Tapestry or Jigsaw Puzzle?

Try to imagine the picture of the historical Jesus that emerges from a rigorously, historical, critical examination of our surviving sources as a large tapestry. The individual threads make up the overall portrait. There are a few threads here and there that appear out of place at first glance. But you can’t take these few threads and claim that they represent the overall portrait of the tapestry. The tapestry has to be understood as a whole, looking for the major features of its portrayal (and of course the stray threads need to be fit into it somehow).

Bart Ehrman.

The quote above comes from a blog post Ehrman wrote discussing Reza Aslan's book Zealot, which argues that Jesus was actually a political revolutionary who advocated violent resistance to the Romans.  Ehrman finds Aslan's thesis unpersuasive.

The data that do seem to support the idea of Jesus as a political revolutionary are very, very few and far between. They do not comprise the majority, or even a significant minority, of the data we can establish as going back to the historical Jesus.

I can imagine the picture of the historical Jesus as a large tapestry, but I think that the analogy is terrible. I think that a better analogy is a large jigsaw puzzle for which we only have a handful of pieces--say a 5,000 piece puzzle where we only have about seventy-five of the pieces.

Now suppose that of our seventy-five pieces, sixty are green.   We might be inclined to conclude that the picture is some sort of landscape, perhaps a forest.  However, in order to justify this conclusion, we would need to know how we got those pieces.  If someone simply reached into the box and grabbed a handful of pieces, it might be reasonable to think that they are a representative sample and that 80% of the entire picture is green.  On the other hand, if someone grabbed the pieces from a single area of a completed puzzle, there would be less reason to think that green predominates in the whole.

Even if we could establish that some data goes back to the historical Jesus (which I doubt), Ehrman's argument presupposes that such data constitutes a representative sample of Jesus' words and deeds.  I cannot see  how such a presupposition can be justified.  The data we have is the data preserved by people who came to believe that Jesus was the prophesied Messiah who God had raised from the dead. They would have no reason to preserve anything about him that did not support that picture.  Had Jesus been a revolutionary Zealot, data that portrayed him as an apocalyptic preacher might still have been the only data that was preserved.  In fact, if you subscribe to the criteria of dissimilarity, those few data points that support the idea of Jesus as a political revolutionary may be the points that are most likely to be authentic as no one would have any reason to invent those.

DJE? (11): When Did Jesus Become the Messiah?

One of the things that frustrated me so much about Did Jesus Exist? was Ehrman’s failure to discuss the mythicist implications of many of the issues he raised. For example, at one point he discusses how the the point at which Jesus was thought to have become the messiah changed from his baptism by John to his conception to the Gospel of John's doctrine that he had been the Son of God from the beginning of the universe.According to Ehrman,

There were yet earlier traditions about Jesus that did not speak of him as the son of God from eternity past or from his miraculous birth or from the time he began his ministry. In these, probably the oldest, Christian traditions, Jesus became the Son of God when God raised him from dead. It was then that God showered special favor on the man Jesus, calling him the son, the messiah, the Lord. Even though this view is not precisely that of Paul, it is found in an ancient creed (that is, a preliterary tradition) that Paul quotes a the beginning of his letter to the Romans, where he speaks of Christ as God's "son who was descended from David according to the flesh and designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness at his resurrection. . . . It is, in other words, a very ancient tradition that predates Paul's writings. (p.111)

Ehrman raises this point as part of an argument assigning an early date to the traditions underlying Acts, but it seems to me that its mythicist implications are fairly obvious and might have been addressed.

Why would the earliest Christians, presumably the ones that Paul persecuted before his conversion, believe that Jesus became the messiah only upon his resurrection if they understood him to have been anything like the wonder working messianic claimant that we find in the gospels?  Had their been any known traditions concerning a Galilean teacher and healer, wouldn't the early Christians have believed that Jesus was the messiah and the Son of God throughout his entire earthly ministry?   Doesn't the fact that the earliest Christians thought of Jesus as becoming the anointed one only upon his resurrection at least suggest that the stories about the activities of the earthly Jesus were added sometime later.

DJE? (10): It's Not What Ehrman Read, It's How He Read It

In his review of Did Jesus Exist?, Richard Carrier suggests that Bart Ehrman didn't read Pliny and hadn't understood Plutarch. Ehrman responded that he has read Pliny many times and that he has taught seminars on Plutarch.

While I have no reason to doubt that Ehrman has read all the things he says he has read, I wonder whether the problem is that he has never tried to think about them from a mythicist perspective.  As a former fundamentalist, Ehrman has no trouble recognizing the fundamentalist implications of anything he reads in Pliny or Plutarch or Tacitus.  He knows how any source might be used by someone who believes that the Bible is inspired and inerrant. Ehrman has never been a mythicist though so I don't think that he is as adept at spotting the mythicist implications.

In a comment to a post titled The Text of the New Testament: Are the Textual Traditions of Other Ancient Works Relevant?, I asked Erhman the question I posed in a previous post here, i.e., how can our certainty about Paul thinking that James was Jesus' biological brother be any greater than our certainty about the textual integrity of Galatians? Ehrman answered that all of our manuscripts include the reference to James as "the brother of the Lord" and that "we know from other sources that the James who headed the church in Jerusalem was in fact known to be the brother of Jesus." This prompted  the following exchange between Steven Carr and Dr. Ehrman:

Carr:      Out of curiosity, which sources would they be? Luke/Acts, the Epistle of James, Jude? Does Josephus ever claim James was the head of the church?"

Ehrman:  In the NT, just Acts. But later traditions of the second century are uniform in making this claim, I believe. And they got the idea from *somewhere*!

Carr:      Acts claims that James the brother of Jesus was a church leader. Where does it say that?

Ehrman:  Ah good point. Acts does indicate that James was the leader of the church in Jerusalem, and it does differentiate this James from the disciple of Jesus, the son of Zebedee, but it never explicitly says he was Jesus’ brother.

I was rather taken aback by this as was Steven.  How can Ehrman cite Paul knowing the biological brother of Jesus as one of the key points that shows "beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt" that there was a historical Jesus and not even notice that the only other New Testament book that talks about this James doesn't identify him as Jesus' brother?   I have no doubt that Ehrman has read Luke and Acts countless times, but apparently he never thought about the fact that while Mark 6:31 explicitly gives James as the name of one of Jesus' biological brothers, the author of Luke drops that reference.  Luke knows that Jesus has brothers, but he never tells us any of their names.

This is what leads me to believe that Ehrman has never thought about the mythicist implications of the things he has read.  Perhaps he simply assumed that there weren't any, but plainly if the question of Jesus' existence turns on whether the leader in Jerusalem named James was the biological brother of Jesus, it matters that the only two references in the New Testament don't say the same thing.   If you are going to rely heavily on Galatians 1:19, you need to have some explanation for why Acts doesn't corroborate.

As I pointed out to Dr. Ehrman, the simplest reading is that the James in Acts 15 and 21 is James the son of Alphaeus mentioned in Acts 1 and Luke 6, and that the author doesn't bother to mention his father in the later chapters because James the son of Zebedee had been killed off in Acts 12.  With only one James left in the story, there was no need to identify his father in order to distinguish him.  Occam's Razor would suggest that this is a simpler solution than positing that the author is introducing a third James into the narrative without bothering to distinguish him from the ones who had been mentioned earlier in the story.  This interpretation is not mandatory, but it seems to be the most natural.

Dr. Ehrman responded to this with the well known "everybody knew it" defense:

Well, if everyone knew who James was, there may in fact be no reason to identify him — especially if it is his custom to identify some other James (son of Alphaeus) with an identifying marker precisely becuase he wsa *not* well known.

