Bart Ehrman says most of the New Testament is a forgery but it's still an important body of work.
Posted on 05/15/2009 12:18:43 PM PDT by JoeProBono
Just so you know, Bart Ehrman says he's not the anti-Christ. Bart Ehrman says most of the New Testament is a forgery but it's still an important body of work. Bart Ehrman says most of the New Testament is a forgery but it's still an important body of work. He says he's not trying to destroy your faith. He's not trying to bash the Bible. And, though his mother no longer talks to him about religion, Ehrman says some of his best friends are Christian. Ehrman, a best-selling author and a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is a biblical sleuth whose investigations make some people very angry. Like the fictional Robert Langdon character played by actor Tom Hanks in the movie "Angels & Demons," he delves into the past to challenge some of Christianity's central claims. In Ehrman's latest book, "Jesus, Interrupted," he concludes: Doctrines such as the divinity of Jesus and heaven and hell are not based on anything Jesus or his earlier followers said. At least 19 of the 27 books in the New Testament are forgeries. Believing the Bible is infallible is not a condition for being a Christian.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Bart Ehrman says most of the New Testament is a forgery but it's still an important body of work.
Back into the rubber room, Bart.
I bet Bart doesn’t have many friends ...
The #1 requirement for all professors of religious studies is that they not be religious.
I will have to read more on this latest book, but it doesn’t sound like any new material compared to some of his other recent works.
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
His name might as well be Bart Simpson? Never heard of him.
False but Accurate (tm)!
"The fool says in his heart 'there is no God'."
"Jesus didn't physically appear, it was just a vision."
That's why he ate fish at one of their houses right?
"Paul says women should stay silent here, and over here he said they were church leaders."
Anyone who studied the Pauline Epistles would be able to explain it to him in a short time.
But, he doesn't believe the scriptures are true anyway, they are all "forgeries", so no argument would hold water with him.
He knocks down kids blocks in a sandbox to prove that the Church is not stable.
If anything, I believe Jesus will return simply to collect royalties owed by people trying to profit off His name.
I read Ehrman’s book “Misquoting Jesus”, and for balance I read “Misquoting Truth” by Timothy Paul Jones and “Fabricating Jesus” by Craig A. Evans. The areas of textual criticism discussed in these books is fascinating but overall, if your faith was dependent on a particular sequence of words in a text, you don’t have a mature faith and that is what clouds many of Ehrman’s conclusions, imho.
CNN will probably give him his own primetime show.
I still wonder how you can forge prose.
Wow, thousands of years of biblical scholarship, and all of a sudden Burt Ehrman vaults ahead of all and debunks everything. What a genius.
I would love to see a “Texas Death Cage Match” between this clown and N.T. Wright.
T’would be a slaughter, I tell ya....
“I still wonder how you can forge prose. “
Forgery in the day was not copying text per se and taking credit for it, but writing a text and claiming the work was penned by someone else, like an apostle.
Ha ha ha ha!
“Last eve I passed beside a blacksmith’s door
And heard the anvil ring the vesper chime;
When looking in, I saw upon the floor,
Old hammers worn with beating years of time.
“How many anvils have you had, said I,
To wear and batter all these hammers so?
Just one, said he; then said with twinkling eye,
The anvil wears the hammers out you know.”
“And so, I thought, the anvil of God’s word
For ages skeptics’ blows have beat upon;
Yet, though the noise of falling blows was heard,
The anvil is unharmed - the hammers gone!”
In Chapel Hill? Sure he does.
If one doesn’t believe Jesus rose from the dead, then they don’t believe the central tenet of Christianity. Thus, they are not Christians. I think we should all pray for this man.
This guy is just another “retro-heretic”.
All of his ideas have been seen before and have been debunked.
Most Liberals say that Jesus would never have said....I am the way the truth and the life, no man cometh unto the Father but through Me, etc etc etc. Hey, Obama and Hillary both answered that homosexuality is not a sin. Obama says Christ is not the only way to God. Joel Osteen says that Christ is not the only way to God.
I fail to see the difference between this fellow and any “liberal Christian” (another oxymoron)
Oh, I'm sure satan (the father of lies, "Yea, hath God said...") and the world have befriended Bart. Interestingly enough, Islam also teaches this forgery nonsense...
But the Truth will be revealed in its time.
It would have been better if Bart had taken this passage to heart - rather than crank it through his textual criticism analysis:
Matthew 10
32 Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven.
33 But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven.
But of course Bart believes this is all forgery...Here's praying that he gets his head and heart right before he finds out when it is too late.
I guess CNN, History Channel, and other liberal media groups got tired of trotting out the usual Jesus Society hacks whenever they feel like attacking Christianity. Erhman’s been around for a while now, and his approach likewise finds its roots in the so-called Higher Critism movement of a century ago. His methods, assumptions, and speculations have been likewise debunked as unscientific wishful thinking.
