When it comes to assessing which parts of the Gospels are historically credible and which aren’t, Bart Ehrman adheres to the generally accepted methods of biblical scholarship that, in and of themselves, are perfectly fine and reasonable. In a nutshell, the criterion Ehrman uses is the following: The Criterion of Independent Attestation: If a story…
After a temporary diversion into addressing Richard Carrier and the “mythicist movement,” I am now getting back to my extended book analysis of Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God. In this post, I will begin to look at chapter 3 in HJBG, where Ehrman discusses whether or not Jesus believed he was God. Well then,…
Up until about three weeks ago, I really hadn’t paid much attention to Richard Carrier and the “mythicist movement.” I knew a little bit about his claims, but simply didn’t feel it was worth the hassle. And then (as I mentioned in the first post of this series) I got into a rather silly and…
We now come to the third post of my series on Richard Carrier and the “mythicist movement” which claims there was no historical person named Jesus, and that the Gospels are just myth. Of course, as I said in my first post, Carrier doesn’t define “myth,” and it becomes apparent that what he means is…
In my last post, I began to look at Richard Carrier’s claims that Jesus probably never existed and that the Gospels were, in fact, a myth. I noted that several problems with those claims: not only did he fail to even properly define “myth,” his interpretation of various biblical texts smacks of wooden literalism and…
Last week I got into a little bit of a “Twitter war” over the issue of whether or not Jesus was a historical person. As often happens on social media like Twitter or Facebook, you might intend to just make one comment, but then you find yourself roped into the equivalent of WWE’s Royal Rumble,…
I wanted to share this with anyone interested. I was just interviewed by SJ Thomason on her YouTube channel. We discussed a variety of things from Biblical Studies in general, to YECism, Genesis 1-11, Bart Ehrman, and Richard Carrier. I also give a little bit of background about myself. So if you have an hour…
In my last post, I began to go through chapter 2 of Bart Ehrman’s book, How Jesus Became God. It is in chapter 2 that Ehrman attempts to argue that within Judaism there was a “divine-human continuum” similar to that of the pagan world. What does that mean? Basically, it is the belief that there…
Bart Ehrman’s second chapter in his book, How Jesus Became God, is entitled, “Divine Humans in Ancient Israel.” Having spent his first chapter taking about pagan concepts of what he calls a “divine-human continuum,” Ehrman then turns his attention to ancient Judaism and proceeds to basically argue that even though Judaism was monotheistic, it wasn’t…
With the Idumeans now in the city, they and the zealots began to unleash a reign of terror in Jerusalem. The first order of business for the Idumeans was to go directly to the temple, slaughter the temple guards, and free the zealots who had been holed up in the temple. The fighting was vicious,…