I have never thought that the "everybody knew it" defense was a particularly convincing argument when used to explain why Paul is so silent about the historical Jesus, but I think it is even weaker with respect to Luke/Acts. At the beginning of his gospel, Luke says that he is writing his gospel because earlier works were unsatisfactory. I have to think that he expected his work to be the definitive account. When Luke/Acts departs from Mark, I think we have to assume that the author thought that Mark had gotten something wrong.

My good friend Dagoods is also less than impressed with the argument

“Everyone knew it” is a failed methodology. The Acts author narrows the “James” in 12:2 as “James, brother of John” and the “James” of 1:13 as “James of Alphaeus.” But this method alleges the author did NOT list “James” of 21:18 as “James, brother of Jesus” because everyone knew it? It would seem to follow, that meant no one knew who James, brother of John was. Or who James, son of Alphaeus was.

Don’t forget, Luke/Acts knew Jesus had brothers, but does not list their names. Even though his source (Mark) DOES indicate there is a brother to Jesus named James. Under a straight reading of Acts, the better argument is that James of 21:18 is James, son of Alphaeus—NOT the unknown “brother of Jesus” who never is identified by Luke/Acts.

See Also the author’s treatment of “Philip” in distinguishing between “Philip the Disciple” and “Philip the Evangelist” that equally shows a tendency to make distinctions for intended recipients.

I’ve been on the fence regarding Ehrman’s scholarship in reading these reviews, but if he really did use the method “everyone knew it” for arguing the silence on James in Acts; I find this devastating to his credibility. This is Mythical Skepticism 101 stuff.

Well, Ehrman really did use the "everyone knew it" defense and it leads me to think that he really didn't put enough effort into thinking about about the mythicists' arguments.  He shouldn't have been surprised when someone pointed out that Acts does not corroborate a biological relationship between James and Jesus, and he should have been ready with a stronger reason for discarding Acts.

"Did Jesus Exist?" (9) Ehrman's Response to Carrier

Bart Ehrman has responded to Richard Carrier's review of Did Jesus Exist? in a couple of posts on his blog here and here. Happily he responded in the Public Forum so anyone can read them. He admits to a couple of mistakes, insists that he is right and Carrier is wrong about a couple of points, and insists that Carrier is misinterpreting his statements or taking them out of context in a couple of cases. Unfortunately I don't have the expertise to evaluate the substance of all these disagreements, but I do know what I want and expect out of a book by Ehrman.

For me the important issue is how well informed about mythicism someone will be after reading Did Jesus Exist? I knew nothing about textual criticism prior to reading Misquoting Jesus. After reading it I found that I could follow reasonably sophisticated discussions of the topic, ask intelligent questions, and generally spot the difference between someone who knew their stuff and someone who was just bluffing. I have had many debates with internet apologists using Ehrman’s works as a reference and I don’t think that I have ever been caught short due to having an inaccurate picture of the evidence and arguments on either side of a question.

My standard for evaluating all of Carrier’s criticisms and Ehrman’s defenses is whether someone who entered an argument with a mythicist using Did Jesus Exist? is likely to wind up with egg on his face if he relied on Ehrman in the way that I have relied on him in arguments with Christian apologists.

(1) Tacitus: Carrier says that Ehrman got some nitpicky details wrong about Tacitus. Ehrman says that his statements are correct.

Edge: Ehrman. The main thing is that none of this is likely to come up in an argument with a mythicist.

(2) Pliny: Carrier says that Erhman got some nitpicky details about Pliny wrong. Ehrman admits he made a mistake in citation but says that there was no need to go into the other nitpicky details.

Edge: Ehrman. Once again, none of it this is likely to matter in an argument with a mythicist.

(3) Roman records: Carrier says that Ehrman was wrong about what kind of records the Romans kept. Ehrman says Carrier is talking about records that were kept in Egypt and he was talking about what we might expect to find in Palestine.

Edge: Carrier. The general propensity of the Romans to keep records is clearly relevant to the kind of records we might expect to find regarding Jesus of Nazareth. I interpret Ehrman to be saying that Romans didn't keep the relevant type of records at all. “If Romans were careful record keepers, it is passing strange that we have no record, not of Jesus but of nearly anyone who lived in the first century.” (p. 29) I think a person could wind up looking very foolish arguing this point with a mythicist if he didn't know that there were such records kept in Egypt.

(4) The Peter priapus: Carrier says Ehrman was wrong about a penis-nosed statue of Peter in the Vatican’s collection. Ehrmans says the statue isn’t of Peter.

Edge: Carrier. It is important to know whether mythicists are misinterpreting the existing evidence or inventing evidence from whole cloth. Ehrman makes it sound like the mythicists are inventing things: “There is no penis-nosed statue of Peter the cock in the Vatican or anywhere else except in books like this which love to make things up.” (p.24) Little is more embarrassing than having someone produce a piece of evidence that you have just accused them of inventing.

(5) Earlier Jesus: Carrier says Ehrman was wrong about whether any sources ever had Jesus living in the early 1st or 2nd century BC rather than the early 1st century AD. Ehrman says that all he meant was that those sources weren’t relevant to Paul's understanding.

Edge: Carrier. Once again, it is important to know whether mythicists are misinterpreting existing sources or inventing stories from whole cloth. Ehrman wrote "[T]he logic of Paul’s understanding of the resurrection show[s] that he thought that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus were recent events. I should stress that this is the view of all of our sources that deal with the matter at all” (p. 251). I think that Ehrman is clearly saying that no such source exists rather than that no such source was available to Paul.

(6) Earl Doherty: Carrier says Ehrman was wrong to say that Earl Doherty fails to acknowledge that the scholars he cites don’t agree with his ultimate conclusion. Ehrman says that Doherty “often gives the impression that the scholars he quotes agree with him on a point when they expressly do not.”

Edge: Carrier. Ehrman is often criticized unfairly by Christian apologists for the "impression" he gives rather than for what he actually says, e.g., "Ehrman makes it sound like we can't know anything at all about the text of the New Testament." Although this wouldn't come up in a debate, it is very disappointing to see Ehrman trying to justify a misstatement about someone else on these grounds.

(7) Dying and rising gods: Carrier says Ehrman is wrong about the dying and rising Gods. Ehrman says he got it right.

Edge: Too close to call (for me). This is obviously a very important issue for the mythicist argument and it comes up many times in the book. I don’t understand the issue well enough to say who’s right, but it doesn’t look to me like Ehrman is as dogmatic as Carrier implies so I don’t think that I would make any blanket statements based on Did Jesus Exist?, and hence I would not wind up with egg on my face when arguing with a mythicist.

(8) Carrier's credentials: Carrier says Ehrman is wrong about the degrees he holds. Ehrman admits the mistake and says he doesn't know where he got the erroneous information.

Edge: Carrier. Although this is never going to matter in a debate, I cannot see any excuse for Ehrman not checking this and the information is easy to find on the internet.

Overall, I have to agree with the substance of many of Carrier's criticisms, although I think that the tone of his review probably left something to be desired.

"Did Jesus Exist?" (7): Carrier's Review

Dr. Richard Carrier has posted a scathing review of Did Jesus Exist? titled Ehrman on Jesus: A Failure of Facts and Logic.  Interestingly, it doesn't overlap all that much with the posts that I have been writing.  While I have been concentrating on weaknesses in arguments that any layman might appreciate,  Carrier goes after Ehrman for his shortcomings in the field of ancient history and religion.

One of the things I have always appreciated about Ehrman is how careful he is to present the evidence accurately and to deal with counter argument fairly.  I have argued with many internet apologists using Ehrman as my primary reference and I don't think that I have ever been caught short by arguments or evidence that I couldn't have reasonably anticipated after reading Ehrman.  Even if I didn't agree with Ehrman's conclusion, I always felt that I had a clear picture of the evidence upon which it was based and the counter-arguments that might be offered against it.

