Those over there! .... They are not Christians!

[thormas]

Ehrman's stature is almost entirely based on his position of being the most well known of those who take his position and little else. As I said he often confuses eisegesis for exegesis.

As for the others, I'm familiar with a few of them, and heard of a couple more but don't know enough concerning them to fairly comment.

So he is well known, so what? What is the issue, specifically, with his positions?

[thormas]

Humanity has listened to the 'Experts' too often and too long.
For example, the Pope was/is considered one of the authorities on all matters relating to God and Christ. True?
Well, I can't remember which but you might..... Which Pope woke up one morning and decided that Mary Magdalene had been/was a prostitute? Remember?
The Christian World rushed to that junk and clutched it to breast for hundreds of years.
But more recently (can't remember exactly) yet another Pope apologised and retracted that indictment.

Let's not hang on people's opinions because they have some kind of position.


Oh my goodness. !!
I don't think that I ever read any of his ideas that didn't look weak and sloppy. I burned his books when I burned Crosson's, if remember right, so don;'t ask me to look up something to show here. And they weren't cheap books. Crossons was £28 I remember.

Ehrman's idea will show up here occasionally, no doubt.

Elder, you're reaching which isn't a very good sign for your position.

We all know about the Popes, the good ones and the scoundrels. But I don't remember about a Pope and Mary ..........which one?
And with scholars , it is not that they have some position, after all most of us have no idea what someone's position is in a university and care even less. Why we listen to their positions is because of their years of study and research and a lifelong development of their expertise which even they acknowledge is never complete. Most of these people are very humble and don't lord it over people. Another reason we listen is because they are peer reviewed and other scholars have no issue disagreeing on some issue if they believe another has missed something or is simply wrong. Yet even these disagreements are minimal among the critical scholars.6

As for Ehrnman, the same is posed to you, what exact ideas and positions are weak and sloppy? Ehrman has a blog and it is relatively inexpensive and there are also scholarships, so go on there (or go to Youtube where many videos are free), identify what you say is weak and sloppy and get back to us.

Elder, first you say your HJ opinions are based on massive research and then you quote Mark, providing no other research. Now you mock Ehrman and make the excuse that you burned his books so you can't back up your words. Not a very good position to be in for you.

And you are losing credibility: you don't value scholars yet can offer no particulars other than a wayward Pope and general quips as to why we shouldn't value them and now you burn books - never a good sign.

A man who burns a book had no argument to counter what was written in that book in the first place.

[thormas]

I really did appreciate reading Geza Vermes.
I once quoted Vermes and also Sanders in a discussion and somebody replied that they were not on the cutting edge of theological research. !!!!


I'll accept your apology. That's alright.

I'll stop you there. I've got something to tell you.

Any kind of research is good, including referring to other people's searches, but:-

Individual Investigation before Institutional Indoctrination

Every time.

You misread again, I didn't apologize since there was nothing to apologize for or about :+}.............but again, you have given us nothing. I asked for maybe 5 and I got two but you didn't say if you base your position on Mark, on either of them. Where is the massive research?

And you keep making the same assumption and mistake. these scholars are not involved in institutional indoctrination: Vermes, Levine and Fredriksen are Jews (and I have read Fredriksen for a few years and only recently discovered she was Jewish (a covert I believe) because it made no difference for what she wrote. Some of the others I mentioned are probably Christians but whether they are practicing or to what Church they belong (if any) I have no idea because it doesn't matter. So too the atheist, Ehrman.

And individual investigation, if it is serious and takes itself seriously, does look to those who have came before, does look to experts in the field and is humble enough to realize, especially without the specific kinds of expertiseI listed above that many biblical scholars have, that they, an amateur needs help.

Your mantra about investigation over indoctrination is catchy but, in addition to being totally off point, is simply an excuse for one who doesn't do research, massive or otherwise.

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

Elder, you're reaching which isn't a very good sign for your position.

We all know about the Popes, the good ones and the scoundrels. But I don't remember about a Pope and Mary ..........which one?
And with scholars , it is not that they have some position, after all most of us have no idea what someone's position is in a university and care even less. Why we listen to their positions is because of their years of study and research and a lifelong development of their expertise which even they acknowledge is never complete. Most of these people are very humble and don't lord it over people. Another reason we listen is because they are peer reviewed and other scholars have no issue disagreeing on some issue if they believe another has missed something or is simply wrong. Yet even these disagreements are minimal among the critical scholars.6

As for Ehrnman, the same is posed to you, what exact ideas and positions are weak and sloppy? Ehrman has a blog and it is relatively inexpensive and there are also scholarships, so go on there (or go to Youtube where many videos are free), identify what you say is weak and sloppy and get back to us.

