How do you refute him?
>>25368106Bart is a Christian. His obsession with the “historical Jesus” is merely the final stage of protestantism. After rejecting the catholic church, it is only natural that one should reject the scripture arbitrarily canonized by it, and return only to “Jesus” himself. Bart fetishizes “Jesus” and has spent his entire life trying to find out what “Jesus” “really said” as if the Historical Jesus Christ is anything more than at best a mythical figure and at worst an unoriginal cult leader who split off from John the Baptist’s group and claimed to have received revelation from God that surpassed the religious institutions of his time in authority. The only thing left for the ultimate protestant is the supposed ethical and moral teachings of Jesus, which were ripped from pre-existing Jewish literature of the time such as the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs and are no more profound than those of dozens of other religions, all assuming he even said them. Bart does not need to be refuted because he could be correct on every single historical point and his life’s work would still have been a waste of time.
>>25368106bart's entire problem has nothing to do with the work itself. he's a self admitted skeptic to evolution and has problems reconciling the problem of evil. everything else is just putting food on the table.
>>25368160vicious takedown
I wouldn't mind throwing a fuck into this little bitch. You just know she's a freak who loves being degraded and treated like a worthless little whore. That's how I'd refute him
>>25368106by throwing holy water in his face
>>25368106Michael Kruger, his former student does a pretty good job. It’s come full circle since Bart was a student of Metzger.
I find it funny how 99% of Christian academics are also hardcore christcucks and then you go on Wikipedia and it says "Jesus totally existed bro, it's academic consensus!". Wow really some hardcore evangelist that happens to have a degree thinks Jesus existed, no way bro.
>>25369349Secular biblical scholars also believe he existed. Why is this so hard to believe?
>>25368106Also the authors Craig Bloomberg, Mike Lincoln’s, Daniel Wallace, and FF Bruce.
>>25369369*Mike Lincona
>>25368106no refutation needed he's great. also im still a christian and as far as i can tell bart is saved and essentially a good man.bros i hope the personal god from conventional christianity really exists and that the resurrection happened and that there's an afterlife/things don't just stop
>>25368932please lets not disrespect our host megan lewis
>>25369367NTA but the whole point is not whether some preacher existed, but whether he was what his cult claims he was. Hitler existed, but was he actually Kalki, the final avatar of Vishnu as Serrano claims?
>>25370825Where's Jesus' body?Where is His tomb?Or, would he be buried in a shallow grave? Why haven't we found it? Or if He was cremated, why do we have no record of it that has surfaced by now?Surely such a significant figure, we would have discovered the nature of His body's final resting place, if it was there to be found.That we have not suggests there was something very unusual that happpened to Jesus' body after the Crucifixion.
>>25368106How do you refute basic facts you’d learn about in seminary? By being a retarded evangelical internet christian I suppose.
>>25368106What did he say that needs refutation? Give examples
>>25368106Call him a Jew.
>>25368106Might is right, it’s basically a philosophy suicide bomb to destroys their argument, your argument, and society.Possibly you are raped between those three points.
>>25368106Ehrman's work is the last gasp of the hopeless attempt to ground the Bible in history. The next generation of scholars will instead use the framework of gender theory, queer theory, and marxist analysis to study and interpret the Bible
>>25370986Jesus was a kike schizophrenic failed apocalyptic prophet
>>25369367Because contemporary sources that you would think would mention him do not. Secular biblical scholar's careers depends on Christians liking what they say about the bible.
>>25371147So a misinterpretation of Matthew 24?
>>25371012Gottem
>>25371103Why not ground it science? I mean it sounds ridiculous at first glance but maybe that'll get the fedoras to shut up.
>>25368160/thread
Really tired of tradlarpers mistaking this board for /his/
>>25370845There are many historical figures far more important than Jesus whose grave have never been found. Also, Jesus was not an important person back in his days, just a blip in the historical radar.
>>25371163who would mention him? he was some random jewish preacher from the Near East. no one had any reason to talk about him
>>25371974Superstitious magic kike worshippers need to be gassed.
