Nothing new under the sun....

This scholar is pretty well known in biblical circles. He is very good at cutting down very deep, complex ideas and expressing them in a probing question. He believes most of the New Testament to be a forgery and claims the Resurrection never took place. His new book Jesus, Interrupted is a current best-seller.



A refutation of some of his claims:

1. NT a forgery- this one has been brought up before, church fathers distorted and excised parts of the Bible they did not like and formed our current canon long after Christs life.

-Simply not true. P52, the famed Ryland's Papyrus, is a fragment of a codex, or ancient book, dated from 90 AD to no later than 150 AD. It was found in Egypt. It contains John 18:31-33 on one side and 37-38 on the back. The 90 AD date seems most likely and if that is the case, that coupled with the fact that it seems that the 4th Gospel was in Egypt by the end of the 1st century, would affirm its very early acceptance as "canon". The Gospel of John is uniformly believed to have been the last Gospel written and then accepted as canon. This would mean that an early acceptance of John, which presents Jesus as divine, was understood among 1st century Christians. It was not the formulation of church fathers hundreds of years later. The second fact of the the fragment being from a Codex shows a clear break from Judaism (Jews used scrolls) just like what we see emerging in Acts and Paul's letters.



2. The Resurrection never happened. This has been floating around since the Resurrection.

- I really do not have enough space or time to really cover this. To really understand this, you need to study the Gospels and Paul's confessions. A few quick notes:

- Paul's letters are the earliest Christian writings. They pre-date the Gospels by a decade or more. Galatians is thought to be the earliest and contains what is the very first written account of the Resurrected Jesus appearing to some one. Simply writing off the resurrection appearances as visions is bad scholarship when viewing the complete context of scripture. The earliest Christians had nothing to gain by believing in Jesus and spreading the word. Paul's writings are certainly not the ramblings of a mad-man or one experiencing "visions" he has a deep understanding of theology and is able to string together complex religious systems into a coherent terms while making comparisons to known Roman and Greek customs (justification, logos, and adoption). Paul is not some back water hick claiming revelation and coming across as crazy, he is a very intelligent and well educated individual who knew he had experienced something profound. His testimony is the most important of all.
- Church tradition as far back as the end of the 1st century (Poycarp) , upholds that the twelve were subjected to torture and death, one does not endure such for doubtful visions or lies.

In the end Dr. Ehrman comes at the information from a bias. He has let his negative influences compromise his objectivity. Luke/Acts has been shown time and again to be one of the best ancient histories in existence, verified by several archaeological discoveries. You need to know that Ehrman is a fringe scholar and his beliefs, especially the conspiracy of Church Fathers to form their own Jesus, is not held by serious scholarship. The Dan Brownaphiles will no doubt embrace his stance but they need to be aware that he himself ignores empirical evidence to the origin of Christian beliefs.

If you want serious scholarship on the subject of NT reliability, evolution of Church thought, etc, any book by F.F. Bruce will suffice.