Price/Ehrman - Did Jesus Exist? Debate - Oct. 21, 2016

[MrMacSon]

Tacitus and hints of a Jesus in seemingly-genuine Pauline epistles are good pieces of evidence for a historical Jesus.

Annals 15.44 and hints of a Jesus in the Pauline epistles are snippets of narratives. It seems disingenuous to appeal to Tacitus in toto when he wrote lots about history, yet Annals contains nothing more than a snippet about some nebulous Christ, and when that passage has no primary source. The fact Tacitus was not a Christian is hardly relevant.

[MrMacSon]

.
It will be interesting to see if, in this debate, Price lays out his views of Paul as he laid them out in his 2012 book The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul*, and how Ehrman responds. It will be interesting how much they discuss other recent publications tying the start of core Christian literature to Marcion.


* Here's a commentary about Robert M Price's published view -

"In 'The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul' [2012; Signature Books, Salt Lake City; 580 pages], Robert M Price suggests that Paul is a composite of several historical figures, including Marcion of Pontos, Stephen the Martyr, Simon the Sorcerer, and [an] iconoclastic evangelist who was named Paul. [Price claims that Paul's] letters were actually written and edited by other people, including Marcion, and an early Church Father, Polycarp of Smyrna ...

"The story of Paul in the Book of Acts is not evident in Paul’s epistles. Acts contains fanciful “miracle-mongering” motifs, including a resurrected Jesus who walks through walls and people who can make earthquakes happen through prayer. In fact, only in the Book of Acts do we have twelve apostles. Paul’s letters mention more apostles, some of them female. In the early Christian church, there were other sources of information about Paul which were, for a time, canonical, including Acts of Paul and Acts of Paul and Thecla ...

"Some of the early Church Fathers, such as Justin Martyr, never even mentioned Paul in their extensive writings, so it is debatable whether or not Christians in Justin’s day had heard of Paul ...

"In the final analysis, according to Price, the canonical writings are not only infused with the hand of Marcion and Polycarp, as many scholars would acknowledge, but are an amalgam of biographical details derived from the other Christian martyrs’ lives ..."

http://signaturebooks.com/new-testament ... y-existed/

[Blood]

I think that the historicity of Paul will be a bridge too far for this debate. I hope it doesn't come up, but I fully expect Ehrman to make some silly remarks such as, "Paul said he met James the brother of Jesus, therefore it really happened, ergo historic Jesus."

Ehrman only questions stuff that his teachers and peers have told him its OK to question. Something like the authenticity of the seven epistles, for example, is never questioned by Ehrman, because his teachers never questioned them.

[MrMacSon]

Unless Price touches on his views on the Pauline texts, and touches on what Vinzent, Klinghardt, & Tyrson, have said about some or all of the Synoptic gospel texts likely being more dependent on Marcion that has previously been espoused, and if Ehrman responds to such commentary.

[toejam]

Blood said: "Ehrman only questions stuff that his teachers and peers have told him its OK to question"

If you believe that, that's just stupid.

[toejam]

I hope discussion of the authenticity of the Pauline texts is plentiful as that's probably the biggest difference between the two and that ultimately effects their views on the HJ.

[Blood]

Blood said: "Ehrman only questions stuff that his teachers and peers have told him its OK to question"

If you believe that, that's just stupid.

OK. In the future I'll make sure I get your permission before forming an opinion.

[spin]

Blood said: (1*) "Ehrman only questions stuff that his teachers and peers have told him its OK to question"

(2*) If you believe that, that's just stupid.

OK. In the future I'll make sure I get your permission before forming an opinion.

I find the sorts of statements 1) reported of Blood and 2) stated by toejam are not conducive of reasoned discourse. They are both reductionist and of little chance of representing reality in its messiness. I'm sure both Ehrman and Blood are more complex than their representations here above. I would hope that such simplistic statements are not valued in this forum and are avoided in the future.

[Giuseppe]

I hope discussion of the authenticity of the Pauline texts is plentiful as that's probably the biggest difference between the two and that ultimately effects their views on the HJ.

I don't think that this works on Price.

Price is Mythicist even if the 7 epistles are genuine. That seems to be his conclusion in his next book, Holy Fable (if I remember well his post on Facebook), where he assumes - for sake of discussion with the consensus - that the epistles are genuine, to make a Mythicist case again.

It is better so. My prophecy is that we will see (or better, you will listen) a Price more ''Carrier-ized'', in a word: more coldly logical.

[MrMacSon]

• Ehrman only questions stuff that his teachers and peers have told him its OK to question.

Ehrman seem, in recent years, to have either back-tracked or plateaued in his talk and his writings about a diminishing Jesus.

1. In ~2006 he said -

• "Sometimes Christian apologists say there are only three options to who Jesus was: a liar, a lunatic or the Lord. But there could be a fourth option - legend."
  
  Neely Tucker The Book of Bart, Washington Post article, Sunday, March 5, 2006; and, here - http://www.azquotes.com/author/18585-Bart_D_Ehrman

Yet, in a 2013 blog post, he said -

• "In this post I want to take up the question about C.S. Lewis. Lewis was a great scholar of 17th century English and obviously a popular author of children’s books and Christian apologetics ...
  
