ApostateAbe

Yes, I do.
I don't think he states any conclusion concerning the historical "empty tomb" in his book.

hjalti

Well, clearly he can't be, since he doesn't accept the conclusion regarding Judas among critical scholars.

I just looked in the book and saw that you are correct.

And Ehrman is just too credulous, look at what he says in the book:
Amazing.

So when even skeptics like Ehrman say stuff like this, is it any wonder that the "consensus" is that there was an empty tomb and that Judas was real et cetera? Biblical scholarship just isn't that skeptical.

aa5874

Some Scholars have ASSUMED among themselves that there was an "historical Jesus" WITHOUT a single shred of evidence from antiquity.

In other words, most or all persons who are HJers have ONLY ASSUMED an HJ.

Bart Ehrman has NOT given any actual written credible evidence from antiquity for an "historical Jesus" and HJ Scholars have NOT even attempted to put out any argument for HJ based on historical sources of antiquity.

ApostateAbe

OK, maybe there is a misunderstanding. Whenever I speak of "consensus" or "the opinion," it would never be about a universally-accepted opinion. That would be true in all fields, but it would be especially true in New Testament history. I am curious--what does Burton Mack believe about Judas?
I don't know why you would find that so unreasonable. You quoted the conclusion of Ehrman, but you didn't quote his reasoning, and I would use mostly his reasoning to judge his conclusion. His conclusion doesn't seem to be so unreasonable on the face of it. If all four gospels say that women found Jesus' body missing, then it seems to follow that such a belief would be most likely attributed to the disciples of Jesus.

Toto

Yes, at page 216, Ehrman says that Judas' betray is "about as historically certain as anything else in the tradition," since it is multiply attested and not the sort of thing Christians would make up.

That's really appallingly naive, unless you assume he is saying that everything in the tradition has an insecure foundation.

ApostateAbe

Yeah, I wouldn't know how to make sense of that statement, since he has made a name of himself in large part by rhetorically undercutting the historical certainty of much of the New Testament tradition. He does it in the titles of all of his recent books.

hjalti

So you think that majority of "critical scholars" accept the historicity of Judas? Personally I don't know how you would know that.

A Myth of Innocence p. 304
Then he gives some reasons, e.g. it's similar to what Christians were facing (in the Olivet discourse) and it's making the jews the bad guys.

Sure it's possible that the disciples preached about women finding an empty tomb, but what evidence is there for this claim? And it must be really good evidence since we have "complete certainty"!

hjalti

Abe, I think that Ehrman is only viewed as an extremely skeptical NT scholar because he's in the United States. So when he makes the case for very moderate claims against the beliefs of US fundies (textual accuracy of the NT, infallibility) he's viewed as a "radical" and an "extremist".

Don't get me wrong, I think Ehrman is doing a great job, getting a lot of good info out to the masses, and you need that in the fundie-infested USA :Cheeky:

ApostateAbe

I have been investigating these topics on and off for years, so some of my opinions about what the consensus of critical scholars believe are my own intuitions that I am not able to prove, and I wouldn't ask you to believe them.
Thank you for that, I appreciate it.
Bart Ehrman has a set of criteria that you may have read about--multiple attestation, dissimilarity, earlier is better and plausibility. I may have left out one or two, but the explanation that some of the disciples insisted that some women found the body missing seems to satisfy all of those criteria, and of course it probably fits into Ehrman's general model. The evidence, like pretty much all other evidence concerning the life of Jesus, are the documents of the New Testament canon.

spin

The turning of text into history... like turning water into wine. There's something missing in the process.