According to Carrier, Did Jesus Exists? consistently misstates the evidence and fails to inform the reader of the diversity of scholarly opinion on the issues it addresses.  I don't have the expertise or knowledge to critique Carrier, but I can say that I have always found him reliable in the past and that no internet apologist has ever managed to trip me up when I relied on Carrier either.

Update:  Carrier does address one point that I covered in an earlier post, which is the problem with the "nobody would/could have invented it" argument.  Not surprisingly, he does it better.

[T]here is a logical fail here as well, since he bases his conclusion that no Jews would develop a belief in a dying messiah on the premise that no Jews had a belief in a dying messiah, which apart from being a circular argument (all novel beliefs start somewhere; you can’t argue that x would not arise because x hasn’t arisen), and apart from the fact that the inference is refuted by the fact that Jews later did develop such a belief (independently of Christianity, as I also demonstrate in the preceding link) so clearly there was no ideological barrier to doing so, but besides all that, his premise requires knowing what all Jews, of all sects, everywhere, believed or imagined, which knowledge Ehrman doesn’t have (not even close: see my discussion of what I and other scholars have said about such preposterous claims to omniscience in Proving History, pp. 129-34). He even knows his own inference is illogical, because he makes the exact same argument I just did (on p. 193): “how would we know this about ‘every’ early Christian, unless all of them left us writings and told us everything they knew and did?”* Substitute “Jew” for “Christian” and Ehrman just refuted himself.

*  In the quoted passage, Ehrman is addressing Rene Salm's argument that we can infer the non-existence of Nazareth from the fact that early Christians didn't bother to look for it and seemed not to know where it was.

"Did Jesus Exist?" (6): Is Corruption in Transmission Relevant?

I have been a fan of Bart Ehrman ever since reading Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why in which he describes how errors occurred when scribes copied the New Testament texts and how scholars go about trying to identify those errors.  This was the book that first gained Ehrman widespread attention and aroused the ire of conservative Christian apologists. However, when it comes to Jesus' existence, Ehrman dismisses this as a cause of concern:

I do not need to explicate all these problems here, as I have written about them in more detail elsewhere.  My point in this context is the for the question of whether or not Jesus existed, these problems are mostly irrelevant.  The evidence for Jesus' existence does not depend on having a manuscript tradition of his life and teachings that is perfectly in line with what the authors of the New Testament gospels really wrote. (p.180)

He goes on to say,

If we had no clue what was originally in the writings of Paul or in the Gospels, this objection might carry more weight. But there is not a textual critic on the planet who thinks this, since not a shred of evidence leads in this direction. (p.109)

This sounds pretty reasonable, but I have a hard time squaring this with what he said in a 2008 debate with Dan Wallace at the Greer-Heard Forums:

Can we trust that the copies of Galatians we have are the original copies. No. We don’t know. How could we possibly know? Our earliest copy of Galatians is p46 which dates from the year 200. Paul wrote this letter in the 50’s. The first copy that we have is 150 years later. Changes were made all along the line before this first copy was made. How can we possibly know that in fact it is exactly as Paul wrote it. Is it possible that somebody along the line inserted a verse? Yes. Is it possible that someone took out a verse? Yes. Is it possible that somebody changed a lot of the words? Yes. Is it possible that the later copies were made from one of the worst of the early copies? Yes. It’s possible. We don’t know.
. . . .
What I have said to my colleagues is that we are as close as we can hope to be to what we might imagine as the earliest text. What I have said in popular audiences is we don’t know if we can get back to the original text. And I stand by both statements. We don’t know what Paul originally wrote to the Galatians, and we no hope of getting any closer in the future than we are already now. We have no evidence that can get us any further back than we have already gotten and our earliest evidence is from the year 200, 150 years later. So can we know for certain? No. We can’t know for certain that the text is reliable. You might want to think it is. You might want to hope it is. You might want to say there are intelligent people who say it is so probably it is. But think about it. There are people copying these texts year after year, decade after decade.

Recall that it is in Galatians 1:19 where Paul says that he saw James "the brother of the Lord," which Ehrman says proves that Jesus was a historical person "beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt." (p.144) How can we possibly have that kind of certainty if "[w]e can’t know for certain that the text is reliable"?   If it's possible that someone changed a lot of words in Galatians, then it has to be possible that "the brother of the Lord" was added by some scribe to identify which James Paul was talking about and that it wasn't written by Paul himself.

I cannot help but think that there is a bit of inconsistency here.  When debating a conservative Christian apologist, Ehrman insists that everything in Galatians is subject to at least some degree of doubt due to uncertainties about its transmission.  However, when arguing against mythicism, Ehrman insists that we can be certain "beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt."

It's very disappointing to see Ehrman argue that way.

"Did Jesus Exist? (5): Nazareth

Another concern I have with Did Jesus is Exist? is how quick Ehrman is to label an argument irrelevant to whether Jesus existed when the worst that can be said about it is that it's not dispositive of whether Jesus existed.  One of the most frustrating examples of this is his discussion of the argument that Nazareth did not exist at the time Jesus is claimed to have lived there (an argument about which I have no strong feeling).  Ehrman writes: 

I could dispose of this argument fairly easily by pointing out that it is irrelevant.  If Jesus existed, as the evidence suggests, but Nazareth did not, as this assertion claims, then he merely comes from somewhere else.  (p.191)

This sounds quite logical except for one thing: Nazareth is frequently cited as one of those things that can be known with relative certainty about the historical Jesus.  Ehrman makes this very point a couple of pages earlier:

Nazareth was a little one-horse town that no one had ever heard of, as far as we can tell before Christianity.  The savious of the world came from there?  Not from Bethlehem?  Or Jerusalem? Or Rome?  How likely is that?  And so we have a multiply attested tradition that passes the criterion of dissimilarity.  Conclusion:  Jesus probably came from Nazareth. (p.189)

Now technically I suppose that Ehrman isn't claiming in this passage that Nazareth constitutes evidence Jesus existed.  If he were, his earlier quoted claim would boil down to the self-refuting "If Jesus existed, as the existence of Nazareth suggests, but Nazareth did not, the he merely comes from somewhere else."   Nevertheless, he is citing it as something that we can know about the historical Jesus.  It seems like more than a little smoke and mirrors to claim that the validity of the things that we think we can know about Jesus are irrelevant to whether we can know that he existed.

I will concede that the non-existence of Nazareth would not be dispositive of Jesus' existence, but surely it is relevant.

Ehrman's "Did Jesus Exist?" (4): Does Paul Quote a Historical Jesus?

There are three passages that are usually cited as proof that Paul knew the teachings of a historical Jesus of Nazareth and they all come from his first letter to the Corinthians.

Don’t you know that those who serve in the temple get their food from the temple, and that those who serve at the altar share in what is offered on the altar? In the same way, the Lord has commanded that those who preach the gospel should receive their living from the gospel. 1 Cor. 9:13-14.

This teaching is reputed to be based on a passage in Luke

“When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ If someone who promotes peace is there, your peace will rest on them; if not, it will return to you. Stay there, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house. Luke 10:5-7

Next is Paul's teaching about divorce.

To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): A wife must not separate from her husband.  But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife.  To the rest I say this (I, not the Lord): If any brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her. 1 Cor 7:10-12

This is thought to be based on a teaching found in Mark.

