# ردود العلماء على بارت إيرمان Review of Bart Ehrman  + متجدد بإستمرار +



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

*ردود العلماء على بارت إيرمان Review of Bart Ehrman


*[YOUTUBE]nFHnqxhfk9k[/YOUTUBE]​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]cYpzWvX_Quc[/YOUTUBE]​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]eWsDZzTIWhw[/YOUTUBE]​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]DcTdes3MSYY[/YOUTUBE]​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]jJ7cpydGZ8M[/YOUTUBE]​​
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]cdW8XF6UiUE[/YOUTUBE]​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]NCTxAWqr6TI[/YOUTUBE]​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]d15gsf27ryY[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]EhuAm13Ji8o[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]hF0BHErlsEQ[/YOUTUBE]​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]i6zudFtjI4U[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]DVgpkG4Ks1s[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]PTQpBsc_swc[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]8EBWzOdJLhU[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]ie33alesi00[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]ADDVUpVBCKI[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]hitQxPpweOg[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]tSc9Y7ET7SM[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]kjx9N2R02c4[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]yntziZr2cxw[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]jPFtDaQdkfo[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]jPFtDaQdkfo[/YOUTUBE]​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]3IoqMPdebuI[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]NI2XG1T_fNI[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]4g5cnpO3p8Y[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]--Qy3VcbwGE[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]M1OD9hBFxyM[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]v3VBNFhC52A[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]Ak0P7hgj65w[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]qWm0O93unDY[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]cp1nF_GgC_0[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]rWJMz1CG5Yc[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]wEnKMLpclUc[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]O5QMfy7MEAE[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]8jdKFotjGd4[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]jiHei3R_RE4[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]KtOWUUMoc6Q[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]gieq2fYH9gs[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]ABuYcQJd4b0[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]YojyPM-fKs0[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]EicA4gik6FI[/YOUTUBE]​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]V2kRn6y_qOE[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]iShBFAJBBVQ[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]A8sxmklrHMY[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]y1bsmv-lh-g[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]NKKQnZg3q0A[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]zoEBEXlXua0[/YOUTUBE]  ​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]tmhExCFf0lE[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]lhqVti__wDk[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]XnR1MJAE84g[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]kACnUo0I7hE[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]WHQMaUY--ZU[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]OzIwwXkN8Pk[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]-1pyimuAOjg[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]S9WuV1BkYNA[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]q7iBkQA5ujM[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]9GgtyksNmyo[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (3 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]XC78xZ97sdo[/YOUTUBE]
​


----------



## Molka Molkan (5 فبراير 2012)

*بارت إيرمان يُفنّد إدّعاءات الإسلام حول المسيحية
*


----------



## Molka Molkan (5 فبراير 2012)

*المسيح هو : الله الإبن ، الله الوحيد ، حرفياً في الكتاب المقدس*


----------



## Molka Molkan (5 فبراير 2012)

*الصوم والصلاة هما الذان جعلاني اكتب هذا البحث : دراسة نصيّة في بعض نصوص العهد الجديدعن كلمة " الصوم "*


----------



## Molka Molkan (5 فبراير 2012)

*أليس هذا هو النجار ابن مريم؟ ( مرقس 6 : 3 ) : دراسة نصية مبسطة ، ضمن سلسلة الرد على تفهات بارت إيرمان*


----------



## Molka Molkan (5 فبراير 2012)

*إلهي  إلهي لما تركتني ، دراسة نصيّة تفسيريية مُبسطة ، للرد على الفكر الخاطيء  في أسباب إختلاف قراءات هذا النص ، ضمن سلسلة الرد على تفاهات إيرمان*


----------



## Molka Molkan (5 فبراير 2012)

*هذا هو جسدي الذي يبذل عنكم - ( لوقا 22 : 19، 20 ) هل هذه الآية محرفة ؟*


----------



## Molka Molkan (5 فبراير 2012)

*برنامج فماً وحكمة ( 1 ) : تكذيب كذب يسوع ، هل كذب يسوع ، هل يسوع كاذب ؟*


----------



## Molka Molkan (5 فبراير 2012)

*برنامج فماً وحكمة ( 2 ) : Angry Jesus يسوع الغاضب ، هل غضب يسوع حقاً ؟*


----------



## Molka Molkan (5 فبراير 2012)

*Did the New Testament Misquote Jesus a Tech & Science video*


----------



## Molka Molkan (5 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]j9msNOuPap4[/YOUTUBE]​


----------



## Molka Molkan (5 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]-Oh1S8g1gaQ[/YOUTUBE]

​


----------



## Molka Molkan (5 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]L7gmgdk9qG8[/YOUTUBE]

​


----------



## Molka Molkan (5 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]q5u1dKk_sVM[/YOUTUBE]

​


----------



## Molka Molkan (5 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]Z5vrFAAhpss[/YOUTUBE]

​


----------



## Molka Molkan (5 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE] mWzFL44Y608[/YOUTUBE]

​


----------



## Molka Molkan (5 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]Q9zllyFvQ5k[/YOUTUBE]

​


----------



## Molka Molkan (5 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE] uXSVRkKD3FM[/YOUTUBE]

​


----------



## Molka Molkan (5 فبراير 2012)

[YOUTUBE]AsvaxOMFnpA[/YOUTUBE]​


----------



## Molka Molkan (5 فبراير 2012)

*John Warwick Montgomery Refutes Bart Ehrman’s Claim of New Testament Forger*

[YOUTUBE]Is7QjsOwZI4[/YOUTUBE]​


----------



## Molka Molkan (5 فبراير 2012)

*http://www.tektonics.org/ezine/ijindex.html

Over the years, Bart Ehrman has  produced several books; a couple have been relatively non-controversial,  but most have not. In those that have provoked controversy, there has  always been an underlying lack of forthrightness in the way Ehrman  conducts his business.   
In some cases Ehrman has abused his authority as a popular author to address topics on which he is not an expert. God's Problem  is a classical full-text example of this; Ehrman is not a philosopher  and has no business addressing the "problem of evil." In other texts,  Ehrman has ranged outside his specialty field (textual criticism) to  comment on matters on which he is (compared to other Biblical scholars)  badly informed, such as theology and Biblical exegesis. And even when it  does come to his specialty, he has repeatedly been dishonest to the  extent that he fails to tell the "whole story." This is especially  disgraceful inasmuch as a clear dichotomy can be found in how he  presents the truth in his more academic works, versus how he presents  only as much truth as he wants readers to see in his popular works.   
With Jesus, Interrupted Ehrman has stepped far over the  line of intellectual honesty and decency, using his platform as a  popular author to disseminate much that he surely knows is incomplete  and misleading information. The benefit of the doubt is now exhausted.  Despite his pretense at scholarship, Bart Ehrman has proven himself, by  this book, to be someone not in the least interested in truth, but only  in using whatever means are necessary to deconvert as many Christians as  possible.  
For this reason, I have elected to present as a special edition of the E-Block a thorough refutation of Jesus, Interrupted.  Yes, there is also the factor that as predicted, many Skeptics are  practically wetting themselves over this one, though it contains nothing  new and nothing that has not been refuted before, especially on this  site. But primarily, it is Ehrman's lack of intellectual honesty that is  the problem here. He is abusing his public trust, and so a response is  warranted which publicly shames him for his despicable absues of that  trust in Jesus, Interrupted.  

This series was begin March 17, 2009 and was completed April 14, 2009.
​ Chapter 1: A Historical Assault on Faith -- see a sample here 
Chapter 2: A World of Contradictions -- see a sample here 
Chapter 3: A Mass of Variant Views -- see a sample here 
Chapter 4: Who Wrote The Bible? 
Chapter 5: Liar, Lunatic, or Lord? 
Chapter 6: How We Got the Bible 
Chapter 7: Who Invented Christianity? 
Chapter 8: Is Faith Possible?​*


----------



## Molka Molkan (5 فبراير 2012)

*Is There Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus?*

*Ehrman** vs. Logic, History, and the Law*​ 
  Logical Fallacy
  History – historical precedent
  The Law – legal precedent

  Answers to specific claims

http://bit.ly/wccQgH 

*Is There Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus?*
*A Debate between William Lane Craig and Bart D. Ehrman*
  College of the Holy Cross, Worcester,  Massachusetts
  March 28, 2006
  Copyright 2006 William Lane Craig and Bart D. Ehrman. All Rights Reserved.

  Ehrman:

  What kinds of evidence do scholars look for when trying to establish probabilities in the past?
  Well, the best kind of evidence, of course, consists of contemporary accounts; people who were
  10
  close to the time of the events themselves. Ultimately, if you don’t have a source that goes back
  to the time period itself, then you don’t have a reliable source. There are only two sources of
  information for past events: either stories that actually happened based on, ultimately, eyewitness
  accounts or stories that have been made up. Those are the only two kinds of stories you have
  from the past – either things that happened or things that were made up. To determine which
  things are the things that happened, you want contemporary accounts, things that are close to the
  time of the events themselves, and it helps if you have a lot of these accounts. The more the
  merrier! You want lots of contemporary accounts, and you want these accounts to be
  independent of one another. You don’t want different accounts to have collaborated with one
  another; you want accounts that are independently attesting the results. Moreover, even though
  you want accounts that are independent of one another, that are not collaborated, you want
  accounts that corroborate one another; accounts that are consistent in what they have to say about
  the subject.

*Testimony is not valid if it is written decades after the event.*

  What do we have with the Gospels of the New Testament? Well, unfortunately we’re not as well
  off as we would like to be. We’d like to be extremely well off because the Gospels tell us about
  Jesus, and they are our best sources for Jesus. But how good are they as historical sources? ... Unfortunately, they’re not as good as
  we would like. The Gospels were written 35 to 65 years after Jesus’ death—35 or 65 years after
  his death,
  ... They’re not written by Jesus’ Aramaic-speaking followers. They’re written by people living 30,
  40, 50, 60 years later.
  They’re written many decades
  after the fact by people who were not there to see these things happen,

  Bill quotes the apostle Paul, just to pick an
  example, to indicate that already, just five years after Jesus’ death, Joseph of Arimathea buried
  Jesus. Paul wasn’t writing five years after the burial; he was writing 25 years later, and he never
  mentions Joseph of Arimathea. Joseph of Arimathea is not mentioned until you get to the Gospel
  of Mark, 35 or 40 years after the fact.

*Testimony cannot be biased*
              Genetic fallacy
              Argument by popularity
              Appeal to authority
              Double standard
  Moreover, finally, you want sources that are not biased toward the subject matter.
  You want accounts that are disinterested. You want lots of them, you want them independent
  from one another, yet you want them to be consistent with one another.

  First, Bill makes dubious use of modern authorities. Bill constantly quotes modern scholars as if
  somehow that constitutes evidence for his point of view. As Bill himself knows, the fact that the
  majority of New Testament scholars would agree with his four points is not proof that they are
  right. For one thing, the majority of New Testament scholars are believers in the New Testament,
  that is, they’re theologically committed to the text, so of course they agree on these points. I
  should note that the majority of historians do not agree with Bill’s conclusion. Does that make
  those conclusions wrong? No. It simply means that his conclusions are not persuasive to most
  historians. Having said that, I’m surprised by some of his so-called authorities that Bill cites, for
  the reality is that the majority of critical scholars studying the historical Jesus today disagree
  with his conclusion that a historian can show that the body of Jesus emerged physically from the
  tomb. Bill might find that surprising, but that would be because of the context he works in – a
  conservative, evangelical seminary. In that environment, what he’s propounding is what
  everyone believes. And it’s striking that even some of his own key authorities don’t agree. He
  10 N. T Wright, _The__ Resurrection of the Son of God _(Minneapolis,  Minn.: Fortress Press, 2003),
  p. 710.
  20
  quotes a number of scholars, whom I consider to be friends and acquaintances, and I can tell you,
  they don’t agree with his views. Does that make him wrong? No, it simply means that his
  impressive recounting of scholarly opinion is slanted, lopsided, and fails to tell the real story,
  which is that he represents a minority opinion.

