Bart Ehrman destroys Christianity in under 12 minutes.

[Aractus]

I have see that video before and also read "Jesus Existed" Where as you don't have the attention span to watch a whole 12 minute video. So don't go pretending to be an expert on something you don't know anything about. I mean that happens on these forums on a daily basis, but it's particularly agregious when you proclaim so proudly that you didn't even bother to watch all of something and then proclaim yourself an expert.

Like I said before, his claim of systemic alterations is not backed up by any scholarship - not even his own. If you think you can disprove that go right ahead.

You have a very, very weak grasp of scholarship. I'll retract what I said about him not being a textual critic, he is, but in saying that he has no evidence for the view put forward that the originals were substantially different to what we have today - and he can't even win a debate on it against someone who isn't a textual critic such as Wallace. And alas I was using the term incorrectly anyway: Bart is qualified to look at Greek Manuscripts and make a decision about what he thinks the original wording is, but he isn't qualified to make observations in other areas of textual criticism, such as hypothesising that somebody else wrote 'section x' of Mark (which is why you will not find anything about that written by him published in an academic Journal). But let me ask you this, if Bart is so passionate about it, then why did he write this about the ~2012 discovery of Mummy-Mask Manuscripts?

One of the things that I find disconcerting about all the discussion about whether it is legitimate to destroy mummy masks in order to get NT papyri is that the only people who seem to know anything about what has been found (this alleged first century copy of the Gospel of Mark) are not experts in the specific fields in which expertise is required, both to dismantle masks and to date papyri.   As it turns out, they’re all friends of mine.  Craig Evans is a New Testament scholar, but he is not a textual critic, let alone a papyrologist (expert in papyri) or palaeographer (expert in dating manuscripts).   Dan Wallace, who first announced the discovery in a debate against me over two years ago, is in the same boat; he’s done lots of good for the academy by going around the world to photograph/digitize manuscripts, but he is not trained in either papyrology or palaeography and is expert in neither.  My oldest friend in the field, a good friend for some thirty years now, Michael Holmes, is, as Craig told us in his response to the criticism, the person in charge of textual research for the Green Scholars Initiative (the group behind the destruction and discovery) (and is on this Blog!), and even though he is one of the leading textual critics in North America, he too is not trained or expert in papyrology or palaeography.   Why don’t we have an expert tell us what’s going on???

http://ehrmanblog.org/an-expert-talks-ab...nd-papyri/

Elsewhere he also explains how "outraged" he is that his "friends and colleagues" are going about destroying ancient artefacts in order to retrieve the NT manuscripts they contain. Now let me break this down for a moment, the whole saga is currently shrouded in secrecy due to the team working on it being under gag orders (a contract with the owners preventing them from discussing the event). Now that's not unusual, the only reason we know anything about these manuscripts is because Wallace "accidentally" let it slip. They will eventually be published and catalogued, which was meant to have already happened, but clearly not. Yes some people probably would be shocked by this, and that's why they're under a gag-order: you don't really want to tell people how many mask you've destroyed in an effort to find NT manuscripts, and how much "junk" you were left over with, and you especially don't want to tell people about it if you don't find anything at all.

But look at the criticisms he levels at the other scholars. Yes they're not all textual critics, but they don't claim to be (and as he mentioned himself Holmes is). In fact between them they do have a combination of expertise, and yet we don't know who else is working on the project to expand that base of expertise. Yet he has no problem in criticising them all, and acting horrified that the masks are being destroyed. These are not the actions of a rational, sensible, textual scholar. Any decent textual critic would be far more interested in the NT manuscripts that exist than in the ordinary papyrus masks that all look identical and have no interesting features anyway (well, mildly interesting to Egyptologists perhaps, but not at all interesting to NT scholars).