stephan huller

What do i have to confess? ive always beem centrally focused on marcion. how could i be married to jesus the man and be so interested in marcion. but in writing that book it was useful not to question who jesus was while questioning who mark was

I am not impressed with the mythicist approach to the long and hallowed belirf in jesus the god within christianity

outhouse

mark might have been a disciple

the author of M was certainly not.


the author of M would have been a direct enemy to the teacher of judaism from Galilee.




cross cultural oral tradition, is all M had to base his work. This results in a very minimalist view one can place any history at all on.

maryhelena

Stephan, I'm going to let this go - you are not prepared to give straight answers. You said one thing in your book, The Real Messiah, now you want to excuse that statement by arguing that you were writing for a general audience - and *useful* not to question who Jesus was...Stephan, I give up! I can't for the life of me understand why you would want to give the impression, to your general readers, that you hold to a flesh and blood gospel JC - when, now, you are maintaining that you never did hold such a position..........................:banghead:


Re Marcus Agrippa (II)


Oh, and welcome to the mythicist side of the debate....:wave:

outhouse

what a waist of 16$ bucks


Ive had bad dreams with more reality then that book.

stephan huller

That's certainly true if those 'bad dream' were about ending up becoming a used car salesman. http://priuschat.com/forums/dealers-...rthern-ca.html You shouldn't have paid $16 dollars for it, you can get it for $2 or less on Amazon.

outhouse

No, thats new and used cars lol


I also have another job

stephan huller

It's harder than you think to write a book from end to end, just as I am sure that more goes into selling cars than meets the eye. I appreciate you taking the time to give me your feedback.

outhouse

just giving you crap out of boredom more then anything else.

i do enjoy your knowledge on many subjects, even though I dont folow your doctrine


My riding partner I train with is a author, its not easy.

Grog

Oh, it is definitely as simplistic as portrayed in the OP. I read this in an hour at Barnes & Noble. Most you could just skim because the arguments are such a rehash of something you could easily read on Tektonics. There's little scholarship here. For all of his fans, I find Ehrman to be pretty lightweight and bringing to the public the lightest of fare that has been well-known in scholarship for over a century. There's nothing new in this defense of the establishment paradigm.

What is most problematic is Ehrman's mischaracterizations of "mythicist" arguments AND motivations. Ehrman, at one point in the book, surmises what the possible motivations of "mythicists" might be. Mostly, he decides, they are atheists and agnostics bent on the destruction of Christianity. Wow. Look, I am trained as an historian (sure, modern, not a classicist) and I am plain interested in the origins of Christianity. I find the paradigm under which "New Testament" studies operates to be fatally flawed. I find the evidence presented to be weak. AND (read Avalos on this one) the deck is stacked. For those of you familiar with academic departments, you know that if you were to come to a dissertation defense defending a mythicist inspired theory of the origins of Christianity, you would be absolutely crucified (figuratively, of course, but the desire for the real thing would probably be there). However, you could present the lamest of arguments such as this:

"The earliest Christians believed in a human Jesus."

That assertion would pass with no comment. It is taken as a given. Ehrman states it as a given several times in his latest book. Where is his evidence for this? He doesn't really ever say. He DOES say, in direct contradiction, that our actual earliest source, Paul, does believe in a divine Jesus. So Ehrman stands on an assertion that he directly contradicts over and over again in his defense of the historicist position.

Another issue I have is with Ehrman's characterization of the mythicist position as one that includes an "invented Jesus." In my view, no one invented Jesus (my apologies to the constantinian origins folks). In my view, Jesus was believed to be a logos figure who at some point in the past really did come to earth. The earliest Christians were not acquainted with the human Jesus, just the Jesus of revelation. In my opinion, this is the only way to explain Paul (accepting that there are authentic letters from such a character dating to the mid-first century). Reading Paul in this light, Paul makes sense. The earliest Christians had much the same relationship with Jesus as modern Christians do. Not much as changed. Jesus was a revealed character, not an earthly minister.

Ehrman spends a lot of time debunking the rising and dying god parallel which, seems to me, to be a dead issue. I don't see that position much in the mythicist camp.

Ehrman also cites (well, asserts as a basis for his position) "Aramaic" sources. I have heard this in some of his debates, as well. Really? This seems to be made up from his imagination. Aramaic source material would have made something of a splash in the world, I would think. Oh, ok, so Bart does say, yes, we don't have any actual sources, but we do have a few stray phrases in Aramaic in the Gospels AND if you stretch a certain passage about the Son of Man and squint a lot, you can come to believe that it was originally an Aramaic saying (or, on the other hand, just borrowed from Daniel). Look, ever read the Milagro Beanfield War? Yes, the characters often utter spanish phrases. The book was written in English. All NT texts are in Greek and utterly saturated in Greekness right down to using the Septuagint as the source for Old Testament material.

The strongest element in this book is Ehrman's defense of the criterion of dissimilarity. Not that there aren't still problems with the criterion (how do we in the 20th century determine what was "embarrassing" to anonymous first century writers?). But, the fact that in the Gospels and in Galatians, there are references to the "brother(s) of the lord" or brethren of the Lord" is a strong fact to consider. I do not find that explanations from the mythicist point of view have (or can) adequately address this problem. Also, Ehrman doesn't mention the confusion of the Cephas/Peter parts of Galatians and when he writes about Paul referring to Peter, he always uses "Cephas" in spite of the fact that in Galatians 1, Paul uses Peter several times...a paradox that has yet to be explained.

THAT BEING SAID (and yes this is much too long now), there are, on the other hand, smoking gun pieces of evidence against the standard, presiding paradigm. For example, I believe that Romans 13 completely undermines any belief that Paul knew of a crucifixion at the hands of the Romans as part of a Jewish conspiracy. I do not believe the two positions are compatible. Romans 13 rules this out.

I have a lot more to say about this book by Ehrman, but I mostly found it to be overly defensive in tone, dismissive (and thus dismissed), and lacking in depth.

Grog

Birger Pearson vs. Bart Ehrman? I side with Pearson on this one. Read his article, which is the authoritative take on this passage. Ehrman's argument here is amateurish compared to Pearson's peer-reviewed article published in the Journal of Bible Literature.