Jesus is a legend, like King Arthur or Robin Hood or Paul Bunyan. There may have been some individual in the past who inspired the stories, but he’s not part of the historical record, and the tall tales built around him almost certainly bear little resemblance to the long-lost reality. It’s simply bad history to invent rationalizations for an undocumented mystery figure from the distant past.

Well, then, there you go. Case closed. A guy who works for the government in teachign pimple faced teenagers all about animalsin a village of approximately 5,000 souls in western Minnesota has exerised the "magisterium of science" to tell us what's-what about history.

Myers' magisterial pronouncement has resulted in this terrific putdown by R. Joseph Hoffman:

I’ll make a deal with PZ Myers: I don’t try to lecture him on grasshoppers and he doesn’t lecture anybody on Jesus and “bad history.” I can’t quite imagine that the combined religion faculties at Harvard, Claremont and Tuebingen are awaiting further instruction on Bayes Theorem from Richard Carrier or packing up their offices, having been served notice that an associate professor of biology at the Morris campus of the University of Wisconsin has discovered that Jesus is just like Robin Hood—and Paul Bunyan. I know it gives the mythtics a rush to think that the scholarly establishment discourages revolutionary ideas but in fact it is designed to discourage error and non-revolutionary discredited ideas.

And:

The free thought rabble have chosen Carrier as their standard bearer, without any reason to put their trust in his inane conclusions and methods—a man who has never published a significant piece of biblical scholarship, never been peer reviewed (peers?), never been vetted, and never held an academic position. His “reputation” depends on deflecting his mirror image of himself as a misunderstood, self-construed genius onto a few dozen equally maladroit followers. This billboard for poor method, we are now asked to believe by freethought’s bad boy, PZ Myers, has cold-cocked a senior New Testament scholar for saying something as reasonable as “Jesus existed.” Only in the age of instant misinformation and net-attack is this kind of idiocy possible. Only in the atheist universe where the major premise– “religion is a lie so the study of religion is a study of lying”—infects everything is this kind of lunacy possible. Unfortunately, we have Richard Dawkins to thank for the original formulation of that premise.

Let's sit back and enjoy the digital blood-letting.

Apropos of the risk that those who need the "perfect" book or the "perfect 'oral tradition'" lest they lose their faith...

...Mark Shea writes:

The Bible is not written to be the Big Perfect Book of Everything. It is written to relay firmly, faithfully and without error those truths God wished us to know for the sake of our salvation. Eyewitness accounts which do not record “ipssissima verbi” (the exact tape-recorded words) are not “contradictory”. They get at the gist of what happened. They can leave out details that don’t concern the author or his readers and include details that do (as, for instance, when both Paul and Luke record that Jesus said the cup is the “new covenant” and not merely the “covenant” in His blood. But varying details do not (except for flat-footed fundamentalists) “prove” the story is worthless. They merely prove that the witnesses are human beings telling about an intensely important memory in a human way. The only thing more foolish than trying to enforce a foolish hyper-consistency on such testimony is to lose your faith when you fail to do so.

Mark Shea is kindly referencing my podcast on Apologetic Thomas - Thomas v. Bart Ehrman, but after the back and forth with Steve Hays at Triablogue, it is palpably clear that the fundamentalist and the atheist are driven by the same foolish need to see perfect consistency.

We don't need to "see" a perfect consistency because "seeing" is not univocal with "believing."

Notice how different this need to "see" is from the approach of St. Thomas Aquinas on dealing with what Bart Ehrman calls - and a wooden literalist like Steve Hays might fear is - a contradiction, i.e., the difference between the Gospel of Mark that implies that Christ was crucified at the "third hour" and the Gospel of John that implies that it was "about the the sixth hour." Ehrman would - actually he does - ullalate in victory, "See, there's a contradiction, it must be all wrong." A wooden literalist would do back-flips trying to explain how "third" really means "six."