  Third, and finally, if the only miracles that Bill allows of having happened all belong to the
  Judaeo-Christian tradition that he himself personally affirms, I’d like him to address the question
  of how that can be historically. How is it that the faith that he adopted as a teenager happens to
  be the only one that is historically credible? Is it just circumstance that he was born into a
  religious family or a religious culture that can historically be shown to be the only true religion?



*Eyewitness claims are necessary but if they oppose one’s worldview, they can be ignored*

  The Gospels were
  written by highly literate, trained, Greek-speaking Christians of the second and third generation.
  They’re not written by Jesus’ Aramaic-speaking followers. They’re written by people living 30,
  40, 50, 60 years later. Where did these people get their information from?

  ...These are not eyewitness accounts. So where did they get their stories from?

  ...The authors were not eye witnesses; they’re Greek-speaking Christians living 35 to 65 years after the events they narrate.

  The resurrection has to be taken on faith, not on the basis of proof.

  Anyone who’s intimate with Mark’s Gospel would have no
  difficulty at all seeing why, 35 years after the event, he or someone in his community might have
  invented the story.

  We don’t know if Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea.

  We don’t know if his tomb was
  empty three days later. We don’t know if he was physically seen by his followers afterwards.

  Hume was talking about the
  possibility of whether miracle happens. I’m not talking about whether miracle can happen. I
  don’t accept Hume’s argument that miracles can’t happen. I’m asking, suppose miracles do
  happen, can historians demonstrate it? No, they can’t demonstrate it.

  My final point is a very simple one. Even if we want to believe in the resurrection of Jesus, that
  belief is a theological belief. You can’t prove the resurrection. It’s not susceptible to historical
  evidence. It’s faith. Believers believe it and take it on faith, and history cannot prove it.

Dr. Ehrman, can historians verify a miracle if there were eyewitnesses
of evidence that a miracle took place? Given your historical method, has any miracle ever
occurred, and if so, which ones? And if not, might it be that you willfully refuse to believe in
miracles?
*Answer from Dr. Ehrman*: Good, good question! Thank you! Let me try it again. “Even if you
  have eyewitnesses”. Suppose from the 1850s, we have an account of a pastor of a church in
  Kansas who walked across this pond during the fourth of July on a celebration, and there were
  twelve people who saw him do it. The historian will have to evaluate this testimony and have to
  ask, did he probably do it or not? Now these eyewitnesses might have said that he did it. But
  there are other possibilities that one could imagine. There might be stones in the pond, for
  example. He might have been at a distance, and they didn’t see him. There were other things
  that you could think of. If you were trying to ask for probabilities, what is the probability that a
  human being can walk on a pond of water unless it’s frozen? The probability is virtually zero
  because in fact humans can’t do that. And if you think humans can do that, then give me one
  instance where I can see. None of us can do it. No one on the face of this planet can do it.
  Billions of people who have lived cannot do it. And so is the historian going to conclude that
  probably Joe Smith, the pastor of this church probably did it? I don’t think so. Historians aren’t
  going to conclude that because the miracle simply is a violation of the way nature typically
  works. And so you can’t ever verify the miracle on the basis of eyewitnesses. Let me say,
  secondly, though, we’re not talking about somebody in 1850s. We’re talking about somebody
  who lived 2000 years ago, and we don’t have eyewitness reports at all. And the reports we have
  are from people who believed in him. They’re not disinterested accounts. They’re contradictory
  accounts, and they’re accounts written 30, 50, 60 years later.

*Noneyewitness** accounts take precedence over eyewitness testimony and circumstantial evidence*

  The noncanonical pagan sources in fact never refer to the resurrection of Jesus until centuries later. Jesus actually never appears any non-canonical pagan source until 80 years after his death. So clearly he didn’t make a big impact on the pagan world. The Jewish historian Josephus mentions Jesus but didn’t believe in his resurrection. There are non-canonical Christian sources that talk about the resurrection, but unfortunately virtually all of them that narrate the event, although they are non-canonical Gospels, narrate the event in a way that disagrees with Bill’s reconstruction. They don’t believe that Jesus was physically, bodily raised from the dead. For evidence of that simply read the account of the Second Treatise of the Great Seth or read the account the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter; just go down the line.

*Theory takes precedence over eyewitness testimony and circumstantial evidence*

  The resurrection has to be taken on faith, not on the basis of proof.

  Let me illustrate by giving you an alternative scenario of what happened to explain the empty
  tomb. I don’t believe this. I don’t think it happened this way, but it’s more probable than a
  miracle happening because a miracle by definition is the least probable occurrence. So let me
  13
  give you a theory, just one I dreamt up. I could dream up twenty of these that are implausible
  but are still more plausible than the resurrection.

  Historians, I’m sorry to say, have no access to God.
  The cannons of historical research are by their very nature restricted to what happens here on this
  earthly plane. They do not and cannot presuppose any set beliefs about the natural realm. I’m not
  saying this is good or bad. It’s simply the way historical research works.
  Let me give you an analogy. It’s not bad that there can be no mathematical proof for the
  existence of an anti-Semitic polemic in _The Merchant of Venice_. Mathematics is simply
  irrelevant to purely literary questions. So too, historical research cannot lead to theological
  claims about what God has done.

  But there’s the problem with miracle. It’s not the philosophical
  problem with miracle discussed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It’s a historian’s
  problem with miracle. Historians cannot establish miracle as the most probable occurrence
  because miracles, by their very nature are the least probable occurrence.

  When Paul indicates that Jesus was buried, he may just as
  well have meant that he was buried in a communal grave, which is what far more frequently
  happened with crucified criminals. Paul said he got buried; he may simply have been tossed into
  a communal grave.

  Anyone who’s intimate with Mark’s Gospel would have no
  difficulty at all seeing why, 35 years after the event, he or someone in his community might have
  invented the story. Mark’s Gospel is filled with theological reflections on the meaning of the life
  of Jesus; this is Mark’s Gospel. It’s not a datasheet; it’s a Gospel. It’s a proclamation of the good
  news, as Mark saw it, of Christ’s death and resurrection. One of Mark’s overarching themes is
  that virtually no one during the ministry of Jesus could understand who he was. His family didn’t
  understand. His townspeople didn’t understand. The leaders of his own people didn’t understand.
  Not even the disciples understood in Mark—especially not the disciples! For Mark, only
  outsiders have an inkling of who Jesus was: the unnamed woman who anointed him, the
  centurion at the cross. Who understands at the end? Not the family of Jesus! Not the disciples!
  It’s a group of previously unknown women. The women at the tomb fit in perfectly with Mark’s
  literary purposes otherwise. So they can’t simply be taken as some kind of objective historical
  statement of fact. They too neatly fit the literary agenda of the Gospel.

  The same can be said of
  Joseph of Arimathea. Anyone who cannot think why Christians might invent the idea that Jesus
  had a secret follower among the Jewish leaders is simply lacking in historical imagination.


  Bill infers that Paul must have believed in
  the empty tomb, because he talked about Christ’s appearances. Christ appeared, so the tomb
  must be empty! This is a highly problematic view. For ancient people, as opposed to post21
  Enlightenment thinkers like Bill, an appearance does not need to mean reanimation of the
  physical body. According to the Gospels, Moses and Elijah appeared to Jesus, James, and John.
  Are we to believe that these men, Moses and Elijah, came back to life? That Moses’ body was
  reconstituted and raised from the dead and that they appeared from heaven? Or was this a vision?
  Surely it was a vision; they disappear immediately. Ancient people had no trouble believing that
  bodies can be phantasmal, not physical. Evidence for this is found abundantly throughout all of
  our ancient sources – Jewish, pagan, and Christian. Pagan sources from the 8th century Homer to
  the 2nd century Homeric hymns; from pagan myths to pagan novels to pagan poets to pagan
  philosophers, they’re all replete with accounts of God appearing to humans in human form. But
  these are appearances, visions; they’re not real human bodies. The pagan holy man, Apollonius
  of Tyana, appears to his followers after his death, but it’s an appearance, a vision, not the
  reanimation of his body. Jewish texts are the same. For angels and archangels and demons and
  devils appear to people bodily, but they aren’t real bodies.
  In short, Bill makes the mistake by assuming that if the disciples claimed to see Jesus alive
  afterwards, they necessarily believed or knew that this was his actual physical body. That’s a
  modern assumption, not an ancient one. The texts we’re dealing with are ancient texts, not
  modern ones. Ancient people have no difficulty at all thinking that a divine appearance was not
  an actual physical appearance. A body could be buried and the person could appear alive
  afterwards without the body leaving the tomb.

  Moreover, Jesus’ body after the resurrection does things that bodies can’t do. It walks into rooms
  that are behind locked doors. It ascends to heaven. Is Bill seriously going to argue on historical
  grounds that Jesus’ resurrected body could do this? This is a theological claim about Jesus, not a
  historian’s claim. Historians are unable to establish what God does. That’s the work of the
  historian. So, too, with his concluding inference that God raised Jesus from the dead. This is a
  theological conclusion. It’s not a historical one. It’s a statement about God. If he wants to mount
  mathematical evidence for what God probably did in the world, I have to say it’s not going to be
  convincing to most mathematicians and certainly to most historians. Historians have no access to
  God. The historian can say that Jesus died on the cross, but he cannot say that God accepted his
  death as an atonement. The historian can say that the apostle Paul claimed to have a vision of
  Jesus after his death; he cannot tell you that God raised him from the dead.

  I think I’m most struck by Bill’s refusal to deal with the historical alternative that I’ve given to
  his claim that God raised Jesus from the dead.

  other historical options—for
  example, the one that I’ve already laid out that he’s ignored, that possibly two of Jesus’ family
  members stole the body and that they were killed and thrown into a common tomb. It probably
  didn’t happen, but it’s more plausible than the explanation that God raised Jesus from the dead.
  Let me give you another explanation, just off the top of my head from last night, sitting around
  thinking about it. You know we have traditions from Syriac Christianity that Jesus’ brothers,
  who are mentioned in the Gospel of Mark, one of whom was named Jude, was particularly close
  to Jesus and that one of these brothers, Jude, otherwise known as Judas Thomas, was Jesus’ twin
  brother. Now I’m not saying this is right, but that is what Syrian Christians thought in the second
  and third centuries, that Jesus had a twin brother. How could he have had a twin brother? Well, I
  don’t know how he could have a twin brother, but that’s what the Syrian Christians said. In fact,
  we have interesting stories about Jesus and his twin brother in a book called the Acts of Thomas,
  in which Jesus and his twin brother are identical twins. They look just alike, and every now and
  26
  then Jesus comes down from heaven and confuses people: when they’ve just seen Thomas leave
  the room, there he is again, and they don’t understand. Well, it’s because it’s his twin brother
  showing up. Suppose Jesus had a twin brother—nothing implausible! People have twins. After
  Jesus’ death, Judas Thomas and all others connected with Jesus went into hiding, and he escaped
  from Judea. Some years later one of Jesus’ followers saw Judas Thomas at a distance, and they
  thought it was Jesus. Others reported similar sightings. Word spread that Jesus was no longer
  dead. The body in the tomb by that time had decomposed beyond recognition. The story became
  more widely accepted that Jesus had been raised from the dead, and in the oral traditions more
  stories started up and told about the event, including stories about them discovering an empty
  tomb. That’s an alternative explanation. It’s highly unlikely. I don’t buy it for a second, but it’s
  more likely than the idea that God raised Jesus from the dead because it doesn’t appeal to the
  supernatural, which historians have no access to.