  "This post is ...about one of his most commonly adduced claims. Since Jesus called himself God, then he was either telling the truth or not. If he was not telling the truth, he either knew he was not telling it or not. And so there are only three choices. Jesus either was a Liar, a Lunatic, or the Lord. (A liar if he was not telling the truth and knew it; a lunatic if he was not telling the truth but thought he was; and the Lord if he was telling the truth.) Moreover, given Jesus’ great ethical teachings, it is completely unreasonable to think that he could have lied about the most important facet of his proclamation, his own identity; and given the tenor of his life as we have it recorded in our early Gospels, he was nothing like a lunatic, but was exceedingly clear and level-headed and thoroughly sane. The only logical and sensible conclusion then is that he was who he said he was. Jesus really was God. He must have been. There is no other choice."
  
  https://ehrmanblog.org/the-problem-with ... r-members/

Now, I don't know if some stuff has been published that's not supposed to be, as the next paragraph is

• "FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, log in as a Member. If you don’t belong yet, JOIN! OR YOU MAY NEVER FIND OUT!!"

and the post ends '[\private]', but the post does go on, today at least, --

• (tl;dr - go to the last sentence, or paragraph, where Ehrman has narrowed the notion of 'legend'),
  
  "When I was a young evangelical this view seemed so logical to me, so clear, so certain. There was no way around it! It was only when I got an education that I realized why it was thoroughly problematic.
  
  "The problem is that in addition to not being a philosopher or theologian by training, Lewis also was not a biblical scholar. And any biblical scholar on the planet who is not a fundamentalist or conservative evangelical will tell you that the problem with this “proof” is its major premise – namely, that ('since') Jesus 'called himself God.'
  
  "The problem is that the only Gospel of the New Testament where Jesus makes divine claims about himself is the Gospel of John. In the three, earlier Gospels you do not find Jesus saying things like “I and the Father are One,” or “Before Abraham was, I am,” or “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” These sayings are found only in the Fourth Gospel, as are all the other “I am” sayings, in which Jesus identifies himself as the one who has come from heaven to earth for the salvation of all who believe in him.
  
  "One needs to ask why Matthew, Mark, and Luke never portray Jesus as calling himself God, or equal with God, or one with God. They certainly portray Jesus teaching a lot – for example, about God, and about the coming kingdom of God, and the apocalyptic crisis that is soon to appear, and what people must do in preparation for it to avoid the coming destruction. But he doesn’t ever teach about his divine identity in these Gospels. But how can that be? If Jesus really was God, and if he knew he was God, or if, at least, the Gospel writers believed that he knew (or thought) he was God – wouldn’t they say something about it? Did they just forget that part? Surely it would be THE SINGLE most important thing to say and know about Jesus. How could they possibly leave it out?
  
  "The most common way that scholars have explained this almost inexplicable omission in the Synoptic Gospels is simply that their authors did not think of Jesus as a divine being who was equal with God and pre-existed his birth, who became incarnate as the God-Man. They had different understandings of who Jesus was, for example, that he became the Son of God when God adopted him at his baptism (possibly the view of Mark) or that he became the Son of God when he was born of a virgin (which is the moment when he came into existence, as in the Gospel of Luke).
  
  "If this view is correct – I agree with it completely – then the earliest Gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke – did not understand Jesus to be a divine being who pre-existed his birth and was equal with God from eternity past. Nor did the sources for these three Gospels (Q, M, L) understand Jesus this way. Nor did the oral traditions lying behind these sources understand Jesus this way. This way of understanding Jesus is only on our latest Gospel, written some 60 years after Jesus’ death. It was a view that almost certainly developed within the Johannine community (this, again, is the majority view among scholars who are not fundamentalists and very conservative evangelicals). And the ultimate pay off is that this view of the Fourth Gospel is not the view of the historical Jesus himself. It is a later view put on his lips by the author of John or his sources.
  
  "And so there is an easy response to the false conclusion that because Jesus called himself God, he *must* be a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. The response is that the premise is false. The idea that Jesus called himself God is not historical. It is a Legend. And so the choices are Liar, Lunatic, Lord, or Legend. Not that Jesus himself was a legend. Far from it! But the idea that he called himself God is a legend.[\private]"
  
  https://ehrmanblog.org/the-problem-with ... r-members/ - accessed as of the time & date of this post

2. Erhman has been quotes as saying this -

• a. "In the entire first Christian century Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religion scholar, politician, philosopher or poet. His name never occurs in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero! Zip references!"
  
  If someone has a specific source, please post it. I'm pretty sure it pre-dates 'Did Jesus Exist?...' (HarperCollins, 2012)
  
  - from the Craig Evans vs. Bart Ehrman Debate (3/31/2010): video on next page ...
  
  
  b. “ 'In no first-century Greek or Roman (pagan) source is Jesus mentioned': Scholars”
  
  ― Bart D. Ehrman (2009) Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible

3.

“There were lots of early Christian groups. They all claimed to be right. They all had books to back up their claims, books allegedly written by the apostles and therefore representing the views of Jesus and his first disciples. The group that won out did not represent the teachings of Jesus or of his apostles. For example, none of the apostles claimed that Jesus was “fully God and fully man,” or that he was “begotten not made, of one substance with the Father,” as the fourth-century Nicene Creed maintained. The victorious group called itself orthodox. But it was not the original form of Christianity, and it won its victory only after many hard-fought battles.”

― Bart D. Ehrman (2009) Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible