Derek Mythvision Podcast
Last month I did a long and detailed interview with Derek Lambert, the person who started and runs an interesting podcast called MythVision Podcast. Derek is unusually well informed about the New Testament and he has deep and penetrating questions about my positions/views in some of my popular books, especially in light of what a very conservative evangelical apologist John McLatchie has been saying about my, well, sloppy ignorance. I had never heard of McLatchie before, but that’s not unusual. There are over two billion Christians in the world and I’ve never heard of most of them. Still, not that many of them assault my intelligence without telling me directly (e.g. in an email) that I’m an idiot.
Still, maybe he’s right about everything. That’s the nice thing about human intelligence. You yourself have it, and you can make up your own mind. In any event, here’s the interview. The bit with McLatchie kicks in part way through, but the whole thing is about important topics that I’ve dealt with in my writings.
Mr. Ehrman, I have watched pretty much every debate you’ve done and is out there on YouTube.
I look at you as a fierce debater, most times extremely confident and potent. And I have wondered many times if there has been any instance when you thought you’re losing or you felt overwhelmed by your opponent. I tend to conjecture that this may have happened but only once or twice maybe, that this is extremely rare, because you always or almost always defend an idea that’s probably true, and this makes it easier for you. But I have really wondered about it, and I would really appreciate it if you told me.
There are a few times when I *thought* I would be overwhelmed (going into my first debate with Dinesh D’Souza especially). But as it turns out, I’ve never felt that it happened during the debate itself (even that one, to my surprise at the time)
Bart, loved this, thanks for speaking with some of these great youtube channels.
While people insulting or dismissing your research out of hand is annoying, what is worse is simply slandering you. On Alisa Childer’s podcast (she is, or at least used to be a blog member of yours) she interviews Andreas Köstenberge about early Christianities. For someone who has written as much as he has, he seems to have little concern for collegial respect. In the first minute of the talk, he says this (and it goes downhill from here): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XCvR24Uxtc
“Bart Ehrman is the head of the religion department at the unc chapel hill where he typically teaches new testament survey and other classes taken by college freshmen who often become the unsuspecting victims of his skepticism in fact he stated publicly that his agenda is to convert his students from christianity which he considers to be naive and and and even gullible undiscerning uh to his views which are atheism or at least agnosticism.”
Are you willing to always let this go, or do you ever ask someone to stop lying about you and your work?
I hadn’t heard this, but I”ll write him and ask him why he’s saying that.
He actually says the words “victims of his [Bart’s] skepticism.” LOL.
Yeah, I wrote him about that after seeing the comment and he apologized.
Erman may not have heard about McLatchie, but McLatchie has certainly heard about Erman. “Why you should not be intimidated by Bart Ehrman (Part 1)”, “More Misrepresentations and Distortions by Bart Ehrman (Part 2)”, Finding Contradictions Where There Is None (Part 3), “Yes, Bart Ehrman, Jesus is Yahweh” … it appears to be something of an obsession, from the look of McLatchie’s blog.
I hadn’t previously heard about McClatchy, until this blog post, but I came across a debate between McLatchie and Dr. Peter Atkins, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lxg1IBx4Kz0, which was interesting. One of the commentators suggested that the debate was unfair, because Dr Atkins’ accent automatically made him sound smarter than McLatchie. Even allowing for that, I still wasn’t convinced by McClatchy’s claim that the virgin birth actually happened, and that Jesus really did transfer demonic possession to a pig, because the probability that these things happened was higher than alternative explanations. I had thought that modern scholars with Christian inclinations were more nuanced than that.
For what it’s worth, McClatchy has published a rebuttal to Ehrman’s comments on the MythVision Podcast:
https://jonathanmclatchie.com/a-reply-to-bart-ehrmans-defense-of-jesus-interrupted-on-the-mythvision-podcast/
*Jonathan McLatchie
For anyone interested in my detailed response to Ehrman’s recent appearance on the MythVision podcast, you can find it at the link below. I am surprised Bart doesn’t acknowledge or link to it in his post above.
https://jonathanmclatchie.com/a-reply-to-bart-ehrmans-defense-of-jesus-interrupted-on-the-mythvision-podcast/
Bart, my name is Jonathan (not John). Thank you for your interaction with my comments on your work. I do not think you are an idiot (I don’t know how you came to that conclusion from my work). My interaction with other scholars is always professional.
Thanks Jonathan. Sorry about the misname. I don’t post responses to my work generally on the blog, since there are too many of them; but I’m always open to a back and forth. (I’ve never read or heard your work, and so was not expecting those questions on the podcast; I don’t remember making a comment about your view of my intelligence, but it does sound like something I’d say! If so, it most likely was because as I heard what you were saying about my views, it appeared that you did not think I was very adept at reading Greek; that’s not a view I often hear.)
In any event, maybe down the road we can have a written back and forth on the blog on some specific topic or other.
Hi Bart,
Thank you for your reply. The comment I alluded to regarding my alleged view of your intelligence is in your blog post above (i.e. the one on which we are commenting).
I would never say that you are not adept at reading Greek. That is not stated or implied in any of my articles (in fact I explicitly state that you are an expert in Greek).
You should be aware that I am not an inerrantist (which you insinuated multiple times during the podcast). There are examples where I think the gospel authors err — I just do not happen to believe that the ones I was addressing in my articles are good examples of them. I appreciate that you are not otherwise familiar with my work, but in that case it is unwise to assume what my views in fact are.
I would indeed likewise welcome a written back and forth if it interests you and you have time to engage.
Jonathan
Does 2 Samuel 7:16 and 1 Kings 9:5 state that there will always be a Davidic king on the throne? Does this mean that when the kingdom of Judah fell, the prophecy was debunked? Was this the end of Judaism and the inspiration of scripture? What does an exegesis of these passages mean?
Yes. And that’s why some later Jews developed the idea of a *future* “anointed one” (= Messiah). God would fulfill his promise to David.
Unrelated, what do you think about those scholars who think Marcion’s gospel shares a common source with Luke, or even that Luke is the work of editing the Gospel of Marcion? The general argument against the Patristic hypothesis seems to be that Marcion’s gospel says things inconvenient to Marcionism, and therefore Marcion didn’t edit it. What do you think about this argument? What view do the majority of scholars have?
It’s complicated. I think that Marcion had a form of Luke’s Gospel (lacking chs. 1-2, e.g.) and that he probably edited it some, but not completely, and it’s very difficult to reconstruct his actual text, given the fact that we have to rely on later assertions by his enemies about what was in the text. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he didn’t do a completely consistent job on whatever editing he did….
Early in the video there is a discussion of Lucian. Some years ago I bought a copy of the selected dialogues of Lucian, at an exhibition on the history of science fiction at the British Library.
In Death of Peregrinus 16, Lucian’s character states his understanding that Peregrinus was expelled from the Christian community for eating a forbidden food. Any ideas on why he might be under that impression? Either it’s true and there was a (non-Pauline) sect of Christianity that forbade certain foods, or it’s not true and is just a guess, but a guess made on what basis? Perhaps if the only thing one knows about Christianity is that it began as a form of Judaism…
I may have more comments when I’ve watched more of the video.
My sense is that he was eating meat offered to idols — possibly participating in pagan festivals.
Regarding the historical use of the curse of Ham to justify slavery, I have a book of Christian apologetics published in 1977 that addresses this, and it astonishes me that the authors of such a book felt the need to do so as recently as the year I was born!
For the record, the authors are against racism and are rebutting the claim. It appears in a chapter addressing the question, “Why are there so many Christians who are racially prejudiced?”. They spend a meaty paragraph and three footnotes on it.
It is always obvious to me, in all of these debates I have watched, that you know the material so thoroughly that you already show up fully prepared. And you do not comment on things you do not know about (beyond what is necessary to say so as a reply). I appreciated the mutual respect in your debate with Dan Wallace, even though you both clearly disagree on the implications of the information (even where you do agree on the information itself). And there is never a sense of meanness on your side, or extravagantly negative positions, as Dawkins, Harris and many others do (to the detriment of their arguments, I think). The problem for people like Sean McDowell is that they create a false binary. You have to accept everything or dismiss everything, which forces them to try to justify really absurd claims, like Noah and the flood and even small but clear differences in the gospels. Their position is simply untenable, and it totally undermines their credibility. (I can only guess that their absolute position helps them to deny their own doubts in some way that I do not fully understand.)
Regarding mythical stories I’ve always thought the account of Ananias and Sapphira being individually condemned under by Peter in Acts of the Apostles was rather odd.
Their sin was to deny holding back money from a land sale, which compared to Peter’s denial of knowing Jesus was rather trivial. Peter could have told each one ” You are forgiven, just hand over the money” but if the account is correct he condemned each in turn and they dropped dead rather like a witch doctor throwing the bones!
For Peter “The Rock” to do this must count as rank hypocrisy with his record of denial and forgiveness. Even a vicar friend described the account in acts as “A disgraceful story”
Apparently their sin was lying about it rather than doing it. But, right: maybe they should have been given a chance to amend their ways!