Bart Ehrman quote from an article- please help refute!

[HarryStotle]

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.

Perhaps he doesn’t “see it as his role,” and yet his published books seem to be aimed at precisely that end.

Why are you presuming animosity on my part? Persuading people to abandon their faith is what he does for a living. Being “Professor of Religious Studies at UNC Chapel Hill” is merely a sideline. His income from selling books to atheists, I am relatively certain, is far more lucrative than his professorship.

I am just not buying that his arguments regarding what can be demonstrated about the historicity of Jesus, the anonymity of the Gospels, and supposed contradictions in Scripture are that compelling to anyone steeped in the subject.

Ergo, for someone with Ehrman’s credentials to be convinced by the weak arguments he makes in his work, I can’t help but think something else is in play regarding his conclusions.

You suggest his inability to reconcile himself with the problem of evil as his motivation. Perhaps that is a small factor, though more of a rationalization, perhaps.

I tend to think that, pride and self-love being what they are, human beings are far more likely to deceive ourselves about our real motives than we are to be forthright.

My guess is that Ehrman just isn’t convinced about the reports of miracles in Scripture, and given the prevalence of these he thinks, deep down, that the rest of the narrative was also just made up. He has to justify his career choice and investment in it, so to make the best of a bad situation, he has made a lucrative game out of justifying his disbelief by immersing himself in the historical aspects of Christian Scripture. Partially, it is to keep reminding himself that he is right about viewing the theological dogmas of Christianity as largely mythical, but also because selling books and the notoriety from them has been rewarding. He likely wouldn’t or couldn’t admit that so the problem of suffering makes a compelling alternative.

Why would an agnostic - atheist spend his life researching something he thinks has been largely made up? He is professor of religious studies, is he not? Fame and a modicum of fortune seems to explain it quite well.

 

[Calliope]

Religious studies is just that. The study of religion, an important part of history and culture. There is no requirement or expectation that one believes the religions they study. It’s not an excuse to indulge one’s faith, it’s an area of study.

 

[PickyPicky]

Why are you presuming animosity on my part?

I note that you do not present counter-arguments to any of Ehrman’s views, instead you resort to totally unsupported attacks on his private character, attacks verging, I suggest, on the defamatory. That looks awfully like animus to me. At any rate it produces an unpleasant atmosphere here, one which I have breathed too long. I will read no more of it; I leave the field to you.

 

[HarryStotle]

HarryStotle:

Why are you presuming animosity on my part?

I note that you do not present counter-arguments to any of Ehrman’s views, instead you resort to totally unsupported attacks on his private character, attacks verging, I suggest, on the defamatory. That looks awfully like animus to me. At any rate it produces an unpleasant atmosphere here, one which I have breathed too long. I will read no more of it; I leave the field to you.

And I note that Ehrman engages in almost totally unsupported attacks on the character of the Gospel writers and early Church, attacks verging, I suggest, on the defamatory.

Since his “arguments” are one-sided and since his Introduction to the New Testament is the singularly most used text in universities, perhaps across the world, introducing students to Christianity, he is probably the one person most responsible for the de-Christianization of the past several generations; at least among university students, but also the general public given many of his books are targeting general audiences.

An example:

Nearly all of these story tellers had no independent knowledge of what really happened to Jesus. It takes little imagination to realize what happened to the stories about Jesus. You are probably familiar with the old birthday party game: Telephone. A group of kids sit in a circle. The first tells a brief story to the one next to her who tells it to the next, and to the next, and so on until it comes back full circle to the one who started it. Invariably the story has changed so much in the process of retelling that everyone gets a good laugh. Imagine this same activity taking place not in a solitary living room with ten kids on one afternoon, but over the expanse of the Roman Empire some 2500 miles across with thousands of participants. (Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, 72–74)

Continued…

 

[HarryStotle]

So, if characterizing the Gospel writers as “story-tellers” with “no independent knowledge of what really happened to Jesus,” despite that two of them were disciples of Jesus from early on, that Mark was scribing for Peter and Luke claimed to be carefully compiling accounts of eyewitnesses, isn’t defaming those individuals, I am not sure what is.

For a scholar, the level of Erhman, to compare the transmission of the corpus of the Gospels to the telephone game is outrageous. The only reason he can get away with it is because he is looked to as the reigning expert on the subject. Even, on its face, the claim is preposterous, since it doesn’t account for the fact that followers of the disciples and their followers vouched for the authenticity and authorship of the Gospels.

