Steven Carr

http://ehrmanblog.org/my-next-book/

After reading this, you will hardly be surprised by the number of factual errors in Did Jesus Exist?, or the fact that the book looked for all the world as if it had been knocked out by a man writing over 12,000 words a day.

tanya

Much as I criticise Ehrman, I am obliged to admit, he genuinely DOES something, while I, and many, many other forum members, just sit around and complain.

He knows a lot, he knows how to tell a story, and as his interesting message reveals, he works hard. He is a committed storyteller.

I wish there were a way to arrange for a BC&H textbook in competition with his forthcoming book, but, as I think about it, though the forum has a surplus of brilliant members, there appears to be a decided paucity of organizers here.

That's where Ehrman has us beat. He is organized. We are chaotic. Even if our message had more substance (I am not certain that it does), better illustrations, more salient analogies, superior historical research behind the text, still, I am not sure that we, collectively, could pull it off.

I can name a dozen authors on this forum, starting with Steven Carr, who could contribute to an alternative vision of the Bible, a BC&H version, but, I know it won't happen, not just because we don't have the wine to drink, after the sauna.....

aeebee50

Seems like he is earnest in writing.

LegionOnomaMoi

I'm a little confused, after reading the link, by the thread title. I expected something on methodology (either an explanation of those employed in the areas he works or his own). Instead, he just explains that he writes for more than one type of audience. But aside from the distinction between textbooks (which are often riddled with errors) and technical books/monographs, both of which are written by specialists and at times can seem rather similar (a great many books intended especially for upper level undergrad or grad courses do not resemble the standard textbook), I would have thought that the rest was obvious. One can certainly get a doctorate and decide to write popular books, but professors (tenured or no) are expected to produce scholarship. The first book is usually a version of their dissertation, but few professors, especially those in the humanities, stick to writing papers for journals.

Those scholars who end up producing popular books and gain at least a fairly wide readership can't simply back out of producing technical works unless they don't care about keeping their academic post. Ronald Hutton, for example, happened to write a book or two which were not intended for specialists, but because of the topic covered (particularly in the second, which remains perhaps the only book by a professional historian on the history of Wicca) they became fairly popular. However, his "readers" (for which the books were not intended) complained about the dense nature of his books. So he wrote two books on the changing interpretation of the druids during the early modern and modern era: one for the public followed by an academic version.

In addition to publishing companies which do not publish anything other than technical books or other work intended for specialists, there are also numerous series (e.g., Computational Neuroscience, Amsterdam Studies in Classical Philology, Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, etc.) which, like journals, have an editorial board. However, they publish books (or monographs). This is not to say that technical books published by a company like Brill, Walter de Gruyter, Wiley, Springer, etc. are not reviewed carefully. They are, and it's not easy to get published by such companies.

The same cannot be said for HarperOne (which published Ehrman's latest work) or any similar publishing company. That's why Holy Blood, Holy Grail and similar works can be published as non-fiction.

There are works which fall in between, in that for the dedicated "amateur" they are still accessible but are also read and cited by professionals. As far as historical Jesus studies are concerned, the volumes that spring to mind are those by Meier, mainly because he begins by saying that he wrote with the non-expert in mind, but included extensive and detailed footnotes for scholars. Like all such works, however, when an ancient text is quoted, not only is a translation provided as well, but the original language is transliterated (i.e., Hebraic languages and Greek are written out using the Roman alphabet rather). By contrast not only do technical works seldom transliterate, many don't translate ancient texts. Also, at least in the humanities, often such works will quote other secondary scholarship written in German, French, etc., without bothering to translate as they expect their audience to be familiar with these languages.

So quite apart from the price difference (a lot of my books were over $200), there's no way one can mistake books intended for experts with something like Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist? I have no idea about the number of mistakes he made (and by that I mean something that everyone would recognize as an error, not those things which could be interpreted as an error but could also be seen in a different light), but I doubt I would be suprised at the total. It's one of the reasons I stopped being a fan of Ehrman. The ratio of works he writes for specialists and popular books is bad enough, but few scholars produce popular books so close in content and value to sensationalist stuff. I have a hard time believing that the divide between his popular and academic works is due solely to a desire to write books accessible by anyone interested. Everything from the titles to much of the content is written to sell first and inform second. His case against mythicism was probably worse than all of the better books (i.e., not Freke and Gandy or Acharya) arguing for it.

spin

It doesn't matter about the case for or against mythicism, if you're going to fucking ask the question "did Jesus exist?". You are supposed to attempt to answer that question rather than poke holes into one species of counter-position. You don't make excuses for the paucity of evidence to come up with a so-called best explanation based on that paucity. You have the guts either to answer the question with seriousness or you admit that there is insufficient evidence. Mythicism is a red herring for the question "did Jesus exist?".

