Bart Ehrman quote from an article- please help refute!

[Gorgias]

Ehrman has sterling credentials

I would gently suggest to you that a Christian Scripture scholar whose studies lead him to abandon the faith and proclaim it to be untrue is just about the clearest example of a lack of sterling credentials.

 

[PickyPicky]

It was not his studies that caused him to lose his faith. It was the old, old problem of the Problem of Pain. Why are people so confident of knocking Ehrman down on the basis of their ignorance?

 

[Gorgias]

It was not his studies that caused him to lose his faith. It was the old, old problem of the Problem of Pain. Why are people so confident of knocking Ehrman down on the basis of their ignorance?

“My personal theology changed radically with this realization [that “the Bible is not this kind of inerrant guide to our lives”], taking me down roads quite different from the ones I had traversed in my late teens and early twenties. … [This book] is written based on my thirty years of thinking about the subject, and from the perspective that I now have, having gone through such radical transformation of my own views of the Bible.” - Ehrman, Introduction to “Misquoting Jesus”, pp 14-15.

(Why are people so confident of holding Ehrman up on the basis of their ignorance, I wonder?)

 

[Sedona]

Good Evening Gorgias: My observations on Ehrman’s credentials are based on his education, and the institution where he teaches, and not based on whether or not his conclusions agree or disagree with what anyone believes, or even with what I believe or don’t believe. Moreover, my comments were in reply to the statement that he’s a fraud. To be fair, I think we should grant that he’s far from that. There are a number of scholars I disagree with, but I recognize the validity of their positions and have respect for their credentials. Where I disagree with Erhman is in his clear sense of disappointment. I perceive that he has a sense of having been betrayed by the Christian faith. I don’'t think he should be disappointed or feel betrayed, because I don’t feel that anyone intentionally mislead him. I think he should simply come to terms with his conclusions and move on from there.

With regard to the discussion between yourself and PickyPicky, it is not that altogether uncommon for bible scholars to lose their faith. It doesn’t mean that they don’t see Jesus as a role model and such, or that they abandon spirituality. They just come to some more down to earth conclusions about the probabilities of certain dogmas and theological positions once the authorship and historical perspectives of the Bible come into focus through intensive and pragmatic study. I think it was Reza Aslan who said that there’s the “Jesus of history” and the “Jesus of faith.” Once you’ve seen both, you have to land somewhere, and it may not be where you started.

All the best

 

[HarryStotle]

I think it was Reza Aslan who said that there’s the “Jesus of history” and the “Jesus of faith.” Once you’ve seen both, you have to land somewhere, and it may not be where you started.

Except that there is nothing about the “Jesus of history,” by himself, that could make you lose sight of the “Jesus of faith,” unless you have some predisposition towards losing contact with the “Jesus of faith.”

 

[PickyPicky]

“My personal theology changed radically with this realization [that “the Bible is not this kind of inerrant guide to our lives”], taking me down roads quite different from the ones I had traversed in my late teens and early twenties

And now a misleading quote.

Ehrman’s personal theology changed radically from fundamentalist Evangelical to liberal mainstream Christian because what he found in his scholarship argued against biblical inerrancy. He lost his faith later, because of his struggles with the problem of suffering.

You know it is perfectly fine to disagree with the findings of Professor Ehrman’s scholarship — of course many scholars do — but it is not necessary for you to try to blacken his substantial and respected reputation.

 

[Sedona]

I think that people come to differing conclusions when encountering facts, and as you say, it may be based on predispositions to an extent. Conversely it could be said that certain predispositions could make one resistant to the implications manifest in factual analysis. I see it on both sides of course, whereas I have seen very religious people resist conclusions based on historical knowledge. Likewise, I have seen hard core atheists like Dawkins dismiss perfectly logical ideas that don’t mesh well with their own dogmas (committed atheists have dogmas as much as religious people do).

As for the idea of predispositions, it would be a good topic of discussion to delve into where our predispositions come from, and how much control a person actually has over any of that.

All the best

 

[Gorgias]

I perceive that he has a sense of having been betrayed by the Christian faith. I don’'t think he should be disappointed or feel betrayed, because I don’t feel that anyone intentionally mislead him. I think he should simply come to terms with his conclusions and move on from there.

I agree. The first time I read his introduction in Misquoting Jesus (and, coincidentally, reading Azlan’s similar story of his life), I was struck by a particular theme: their flavor of Christianity’s teachings regarding the Bible itself were so rigid, so dogmatically inflexible, that when they saw that things were not so cut-and-dried as they’d been led to believe… they lost faith. Not in their brand of Christianity, mind you, but all of Christianity.

That, in itself, is a leap of illogic that’s sad to see from a scholar. (I mean… one does not abandon biology when the ‘out of Africa’ theory hits some bumps, eh?)