Elder, first you say your HJ opinions are based on massive research and then you quote Mark, providing no other research. Now you mock Ehrman and make the excuse that you burned his books so you can't back up your words. Not a very good position to be in for you.

And you are losing credibility: you don't value scholars yet can offer no particulars other than a wayward Pope and general quips as to why we shouldn't value them and now you burn books - never a good sign.

A man who burns a book had no argument to counter what was written in that book in the first place.

I do not think either of us is going to get anything sensible from these exchanges.

It might also do well for eider to remember Heine's comment on book burning.

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

So he is well known, so what? What is the issue, specifically, with his positions?

As I remarked yesterday, do not hold your breath!

[thormas]

I do not think either of us is going to get anything sensible from these exchanges.

Perhaps but I don't mind trying, hope springs eternal.

[rogue06]

Yes! Absolutely!
Hear hear!

To elaborate on what I mean, I must base my opinion here on the book of his I read shortly after it came out a little over a decade ago that a friend of mine, who was quite taken by it, insisted that I read. The basic premise of it was since we don't have the original autograph version of the text (something we don't have for ANY books or written works from that period^[1]) that what we have is therefore stuffed full with later interpolations inserted into the text during the 2nd century or later.

While a case can be made that there are indeed a few such interpolations, the long ending of Mark may be one and the Johannine Comma of 1 John 5:7-8 being one, he uses these to pretty much presume that the rest of the New Testament consists of innumerable such later additions^[2]. In several cases he simply dismisses portions that don't support his contentions as later additions primarily because they contradict his presumptions. He either dismisses or outright ignores scholarship that supports the originality of portions that he calls into question.

That is remarkably shoddy and sloppy argumentation.

For instance, from what I remember, he raised questions concerning parts of the opening of the Epistle to the Hebrews but ignores the Jewish Wisdom literature and teachings of rabbinical hermeneutics of that period that could have contextualized most of his issues and shown that there is no need to suppose that they need to be seen as something added later. This was something explained earlier in such works as Utley's The Superiority of the New Covenant: Hebrews from 1999.

Another thing that stuck out is Ehrman's bringing up of (IIRC) Aulus Cornelius Celsus' mentioning that Christians in his time consisted of mainly "lower, uneducated classes" as some sort of evidence for his claims. FWIU he has brought this up in other works of his and maybe there he explains his reasoning but in the book I read it was pretty much just thrown out there with the expectation that the reader would naturally see the connection.

The fact is that back then the world really did consist of the one percenters and pretty much everyone else. There was no real middle class or bourgeois. It's like he ignorantly projects society in modern times back into the first centuries A.D. Ehrman's habit of reading modern understandings into things has been a frequent criticism of his work and this has resulted in his creating issues where there are none.





1. Ehrman's expressed concerns find absolutely no parallel among scholars of ancient and classical secular texts. You will find an absence of hand wringing over the fact that they don't have the original manuscripts or questioning whether all the copies we do have were all 100% totally correct.

2. Another example is the story of the woman taken in adultery found in the Gospel of John. While it is almost certainly not original to John (some early manuscripts place it in Luke, where I think a far better case for it belonging to that author can be made), even many of the most skeptical acknowledge that it reflects an authentic episode in Jesus' life. C.S. Lewis raised a great point in noting that the mention of Jesus writing in the dust bears the earmarks of an eyewitness account and raises the question why note that detail and not mention what was written if it was just a nice story tacked onto Scripture.

[rogue06]

So he is well known, so what? What is the issue, specifically, with his positions?

See my reply in post #112 for a couple of examples.

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

The fact is that back then the world really did consist of the one percenters and pretty much everyone else. There was no real middle class or bourgeois. It's like he ignorantly projects society in modern times back into the first centuries A.D.

What complete and utter nonsense.

Even if we only examine the inhabitants of the Roman world, we find different social strata. During the Republic there were patricians, equites and plebs. The latter were originally categorised by a property qualification but all three classes were free Roman citizens.