What does St. Thomas Aquinas do? Read for yourself:

Reply to Objection 2. As Augustine says (De Consensu Evang. iii): "'It was about the sixth hour' when the Lord was delivered up by Pilate to be crucified," as John relates. For it "was not quite the sixth hour, but about the sixth--that is, it was after the fifth, and when part of the sixth had been entered upon until the sixth hour was ended--that the darkness began, when Christ hung upon the cross. It is understood to have been the third hour when the Jews clamored for the Lord to be crucified: and it is most clearly shown that they crucified Him when they clamored out. Therefore, lest anyone might divert the thought of so great a crime from the Jews to the soldiers, he says: 'It was the third hour, and they crucified Him,' that they before all may be found to have crucified Him, who at the third hour clamored for His crucifixion. Although there are not wanting some persons who wish the Parasceve to be understood as the third hour, which John recalls, saying: 'It was the Parasceve, about the sixth hour.' For 'Parasceve' is interpreted 'preparation.' But the true Pasch, which was celebrated in the Lord's Passion, began to be prepared from the ninth hour of the night--namely, when the chief priests said: 'He is deserving of death.'" According to John, then, "the sixth hour of the Parasceve" lasts from that hour of the night down to Christ's crucifixion; while, according to Mark, it is the third hour of the day.

Still, there are some who contend that this discrepancy is due to the error of a Greek transcriber: since the characters employed by them to represent 3 and 6 are somewhat alike.

In other words, the first thing that Thomas does is not to read the text of the Bible as a wooden literalist does, ie., like Bart Ehrman. Thomas suggests that maybe, just maybe, the times were collapsing an entire series of events into a single time, which, you know, when you think about it, is what people often do.

The second thing he does is even more interesting - and more precious as a character trait: Thomas says, "Hey, maybe there's an error in the Bibles we are reading."

Thomas points out that there could have been a scribal error because in Greek "three" and "six" are "somewhat alike."

Notice the casual way he concedes the fargin' obvious? Thomas isn't suffering a crisis of faith because of it. He isn't saying, "Woe is us; we can know nothing." To the contrary, he says, in essence, "well if there is a problem, let's work it out."

Jeepers, you mean, just like a scholar?

Also, think about why Thomas might not have been overly-shocked about this prospect, unlike Bart Ehrman and modern folks. Namely, because Thomas actually worked with scribes, who undoubtedly made errors all the time, unlike Bart Ehrman and his audience who think that everything should look like a "Xerox"(TM) brand copy.

On the other hand, if you listen to the podcast, if you listen closely and pay attention, you may just hear the dog that didn't bark in the night.

You know who should have suggested that the so-called discrepancy might be a scribal error? Bart Ehrman, that's who. Ehrman has written books on scribal errors. Yet, he never suggests - as does St. Thomas - that maybe we can answer the question of "contradiction" on the basis that both texts once said "three" or "six," until a scribe came along and confused one for the other because in Greek "three" and "six" are "somewhat alike."

But Bart Ehrman doesn' offer that possibility because he's on record as saying that if the Bible were really and truly God's word, then God would have prevented there ever being any confusion, such as perhaps by inventing photocopiers in the First Century.

Which when you think about it has the same structure as Steve Hays' argument: if God had wanted His truth to be communicated, He wouldn't relay on impermanent, easily confused oral communications; He would only have allowed His word to be communicated in something permanent and less easily forgotten, like a written text.

Fundamentalism and atheism - both want to tell God how He could do His job so much better.

Jesus is not a Myth...

...but who cares?

CNN apparently had a debate that epitomizes the annual insult offered to Christians by the secular left. It hosted a debate between one side that believed that Jesus was a myth and the other side that believed that Jesus existed but stayed dead:

CNN's annual “Bash Christianity on Easter” story is crazier than usual.

This year, they ran an article entitled The Jesus Debate: Man vs. Myth. On one side were John Dominic Crossan and Bart Ehrman, who deny the physical Resurrection. On the other side, are folks like (self-proclaimed “spiritual pioneer”) Timothy Freke who go even further, and deny that Jesus even existed. They don't just deny Easter, they deny Christmas.

