Bart Ehrman



Ehrman’s Orthodox Corruption of Scripture was interesting but apart from that I have never understood why so many people seem to get excited over any work by Ehrman. The books of his I’ve read are very light-weight, often demonstrating an unprofessional ignorance of the current scholarship, riddled with logical fallacies, and sometimes containing fundamental errors of fact. How he acquired his reputation as such a prominent scholar I do not know.

Bart D. Ehrman is an American New Testament scholar and author, and the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is currently Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the same said university. His books are mainly about the Bible and Scriptures and often contain textual criticism.

Bart Ehrman was an evangelical Christian as a teen, however through his hard, careful study of the Bible, along with the problem of evil, he now identifies himself as an agnostic.

Although skeptical of classical Christian theological claims, Bart Ehrman does not subscribe to the "mythicist" theory that Jesus of Nazareth was an entirely fictional person. The first book describing his portrait of the historical Jesus was his 2000 Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, in which he heavily (but not entirely) followed Albert Schweitzer in arguing that Jesus was an apocalyptist who believed that cataclysmic end-time events were shortly going to occur. In March of 2012, Ehrman published a book giving his reasons for believing Jesus actually existed, entitled ''Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth''.

So why do many people get excited over any work by Ehrman? León Santiago opines:

Erhman v. Craig
Bart Erhman debated Christian apologist William Lane Craig at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. The topic was, Is there Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus?. Dr. Ehrman's main problem was that he would not accept the possibility of God intervening in the physical world to Resurrect Jesus.

Well that certainly is a bizarre way of stating Erhman's "problem", which is not Erectile Dysfunction, but rather "he would not accept the possibility of God intervening in the physical world to Resurrect Jesus." However the more discerning viewer might note that "Ehrman hammers home the point that historians exclude appeals to miracles, on methodological grounds." And that Craig's problem is that he is not credible (perhaps also suffering ED) and that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Historicity of Jesus
Before and after writing that book [Did Jesus Exist?], Ehrman was and is capable of proper critical research on the biblical texts. But for some reason, during the writing of Did Jesus Exist?, Ehrman’s standards dropped remarkably, only for the ‘old Ehrman’ to return soon after, as if he suffered from a fugue state. I suspect that Ehrman consciously or unconsciously realised that the case for Jesus would be very poor indeed if he consistently applied his critical approach and all of his vast knowledge to this question, leading to this strange Jekyll and Hyde situation.

Apart from Ehrman's work on the question of the historicity of Jesus—as a sustained argument that Jesus lived—is not comparable to any other work by a contemporary scholar who also holds the historicity position. Ehrman and Casey are the only contemporary "secular" scholars to comprehensively address this issue. Ehrman writes, "Odd as it may seem, no scholar of the New Testament has ever thought to put together a sustained argument that Jesus must have lived." Ehrman also notes that his book Did Jesus Exist? was written for a popular audience and that in regards to the question of the historicity of Jesus, "I was not arguing the case for scholars, because scholars already know the answer to that question."

Ben Goren notes Ehrman's position on Jesus as:

Quotes

 * No Greek or Roman author from the first-century mentions Jesus. [...] we do not have a single reference to Jesus by anyone—pagan, Jew, or Christian—who was a contemporary eyewitness [...] the Gospels of the New Testament are not eyewitness accounts of the life of Jesus. [...] The Gospel writers (anonymous Greek-speaking Christians living thirty-five to sixty-five years after the traditional date of Jesus’s death) were simply writing down episodes that they had heard from the life of Jesus.
 * "It is true that the Gospels are riddled with other kinds of historical problems [separate from the historicity of Jesus] and that they relate events that almost certainly did not happen."
 * "[Per non-Christian references to Jesus in writings that were produced after a hundred years of when Jesus is traditionally thought to have died] writings after that time almost certainly cannot be considered independent and reliable witnesses to his life but were undoubtedly based simply on what the authors had heard about Jesus, probably from his followers."

Contra Ehrman

 * Richard Carrier:
 * "Ehrman on Jesus: A Failure of Facts and Logic", Richard Carrier Blogs. Review of DJE.
 * “How Not to Defend Historicity”, An Evaluation of Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist?. ISBN 9781578840199.
 * Raphael Lataster:
 * "Review Essay: Bart Ehrman and the Elusive Historical Jesus", Literature & Aesthetics 26 (1). Review of DJE [PDF .]
 * "Ehrman’s Dual Approach towards the Gospels", Questioning the Historicity of Jesus. ISBN 978-9004397934.

Publications

 * Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium Oxford University Press, USA. (1999) ISBN 0-19-512474-X
 * Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew Oxford University Press, USA. (2003) ISBN 0-19-514183-0
 * The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings Oxford University Press, USA. (2003) ISBN 0-19-515462-2
 * Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why HarperSanFrancisco. (2005) ISBN 0-06-073817-0
 * God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer HarperCollins, USA. (2008) ISBN 0-06-117397-5
 * Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them) HarperCollins, USA. (2009) ISBN 0-06-117393-2