Under the Principate there were also freed men, several of whom often had influential and powerful positions in government (as with Claudius’ two ministers Pallas and Narcissus). Other freed men made their fortunes and became extremely wealthy, as Petronius’ vulgar, but exorbitantly rich, Trimalchio exemplifies. There was also a growing mercantile class which could produce Emperors (as in the case of Vespasian). Furthermore, senior army officers could rise to positions of power and even attain the purple (as did Hadrian) or they could be acknowledged with the support of their troops (as with Vespasian, Severus, and Constantine). The equestrian order which was the middle rank of the Roman nobility, coming after senators but before curials produced men like Pontius Pilate and it was entirely possible for men of lower rank to be promoted to the order following exceptional military service. Augustus had originally been from an equestrian background. Even slaves could sometimes manage to acquire savings through their peculium.

As to Celsus and Origen's comments on his work [which is our only source] Christianity did have an appeal to the lower orders, women, and slaves. It was Lucian of Samosata who regarded Christianity as a form of sophistry aimed at an unusually gullible class of people; a view that would later be exploited by Celsus.

[thormas]

Good points all.
I don't toss out qualified opinion, A bunch of very clever people realised that I was very very ill when I felt great, rushed me in to hospital at 15 hours notice and saved my right kidney in an operation next day. Experts. Well, specialists.

I just treat the title 'expert' with extreme caution.
By all means tell me about somebody's work in historical or theological research, but you won't get more attention from me by calling them an expert. Ad Hominem.

I have experienced 1st hand over decades the whole crazy business of 'attested attested expert expert witnesses'. If you can become recognised by the Court System as an expert the fees and expenses can really roll in, and you can gain lots of extra by writing articles for magazines, or give interviews on telly and to the press. You are an 'Expert'!

In Court cases, where one side produced an expert to tell a jury that (say) a tyre track was almost certainly made by a particular vehicle's offside front tyre, an equal expert a could then give evidence for the other side to throw doubt or junk that evidence. And the money!!

One Journalist figured that the expert witness situation was a complete joke and so built up an imaginary forthcoming case where he needed expert witnesses to lie through their teeth on his behalf. He just had to pay them! The resulting television programme was a revelation. The Handwriting Identification Expert who (back then) wrote the training course in that discipline for the Metropolitan Police Force of London (initials:M.A.) got caught taking a massive fee to write a report which destroyed obvious 'evidence' against the jounalist in his imaginary case. Love it!

I occasionally worked with a fingerprint specialist and he could 'spin' evidence so easily, he boasted about it to friends and made the most money when on such jobs. His greatest claim to fame was that he worked on the front line in the 'Birmingham Pub Bombing' investigation. He mentioned this in his resumees, interviews, articles..... all the time. He was a sham, and years later when all the persons convicted in that case were acquitted, pardoned and released...... he stopped the boasting.

Just give the evidence. The fact that the researcher has an impressive resumee cannot make the evidence better or worse. Ad Hominem arguments are just that.

A medical specialist is an expert. But you say that the person who saved your kidney was, "well a specialist" and what, not an expert? Yet you let that person operate on you? Really? And, to call them an expert is an ad hominem? So the first person to successfully perform open-heart surgery does not get extra attention from you for his expertise, but he does from the rest of the world? I'll stick with the world on that one.

Sounds like you were not dealing with actual experts and certainly not honest brokers in your court example. And biblical experts are appalled at unscrupulous people in their field because, if believed, it can set the enterprise back and/or send amateurs down the work avenue and waste everybody's time (I give you the DiVinci Code and that was just a novel). And these biblical scholars, men and women, are not to be trifled with: they are involved in peer review and call a spade a spade......even when the admire a fellow scholar. It is all about the work, the sources, the 'evidence.'

The 'expert' biblical researcher has the resume because s/he worked his butt off over decades to develop the expertise. And they do give the evidence, evidence that the 'average individual researcher' does not have and would not be able to grasp without the aid of the .......expert. Like your kidney :+}

The impressive resume means that they do 'give the evidence' - the evidence is discovered, understood, rigorously vetted and reviewed by other experts. You know like cancer doctors do.

[Starlight]

As to Celsus and Origen's comments on his work [which is our only source] Christianity did have an appeal to the lower orders, women, and slaves. It was Lucian of Samosata who [COLOR=black]regarded Christianity as a form of sophistry aimed at an unusually gullible class of people; a view that would later be exploited by Celsus.

