Category: Vridar

*

Part II: The Mythicists’ Claims – One: A Problematic Record

.

.COVERED IN THIS POST:

• Admitting to problematic Gospels
• Gospel authors unknown
• Fallacious analogies:
  • Obama’s birth certificate
  • The Hitler diaries
  • Clinton’s presidency
  • George Washington
• Discrepancies and contradictions in the Gospels
• Radically different pictures of Jesus
• How much of the Gospels is fictional?
• Form criticism and the argument of Robert Price
• The criterion of dissimilarity: is it applicable in the Gospels?
• Doubly strong claims? — multiple attestation and dissimilarity:
  • crucifixion
  • brothers
  • Nazareth
• P.S. Claim 2: Nazareth Did Not Exist

* * * * *

Chapter Six: The Mythicist Case: Weak and Irrelevant Claims

Claim 1: The Gospels Are Highly Problematic as Historical Sources

(Did Jesus Exist? pp. 177-190)

.

The present chapter will look at the typical arguments used by mythicists that are, in my judgment, weak and/or irrelevant to the question. (DJE? p. 177)

With that, Ehrman embarks on a direct attempt to discredit some of the arguments on which mythicists like myself base their contention that Jesus did not exist.

.

Problematic Gospels as Historical Sources

After allowing that the great number of manuscripts of the New Testament documents we possess, as compared to copies of other ancient writings, has nothing to do with whether they are reliable or not, Ehrman makes a pretty heavy set of admissions:

• we do not have the original texts of the Gospels, and there are places where we do not know what the authors originally said;
• the Gospels are not authored by the persons named in their titles (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) but were written by people who were not followers of Jesus but lived forty to sixty years later in different parts of the world;
• the Gospels are full of discrepancies and contradictions;
• the Gospels report historical events that can be shown not to have happened.

Moreover,

. . . even though the Gospels are among the best attested books from the ancient world, we are regrettably hindered in knowing what the authors of these books originally wrote. The problem is not that we are lacking manuscripts. We have thousands of manuscripts. The problem is that none of these manuscripts is the original copy produced by the author (this is true for all four Gospels—in fact, for every book of the New Testament). Moreover, most of these manuscripts were made over a thousand years after the original copies, none of them is close to the time of the originals—within, say, ten or twenty years—and all of them contain certifiable mistakes.

But in Ehrman’s view,

 . . . for the question of whether or not Jesus existed, these problems are mostly irrelevant. (DJE? p. 180)

.

Inconsistent and contradictory Gospels

Well, let’s see. The Gospels do not agree in their wording, or in the inclusion of certain passages in all the extant copies? “So what?” Ehrman asks. It doesn’t matter, for example, if some copies of John are missing the pericope of the woman taken in adultery, this hardly has any bearing on whether Jesus existed or not.

Continue reading “23. Earl Doherty’s Response to Bart Ehrman’s Case Against Mythicism – Part 23”

*

The Epistle to the Hebrews (Part One)

.

• God speaking through a Son in a new reading of scripture
• Hebrews’ Son a heavenly entity like the Logos
• Hebrews 101: a sacrifice in a heavenly sanctuary
• an event of revelation at the start of the sect
• no words of Jesus on earth to be found
• another motif of “likeness” to humans
• “In the days of his flesh”: not Gethsemane
• Christ “out of Judah”
• Hebrews’ sacrifice in heaven
• taking on a “body” in the scriptural world

.

* * * * *

Evidence for Jesus from Outside the Gospels

(Did Jesus Exist? pp. 116-117)

.

Reading an historical Jesus into scripture

Those who have become familiar with my writings over the years will know that I have a soft spot for the epistle to the Hebrews. In many ways it is the most revealing of the New Testament documents.

• It gives us a Son who is entirely known from scripture.
• It presents a heavenly event that could only have been imagined out of a Platonic application of scripture: a sacrifice by the Son, performed in a spiritual sanctuary, in which he offers his own “blood” to God — a blood which can hardly be regarded as being human, hauled up from Calvary.