  Yes, Mary Magdalene was a follower of Jesus, but his own argument was that
  nobody would invent the women because they were marginalized, because men didn’t think
  highly of women. My response is, that’s precisely why Mark would invent the tradition, because
  in Mark’s Gospel, it’s the marginalized who understand who Jesus is, it’s not the male disciples.
  That’s why you have the story of the women discovering the tomb.

  I think the theological modes of knowledge are perfectly acceptable
  and legitimate as theological modes of knowledge. But I think theological claims have to be
  evaluated on a theological basis. For example, you know the idea that these four facts that Bill
  keeps referring to showed that God raised Jesus from the dead. You could come up with a
  different theological view of it. Suppose, for example, to explain those four facts that the God
  Zulu sent Jesus into the 12th dimension, and in that 12th dimension he was periodically released
  for return to Earth for a brief respite from his eternal tormentors. But he can’t tell his followers
  about this because Zulu told him that if he does, he’ll increase his eternal agonies. So that’s
  another theological explanation for what happened. It would explain the empty tomb, it would
  32
  explain Jesus appearances. Is it as likely as God raised Jesus from the dead and made him sit at
  his right hand; that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has interceded in history and
  vindicated his name by raising his Messiah? Well, you might think no, that in fact the first
  explanation of the God Zulu is crazy. Well, yeah, O.K., it’s crazy; but it’s theologically crazy.
  It’s not historically crazy. It’s no less likely as an explanation for what happened than the
  explanation that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob raised Jesus from the dead because
  they’re both theological explanations; they’re not historical explanations. So within the realm of
  theology, I certainly think that theology is a legitimate mode of knowledge. But the criteria for
  evaluating theological knowledge are theological; they are not historical.


*The Ancient ********s Rule can be ignored*
  I should point out that
  the Gospels say they’re written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But that’s just in your
  English Bible. That’s the title of these Gospels, but whoever wrote the Gospel of Matthew didn’t
  call it the Gospel of Matthew. Whoever wrote the Gospel of Matthew simply wrote his Gospel,
  and somebody later said it’s the Gospel according to Matthew. Somebody later is telling you
  who wrote it. The titles are later additions. These are not eyewitness accounts. So where did they
  get their stories from?

  [See Francis J. Lamb, Greenleaf]

*Misrepresenting testimony is allowable*
              See also Theory takes precedence over eyewitness and circumstantial evidence

  How do you convert somebody to stop
  worshipping their God and to start worshipping Jesus?
  ... The authors were not eye witnesses; they’re Greek-speaking
  Christians living 35 to 65 years after the events they narrate.


  The Jewish historian Josephus mentions Jesus but didn’t believe in his resurrection.
  Yes, Mary Magdalene was a follower of Jesus, but his own argument was that
  nobody would invent the women because they were marginalized, because men didn’t think
  highly of women. My response is, that’s precisely why Mark would invent the tradition, because
  in Mark’s Gospel, it’s the marginalized who understand who Jesus is, it’s not the male disciples.
  That’s why you have the story of the women discovering the tomb.

  Let me conclude by telling you what I really do think about Jesus’ resurrection. The one thing we
  know about the Christians after the death of Jesus is that they turned to their ******ures to try and
  make sense of it. They had believed Jesus was the Messiah, but then he got crucified, and so he
  couldn’t be the Messiah. No Jew, prior to Christianity, thought that the Messiah was to be
  crucified. The Messiah was to be a great warrior or a great king or a great judge. He was to be a
  figure of grandeur and power, not somebody who’s squashed by the enemy like a mosquito. How
  could Jesus, the Messiah, have been killed as a common criminal? Christians turned to their
  ******ures to try and understand it, and they found passages that refer to the Righteous One of
  God’s suffering death. But in these passages, such as Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22 and Psalm 61, the
  one who is punished or who is killed is also vindicated by God. Christians came to believe their
  ******ures that Jesus was the Righteous One and that God must have vindicated him. And so
  Christians came to think of Jesus as one who, even though he had been crucified, came to be
  exalted to heaven, much as Elijah and Enoch had in the Hebrew ******ures. How can he be Jesus
  the Messiah though, if he’s been exalted to heaven? Well, Jesus must be coming back soon to
  establish the kingdom. He wasn’t an earthly Messiah; he’s a spiritual Messiah. That’s why the
  early Christians thought the end was coming right away in their own lifetime. That’s why Paul
  taught that Christ was the first fruit of the resurrection. But if Jesus is exalted, he is no longer
  dead, and so Christians started circulating the story of his resurrection. It wasn’t three days later
  they started circulating the story; it might have been a year later, maybe two years. Five years
  later they didn’t know when the stories had started. Nobody could go to the tomb to check; the
  body had decomposed. Believers who knew he had been raised from the dead started having
  visions of him. Others told stories about these visions of him, including Paul. Stories of these
  visions circulated. Some of them were actual visions like Paul, others of them were stories of
  visions like the five hundred group of people who saw him. On the basis of these stories,
  narratives were constructed and circulated and eventually we got the Gospels of the New
  Testament written 30, 40, 50, 60 years later.


*Oral tradition is not reliable and can be ignored*

  You have to tell stories about Jesus. So
  you convert somebody on the basis of the stories you tell. That person converts somebody who
  converts somebody who converts somebody, and all along the line people are telling stories.
  The way it works is this: I’m a businessman in Ephesus, and somebody comes to town and tells
  me stories about Jesus, and on the basis of these stories I hear, I convert. I tell my wife these
  stories. She converts. She tells the next-door neighbor the stories. She converts. She tells her
  husband the stories. He converts. He goes on a business trip to Rome, and he tells people there
  the stories. They convert. Those people who’ve heard the stories in Rome, where did they hear
  them from? They heard them from the guy who lived next door to me. Well, was he there to see
  these things happen? No. Where’d he hear them from? He heard them from his wife. Where did
  11
  his wife hear them from? Was she there? No. She heard them from my wife. Where did my wife
  hear them from? She heard them from me. Well, where did I hear them from? I wasn’t there
  either.
  Stories are in circulation year after year after year, and as a result of that, the stories get changed.
  How do we know that the stories got changed in the process of transmission?

  ... The accounts that they narrate are based on oral traditions that have been in circulation for decades. Year after year Christians trying to convert others told them stories to convince them that Jesus was raised from the dead.  These writers are telling stories, then, that Christians have been telling all these years. Many stories were invented, and most of the stories were changed. For that reason, these accounts are not as useful as we would like them to be for historical purposes. They’re not contemporary, they’re not disinterested, and they’re not consistent.

  What we have
  are Gospel stories written decades later by people who had heard stories in circulation, and it’s
  not hard at all to imagine somebody coming up with the story.

*Solutions to allegedly conflicting testimony can be ignored*

  How do we know that the stories got changed in the process of transmission? We know the
  stories got changed because there are numerous differences in our accounts that cannot be
  reconciled with one another. You don’t need to take my word for this; simply look yourself. I tell
  my students that the reason we don’t notice there’s so many differences in the Gospels is because
  we read the Gospels vertically, from top to bottom. You start at the top of Mark, you read
  through to the bottom, you start at the top of Matthew, read it through the bottom, sounds a lot
  like Mark, then you read Luke top to bottom, sounds a lot like Matthew and Mark, read John, a
  little bit different, sounds about the same. The reason is because we’re reading them vertically.
  The way to see differences in the Gospels is to read them horizontally. Read one story in
  Matthew, then the same story in Mark, and compare your two stories and see what you come up
  with. You come up with major differences. Just take the death of Jesus. What day did Jesus die
  on and what time of day? Did he die on the day before the Passover meal was eaten, as John
  explicitly says, or did he die after it was eaten, as Mark explicitly says? Did he die at noon, as in
  John, or at 9 a.m., as in Mark? Did Jesus carry his cross the entire way himself or did Simon of
  Cyrene carry his cross? It depends which Gospel you read. Did both robbers mock Jesus on the
  cross or did only one of them mock him and the other come to his defense? It depends which
  Gospel you read. Did the curtain in the temple rip in half before Jesus died or after he died? It
  depends which Gospel you read.

  Or take the accounts of the resurrection. Who went to the tomb on the third day? Was it Mary
  alone or was it Mary with other women? If it was Mary with other women, how many other
  women were there, which ones were they, and what were their names? Was the stone rolled
  away before they got there or not? What did they see in the tomb? Did they see a man, did they
  see two men, or did they see an angel? It depends which account you read. What were they told
  to tell the disciples? Were the disciples supposed to stay in Jerusalem and see Jesus there or were
  they to go to Galilee and see Jesus there? Did the women tell anyone or not? It depends which
  Gospel you read. Did the disciples never leave Jerusalem or did they immediately leave
  Jerusalem and go to Galilee? All of these depend on which account you read.
  You have the same problems for all of the sources and all of our Gospels.

  Bill asserts that the story of the
  women going to the tomb would never have been invented by the early Christians. I should point
  out, Paul never mentions the women at the tomb, only the later Gospels, Mark and following.


Below from *The Trial of Jesus from a Lawyer’s Standpoint*, Vol. 1 by Walter M. Chandler.  New York: 1925, pp. 29-33.

            In considering the subject of discrepancies it should be constantly kept in mind that contradictions in testimony do not necessarily mean that there has been falsehood or by faith on the part of the witnesses.  Every lawyer of experience and every adult citizen of average intelligence knows that this is true.  Men of unquestioned veracity and incorruptible integrity are frequently arrayed against each other in both civil and criminal trials, and the record reveals irreconcilable contradictions in their testimony.  Not only do prosecutions for perjury not follow, but, in many instances, the witnesses are not even suspected of bad faith or an intention to falsify.  Defects in sight, hearing, or memory; superior advantage in the matter of observation; or a sudden change in the position of one or both the parties, causing distraction of attention, at the time of the occurrence of the events involved in litigation – all or any of these conditions, as well as many others, may create discrepancies and contradictions where there is a total absence of any intention to misrepresent.  A thorough appreciation of this fact will greatly aid in a clear understanding of this phase of the discussion.