>>25371558Because Christianity makes supernatural claims that cannot be verified using the scientific method, as they are both supernatural and therefore super historical. Christians outright reject science in favor of magic, regardless.
>>25371203
>>25372209>too scared to engage in a discussionMany such cases
>>25370845We haven’t even found the tomb of Alexander the Great and we know roughly where it is, in a major city and we know it was a major complex. Why would you expect to find some wandering jewish preacher’s unmarked grave in a desert?
>>25368160>Bart does not need to be refuted because he could be correct on every single historical point and his life’s work would still have been a waste of time.Why bother making the assumption that Bart's obsession with Jesus is of the same essence as that of a devout Christian? Thoroughly disappointing how no other anon picked up on this fallacious reasoning, and perhaps the biggest tell that lit has been inherited by brown "readers".
>>25368106Who the fuck cares about all this abrahamist christcuck shit in 2026? Grow up.
>>25368106Bible said that in the final days there would be scoffers. He's one.
>>25372993Yeah I just used this thread to rhetorically express my impression after watching Bart’s podcasts. I obviously was not attempting to actually refute him on anything. I mean, personally I prefer christ mythicism and you COULD argue that Bart is biased against Christ mythicism due to his obsession with Jesus Christ, but there’s nothing new I could really add to that debate in the specifics as all the corpus of evidence is so scant that every single verse has been argued over millions of times and anyone can pretty much believe whatever they want on it and still have some decent probability of being right.
>>25372018because science is gay af and the we are supernatural creatures, science is lame
>>25369349he's an atheist. the majority of historians and biblical scholars, religious or secular, believe that a historical jesus probably existed. you just straight up don't understand history as a discipline. >>25371103is there some retard samefagging this thread? i can't believe there are so many people who think ehrman is some sort of william laine craig style apologist because he isn't a mythist crank.
>>25370825that isn't the claim, you absolute monoloid.
>>25371163no, they don't. do you think fundies run academia? the majority of people buying books by people like ehrman are secular or religious in a kind of wishy washy way. you clearly don't know your ass from your elbows and you're sitting here making up all kinds of dumb shit because you're attracted to this 16 year old reddit new atheist garbage.
>>25373097you're such an unbelievable pseudo, and it's obvious you don't even understand the argument. mythicism is crank shit. plain and simple. no serious historian or biblical scholars accepts it. "yeah, well, no contemporaneous blah blah blah". history isn't physics or mathematics. it has different evidentiary standards, and for good reason. treating it like a hard science would force you to adopt a position of total agnosticism about nearly all of ancient history, which isn't tenable. you can't have absolute certainty about any of this stuff, so you just have to come at it from a perspective of epistemic humility and make reasonable inferences based on the available evidence. you wouldn't expect someone like jesus to be as well documented as julius caesar. the existence of jesus is corroborated in a number of roman, greek, and jewish sources (ditto a number of other of his contemporaries, like john the baptist, st. peter, pontius pilate, etc.), and frankly, jewish preachers like this in 1st century judea were a dime a dozen, so claiming he probably existed isn't some extraordinary claim, particularly as he left behind followers and a growing religious cult."i prefer christ mythicism". "anyone can pretty much believe whatever they want on it and still have some decent probability of being right." what utter nonsense. you're such an annoying retard, and i hate you.
>>25368160you've just straight up made up a person. lol ehrman is not at all religious, and it's insane that you imagine that anyone who would be interested in studying the bible or its historicity is some sort of religious fanatic, and btw his opinions about most of this stuff aren't even what you're imagining based on whatever hallucinations were produced by your emotionally addled brain when you watched a podcast and were shocked to find out serious scholars don't agree with the retarded wiki skimmers you watch on youtube.i know it's low hanging but god damn reddit new atheists are such pseudos. all the hatred against is totally deserved, and it's a shame it's starting to let up.
>>25368187>he's a self admitted skeptic to evolutionlol what the fuck are you on about?
