How Long Did It Take Bart Ehrman to Write His New Book?

It might have taken him that long to write it down, but I’ll bet the thing was pretty well gelled in his mind before he started. Even so, it’s a remarkable feat.

Charlotte Observer: At 53, Ehrman is the first to acknowledge his popular books aren’t groundbreaking: His strength is his ability to translate the consensus New Testament scholarship of the past 150 years into plain English.

It’s sad that this stuff has been available for that long, but that so many Christians still adhere to the claim of Biblical inerrancy.

Ehrman is indeed a very good writer.

Obviously he is writing about things he knows like the back of his hands. The research and acquiring familiarity with the subject matter would have taken substantially longer than 2 weeks.

Don’t feel bad. The book can hardly be called scholarship or original or even intelligent. It is pap.

I was disappointed on how much he actually considers historical evidence for Jesus, but that’s an issue I’ve had with him for a while. . .

Are you saying that you don’t think there’s good historical evidence for Jesus existing? The evidence strikes me as quite strong. (That’s the evidence for his existence, not his supernatural powers, of course.)

Care to expand on this a little chuck?

The book can hardly be called scholarship or original or even intelligent. It is pap.

Crap, I don’t want to hate Ehrman. Its not often you meet another Bart (my name too). But since Ive been working on my book for over 8 months now, I have to truly despise him for half a day.

After I get over it, Ill probably go pick up a copy of it.

Autumnal Harvest – There isn’t any evidence. It’s hard to say that it’s strong when it doesn’t exist!

That being said, I agree with Ehrman that it isn’t really worth trying to assume that Jesus didn’t exist. It’s a plain fact that most cults (especially dissenting cults like early Christianity) tend to start with a charismatic leader. Whether his name was actually Jesus or not doesn’t matter any more than whether the author of Mark was really named Mark or not.

The only compelling alternative to the existence of Jesus that I’ve heard is that Paul was the initial charismatic figure. Even so, it doesn’t match timelines too well and Paul’s writings show his fear of the Jerusalem followers, which suggests to me that the charismatic leader was before Paul.

As for the idea that a bunch of guys just got together and said “hey, you know that messiah we’re looking for? Why don’t we just pretend he already came?” – it just doesn’t strike me as very likely. Someone had to start the rumour, there has to be a kernel of truth (such as a charismatic preacher who, after several tellings of the same story, was deified). It seems silly to believe otherwise.

Autumnal Harvest – I don’t accept the New Testament as evidence (except of what the authors believed). So when the New Testament says that Jesus existed, I don’t take that as proof that he existed – just that some people believed he did.

The fact that there is no contemporary evidence to be found outside the writings of Christians makes the case for the evidence of Jesus all that much weaker.

But notice that I said “the case for the evidence of Jesus” and not “the case for Jesus.” That was the first part of my post – that there isn’t any evidence in either direction.

The second part of my post is addressing the actual existence (or non-existence) of Jesus. When there’s no evidence pointing in either direction, it becomes a look at probabilities.

There is no evidence (or non-evidence) for the existence of the Christian god either, but on that matter I assume a negative. I go for a negative because I cannot fit that god into the world as I can observe it to exist. On the other hand, I can think of many reasons why people would invent a deity and I can understand how myths can be formed. So in this case, in the absence of all evidence, I assume that the Christian god doesn’t exist.

In the case of Jesus, taking into account what I know of the world, of how cults are formed, and of how myths are generated, I assume a positive. But it’s all just logical thinking. I think my case is rather strong (if I do say so myself), but the fact is that there really isn’t any evidence either way. It’s still all just a thought experiment.

Anyways, I hope that cleared everything up for you. I fully accept that my definition of evidence may be incorrect since this is all what I’ve managed to put together by reading people like Ehrman and by mulling it over on many sleepless nights. I’m certainly no scientist or historian, so the categories I’ve formed to understand my world may not be universal. But I hope that I’ve been able to explain the distinction I make. Let me know if you have any other question!

You just explained my own thoughts a whole lot better and more succinctly than I ever could!

But whichever way we get to it, we both seem to make the assumption that Jesus really existed (or, at the very least, was originally based on a historical figure who lived around 0-33CE in or around Jerusalem). From there, we get into the much more interesting stuff like how much we can reconstruct his biography given the (very) limited sources at our disposal?

It’s like a puzzle. It’s oodles of fun!

R. Selkirk, I think it’s generally understood that the claim that there was a historical Jesus means not just that there happened to be someone named Jesus, but that he shares some key non-supernatural traits of the Jesus described in the New Testament. For example, I think the case (or evidence—whatever ) is pretty strong that there was a historical character named Jesus who lived around 0-33 CE, led a Jewish religious cult with (maybe) apocalyptic teachings, was killed by the Romans, and whose cult later broke away from the mainstream of Judaism to become Christianity. I’m not sure that there’s a lot more that I’d feel terribly confident about—as Grimalkin says, it’s a neat puzzle, but the sources are terribly limited—but it’s a little more than just his name.

A PROBLEM WITH EHRMAN’S BOOKS: Basically, as people have said, Ehrman’s books are simply a matter of taking things he already knows and putting them in book form. This is awesome when he’s talking about things he’s an expert in (I highly recommend his Jesus book from 1999, “Lost Christianities,” and “Misquoting Jesus”) but recently it seems like he’s running out of material. His book “God’s Problem,” for example, required him to talk about the Old Testament a fair amount, which he is not an expert in, and the result was a kinda crappy book.

I’m curious to know why so many people are willing to believe that there was no historical Jesus

Nobody seriously doubts, for example, that there was a historical Aesop, even though we have essentially no first or second-hand information about his life.

I don’t understand it either. Just as with Aesop, we have have books written by Jesus own hand, so what is there to doubt?

Well sure, they’re not manuscripts, but copies of copies of copies of course. But still books once written by his own hand.

Just like the books written by Jesus.

Gospels? I was talking about the books written by Jesus himself.

Pseudo,

Check the “url” on ptah’s name above. I think he’s speaking ironically.

Pseudo, some historians do doubt the historical Aesop. So it’s factually incorrect to say that nobody seriously doubts his existence.

Of course, to my knowledge nobody was ever chained to the rack because they denied the existence of a historical Aesop, so one might see how passions (!) run higher in one instance than another.

Just as we don’t have anything written by Jesus, we also don’t have anything written by Aesop… only stories attributed to them.

despite the fact that we have more evidence for that than for other historical figures that we take for granted.

That’s a claim we often hear around these parts. But answer me this: If we could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that a historical Aesop, or a historical Arthur or a historical Brutus never existed, would that cause any great disruption within the general public?

There is a reason that religious folks continue make the claim (with almost the exact same formulation) that we’ve got more evidence for Jesus than any other historic figure that we all accept. Now, that’s just not true, as there are no written accounts of him during his lifetime, and we don’t even know who the authors of the gospels were, and Paul never even met the man. Whereas we actually have books written BY Julius Caesar, and vast histories written about him while he was alive. We have artwork commemorating him.. statues and buildings that carry his face, and thousands of coins minted during his reign carrying his likeness.

And Caesar was but a king, which is to say but a man. There is nothing even approaching that for the supposed God on Earth.

Siamang:

I think he’s speaking ironically.

I got that ptah was trying to make a snide remark about Jesus not having written anything. My point was that it was irrelevant.

There is a reason that religious folks continue make the claim […] that we’ve got more evidence for Jesus than any other historic figure that we all accept.

Woah there. We don’t have more evidence for Jesus than “any other historical figure”, and I never said any such thing. I gave one example, Aesop, for which the amount of external historical evidence is very similar.

We’re not talking about a Julius Caesar-type figure here.

If we could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that a historical Aesop, or a historical Arthur or a historical Brutus never existed, would that cause any great disruption within the general public?

I think my irony meter just broke. An Atheist telling a Christian that religion should be singled out for special treatment was too much for it to handle.

Autumnal Harvest:

Given that all the sources we have about Jesus are so unreliable, it doesn’t seem amazing that some people might hypothesize that the entire story was made up from scratch.

I’m not surprised about some people proposing that hypothesis. What I’m surprised about is that there are a lot of Atheists who aren’t willing to apply basic critical thinking skills in evaluating this hypothesis.

If someone proposes a belief about evolution, global warming or the holocaust that contradicts the overwhelming academic consensus, we would rightly say “put up or shut up”.

So why is religion special? I think Siamang inadvertantly answered that question.

ptah, my point is that the amount of evidence for a historical Jesus and a historical Aesop are about the same. The fact that we have 10th-generation copies of a book purportedly compiled by someone named Aesop does not change this.

I’m not surprised about some people proposing that hypothesis. What I’m surprised about is that there are a lot of Atheists who aren’t willing to apply basic critical thinking skills in evaluating this hypothesis.

But my point is that evaluating the evidence is not a matter of applying basic critical thinking skills. At least, you haven’t shown that it is. Personally, while I reach the same end conclusion as you, I found it rather difficult to evaluate the evidence. That may be because, as an atheist, I have a bias against Christianity, but I think an equally good explanation is that I had no expertise in evaluating old, sketchy, historical evidence. Your argument is that it’s just as easy as evaluating the evidence for a historical Aesop, which isn’t really a great comparison, since very few people are equipped to evaluate the evidence for a historical Aesop either. The case for a historical Holocaust is fairly easy to understand, but the case for a historical Jesus is not. If you really think that the case for a historical Jesus is so easily made, I’d be curious to hear what your case is, directly, rather than by analogy to another historical figure whom I know nothing about.

. . .there is a tendency amongst some (not all) to hold beliefs that fly in the face of the overwhelming consensus of pretty much every expert while admitting ignorance. What puzzles me is why people do this.

Well, that brings up the issues of figuring out who the relevant experts are, what their consensus is, and whether those experts are generally trustworthy, which I think are pretty tricky for all kinds of questions. If you ask about the case for the historical Jesus, there’s no shortage of experts on Biblical history who will tell you that the case is overwhelming. The trouble is that many of these experts will also tell you that the case is just as strong for the case for the historical Julius Caesar, and that the case is also very strong that Jesus rose from the dead; others won’t make these latter claims, but they believe weird things about this Jesus being able to walk on water and raise people from the dead. To my mind, this makes these experts suspect, just as I would be suspicious if half of climate change scientists regularly talked about CO2 emissions from orbiting alien spaceships. I realize that there are theologically liberal Christians who have put a lot of study in the Bible using normal, secular approaches towards historical documents and literature. But I found it nontrivial both to find this class, and to convince myself that they did a good job of standard historical analysis, despite believing unbelievable things about Jesus coming back from the dead.

In some ways, while I find creationists distressing, I don’t find them puzzling; in fact, I find it a little difficult to explain why they shouldn’t be creationists. It’s not that they have a shortage of experts. They have secular scientific experts who have a consensus that evolution is true, and religious experts who have a consensus that it’s not. I have an epistemology that explains why scientific experts are more trustworthy than religious experts at explaining natural phenomena (and I have good reasons for that epistemology). But given that they don’t share it, it’s unclear how they handle the specific question of evolution vs. creationism. Ideally, they should read a textbook on evolution in their free time, and critically assess the evidence for and against, but that’s pretty difficult for most people. It’s particularly difficult if you’ve been exposed to a wide range of bad scientific arguments from your religious experts.