Papias of Hierapolis ( ~120 to 130 AD ) was a disciple of John, the Apostle. Irenaeus of Lyon ( ~150 to 200 AD) was a disciple of Polycarp, who was a disciple of John. Clement of Alexandria ( ~ 170-200 ) knew elders who knew the Apostles. These men reported on who wrote the Gospels and quoted from them extensively.

Further points (based on the work of Brant Pitre):

There is no historical basis for the claim that the Gospels ever were anonymous because no anonymous manuscripts exist. None.
In fact, the anonymous Gospel theory is incredible, for several reasons:

1. If the Gospels circulated anonymously across the Roman Empire for a century (and they did), how did the scribes unanimously agree at a later time to attribute the same versions of the Gospels to the exact same writers?
2. Why is there no trace of anonymity in the Gospel tradition? Not in the manuscripts and not in the writings about the Gospels.
3. If we compare the Gospels to actually anonymous texts like the Letter to the Hebrews, we find a great deal of debate arising from texts which actually were anonymous. Yet no such debate exists surrounding Gospel authorship.
4. If the authors were chosen to give the Gospels authority, why choose Mark or Luke, who were not even eyewitnesses and only became well-known later as a consequence of having written their Gospels?

In short, if you wish to claim about me that I am engaging in “unsupported attacks on his private character, attacks verging, I suggest, on the defamatory,” you will need to make precisely the same point about Ehrman’s attacks on the characters of the Gospel writers since, basically, he is calling them, and the entire early Church, fabricators of stories – liars, essentially, purporting to tell the truth of what they witnessed, but really having made it all up.

 

[Dovekin]

Okay.

We no longer need to presume your animosity toward Ehrman, it is a chosen position in reponse to your ideas about what he says.

I am glad that is settled.

 

[Gorgias]

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.

I think they’ve taken a different route, wouldn’t you say? And, at the risk of stretching the thesis too far, then what I’d say I see in their cases is a liberal Christianity that, upon exposure to Scriptural scholarship, turns even more liberal (as opposed to Ehrman and Azlan, who eschew Christianity altogether).

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.

I think it would be fair to say that in the context of Bible study – as in the context of all other endeavors! – people react in a vast array of ways in response to deeper examination of the material…

for someone with Ehrman’s credentials to be convinced by the weak arguments he makes in his work, I can’t help but think something else is in play regarding his conclusions.

I see the same surprising reliance on weak argumentation… but I’m not so certain that I see the ulterior motive.

He has to justify his career choice and investment in it, so to make the best of a bad situation, he has made a lucrative game out of justifying his disbelief

Interesting. (Kinda irrelevant to the discussion at hand, but interesting thought!!)

We no longer need to presume your animosity toward Ehrman, it is a chosen position in reponse to your ideas about what he says.

Hang on a second – @PickyPicky challenges @HarryStotle to “present counter-arguments” and not simply “resort to totally unsupported attacks” on Ehrman – and when he does, you accuse him of animosity? Seriously?!? By that standard, no one who disagrees with you is allowed to present a rebuttal, or else risk being labeled ‘hostile’ to you!

 

[Dovekin]

Hang on a second – @PickyPicky challenges @HarryStotle to “present counter-arguments” and not simply “resort to totally unsupported attacks” on Ehrman – and when he does, you accuse him of animosity ? Seriously?!? By that standard, no one who disagrees with you is allowed to present a rebuttal, or else risk being labeled ‘hostile’ to you!

He does not present counter arguments. Instead he accuses Ehrman:

Persuading people to abandon their faith is what he does for a living

and

And I note that Ehrman engages in almost totally unsupported attacks on the character of the Gospel writers and early Church, attacks verging, I suggest, on the defamatory.

He presents obvious distortions of Ehrman’s positions so he can accuse Ehrman of animosity. Yes, Ehrman calls the evangelists “storytellers,” but that does not have the negative connotations that Harry implies it does — “liars…made it all up…” We have St Luke’s account of how he wrote his gospel that shows he had no eyewirness experience but relied on other accounts which he reworked into his “orderly account.” This is essentially what Ehrman describes and Harry rejects. It is not an unsupported attack verging on defamatory, but what St Luke himself tells us.

If I believed Ehrman was doing what Harry says, I would feel animosity toward him as well. Harry seems to be saying that his animosity is justified, not that he has no animosity. Hence my acceptance of his animosity.