            Again, an investigation of the charge of discrepancy against the Gospel writers shows that the critics and skeptics have classified mere _omissions_ as contradictions.  Noting could be more absurd than to consider an omission a contradiction, unless the requirements of the case show that the facts and circumstances omitted were essential to be stated, or that the omission was evidently intended to mislead or deceive.  Any other contention would turn historical literature topsy-turvy and load it down with contradictions. * Dion Cassius, Tacitus, and Suetonius have all written elaborately of the reign of Tiberius.  Many things are mentioned by each that are not recorded by the other two.  Are we to reject all three as unreliable historians because of this fact?  Abbott, Hazlitt, Bourrienne, and Walter Scott have written biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte.  No one of them has recited all the facts recorded by the others.*  Are these omissions to destroy the merits of all these writers and cause them to be suspected and rejected?  *Grafton’s Chronicles rank high in English historical literature.  They comprise the reign of King John; and yet make no mention of the granting of Magna Charta.  This is as if the life of Jefferson had been written without mention of the Declaration of Independence; or a biography of Lincoln without calling attention to the Emancipation Proclamation.  Notwithstanding this strange omission, Englishmen still preserve Grafton’s Chronicles as valuable records among their archives.  And the same spirit of generous criticism is everywhere displayed in matters of profane literature. * The opponents of Christianity are never embarrassed in excusing or explaining away omissions or contradictions, provided the writer is a layman and his subject secular.  But let the theme be a sacred one, and the author an ecclesiastic – preacher, priest, or prophet – and immediately incredulity rises to high tide, engulfs the reason, and destroys all dispassionate criticism.  Could it be forgotten for a moment that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were biographers of the Christ, a sacred person, no difficulties would arise in the matter of inconsistencies, no objections would be made to their credibility.  The slight discrepancies that undoubtedly exist would pass unnoticed, or be forever buried under the weight of an overwhelming conviction that they are, in the main, accurate and truthful.
            But the Evangelists were guided by inspiration, the skeptics say; and discrepancies are inconsistent with the theory of inspiration.  God would not have inspired them to write contradictory stories.  But the assumption is false that they claimed to be guided by inspiration; for, as Marcus Dods truthfully says, “none of our Gospels pretends to be infallible or even _inspired_.  Only one of them tells us how its writer obtained his information, and that was by careful inquiry at the proper sources.”*

*  An opposite doctrine seems to be taught in Luke 12:11-12; 24:48-49.

            A more pertinent observation upon the Gospel discrepancies has not been made than that by Paley in his “Evidences of Christianity,” where he says:

I know not a more rash or unphilosophical conduct of the understanding, than to reject the substance of a story by reason of some diversity in the circumstances with which it is related. The usual character of human testimony is substantial truth under circumstantial variety. This is what the daily experience of courts of justice teaches. When accounts of a transaction come from the mouths of different witnesses, it is seldom that it is not possible to pick out apparent or real inconsistencies between them. These inconsistencies are studiously displayed by an adverse pleader, but oftentimes with little impression upon the minds of the judges. On the contrary, a close and minute agreement induces the suspicion of confederacy and fraud. When written histories touch upon the same scenes of action; the comparison almost always affords ground for a like reflection. Numerous, and sometimes important, variations present themselves; not seldom, also, absolute and final contradictions; yet neither one nor the other are deemed sufficient to shake the credibility of the main fact. The embassy of the Jews to deprecate the execution of Claudian's order to place his statute, in their temple, Philo places in harvest, Josephus in seed time; both contemporary writers. No reader is led by this inconsistency to doubt whether such an embassy was sent, or whether such an order was given. Our own history supplies examples of the same kind. In the account of the Marquis of Argyle's death, in the reign of Charles the Second, we have a very remarkable contradiction. Lord Clarendon relates that he was condemned to be hanged, which was performed the same day; on the contrary, Burnet, Woodrew, Heath, Echard, concur in stating that he was beheaded; and that he was condemned upon the Saturday, and executed upon the Monday. Was any reader of English history ever skeptic enough to raise from hence a question whether the Marquis of Argyle was executed or not? Yet this ought to be left in uncertainty, according to the principles upon which the Christian history has sometimes been attacked.*

* Evidences of Christianity, p. 319.  (Presented here in Appendix Two.)

            The reader should most carefully consider the useful as well as the damaging effect of Gospel inconsistencies in the matter of the credibility of the Evangelists.  A certain class of persons have imagined the Gospel writers to be common conspirators who met together at the same time and place to devise ways and means of publishing a false report to the world.  This is a silly supposition, since it is positively known that the authors of the Evangelical narratives wrote and published them at different times and places.  Moreover, the style and contents of the books themselves negative the idea of a concerted purpose to deceive.  And, besides, the very inconsistencies themselves show that there was no “confederacy and fraud”; since intelligent conspirators would have fabricated exactly the same story in substantially the same language.


*A priori reasoning is allowed*
  These are not
  historically reliable accounts.

  ... But even if these stories were the best sources in the world, there would still be a major obstacle
  that we simply cannot overcome if we want to approach the question of the resurrection
  12
  historically rather than theologically. I’m fine if Bill wants to argue that theologically God raised
  Jesus from the dead or even if he wants to argue theologically that Jesus was raised from the
  dead. But this cannot be a historical claim, and not for the reason that he imputed to me as being
  an old, warmed over 18th century view that has been refuted ever since. Historians can only
  establish what probably happened in the past.

  Historians cannot establish miracle as the most probable occurrence
  because miracles, by their very nature are the least probable occurrence.

  God
  does things all the time, and so there’s nothing implausible at all about God raising Jesus from
  the dead.
  Well, that presupposes a belief in God. Historians can’t presuppose belief in God. Historians can
  only work with what we’ve got here among us. People who are historians can be of any
  theological persuasion. They can be Buddhists, they can be Hindus, they can be Muslims, they
  can be Christians, they can be Jews, they can be agnostics, they can be atheists, and the theory
  behind the canons in historical research is that people of every persuasion can look at the
  evidence and draw the same conclusions. But Bill’s hypothesis requires a person to believe in
  God. I don’t object to that as a way of thinking. I object to that as a way of historical thinking,
  because it’s not history, it’s theology.

  does the report of
  occurrence of miracles over time increase the probability? I’d say the answer is probably “no”
  because in every single instance you have to evaluate whether it’s a probable event or not. And
  it never can be a probable event. So that, if one thinks so, that it is a probable event, what I
  would like Bill to do is to tell us why he doesn’t think that Muhammad did miracles because we
  certainly have reports of that. Why doesn’t he think Apollonius of Tyana did miracles? He
  quoted Larry Yarbrough, who, in fact, probably has never read the Life of Apollonius. I know
  this because I had an argument with Larry Yarbrough about it. He has never read the texts. I
  don’t know if Bill has read the texts. They’re very interesting; they are Greek texts; they are
  widely available. They report Apollonius of Tyana did many of things that Jesus did; he could
  cast out demons, he could heal the sick, he could raise the dead, at the end of his life he ascended
  to heaven. And Apollonius of Tyana was just one of the hundreds of people about such things
  were said in the ancient world. So if we allow for the possibility of Jesus, how about allowing
  the possibility for Apollonius? Or Honi the Circle-Drawer or Hanina ben Dosa or the Emperor
  Vespasian? Or you could name the list as long as your arm of people. Now the reason we don’t
  know about these people is because, of course, the only miracle-working Son of God we know
  about is Jesus. But in fact in the ancient world there are hundreds of people like this, with
  hundreds of stories told about them. We discount them because they’re not within our tradition.


  My final point is a very simple one. Even if we want to believe in the resurrection of Jesus, that
  belief is a theological belief. You can’t prove the resurrection. It’s not susceptible to historical
  evidence. It’s faith. Believers believe it and take it on faith, and history cannot prove it.

  I don’t believe that history is an 
  objective discipline to start with. It sounded from your question that you agree with this, but we
  need to talk more about your take on postmodern theory. My view is that the historian does have
  to back up any presuppositions that he or she has. But my point is that for the historian to do his
  or her work, requires that there’d be certain shared assumptions. And it’s fine to say what those
  assumptions are, but there are some assumptions that have to be agreed on by people of various
  theological persuasions. And they have to be assumptions that are rooted in things that can be
  observed. God can’t be observed. So we might very well disagree on important historical events.
  There are people who, for example, in our world deny the holocaust, who say the holocaust
  never happened. Well, how does one demonstrate that the holocaust happened? Well, one gets
  together materials of eyewitness reports and photographs and movies, and you get information
  that historians agree is valid information, and you try to make a case. But it has to be the kind of
  information that historians of every stripe agree is valid information, such as eyewitness
  testimony. And appeals to the supernatural are not accepted in the historical community as being
  valid criteria on which to evaluate a past event.

  My final point is a very simple one. Even if we want to believe in the resurrection of Jesus, that
  belief is a theological belief. You can’t prove the resurrection. It’s not susceptible to historical
  evidence. It’s faith. Believers believe it and take it on faith, and history cannot prove it.


*Non-eyewitness testimony is as valid as eyewitness testimony*

  Ancient people have no difficulty at all thinking that a divine appearance was not
  an actual physical appearance. A body could be buried and the person could appear alive
  afterwards without the body leaving the tomb. If Bill doubts this, then I suggest he read some
  more ancient texts to see how they talk about the matter. He might start with the Christian texts
  of the second century, such as the Acts of John or the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter or the Second
  Treatise of the Great Seth, or he might consider the arguments used by Basilides, who was the
  disciple of the follower of Peter. For ancient people, post-death appearance was not the same as
  the reanimation of the body.

*Circumstantial evidence can be ignored*

  Yes, Mary Magdalene was a follower of Jesus, but his own argument was that
  nobody would invent the women because they were marginalized, because men didn’t think
  highly of women. My response is, that’s precisely why Mark would invent the tradition, because
  in Mark’s Gospel, it’s the marginalized who understand who Jesus is, it’s not the male disciples.
  That’s why you have the story of the women discovering the tomb.

*Presumption of innocence can be ignored*
              See also Theory takes precedence over eyewitness and circumstantial evidence

  Year after year Christians
  trying to convert others told them stories to convince them that Jesus was raised from the dead.
  These writers are telling stories, then, that Christians have been telling all these years. Many
  stories were invented, and most of the stories were changed. For that reason, these accounts are
  not as useful as we would like them to be for historical purposes. They’re not contemporary,
  they’re not disinterested, and they’re not consistent.

  What we have
  are Gospel stories written decades later by people who had heard stories in circulation, and it’s
  not hard at all to imagine somebody coming up with the story.

  Third, and finally, if the only miracles that Bill allows of having happened all belong to the
  Judaeo-Christian tradition that he himself personally affirms, I’d like him to address the question
  of how that can be historically. How is it that the faith that he adopted as a teenager happens to
  be the only one that is historically credible? Is it just circumstance that he was born into a
  religious family or a religious culture that can historically be shown to be the only true religion?


*Mythological claims have equal validity to historical claims*

  For ancient people, as opposed to post21
  Enlightenment thinkers like Bill, an appearance does not need to mean reanimation of the
  physical body. According to the Gospels, Moses and Elijah appeared to Jesus, James, and John.
  Are we to believe that these men, Moses and Elijah, came back to life? That Moses’ body was
  reconstituted and raised from the dead and that they appeared from heaven? Or was this a vision?
  Surely it was a vision; they disappear immediately. Ancient people had no trouble believing that
  bodies can be phantasmal, not physical. Evidence for this is found abundantly throughout all of
  our ancient sources – Jewish, pagan, and Christian. Pagan sources from the 8th century Homer to
  the 2nd century Homeric hymns; from pagan myths to pagan novels to pagan poets to pagan
  philosophers, they’re all replete with accounts of God appearing to humans in human form. But
  these are appearances, visions; they’re not real human bodies. The pagan holy man, Apollonius
  of Tyana, appears to his followers after his death, but it’s an appearance, a vision, not the
  reanimation of his body. Jewish texts are the same. For angels and archangels and demons and
  devils appear to people bodily, but they aren’t real bodies.

