Bart's Debates Archives - Page 6 of 6

Carrier, Bayes Theorem, and Jesus’ Existence

As most of you know, I’m pretty much staying out of the mythicist debates. That is for several reasons. One is that the mythicist position is not seen as intellectually credible in my field (I’m using euphemisms here; you should see what most of my friends *actually* say about it….) – no one that I know personally (I know a *lot* of scholars of New Testament, early Christianity, and so on) takes it at *all* seriously as a viable historical perspective (this includes not just Christians but also Jews, agnostics, atheists – you name it), and my colleagues sometimes tell me that I’m simply providing the mythicists with precisely the credibility they’re looking for even by engaging them. It’s a good point, and I take it seriously. In that connection I should say that I can understand how someone who hasn’t spent years being trained in the history of early Christianity might have difficulty distinguishing between serious scholarship that is accepted by experts as being plausible (even when judged wrong) and the writings of others [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:23:14-04:00November 7th, 2013|Bart's Critics, Bart's Debates, Historical Jesus, Mythicism|

My Views on Suffering Are Not Held by Those Who Suffer

In two of my debates, one with the “Messianic-Jewish Apologist” Michael Brown (whom I had never heard of before, but who was a remarkably good debater) and with the conservative Christian Dinesh D’Souza (whom I had heard of before, loud and clear, and who is also a remarkably good debater), I have been confronted with a point that, in both instances, my opponents thought was a decisive strike against me. My views of suffering are not shared by the people who, unlike me, actually suffer. It’s an interesting point. To explain it, and my response to it, I need to say a few words about the context of these debates. The topic of my debates on the problem of suffering is never whether or not there is suffering. Luckily. Everyone (at least everyone I debate, and most everyone who listens to the debates) agrees that there is suffering. The question at stake is whether it makes sense to believe in God given the nature and extent of suffering in the world. FOR THE REST OF [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:17:36-04:00June 3rd, 2012|Bart's Debates|

The Irony of our Earliest Manuscripts

It’s a little hard to get one’s mind around the irony of our early manuscripts, as I was alluding to in my earlier post. To reconstruct the “original” text of the New Testament – by which, for my purposes here, I mean the text that the author himself produced and put into the public sphere by “publishing” (or sending) it – we would love to have lots of early manuscripts to look at. Unfortunately, we don’t have lots of early manuscripts. 94% of our manuscripts are 800 years after the fact. We have only a handful of manuscripts, at best, that can plausibly be dated to the second century. These are all *highly* fragmentary (the oldest is just a scrap with a few verses on it). And even these are decades after the authors were all dead and buried. The problem is that every time a manuscript gets copied, mistakes – either intentional or accidental – are introduced. And then when that manuscript serves as an exemplar for the next scribe, its mistakes are [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:17:01-04:00May 3rd, 2012|Bart's Debates, New Testament Manuscripts|

For the “Original” Text: What Kinds of Manuscripts Would We Need?

As I pointed out in my previous post, in my debates with Dan Wallace I have stressed that we simply don’t have the kinds of manuscripts we need in order to know with certainty (let alone complete certainty!) what the authors of the New Testament originally wrote. Dan will typically argue that we have so many more manuscripts of the New Testament than for any other ancient author, that of course we can know the originals. My reply is that what we have – even though we have 5560 or so Greek manuscripts – is not enough. Out of some frustration, Dan or a member of the audience during the question –answer period sometimes asks, “Look! What exactly do you want?!? ” It’s a fair question. What do I want? Of course, what I really want are the originals. But it seems unlikely that I’ll ever be getting them. They disappeared long ago, probably within a couple of centuries of their being written, at the latest (the great textual scholar of the early third [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:17:01-04:00May 1st, 2012|Bart's Debates, New Testament Manuscripts|

The Text of the New Testament: Are the Textual Traditions of Other Ancient Works Relevant?

I have had three debates with Dan Wallace (author of Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament and Reinventing Jesus) on the question of whether or not we can know for certain, or with relative reliability, whether we have the “original” text of the New Testament. At the end of the day, my answer is usually “we don’t know.” For practical reasons, New Testament scholars proceed as if we do actually know what Mark wrote, or Paul, or the author of 1 Peter. And if I had to guess, my guess would be that in most cases we can probably get close to what the author wrote. But the dim reality is that we really don’t have any way to know for sure. Our copies are all so far removed from the time when the authors wrote, that even though we have so many (tons!) of manuscripts of the New Testament, we do not have many (ounces!) that are very close to the time of the originals, and it is impossible to say whether the texts were altered [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:17:01-04:00April 30th, 2012|Bart's Debates, New Testament Manuscripts, Public Forum|

What Do Tectonic Plates Have To Do With Suffering?

I have always found it interesting that when I talk about how there can be suffering in the world if there is a good God who is in charge of it, someone will tell me that it is all because of “free will.” I think most of us – not Sam Harris, of course, or some others, but most of us – think that there is such a thing as free will, that our actions are not completely determined for us but to some extent (not completely! Or even nearly completely) we can decide what to do (we can’t decide to walk on the ceiling without special equipment; most of us can’t decide to understand the general theory of relativity; and so on. But we can decide whether to cross the street, or go to a movie, or punch our neighbor in the nose). Moreover, most of us would agree that a good deal of suffering happens as the result of humans exercising free will. Your own broken nose may be because your neighbor was [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:17:00-04:00April 23rd, 2012|Bart's Debates, Reflections and Ruminations|

First-Century Copy of Mark? – Part 1

On February 1, I had a public debate in Chapel Hill with Daniel Wallace, a conservative evangelical Christian New Testament scholar who teaches at that bastion of conservative dispensationalist theology, Dallas Theological Seminary. He is also the author of several books, including Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament and Reinventing Jesus. I have known Dan for over thirty years, since we were both graduate students interested in similar areas of research: my field (at the time I too was an evangelical) was textual criticism, the study of the ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and of what they can tell us about the “original” writings of the New Testament; his field was the grammar of the Greek New Testament. The term “textual criticism” is a technical term. It does not refer to any study of “texts.” It is specifically the study of how to establish what an author wrote if we do not have his or her actual writings, but only later copies of them. In the case of the New Testament we [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:17:00-04:00April 7th, 2012|Bart's Debates, New Testament Manuscripts|

Is Suffering All About Us?

I have had a number of interesting public debates on the problem of suffering since writing my book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails To Answer Our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer. Some of these debates have been with high profile scholars, in a range of fields: N. T. Wright, professor of New Testament; Dinesh D’Souza (three times!), public intellectual and now president of King’s College in NYC; Richard Swinburne (on the radio in the UK), philosopher and Christian apologist at Oxford, emeritus, and others. One argument that frequently gets used in these debates really irritates me, aggravates me, makes my blood boil (I’m not saying that everyone I debate uses it). It is the view that suffering can be justified because it contributes to making us human. I can understand this argument, and can even affirm it in part, when it is used of our own, mild and infrequent, suffering. Sometimes when bad things happen to us it ends up being for our own good, making us stronger, better people. The example [...]

BDEhrman2025-09-10T12:16:59-04:00April 4th, 2012|Bart's Debates|

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