>>25373441Why do you dismiss mythicism as completely absurd and a crank position while also saying you can’t be certain of anything in history and that Jesus “probably” existed?>>25373462> it's insane that you imagine that anyone who would be interested in studying the bible or its historicity is some sort of religious fanaticHe has dozens of videos dedicated to investigating what “Jesus really said” and frames it like it is somehow important what did say. Anyway my post was just a rhetorical exercise replying to a post that asked me to “refute” Bart Ehrman. Obviously I was exaggerating everything. Idk why you guys got so offended.> reddit new atheists are such pseudos“New atheists” haven’t existed for like 10 years. It’s time to move on.
>>25373484>Why do you dismiss mythicism as completely absurd and a crank position while also saying you can’t be certain of anything in history and that Jesus “probably” existed?take it up with academia. mythicism is universally regarded as crankery. there's a difference between not expressing certainty about someone's existence and asserting that he didn't exist. in this case, we have evidence he existed, just not absolute proof, but the only thing we have to suggest he didn't exist is 16 year old reddit atheist who misunderstand what sort of evidence one could reasonably expect to exist corroborating the existence of a 1st century preacher from roman judea. >He has dozens of videos dedicated to investigating what “Jesus really said” and frames it like it is somehow important what did say.what is your point? what he said was objectively important, as he is responsible for one of the world's major religions and was among the most significant influences on western civilization. what muhammad, buddha, confucius, etc. said is also important. it's weird how you might it weird or confusing that someone would be interested in studying one of the most influential religious figures in world history. you seriously talk like a guy who just crawled out of a cave.>Anyway my post was just a rhetorical exercise replying to a post that asked me to “refute” Bart Ehrman. Obviously I was exaggerating everything. Idk why you guys got so offended.no one's offended. you're just extremely and aggressively stupid, and it's quite annoying. you literally just inventing a person because something he said annoyed you on a podcast, and you didn't even bother to look him to confirm whether any of the stupid shit you made up had any basis in reality.oh, and "exaggerated"? you said that a guy who is kind of the go-to atheist religious scholar that everyone knows of was a creationist. lol>“New atheists” haven’t existed for like 10 years. It’s time to move on.doesn't matter what they call themselves. there's still a community of such people on reddit and youtube, and they're just as bad as the previous iterations. i don't believe in god btw.
>>25373515> he is responsible for one of the world's major religions and was among the most significant influences on western civilization. what muhammad, buddha, confucius, etc. said is also importantYou seem to be conflating the “Jesus” of Christianity with the “real” Jesus Bart seeks. What the REAL Jesus said IS NOT IMPORTANT as it is not what had influence on those things anyway. What was influential is the representation of Jesus in books. It is influential REGARDLESS of whether “Jesus” ever said it. And anyway, even that still is not “objectively” important as importance can only be evaluated by subjective criteria. If society considers it “important” that is because people like you and Bart Ehrman still consider it to be so.>I’m not offended, I’m just extremely offended by you!ok man> oh, and "exaggerated"?Yes, it’s called /lit/ not /his/. If you read my post and didn’t realize that it was stylistic hyperbole responding to the conceit of the thread then maybe it is you who is the ‘brown “reader”’ inheriting /lit/.
>>25373441I'm not a mythicist but the non-Christian sources are pretty weak, it's just people who heard about the religion. No eye witnesses or even just people who have spoken with the apostles.
>>25373527And btw. If Jesus wasn't a human on earth, that wouldn't automatically mean that Jesus isn't the son of God, or that God doesn't exists, only mainstream Christianity would be false.The view is that the inner circle believed that Jesus was a purely cellestial being, I don't find that inherently less plausible than the son og God walking the earth.
>>25373462>ehrman is not at all religious>anyone who would be interested in studying the bible or its historicity is some sort of religious fanaticEhrman was an evangelical fundamentalist in his teens and early twenties and IIRC he's said that this is what motivated him to study the Bible to begin with. He only gradually moved away from religion throughout his life.https://ehrmanblog.org/explanations-for-why-i-left-the-faith/>You write that you ‘remained a Christian of an increasingly liberal stripe until you were about 40’.So I don't think it's totally unreasonable to tell a story where he's still clinging to Christianity in his heart, and there are still a few further steps in the direction of unbelief he could take, but he won't as long as there's any chance he can avoid it.
