Solo

DVC is fast-paced all right; as a literary creation it could have succeeded only with folks not pausing to think about what they read. Obviously neither the author, nor the titillated feminists who knew all along that the Church stole "something" from them, have the slightest appreciation of the difficulty for a man in his seventies, whose stomach is perforated by a bullet and who is minutes dying from the wound, to summon any kind of thought, let alone think through a multi-level scheme, with interlocking clues and a message coded such that only one American could tackle it. Better move through that sort of a plot real fast !

As for "spellbinding" , it sure is that to the naifs who think Paris cops talk to each other by reciting from Berlitz handbook.

Jiri

mountainman

We know that Bart Ehrman is capable
of writing the following:

The The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, more than any other book
of recent memory, has really done the trick. The story
itself is fast-paced, intricate, spellbinding. And the
historical moments in which the past - especially
Christian antiquity - is discussed are integrated so
well into the fiction that it seems to take almost no
effort at all to pick up information about Jesus, Mary
Magdalene, the emperor Constantine, the formation of
the Christian Bible, and the noncanonical gospels. \
What a terrific way to learn history - completely
painless!

The problem is that people who read a book like this
have no way of separating the historical fact from the
literary fiction. The author himself wont help you out
by telling you which historical claims are just as
fictional as the characters and the plot of the novel.
And in many places, he himself may not know. He is a
novelist, not a scholar of history.

The question is whether anyone in this forum
thinks the same author is capable of writing
the following variant:

The Ecclesiastical History by Eusebius, more than any other book
of memory, has really done the trick. The story
itself is fast-paced, intricate, spellbinding. And the
historical moments in which the past - especially
Christian antiquity - is discussed are integrated so
well into the fiction that it seems to take almost no
effort at all to pick up information about Jesus, Mary
Magdalene, the emperor Constantine, the formation of
the Christian Bible, and the noncanonical gospels. \
What a terrific way to learn history - completely
painless!

The problem is that people who read a book like this
have no way of separating the historical fact from the
literary fiction. The author himself wont help you out
by telling you which historical claims are just as
fictional as the characters and the plot of the novel.
And in many places, he himself may not know. He is a
novelist, not a scholar of history.

Toto

Mountainman - your last post adds nothing to previous posts. You seem to feel the need to just repeat yourself. It does nothing to get people to engage in discussion with you.

I don't think that Ehrman would describe Eusebius' Church History as a spell binding page turner. But neither would he describe it as accurate history. Eusebius' reputation for accuracy is not very good, even amoung Christians.

But you're still the same distance from showing that Eusebius wrote the entire Christian canon from scratch.

mountainman

Would Ehrman describe Eusebius' Church History as a fiction story?

jgibson000

If he said "no, would you accept his judgment?

In any case, if you really want to know, why don't you ask him?

JG