Quote:
Isn’t that like a person getting a bogus $20 bill, realizes that it’s bogus, yet tries to pass if off anyway????
I guess CNN, History Channel, and other liberal media groups got tired of trotting out the usual Jesus Society hacks whenever they feel like attacking Christianity. Erhman’s been around for a while now, and his approach likewise finds its roots in the so-called Higher Criticism movement of a century ago. His assumptions are unsubstantiated speculations and wishful thinking.
Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 1 Corinthians 1:20
Standing back...making room for the wrath of God!!!
If memory serves, this was a common, and not illegitimate, practice in earlier times.
If a follower wrote about the teachings it was in the teacher's name. This is true not just for Christian writers. The weren't concerned with copyright or royalties and it was in humility and for accuracy they credited the teacher.
That a certain scripture under the name of X was written by X's disciple is not a revelation or discredit. There's also a great many writings in world religion that were orally transmitted long before they were committed to writing. Who was the forger then?
This whole point seems to fail in an anachronistic error.
Does he speak Greek and Hebrew? Otherwise don’t waste my time.
Sigh. Better and more informed people than Ehrman have tried to discredit this PERSON in the last 19 centuries and they have failed.
As others have pointed out the bible is quite probably THE most-studied book in human history. It has been subjected to every form of calumny, misrepresentation and distortion that human minds have been able to conjure - all of them repeated with monotonous regularity over the centuries. This fellow has not and will not come up with anything new, startling or even interesting.
Critics have been “debunking” the bible and pointing out the contradictions and inconsistencies for as long as there has been a bible. The bible is still here. Where are the critics?
I think he’s saying that it’s not the actual true word of God, but still teaches valuable lessons about right and wrong.
But I could be mistaken.
It’s great to see my NC taxes are going to fund to such profound work. /s
Thanks for the visual, Joe.
:)
I was raised as an evangelical Christian and graduated from a evangelical fundamentalist Bible College.
I have never heard of this man.
This is the case of a guy who was very religious, but lost it after extensive study of history. I always thought it was pretty sad if you base your faith on the infallibility of book written by humans. He probably grew up under inerrantists and lost it all when he found out that wasn't true.
In that it's not God's dictation, but His inspiration through his children, he's correct. Christians, as an orthodox whole, do not have the same view of the Scripture as Muslims for the Koran, for example. The Muslim dogma is seen as idolatry, and in Christians, bibliolatry specifically.
From reading the article, my impression is that this man was taught differently, and when he learned the difference, rejected his whole teaching. An understandable, though foolish, reaction.
Something that Christian teachers should be careful of.
The simple fact that there are apocryphal texts that the church voted out of the bible would seem to be a form of validation that the bible is a book by men and not the true and infallible word of a supreme being.
Some questions:
If the world was flooded in the old testament and the Noah’s Ark story is real, where did the water come from and to where did it recede?
Why would God put Job through all those hardships just to prove a point to the devil? If He’s omnipotent, he could do something else (not involving cruelty to a faithful servant) to show the devil the truth of things.
Jesus’ mother was a virgin when she gave birth, yet science tells us that a woman can get pregnant without penetration as long as there is exposure to semen. Isn’t it possible that Mary and Joseph did some fooling around (of a sexual nature, but without intercourse) that resulted in her pregnancy?
That's what I see from the article as well.
His premise is that this central tenet is the one that evolved after all these years based on false information. It's Christianity as you know it, not as it was originally. Apparently his take is that it doesn't matter and shouldn't affect your faith.
From the wiki bio: "Ehrman began studying the Bible and its original languages at the Moody Bible Institute and is a 1978 graduate of Wheaton College in Illinois. He received his Ph.D and M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, where he studied under Bruce Metzger."
I would say yes, definitely.
Faith in what? I’m not sure what Christianity is if it’s not about Jesus, salvation, etc.
Sky, earth.
Why would God put Job through all those hardships just to prove a point to the devil?
Job is one of the most intriguing books in the Bible, and has been analyzed through the eyes of religion, literature and psychology. It's often referred to as the first short story. Your reading is literal; give the book a bit more credit artistically and read it again.
Jesus’ mother was a virgin when she gave birth, yet science tells us that a woman can get pregnant…
First, there are very rare examples in nature of very similar birth events. (If you watch House, he used it in an episode.) Second, the "science tells" part is based on inferential logic not deductive - as are most miracles which violate what "science tells us" (the definition of a miracle BTW). It is very strong evidence, but it is not technically (formal logic) proven true.
I just wonder why the Egyptians didn't notice it. They had a pretty big kingdom going around 4,300 years ago (about the time of the flood).
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