 

[Sedona]

Sorry to see you leave the discussion, but in truth, I think we both would have liked to have seen some counterpoints to Ehrman’s views rather than attacks on his character and credentials, which was my original objection as well. The word fraud is reserved for people who offer answers they don’t have, or heal people on television or sell survival kits for the end-times. Erhman is a scholar, and no one gets rich on publishing scholarly works. They just don’t. Sorry to see you go.

All the best

 

[Gorgias]

He does not present counter arguments

Papias of Hierapolis ( ~120 to 130 AD ) was a disciple of John, …

There is no historical basis for the claim that the Gospels ever were anonymous …

In fact, the anonymous Gospel theory is incredible, for several reasons …

I would say that there are several counter arguments in his post… wouldn’t you?

Yes, Ehrman calls the evangelists “storytellers,” but that does not have the negative connotations that Harry implies it does

But Ehrman does claim late authorship (and therefore, lack of eyewitness reportage), doesn’t he?

We have St Luke’s account of how he wrote his gospel that shows he had no eyewirness experience but relied on other accounts which he reworked into his “orderly account.” This is essentially what Ehrman describes and Harry rejects.

So, here’s the thing: you can have an eyewitness report in two ways – either the eyewitness speaks to you directly, or the eyewitness provides his account to a scribe, who presents you with his account. Both, by the way, are admissible in present-day courts of law. Ehrman takes Luke’s preamble and uses it to claim that we’re not looking at eyewitness accounts. On the face of it, that’s a poor conclusion. After all, throughout all of recorded history, we have eyewitness accounts written down by historians – and do we call them mere “story-tellers”, or rather, “history-tellers”?

I think we both would have liked to have seen some counterpoints to Ehrman’s views

At the very least, I think that this is what we’ve seen in a few posts here, don’t you think? (Yes, they come along with attacks on the quality of his scholarship, but you can easily set those aside.)

Are there particular claims of Ehrman’s that you’d like to see rebutted?

 

[Dovekin]

In fact, the anonymous Gospel theory is incredible, for several reasons …

Nope. For example, the counter arguments to “the anonymous Gospel theory” willfully misunderstand the word “anonymous.” If Ehrman really held anything like what these arguments refute, he would be ridiculed by everyone.

Ehrman takes Luke’s preamble and uses it to claim that we’re not looking at eyewitness accounts.

Luke says he has eyewitness accounts and other documents that he uses to create his own account. The point is that Luke creates his own account; he would describe his process differently if he were giving his own eyewitness account. Does that address what you say here?

Yes, I call historians storytellers. I suspect that is Ehrman’s approach as well. That was kind of the point. Using “storyteller” as a pejorative misrepresents Ehrman.

 

[Gorgias]

For example, the counter arguments to “the anonymous Gospel theory” willfully misunderstand the word “anonymous.”

Fascinating! I have to admit that I’ve never heard that particular defense! What, then, does “anonymous” mean in this context?

The point is that Luke creates his own account; he would describe his process differently if he were giving his own eyewitness account. Does that address what you say here?

I don’t think it does, since it doesn’t address the genre in which Luke writes, in the cultural and temporal context in which he’s writing. His account is precisely what a Greco-Roman history looks like!

Yes, I call historians storytellers. I suspect that is Ehrman’s approach as well. That was kind of the point. Using “storyteller” as a pejorative misrepresents Ehrman.

Except that he uses it in juxtaposition with the term “eyewitness”. In doing so, the natural connotation is that he’s rejecting them as telling what they saw, and instead claiming that they’re merely relating stories. That, to a Christian believer, is itself perjorative!

 

[Dovekin]

What, then, does “anonymous” mean in this context?

Do you think I oversold it? Anonymous means without a name. It means one thing in a society of mass produced books, and something else of hand copied scrolls. Trying to exaggerate the alienation of book from copyist by extending time of “circulation” is something, not sure how to finish thethought.

His account is precisely what a Greco-Roman history looks like!

Yes, that is the point. You know the difference between Herodotus and Thucydides? There are a variety of ways of writing history, telling stories, etc.

That, to a Christian believer, is itself perjorative!

Not to a charitable Christian.

 

[HarryStotle]

He presents obvious distortions of Ehrman’s positions so he can accuse Ehrman of animosity. Yes, Ehrman calls the evangelists “storytellers,” but that does not have the negative connotations that Harry implies it does — “liars…made it all up…” We have St Luke’s account of how he wrote his gospel that shows he had no eyewirness experience but relied on other accounts which he reworked into his “orderly account.” This is essentially what Ehrman describes and Harry rejects. It is not an unsupported attack verging on defamatory, but what St Luke himself tells us.