  I’d like him to
  discuss the evidence of other miracle workers from Jesus’ day outside the Christian tradition. Is
  he willing to admit on the same historical grounds that these other people also did miracles? I’m
  referring to the tradition of miracles done by Apollonius of Tyana, Hanina ben Dosa, Honi the
  Circle-Drawer, Vespasian. Is Bill willing to acknowledge that Apollonius appeared to his
  followers after his death or that Octavian ascended to heaven? Or he can pick any other miracle
  worker form the pagan tradition he chooses.

  does the report of
  occurrence of miracles over time increase the probability? I’d say the answer is probably “no”
  because in every single instance you have to evaluate whether it’s a probable event or not. And
  it never can be a probable event. So that, if one thinks so, that it is a probable event, what I
  would like Bill to do is to tell us why he doesn’t think that Muhammad did miracles because we
  certainly have reports of that. Why doesn’t he think Apollonius of Tyana did miracles?  They’re very interesting; they are Greek texts; they are
  widely available. They report Apollonius of Tyana did many of things that Jesus did; he could
  cast out demons, he could heal the sick, he could raise the dead, at the end of his life he ascended
  to heaven. And Apollonius of Tyana was just one of the hundreds of people about such things
  were said in the ancient world. So if we allow for the possibility of Jesus, how about allowing
  the possibility for Apollonius? Or Honi the Circle-Drawer or Hanina ben Dosa or the Emperor
  Vespasian? Or you could name the list as long as your arm of people. Now the reason we don’t
  know about these people is because, of course, the only miracle-working Son of God we know
  about is Jesus. But in fact in the ancient world there are hundreds of people like this, with
  hundreds of stories told about them. We discount them because they’re not within our tradition.

  That’s why my alternative explanation of Zulu sounded implausible to Bill because in his
  tradition it’s the God of Jesus, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who must be involved in
  the world. And, of course, people from other religious traditions say other Gods are involved. So
  this isn’t just a question about whether God is involved. Which God is involved? And as I
  pointed out earlier, it’s just a very happy circumstance that it happens to be the God, the God that
  Bill can historically demonstrate its existence, who happens to be the God that he converted to
  when he was 16.

*Visions can be shared*

  For ancient people, as opposed to post-Enlightenment thinkers like Bill, an appearance does not need to mean reanimation of the
  physical body. According to the Gospels, Moses and Elijah appeared to Jesus, James, and John.
  Are we to believe that these men, Moses and Elijah, came back to life? That Moses’ body was
  reconstituted and raised from the dead and that they appeared from heaven? Or was this a vision?
  Surely it was a vision; they disappear immediately.

  Ancient people had no trouble believing that bodies can be phantasmal, not physical. Evidence for this is found abundantly throughout all of our ancient sources – Jewish, pagan, and Christian. Pagan sources from the 8th century Homer to the 2nd century Homeric hymns; from pagan myths to pagan novels to pagan poets to pagan philosophers, they’re all replete with accounts of God appearing to humans in human form. But these are appearances, visions; they’re not real human bodies. The pagan holy man, Apollonius of Tyana, appears to his followers after his death, but it’s an appearance, a vision, not the reanimation of his body. Jewish texts are the same. For angels and archangels and demons and devils appear to people bodily, but they aren’t real bodies.


*The existence of hostile eyewitnesses as a corrective can be ignored*

*Double standards in the evaluation of historical ********s is allowed*

  To sum up, the sources we have are not as good as we would like.

  First, Bill makes dubious use of modern authorities. Bill constantly quotes modern scholars as if
  somehow that constitutes evidence for his point of view. As Bill himself knows, the fact that the
  majority of New Testament scholars would agree with his four points is not proof that they are
  right. For one thing, the majority of New Testament scholars are believers in the New Testament,
  that is, they’re theologically committed to the text, so of course they agree on these points. I
  should note that the majority of historians do not agree with Bill’s conclusion. Does that make
  those conclusions wrong? No. It simply means that his conclusions are not persuasive to most
  historians. Having said that, I’m surprised by some of his so-called authorities that Bill cites, for
  the reality is that the majority of critical scholars studying the historical Jesus today disagree
  with his conclusion that a historian can show that the body of Jesus emerged physically from the
  tomb.

*Burden of proof standard is ignored*​


----------



## Molka Molkan (5 فبراير 2012)

*Bart Interrupted--- A detailed Analysis of 'Jesus Interrupted' Part One*

Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted, (San Francisco: Harper One, 2009), xii +292 pages.  Part One ( the first 60 pages)

 Bart Ehrman is both a gifted writer and a gifted lecturer.  Perhaps his  best gift is the ability to distill difficult and complex material down  to a level that undergraduates and ordinary lay folk can understand.   It is thus understandable that his popular level books on the New  Testament and cognate subjects have been well and widely read, and in  age disposed to ‘dis’ the Bible anyway, which is to say, in a generally  Biblically illiterate age, Bart’s work has been seen as confirming  suspicions already long held by the skeptical or those prone to be  skeptical about the Bible and Christianity.  

One of the problems  however with some of Bart’s popular work, including this book, is that  it does not follow the age old adage--- “before you boil down, you need  to have first boiled it up”.   By this I mean Bart Ehrman, so far as I  can see, and I would be glad to be proved wrong about this fact, has  never done the necessary laboring in the scholarly vineyard to be in a  position to write a book like Jesus, Interrupted from a position of long  study and knowledge of New Testament Studies.   He has never written a  scholarly monograph on NT theology or exegesis.  He has never written a  scholarly commentary on any New Testament book whatsoever!  His area of  expertise is in textual criticism, and he has certainly written works  like The Orthodox Corruption of ******ure, which have been variously  reviewed, not to mention severely critiqued by other textual critics  such as Gordon D. Fee, and his own mentor Bruce Metzger (whom I also did  some study with).  He is thus, in the guild of the Society of Biblical  Literature a specialist in text criticism, but even in this realm he  does not represent what might be called a majority view on such matters.    
It is understandable how a textual critic might write a book like  Misquoting Jesus, on the basis of long study of the underpinnings of  textual criticism and its history and praxis.  It is mystifying however  why he would attempt to write a book like Jesus, Interrupted which  frankly reflect no in-depth interaction at all with exegetes,  theologians, and even most historians of the NT period of whatever faith  or no faith at all.  A quick perusal of the footnotes to this book,  reveal mostly cross-references to Ehrman’s earlier popular works, with a  few exceptions sprinkled in—for example Raymond Brown and E.P Sanders,  the former long dead, the latter long retired.  What is especially  telling and odd about this is Bart does not much reflect a knowledge of  the exegetical or historical study of the text in the last thirty years.   It’s as if he is basing his judgments on things he read whilst in  Princeton Seminary.  And that was a long time ago frankly.  

It  is not sufficient to reply that Bart is writing for a popular audience  and thus we would not expect much scholarly discussion even in the  footnotes.  Even in a work of this sort, we would expect some good up to  date bibliography for those disposed to do further study, not merely  copious cross-references to one’s other popular level books.  Contrast  for example, my last Harper book What Have They Done with Jesus?  The  impression is left, even if untrue, that Ehrman’s actual knowledge of  and interaction with NT historians, exegetes, and theologians has been  and is superficial and this has led to overly tendentious and  superficial analysis.  Again, I would be glad to be proved wrong about  this, but it would certainly appear I am not.  This book could have been  written by an intelligent skeptical person who had no more than a  seminary level acquaintance and expertise in the field of NT studies  itself.  And I do not say this lightly, for this book manifests problems  in all areas, if one critiques it on the basis of  NT scholarship of  the last thirty or so years.   There are methodological problems,  historical problems, exegetical problems, theological problems, and  epistemological problems with this book, to mention but a few areas.    

 My grandmother used to say, “if you can’t say anything nice about a  person, then don’t say anything at all.”  So let me start the more  detailed part of this discussion by saying something positive--- I  believe Bart Ehrman is an honest person, who really has been a truth  seeker when it comes to the Bible and Christianity.  His preface to this  latest volume reflects that, and I applaud his honesty and  forthrightness, while at the same time pointing out that I was a person  who went through the same process of deep study and inquiry whilst in  college and seminary and came to very different conclusions than Bart,  and it wasn’t because I checked my brain at the door or ceased being a  critical thinker on these subjects along the way.  Bart and I are  different in that I did not come out of a fundamentalist past at all,  but we do share not only UNC and Bruce Metzger in common, we also both  did English literature degrees in college, which explains to some degree  the ability to write and the tendency to do it frequently. 

Let  me start then with a general criticism about Bart’s entire approach.  He  begins in his first chapter by bemoaning the fact that the general  populus including the church, has been left in the dark about what  “scholars have been saying” for lo these many years (over a hundred  actually) about the Bible. He puts it this way “the perspectives that I  present in the following chapters are not my own idiosyncratic views of  the Bible. They are the views that have held sway for many, many years  among the majority of serious critical scholars teaching in universities  and seminaries of North America and Europe”(p.2).   

Now it is  always a danger to over generalize when we are dealing with as important  a matter as the ‘truth about the Bible’. And frankly it is simply  untrue to say that most scholars or the majority of Bible scholars or  the majority of serious critical scholars would agree with Bart Ehrman  in his conclusions about this or that NT matter.   NT scholarship is a  many splintered thing, and Ehrman’s position certainly does not  represent a majority view, or the critical consensus about such matters.   At best, one has to say yes and no repeatedly to what Bart takes as  the critical consensus about such matters.  Bart Ehrman, like the more  radical members of the Jesus Seminar (e.g. Robert Funk cf. Robert Price)  represents a minority position which has indeed been very vocal in  proselytizing for their point of view.  So this book should have come  with a caveat emptor--- “Buyer Beware: Hyperbolic claims about what most  or the majority of critical scholars of the NT think will be frequent  in this tome”.  The appeal to authority or expertise in any case does  not really settle much. The issue is—what is the evidence and why should  we draw this or that conclusion?   The other issue is--- why mislead  the general public about what “the majority of serious critical  scholars” have been saying?  Perhaps an end run has been done from the  outset--- you define a small circle of scholars as the serious ones, the  critical ones, the real scholarly thinkers, the real historians, and  then having defined your own group narrowly enough, you then say—“the  majority of such people think…”  Evangelicals are sometimes just as  guilty of this ploy as others, but in any case, it does not help when  one misrepresents the actual state of play of things among scholars to  the general public.

Bart reminds us early on that the method of  studying the Bible taught in most mainline seminaries is “the historical  critical method”.  It is also, in fact perhaps the main method of  teaching the Bible in evangelical seminaries today as well.   And two of  the major things one is taught, quite correctly in the study of this  method are: 1) ancient historical texts must be studied in their  original historical contexts to be properly understood; and 2) modern  post-Enlightenment historiography is at odds with the historiography of  most ancients, particularly when it comes to the issue of God’s  involvement in human history.  

There is a further corollary—in  order to understand the Gospels or Acts, or Paul’s letters, or  Revelation, one needs to understand the features and characteristics of  such ancient literature—in short their respective genres.  The Gospels  are written like ancient biographies, not modern ones, or in the case of  Luke-Acts like an ancient work of Hellenistic (and Septuagintal)  historiography.  Unless one knows the conventions and limitations that  apply to such literature, one is in no position at all to evaluate  whether there are “inconsistencies” “errors” or other problematic  features of such literature.   Error can only be assessed on the basis  of what an author is attempting to do and what literary conventions he  is following.  Let us take an example Bart uses from p. 7 of his  book—the fact that in John the cleansing of the temple comes early in  the Gospel account, whereas in the Synoptics it is found in the Passion  narrative.  He is right of course that some modern conservative  Christians have attempted to reconcile these differences by suggesting  Jesus did the deed twice--- once at the beginning and once at the end of  the ministry.  The problem is, that this conclusion is just as  anachronistic (and genre ignoring) as the conclusion that the Gospels  contradict each other on this point.  What do I mean? 