The demographics of Christianity in the ante-Nicean period are a bit outside my fields of expertise... but I'd gotten the impression from things I've read that it's pretty much universally taken for granted today that Christianity flourished primarily among the lower classes and the less educated, rather than among the elites. Did I get the wrong impression?

[rogue06]

That saying does not come from de Dominis - nor from Philip Melanchthon, to whom it has also been attributed. It is the kind of thing Sebastian Castellio or George Calixtus might have said.

At least for now, it is a quotation from that prolific author Unknown.

I'm not familiar with it ever being attributed to Melanchthon, and for years it was generally accepted that it came from Meldenius/Meiderlin until a few years ago when in some old 17th cent. letters that surfaced there was a mention of it being written by Dominis in an edition of his De republica ecclesiastica which led to some frantic searching and confirmation that his was the earliest known use of the expression.

[thormas]

To elaborate on what I mean, I must base my opinion here on the book of his I read shortly after it came out a little over a decade ago that a friend of mine, who was quite taken by it, insisted that I read. The basic premise of it was since we don't have the original autograph version of the text (something we don't have for ANY books or written works from that period^[1]) that what we have is therefore stuffed full with later interpolations inserted into the text during the 2nd century or later.

While a case can be made that there are indeed a few such interpolations, the long ending of Mark may be one and the Johannine Comma of 1 John 5:7-8 being one, he uses these to pretty much presume that the rest of the New Testament consists of innumerable such later additions^[2]. In several cases he simply dismisses portions that don't support his contentions as later additions primarily because they contradict his presumptions. He either dismisses or outright ignores scholarship that supports the originality of portions that he calls into question.

That is remarkably shoddy and sloppy argumentation.

For instance, from what I remember, he raised questions concerning parts of the opening of the Epistle to the Hebrews but ignores the Jewish Wisdom literature and teachings of rabbinical hermeneutics of that period that could have contextualized most of his issues and shown that there is no need to suppose that they need to be seen as something added later. This was something explained earlier in such works as Utley's The Superiority of the New Covenant: Hebrews from 1999.

Another thing that stuck out is Ehrman's bringing up of (IIRC) Aulus Cornelius Celsus' mentioning that Christians in his time consisted of mainly "lower, uneducated classes" as some sort of evidence for his claims. FWIU he has brought this up in other works of his and maybe there he explains his reasoning but in the book I read it was pretty much just thrown out there with the expectation that the reader would naturally see the connection.

The fact is that back then the world really did consist of the one percenters and pretty much everyone else. There was no real middle class or bourgeois. It's like he ignorantly projects society in modern times back into the first centuries A.D. Ehrman's habit of reading modern understandings into things has been a frequent criticism of his work and this has resulted in his creating issues where there are none.





1. Ehrman's expressed concerns find absolutely no parallel among scholars of ancient and classical secular texts. You will find an absence of hand wringing over the fact that they don't have the original manuscripts or questioning whether all the copies we do have were all 100% totally correct.

2. Another example is the story of the woman taken in adultery found in the Gospel of John. While it is almost certainly not original to John (some early manuscripts place it in Luke, where I think a far better case for it belonging to that author can be made), even many of the most skeptical acknowledge that it reflects an authentic episode in Jesus' life. C.S. Lewis raised a great point in noting that the mention of Jesus writing in the dust bears the earmarks of an eyewitness account and raises the question why note that detail and not mention what was written if it was just a nice story tacked onto Scripture.

I have read most of Ehrman's books and you do not characterize this one properly. Your choice of words is very colorful and one-sided, so let's allow Ehrman to speak for himself (from his blog and referencing a couple of books oh is on this subject:

"I don’t think there is a textual scholar on the planet who can object to any of these statements, which are not my deceptive misunderstandings but simply bits of factual information:

• We do not have the original copies of any of the books of the New Testament
• Instead we have thousands of copies, most of which date from many centuries after the originals
• So far as we know, none of these copies was made from the originals or from a copy of the originals or from a copy of the copy of the originals. They were all made much later from other copies.
• All of the surviving copies have mistakes in them, where scribes altered the texts they were reproducing, either accidentally or on purpose.
• We don’t know how many mistakes there are in our surviving copies, but estimates book the number at 300,000 or 400,000 or (the most recently argued) 500,000. However many there are, there are more mistakes in our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.
• The good news, though, is that the vast majority of those changes / mistakes are immaterial, insignificant, and of no greater importance than to show that the scribe of antiquity could spell no better than the student of today.
• There are other changes/mistakes that are much harder to resolve, as when a passage is worded in two different ways, by significant manuscripts, and both ways make good sense. In such cases textual scholars have to decide what the original said.
• There are many places where that is very difficult indeed, to the extent that prominent scholars have opposite views of the matter. That is, there are some places where the matter simply cannot be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. And some of those places are significant for knowing the correct interpretation of a verse, an entire passage, or even a whole book.
• None of this means that a passage of the New Testament is “inauthentic.” It simply means that that there are places where we are not sure what the New Testament originally said.