No, actually. Ehrman is not claiming that we just don’t know for certain who wrote the Gospels. He is claiming that there is no one author for each, but that they were slowly compiled from disparate accounts from across the Roman Empire for 2-300 years, then written down and atrributions made to notable early Church figures like the Apostles in order to lend them an air of credibility.

You don’t understand what Ehrman is getting at when he uses the term “anonymous Gospels.”

Here is a quote from him.

N]early all of these storytellers had no independent knowledge of what really happened [to Jesus]. It takes little imagination to realize what happened to the stories. You are probably familiar with the old birthday party game “telephone.” A group of kids sits in a circle, the first tells a brief story to the one sitting next to her, who tells it to the next, and to the next, and so on, until it comes back full circle to the one who started it. Invariably, the story has changed so much in the process of retelling that everyone gets a good laugh. Imagine this same activity taking place, not in a solitary living room with ten kids on one afternoon, but over the expanse of the Roman Empire (some 2,500 miles across), with thousands of participants.
Source: Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 72–74.

He doesn’t mean we don’t really know who wrote the Gospels, he means they were fabricated over time, over great distance, by “thousands of participants,” nearly all of whom never knew Jesus personally, but simply compiled whatever stories were made up and told about him over the previous 200-300 years, wrote these down and retroactively attributed them to some important figure in the early Church, The exact time period cannot be known, according to Ehrman, because we don’t have the original copies.

If I believed Ehrman was doing what Harry says, I would feel animosity toward him as well. Harry seems to be saying that his animosity is justified, not that he has no animosity. Hence my acceptance of his animosity.

Ehrman is, indeed, doing what “Harry says.” Read the quote above. And I do not have animosity towards him, although I am highly critical and left to wonder about his motivations.

 

[Dovekin]

Ehrman is, indeed, doing what “Harry says.”

And as I said, I do not believe he is. Your accusation that he calls the evangelist liars is not convincing. I have a much higher regard for storytellers and fabricators than you do apparently.

 

[HarryStotle]

HarryStotle:

Ehrman is, indeed, doing what “Harry says.”

And as I said, I do not believe he is. Your accusation that he calls the evangelist liars is not convincing. I have a much higher regard for storytellers and fabricators than you do apparently.

Except that he isn’t calling the evangelists liars because he doesn’t think there were evangelists, in the sense of those who wrote the Gospels. He is claiming that the Gospels came about as the result of a telephone game played by “thousands of participants.”

That, essentially, means the early Church fabricated the Gospels by continually and knowingly embellishing the story over time. So any claim, like in the Gospel attributed to Luke that claims the writing is a reliable historical account, was basically a lie… well okay… a deliberately fabricated tale made out to be a true story.

 

[Dovekin]

any claim, like in the Gospel attributed to Luke that claims the writing is a reliable historical account, was basically a lie… well okay… a deliberately fabricated tale made out to be a true story.

If there were no evangelists, there was no “deliberately.” You constantly read intention into the process, so you can accuse Ehrman of saying the evangelists were lying. (Evangelist meaning gospel writer, whether 4 or thousands did the writing)

I understand much of what Ehrman was saying, but you express it as if it were in a modern situation. A book without a name in ancient times would still have much of the authority we attribute to authors. Someone handcopied the text, something that was not cheap. No one ran to a print shop and ordered 500 copies by tomorrow. Each copy took effort or a lot of money paid to a copyist. That scribe, or the patron who paid him, establishes the value of the text, apart from the value of the content. Personal relationships are involved.(read the later story of St Columba, where a copy is called a child of the original and so belongs to the text, not the copyist.) An anonymous text was not an authorityless text.

Within that context, the gospels may have circulated with no name attached. They still have some authority behind them. The process of identifying the original author, as I assume Ehrman thinks four people authored the originals though I cannot be sure, goes through the authority of the scribes. Or it was made up for political purposes. Either way, that is just the identification of the author; the texts are in no way “deliberate fabrications” as you accuse him of implying.

 

[deMontfort]

It would be nice if Modernists would be honest and upfront and just admit that they’re practical atheists

 

[Dovekin]

Ehrman has practically done that. When will you?

 

[deMontfort]

Since I’m not, in fact, an atheist, while an apostatized Modernist is, that question doesn’t apply to me.