Baker Academic

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Getting into the Holiday Spirit with Bart Ehrman


Say what you will about Ehrman, he is always an interesting read:

What Do We Really Know About Jesus?

Expect more of the same in the next few weeks... tis the season.

-anthony

7 comments:

  1. Erhman concludes: "...the lives of those who believe that 
stories such as these can convey a 
greater truth."

    These are surprisingly theological keystrokes!

    -anthony

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  2. Bart is interesting? Only on this site do I find Santa Claus compared to Rowdy Roddy Piper.

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    1. Santa and Piper are my two favorite icons.

      -anthony

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    2. "favorite icons"

      Sinai Christ for me.

      One of the greatest artworks of all time imo, and surely the original "Constructed Jesus" (left and right sides of His face are completely different, and were probably independently conceived as wholes to get the diametrically opposed expressions)


      one can only hope & pray that this He meets you in the middle of the air

      http://imageshack.us/a/img833/3703/81810777.jpg



      and one DOES NOT want to be judged by this Him

      http://imageshack.us/a/img405/4116/44925654.jpg

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  3. talking about the red-nosed, heretic-punching, gift-giving fatty, there was a great deal (still is in fact) on canadian amazon for ehrman's latest 1 kilo tome so I took it & am currently tracking its progress on Santa Radar (07:10:00 AM Cincinnati Hub OH US Sleigh Arrival Scan)

    looking forward to reading it, and blogosphere deconstructions of it, while sipping some sugary xmassy stuff sitting all bundled up beside my crackling seventeen-inch ersatz fireplace..........

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  4. "The accounts of Jesus’ life in the New Testament have never been called “histories”; instead, they have always been known as ­“Gospels”—that is “proclamations of the good news". These are books that meant to declare religious truths, not historical facts" - Ehrman.

    -VS-

    "The nature of the traditions — as soon as we consider them outside the perspective the form critics brought to them — shows that they made reference to the real past history of Jesus. The fact that this is stated in the excellent textbook The Historical Jesus, by Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz,shows how far the mainstream of Gospels scholarship has moved since the heyday of form criticism. The early Christian movement was interested in the genuinely past history of Jesus because they regarded it as religiously relevant...It was left to the Gospel writers to integrate their testimonies into biographies (bioi) of Jesus." - Richard Bauckham

    BTW - meteorologists tell us that it NEVER snows in June, ever.

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    Replies
    1. Well ... not that I want to be accused of harmonizing, but there's a difference between saying that the Gospels did not intend to "declare" historical facts, and that the Gospels "made reference" to real past history, or that early Christians were "interested" in genuine past history. Ehrman believes that the Gospels are our best historical record of Jesus, and that a careful analysis of the Gospels reveals historical truth. I don't know Bauckham all that well, but I doubt he believes that everything in the Gospels is historical fact.

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