RE: What were Jesus and early Christians like?
March 4, 2015 at 9:33 am
(This post was last modified: March 4, 2015 at 9:48 am by Anomalocaris.)
(March 3, 2015 at 11:28 pm)Minimalist Wrote: Ehrman's problem is that all he can trot out are the fucking gospel which he has made a career of trashing. He doesn't get to turn around now and claim they are reliable.
An analogy I've used is that he has spent 20 years shitting in the same small pond and now wants to say "but, here....here is a clean spot you can drink from."
No, for 20 years he didn't shit in the pond. A better analogy would be he spent 20 years analyzing the content of the pond and found high concentrations of decomposed feces. He announced so. He analyzed the germs that did the decomposing to determine what the turd was like when first laid into the pound. He also announced that. Now he is trying to reconstruct from the deduced properties of the fresh shit whether one animal laid the shit at the beginning and what some of the traits of the animal must have been.
The fact that christians think the pound is rose water glittered into existence by magic unicorns does not mean one could not say there really was an animal that laid the turd that spoiled the pound.
You may disagree and think there really wasn't an original turd, only lots of bacteria churning away, that made the pond what it is today. But that is not the challenge you are posing to him. You are saying since it ain't no rose water, there ain't no unicorn.
One learns more by trying to find out whether and what animals laid the shit to stimulate bacterial activity than simply stopping at there ain't no unicorn.
