The Catholic Church has plenty of competent scholars!

[MarkRome]

I wouldn’t put James White in the camp of a “Greek scholar”.

 

[otjm]

Thanks for the followup. I looked at the post by Pattylt and all she mentions is the historical-critical method; I don’t think she asked for an historian as opposed to a theologian. ’

And while I agree that Brant is not an historian, his book The Case for Jesus basically takes apart much of the whackadoodle theories which have come from Scripture scholars “using” the method - Dr. Ehrman in particular, but not isolating only on him. Ehrman does not hold himself out as a historian but as a theologian, which perhaps is an equally good description of oxymoron.

A clip from Wikipedia: " an American New Testament scholar focusing on textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, the origins and development of early Christianity." Without further research on him, he sounds like part of the crew of The Jesus Seminar. And out of charity I will not characterize them. He teaches in the Religious Studies Department at U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

 

[otjm]

I don’t know that there is a list anywhere lining up scholars for or against any particular theory which Bart Ehrman may hold. I may be beating on the drum, but in the first chapter of The Case For Jesus, Brant notes that both on the level of an undergraduate degree and in working on his Masters in theology, he ran headlong into professors who buy into some or all of Bart’s theories. Brant states: "Needless to say, I was somewhat taken aback when the professor began by saying: ‘Forget everything you though you knew who wrote the Gospels. … In fact, we really don’t know who wrote the Gospels. Nowadays, modern scholars agree that the Gospels were originally anonymous’ "(pp. 1-2).

Further he says “I learned that many modern scholars believe that the Gospels are not biographies of Jesus, and that they were not authored by disciples of Jesus, and that they were written too late in the first century AD to be based on reliable eyewitness testimony.” (p 3).

As to your remark that “the majority of biblical scholars are believing Christians and they most assuredly do not agree with Ehrman”, since you are challenging others to prove a point, I would invite you likewise to prove your point.

Biblical scholars normally - like the rest of us - need to pay rent or a mortgage, buy groceries, and etc. and as a result, someone needs to employ them. While not all biblical scholars work in academia, I would suspect a large number of them do, and I will leave it to Pitre’s comment noted above - he is both a scholar and a professor, operates in the world of biblical scholarship, and I suspect he has a pretty good handle on the matters. He said “many”; he did not define that in a percentage, but I suspect it is far larger than you think.

As to whether or not individuals on either side of the debate are believing Christians, I will leave to others; I don’t think either you or I have a handle on that.

 

[otjm]

History can inform theology - like it does for Pitre - but they can neither prove nor disprove one another.

To which I would add, every historian needs to read whatever original sources they can find, and from that, determine what material they rely on. On the theological end of the spectrum, it is clear that there are biblical scholars who appear to ignore material which would be contrary to their theory of “how it was” - and I doubt that historians are any different. Even the “best” historians (however we choose to define “best”) have prejudices and assumptions - which may be correct, incorrect, irrelevant or simply unique. And when matters cover vast amounts of time and different cultures (which in themselves may have changed or varied over that time span) matters become even more “interesting”.