Posted: Jun 07, 2021 9:44 am
Stein wrote: No, I don't have any personal acquaintance with Bart Ehrman, for instance. But I can recognize him as a worthy scrupulous historian. He has received all the flak from religious bigots my father's colleagues received, and then some. When someone like him stoutly maintains that Jesus was a simple mortal, and that J was also historical, that is NOT said to please the church or anyone remotely affiliated with it. It is a statement of the utmost integrity.
What Ehrman says about his own opinion on the historicity of Jesus, and the forgery of Christian manuscripts is fine. He is entitled to it. So is everyone. The problem is that Ehrman also has the opinion that those who deny the historicity of Jesus are comparable to "holocaust deniers". Hyperbolic. He equates an evaluation of evidence from antiquity (whether the NT Jesus existed) with an evaluation of evidence from the 20th century (whether a holocaust occurred). This kind of exposes Bart's understanding and evaluation of available historical evidence. This is not a sound comparison.
Bart and others are also not identifying all the evidence when they claim that mythicism only appeared in the 17th/18th/19th century. They claim it is a modern invention. But they don't mention the negative evidence such as the laws of blasphemy or indeed the "Index of Prohibited Books" run by the utterly corrupt Vatican church industry.
As much as we are amateur historians we should be prepared to admit that our conclusions can only ever be hypothetical and provisional.