That's right: the Resurrection-denying side was the closest thing to orthodoxy in this debate, at least for the first forty paragraphs (literally). Around the forty-seventh paragraph, they finally quote Prof. Craig A. Evans, who explains that Jesus of Nazareth existed. He is literally the first and only Christian source quoted. And the only thing they use Evans for is to provide some quotes saying that Jesus exists -- you wouldn't be able to tell from the context whether or not Evans even believes in the Resurrection.

So CNN's idea of a balanced article commemorating Easter is to depict the debate as between those who deny the Resurrection and those who deny the entirety of the Gospels. It's hard to know what to describe this as, if not flagrant bias...

I'm also going to note the Third Century amulet used as evidence to support the Mythicist position in case it shows up in some future context:

But let's look at the specific “evidence” that gets trotted out for the CNN piece. The article opens by talking about how Freke decided Jesus didn't exist after reading an old book with a picture of “a drawing of a third-century amulet” of “Osiris-Dionysus, a pagan god in ancient Mediterranean culture” on a cross in a very Christological manner.

It's hard to know where to begin. First of all, the drawing in question (depicted on the left) doesn't claim to be of “Osiris-Dionysus” but of “Orpheus” and Dionysus (also known as Bacchus). This mistake is embarrassing, since the drawing has ΟΡΦΕΟΣ ΒΑΚΚΙΚΟΣ (Orpheus Bacchus) written on it.

And “Osiris-Dionysus” wasn't “a pagan god in ancient Mediterranean culture.” These were two separate gods from different cultures. Osiris was the Egyptian god of the dead, and Dionysus was the Greek god of wine. And Orpheus wasn't another name for Osiris or Dionysus, or any other god, for that matter. Rather, it's the name of a mythical Greek prophet and storyteller. In Greek mythology, Orpheus was killed by Dionysus. So the idea that Osiris, Orpheus, and Dionysus are all one god is off to a ... rocky start, to say the least.

There's also the fact that the now-lost amulet was almost certainly a forgery. The German epigrapher Otto Kern, who initially promoted the amulet as authentic, recanted in the face of the evidence, a fact that Freke's coauthor Peter Gandy has acknowledged. In Kern's words, the amulet “is almost certainly a fake.” For example, the bent knees in the depiction of the Crucifixion is characteristic of later Medieval art, not art from late antiquity. But since the only evidence of the amulet's existence is the line drawing, it's impossible to know for sure.

Of course, Ehrman is not much better. He regularly cites Third Century stories of Apollonius of Tyana to suggest either (a) that Christians borrowed this story in the First Century to invent stories about Jesus or (b) that because two centuries after the death of Jesus, pagan apologists stole from Christians, that proves that miracle stories by Christians could have developed within a single life-time or (c) both (a) and (b).

Ehrman calls Mythicists lunatics...

...and Mythicists accuse him of betraying their cause.

Bart Ehrman has a "damn by faint praise" essay in the Huffington Post allowing that the bad and biased evidence found in the New Testament and elsewhere establishes that Jesus existed as a matter of history:

Moreover, the claim that Jesus was simply made up falters on every ground. The alleged parallels between Jesus and the "pagan" savior-gods in most instances reside in the modern imagination: We do not have accounts of others who were born to virgin mothers and who died as an atonement for sin and then were raised from the dead (despite what the sensationalists claim ad nauseum in their propagandized versions).

Moreover, aspects of the Jesus story simply would not have been invented by anyone wanting to make up a new Savior. The earliest followers of Jesus declared that he was a crucified messiah. But prior to Christianity, there were no Jews at all, of any kind whatsoever, who thought that there would be a future crucified messiah. The messiah was to be a figure of grandeur and power who overthrew the enemy. Anyone who wanted to make up a messiah would make him like that. Why did the Christians not do so? Because they believed specifically that Jesus was the Messiah. And they knew full well that he was crucified. The Christians did not invent Jesus. They invented the idea that the messiah had to be crucified.

One may well choose to resonate with the concerns of our modern and post-modern cultural despisers of established religion (or not). But surely the best way to promote any such agenda is not to deny what virtually every sane historian on the planet -- Christian, Jewish, Muslim, pagan, agnostic, atheist, what have you -- has come to conclude based on a range of compelling historical evidence.