>>25373522>You seem to be conflating the “Jesus” of Christianity with the “real” Jesus Bart seeks. What the REAL Jesus said IS NOT IMPORTANT as it is not what had influence on those things anyway. how am i conflating anything? i haven't made any claims. are you trying to say that it's worthless to look at the gospels to glean insight into his beliefs? that books that describe supernatural or unhistorical events are totally worthless? are we also totally discard plutarch, tacitus, etc.? >What was influential is the representation of Jesus in books. It is influential REGARDLESS of whether “Jesus” ever said it. And anyway, even that still is not “objectively” important as importance can only be evaluated by subjective criteria. If society considers it “important” that is because people like you and Bart Ehrman still consider it to be so.i don't even know where to start with this gobbledygook. you seem to be confused about a great many things but also have some feel a strong need to weigh in on things you haven't really investigating. this is what is so annoying about you. >If you read my post and didn’t realize that it was stylistic hyperbole responding to the conceit of the thread then maybe it is you who is the ‘brown “reader”’ inheriting /lit/."i was only pretending to be retarded".btw i'm not the guy who called you "brown".
>>25368106Understand that he is a jew
>>25373540but he didn't write his books as a christian.also, the notion that he is clinging to christianity solely because he is a biblical scholar and doesn't subscribe to mythicism (no serious scholar does!) is too stupid to even bother refuting.you really are one of the stupidest people i've ever encountered on this website.
Harold Bloom, in his own Jesus book "Yahweh and Jesus: The Names Divine" ** mentions that, if remember the wording right, "those who go looking for the historical Jesus merely find themselves." That is an axiom of "historical Jesus" scholarship if there ever was one. ** which is very good and also very theologically Jewish in its overall perspective, and hence it is indeed an anti-Christian work at day's end.
>>25373540>further steps in the direction of unbelief he could takeby subscribing to reddit tier crankery that all educated people laugh at?
>>25373553>you really are one of the stupidest people i've ever encountered on this websiteThanks, that was my first post in the thread.>the notion that he is clinging to christianity solely because he is a biblical scholar and doesn't subscribe to mythicismNot solely because he's a Biblical scholar and doesn't subscribe to mythicism, but because he started out as a hardcore Christian and only very gradually moved away from it, keeping whatever he could at each step, rather than cutting it off all at once. It indicates that he was emotionally attached to it for a long time, and he could easily still be in some small way. >(no serious scholar does!)Maybe if you define "serious scholar" as only including those scholars who don't subscribe to mythicism. But there are people with relevant education who lean toward mythicism or see mythicism as a viable competing theory. Carrier keeps a list: https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/21420Admittedly I might be counterexample to the original Anon's line of argument myself, because I'm a former Christian who now leans mythicist, and in my case I think part of my motivation is that I use *mythicism* to hold onto the parts of Christianity I like in a small way, so mythicism isn't necessarily uniquely at the far end of letting go of Christianity. Maybe the last thing a person is willing to let go of says more about them than about Christianity itself.
