Loading...In celebration of our blog 10 year anniversary on April 18, I’ve decided to post the past ten years posts that were posted on April 18 of each year! Here is the first, from April 18, 2012. You will notice (if you pay attention to how I write these posts), that I was even more thin-skinned, defensive, and argumentative than I am now! Ha. I thought about editing these then thought, ah, why? In this first from ten years ago, I was responding to an accusation that I don’t do my own work. (!)
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I was surprised, shocked, dismayed, incredulous, and well, OK, pretty ticked off and aggravated when some of the mythicists that I deal with in my book, Did Jesus Exist, went on the attack and made it personal. Let me make a confession: before getting ready to do this Blog, and getting into Facebook as a preparation for it, I had no idea how grimy the Internet can be. It is one messy place. I know, I know – welcome to the 21st century!
One of the charges against me that is being made is not just atrociously wrong but insulting to my integrity, something I take very seriously. It’s one thing to have a disagreement about how to interpret historical data; it’s another thing to charge a scholar with dishonesty. The first instance I know of the charge was suggested by Achyra S on her blog, and most forcefully by Robert Price on his podcast. The charge is that I did not actually do any of the research for Did Jesus Exist myself, but that I had my Research Assistants (RA’s) read the mythicist literature for me and I relied on what they summarized (poorly, is the implication) for the comments I make about it.
This is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Let me explain how I use my RAs generally, then say something about their role in Did Jesus Exist.
I’ll start at the beginning. Most senior professors at research universities are given, in addition to their salary, a research budget. My colleagues at UNC and around the country
I get a bit feisty here. Most of my posts, though, aren’t about me but about the NT and early Christianity. Join the blog and get tons of content, with access to archives going back five years! Click here for membership options
“A number of mythicists simply don’t believe me.” Of course not – they don’t believe in facts…. they’re mythicists!
So your RAs need a reading knowledge of German and French as well as Greek, Latin, and Hebrew?
Where do they pick up this facility?
They get all that en route. But I don’t give my TAs work to do in languages they can’t handle yet. And as I said, Oh boy do I check their work carefully….
I think the charge that an author gets research assistants to do his/her work is pretty common now and is often levelled at the more successful fringe science/history/archaeology works. However, it is disgraceful that such an unfounded charge was made against a reputable scholar such as yourself.
Can you recommend any “techniques” for reading the Bible, especially the Gospels, so that it seems fresh and alive? I’ve heard the Gospels so many times before, with so much-often repetitive-pious commentary piled on top, in an atmosphere in which I am forced to or manipulated into or at least expected to agree with it and find it profound, and with so many inconsistencies and nasty incidents papered over, that it seems almost impossible to have an authentic, personal reaction to it. Instead I’m reacting to all these other factors.
I suppose I could avoid the Bible for, say, 5 years and then try reading it. Or I could read things that compare the Bible to the sacred writings of other religions.
Can you recommend any books or authors?
The best thing to do is to read it in other languages. That way you *have* to go slow and think of every word! For the Gospels, though, another good tecnique is to read a parallel edition, where you read a story in one of the Gospels and then read it in the next column in another Gospel and then in another — to see, in detail, what the similarities and differences are. I usually recommend Kurt Aland, Synopsis of the Four Gospels (be careful to get *that* title: he has others that are the same thing but in Greek!)
Are these people like so traumatized leaving innerrant Christianity they simply can’t fathom that some things aren’t lies? They are so bizarre in YouTube comments sections too. I don’t mind them as much as the fundies, more weird than irritating.
Bart, how good of a Bible scholar would you say Cardinal Carlo Martini was?
He was *terrific*, a superb manuscript expert. He wrote an article on the use of the NT in Didymus the Blind, years before my dissertatoin on the same topic.
Off topic quesion Dr. Ehrman. When the unknown author of the pastoral epistles wrote as Paul to the head pastors in Paul’s churches (presumably 20 + years after Paul’s death) why did the churches not already know he had died and suspect the letters forged? He was their main leader. Please share your thoughts and speculations.
Thank You,
Whoever put them in circulation didn’t say they were hot off the press. They were circulated as having been in circulation for a 20 years. THat happened a lot in antiquity. Even hundreds of years later.
