Exactly. Ehrman knows full well that “telephone game” has connotations of undisciplined and embellished transmission of a story. So trying to defend this “game” as an analogy of how the Gospels were actually compiled is dishonest to say the least.
My apologies. I did not realize you had set it up so that if I disagreed, you would take it as an ad hominem attack. How should I have disagreed with this opinion of his scholarship?
His blog post on the topic begins “In my previous posts I have tried to establish that the four Gospels circulated anonymously for decades after they were written.” I do not see how you reconcile your statement with his.
I am relying only on his blogpost “Why are the Gospels Anonymous?” Maybe he says something different elsewhere. But there he gives a clear sense that the gospels were written, and they circulated anonymously, which suggests they remained identifiable as the same text throughout their circulation.
No actually, there is strong support for second century dating. For example, from the Wikipedia article on P4 and P64/67:
LOL! Sorry – I was rushing, and didn’t make myself very clear. What you did in your post was an “ad hominem attack” in reverse – rather than addressing the argument, you give it credence based on its author. To my mind, that’s as bad as an ad hominem.
One must read a scholar’s published writings, and perhaps give preference to them over blog posts. There’s one confusing aspect to Ehrman’s claims, and I suspect that, given the way he described things, he might be conflating them, consciously or unconsciously. In Misquoting Jesus, he spills a considerable amount of ink talking about the way that Scriptural texts changed over the centuries, due to scribal errors and conscious scribal modifications. So, I think, we have to ask what, precisely, does Ehrman mean by his allusion to the ‘telephone game’. Does he mean that he believes that Scriptural narratives changed in the (relatively short) timeframe prior to the Gospels being first written down? Or, does he mean the changes that happened between the 3rd-4th centuries AD and the invention of the printing press? One must analyze his claims differently, based on which claim we think he’s making. It would seem that his claims take on greater (or lesser) credence depending on which one he’s thinking about. One must also read his words in Misquoting as betraying the angst he references, having gone from a Fundamentalist background to becoming a Scripture scholar.
P4 has the fly leaf from Matthew along with the fragments from Luke. Here is a reference image from the P4 article from Wikipedia.
There are two senses that “immediate cause” might be understood here. Yes, Clement uses the plural “they” as the immediate cause of Mark writing the Gospel.
Respectfully >>opinion only >>pondering
on His Spoken Word throughout the whole Bible, within Jesus teaching, preaching was he not teaching us , his listening audience also that >>>>>>
Perhaps the problem is Ehrman’s? It also depends upon what he means by the deliberately vague term “decades.” Does he mean 1-2 decades or 10-20?
Except that Jesus transformed human flesh and blood into divine food and drink, without which we would not enter the Kingdom.
I listen to a lot of people’s crackpot theories, engage in conversations about them, learn from them. Here, I was just saying Ehrman was certainly knowledgeable about transmission of he gospel in the early centuries after Christ. He studied under Bruce Metzger at Harvard, meaning he has probably forgotten more than I ever knew on the subject, and retains much more.
Now I feel sorry for you, being raised in such a sadistic environment. Wikipedia says “Although the objective is to pass around the message without it becoming garbled along the way, part of the enjoyment is that, regardless, this usually ends up happening.“ it never occurred to me that people played it with malicious intent, trying to prevent the transmission of the message. The whole point, to me, was to pass it on faithfully. I can understand your confusion if you knew only the variant you describe.
That is the point. Francis earlier this year spoke about how the voice of God echoes at every baptism “You are my beloved child.” I love the image, and I just found it in JP2’s writing yesterday. It is the message of God Jesus tried to teach us. Our Father…
Isn’t that what we expect from an esteemed scholar, though? Precision in thought and expression? I mean… that’s their stock in trade, after all!
Ahh, but here it’s important to remember what the Church teaches us about the sacred texts. Ehrman is distressed, presumably, because he’d been raised with a strict Scriptural inerrancy that claimed, among other things, that the Word has been the Word, without change, from the beginning. And so, when he sees evidence of any change – in any form, by any author – it sets off alarm bells in his head. (At least, reading his rhetoric, that’s my take-away.)
You have got to be kidding!
The variant I describe is that of game theory. Ehrman is turning the transmission of the central and eternally significant message of Christianity into something as frivolous and inconsequential as a child’s party game. Kind of reduces the stature of Christianity to child’s play – something we modern and sophisticated people need not really be concerned about because it was pretty much all made up by primitive and unsophisticated ancients who believed crazy things like turning water into wine, walking on water and stilling storms. If they aren’t to be trusted when they reported such things as those, why trust them on the more weighty matters, like morality or truth. We know better today and we can figure out truth without the need for embellishing it with fictions like the resurrection or virgin birth.
Less than a handful of textual variants make any difference with regard to dogma or theology. And those differences are very minor. Changes “made by copyists” are mostly copyist errors, word translation choices and variants. Ehrman grossly overstates the case when he claims hundreds of thousands of differences.
Here is Ehrman, in the first three minutes of the video, claiming MOST of the early Christian writers were “lying about who they were.” His own words.HarryStotle:
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.