I haven’t read his book, but I’ve listened to podcasts of a number of courses of Biblical studies including one by Yale professor Dale B. Martin, who assigns Ehrman as reading, and these scholars accept that it was likely that there was a historical Jesus, but that he would be considerably different than what was portrayed in the NT.
Googling, this person’s comment seems to make reasonable sense for the meaning of the quote, that it is telling people who believe that the NT is historical that it is not.
Perhaps this comment was aimed at those who believe that the KJV is faxed from God.
Now that I’ve actually tracked down Ehrman’s quotation, it makes a lot more sense. It’s from a public debate, with Ehrman’s points summarized at 国产在线观看不卡,公交车车站最后一排被多人玩,人成午夜高潮免费视频,印度av无码一级,综合色美女,国产片一区二区,久久免费看黄片 and the Youtube short version at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0GF6YIk-2s&feature=youtu.be. Ehrman’s point is simply that the Christian sources provide virtually all the first century information about Jesus, other than a couple of references in Josephus. In this context, it doesn’t matter that Paul and Josephus were Roman citizens or that some of the epistles arguably were private correspondence, because he’s specifically referring to sources other than Christian writers and Josephus.
However, Ehrman very much is not arguing that this means Jesus did not exist. To the contrary, his article Did Jesus Exist? in The Huffington Post, Did Jesus Exist? | HuffPost Religion, includes the following:
Excellent find. Listening to the short version, it’s clearly a rebuttal to Craig Even’s claims of accuracy in the Bible. The debate concerned the reliability of the bible, including the four gospels, and it was debated before a crowd which believed them to be so.
And yet, think about this quote from Ehrman that jbaker posted:
It is the official position of the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Catholic Church that Jesus was an only child and that mentioned siblings were in fact cousins or Joseph’s children by a previous marriage. I think catholic.com should be a good cite:
The most powerful evidence of the existence of Jesus comes from Jesus’s brother, yet the most powerful christian churches in world history must deny that Jesus ever had a brother to supply this evidence.
It’s obviously true that some modern scholarship looks at the Bible rationally to try to uncover what Ehrman describes as the historical kernel. Trying to apply rationality to the church, the beliefs, the believers, or even all historians is a doomed exercise. People don’t want a rationalized religion. That’s atheism for them.
No, of course I don’t think Ehrman *forgot *Paul. I think he phrased the quote in a way to make it seem like no letters from the first century mention Jesus, while remaining technically correct.
In other words, he uttered the most sensational thing he could with a little bit of weaseling to keep it ‘true.’
The Catholic church acknowledges the existence of James, that he had a brotherly relationship with Jesus, and that he was referred to as “the brother of Jesus”. The exact details of their familial relationship are irrelevant to the reference in Josephus.
Of course, the Catholic church also doesn’t consider the reference in Josephus to be particularly necessary, since they of course consider the abundant Biblical references to Jesus to be perfectly sufficient.
I’m not arguing for or against the existence of Jesus, and I’m not arguing for or against the existence (or value) of faith. Merely that applying standard rationality tests to statements of faith is at best a shaky proposition and almost certainly irrelevant to all those who adhere to the faith.
If you insist upon making it rational and relevant, then you do have to be consistent in its application. Using the Bible to prove the historic truth of the Bible is circular reasoning that is all too common. That’s my understanding of Ehrman’s statement. He’s saying that we need to expand your thinking to look at it from the outside. I’m seeing reflexive dismissal of that perspective in that thread. But that’s what makes Ehrman an interesting read for me.
Exapno, Chronos’s point (IIUC) is that your objection (quoted below) can be dismissed by understanding “Jesus’s brother” to mean “the person referred to as Jesus’s brother.”
Are you asking “How strong of evidence is it that nobody who wrote about Jesus questioned his existence?”
I don’t know how to measure that. If we knew about somebody who didn’t exist, who some ancients for a long time never questioned the existence of, that might help. I have no idea if anybody fits that bill.
Isn’t Peter and the foundation of Catholicism generally dated to the 1st century? I don’t see significant dating of it after that (or much doubting of the historicity of Peter)… and certainly he addressed the topic.
Including Jesus. That fact that nobody questioned the existence of Jesus in the first few centuries he was written about could merely mean that people back then weren’t in the habit of questioning the existence of the people they were writing about because, for the most part, there was no way to fact-check the information.
And perhaps he was just an amalgamation of several miracle workers, and the name of one of them just took. It’s much easier to put forth the idea of one Son O’God then several dozen of them, so he becomes the figurehead for the movement and a collection of tall tales are attributed to him to further the movement along…which would certain account for the disparity between the Gospels.
I mean I suppose you could argue that Peter was neither Greek nor Roman so the statement still is true from a strict semantics perspective — though he settled in Rome long enough that now you’re just arguing citizenship issues, which is minutia even for historicity.
Again, there would be no outside historical record of James, brother of Jesus.
Assuming there is a Jesus, the disparity of the Gospels can be easily accounted for by various interpretation of Jesus’ teachings by the movement following his death, and for the propaganda purposes of the respective authors. There really isn’t a need to have multiple miracle workers to account for that.
I’ve heard the argument that Jesus had been a disciple of John the Baptist and then founded his own group. This would be somewhat similar to this idea in that Jesus would have incorporated some of John’s message into his.
OTOH, I would expect that with the reports of the miracles first recorded in the Gospels more than 40 years after the death, there would have been a significant amount of details either created or borrowed from other miracle workers.
Although that’s the traditional view, it’s not commonly accepted by most New Testament historians. The historians I’m studying explain that in the first century, there wasn’t a unified movement, and that orthodoxy developed only.