If you  actually bother to read ancient biographies (see e.g. Tacitus’s Life of  Agricola, or Plutarch’s famous parallel lives) you will discover that  the ancients were not pedants when it comes to the issue of strict  chronology as we are today.  The ancient biographical or  historiographical work operated with the freedom to arrange there  material in several different ways, including topically, geographically,  chronologically, to mention but three.  Yes they had a secondary  interest in chronology in broad strokes, but only a secondary interest  in that.
If one studies the Fourth Gospel in detail and closely in  the Greek, comparing it to other ancient biographies what one learns is  that it is a highly schematized and edited product, and the sign  narratives are arranged theologically not primarily chronologically.   And whilst this might cause a modern person some consternation, it is  not a reason to say that John contradicts the Synoptics on this Temple  cleansing matter. The Fourth Gospel begins by showing that Jesus  replaces the institutions of Judaism with himself—a theological message  (he is the Passover lamb, he is the Temple where God’s presence dwells  etc.).  The Synoptic writers are likely presenting a more  chronologically apt picture of when this event actually happened.  But  strict chronology was not the major purpose of the Fourth Evangelist, we  should not fault him for not giving us information we might want to  have, or for focusing on the theological import of the event, rather  than its timing.  Such was the freedom, within limits, of ancient  biographies and histories.   I must disagree with the conclusion then  when Bart says “Historically speaking, then, the accounts are not  reconcilable.” (p. 7).  False.  This is only so if one insists on a flat  modern anachronistic reading of the text which pays no attention to  what the authors are attempting.  

The Gospel of John probably  tells us nothing about this chronological issue, the Synoptics probably  do, and judged on their own terms and on the basis of their ancient  genre, one cannot draw the conclusion Bart does. Period.   And  unfortunately, this is a mistake Bart makes over, and over again,  judging ancient texts on the basis of modern presuppositions about  history writing, and what counts as truth or error.  In fact, it is not  entirely erroneous to say that Bart reads the Bible with the same sort  of flat literalistic hermeneutic that he would have used before he did  his scholarly study of the text.  And I find this passing strange. 
Let’s  take his next pet example--- the three denials of Christ by Peter, and  the cock crows. I quite agree with his critique of those who come up  with six denials of Christ by Peter.  No Gospel says that, any more than  any Gospel mentions two cleansing of the Temple.  Bart points to the  difference between Matthew and Mark, the latter saying Peter will deny  Christ before the cock crows twice, whilst in Matthew it says ‘before  the cock crows”.  He then asks--- “which is it?”    The assumption is:  1) these Gospel writers were trying to be very precise; and 2) these two  options are mutually contradictory; and 3) we should ask these sorts of  detail questions of ancient historical ********s because we have a  right to assume that modern historical ways of analyzing this material  will help us to get to the bottom of such matters and find the  historical truth.  

In the first place let’s consider point 2).    In fact, if Peter denied Christ three times before the cock crowed at  all, then he certainly denied Christ three times before the cock crowed  twice!!!  But suppose the Gospels writer were not much concerned to give  us precise information about the intricate relationship and  intercalation between denials and cock crows.  Suppose, in terms of  historical information they just wanted to make clear that there were  three denials and there were cock crows?  Of course this is maddening to  those who think that we must have precision on such matters, but in  fact if an author wants to be general let him be general, and if he  wants to be more specific, let him be more specific.  Mark may simply  have wanted to be more general in his account.  And since I think, with  most scholars that the First Evangelist is using Mark’s account, he  probably knew far more about the Markan intent than we do, and decided  to be more specific.  He edits his Markan account according to his own  presentation of things.   I could go through Bart’s examples one by one  explaining how insufficient attention has been paid by him to the  ancient conventions of such genre of literature, but I agree with him  that over-harmonizing on the basis of modern anachronistic  considerations is wrong, just as wrong as claiming there are obvious  contradictions based on a modern literalist reading of the same texts.    And herein lies a very fundamental problem with the ex-fundamentalist  readings of Bart Ehrman.   

The Gospels are not, and never were  intended to be inspected as if they were ancient photographs of Jesus  taken with a high resolution, all seeing lens.  On the contrary these  ********s are much more like portraits, and portraits always are  selective, tendentious, perspectival.  Let me illustrate this point. 
One  of my favorite Impressionist painters is Claude Monet, and I really  love his series of painting done of Rouen Cathedral.  These paintings  were done in the late 1890s and they depict the front face of the  Cathedral from slightly different angles of incidence, and in different  lighting.  But in each case it is recognizably the same cathedral with  the same basic shape, from the same basic ***** of reference.  Let us  suppose for a minute then that the Gospels are like these paintings.   Now it would be totally pedantic to have an argument that went as  follows: “In this painting Monet depicts the color of the front façade  of the cathedral as being gray, but in this picture he paints it as  being a yellowish shade, and in this picture a pinkish shade.”  Which is  it?  Surely one must be right and the other depictions wrong.”  Of  course the proper response to this silly discourse is that they are all  right, because they attempt to depict the appearance of the building at  different times of day from slightly different angles. And no art critic  in their right mind would think of suggesting that one painting was in  error compared to the other.  My point is simple.  The Gospels are not  works of modern biography or historiography and they should not be  evaluated by such canons.  

Nor for that matter are we much  helped by evaluating the Gospel traditions on the basis of the canons of  modern German form criticism which is grounded in notions about the  passing on of oral traditions which simply do not apply to the first  century A.D. and in the Jewish setting of the Gospels and Acts (on this  point see Richard Bauckham’s fine study Jesus and the Eyewitnesses).  Various of Bart’s comments presuppose that most NT exegetes and  historians assume that the Bultmannian conclusions about oral history  and oral tradition are correct.  This is certainly not true now in the  way it might have been said to be true specifically in mainline schools  in the 70s.  On the contrary, there is now a lively discussion about  oral history that makes clear that the notion that there was likely a  long gap between the events and their being written down, or between  eyewitness testimony and their being written down is probably false.  

Equally  pedantic and unhelpful is Bart’s analysis of Genesis 1 and 2(pp. 9-10),  which are generally agreed to be two different ways of telling the  story of creation, one more general, and one more focused on the  creation of humankind.  Besides the fact that Genesis 1 falls into the  category of poetry or poetic prose and should not be analyzed on the  basis of it being some sort of scientific account of creation, it is  frankly not fair game to compare and contrast these two chapters as if  they were attempting to say the same thing in the same way writing like  modern historians.  They are not. Ancient narratological conventions  come into play (see now Bill Arnold’s fine commentary on Genesis in the  Cambridge series I edit).  And now we begin to see why Biblically  illiterate folk who are skeptical about the Bible are drawn to the  Ehrman analysis. It appears to take the text at face value, and evaluate  it by comparison and contrast, without taking into consideration at all  issues of literary context or conventions.  In other words, it  approaches the matter as if one could simply read the English  translation of the text without any knowledge of ancient writing  conventions and come to important conclusions about historical truth and  error.  But in fact, this is not only not proper, in most cases it is  not possible.  The real truth seeker knows that a text without a context  is just a pretext for whatever you would like it to mean. 

Let’s  take another example--- Bart’s treatment on pp. 10-11 of Psalm 137.  In  the first place this is a song, and so should not be treated like a  theological or ethical treatise. In the second place, what this song is a  revelation of  is what is on the heart of the psalmist.  In the psalms,  human beings speak to, pray to, implore their God in various ways.  It  is a very truthful and accurate reflection of various things on and in  the human heart, including the desire for vengeance.  What the psalms  are generally not is a revelation of what is in God’s heart or  character.  But Bart seems oblivious to this point which is commonly  enough recognized by commentators on the Psalms.  More in depth study of  the psalms could have led to the avoidance of this sort of error.

Let’s  take now an example from the second chapter (pp. 24ff). Here Bart is  comparing and contrasting the relationship between the events that lead  up to Jesus’ death as told in Mark and as told in John, and trying to  synch that up with the Jewish liturgical calendar in regard to the  celebration of Passover, and the Day of Preparation.  

A few  historical remarks are in order. 1) despite what Bart says,  no Gospel  suggests Jesus was crucified on Passover, which is to say between  sundown Friday and sundown Saturday on April 7 A.D. 30 (or less possibly  in A.D. 33); 2) the meal described in John 13 is definitely not the  same meal as that described in Mark 14 and the other Synoptics.  John 13  is very clear about this--- John 13.1 reads literally “But before the  festival of the Passover…”  The text does not say how long before. This  could easily be a meal at the beginning of the week when the feast of  Passover transpired, rather than near its end. And nothing whatsoever is  said in John’s story about sharing the Passover elements.  This is a  striking difference from the accounts in the Synoptics, and I would say  the differences are great enough that we must take them to indicate we  are dealing with different stories here. 3)  Most scholars who have  written commentaries on the Synoptics do indeed think that Jesus  celebrated his last supper with his disciples on Thursday night, which  is to say, on the beginning of the Day of Preparation rather than on  Passover day.  There was precedent for this in early Judaism in some  cases, and some scholars have even argued that Jesus was following the  Galilean rather than the Judean liturgical calendar, which is certainly  possible and believable.  Whether this is so or not, it is notable that  there is no mention at all about Jesus and his disciples eating lamb….in  any of the accounts.  This has led some to conclude, wrongly in my  judgment, that even the Thursday night meal was not a Passover meal.  4)  one of the major issues in determining when Jesus actually died is the  question of which clock an Evangelist is running on--- is it the Roman  way of keeping time, or a Jewish and Oriental one?  Which hour is the  third, sixth and ninth hours, according to the respective Evangelists?    Mark’s seems to be based on the Roman way of time keeping, but this may  not be the case in John.  In any case, all the Gospels in fact are in  agreement that Jesus died before sundown on Friday, which is to say,  before Passover actually begun, which is to say on the Day of  Preparation.  5) in A.D. 30 the day of preparation for the Sabbath was  in fact the day of preparation for Passover.  It was one and the same  day.  Therefore, Mk. 15.42 does not in any way disagree with John when  it says that Jesus died on the day of Preparation.  Correct— and this  was Friday before sundown when both Passover and Sabbath began that  year.  John did not need to change a historical datum to make a  theological point that Jesus was the Passover lamb.  The point is  inherent in a theological interpretation of the actual day Jesus died.   In this case, Bart is busily finding contradictions in the text which  are a chimera. They are not really in evidence. 

Bart carries on  in much the same vein in his analysis of the birth narratives. What is  of concern to us is not where he sees differences in Matthew and Luke’s  accounts, but rather where he finds what he deems to be actual  discrepancies. The first of these is that Bart claims that what Luke  says in Lk.2.1-3 is clearly historically in error (pp. 34-35).  What  however does the Greek text of Lk.2.2 actually say--- “this registration  happened first/prior to the governing of Syria by Quirinius.”  The  issue here is the function of the word prote.  What it seems to indicate  is that the census in question took place prior to when Quirinius was  governor of Syria.  There was indeed a famous and indeed notorious  census which led to the rebellion of Judas the Galilean in A.D. 6, and  so Luke would be distinguishing that census from the earlier one when  Mary and Joseph were enrolled.  Bart also deems the notion of such  enrollments as historically improbable, at least in the way Luke tells  the story.  There are however very clear examples from the province of  Egypt of such census taking done for the purpose of taxation. And in  fact, the evidence suggests a link with one’s ancestral home. I see no  reason why the Romans would do it any differently with the province of  Judea.  Furthermore, when Augustus decide to go for the full blown  Empire deal, he needed much more money for many more troops and  armaments.  