So, yeah, the NT does contain hundreds of thousands of mistakes, the consensus of the experts, but he still insists that this does not mean that a NT text is unauthentic.

He is not 'dismissing' anything, however, he is, as he has written, saying that scholars - in some cases - find certain passages harder to resolve and some cases where scholars disagree. However, you would have to provide details where Ehrman, according to you, is simply dismissing portions rather than having an honest disagreement if they are hard or impossible to resolve. So what scholarship is he ignoring? And I really hope it isn't the work of a literalist/fundamentalist.

As for Hebrews and Jewish Wisdom literature and Utley, let me know if you have more specific information as I am interested. However your comment about Jewish Wisdom Literature is intriguing since Hebrews is an attempt to convince its listeners to not convert to Judaism, that Judaism is only a foreshadowing of Jesus and that faith in Christ is superior. Plus on Hebrews and Celsus, Ehrman has not 'dismissed' - he is provided reasons for his position.

Ehrman wrote:

"“Christians came from the ranks of the illiterate. This is certainly true of the very earliest Christians, who would have been the apostles of Jesus. In the Gospel accounts, we find that most of Jesus’s disciples are simple peasants from Galilee—uneducated fishermen, for example. Two of them, Peter and John, are explicitly said to be “illiterate” in the book of Acts (4:13). The apostle Paul indicates to his Corinthian congregation that “not many of you were wise by human standards” (1 Cor. 1:27)—which might mean that some few were well educated, but not most. As we move into the second Christian century, things do not seem to change much. As I have indicated, some intellectuals converted to the faith, but most Christians were from the lower classes and uneducated”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible & Why

He gives ample reason by citing Scripture to make his point and it seems obvious. What's the issue? Theres is no projection as by 1st C CE standards they, i.e. Peter, John, Paul's congregation, Galileans, etc. were uneducated and from the lower classes. You seem to be trying to make an issue but there is nothing there. And, simply, there is no evidence of Ehrman having a habit of reading back into the scriptures; the (quote) above does not create an issue, it merely states the case of Christians at that time. Don't make sweeping statements, give specific examples.

And who are the critics to whom you refer? If they are literalists or evangelicals - we know they disagree with Ehrman. But are there other critical scholars who share these criticisms?


Are you saying there are no scholars who agree there are hundreds of thousands of mistakes? Who? That don't think that most 1st C into the 2nd C CE Christians were uneducated and illiterate? Who? Of course these scholars wring their hands, they are historians, they would love to have the originals of anything the NT. Who wouldn't? And, again, if it is literalists/fundamentalists, it is probably safe to say they believe the NT in intact without errors, certainly not 10k plus not to mention 200k or 300k plus.

Was Lewis a biblical scholar? Plus it was a nice story and it spoke volumes whether it was historical accurate or not.

[thormas]

The demographics of Christianity in the ante-Nicean period are a bit outside my fields of expertise... but I'd gotten the impression from things I've read that it's pretty much universally taken for granted today that Christianity flourished primarily among the lower classes and the less educated, rather than among the elites. Did I get the wrong impression?

Not according to the research.

[rogue06]

The demographics of Christianity in the ante-Nicean period are a bit outside my fields of expertise... but I'd gotten the impression from things I've read that it's pretty much universally taken for granted today that Christianity flourished primarily among the lower classes and the less educated, rather than among the elites. Did I get the wrong impression?

Some scholars have held that it was initially the opposite in the earliest (apostolic) period. That there was a good deal of support among the upper classes and educated. I'm pretty sure that was, for example, the view of Wayne Meeks, the Woolsey, Professor Emeritus Religious Studies at Yale, who is known for his research in to the social history of earliest Christianity but I'm not completely certain. There is at least one other that I'm familiar with but the name is much to my frustration currently alluding me.