Given:
The Department of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Bart Denton Ehrman (/bɑːrt ˈɜːrmən/; born October 5, 1955) is an American New Testament scholar focusing on textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the development of early Christianity.
In Jesus, Interrupted, he describes the progress scholars have made in understanding the Bible over the past two hundred years and the results of their study, results which are often unknown among the population at large. In doing so, he highlights the diversity of views found in the New Testament, the existence of forged books in the New Testament which were written in the names of the apostles by Christian writers who lived decades later, and his belief that Christian doctrines such as the suffering Messiah, the divinity of Jesus, and the Trinity were later inventions.
In Jesus Before the Gospels, he examines the early Christian oral tradition and its role in shaping the stories about Jesus that we encounter in the New Testament.
Steefen
It is so important to prepare texts for examination. Ehrman has shown some of what not to even consider as legitimate.
Robert
It is not the case that Bultmann and his followers did not value history, but rather that they do not consider the gospels to be reliable historical sources insofar as they were created out of oral traditions and legends that developed over decades.
Steefen
Did he and his followers bother to search for the historical Jesus? What was his great contribution to that endeavor? If he valued history, he would not have copped out to the extent that the historical analysis of the New Testament is not only futile but unnecessary.
Faith on solid ground is based on historical accuracy: it is necessary.
Robert
Some of his students were influential in the so-called second quest for the historical Jesus
Stephen
Because Bultmann pushed the historical analysis of the NT as necessary and not futile?
If so, push for a correction to his Wikipedia article. We can pick up the conversation after that.
Robert
Bultmann did not consider our sources to be adequate for recreating anything like a historical portrait of Jesus but that does not mean he did not value history. Karl Jaspers considered him an excellent historian.
Stephen
The topic in this thread is Jesus and what Jesus said. You say Bultmann found nothing adequate. Being an excellent historian regarding an off-topic is irrelevant. Bultmann is outdated and time has proven him wrong: faith on solid ground in the person or the historical fiction character Jesus is based on historical accuracy at least to know if the object of faith is person or fictional character.
I think the relative weights of ulterior motives and biases of authors have to be determined specifically in order to single them out for analysis, critique or assessment. It seems safe to assume that all authors have limited motives in writing texts of whatever genre, as well as biases of various kinds. How these effect their presentations of the materials need to be worked out in detail and not in the abstract. One thing that ancient and modern authors seem to have in common is providing a believable picture of Jesus. But their respective criteria of believability differ greatly. What is believable for the ancient authors depends largely on the faith commitments of the communities they want to create and/or solidify. What is believable for modern New Testament scholars, if they are attempting to construct a historical representation, is whatever answers to the fulfilment of certain methodological criteria that are widely accepted in connected fields of research. Which is more accurate? We could only “objectively” determine the answer to that question if we could weigh these various depictions against a certain knowledge of the historical Jesus. But we have no such certain knowledge, not even close. So, we have decide, each of us, what approach to that question, and what depictions we get from the approach, we find more believable. And why.
One thing I have always been a bit uncomfortable with regarding the scholarly criteria applied to Jesus though. This worry is not about any specific scholar or school of thought regarding Jesus but about some of the criteria used in the research in general. I do believe that criteria such as “embarrassment” or “dissimilarity” have yielded some good clues regarding what Jesus probably did actually say or do or undergo, so I do believe they are valuable and usable standards in practice. But there is another sense in which they ensure that the modern historian and the first-century Christian writer are bound to end up with depictions of Jesus that are diametrically opposed, at least in some major ways. The early evangelist is always looking to portray Jesus in ways that support the developing faith, while the modern historian takes those attempts, almost by definition, to be unreliable. These criteria therefore, at least in some major respects, “pit” the historian against the evangelist. I realise of course that other criteria are brought in to balance the assessments. But I do often wonder whether criteria which essentially put the historian in not just a naturally skeptical relationship with the sources but in an adversarial one are always good methods for yielding historical results.
skeptik said
Let me answer by way of an admittedly less-than-perfect analogy.You are reading a hand written trial transcript from 60 years ago that pertains to the disappearance of a policeman near Roswell New Mexico.
In that transcript, two witnesses are claimed to have certain knowledge of an extraordinary event in which a flying saucer shot a beam of light and caused the policeman to vanish into thin air.
These witnesses are put on the witness stand and are asked to relate what they know. The first says that the event happened on Monday morning. The second says that it happened in the Wednesday evening. When questioned about other facts relevant to the story they diverge on other points as well. Both claim that other people saw the event also but they disagree on who these people were. (and none came forward to verify this claim.)
The testimony of those witnesses is then put under scrutiny. It is determined that neither one of those witnesses were actual eye witnesses of the event but were relating what they had heard or pieced together from others who allegedly saw the event. (now we have entered into the realm of hearsay which is problematic in court testimony multiple reasons).
You then learn that the trial transcript that you are reading is not the original, but a fifth hand copy that had been passed down by a group of people who have long promoted the belief in flying saucers.
How much belief can you place in the story as it has been related to you? Do you buy the story? Some might, especially if they already had a strong belief in flying saucers. But I would not find such a thing at all convincing.
Okay, now let’s apply this analogy to all history.
Does history still exist as an academic discipline? Or is it simply a matter of individual people being asked whether or not they have “belief”?
I was watching a new movie the other day called American Animals; it’s about the attempted theft of the Audubon books held at Kentucky’s Transylvania University campus library in December 2004 by a group of college students. What’s interesting about the movie is that not only are the thieves depicted by actors (including Evan Peters), but the actual thieves themselves (now all in their early 30s) also appear in the film and describe what happened.
And … even know these are well-documented events that undisputedly happened, the memory of each of the four actual thieves differs in critical ways as to precise details. Indeed, about the minor details (e.g., who came up with which idea, who was present for what meeting, what people looked like, etc., etc.) there was almost never unanimous agreement. But when it came to the big things — like how the actual attempted heist went down, what each person’s role in the heist was, where the thieves went after the heist, etc. — there was almost unanimous agreement.
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