LegionOnomaMoi

He wasn't trying to answer this question. He is quite clear about that. His goal is to "convince genuine seekers who really want to know how we know that Jesus did exist" (emphasis added). He (like pretty much every specialist in the field or one related to it) thinks that the answer to this question has been demonstrated at least in the early 20th century, and certainly long before his book. The issue of who this historical individual was, and what we can know about him (if much of anything) is a seperate question, but as far as Ehrman is concerned mythicism is a dead issue except among non-specialists. And with a few exceptions, it is (whether because of some "hegemony" or for some other reason).

His hope was to convince those who have read a few blogs, online articles, and perhaps a book or two, and are like those who email him (who ask this question because they really don't know and want to know what a professor/specialist thinks rather than whatever they read) that there is in fact a good reason why so few outside academia think we lack the evidence to say Jesus was a historical person. It was not meant to convince those who have read a great deal (or have simply already made up their minds), and Ehrman says this (albeit more than a little disparagingly) at the outset.

So there is no reason to get worked up over either Ehrman's book or my post, unless you simply enjoy being upset. He didn't intend the book for those like you or Doherty or Price or Freke or your average conspiracy theorist, nor did he intend it to answer the question of Jesus' historicity, but to explain to those who want to know, as simply as possible, why scholars whose area of expertise relates to Jesus' historicity think that the question has already been answered more than adequately enough.

For those looking for something more, there's 200+ years of scholarship to read and a few languages to learn. And if not only the entirety of methods used to discern what comes from Jesus and what doesn't, but also the very question of Jesus' historicity is not resolved to your liking, then this is an entirely seperate issue.

spin

For obvious reasons. (See your concluding statements for you sitting on your hands.)

But if you call a book "did Jesus exist?" you'd expect some serious attempt to answer the question. Otherwise you call your book "Mythicism is Hooey" or whatever else you think reflects the argument.

Smug ignorance is no response. It is only to be expected when christianity has been in control of the means of preserving the traces of the past for very many centuries that the past looks more christian than it might have been. One should expect that it is also more christian in interpretation than in reality.

We are first interested in the question in Ehrman's title: "did Jesus exist?" which necessarily comes before who this historical individual was, an issue which presupposes a positive answer to the question in the title.

Stop fucking up. Mythicism is irrelevant to the question "did Jesus exist?" You know, three answers: "yes, he did", "no, he didn't", or "there is not enough evidence to make a decision". Mythicism doesn't come into this equation.

Glib rubbish. What's happened in the last few hundred years is the slow reduction of what can be considered relevant for the question "did Jesus exist?" Substance is just as lacking. That lack is merely becoming more evident. Three attempts have been made to find a historical Jesus and three attempts have failed, but with each iteration their foundation is still assumed rather than substantiated: "Jesus existed, though we can't show any substantive evidence". Historical research stops before it starts.

Steven Carr

And we need to read the invisible documents Bart cited as evidence, the Aramaic sources that can be dated to within a couple of years of the death of Jesus....

LegionOnomaMoi

You can't seriously be this naive. Perhaps someone who has little or no experience reading scholarship might make that mistake. But even a scholar from an unrelated field who has never read a book about the historical Jesus (or lack thereof) is not going to think that any book with a title like Did Jesus Exist? is an attempt at serious scholarship or an attempt to actually answer the question as if it were one (unless the author isn't a scholar). That title should be taken about as seriously as Mythicism is Hooey, and in case that weren't enough, there's the publisher and the price to clue you in without even cracking it open. And if you still aren't sure, Ehrman says quite clearly what the book is.

And (while I have no idea if this is the case for Ehrman's book) the titles of such works are often suggested by the publisher. By this time, I would be suprised if Ehrman's experience with such works hasn't made this unncessary, but those few academics I know who have written popular books have had titles suggested to them which the publisher thought would sell (a certain math professor at Brown I know, for example, thought that an introduction to number theory was sufficient, but his publisher disagreed, and they settled by putting the word "friendly" into the title).

Regardless, if you are going to take the titles of sensationalist/popular books seriously, you're going to find yourself disappointed. Proving History ? Really? Should we all get our respective panties in a twist because "proof" isn't even commonly used within "hard" sciences, let alone humanities? You can rant and rave about the inappropriateness of the notion of "proving" outside of mathematics if you want, and your time would be just as well spent as it is ranting about Ehrman's title or anything in your two replies to my posts here thus far.


What part of "he isn't trying to answer the question of Jesus' historicity" is so hard for you to understand? I know you think that some ubiquitous insidious hegemony (however inaptly you apply the term) is at play here, but even if you were right, or if there was a clandestine agency funded by Halliburton and Walmart responsible for controlling historical Jesus research, it would still make your fuming just as pointless and meaningless. If you want to get upset about actual historical Jesus scholarship, that's a different matter, but it has nothing to do either with the OP or with Ehrman's latest work, which was intended neither as actual scholarship nor as an attempt to "answer the question" of Jesus' historicity, but to give a dumbed-down explanation of what "mainstream" scholarship thinks of the mythicist case and why for those who wanted exactly that.

Fantastic. Great. Wonderful. And utterly irrelevant.



First, the full title is Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. So the fucking title "presupposes a positive answer": it's not "an argument for Jesus..." but "the argument for Jesus..." Why the definite article in the title which for some strange reason so offends you? Because Ehrman isn't presenting his case, or "an" argument, but summarizing in simplistic terms what the general argument within academia is here, so it's "the" argument. But even if he only had Did Jesus Exist? are you so unfamiliar with such books that sensationalist titles confuse you? It's a title, intended to sell books. If you are so concerned about accuracy in the titles of the books, the first thing would be to avoid reading books published by HarperOne.


Mythicism isn't irrelevant to the entire point behind Ehrman's work, which is to explain why it is wrong to those who aren't really familiar with what specialists who have dealt with Jesus' historicity in any depth think and a cursory examination of why. You can foam at the mouth over the title all you want, but why waste the energy over a title of a book like this?


Don't confuse "three attempts" with some rather arbitrary demarcation into so-called stages of the "quest" (and three? why three? Did you not read Rubio's "The Fiction of the 'Three Quests': An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Historiographical Paradigm", not to mention the various different divides used, at least one of which includes a "Fünfte Phase: The 'third quest' for the historical Jesus"). Every work of scholarship since perhaps Thomas Chubb's work but at least since Reimarus was "an attempt". More importantly, few argue that these attempts "failed" to show that Jesus existed, but most argue that few if any were successful at making much headway into seperating the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith.

Most of all, it's completely irrelevant. My post which you went off on was merely about my confusion with this thread's title and an attempt to explain that these differences in publication type are by no means limited to Ehrman (for those whose reading material is generally or exclusively limited to the selections available to "the barnes and nobles crowd" as Ehrman calls it in the blog post linked to by the OP).

But instead of taking it as such, you leapt upon one minor detail which compared Ehrman to other sensationalist/popular works of the very type he was dealing with.
And we need go no further. Because he didn't "fucking ask the question" at all, except in part of a title (followed by the rest which should have alerted you to the fact that he wasn't even attempting to offer his own argument about this issue, which he already did in an only slightly better book which was largely a bad rehash of Schweitzer, and also intended for the public). If you want to rant about the state of historical Jesus research again, you can start a new thread or continue an old one, but what is the point of
1) Going off on my post which barely even mentioned mythicism except as an critique of Ehrman's book by acting as if this said something about historical Jesus scholarship rather than Ehrman's crappy job at writing books for the public
2) Going on and on about the title of a book which is designed to attract readers, not as a clear indication about the material. While you are at it, why not rant about the title of Misquoting Jesus because he never really talks about "quoting" Jesus, but rather how the Jesus material was altered by copyists and the manuscripts we have make reconstructing any "original" NT impossible.

spin

You mean as you present yourself to be?

Here's the subtitle: "The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth". And the first section: "Evidence for the Historical Jesus". But it's not what he's really on about.

Perhaps the publisher supplied the subtitle and first section titles as well. The "Evidence for the Historical Jesus" occupies five chapters while the second section, "The Mythicists’ Claims", fills two whole chapters. Then we get part three, "Who Was the Historical Jesus?" Perhaps the publisher suggested it all.

The part where he goes out of his way to claim that he deals with "the question of Jesus' historicity".

While we're here, you don't hope to understand the implications of hegemony when all you've done is skimmed a duffer's guide to the notion. As I said, "Smug ignorance is no response."

Fake answers to the question "did Jesus exist?" fit nicely within the context of the obfuscation of the past. In fact it is merely what happened before being repeated for a new generation.

Nice that you noticed.

That's par for the course in the analysis of the existence of Jesus. There is no analysis.

You take it up with the donkey who puts his name on the front, fills the content, and takes a share of the profit.

I think you've missed the whole point of the book, which is something you do so often: it's a huge bait and switch. The ultimate goal seems to be to console those buyers such popular books who feel the mythicist noise is getting hard on the ears.

I don't usually read secondary sources, so you can name most any book including Noddy Goes to School and you're likely to find something I haven't read. I have noted that you have good library access. Do you have the other volumes of Noddy?

Now you're just being plain silly. There is no point in pedantry over the famed three goes at the quest. It is not point to look at them, but to understand that the process hasn't got anywhere. Jeeesus.

I "leapt upon" the conflict between claiming to examine "did Jesus exist?" and examining why mythicists are wrong. You can pretend that Ehrman isn't intent on sustaining the notion that Jesus did exist in his first five chapters. I made clear what interested me, which wasn't what interested you or the o.p. There is no subterfuge here.

[T2]It doesn't matter about the case for or against mythicism, if you're going to fucking ask the question "did Jesus exist?". You are supposed to attempt to answer that question rather than poke holes into one species of counter-position. You don't make excuses for the paucity of evidence to come up with a so-called best explanation based on that paucity. You have the guts either to answer the question with seriousness or you admit that there is insufficient evidence. Mythicism is a red herring for the question "did Jesus exist?".[/T2]

Have you actually read it?

I'd rather rant about calling a book "Forged", which is pretty ridiculous, but certainly a money-maker.