ApostateAbe

Thanks. According to that page, he has had "some years teaching in the religious studies department of Mount Olive College in North Carolina," an unspecified period between 1981 and 1993. To be fair, that college is accredited, but it was during his Christian years and it was decades ago. Which economic recession were you referring to?

ApostateAbe

shalak, I am thinking maybe the literature of Bart Ehrman really is the best choice. Not giving serious consideration for his readers to scholarship after 1985--I suppose that would be a criticism given from the perspective of an advocate of Funk, Crossan and the Jesus Seminar--may be legit, but I personally don't think that camp has contributed anything more than a passing ideological scholarly trend (for liberal Christians). Whatever may be wrong with Ehrman, the flaws of his literature seem to be among the least of the vast array of flawed scholarship.

stephan huller

Let's start with that. Why approach things from this angle? Why not start by asking whether or not the stuff that came down to us is corrupt?

It really doesn't matter if the gospel was the greatest thing ever written. It is gone, lost, perdu - how ever you want to say it.

It's like asking if Cindy Crawford or Claudia Schiffer was the best lay of all the supermodels from the 1980s. They're old now and all have rubber faces.

And besides none of us are going to find out.

spin

Yo Shalak!

There is a great difficulty in using any sources regarding christianity. It should be obvious that christian sources by their nature contain bias towards christianity. At the same time many reasonable secular sources also contain a bias towards christianity because they have been written assuming many of the "scholarly" biases inherited from earlier studies in christianity.

The discussion concerning the historical Jesus assumes the conclusion that Jesus is in fact historical (rather than demonstrating the historicity) because that's how the scholarly movement over the last 100 years or so have developed to match the change in scholarly ethos towards more scientific and more historically based analyses. We have inherited the notion of a historical Jesus, though it has not been justified. (And I don't claim that Jesus didn't exist. He may have, but I don't think anyone has the evidence to show his existence either way.)

Kitchen is a highly reputed Egyptologist, but when he writes as an evangelical christian on biblical issues it is from a highly conservative maximalist approach. His work reflects his faith rather than any past reality.

We have had christianity engrained into our society for the last 1600 years, so it is very hard to separate fact from mere habit of thought. The instruments of scholarship were in the hands of christian institutions for well over 1000 years before educational entities began to emerge that were to some degree distinct from religious institutions. This makes doing objective religious studies exceptionally hard, because the tools we have available are not independent of the religion.

Historical methodologies when we apply them to christianity leads us to inconclusions rather than definite information about specific pasts. This causes a religious backlash which attempts to reclaim a historical past through the development of pseudo-historical tools that are more adapted to dealing with text analysis rather than the past. Think of the so-called "criterion of embarrassment", frequently touted here as some means of arriving at a past by deciding that religious material causes embarrassment. (See a good brief outline of those tools here.)

The thoughts of everyone brought up in our societies are influenced by precepts handed down by christianity. We know charity centers on the church, that morals center on the religion--but we don't really. That's just what we've been made to believe. Our views of christianity are what we've been made to believe and leaving christianity doesn't help you escape from the indoctrination of centuries of christian shaping of most facets of our understanding.

What this means for all of us is that most conclusions regarding the religion will be at best provisional. It will be hard to know how much is based on christian ideas and how much just might really be objective analysis. We must be prepared to abandoned any notion we construct as tainted, wrong, unsupported, or simply contrary. Ex-christians tend to take contrarian positions on any aspect of religion, leading to the syndrome of "throwing out the baby with the bathwater".

Christianity is culturally rich and dominating with a heritage of 1600 years. All western societies have been in its clutches for most of their existences. You can't expect to shake its effect, but the attempt to do so helps you define an independent view for yourself. This doesn't mean to reject everything about christianity, but to be able to evaluate more of its unnecessary effects.

As you're interested in Ehrman, you'll know that he has a good education with some of the finest christian scholars, including Bruce Metzger.
Ehrman isn't in the business of contradictions. That's something for skeptics and fundamentalist christians. Ehrman is interested in what he thinks he can learn about early christianity from the flaws and cracks in the new testament text. A lot of what he looks at has been looked at by christian scholars, but there is never any problem in re-examining things from a new(-ish) perspective. Being a top notch biblical scholar and yet not a christian gives Ehrman a fairly rare perspective, which makes his work worth looking at. But it is not the be-all-and-end-all on the subject. He is just one scholar who has been brought up in the shadow of 1600 years of christian influence on our societies.

If you are no longer a christian, you no longer need to be held by christian scholarly conclusions. You can happily forget about it rather than linger in the shadow. Or you can try to develop as objective a viewpoint on christianity as is possible given its shaping force on what we are and think today.