Some Pharisees came and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”      “What did Moses command you?” he replied. They said, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.”  “It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,” Jesus replied.  “But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh.  Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” When they were in the house again, the disciples asked Jesus about this.  He answered, “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her.  And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery.” Mark 10:2-12

Finally Paul's description of the institution of the Eucharistic meal:

For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread,  and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.”  In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.”  For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. 1 Cor 11:23-26

The parallel passage is found in Luke:

And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.”  In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.  Luke 22:19-20  

The first one strikes me as particularly unimpressive.  I think that almost any preacher can independently come to the conclusion that his congregation should support him and that it is the God's will that they do so.  I don't think that Paul needed to have heard an actual saying of a historical person to think that this was what the Lord was commanding.  The second one is more interesting because Paul attributes some of the teaching to the Lord and takes credit for some of it himself.  This suggests that there was some independent tradition concerning divorce that was already known to the Corinthians.

I question whether the tradition Paul knows concerning divorce is necessarily the same one attributed to Jesus in Mark.  Paul's teaching is driven by a couple of elements that aren't found in Mark.  First, he thinks that believers would be better off not marrying at all since the time is short and they should be focusing on the Lord "[f]or this world in its present form is passing away." 1 Cor. 7:30.  He is also addressing the question of whether believers should remain married to unbelievers which isn't found found in Jesus' teaching.   It is certainly possible that Paul's teaching is in some way dependent upon Jesus', but it doesn't seem obviously to be so.

Ehrman also mentions the possibility that someone within one of Paul's communities may have claimed to have received a divine revelation or prophecy which Paul and the community accepted as a valid commandment from the Lord.  Ehrman thinks that this is a reasonable hypothesis for the rapture passage in the first letter to the Thessalonians.

According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. 1 Thes. 4:15-18.

However, Ehrman rejects this as an explanation for the teachings on divorce and support of religious leaders for a very curious reason.  "When Paul claims that the Lord said something, and we have a record of Jesus saying exactly that, it is surely most reasonable to conclude that Paul is referring to something that he believed Jesus actually said."  (p. 129)  This seems very circular to me.  Isn't this only the most reasonable conclusion if we have first concluded that Paul actually believed that he knew things the historical Jesus said?  Isn't that what we are trying to figure out here?  Surely we cannot use the assumption that Paul knew the sayings of a historical Jesus in order to prove that Paul knew the sayings of a historical Jesus.

One of the reasons the revelation explanation makes sense to me on the divorce teaching is that Paul ends the discussion with "and I think that I too have the Spirit of God."  I'm just spit-balling here but that sounds to me like the kind of thing you might write if someone else in the community was claiming to receive prophecies or revelations.

With the description of the Last Supper, there can be little doubt that Paul and Luke are part of the same tradition, but there is still a question of which way that tradition flows.  If Paul indicated that he heard about this event from someone who was there, there would be little doubt that he understood himself to be quoting the words of a historical person.  Unfortunately, that's not what Paul says.  Paul says that this was "received from the Lord," i.e., Paul knows this by divine revelation.  While we cannot take such a statement at face value, I think we at least have to allow for the possibility that Paul sincerely believed it to be true.  If the Christian cult practiced some sort of ritual communal meal before Paul came along, he might have believed that its true meaning had been revealed to him and he could have added elements to the tradition that were later picked up by Luke when he wrote his gospel.

In sum then, I don't think that there is any conclusive reason to think that Paul viewed the teachings on divorce or supporting religious leaders as the words of the itinerant preacher described in the gospels.  He does seem to think that is was an actual historical person who instituted the Eucharistic meal, but I think some uncertainty is created by the fact that he claims not to have come by his knowledge of the event in the way that we think people normally come by their knowledge of actual historical events.  I think it's possible that Paul all three passages reflect actual memories of a historical person, but I also think that it's far from the slam dunk that Ehrman makes it out to be.

Ehrman's "Did Jesus Exist?" (3): Were Jesus and James Biological Brothers.

Bart Ehrman writes that "two points are especially key.  I think that each of them shows beyond a shadow of reasonable doubt that Jesus must have existed as a Palestinian Jew who was crucified."  (p. 144) One of those points was that no Jew would ever invent a crucified messiah.  As I noted in an earlier post, I don't find this argument convincing.  Ehrman's other key point is that our earliest source Paul claims to have known Jesus biological brother James.  I think that this argument is stronger, but "beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt" is really over the top and I am surprised and disappointed that Ehrman would ever claim that it yields such certainty.


One of the things that bothers me about Did Jesus Exist? is how imprecise Ehrman is at times.  He is often accused of giving misleading impressions by Christian apologists, but I have always found him to be very careful to be accurate about the evidence.  However, in Did Jesus Exist? he writes  "Paul knew Jesus' brother, James, and he knew his closest disciple, Peter, and he tells us that he did." Although this post is going to discuss the question of James, I want to note how inaccurate this statement is concerning Paul and Peter.  Paul never tells us that Peter was Jesus' closest disciple or that he was Jesus' disciple at all or that he even knew Jesus or that Jesus even had disciples.  All we know from Paul is that Peter witnessed an appearance of the risen Christ. 

Moving on to James, lets look at what our first century sources tell us:

• Mark 6:3 and Matthew 13:55 both say that Jesus had several several brothers, one of whom was named James.  However, James was a common Jewish name and neither Mark nor Matthew give us any information that would help us identify a James mentioned by anyone else as being the same person.

• Luke indicates that Jesus had brothers, but he doesn't name any of them.  Luke identifies two men named James as being among the twelve apostles, James the son of Zebedee and James the son of Alphaeus.  The son of Zebedee is killed in Acts 12 and the name James comes up again in Acts 15:13 and Acts 21:18 referring to a man who is a leader among the Christians in Jerusalem.  The father of this James is not identified.  The most natural reading of Luke-Acts is that this is the earlier mentioned son of Alphaeus whose father is not identified because there is only one James still in the story.  There  is no obvious reason to think that Luke would introduce a new James into the narrative without distinguishing him somehow from the one already mentioned.

• In Galatian 1:18-19, Paul writes "I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Cephas [Peter] and stayed with him fifteen days. I saw none of the other apostles—only James, the Lord’s brother."  This occurred three years after his conversion.  In Galatians 2:9, Paul refers to James as a "pillar" of the Jerusalem community.  Since Paul is perfectly clear that every Christian is a brother (or sister) of the Lord, there would be no reason to call this particular James the brother of the Lord unless Paul thought that he had some unique relationship to the Lord, e.g., he was the biological brother of Jesus.  Although it is hotly contested by mythicists, for the sake of this discussion let's accept that the most natural reading of Galatians is that this James is the natural brother of Jesus in addition to being a spiritual brother.

• Around 90 A.D., the Jewish historian Josephus wrote: 

  And now Caesar, upon hearing the death of Festus, sent Albinus into Judea, as procurator. But the king deprived Joseph of the high priesthood, and bestowed the succession to that dignity on the son of Ananus, who was also himself called Ananus... Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so he assembled the sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned.

  Antiquities of the Jews 20-9.  Josephus doesn't say anything about James being a Christian or leading the Christians in Jerusalem.

The issue then is whether we have reason to think that the James who was a leader of the Church in Jerusalem was the biological brother of Jesus referred to by Mark and Matthew. The relevant considerations would seem to be:

• The most natural reading of Paul is that the pillar of Jerusalem was Jesus' natural brother.

• The most natural reading of Luke-Acts is that the James in Acts 15 and 21 was not the same person as the James in Matthew and Mark.  Rather, he was the son of Alpheaus.

• Josephus doesn't help much as he doesn't give us any information that would allow us to identify his James as a leader of the Christian community.  His James could be the James mentioned by Mark and Matthew without being the same one mentioned by Luke and Paul.

The next issue is what the less obvious readings of Luke-Acts or Paul might be.  For Luke-Acts:

• Luke didn't know that the James he described was Jesus biological brother.  This is possible of course but I don't think it helps the historicists' case.