Whether we like it or not, Jesus certainly existed.

Ehrman has been treading into mythicist waters in his recent debates, particularly where he starts to argue that various stories about Jesus described in the Gospels parallel - according to him - various myths. To make these arguments, Ehrman has to act like a tin-eared mythicist reducing all of the actual detail of various myth into some kind of parallel to Christianity, such as claiming that Mithras was born of a version when there is not a scintilla of evidence for that claim. Likewise, Ehrman has been forced to imply to audiences - without ever saying it and being shown the door to academic disgrace - that Christians borrowed from myths that didn't exist until hundreds of years after Christ's crucifixion.

Ehrman is flogging his new book - Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. Given my distrust for Ehrman's scholarly chops these days, I'm giving it a pass.

Mythicist Richard Carrier, on the other hand, is offended - offended! - at what Ehrman has written and is throwing the book at Carrier's errors. You get the sense that Carrier was looking at Ehrman as an ally and is seeing this as a personal betrayal.

You have to wonder where Ehrman is coming from? Is he selling books where the audience is? Is he burnishing his anti-anti-mythicist credentials so that he can pose as an objective scholar? Is he honestly concerned about the zaniness of the mythicists? But if that was the case, why resort to their lame arguments in debates?

Aquinas v. Bart Ehrman.

Raiders of the Lost Textual Fragments!

Archeologists uncover First Century fragments of the Gospel of Mark.

And there are not earth-shaking revelations!!!

According to Dan Wallace:

On 1 February 2012, I debated Bart Ehrman at UNC Chapel Hill on whether we have the wording of the original New Testament today. This was our third such debate, and it was before a crowd of more than 1000 people. I mentioned that seven New Testament papyri had recently been discovered—six of them probably from the second century and one of them probably from the first. These fragments will be published in about a year.

These fragments now increase our holdings as follows: we have as many as eighteen New Testament manuscripts from the second century and one from the first. Altogether, more than 43% of all New Testament verses are found in these manuscripts. But the most interesting thing is the first-century fragment.

It was dated by one of the world’s leading paleographers. He said he was ‘certain’ that it was from the first century. If this is true, it would be the oldest fragment of the New Testament known to exist. Up until now, no one has discovered any first-century manuscripts of the New Testament. The oldest manuscript of the New Testament has been P52, a small fragment from John’s Gospel, dated to the first half of the second century. It was discovered in 1934.

Not only this, but the first-century fragment is from Mark’s Gospel. Before the discovery of this fragment, the oldest manuscript that had Mark in it was P45, from the early third century (c. AD 200–250). This new fragment would predate that by 100 to 150 years.

How do these manuscripts change what we believe the original New Testament to say? We will have to wait until they are published next year, but for now we can most likely say this: As with all the previously published New Testament papyri (127 of them, published in the last 116 years), not a single new reading has commended itself as authentic. Instead, the papyri function to confirm what New Testament scholars have already thought was the original wording or, in some cases, to confirm an alternate reading—but one that is already found in the manuscripts. As an illustration: Suppose a papyrus had the word “the Lord” in one verse while all other manuscripts had the word “Jesus.” New Testament scholars would not adopt, and have not adopted, such a reading as authentic, precisely because we have such abundant evidence for the original wording in other manuscripts. But if an early papyrus had in another place “Simon” instead of “Peter,” and “Simon” was also found in other early and reliable manuscripts, it might persuade scholars that “Simon” is the authentic reading. In other words, the papyri have confirmed various readings as authentic in the past 116 years, but have not introduced new authentic readings. The original New Testament text is found somewhere in the manuscripts that have been known for quite some time.

These new papyri will no doubt continue that trend. But, if this Mark fragment is confirmed as from the first century, what a thrill it will be to have a manuscript that is dated within the lifetime of many of the eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrection!

Are there contradictions in the Resurrection accounts?

This is a big issue for raging fundamentalist Bart Ehrman, but it's not so much for other - saner - people.

More things that everyone knows packaged as faith shattering news.