Toto

Ehrman differs from the Jesus Seminar (see review here) but both are equally anathema to conservative Christians.

I suspect that scholarship after 1985 refers to the development of a more intellectually respectable evangelical scholarship. The Jesus Seminar did not make much of an impression until the 90's

shalak

First of all I wanted to thank you all for your continued comments. Yeah I am not too convinced by things such as the "criteria of embarrassment" or anything that tries to use what I think is a terrible idea of proof. I can write something that would be "embarrassing" like my main hero character getting killed or my other characters being cowards at times etc but that doesn't make it any more true.

I suppose part of my confusion lies in the fact that the Christian side claims to have historical evidence to back up their claims. Perhaps it is that they are considering things like "the criteria of embarrassment" as their historical evidence. I do not think that the Bible has to be true or that Christianity is necessarily divine in any way however I am interested in investigating the supposed evidence that supports this idea. If there were not a claim of such evidence I would not really be able to investigate something like it perhaps. For all I know the evidence that people are talking about is nothing that I haven't heard before which may mean I don't even consider it evidence myself. I should get to figure that out rather soon since I should be getting a lot of this supposed evidence at school.

It sounds like its going to be an annoying but enlightening process if it really is hard to separate the fact from just traditional thinking. I already am anticipating some of the historical evidence people are going to present to me back at school. I do know that we have some writings from the church fathers but I as of right now don't think that they will help. After all they are definitely not contemporary to the events for the most part (besides maybe one or two?) and all assume the truth of Christianity in the first place. I also think that it is possible that things were forged/edited for the sake of pushing the idea of Christianity. As I said I think it is a possibility but not a necessity and I really have not studied enough to offer any kind of relevant opinion.

I suspect that some of the sources I will be given at Freed Hardeman will be - Tassidus, Tactius, Josephus, Justin Martyr, etc. I have already seen some of things on this so I am at least not going to be completely surprised by it. I am still in a puzzled state partially because I honestly don't see how I am going to be able to recover my faith in Christianity/God/Jesus again. That will probably surprise none of you but it is a weird thing for me to say especially considering this has represented essentially my entire life although I am only 22. I am not really sure what kind of evidence I would need to see anyway for me to actually be able to say with complete honesty that I beleive.

It sounds like I may not be able to learn much of anything for certain about Christianity from my studies. If that is the case so be it. I will pursue it until I get to that point so I can lay the issue to rest peacefully. I don't want to lay in bed one night and think "Did I really look at all of the supposed evidence?" Some of this may seem silly to some of you but I am pursuing this for sake of peace of mind really. Before I settle down firmly into my atheism I want to make sure I haven't overlooked something crucial in regards to the supposed/actual evidence. Hopefully I haven't just been repeating the exact same thing over and over again and if I have I apologize I will be able to probably ask more relevant questions when I get back to college and start reading more into what is available.

spin

It's not a good way to get to sleep, but there is nothing wrong with the question, "Did I really look at all of the evidence?" It is one of the better questions, as it directs your thought constructively. Another good question is "Does the evidence say what I (or anyone else) think it does?"

A better way to go to sleep is with a warm glow in your stomach and someone you know well.

Toto

Sometimes Christians claim that there is historical evidence to back up their claims because they think that the Bible counts as evidence; plus there are a few bits of archaeology that support parts of the Bible.

Christians tend not to use the criterion of embarrassment because this admits that parts of the Bible might not be true.

Gorit Maqueda

Precisely. I like Price because he does not stick to one theory and defends it to death: he offers a whole bunch of posibilities, and makes you think. If what you want is a polished Hollywood story, or a proof of Fermat's, don'y buy his books. If you prefer good questions instead of one forced answer, Price is your man.

ApostateAbe

I don't think that the study of early Christianity is especially different from other fields of the study of objective reality. There is only one model that is most correct, all of the remaining models are inferior, and we can make reasonable judgments of the best model the same way we think critically about anything else. Sometimes it is argued that we just don't have enough evidence to decide the best model for early Christianity (which I think would be a faulty point--historical facts reflecting the common beliefs of the time are abundant), but granting that point would still be no excuse to take the all-accepting scholarly approach to the extreme that Robert Price takes it. To him, almost no skeptical hypothesis is too loony, not even the theories of Acharya S. It is kind of refreshing to have seen Richard Carrier speak critically on such big-tent-oriented scholarship, because we are skeptics, and I think that one of the best things about the skeptical community is that there we are typically very narrow-minded with respect to which ideas are more probable than others. We get into New Testament studies, and somehow a lot of us seem to forget that.

Here is the rest of that transcript.

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