• Luke omitted the fact that James was the biological brother because he wanted to downplay James' authority for essentially political reasons.  This is plausible, but I'm not sure we can have any certainty on the point.

• Luke didn't bother mentioning that James was the biological brother of Jesus because he assumed that everyone knew it.  This is not impossible, but I don't find it very convincing.

We can also imagine alternative readings of Paul:

• Paul was merely referring to James as the brother of the Lord in a spiritual sense.  Certainly plausible even if not most likely.  Richard carrier thinks that this is the most probable although I don't completely follow his argument on this point.

• Paul is using "Brother of the Lord" as a title.  Even though all Christians are theoretically saints because they are all sanctified, sometimes saint is used in titular way to designate someone who particularly exemplifies sainthood, e.g., Saint Paul, Saint Theresa, Saint Vincent de Paul.  By the same token, it is possible that some group of early Christians were designated "brothers of the Lord" based on their spiritual qualities.  Possible, but I don't see how we can ever confirm it.

• Paul simply used "the Lord's brother" to distinguish James from other people who had the same name.  For example one James might have been known "James the Lord's brother" and another might have been "James the Lord's servant" even though everyone in the community was both a servant and a brother (or a sister) of the Lord.   After all, this same James later became known as "James the Just" even though every Christian had been justified by faith.  Perhaps one of the James in the early Christian community had gone rogue and been cast out.  Writing to the Galatians many years later, Paul simply wanted them to know that the James he had met was the good one, i.e., "James the Lord's Brother" rather than "James the Heretic."  Plausible but of course there is no evidence to establish this.

• Paul didn't write "the Lord's brother."  It was an interpolation by a later scribe who wanted to clear up any confusion about which James was being referred to.  Plausible but unverifiable.

Weighing all the evidence, perhaps we want to favor James being the biological brother of Jesus.   Paul is the earlier source.  Maybe we think that the alternative readings of Paul are less plausible than the alternative readings of Luke.  I can see this as a reasonable conclusion.

What I cannot see is anyone thinking that the issue is settled "beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt."  That's just crazy talk.  That would suggest that we are as confident as we could possibly be and that we cannot imagine any evidence that would make us more confident.  Personally, I can think of several things.

• Luke could have referred to the James in Acts 15 and 21 as "the brother of Jesus."

• Luke could have named James as one of the brothers of Jesus who was with the apostles in the upper room in Acts 1.

• Paul could have referred to James as "the brother of Jesus" rather than "the brother of the Lord" and he could have done so several times.

• Paul could have referred to other brothers named by Mark or Matthew as "brothers of the Lord."

• Matthew and Mark could have indicated that James became a follower of Jesus.

If any of these things would make us more confident--and I believe that all of them would--then I don't see how we can possibly claim to be sure beyond a reasonable doubt now.  Their is a lack of perspective in Ehrman's assertion of confidence that I find troubling.

Ehrman's "Did Jesus Exist?" (2); Why would he make that up?

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In the classic South Park episode All About Mormons, Joseph Smith tells various people about the supernatural comings and goings in his life. Not everyone believes him, but those who do say "Sure. Why would he make that up?" I think that the most disappointing thing in Did Jesus Exist is that Bart Ehrman resorts to a similar argument:

Before the Christian movement, there were no Jews who thought that the messiah was going to suffer. Quite the contrary. The crucified Jesus was not invented therefore to provide some kind of mythical fulfillment of Jewish expectation. The single greatest obstacle Christians had when trying to convert Jews was precisely their claim that Jesus had been executed. They would not have made that part up. (Did Jesus Exist? p. 173)

To illustrate the problems with this argument, let's recast it:

Before the Mormon movement, there were no Protestants who thought that there might be undiscovered books of scripture that were every bit as inspired, inerrant, and authoritative as the books of the Bible. Quite the contrary. The single greatest obstacle Mormons had when trying to convert Protestants was precisely their claim that Joseph Smith had found another New Testament of Jesus Christ buried in western New York state written on Golden Plates. They would not have made that part up.

If we must believe that there was a historical reality behind the concept of a crucified messiah because we think the idea would have been absurd and offensive to most Jews of the time, why shouldn't we believe that there was a historical reality behind the Golden Plates?

According to Ehrman this is one of the especially key points that "shows beyond a shadow of reasonable doubt that Jesus must have existed as a Palestinian Jew who was crucified."  (P. 144)  I'm sorry Dr. Ehrman.  I love your stuff, but this can't be a good argument.

In support of this claim, Ehrman makes the very same kind of argument from silence for which he berates the mythicists.  "We do not have a shred of evidence to suggest that any Jews prior to the birth of Christianity anticipated that there would be a future messiah who would be killed for sins--or killed at all--let alone one who would be unceremoniously destroyed by the enemies of the Jews."  (p. 170)  Should we expect to have evidence of what every single Jew prior to the birth of Christianity anticipated?  How could we possibly know such a thing.

Let me suggest what seems to me to be a perfectly plausible scenario. 

There is a devout Jew named Saul living in the first century who really really wants a messiah to come and overthrow the Romans.  Every time he hears about someone claiming to be the messiah, he gets his hopes only to have them dashed when the Romans crush the troublemaker.  He struggles to understand why this keeps happening again and again.  Then one day, a thought pops into his head, "Maybe this is part of God's plan."  He searches through the scriptures and he finds all those same verses that Christians always cite as prophecies of Jesus' passion.  One night he has a dream in which he sees an exalted heavenly being who tells him "I had to suffer for Israel's wrongdoing but now God has raised me up and I'll be coming back to kick some Roman ass."

Voila!  There's your crucified messiah without there having to be any specific historical person behind it.

Do I think that's what happened?  I don't know, but I don't see how we can possibly know beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt that it couldn't have happened.  The scenario that Ehrman and others lay out basically amounts to Jesus' followers stumbling onto the idea of a crucified messiah as a result of grief induced hallucinations that they experienced after his crucifixion.  I find that perfectly plausible.  What I find implausible is the idea that historians can be so sure of what every first century Jew thought as to be certain that no one could have possibly stumbled on the idea in any other way.

Bart Ehrman's "Did Jesus Exist?" (1)

I got my copy of Did Jesus Exist?:  The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth yesterday and I'm enjoying it a lot.   I am happy to say that the article Bart Ehrman wrote for the Huffington Post two weeks ago does not fairly reflect the arguments in the book.  Although he is convinced that Jesus was a historical person, the book does not paint all doubters with nearly as broad a brush as the article.  More importantly, while the article made it sound like historians have a lot more evidence for the existence of Jesus than they really do, I think the book fairly describes the evidence and arguments upon which Ehrman at least is actually relying.  

One of the things I have admired most about Ehrman's books is the way that he lays out the evidence upon which he bases his conclusions.  Even if you disagree with those conclusions, you come away with a good overview of the main points of contention and the arguments that each side is making.  After reading Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, I found that I was able to follow debates between scholars of textual criticisms and ask reasonably intelligent questions.  I think that anyone who reads  Did Jesus Exist? will get similar insights into the historicist/mythicist debates.

Despite my appreciation of the book and Ehrman, I don't think it is going to be enough to push me off the fence of historical Jesus agnosticism.  While Ehrman is reasonably respectful of Robert Price, G.A. Wells, and Richard Carrier, he does make a lot of mythicism look very foolish.  My problem is with his positive arguments for Jesus' existence.  They seem to me to rely far too much on hypothetical reconstructions of the sources behind the gospels using techniques which scholars invented for the specific purpose of reconstructing the sources behind the gospels.  The evidence still seems awfully speculative and conjectural and the arguments somewhat circular.