Anyone who does anything out of the ordinary is going to be attacked up one side and down the other.
What a curious position to be in — attacked by those in the faith community who feel you’re trying to destroy Christianity, as well as attacked by those in the Mythicist community who feel you’re trying to keep Christianity alive.
Makes things lively…
Off-topic question: I am currently reading Kristin Swenson’s book A Most Peculiar Book: The Inherent Strangeness of the Bible. She discusses Jonah, his 3 days & nights in the big fish, the exaggerated claim of Nineveh being a 3-days walk across, and how all of Nineveh repented from the king on down, and even the animals were required to wear sackcloth.
In Matthew 12:40-41 and Luke 11:29-32, Jesus talks about Jonah and Nineveh’s repentance. Do you think Jesus thought the Jonah story was historically accurate or was he merely accommodating the beliefs of his audience or did none of them think the story was literally true?
I think every Jew at the time thought the story was historical.
Instead of the earlier comment, this is the quote I’d wanted to share:
“Be the best but get ready to be attacked. Only mediocrity is safe.”
Ha! A lot of people strive to be safe!
Prof. Ehrman,
I had a few questions; I’ll try to keep this as short as possible but here goes.
I’m curious about what the arguments in favor of the Q source are; I’ve seen you mention that they convince most scholars but I don’t know what the arguments actually are. Personally, my own major objection to Q is that it seems improbable to me that both Matthew and Luke independently have elaborate narratives placing Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem along with genealogies. I can’t imagine being the first to have this objection, though, so I wonder what the counter-arguments are.
Also, regarding the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (not really your area of expertise I know): there are apocryphal gospels we only know about from fragments of these papyri. How much do we actually know about all the papyri in this collection that haven’t been studied and published? Is it actually the case that even after over a century, the vast majority of these have contents that are completely unknown? And if it is, how likely is it that there are other unknown apocryphal gospels still to be found in the collection?
1. I talk about the Q source here. The major evidence for it’s existence is that material found in Matthew and Mark but not in Luke (mainly sayings) is almost *always* located in different places in the Markan structure, which shows that Matthew is not copying Luke or vice versa (since that would mean that the copier — say Luke — was following Matthews *sequence* only for stories found in Mark but not for other stories; But how would he know and why would he do that? It’s easier to say they both had a collection of sayings and inserted them wherever it seemed most relevant in Mark’s structure. BTW: the geneaologis and birth narratives cannot be from Q. The way to identify Q material is in verbatim agreements of Matthew and Luke in material found in Mark. The problem with the genealogies and birth narratives are percisely that they are hugely DIFFERENT from each other, not from the same source. 2. We don’t think there are many of the thousands of unpublished fragments that are greatly relevant for the NT, but surprises will emerge; occasionally biblical fragments show up. If there were extensive other gospels, they would have been published already. There may be a few fragments.
It has been 10 years; have any of those RAs gone on to do great things yet?
They are virtually all published scholars, with books at major university presses. Including Travis Proctor, whose post appeared on the blog today!
I think the myth of the RA’s doing Barth work is rooted in his amazing agenda, he works on so many projects at the same time and still he answers every question we ask here in the blog. When I first realized how highly ranked his work is (he is mentioned time and again in many articles I read when searching about any topic relating to early christianity ) I couldn’t believe he was answering my questions and even arguing with me. Skeptic as I am I doubted if he was the “real Barth”, but when reading his books I found a perfect consistency between what he wrote here and his works. Last discrepancy with him was about Paul’s speech in Acts 17 but he is saying more or less what he wrote in The Triumph of Christianity , every time I go to his works trying to understand a certain topic I find similar arguments and a way of exposing the ideas as here in the blog.
Dr. Ehrman must also have RAs that eat and sleep for him.
Dr Ehrman,
You wrote,
“You will notice (if you pay attention to how I write these posts), that I was even more thin-skinned, defensive, and argumentative than I am now! “.
The difference between Galatians(48) and Romans(57) is almost the same. Do scholars take into account how Paul must have changed over years as you have?
Oh, yes — it’s a standard discussion among Pauline specialists.