So, having found out that fundamentalist-style Christianity has fatal flaws, they both leave the faith – but continue to study Scripture “from the outside”, so to speak. They, in a sense, are Scripture scholarship’s ‘prodigal sons’ – but they’ve refused to re-enter their Father’s house, and content themselves with munching on the pods in the trough…

You know it is perfectly fine to disagree with the findings of Professor Ehrman’s scholarship — of course many scholars do — but it is not necessary for you to try to blacken his substantial and respected reputation.

Yes… because quoting what a person has himself written is how one “blackens” a person’s reputation.

And, to your point of his “substantial and respected reputation”, let me make it clear where I take exception to him: to my view, he’s the Giorgio Tsoukalos of Scripture scholarship! That is, he’ll point to a piece of data, draw a conclusion which doesn’t quite follow from the data, and without any further proof or argument for his conclusion, he’ll presume it true and use it as a building block for another conclusion. He may have come from stellar academic programs… but his method is just plain shoddy. (It doesn’t matter, IMHO, where he hangs his hat, in terms of religious affiliation (or disaffiliation!); what matters to me is his method, which again, IMHO, doesn’t quite hold water.)

 

[PickyPicky]

Yes… because quoting what a person has himself written is how one “blackens” a person’s reputation

You quoted him speaking about the time he moved away from fundamentalist Christianity to mainstream Christianity, and used the quote to imply it was about his loss of Christian faith. It wasn’t. That is not a decent way to argue.

 

[deMontfort]

Sedona:

I think it was Reza Aslan who said that there’s the “Jesus of history” and the “Jesus of faith.” Once you’ve seen both, you have to land somewhere, and it may not be where you started.

Except that there is nothing about the “Jesus of history,” by himself, that could make you lose sight of the “Jesus of faith,” unless you have some predisposition towards losing contact with the “Jesus of faith.”

Yeah, it’s more like there’s Jesus, and there’s the spin that the Marxist atheist historians put on Jesus.

 

[Gorgias]

You quoted him speaking about the time he moved away from fundamentalist Christianity to mainstream Christianity, and used the quote to imply it was about his loss of Christian faith. It wasn’t. That is not a decent way to argue.

sigh. So, let’s turn to more things that Ehrman, himself, has written:

I started feeling the tug toward agnosticism sometime during my PhD program. I remember clearly a particular moment, and it was, somewhat ironically, while I was serving as the pastor of the Princeton Baptist Church. Even though I was incredibly busy at the time (I was taking a full load of graduate seminars, preparing to take my PhD exams, serving as a Teaching Assistant for a class taught by Bruce Metzger, AND serving as the pastor of the church) I enjoyed the ministry very much. …

I remember thinking at the time, though, that being actively engaged in the church was “saving my faith.” I had the strong sense that if I didn’t have to stand in front of a congregation every week to direct worship, say prayers, preach sermons, and so on, that I would probably be moving away from my faith. With people depending on me and looking up to me, I really couldn’t afford to think seriously about whether I still believed all this or not. I had to believe it. …

One of the major issues for me: I was wondering – the most basic question of all — if I could really believe there was any kind of God who was active in the world or not.

… I shouldn’t decide what I thought and believed because of the benefits that accrued. I should decide what I thought and believed based on what I really thought and believed.

Now, you can make the claim that it was other considerations that led to his abandonment of the faith, but in doing so, what you’re really saying is that what he learned in his studies – which is what he credits to the genesis of his disillusionment, and which gives rise to his nascent agnosticism! – had no role in his decision.

And that, my friend, is pure nonsense.

 

[PickyPicky]

You’re working hard, but I suspect you now know I was right. Enough, anyway. “Genesis”, “nascent”. Good stuff.

 

[Gorgias]

You’re working hard, but I suspect you now know I was right. Enough, anyway.

Is that another way of saying, “I can’t dispute the quotes you’ve provided, so I’ll just stick to my unattributed claims”? OK… I can deal with that.

 

[PickyPicky]

Is that another way of saying, “I can’t dispute the quotes you’ve provided

They just repeat the tendentious way you’re treating Ehrman’s words. No point me repeatedly pointing that out.

 

[Calliope]

I think it’s a common thing that the more you study something objectively (or as objectively as a human is capable of) the most skeptical you become, especially if one does comparative studies.

The more I study science, the more skeptical I am of any single “discovery”. I automatically begin to ask questions about how the statistics were done, how the study was set up, how many were involved, what about similar studies, etc etc, because I know how science works and that one study does not mean the definitive answer has been found.

When one studies religions and their origins, history and development, there are certain commonalities, because of the way the human brain works, cultures operate and societies organize. Then when one looks at one’s own religion they can either accept that it was likewise influenced, or declare that it is unique in not being subject to those same forces that other religions fell prey to.

Some go one way, some go the other. For some the discrepencies cause them to fall away, others hang on all the tighter.

We can see this in action on these forums. The recent grand jury report is causing some to question whether or not Catholicism is what it claims to be if it’s consecrated clergy could commit such acts, others use it as proof that Catholicism is what it claims, because Satan wouldn’t waste his time attacking the Church if it wasn’t the true faith.