While Luke may be using rhetorical hyperbole when he  says all the oikomene was being enrolled, a rhetorical usage common in  Hellenistic historiography influenced by rhetoric, what Luke is  referring to is the inhabited Roman empire, outside of Rome itself.  In  other words, his audience would likely have understood the reference  quite easily and naturally.   Bart also takes exception to the story of  the wise men following the star.  He says nothing of the fact that  ancients often thought stars were living beings, the heavenly hosts, and  it is more than likely that what Matthew is describing is the leading  of the heavenly host or angels, of these persons to the birth place.  Here again however some latitude must be allowed for ancient story  tellers to present their narrative in ways that their audience would  understand.  While Matthew’s account does not tell us that Nazareth was  Mary and Joseph’s hometown, his account is compatible with this fact,  which Luke does tell us. The absence of an explanation does not a  discrepancy make nor should it lead one to conclude the author thought  something different, especially when Matthew tells us that eventually  the holy family did go to Nazareth, and why would they pick that wide  place in the road out of the blue if they had no prior associations with  it?  No good reason. The ******ure fulfillment text in Matthew is a  midrashic attempt to explain the fact that Nazareth was their home. It  did not generate such an idea. 
Lastly, Bart wants to argue that both  Matthew and Luke made up the notion of a trip to Bethlehem  independently of one another based on Micah’s prophecy, in order to  indicate Jesus’ messianic origins, rather than suggesting he was born in  a one horse town in Galilee.  The problem with this is that Bethlehem  itself was also a one horse town in Jesus’ day, and among other things,  the slaughter of the innocents is perfectly in character with Herod’s  paranoia as described in Josephus.  It was hardly necessary for a  messianic figure to come from Bethlehem unless one wanted to insist he  was a descendant of David, but as we know from Qumran, there were other  Jewish traditions that did not associate messiah with the Davidic line.   In regard to the oft parodied story of the slaughter of the innocents,  we are only talking about a handful of infants at most in such a tiny  village anyway, perhaps 6-8.  There is nothing improbable about a birth  in Bethlehem at all or a slaughter of a few infants.  Jesus was called  Jesus of Nazareth because he grew up there from infancy. 

Differences  there are indeed in the accounts of the birth of Jesus in Matthew and  Luke. And they are not explained by denying their existence, or  resorting to false harmonizing tactics and exegetical gymnastics. We are  not however talking about direct contradictions at all here.  These  narratives are quite compatible in all their essential details, and it  is remarkable that two such independent accounts would in fact emphasize  the same crucial points--- a virginal conception and a birth in  Bethlehem. This did not happen because they were both creative exegetes.   It happened because they both relied on historical sources of  information about these events.  Ehrman’s conclusion that “there are  historical implausibilities and discrepancies that can scarcely be  reconciled” (p. 34) is saying far more than he knows or the evidence  suggests.  Had Luke said Jesus was born in Nazareth and Matthew said no  he was born in Bethlehem, then we would have a contradiction.  But we  find nothing like a contradiction in these two accounts—differences do  not necessarily equal discrepancies much less equal disagreements.  One  has to come up with much better examples than this if one wants to claim  the accounts can’t be explained or reconciled. 

It is the task  of a historian, which Bart Ehrman says he is, to get his facts straight.   When he takes on the differences in the genealogies there are a few  crucial facts he either ignores or is ignorant of.  The first of these  crucial points is that in Jewish law, if a man adopted a son, that son  was entitled to be considered a descendant of his adoptive father,  including being a descendant of his step-father’s ancestors.  The  genealogies in both Matthew and Luke are strange in part precisely  because of this legal issue, and more to the point they are strange  because both writers want to include the notion of the virginal  conception in their accounts, indeed Matthew includes it right in his  geneaology, and this may be the only known genealogy where the wife is  included in the husband’s geneaology like this!   

Bart is right  about various of the differences in these genealogies.  But he does not  correctly explain some of the reasons for the differences.  In the first  place ancient royal genealogies often were prone to leaving the  skeletons out of the list, and so offering an edited version of the  ancestry.  Something like this is happening in Matthew who wants to  suggest Jesus is the seventh son of a seventh son of David, namely the  perfect descendant of David.  In other words, the form of the genealogy  reflects not just historical but also theological interests.  The same  can be said for Luke’s genealogy and his concern to show that Jesus is  not merely son of David son of Abraham, but also son of Adam, and more  crucially, son of God.  The issues here are not purely historical and it  is a form of reductionism to treat them in a purely historical manner.   But they were not intended to answer purely historical questions. One  needs to read them in light of the conventions of such ancient  genealogies, not in the light of modern historical conventions.  

Scholars  have long debated why these two genealogies differ, and Bart may be  right that they both are genealogies connected to Joseph, rather than  Luke’s being connected to Mary’s family.  But even if this is true, one  of them could offer some part of Joseph’s paternal ancestry and the  other some part of Joseph’s maternal ancestry. We honestly cannot say.   What we can say is there is no basis for the confidence that Bart shows  that we have clear contradictions here. More would need to be known  about ancient genealogy composition to come to that conclusion.   We  could carry on with this sort of dialogue with Bart’s list of complaints  but we have already dealt with what he takes to be some of the more  famous parade examples of clear contradictions. Some of his other  examples are much weaker, and can be explained on the basis of the  differing editorial tendencies different Gospel writers had, or in  Luke’s Acts accounts on the basis of what were the conventions of  rhetorical history writing in the first place. About such things Bart  says little or nothing, because he seeks to read the text on the basis  of modern historiographical conventions, a signal mistake.  Ancient  texts must be evaluated on their own terms and without demanding of them  a precision they never were intended to have.      

It is  interesting that as the book moves along, Bart stresses here (and later  in this study) that he does not think that historical critical study of  the Bible should necessarily or will necessarily lead to a loss of  Christian faith.  I quite agree with this.  In fact, I would say in my  case that it is precisely the historical, contextual study of the Bible  that has strengthened my faith in its truth telling on various subjects  of import, not the least of which is the need for and possibility of  human salvation. I also quite agree with Bart that teaching students to  think and do critical thinking about life and the Bible is a good thing.   On these two conclusions we would simply agree.  What is interesting  is that the more I studied the Bible the less I was prone to accuse the  Bible of obvious historical errors and stupid mistakes, including  theological errors about a matter as profound as human suffering and  evil.  To the contrary, I found the Bible rich, complex, varied, and  helpful and truthful in dealing with precisely such life and death  matters.  It would be appropriate then to ask---why exactly did studying  the Bible in the same way at seminary and during doctoral work lead  Bart Ehrman and myself to such different conclusions? In my case, my  faith in the Bible was strengthened, but the opposite seems to have been  the case with Bart.  “This is a mystery and it calls for profound  reflection”.  Some of this clearly has to do with presuppositions.   Let’s take a theological one that seems to be at the root of some of the  differences. 

Bart seems to assume that a God who is both  almighty and a God of love, would not allow the hideous amount of  suffering that goes on in this world.  Now this is by no means an  uncommon objection to Biblical revelation, but what it seems to assume  is a particular sort or deterministic or even extreme Calvinistic view  of God, God’s sovereignty, and human life.  I can see how extreme  suffering and evil is a major problem for such a view of God.  It would  seem to make God the author of suffering and evil, or at least an  uncaring deity in too many cases.  Suppose however that God has not  pre-determined all things?  Suppose God chose to create us in his image  with a measure of freedom of choice, the power of contrary choice?   Suppose God relates to us relationally and not on the basis of divine  decrees?  Suppose the vast majority of suffering in the world is a  result of human misbehavior or stupidity or sin?   Suppose in addition  that God does repeatedly intervene in human history to aid and rescue  us, without taking away our ability to make viable choices that have  moral consequences?  It seems to me that part of the issue here is that  Bart and I have very different views of the Biblical God and how God  actually operates. 
Here’s another quandary and quagmire.  It appears  to me that Bart and I disagree profoundly about the import of textual  variants. As Bruce Metzger who taught us both once said--- we know what  about 92% of the NT said in its original manu******s with a rather high  degree of certainty.  As for the other 8%, very little of theological or  ethical consequence is at stake.  For example, the Trinity is not at  stake if 1 John 5 did not mention it.  The deity of Christ is not at  stake just because some NT ********s do not mention it directly, and  some unscrupulous scribes added some clarity to this matter in other  manu******s in ways that distorted some NT manu******s.  

We also  disagree rather strongly on the degree of flux in belief and in the  handling of NT ********s early on.  It is simply not true to say that  many of the primary Christian doctrines were not affirmed widely until  centuries after the time of Christ.  It is also not true that any such  doctrines hang on only late copies of this or that NT book.  When it  comes to the issue of textual variants, the development of the textual  tradition, and the theological import of such variants, Bart simply  over-reads the evidence, or as the British say, over-eggs the pudding.  

Now  I think I understand why he does this.  He rightly gets peeved with  those fundamentalists who want to stick their heads in the sand and say,  there are no such issues or problems even in the least. But an  over-reaction is just that--- an over-reaction.   Throughout this book,  the real boogeyman that Bart is trying to refute is fundamentalists who  hold to a certain wooden and very literal view of inerrancy which hardly  takes ancient historical considerations into account at all.  I would  actually have as many problems with the same people as I have with  Bart’s views. 

He also does not do justice to a reading of these  texts in light of ancient genre, conventions, purposes, history writing  and the like, but for very different reasons.  The reasons seem to  include that he is a ardent convert from fundamentalism to a very narrow  and all too modern form of historical critical analysis of these  texts-- a form that starts with an inherent skepticism about the  supernatural among other things, and assumes that critical thinking  equals the ability to doubt this, that or the other ancient datum.  I  call this justification by doubt.   It is no more a valid starting point  for evaluating the NT than blind fideism is.  Indeed, I would argue  that to actually understand an ancient author you must start by giving  them the benefit of the doubt and hear them out, doing one’s best to  enter creatively into their own world and thought processes before  understanding can come to pass.  To approach the text with a hermeneutic  of suspicion is to poison the well of inquiry before one even samples  the water in the old well. 

Bart and I furthermore disagree on  the issue of pseudonymity in the canon. It is one thing to say there are  anonymous ********s in the NT, which there are. Hebrews would be a good  example.  It is another thing to say that there are pseudonymous  ********s in the NT, forgeries. I and many other critical scholars think  this is not so, but Bart is right that many scholars think otherwise.  My point is simply this--- there is a healthy debate about that issue  amongst scholars.  It is not a “well assured result of the historical  critical method” on analyzing the NT.  I have pointed out at length in  my Letters and Homilies of the NT, series the problems that pseudonymity  raised in the first century A.D. for both Greek and Latin writers,  never mind writers of ********s supposed to convey God’s truth.  The  Gospels as we have them are formally anonymous in terms of their  internal evidence, though the Fourth Gospel tells is that the Beloved  Disciple (not specifically identified) is the source of the material in  that Gospel.  We can discuss the merits of the attributes later appended  to these Gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke, John), but in my view the  testimony of Papias is important, and makes evident these attributions  already existed in the first century, and in some cases during the time  when there were still eyewitnesses.  They cannot be dismissed with a  wave of a hand, but at the same time one needs to ask--- what were the  conventions when it came to appending names to composite ********s?    This deserves more discussion.  In the second part of this post, we will  pick up the discussion with Chapter Three.  Stay tuned.​


----------



## Molka Molkan (5 فبراير 2012)

http://benwitherington.blogspot.com.au/2009/04/bart-interrupted-detailed-analysis-of.html​


----------



## Molka Molkan (5 فبراير 2012)

*Misunderstanding Christianity: Do Scribal Changes Really Matter and Why? (A*

*Misunderstanding Christianity: *​*Do Scribal Changes Really Matter and Why?*​
A Critical Review of Bart Ehrman’s _Misquoting Jesus: Who Changed the Bible and Why?_​
By H. L. Nigro​
In _Misquoting Jesus_,  Bart Ehrman seems, on the surface, to present a convincing case for the  lack of trustworthiness of the New Testament based on changes to the  ancient manu******s during the scribal copying process, particularly in  the second and third centuries. Unfortunately, he is not always the  objective scholar that he claims to be. This work, while providing an  interesting ********ary on the discipline of textual criticism, only  tells half the story.

