Oh, my, the fundamentalists really have it in for Ehrman' new book...and for Ehrman himself....
Editor’s Preface
The purpose of this volume is to offer a critical response to Bart Ehrman’s book How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. Ehrman is something of a celebrity skeptic. The media attraction is easy to understand. Ehrman has a famous deconversion story from being a fundamentalist Christian to becoming a “happy agnostic.” He’s a New York Times bestselling author, having written several books about the Bible, Jesus, and God with a view to debunking widely held religious beliefs as based on a mixture of bad history, deception, and myth. He’s a publicist’s dream since in talk shows and in live debates he knows how to stir a crowd through hefty criticism, dry wit, on the spot recall of historical facts, and rhetorical hyperbole . He also has a global audience.
.......
While Ehrman offers a creative and accessible account of the origins of Jesus’ divinity in Christian belief, at the end of the day, we think that his overall case is about as convincing as reports of the mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, sitting in a Chick-Fil-A restaurant, wearing a Texan-style cowboy hat, while reading Donald Trump’s memoire — which is to say, not convincing at all. But you’ll have to read the rest of the book.
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In any event, Ehrman is worth addressing, since his skill as a textual critic is widely acknowledged and his showmanship as a public intellectual can hardly be denied. Such a pity then that he is almost always wrong!
Michael Bird:
"Suffice to say, Ehrman’s view of Jesus is low, so low in fact that it could probably win a limbo contest against a leprechaun".
Bird, Michael F.; Evans, Craig A.; Gathercole, Simon; Hill, Charles E.; Tilling, Chris. How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus' Divine Nature---A Response to Bart Ehrman (Kindle Locations 62-65). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.
Haha - "a limbo contest against a leprechaun".....
(I've not bought this book - just downloaded a sample from amazon....)
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
W.B. Yeats
It's painful to see the cottage industry of rebuttal books, especially the hyper-derivative book-length replies to books recently published.
It has something in common with the porn industry's practice of latching onto the popularity of blockbuster Hollywood movies. Why promote when you can tap into someone else's marketing?
It also means that some people out there would rather pay another $14.95 rather than going to the trouble of marking up the margins of a book they hate. Which would mean, you know, thinking for yourself or something. (There's also the possibility that some people get access to secondary literature A only through rebuttal literature A' because they don't want to get their minds dirty.)
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
Doesn't the title, "How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus' Divine Nature," tell you that the POV of the authors is Christian? There seems to be a subtext, "where the F*** does this man (Ehrman) get off questioning what MUST BE TRUE, that Jesus was highly exalted from the beginning because HE IS IN FACT THE SON OF GOD?"
Because of this kind of bias, I will not be buying and eagerly reading the book. I didn't buy Ehrman's either, mainly because he comes across to me as grandstander for his skeptical POV.
by Michael F. Bird, Craig A. Evans, Simon Gathercole, Charles E. Hill, Chris Tilling.
In his recent book 'How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee' historian Bart Ehrman explores a claim that resides at the heart of the Christian faith - that Jesus of Nazareth was, and is, God. According to Ehrman, though, this is not what the earliest disciples believed, nor what Jesus claimed about himself.
The first response book to this latest challenge to Christianity from Ehrman,'How God Became Jesus' features the work of five internationally recognized biblical scholars. While subjecting his claims to critical scrutiny, they offer a better, historically informed account of why the Galilean preacher from Nazareth came to be hailed as 'the Lord Jesus Christ.' Namely, they contend, the exalted place of Jesus in belief and worship is clearly evident in the earliest Christian sources, shortly following his death, and was not simply the invention of the church centuries later.
DCHindley wrote:Doesn't the title, "How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus' Divine Nature," tell you that the POV of the authors is Christian? .. that Jesus was highly exalted from the beginning because HE IS IN FACT THE SON OF GOD?"
Yep. It's a begs-the-question fallacy b/c the nature of the Christian god is merely a proposition.
and; it ignores the lack of contemporary evidence for Jesus as a person, while acknowledging the stories developed/evolved; as myths do, & did them
To be fair, you see this on "both sides of the aisle," so to speak. There's a book-length response to Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist. Doherty has a book-length response to Strobel's The Case for Christ. Robert Price recently did a book-length reply to Killing Jesus. There's a lot of this going on. It's a handy way to ensure modest publishing success.
I suppose it does provide a service for those who are getting pestered by others about a certain book. Being able to point to its rebuttal means not having to deal with the argument personally. It could also be more effective than attempting to talk it out personally. And one doesn't even have to buy either of the books (the service is provided even to those who do not buy but who do promote the rebuttal).
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
Here's a conversation between Ehrman and Gatherscole, one of the contributing authors to the response book. Gatherscole offers some plausible alternatives to Ehrman's hypotheses, but I thought Ehrman's case was stronger overall on most points.
Gatherscole doesn't come across as a total fundamentalist at least. A lot of Ehrman's ideas in this book, while well argued, are more speculative than he cares to admit (pre-Pauline creeds in Romans and Phillipians etc.). Gatherschole for the most part in this interview simply highlights that speculation, but his own positive case for Jesus being believed to be God in his lifetime is even more speculative in my opinion.
My study list: https://www.facebook.com/notes/scott-bignell/judeo-christian-origins-bibliography/851830651507208