Ehrman honestly acknowledges that we do not have the kind of sources for Jesus that historians would like to have and he points out correctly that the absence of these sources doesn't disprove Jesus' existence because we wouldn't reasonably expect to have such sources for a person of Jesus' social status.  The upshot of this according to Ehrman is that historians need to find other ways of establishing Jesus' existence.  To me, however, the upshot of not having the kind of sources historians like and not expecting to have them is that we probably shouldn't expect to have a great deal of certainty about the question.  If there is a problem with the application of techniques that are generally accepted as reliable when considering historical questions, how much confidence can we have in techniques that are developed specifically for determining the historicity of stories about Jesus?

There are many mythicists who have been quick to accuse Ehrman of selling out or knuckling under to religious orthodoxy, but I don't see any reason to question his integrity.  I don't think that his conclusions are driven by a vested interest in the existence of a historical Jesus.  I do think, however, that he may be said to have a vested interest in the methodology of New Testament studies and I think he may be overestimating the degree of certainty that can be achieved by the application of those techniques.  I hope to look at some of those techniques in upcoming posts.

To Hume is Ehrman

There are countless blogs and websites (or maybe 46,700) that compare and contrast Bart Ehrman's argument that miracles are inherently the least probable historical explanation for any set of evidence with David Hume's Of Miracles.  Amazingly however, no one else ever seems to have come up with the obvious bad pun.

Ehrman on Paul's Historical Jesus

As I noted, I am not persuaded by conservative scholars attempts to read the historical Jesus of the gospels into Paul's epistles. However, I haven't run across any liberal scholars tackling the issue as thoroughly as I would like. I heard Bart Ehrman say that he sometimes assigns his new students the task of listing everything Paul says that Jesus said and did, and that they are always surprised by how little there is. On the other hand, I haven't heard Ehrman address the implications of that for the question of the historicity of Jesus himself.

I was intrigued to run across the following comment from Ehrman about the dispute that Paul describes having with Peter in his letter to the Galatians:

One can imagine Peter himself saying such a thing to Paul in their controversy in Antioch: "You think you're right because you saw Jesus for a few moments on the road to Damascus? I spent years with him."

I can imagine that very well. What I find much harder to imagine is how no hint of that found its way into any of the epistles.

I occurs to me, however, that the historical Jesus might have had a much shorter ministry than the gospels give him credit for. Perhaps he was a disciple of John the Baptist who started proclaiming John's message after John was beheaded only to be snatched up and executed by the Romans within days of starting out. Perhaps there are no disputes in the epistles about the meaning of what he said because he did not have a chance to say much besides "Repent. The end is near."

Misquoting Ehrman

We can know some things with relative certainty. We can know what Bibles
look liked in the twelfth century. We can know what Christian churches in the
twelfth century, what their Bibles looked like. We can know what Bibles looked
like in some areas in the seventh century. We can know what one community’s
Bible looked like in the fourth century and the farther you get back, the less
you can know. . . . It’s the nature of historical evidence that you have to go
with the evidence if you are going to be a historian and you can’t fill in the
gaps when you don’t have evidence. And in the early period, we not only have
very few manuscripts, but the other striking phenomenon, is that the manuscripts
we have vary from one another far more often in the earlier period than in the
later period. And so the variation is immense and there aren’t very many
manuscripts. So the historical result, whether we like it or not, is that we
just can’t know.

Bart Ehrman in Q&A after debate with Dan Wallace.

I think most people would look at those comments and say, “That sounds pretty reasonable.”

However, the Christian apologist takes a different approach. He pulls the last sentence out, looks at in isolation and says, “Wow! That is like . . . so misleading. It almost sounds as if he’s saying that we that we can’t like . . . know anything. Ya know? I mean, if you’re going to be like . . . that hyper-skeptical, all historical knowledge would in doubt.”

Why do apologists do that?

The problem is that most evangelical Christians spend every Sunday of their lives listening to sermons in which their pastors talk about what the Bible says as if you can be just as certain about the sayings and doings of a first century itinerant preacher as you can about yesterday’s football scores. They hear things like “The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it.” They hear apologists like Josh McDowell and Lee Strobel tell them that the evidence supporting the New Testament is overwhelming. They are told that no rational person would remain unpersuaded by this mountain of evidence but for a willful rejection of God.

The problem isn’t that reading Ehrman gives them a false picture of the uncertainty of the texts. It’s that they have spent their entire lives developing a false sense of certainty about the Bible.

Most apologists will acknowledge that the evangelical clergy has done a poor job of preparing the laity to deal with the issues that Ehrman raises, but they still want to argue that there really isn’t anything in the field of textual criticism that should upset the believer. After all, no essential doctrines are affected. However, if you are a Christian who has spent his entire life looking at the Bible as the exact words that God wanted you to have in order to guide your life and know His purposes, the fact that you can still be confident of the essential doctrines might not be all that comforting.

The reason that apologists spend so much time trying to exaggerate Ehrman’s skepticism is that they think it makes the Bible look better. After all, even if the texts aren’t as reliable as the average believer always thought they were, they still aren’t as bad as he might think based on the imaginary hyper-skeptical epistemology that the apologists have invented and attributed to Ehrman. As an added bonus, the apologist might get to score some cheap points in a debate with Ehrman by getting him to “admit” that he’s not as skeptical as the apologist claimed he was.

White Pays a Visit

James White stopped by to let me know that he thinks I am a jerk, too, and that my comments about his debate with Bart Ehrman prove "that atheists hear only what they want to hear." Just to make things clear, this is what I heard White say on his podcast about Ehrman's refusal to comment on the extent to which the texts of the Koran were corrupted in transmission:

• Ehrman really knows more about the Koran (because he was Chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at UNC) than he is willing to admit, i.e., he is a liar.


• Ehrman criticizes Christian texts without criticizing Islamic texts, i.e., he is a hypocrite.


• Ehrman is a reluctant to offend Muslims by criticizing their texts, i.e., he is a coward.

What I did not hear was any claim that the Koran had any relevance to the topic of the debate: “Can the New Testament Be Inspired In Light of Textual Variations?” All I heard was White’s insinuations about Ehrman’s character.

The Consistency of Dr. James White

Consider the following hypothetical exchange:

Bart: Hey Jim! Your wife is a slut.

Jim: How dare you say that!

Bart: I slept with
her.

Jim: Well how about Tom’s wife. She’s a slut
too.

Bart: Well I never slept with
her.

Jim: Well I have. Trust me. Tom’s wife is a
slut.

Bart: Fine. Both of your wives are
sluts.

Jim: No. You’re wrong. Only Tom’s
wife is a slut. My wife is a free spirit.

Who is being inconsistent here? Bart who only comments on the woman he knows or Jim who thinks that sleeping around only makes someone else’s wife a slut?

Last week, James White and Bart Ehrman had a debate on the textual reliability of the New Testament. White seems to think that he scored some big points because Ehrman was unwilling to discuss the textual reliability of the Koran. “His unwillingness to apply his own hyper-skepticism to anything other than Christianity betrays his deep bias and prejudice.” Of course, Ehrman is not a scholar of the Koran and has not studied its texts. More importantly, the fact that the Koran is not textually reliable would not for a minute effect the reliability of the New Testament.

I think White is a jerk. However, I have no reason to think that his wife is anything other than pure and virtuous.

