Bart Ehrman trashes his reputation
On page 97 of Did Jesus Exist, Bart Ehrman makes the following amazing statement, doing his best William Lane Craig impression :-
'We have already seen that at least seven Gospel accounts of Jesus, all of them entirely or partially independent of one another, survived from within a century of the traditional date of his death.
These seven are based on numerous previously existent written sources, and on an enormous number of oral traditions about him that can be dated back to Aramaic sources of Palestine, almost certainly from the 30s of the Common Era.'
Those two paragraphs of Bart's have just trashed his reputation.
I love the 'partially independent.'
Bart's answer to Doherty's point that Paul predates the Gospels is to rewrite history, and move the Gospels to before Paul.
Bart completes his rewriting of history on page 238, where he writes that even if something predates Paul, '...it does not represent the earliest Christian understanding of Christ.'
So now Paul has been moved to after the sources of the Gospels, and even parts which Bart thinks might predate Paul are still after the sources of the Gospels.
How can you argue with somebody who rewrites history, moving sources around in time to get a storyline he can sell to himself?
'We have already seen that at least seven Gospel accounts of Jesus, all of them entirely or partially independent of one another, survived from within a century of the traditional date of his death.
These seven are based on numerous previously existent written sources, and on an enormous number of oral traditions about him that can be dated back to Aramaic sources of Palestine, almost certainly from the 30s of the Common Era.'
Those two paragraphs of Bart's have just trashed his reputation.
I love the 'partially independent.'
Bart's answer to Doherty's point that Paul predates the Gospels is to rewrite history, and move the Gospels to before Paul.
Bart completes his rewriting of history on page 238, where he writes that even if something predates Paul, '...it does not represent the earliest Christian understanding of Christ.'
So now Paul has been moved to after the sources of the Gospels, and even parts which Bart thinks might predate Paul are still after the sources of the Gospels.
How can you argue with somebody who rewrites history, moving sources around in time to get a storyline he can sell to himself?
posted by Steven Carr at 1:16 AM
1 Comments:
The thing that I have always loved about Ehrman is his care in fairly laying out the evidence. Regardless of whether I agreed with his conclusions (although I usually did), I always felt that I had a clear picture of the evidence for and against them. I have never had to worry about internet apologists surprising me with some evidence I didn’t know was out there.
I am reserving judgment until I read Did Jesus Exist? for myself, but the quotes I’m seeing so far are very disappointing.
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