Thoughts on Bart Ehrman?
>>18029380He’s bald
>>18029380Brutally mogged by Richard Carrier
>>18029380I seem to remember him claiming that none of the Jews prior to Christ taught that Isaiah 53 referrred to the Messiah. I looked it up, and apparently a number of prominent, pre-Christian Rabbis did teach that Isaiah 53 was talking about an exceptionally righteous individual. It was hard to keep taking him seriously as a scholar of theology after realising this.
>>18029663Moshiach is not "an exceptionally righteous individual", it's the literal anointed king of da joos/israelites.
>>18029380Good translations and commentaries on said works. His works outside of that are fine, rather basic biblical criticism for a larger public.
>>18029679I am sorry, but it's hard not to see this as anything other than pedantry on your part. Obviously, if Isaiah is referring to a righteous redeemer, and certain Rabbis did in fact interpret this as referring to an individual, not simply the nation, Ehrman was misleading when he stated that no Jew saw this passage as referring to the Messiah.
>>18029380Midwit.>>18029429This desu, Jesus mythicism will be mainstream once gatekeepers like Ehrman are too old to keep up the facade.
>>18029429If Carrier is correct that Docetism is missunderstood then his case is very strong I think.>>18029663Interesting, can you give some names and citations?
>>18029380>Thoughts on Bart Ehrman?He never recovered https://youtu.be/Zn7lmu0pek0?si=IsrMm4-UvyJIMbp1&t=3384
>>18029764> the poor illiterate farmers actually had a summer house in egyptThe sheer level of retardation christcucks are on really baffles me sometimes.
See? Never recovered lol
>>18030127Why do you think having a house in Egypt is so improbable? That's stuff is mundane I literally believe a man walked on water 2000 years ago
He was the first person who i knew claimed that original Gospel authors were not the original disciples but Greeks writing under false names years after death of Jesus.To me it was a revelation. People embellish stories that happened just yesterday, thats why eye witness testimonies are often not reliable in criminal cases. Now imagine an account of Illiterate fisherman of some village being passed down multiple people and eventually written by a Greek who never met the original disciple and written years after the events.Gospels are 50% fiction at minimum
>>18029764>The gospels are reliable. Prove me wrong! Isn't the affirmative side supposed to be the one who put forwards their case? There literally isn't anything more to be said than some part being reliable doesn't mean the whole thing is.Then the topic of the debate is resolved in semantics, by figuring out if you want to call that reliable or not.
I love how schizos like evangelical apologists and unemployed mythicists act absolutely unhinged at him merely communicating the safe conservative consensus position on most biblical scholarship issues to the public
>>18030296He and Dan McClellan have interesting things to say. My problem with McClellan is his leftist bias. His condemnation of racism and "white supremacy", his support of DEI and LGBTQ stuff.
Its funny all these contradictions were hidden by Church from public for 1600 years by keeping the bible in an obscure latin language
>>18029663Do we even have writings of pre christian rabbis? Theres just the dead sea scrolls although nowhere in that big corpus do they ever use the word rabbi so idk if its legit to call any of their scribes rabbi, they wouldnt have said so themselves. They have their Great Isaiah Scroll though so maybe they had some written interpretations from elsewhere in their library?
>>18030157It's very obvious that the Gospels were written by non-native Greek speaker
>>18029733Sure -->>Targum Jonathan, Sanhedrin 98a–b, Ruth Rabbah 5:6, Midrash Tanhuma Toldot 14, Yalkut Shimoni 476, Midrash Tehillim 2:7, and Maimonides in Iggeret Teiman 13All of the above apparently assume that the one spoken of in Isaiah 53 is in fact the Messiah. I should also point out that many of these seem to actually be post Christian. I suppose I assumed that they were pre because I couldn't imagine Jewish commentators admitting to a Messianic identity for Isaiah 53. At any rate, Ehrman heavily implied that Jews have never seen Isaiah 53 as a reference to the Messiah, and this is wrong.
>>18030157>Greeks writing under false names years after death of Jesus.I'm pretty sure the idea is that they weren't writing under names at all. They were oddly comfortable being anonymous. Even John only claims to be based on the testimony of the eyewitness "beloved disciple," not to have been written directly by him. The names were all assigned later to give them more authority.
>>18030396Those all postdate Christianity by hundreds of years (Mishnah, Talmud, etc) or even over a thousand years in some cases. The Yakut Shimoni, for example, was written in late medieval (11th-15th centuries) Frankfurt. Rabbis nor the rabbinical institution didn't exist either in the 2nd Temple period.Have you even looked into your sources or did you just copy some chatgpt garbage?