Indeed, anomalies like this have increasingly forced modern scholars to take refuge in interpreting Christ’s sacrifice in the heavenly sanctuary as intended by the author to be merely a metaphor for the earthly Calvary event — an interpretation for which there is no justification in the epistle. Most significantly, Hebrews contains two verses which make it clear that its Jesus had never been on earth, two smoking guns that would do any mythicist gunslinger proud.

Ehrman, true to form, simply seizes on any and all words and phrases in the epistle which he thinks could have an earthly or human application and declares them as such. He admits that this epistle, too, shows no knowledge of the Gospels — which he ought to have extended to no knowledge of the Gospel story, whether written or oral — but nevertheless “it contains numerous references to the life of the historical Jesus.”

Ehrman itemizes some twenty of them (pp. 116-117, DJE?):

• Jesus appeared in ‘these last days’ (1:2).

• God spoke through him (that is, in his proclamation; 1:2). Continue reading “15. Earl Doherty’s Response to Bart Ehrman’s Case Against Mythicism – Pt. 15”

*

Non-Pauline Epistles – Part One

.

• Apostles with no connection to an historical Jesus

• Pilate in the 2^nd century epistle 1 Timothy

• 1 Peter knows a suffering Christ through Isaiah 53

• Christ “hung on a tree”

• The “flesh” and “body” of Christ and his “likeness” to men

• The epiphany of Jesus in 2 Peter

• Reading an historical Jesus into the epistles of John

• No historical Jesus in Revelation

.

* * * * *

Evidence for Jesus from Outside the Gospels

(Did Jesus Exist? pp. 113-117)

.

Is Ehrman being naïve or deliberately misleading?

There is an astonishing naivete to much of Bart Ehrman’s case for historicism. Perhaps it is aimed at a naïve readership, but it must leave such readers wondering if mythicists do indeed suffer from mental retardation or a simple inability to read texts. After all, the way Ehrman presents things, there can be no question that each and every writer in the early record clearly refers to an historical Jesus. Consider this statement:

But even in a letter as short as Jude, we find the apostles of Jesus mentioned (verse 17), which presupposes, of course, that Jesus lived and had followers. (p. 106, DJE?)

Well, it presupposes no such thing. The epistles contain many references to “apostles” who are not in any way represented as followers of a Jesus on earth. The epistle of Jude is only one of several referring to “apostles” that makes no such identification.

Independent Apostles

Paul himself, even in the orthodox view, was such an apostle. His apostleship was the result of a ‘call’ from God (e.g., Romans 1:1) and from ‘seeing’ the Lord Jesus in a vision (1 Cor. 9:1 and 15:8). In 2 Corinthians 11:4-5, in the midst of a diatribe against rival “apostles” who preach a ‘different Jesus’ from his own, he refers to both himself and his rivals as having received their respective kerygmas through the “spirit” (only his own, of course, was the valid one).

No connection here to an historical Jesus.

When he goes on in 11:12-15 to condemn those rivals for “masquerading as apostles of Christ” and being virtually agents of Satan, many scholars (such as C. K. Barrett) recognize that this kind of absolute condemnation is not being directed at the Jerusalem group, but other unspecified “ministers of Christ” (12:23) who proselytize independently, and certainly were not followers of a Jesus on earth.

Ehrman also conveniently ignores that in the entire body of epistles, not a single statement is made indicating that any apostles of the Christ were followers of a Jesus on earth, or traced any authority or correct preaching back to him.

It is impossible to believe that Ehrman could be ignorant of this wider application of the term “apostles” in the epistles, and only a little less difficult to believe that he is ignorant of mythicism’s arguments in this regard. He is either deliberately misleading his readers, taking advantage of their ignorance, or his own naïve reading of the texts is nothing short of an embarrassment. Continue reading “14. Earl Doherty’s Response to Bart Ehrman’s Case Against Mythicism – Pt.14”