temporalillusion

Ehrman does give me the impression that he's become more... I don't know, driven, recently with respect to putting out the information he does. He seemed to always simply be taking scholarly stuff and packaging it for the masses, which I appreciated because I never know textual criticism even existed before, but his recent works do seem more targeted at attacking belief.. could just be an impression though, since he is an agnostic and didn't arrive at that due to his textual criticism work.

But he usually does indicate when things he's saying are more possibilities and when the things he's saying are standard scholarship. To me it wasn't so much the exact conclusion that mattered so much as the fact that things were up for debate in the first place.

I was taught the Bible we read was the Bible that was written to 99.5% accuracy so of course you have to take it literally, that fact alone proves that it's different than any other book.

Once you start picking out the cards in a house of cards things don't last long.

So even with the most basic conclusions that Ehrman communicates, it's easy to see that the version of God I was taught does not exist.

avi

The historians Plutarch and Suetonius may both have written a century after Caesar's death, and may both have suffered interpolation, fraud, forgery, etc,
however,
unlike JC,
Gaius Julius Caesar wrote something, himself: De Bello Gallico.

To me, that is evidence of his life. I think that a better analogy for Ehrman's position, would have been Socrates, since he did not write any document in our possession.

avi

Steven Carr

Do we have members of the Socrates Fan Club writing that the authorities do not bear the hemlock for nothing, and that people who are punished by the authorities brought down God's judgement on themselves?

Doug Shaver

Looks like mine wasn't working, either.

NateVader

It sounds like my story is almost identical to temporalillusion's. I had a very conservative Christian upbringing -- the kind that thought all other denominations were wrong and headed for Hell (a real fun group, as you can imagine). When I read Jesus, Interrupted, I was already heading down the path of deconversion, because I had come into contact with some online articles by people like Farrell Till. But Ehrman's book provided me with more information about contradictions and textual issues, and it's probably one of the main things that finally pushed me away from Christianity.

I agree that some of his arguments dealt more with interpretation of what the passages were saying, and I found those points to be the weakest. I didn't think they were bad points, or irrelevant, but I knew that they wouldn't mean much to fundamentalists. People who hold tightly to inerrancy won't be affected by what someone thinks a passage means. It has to be an obvious contradiction to even catch the attention of someone like that.

I read Misquoting Jesus just a few weeks ago, because I was looking for a book to recommend to my dad that would talk about the textual problems in detail (with supported evidence). I thought that book was pretty good, but I don't know that it's what I'm looking for. I think I need something that's still very readable, but goes into more detail about specific manuscripts. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.

Toto

Review from James McGrath

DCHindley

Even though McGrath did a really fine and detailed review, I think I'll just wait for the scholarly monograph.

It has been difficult for me to size up Ehrman. Having been an evangelical Jesus Person in the 1970s who eventually found Hictorical Criticism more satisfying, I can identify with the guy. In some ways he seems to be another Michel Foucault, trying to break down entrenched ways of thinking about the text of the NT, and in other ways he seems to be minimizing the textual evidence for the NT almost as if he has an agenda.

Back around 2003, I made a close study of an exchange of journal articles between him (JBL 109: "Cephas and Peter", 1990, 463-74) and Dale Allison (JBL 111 "Peter and Cephas: One and the Same", 1992, 489-95). Someone had claimed that Dale Allison overthrew every point made by Ehrman. Since I had independently come to the conclusion that Cephas and Peter were two seperate individuals, and this was Ehrman's position, I wanted to see if this was so.

While I was not convinced that Ehrman made an airtight case, I found that Allison had not in fact "overturned Ehrman's arguments point by point" (or something like that). IMHO, neither of them examined all reasonable possibilities. Ehrman came across as the cowboy shooting from the hip, while Allison seemed more interested in defending orthodoxy than really examining the issue. In the process, I mentioned that Allison's rhetorical skill was a bit more polished than Ehrman's.

I introduced my observations on Crosstalk2, where the original post praising Allison had occurred. While Ehrman responded to others as the subject of the identity/identities of Peter & Cephas had been discussed, he did not respond to me. I got the impression that he was not happy with my comment about his rhetorical style.

DCH

mountainman

Decades later? This is what might be called an anticlimax.
Where does Ehrman get his ten year chronology from if not Eusebius
and the persistent examination of the manifestly forged texts ?

mountainman

Those are leading questions that you ask at Bart Ehrman Schools the Infidel Guy. There was one notable response ...


When was Socrates critical questioning ever a menace to those inside the state of Christendom? Keep up the chrestos questions Steven Carr. It appears you have good support from other outsiders. And not without chrestos reason.