Administrator’s Note: More than 530 comments have been posted to our original post regarding Bart Ehrman-- making that page too long for some computers to download and display quickly and properly. Therefore, we are not allowing any new comments to be added to the original post. Please use this page to…
Such good irony.
I can’t help but shake my head at the many Christians who are temporarily putting on their Skeptic Hats to deal with a bold claim by a Discovery Channel documentary. That documentary is claiming that a tomb discovered in Israel in 1980 held the bones of Jesus. If true, the documentary’s claim would conflict with the alleged resurrection of Jesus.
[Note: there is controversy about the resurrection, based upon the original writings from the Gospel according to Mark]
Ebonmuse, an atheist, has pointed out many reasons to doubt the claims of the television documentary that the tomb discovered in 1980 was the tomb of Jesus. He concludes:
I believe the most likely scenario is that this is a genuine tomb from biblical times, containing several ordinary people with names common from the time, which has been hyped beyond what the evidence supports by overzealous filmmakers trying to create a sensation. It is not a magic bullet to destroy Christianity . . .
Based upon the points raised in his article, I agree Ebonmuse. For those same reasons, I agree with the many Christians who are now attacking the Discovery Channel documentary. There are, indeed, many good reasons to doubt these claims. It’s fun to engage in skeptical inquiry, marching side-by-side with devout Christian believers for a change!
No sooner are they finished criticizing the claim about the tomb of Jesus, though, you can hear many of these same believers asserting, as undeniable facts, all of those ancient …
My earlier post regarding Bart Ehrman was not meant to provoke in an outrageous way, although I suspected that it might distress some people. That post drew much more traffic than we are used to at the site, approximately 25,000 unique visitors in three days. It also pulled in more than 200 comments. I was intrigued by the nature of the comments, especially those comments written by people who ostensibly disapproved of Ehrman’s work or his conclusions. In fact, I did a small informal analysis based upon the comments posted by last night (I believe there were about 150 comments posted at that time).
I need to state at the outset that there were more than a few Believers among the commenters who appreciated and even applauded Ehrman’s work. Some of these Believers specifically stated that even if Ehrman was correct, they could still believe in God and Jesus, they could still be good Christians and they found that Ehrman’s work had enriched their understanding of the Bible. My criticism of the distressed commenters is not directed toward these people.
Approximately 35 of the comments were written by people who appeared to be distressed or dismayed by Ehrman’s work. Notably, only three of those commenters acknowledged the basic points made by Ehrman.
What were Ehrman’s basic points? That earlier manuscripts did not contain some information that was contained in some of the later manuscripts that were ultimately adopted part of “the Bible.” Therefore, the new material found in later writings …
How often do we hear people “explaining” religious beliefs by stating “The Bible says so,” as if the Bible fell out of the sky, pre-translated to English by God Himself? It’s not that simple, according to an impressive and clearly-written book that should be required reading for anyone who claims to know “what the Bible says.”
The 2005 bestseller, Misquoting Jesus, was not written by a raving atheist. Rather, it was written by a fellow who had a born-again experience in high school, then went on to attend the ultraconservative Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Bart Ehrman didn’t stop there, however. He wanted to become an evangelical voice with credentials that would enable him to teach in secular settings. It was for this reason that he continued his education at Wheaton and, eventually, Princeton, picking up the ability to read the New Testament in its original Greek in the process.
As a result of his disciplined study, Ehrman increasingly questioned the fundamentalist approach that the “Bible is the inerrant Word of God. It contains no mistakes.” Through his studies, Ehrman determined that the Bible was not free of mistakes:
We have only error ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways.
(Page 7). At Princeton, Ehrman learned that mistakes had been made in the copying of the New Testament over the centuries. Upon realizing this, …
I can’t get enough of Way of the Master Ministries. Way of the Master’s Biblical Evangelical movement, hosted in website, radio, and television format by former child actor Kirk Cameron and evangelist Ray Comfort, have swept internet culture recently, appearing in nearly equal footing on freethinking and faithful websites alike. Apparently, many other people get a kick out of Comfort and Cameron’s teachings, too; as of this February, Way of the Master has not only “witnessed” to tens of thousands of potential sheep, but the website’s evangelical methods have enrolled over 6,500 eager “students”.
Way of the Master’s gimmick hinges on its oddly friendly use of guilt and fear– like the fire-and-brimstone preachers of old, but nowhere near as menacing as “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The website opens with this introduction by Cameron:
“Did you know that every day 150,000 people die? People just like you and me. Every twenty-four hours, 150,000 people pass from time into eternity. Do you ever think about that? Isn’t there something within you that says, ‘I don’t want to die!’? That is your God-given will to live. And we hope you listen to it, because we make some big claims on this site…”
Ray Comfort’s personal website, Living Waters, runs a constant counter of people who have died since you have opened up his page. Comfort also reminds us that, “The vast majority of those people are entering Hell.” These warm, fuzzy Christian thoughts prove …