Bart Ehrman's next book is coming out in March and is entitled "Forged: Writing in the Name of God--Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are."

We're probably going to discover that the Gospels do not have a title page with their author's name! Shocking!

And some of the Pauline epistles may have been written by Pauls' disciples in Paul's name! Shocking!

And John's epistles were written by a different guy with the same name!

I made up that last one.

Intellectual Integrity and Bart Ehrman.

I originally like Bart Ehrman's work.  I thought that his courses on the Teaching Company were very good.  However, as I've listened to Ehrman's popular stuff, such as his debates and interviews, I've come to wonder how much I can trust Ehrman.  Simply put, Ehrman says stuff that he knows is either overstated or wrong. 

It's not just me who says this.  William Lane Craig points out that there is a "Good Bart" and a "Bad Bart."  "Bad Bart" will make the claim in popular circles that there are more errors in the Bible than there are words, and will foster the impression that we really can't know for sure what the original text said.  However, when called out on it, "Good Bart" will forthrightly admit that we actually do know what the original text said and that the "errors" can be corrected or aren't all that significant. 

Similarly, in one debate, in support of his argument that the post-Resurrection appearances of Jesus were delusions, Ehrman argued that grieving people have such delusions all the time. When it was pointed out that people don't often have the same delusion, Ehrman said, "yes, they do", leaving the impression that he had some academic support for the claim that groups of grieving people have been known to have the same delusion.

It turned out that Ehrman was conflating different events.  Individually, grieving people have been known to have visual and tactile experiences of their dead loved ones, but not in groups.  Ehrman's reference to "group delusions" was to things like the vision of Our Lady of Fatima, which have never been shown to be delusions.  They might be delusions and atheists might assume they are delusions, but most people would never confuse an individual grieving person with the mass phenomenon of Fatima.  By carefully omitting the important details, Ehrman was using his role as "neutral academic" to mislead listeners.

Darrell Bock issues a similar warning with respect to Erhman's academic writing.  Bock discusses Erhman's The New Testament: An Historical Introduction:

This volume is one of the most popular texts for early Christianity classes in the USA, which is why we are discussing it in the class. It is clearly written and engaging. It summarizes many commonly held positions that are held about the Bible and New Testament in some scholarly circles. It is important to know what generations of college students are being taught in the name of knowledge and understanding. I am discovering that it is what Ehrman does not mention that is often important.

For example, in treating the authorship of the gospels (all of them), he does not address any of the external evidence for authorship that comes from sources like Eusebius or Irenaeus or any of the canonical church lists. This is historical evidence and ignoring it prejudices his volume's work, cutting out one of the two key factors one has to address in treating authorship, namely external evidence for a work's authorship. Vincent Taylor and C. E. B. Cranfield regarded such evidence as decisive in treating this question in terms of Mark's gospel.

I am quite aware that many think the internal evidence is against such an authorship claim for Mark (and Ehrman does present those arguments). Those arguments can be addressed. So given a fair debate over the issues that lead one to think about who wrote a gospel, here is a point the claim Mark did not write the gospel has to deal with. What commends Mark as the author, if we are going to simply pick someone to enhance the reputation of a gospel when no one supposedly who knows the author is (which is what the alternative view claims is the situation)? What is Mark's reputation? He failed to survive the first missionary journey and caused a split between Paul and Barnabas according to Acts. So how does randomly attaching his name to the book enhance that gospel's credibility? Such a theory does not work here. Mark's reputation, such as it was, on its own does not enhance the credibility of the work. More than that, the tradition also consistently associated Peter with Mark, so why was this gospel not simply called the Gospel of Peter, if one is free to name any author the church could choose? Given a choice between Peter and Mark on the basis of reputation, Peter would be the obvious choice. Something else must be at work, namely, a tradition careful about who it called an author, naming someone who in this case had an otherwise less than stellar resume. Arguments like the ones I just noted go completely ignored in his volume (and these are fair historical questions). So user beware that if you are being asked to use this text in a college class, some key points are not even being raised.

That really does sound like the "Bad Bart" of the debates and popular lecture.