>>25373603Robert M. Price on Carrier's list is another former Christian mythicist, in fact a former baptist minister, though I'm not sure if his Christianity was ever especially fundamentalist like Ehrman's was (I, on the other hand, was definitely taught fundamentalism, even young earth creationism).Price has a really interesting archive of sermons on his website, but as he says>These sermons use vaguely theistic language, though I had already come to opt for the God of the philosophers, as Pascal put it, over the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacobhttps://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/sermon.htm
How is mythicism even a thing, there’s a guy’s literal epistles describing at firsthand two separate meetings with PETER of all people, at Jerusalem and at Antioch, backed up independently by the author of Luke-Acts. Peter, who is independently attested to have personally known Jesus by at least 3 independent sources off the top of my head (Q, John, Paul). As for Ehrman, you don’t have to refute him if you don’t abide by his axioms. His theory of who Jesus was is a natural conclusion on the basis of methodological naturalism. Even with that methodological stricture and assuming the conclusions resulting from that basis are completely legitimate, plenty of honest scholars have maintained Christian belief in the field. Also, Ehrman has an illogical criterion for judging whether Christ’s revelation in 30 AD is consistent with orthodoxy as though the only way the Christian belief could be true is if he started propounding nicene theology to Jewish fishermen. He spoke to them in the language of second temple Judaism, not late antique Neoplatonism or whatever. Since methodological naturalism by its nature cannot account for a “Holy Spirit” which unveils itself through History, the events of the first century take on an air of contingency. Yea, the apostles probably did think Jesus was an angel, so what. Maybe that’s the point of the messianic secret, I don’t think anyone would’ve had trouble with concepts like “messiah” and “son of man” language, but they could not have accepted in the first century some guy saying “yea I’m literally a hypostasis of YHWH, oh btw he’s three hypostases in one substance, oh you haven’t read Alexandrian middle platonists to even understand the stakes and audacity of what I’m even saying to you, oh you’re still obsessed with cutting off penis skin, my bad” I think Christianity makes more sense as a sort of religious Roadside Picnic event wherein the observers of both the initial event and those subsequently rationalising it never fully comprehend or digest a point of intersection between concrete history and Eternity, even though paradoxically its ultimate meaning remains legible to everyone within their various historical moments. That’s why I think going back to the “historical Jesus” isn’t exactly fruitful since it will always fundamentally be a void. What is far more convincing at least to me is how whatever happened in Judaea completely overthrew an entire ideological worldview probably thousands of years old through a “revaluation of all values” espousing a totally audacious metaphysical claim of Incarnation, “foolishness” which spread like wildfire amongst Hellenes unto pain of death despite it being totally alien to their intellectual being or archetypal unconscious or whatever. It’s at the very least somewhat “spooky”. Rather than a return to the historical Jesus, there should be a return to the historical Spirit.
>>25373670>Robert M. Price on Carrier's list is another former Christian mythicist*former Christian, now mythicist
>>25373671>How is mythicism even a thing, there’s a guy’s literal epistles describing at firsthand two separate meetings with PETER of all peopleMost mythicists aren't mythicist about Peter, only Jesus. The idea is that, in the very earliest Christianity, Jesus had a similar role to the angel Gabriel in Islam or the angel Moroni in Mormonism. He appeared to people in visions. Only early Christianity was relatively open, so lots of people could claim visions of Jesus. And details about Jesus' life and his teachings could also known through interpretations of Jewish scripture.Everyone who claimed to have seen a vision of Jesus was a self-proclaimed apostle. And the visions didn't have to be especially detailed. They could be anything from what Paul is described as experiencing in Acts, a light and a voice that said a few words, to the very elaborate vision the author of Revelation claims to have seen. Then the first gospel, roughly Mark, is understood as a mythical allegory heavily inspired by Paul's life and letters as well as the Old Testament, essentially exactly what the author of 2 Peter--usually considered to be a fairly late forgery--insists it wasn't. "For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ," he says in 2 Peter 1:16. The first gospel then inspired several other competing gospels, which were all expanding on each other and countering each other, and they were meant to be read on different levels by different people, literally by non-Christians or new Christians, allegorically by Christians or higher-ranking Christians (so early Christianity was like a mystery religion).Eventually one or a few Christian sects started insisting that the gospel story was 100% historical to everyone and anyone who said otherwise was an agent of the devil, and that became part of the winning formula for doctrinal stability and gaining new converts that helped "orthodox" Christianity outcompete its opponents.
>>25373401many christians and reactionary-type atheists see william lane craig and bart ehrman as two sides of the same coin. these people dont really have a vocabulary for approaching these things rigorously like other less colored pieces of history, the ghost stories are too central to their way of thought
>>25371998Philo
>>25373429>do you think fundies run academiayes, fundies literally do run bible scholarship in the US