An Over-the-Top Analogy

In my last post, I opined that that skeptics' reservations about the authorship and transmission of the New Testament texts are no greater than any thinking person's reservations about any other ancient writings. I began thinking about this after reading Jeremy Pierce's post entitled Bart Ehrman's Master Argument on his Parableman blog and I made similar comments there. When I argued that any classical scholar would readily acknowledge the possibility that someone other than Plato could have written Plato, Mr. Pierce suggests an analogy that that is impressive in its audacity:

I was saying that Ehrman's skeptical standard would undermine ordinary knowledge
if you applied it to ordinary cases. Ehrman thinks that you can't know anything
if there's any possibility that your belief is wrong. The mere possibility that
any textual reading we've got was changed with no manuscript evidence of the
original reading is enough for him to say that we have no knowledge of the
original text, even though we've almost certainly got the overwhelming majority
of the original text. I don't think it's very likely that I'm in the Matrix, but
there is that possibility. I can't rule it out for sure. If I applied Ehrman's
standard to that, then I'd have to say that I don't know my wife exists or that
what I remember doing yesterday even happened.

Wow! A skeptic's doubts about the integrity of first century copying is comparable to believing that people live in pods providing nutrition for machines. That seems like quite a stretch, even for apologetics.

What I think Mr. Pierce misses here is that certainty and skepticism are functions of the available evidence. When a classicist speaks of being "confident" that something was written by Plato, we don’t interpret him as meaning the same thing as a Civil War historian who is "confident" that Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address. With Plato, we cannot fix the day and time that any particular work was first made public. We cannot trace Plato’s movements in the preceding days. We have no reports from contemporaries who saw him working on it or who discussed it with him. A scholar’s confidence that Plato wrote some particular work is not confidence in any absolute sense, but confidence relative to the surety we can have about anything that happened that long ago.

To be skeptical about whether or not Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address may start to implicate some Matrix-like doubts about our ability to know anything about the past. However, to acknowledge the limitations of our knowledge of who wrote Plato or the New Testament, or how the manuscripts might have been altered during transmission is nothing more than mere rationality. The evidence that Mr. Pierce's wife exists is (I suspect) substantially greater than the evidence that the New Testaments writings were not corrupted during copying in the first couple centuries after they were written.

A Double Standard

As anyone who has followed this blog will notice, I am a fan of Bart Erhman. I have read several of his books and listened to several of his Great Courses from The Teaching Company. Perhaps I identify with him because we are close in age and I also became a born-again Christian in my teens although I did not stick with it as long as he did. When he was studying at the Moody Bible Institute, I was a regular listener of their radio station WMBI. I was attending DePaul University at the time and I often would hop off the el or subway at Chicago Street to browse in Moody's bookstore when shuttling between DePaul's Loop and Lincoln Park campuses. In addition to blogging about Dr. Erhman, I frequently comment on other blogs where his works are discussed.


One of the things that evangelical Christians complain about is Ehrman's claim that there are more variants in the New Testament manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament itself. The Christians complain that he is just being provocative and that this is misleading because most of the variants have no effect on the meaning of the text. Well I will admit that Ehrman describes the number of variants this way for dramatic effect, but even conservative scholars admit that this is true. Moreover, Ehrman consistently qualifies his statement by acknowledging that the overwhelming majority of the variants are trivial.


On the other hand, conservative scholars and apologists like to talk about the sheer number of New Testament manuscripts to achieve the same sort of effect that Ehrman seeks with the sheer number of variants. However, in my experience, the Christians are much less likely to qualify their claim by acknowledging that 85% of those manuscripts date from more than 1000 years after the original. Some do, but most do not.

Climbing that Mountain

This post is part of a dialogue that I have been having with Tim Ricchuitti at If I Were a Bell, I'd Ring.

Back when I was practicing law in Chicago, I learned something about how to handle evidence that makes your client look bad. You don’t want to simply deny everything because it will be obvious that your client is lying. You want to admit the truth of as much of the damning evidence as possible to make it look like your client is being honest about his failings. Then you concentrate on finding those few crucial points upon which your opponent’s case hangs and you come up with a good story to counter them. Happily, I no longer practice law in Chicago.

So I think the fact that the letter to the Galatians still reflects Paul’s anger is not enough to establish that it is free from tampering. Suppose that the letter first went to Antioch where it fell into the hands of an elder named Flabulus. He reads the letter and realizes that it will be devastating for his friend Festivus, who is a leader of the church in Iconium. Flabulus realizes that Festivus is a terrible theologian but he thinks that he is a much better leader than his opponents would be. He is sure that Paul would not want to see Festivus ousted if he knew how badly the new leaders would take advantage of the congregation. He knows that he cannot make the letter congratulatory, but he finds a way to alter the letter to make the other side look as bad as his friend. Is this probable? Certainly not. Is it possible? I think so.

On the other hand, perhaps Flabulus is one of those people who can sit in the front pew every week (and I know the Galatians didn’t have pews) listening to sermon after sermon about the evils of sin without once thinking that any of it applies to him. When he reads Paul’s letter, he says “My goodness! Paul certainly is angry with the church in Iconium.” While copying the letter, it occurs to him that someone who did not know better might think that Paul was mad at the believers in Antioch. Flabulus is sure that Paul would not want anyone to make that mistake so he takes it upon himself to edit those portions that might be interpreted as pointing at his congregation. Once again, it’s not probable, but it’s possible.

At the Greer-Heard conference, Dan Wallace stressed the idea that we have to think in terms of probability, but I don’t find that all that helpful. Suppose for example that there is a 95% chance that the first copyist of Galatians faithfully and accurately captured Paul’s meaning and intent and only a 5% chance that any of the intentional or unintentional problems occurred. At that rate, there is only a 70% chance that the letter came through unscathed after all seven churches had copied it and passed it along. (It would of course be better if the churches kept the copies and passed along the original.) These are admittedly quite arbitrary numbers, but the point is that even if the odds of a bad result are pretty small on any given copy, the chance of one occuring increases as the process is repeated. The roulette wheel in a casino has thirty-six out of thirty-eight numbers upon which the customer wins, but the zero and double zero come up often enough that the house is always a winner at the end of the night.

Tim Ricchuiti notes that “The transmission history we see attests to the stability of the copying.” This may be true, but can we extrapolate from the period we see to the period we don’t see? The period we don’t see is the period during which the vast majority of variants were created, which already tells us that it did not have the same stability as the later period. Writing in the early third century, Origen warned about the transmission during that earlier period:

The differences among the manuscripts have become great either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; the neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please.

Cited in Misquoting Jesus p. 52.

The transmission history we see comes from the period after Constantine, when orthodox Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire, while the history we don’t see comes from a period in which Christianity was a persecuted religion composed of various sects battling over who truly understood Jesus’ message. This was also the period of the forgeries. As early as 2 Thessalonians, Paul warned that someone was attaching his name to letters that he did not write. Some scholars believe that 2 Thessalonians itself was such a letter. The Pauline authorship of many letters in the New Testament is questioned and there were many more forgeries that never made it into the New Testament. The period of the variants was the period of the Gnostic texts, the Marcionite texts, and various other heretical texts. It was also the period of many apocryphal texts that were nonetheless orthodox.

At the Greer-Heard forum, Bart Ehrman said we are as close as we can hope to be to what we might imagine as the original text . . . and we have no hope of getting any closer in the future than we are already now. We have no evidence that can get us further back then we have already gotten . . . .” Tim offers the analogy “that we're 200 feet away from the summit of Everest. And some of us are turning around and going back!” I would like to take that analogy a little farther.

I tend to think that we are still 1000 feet from the summit although that’s not bad since it means that we have successfully climbed 28,000. But it is not really the distance left to the summit that is the problem. It is the fact that we can see that the terrain we have to cover is much worse than the terrain that we covered up until now. It is the fact that the difficulty increases exponentially the farther up we get. The next 500 feet is going to be harder than the first 28,000 were and the next 100 feet after that will be harder still. On top of that, the weather is turning against us and we have used all the oxygen we brought with us and have no way to get anymore. In short, there are some very compelling reasons to think that we have gotten as far as it is reasonable to think we can go.

