There's some unintentional irony here. Asking, "Are you a pastor, Peter Kirby?" No, I'm not. But the question has its own little ad hominem buried in it. Apparently this way of approaching things is like air to certain personalities.Robert Tulip
Peter Kirby does not understand what ad hominem reasoning is. The discussion here is about how going to pastor school trains you to be a pastor, not a historian, and how there is an actual difference, which perhaps Peter Kirby does not comprehend. Are you a pastor, Peter Kirby?
We do not ask a dentist to fix a car, and nor should we ask a pastor for reliable information about history. If we do talk to pastors about history, we will find the information is corrupted by mumbo jumbo such as Erhman's Wheaton College mission statement with its assertions of the existence of Satan, evil powers, and that Jesus was true God and true man.
Erhman's Did Jesus Exist? is an exercise in homiletic politics, and is not intended to be read. Rather, it is a magic talisman that ignorant evangelists can wave at rationalists to ward off discussion.
If Ehrman chose to be trained at institutions that placed faith above reason, it is not unreasonable to expect the views he formed during his training might inform his books. Did Jesus Exist confirms that supposition.
Don't ask a dentist to fix a car? Not on account of being a dentist. But what if he also worked on cars for 10 years? Then that dentist can fix cars. End of story. The fact that he's a dentist doesn't actually count as evidence of anything... except that he's a dentist.
History isn't a trade anyway. It's a description of the past. Anyone can make contributions to that description. There are some skills that are definitely relevant, of course. And you're supposed to pick them up when getting a degree in history. But people with other specializations can do history just as well. And people who have this degree can fail just as badly as anyone else.
The whole obsession with the letters after the name (and what institution they came from), as I have already said, can only be filed under either ad hominem or argument from authority. They are both fallacies. Quite commonly abused, rhetorically, but a complete waste of time really to contemplate as a potential argument for anything.