>>18030396NTA but appreciate the sources I gotta look into them. Those are all later than the gospels though by a few hundreds years at least. For Bart to be wrong all it takes is one single jew to interpret isaiah as messianic one single time before jesus, but that text would need to survive until today and be discovered. If its not in the apocrypha, dead sea scrolls or philo then the the sources are tapped out. What im saying is just because none of the survivng pre christian sources interpret isaiah that way doesnt mean they didnt, thats just the books we have. When i read isiah in its interity it seemed pretty clear to me when god says in the prior chapter you are my servant O israel. But the context of isaiah itself isnt really relevant either, the core method of jewish interpretation in the new testament and talmud is stripping away all context from the book and interpreting a single verse.
>>18029663Isnt this problematic for christianity when a bunch of the new testament is about how the jews dont understand the the messiah is supposed to suffer and die? Paul calling the crucifixion the stumbling block of the jews, Peter in Mark telling jesus he shouldnt die, theres tons of examples. I think one of the main themes of Mark is how jesus is a messiah in a way the jews didnt expect or understand. If suffering servant was understood to be messianic by pre christian jews then why does the new testament go on about how the suffering of jesus stopped jews from believing
>>18030296He's the radical centrist par excellence of Jesus studies.
>>18030484>You DARE to suggest that, accepting the argument that Q did not exist, Matthew might have copied Luke, instead of Luke Matthew? I'll refer you to my literature review of the past 50 years that shows the scholars who prefer the Farrer hypothesis to the Wilke hypothesis at almost a 2:1 ratio. The case is settled in favor of the almighty consensus.
>>18030296Jay Smith is like the christian version of Richard Carrier. Jay Smith is a christian apologist who is even less qualified than Carrier who is at least a historian.Smith has a PhD in apologetics and polemics, whatever that means. He also has a MA in islamics whatever that is but doesn't seem to know arabic which makes him weaker in arguing that Muhammad never existed compared to Carrier who at least knows greek and hebrew or at least that's what I've heard.Smith's main idea is that Muhammad never existed and he relies on others who work for him to give him some evidence for that. He claims that Mahmud or Mohammed or whatever was an arab word that was originally used by arabs for Jesus and that the early muslims were actually christians and Muhammas was only later invented in the Umayad or Abbasid period as a historical period.He was criticised for his weak arguments by Tom Woods and some arab christians:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXqAOO-F3hEHis fans are very similar to Richard Carrier with the difference being that most of them are christians and not atheists/anti-theists.They even used similar claims that Carrier fans used. Like some Carrier fans claiming that Erhman knows that Carrier was right but doesn't want to admit it because it would destroy his field. Similarly Jay Smith fans and Jay Smith himself claimed that Toom Woods and his other critics know that he is right but admitting that he was right would somehow destroy islam and make Tom Woods lose his position of attacking islam somehow. Jay Smith is just too overconfident that Muhammad never existed, he even prayed and thanked Muhammad that he doesn't exist.
>>18030455Jesus stated He is spoken of in the scriptures.
Through books like Misquoting Jesus and Jesus, Interrupted, he’s made academic debates about biblical reliability, contradictions, and canon formation accessible to a mass audience. Regardless of the fact I disagree with him, he’s done a lot to break the wall between the ivory tower and the general public.
>>18030626>Regardless of the fact I disagree with himWhat do you disagree with him?
>>18030523Interesting, I'd never heard of Smith. His PhDs seem like typical strip mall bible college correspondence course trifle, but that MA sounds hilarious. It's also funny that these truther movements, atheist or theist, are basically eschatological in nature, just how like UFO truthers have a pathological need to believe that governments are just about to admit aliens regularly visit us and the world will finally stop laughing at them in two weeks when the secret is revealed. Apparently the next logical conclusion among some Carrier superfans was that Paul did not exist, but he's had to banish most of them from his blog because they don't agree with his idea that Paul invented Jesus. They're very vocal in certain online atheist spaces where they screech constantly that "Ehrman and Carrier and every other lying piece of establishment shit" do know that Paul did not exist, and will admit it very shortly if they're harassed long enough.How long until some of Smith's superfans claim the Ottomans invented the Abbasids?Ammon Hillman of the "Jesus was a drug-addled pedo who enslaved 12 little boys" fame is one of these types. He's some sort of a pagan or grifter who claims to be an expert in medical Koine Greek terminology (he's not, his PhD studies were on Latin) and receives appearances from a Mesopotamian goddess in the form of a little ghost girl who reveals him secrets about the Bible and how everyone else is translating Greek wrong. He claims him being fired from his academic job for sexual harassment of students is because he was possessed by Pan the satyr, IIRC. Absolute cult following online, some of the dregs you might have seen even here on /his/. I'd say his fans are more like an atheist post-christian qanon crowd than anything resembling pagans or theists. The grift podcast scene loves giving these types an episode or two of airtime, and now he's making money from web seminars where he asks his audience to masturbate in unison for magical rituals.
>>18029380Another well-poisoner who's article on Acts could easily be refuted. All canon in the Bible is divinely inspired, we don't need semantics and nitpicking to try to discredit it. >Inb4 "You're le blindly believing it" Nothing blind about it, the words are good and consistent. Every time I've tried to find a fault with the words spoken in The Bible, I've been refuted with logic.
>>18030692What about the story of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah's animals, the flood, the tower of Babel, the beasts Leviathan and Behemoth, satan working for God in the book of Job?
>>18030522Who's suggesting Luke predates Matthew?
>>18030751It was generally the 3rd most important position on the synoptic problem in the 20th century after the consensus view of Q having been used by both Matthew and Luke independently, or its most popular alternative that Luke used Matthew and Mark (a natural assumption because Luke admits he used a variety of written accounts, while Matthew doesn't) and Q does not need to exist. Here's a bunch of recent affirmative or sympathetic blog posts on Matthean posteriority by scholars collected by Alan Garrow. https://www.alangarrow.com/mphoriginstories.htmlThe most famous people on that list are probably Richard Bauckham (e.g. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, a rather conservative defense of the gospels being based on eyewitnesses and correctly named) and Evan Powell (the Unfinished Gospel, basically a Bultmann-esque defense of an early core of the gospel of John, combined with the radical idea that John 21 is the lost ending of the gospel of Mark after Mk 16:8) are probably the most famous names on that list, although keep in mind this is just a group of scholars who happen to be alive and have personally emailed to Garrow about the topic and the actual corpus of scholarship is much larger.
>>18030715What about them? Because they seem fantastical in the modern day, they never happened?
>>18030865How many animal species are there in this world? How many plant species are there? How would all these animal species fit into the ark? How would all these plant species even in seed form fit there?What would they eat? How does it explain the geographical spread of fauna and flora? How did they end up in the Americas and Australia and other islands?How did humans end up in the Americas and Australia before Columbus?What about freshwater animals?What is the firmament? Doesn't that imply flat earth?
>>18030319>Latin>obscure
>>18030715A lot of shit in the bible is allegorical.
>>18031439>>Latin>>obscureLatin was not a common speaking language even in 1500s, everyone spoke french or spanish or english
>>18029429Jesus not existing makes Christianity a more valid religion. Like imagine if the Bible was simply a novel written by God and intended to be read in a highly esoteric way.
>>18031667Carrier has kinda said this somewhere IIRC. Something like, "Yeah, you don't strictly have to stop being Christian to agree with me. You could just believe the same things about Jesus as the original Christians."
>>18030396Ehrman has been wrong about a lot of stuff like this in the past, including his claim that "high Christology" was a late development. Funnily enough mythicists and christians end up agreeing on a lot of these issues, even if they disagree on their implications.
>>18030296>unemployed mythicistsProjection.
>>18030584That doesnt address anything i said in my post. The christian author can write his gospel saying jesus claims hes spoken about in scriptures and that has 0 effect on if anyone before the gospels read that section of isaiah as a messianic prophecyIf im a jew under romes boot i woildnt be compelled to find any hebrew scripture about suffering to be messianic id want to think the messiah is gonna free us from rome. Which is what the jews thought according to the NT so most didnt buy jesus as a messiah
A lot of Ehram audoiobooks on spotify are narrated by Joe Barret who sounds like a legitimate goblin, extremely funny unique voice that makes for a delightful audiobook experience.
>>18029429Mysticism solves nothing and creates more problems.
>>18032574Mythicism offers a more objective and truthful theory of the origin of Christianity and solves problems.
>>18032652I think it's going to need evidence for it to actually be useful to historians. As of now it's just an arguement against the current orthodoxy, it will need far more material for people to work with to become the new orthodoxy. Not to mention Mythists only agree Jesus wasn't real, they don't exactly agree who created the myth or why. I have heard it run the gambit from a Roman Conspiracy to vague jewish folktale that got carried away. So we will have to keep digging and waiting