Although  Ehrman acknowledges that the overwhelming majority of these scribal  changes are those (such as spelling errors) that are, in his own words,  "completely insignificant, immaterial, of no real importance" (p. 207),[1]  he repeatedly breezes over this critical point and focuses instead on  the much rarer intentional scribal additions or changes, most of which  have already been removed in our modern translations or, even if  preserved, have little or no impact on Christian doctrine.

In  addition, Ehrman often misrepresents the body of modern scholarship as  agreeing with him on controversial matters when, in fact, some of the  most highly acclaimed New Testament scholars — including Ehrman’s own  mentor, Bruce Metzger — disagree with him. Although, at the end of the  book, Ehrman admits that "competent … highly intelligent scholars often  come to opposite conclusions" (p. 208), until that point, he repeatedly  uses the inclusive term "scholars" or "most scholars" to support his  conclusions, even though this is rarely true. 

Particularly  disturbing is when Ehrman speculates on issues of authenticity based on  his own personal opinion or responses to the text rather than any  historical evidence (for example, he views minor differences from one  gospel to another as deliberate attempts to change the message and  present a different view of history) then, later in the book, switches  from calling these statements of speculation to statements of fact.

Take,  for example, his contention that Matthew and Luke deliberately  “deleted” references to Jesus’ emotion (either compassion or anger,  depending on the variant reading one chooses) in healing the leper in  Mark 1:41. Because Ehrman prefers the rarer variant reading that Jesus  was angry rather than compassionate, he argues that Matthew and Luke’s  more sparse de******ions were deliberate attempts to hide what he  believes would have been an embarrassing fact. Ehrman’s contention  ignores the glaring problem that, if the gospel writers had penchant for  removing embarrassing references, they overlooked far more embarrassing  ones, such as Peter’s rejection of Jesus, Thomas’ unbelief, and the  fact that the empty tomb was discovered by women. If they left in _these _embarrassing  details, why would they go out of their way to omit something as  innocuous as this? More importantly, the contention that this is a  deliberate omission (thus casting doubt on the motives of the writers)  is a personal interpretation overlaid on the text — and one completely  baseless in fact.

*Subjective Rejection*


Ironically,  Ehrman uses his training in textual criticism as the basis for  rejecting his Christian faith. And yet, even in Ehrman’s own tacit  admission, not one example given in the book touches the core teachings  of Christianity.

Certainly,  some scribal additions bolstered the New Testament’s claims to Jesus’  divinity, for example, but there are a plethora of references, including  Jesus’ own words, that are not under dispute. And not one of these  discrepancies calls into question the heart of the Christian message,  including the details concerning the atoning death, trial, and  resurrection of Christ, which form the heart of the Christian faith. Not  only this, but confirmation of key points of the gospel accounts can be  found in early, pre-Pauline creeds, which arose before the gospels or  epistles were even written (the creed found in 1 Corinthians 15, for  example, is commonly believed to have arisen within a few years of  Christ’s death[2]), and early church writings, as well as in first and second century secular ********s.

Ironically,  Ehrman all but admits that what it boils down to is not the facts of  the matter, but his very personal complaint (which is so important that  he makes it in the first and last pages of the book) that if the Bible  were truly inspired of God, then God would have preserved its original  words perfectly throughout history. No scribe would have made a single  mistake or a single change at any point in time:

…  for God to inspire the Bible would be so that his people would have his  actual words; but if he really wanted people to have his actual words,  surely he would have miraculously preserved those words, just as he had  miraculously inspired them in the first place. Given the circumstance  that he didn’t preserve the words, the conclusion seemed inescapable to  me that he hadn’t gone to the trouble of inspiring them. (p. 211)


This  explains why, in Ehrman’s mind, the smallest, most secondary  discrepancies derailed his faith. It’s not that the evidence truly  points to New Testament ********s as no longer reliably transmitting  historical truth, but rather, because God didn’t meet Ehrman’s own  personal standards.
*Through the Lens of Offense​

This,  at its core, is the lens through which Ehrman views his research. This  is clear, not just in his conclusions, but in his theology. Many of  Ehrman’s claims that changes to the text are significant to Christian  theology, for example, actually reflect what appears to be a superficial  understanding of the text. 
*

In  other places, his problems almost seem manufactured. Take his example  of Jesus’ apparent “error” when He says, in Mark 4, that the mustard  seed is “the smallest of all seeds on the earth.” Responding to the body  of work on the harmonization of these passages, Ehrman writes, “Maybe I  don’t need to come up with a fancy explanation for how the mustard seed  is the smallest of all seeds when I know full well it isn’t” (p. 10).  Rather than conclude that Jesus made an embarrassing blunder, would it  not be more reasonable to assume that Jesus wasn’t making a scientific  statement, but rather was using the common tool of exaggeration to make  an important point — a comparison of the size of the seed to the majesty  of the full grown plant? For Ehrman to see this as an error rather than  an obvious figure of speech suggests a strong bias through which he is  interpreting the text. 

This  bias shines through in the remainder of the paragraph as well, as  Ehrman lists a collection of “contradictions,” after each of which he  states that, rather than accepting the harmonization, “maybe there  really is a difference.” The obvious response is, “and maybe there  isn’t.” The examples that Ehrman gives are well-known to New Testament  scholars, and most — if not all — are easily harmonized. So do we go  with the easy solution? Or do we reject the most intuitive solution and  focus instead on the least — that Jesus, who is commonly cited, even by  those who do not accept His divinity, as the wisest man who ever lived  and who dwelled in a culture of farmers and cultivators, made a clumsy  mistake about the size of a common seed?[3]


Ultimately,  what this boils down to is Ehrman's lack of respect for the message of  the New Testament. This is also clear in inaccuracies in his ******ural  quotations. Occasionally, ******ural references are flat-out incorrect.  In other cases, if one reads the passage Ehrman is referring to, it  doesn't always say what he claims. Whether this is a result of his own  sloppiness or his emotionally charged response to the text, it again  raises a question about his objectivity.

*What’s Christianity Based on Anyway?*​

All  things considered, there is a tremendous irony here. I doubt any  scholar would question Ehrman's discussion of the manu******s  themselves. The scribal changes are well known, and what few "major"  changes have been made to the text are also well known — even "ho, hum"  to other New Testament scholars — but despite the book’s stated purpose  as an introduction to textual criticism for laypeople, it is the  conclusions that Ehrman draws that are really the message of the book.  Those conclusions are highly subjective, and it is in his conclusions  that many of the world’s greatest New Testament scholars part views with  him.


The  greatest irony is that Ehrman rejected his faith in biblical  Christianity based on what he sees as irreconcilable problems with the  text; and yet, the Christian faith has never been based on the perfect  preservation of the New Testament translations. It is based on  eye-witness testimony of the risen Christ, which is one of the  best-attested events in ancient history, with or without scribal  changes, and even outside the Bible. Should all of the New Testament  ********s disappear, the historicity of the risen Christ, crucified for  our sins and worshipped by early Christians as God, would remain intact.  (See _The Historical Jesus_, by Gary Habermas.)

A  final irony is that, while Ehrman researched these texts and rejected  his faith, many of the great intellects of our time have looked at this  same evidence and actually strengthened their faith or become believers  in the first place. I, myself, take something very different from  Ehrman’s evidence than Ehrman does, and I actually enjoyed the book and  plan to add it to my apologetics library _supporting_ the Christian faith — much, I would suspect, to his chagrin.



*NOTES:*


[1]In  his section on the texts of the New Testament, Ehrman summarizes the  work by Daniel Whitby as concluding that “the text of the New Testament  is secure, since scarcely any variant cited by Mill [an opponent  focusing on the textual variants] involves an article of faith or  question of conduct” (p. 86). Ehrman leaves this assessment  unchallenged, and a few lines later, adds, “Whitby’s  defense might well have settled the issue,” except for the additional  publicity he brought to the variants, charging up his critics.  Ironically, the power of the argument, at this point in the book, seems  to rest with Whitby.  Thus, on p. 89, when Ehrman points out that the number of variants could  be 400,000 or more, the reader is left wondering about the relevance of  this statement. If the variants are unsubstantial, as Ehrman admits,  what does it matter? Whether there are 30,000 unsubstantial variants or  400,000, the additional volume doesn’t make them more weighty, just more  numerous. Compounding the problem, when Ehrman continues his  ********ation of the advances in the practice of textual criticism, he  summarizes the work of Johann Wettstein as follows: “Thus, variant  readings may affect minor points in ******ure, but the basic message  remains intact no matter which readings one notices” (p. 112). Again,  Ehrman leaves this assessment unchallenged. At this point, the reader  might wonder whether Ehrman was actually arguing _for _the  reliability of the texts. Ultimately, Ehrman explains that his rejection  of their authority is not based on what he can see, but what he can’t  see — and the importance he places on very secondary and, in his own  admission, theologically minor issues. But for the discriminating  reader, the unwritten message of the book is that, while Ehrman  ultimately rejects the authority of the New Testament texts based on  secondary issues, he clearly _accepts _their reliability on the critical, foundational issues of Christianity.

[2]  Perhaps the earliest of the Christian creeds, 1 Cor. 15:3–8, reads as  follows: “For I delivered to you first of all that which I also  received: that Christ died for our sins according to the ******ures, and  that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to  the ******ures,  and that He was seen by Cephas [Peter], then by the twelve. After that  He was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater  part remain to the present, but some have fallen asleep. After that He  was seen by James, then by all the apostles. Then last of all He was  seen by me also, as by one born out of due time.” Gary Habermas, one of  the foremost experts on the first and second century corroborating  evidences for the New Testament manu******s, notes that numerous  theologians date this creed from three to eight years after Jesus’  crucifixion. For a list of theologians, as well as a variety of other  pre-Pauline creeds, see Habermas’ _The Historical Jesus_, p. 144–146, 154. 

[3]Additional  examples can be found on p. 133, in Ehrman’s discussion of variant  readings of Mark 1:41, in which Jesus is alternately said to be angry  with the leper and compassionate with him. Despite the great sandstorm  Ehrman attempts to create over the issue, I fail to see the relevance.  Other than Ehrman’s offense that God has not preserved the text and has  allowed variant readings in the first place, this is a non-issue.  Whether Jesus was angry or compassionate, both emotions are justifiable.  The same applies for Ehrman’s detailed discussion on whether Jesus was  distressed or imperturbable in the Garden of Gethsemane  in Luke 22. Again, either emotion is justifiable. Moreover, is it not  possible that Jesus felt both emotions? Still, it is based on this and a  collection of other non-issues that Ehrman ultimately rejects his  faith.



​


----------