Obviously, the optimists want to push on, but I would use the Everest analogy to sound one more note of caution. If you push on without the pessimists, you lose an important check. Without a Bart Ehrman to challenge your conclusions, it may be tempting for the optimists to believe that they are making a lot more progress than they are really making. When all the climbers are convinced that they can make it to the top, they may end up convincing each other that they have covered another 50 feet when it is really only five.

Student of Wallace v. Fan of Ehrman

This is a response to Tim Riucchuiti who responded to my last post on If I Were A Bell, I'd Ring.

Thanks for responding Tim. I realize that I can get a little bombastic. I would also like to note that I was not impressed by Bart Ehrman’s opening presentation either. It really did seem like nothing more than a rehash of Misquoting Jesus. Given the audience, it is hard for me to believe that he couldn’t have provided some more challenging insights. However, I really did not feel like Dan Wallace’s presentation provided any deeper insights than popular apologetics.

As a skeptic (and even when I was an evangelical Christian in my late teens), I have always seen the lack of evidence from the earliest days of Christianity as the challenge that apologetics most fails to meet. To quote Ehrman, “We just don’t know.” I thought it significant that both members of Wallace’s team noted both the scarcity of evidence and the higher rate of variants during that period. Michael Holmes said that the first century years of any document are the time when alterations are disruptions are most likely to arise. William Warren noted that during this period the scribes were not professionals and they did not recognize what they were copying as being canonical documents.

This is why I thought that Ehrman’s first response to Wallace got to the heart of the matter. For Galatians as well as at least 60% of the New Testament verses, we have no evidence at all. This is the period when the documents were being copied by less skilled scribes with increased probability of errors. It is the period when Christians were still developing their understanding of the life and death of Jesus, increasing the possibility that variants could arise because copyists did not understand the meaning of what they were copying. This is also the period when the copyists did not see what they were copying as canonical documents increasing the possibility that they would feel free to make a change if they thought that it improved the text.

One of the things I would have liked to seen better developed is the distinction between the known variants in the manuscripts we have and the unknown variants that arose during that first century after composition for which we have so little evidence. When Wallace asserts that none of the variants affect essential Christian doctrines he is only talking about the known variants. Regarding the unknown variants, he can only say that he thinks it is probable that they would not affect any essential Christian doctrines. For me, the implication of the existence of unknown variants is the crux of the problem and I don’t think that Wallace addressed it.

My problem with the “telephone game” analogy is that I think Ehrman made it clear that he was not talking about that level of distortion. I thought that one of his most interesting examples came in his closing remarks when he talked about Luke 22:19 where Jesus says “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.” Ehrman suggested that the “for you” was a scribal addition intended to impose the doctrine of substitutionary atonement on Luke. While I don’t claim to know whether Ehrman is interpreting this correctly, I think it does illustrate that it only takes the addition or subtraction of a few words to significantly change the way a passage or even a whole book should be read.

Ehrman also pointed out that the single word “not” can completely change the interpretation of a passage and I can give you a modern example of this. In Why I Believe the New Testament is Historically Reliable, Gary Habermas argues that "The sort of thoroughgoing propaganda literature that some critics believe the Gospels to be was actually nonexistent in ancient times. Sherwin-White declares, 'We are not acquainted with this type of writing in ancient historiography.'" The problem is that A.N. Sherwin-White said the exact opposite. He wrote that "we are not unacquainted with this type of writing."(emphasis added) Roman Law and Roman Society in the New Testament p. 189. He was saying that historians were familiar with such propaganda and able to deal with the distortions that characterized these types of writings. I don’t know how Habermas came to make this error, but it did not take anything like a “telephone game” distortion for him to completely change the meaning of the passage.

I think that the telephone game analogy was a straw man in large part because I don’t think that the distinctions Wallace drew between it and the textual transmission of the New Testament really address any of the problems created by the early copying. For example, textual critics cannot go back to manuscripts and multiple streams in the first and second century, when the text was most at risk, because the evidence is not available. Wallace cited the witness of the apostolic fathers, but one of the things that Michael Holmes noted is that the early fathers like Ignatius and Justin Martyr did not cite things in a form that allows any firm conclusions about the texts they were citing. The factors cited by Wallace might avoid telephone game like distortions in the later manuscripts, but I don’t think they help much for the early period.

I think it is important to distinguish between the first century A.D. and the first century after the writing of the New Testament, which is in fact, the second century A.D. There were several times that speakers mixed both modes of speaking, as in one of Michael Holmes comments.

With the 15 percent from the 1st millennium of the text’s existence, the closer in time that you get to the origins of the New Testament, the more scarce the manuscript evidence becomes, and indeed, for the first century or more after its compositions, from roughly the end of the late first century to the beginning of the third century we have almost no manuscript evidence for any of the New Testament Documents and for some books the gap extends to two centuries or more.

In fact, Holmes critiqued three scholars who thought that more could be known about the early texts than the evidence warranted.

I don’t think it is accurate to say, as you do, that “[t]o believe that something other than that conservation in later scribal practices was happening in the 1st century is to ignore all available evidence in favor of an argument from silence.” I thought that several affirmative reasons were offered to raise concerns about the earlier scribal practices. Ehrman pointed out that the rate of variants for the second century manuscripts we do have is higher. Holmes pointed out Origen’s complaints about poor practices among early scribes. He also pointed out that the citations in Clement’s letter to the Corinthians in 95 A.D. already reflect fluidity in the texts of Paul’s letters. Warren noted that the earliest copyists would not have viewed themselves as copying canonical scripture. It would of course be wrong to say that all the scholars agreed about the implications of these problems, but I think they all recognized their existence.

That is why I was dissatisfied that Wallace discussed of the number of manuscripts from within the first three hundred years of the originals without discussing the unique problems posed by the earliest period. You might argue as Warren and Holmes did that these impediments should not cause despair. On the other hand, you might argue as Ehrman did that historical methods are unable to overcome this uncertainty. However, I felt that Wallace simply glossed over the problems.

Regarding the idea of conspiracy in the scribal corruption, I still think this is a red herring. Here is what Ed Komoszewski had to say about it:

Vinny, I think you need to read Misquoting Jesus and Lost Christianities again.
Ehrman clearly sees the proto-orthodox doing something with the text that was
not out in the open. Further, he hints here and there that they would have
suppressed the heterodox manuscripts. These two points in combination suggest a
soft conspiracy.

Well, I have been reading them again and I am not finding it.

In Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scriptures and Faiths We Never Knew, Ehrman writes about the battles between the version of Christianity that eventually came to be accepted as orthodox and the various other beliefs that were rejected as heresies. The major front in this battle was the polemics of writers like Irenaeous in his book Against Heresies. Ehrman believes that many of the textual variants he discusses in Misquoting Jesus were inserted in the New Testament as a result of these battles, but I don’t find anything alleging a conspiracy, even a soft one. In a sense, the textual variants were collateral damage from the battles rather than a planned attack. However, even if Ehrman had alleged proto-orthodox conspiracy and control, I cannot see why it would matter that Islam had pulled off a similar scheme more effectively several centuries later. Perhaps the Caliphs decided not to make the same mistakes that the early church had made.

I cannot argue with your assessment of Ehrman’s opening statement and you are certainly in a better position to judge who won the weekend. However, as a reasonably thoughtful skeptic, I can tell you that Wallace’s presentation did not make any points that I felt warranted a prolonged response. On the other hand, I thought Ehrman’s discussion of the 150 years before our first copy of Galatians really highlighted the problems that needed to be addressed. I found it interesting that both Wallace’s team members, Warren and Holmes, addressed these problems and neither of them seemed to have any factual disputes with Ehrman in the discussions that followed.