For some, it’s enough to practice a religion because they experience a true and real benefit in their life to do so, others NEED it to be true and literal outside of any benefit they might sense from practicing it, and if something raises red flags, their faith plummets.

 

[PickyPicky]

Ehrman has explained his journey to agnosticism many times. Here we go:

“For most of my life I was a devout Christian, believing in God, trusting in Christ for salvation, knowing that God was actively involved in this world. During my young adulthood, I was an evangelical, with a firm belief in the Bible as the inspired and inerrant word of God. During those years I had fairly simple but commonly held views about how there can be so much pain and misery in the world. God had given us free will (we weren’t programmed like robots), but since we were free to do good we were also free to do evil. […]

In my mid 20s, I left the evangelical fold, but I remained a Christian for some twenty years—a God-believing, sin-confessing, church-going Christian, who no longer held to the inerrancy of Scripture but who did believe that the Bible contained God’s word, trustworthy as the source for theological reflection. And the more I studied the Christian tradition, first as a graduate student in seminary and then as a young scholar teaching biblical studies at universities, the more sophisticated I became in my theological views and in my understanding of the world and our place in it.

Suffering increasingly became a problem for me and my faith. […]

Eventually, while still a Christian thinker, I came to believe that God himself is deeply concerned with suffering and intimately involved with it. The Christian message, for me, at the time, was that Jesus Christ is the revelation of God to us humans, and that in Jesus we can see how God deals with the world and relates to it. He relates to it, I thought, not by conquering it but by suffering for it. […] What is God like? He is a God who suffers. The way he deals with suffering is by suffering both for us and alongside us.

This was my view for many years, and I still consider it a powerful theological view. It would be a view that I would still hold on to, if I were still a Christian. But I’m not.

About nine or ten years ago I came to realize that I simply no longer believed the Christian message. A large part of my movement away from the faith was driven by my concern for suffering. I simply no longer could hold to the view—which I took to be essential to Christian faith—that God was active in the world, that he answered prayer, that he intervened on behalf of his faithful […]”

http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/blogalogue/2008/04/why-suffering-is-gods-problem.html

 

[HarryStotle]

Ehrman has explained his journey to agnosticism many times. Here we go:

Except for one slight problem…

This is the last paragraph from the article by Ehrman:

As it turns out, my various wrestlings with the problem have led me, even as an agnostic, back to the Bible, to see how different biblical authors wrestle with this, the greatest of all human questions. The result is my recent book, God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question–Why We Suffer. My contention is that many of the authors of the Bible are wrestling with just this question: why do people (especially the people of God) suffer? The biblical answers are striking at times for their simplicity and power (suffering comes as a punishment from God for sin; suffering is a test of faith; suffering is created by cosmic powers aligned against God and his people; suffering is a huge mystery and we have no right to question why it happens; suffering is redemptive and is the means by which God brings salvation; and so on). Some of these answers are at odds with one another (is it God or his cosmic enemies who are creating havoc on earth?), yet many of them continue to inform religious thinkers today.
My hope in writing the book is certainly not to encourage readers to become agnostic, the path that I took. It is instead to help people think, both about this biggest of all possible questions and about the historically and culturally significant religious responses to it that can be found in the most important book in the history of our civilization.

The logical problem is that if the problem of suffering was sufficiently convincing for Ehrman to leave Christianity entirely, why would he NOT “encourage readers to become agnostic?”

Perhaps he doesn’t think the problem of suffering was the compelling cause to make him leave, because if it were, why wouldn’t he forthrightly be arguing that?

There has to be something else.

Perhaps it was a factor, but not THE factor. Otherwise, we would have expected him not merely to write a book to “help people think,” but to persuade them of his own conclusions, no?

A cynic might observe that Ehrman was peddling a book about suffering, so why wouldn’t he add his own personal anecdote in order to sell more books?

Now, you might argue that he is simply being academically neutral on the subject. Perhaps.

But if the problem of suffering was as compelling as you make it out to be for Ehrman, why would it have been treated as an academic subject by him, and not be the compelling case he makes it out to be?

If the problem of suffering wasn’t that compelling, but could remain merely of academic interest, why would it cause him to leave Christianity completely?

Something just doesn’t sit right here.

 

[PickyPicky]

Ehrman does not see it as being his rôle to persuade people to abandon their faith. Good heavens, he is Professor of Religious Studies at UNC at Chapel Hill! Put aside your animosity.

 

[Dovekin]

Perhaps Ehrman doesn’t see agnosticism as an answer to the problem of suffering, but as the best way to point out the lack of an answer.

 

[Sedona]

Thank you for the reply Gorgias: I do think they may have to some extent been victims of a bit of inflexibility that attends any sort of fundamentalism, but I wonder how much that would also be the case with John Crossan, who is also quite scholarly and of course came from the Catholic priesthood or John Spong, who is also a bible scholar and was as you probably are aware, an Episcopal bishop. It seems that ample exposure to bible history can produce a level of pragmatism that is not isolated to the three or four examples we have touched upon.

All the best