Bart Ehrman destroys Christianity in under 12 minutes.

[Jehanne]

It's a great video; anyone who watches/listens to this video cannot possibly have any confidence in "Biblical" Christianity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9US4OxB0Dk

So, "believers", what say you?

[The Valkyrie]

You know that the refutation will be, "Jebus!!", or, "The Bible says..."

[Jehanne]

You know that the refutation will be, "Jebus!!", or, "The Bible says..."

The actual video is under 10 minutes; two minutes of "darkness" at the end.  Not sure if that was a mistake or was deliberate.

[Minimalist]

So, "believers", what say you?

Let's see.... some combination of of the above and "he just hates god."

They don't have too many tools in their kit, you know.

[dom.donald]

Actually, I am quite surprised at how small the differences are between the gospels. I don't know enough about it to know if the gospels were written "independently" i.e. how far removed the author of the second gospel was from the readers of the first, and so on. I think most people accept these inaccuracies and differences because they know that they're inevitable. What people are looking for is a general agreement, so if one person told you something happened on a certain day, but someone else told you something happened on the next day, this would be generally acceptable (unless the date itself is critical). Most people would expect some stories to add detail, others to change or be devoid of detail. People read the patchwork and make a quilt. That seems reasonable, in daily life.

So quibbling over small details doesn't seem very helpful.

What is fascinating is what the original story might have been, where all the supernatural elements came from (previous prophesies, other religions), and how the two were combined.. by whom, when, and for what purpose exactly.

At the end of the day, *something* happened that was worth talking about. It would be fascinating to know if it was a tiny insignificant thing that was blown out of proportion by one or two people - and then it went viral (just like on the internet today), or whether there was any substance to the story that was worth talking about in the first place. And then, who put the supernatural stuff in - was that just people saying "oh yeah, that could've been this or that", or was it contrived by a few powerful literate people?

I am an atheist and am not sure if I believe a character called Jesus ever existed. I certainly don't believe anything miraculous or supernatural happened. Still fascinating though.

[robvalue]

No, they weren't written independently. Mark was the original account (which amusingly did not contain the resurrection; this was later forged onto the end of it). Matthew came later and heavily cribbed off of Mark, then Luke came and did the same. None are believed to be eye witnesses. When read in this order (not the order they appear in the bible) it becomes apparent that the story was becoming more and more embellished over time.

John, written much later, was just a new piece of propaganda loosely based on the other 3.

[Minimalist]

I think most people accept these inaccuracies and differences because they know that they're inevitable.

Talk to some bible inerrantists to see how wrong you are.

[Foxaèr]

Theists are the tools for the loss of capable thinking.

[ignoramus]

I watched the vid. Isn't it amazing that you need highly educated people/historians to state the bleeding obvious!
I suppose he needs to spell it out so it may sink in ...Sadly, this won't change a thing because theists will always resort to the defensive.
They will need proof that any of this shite "didn't" happen. While there's an infinitely small chance that their skyfairy may be real, they'll cling onto it like superglue.

[Aractus]

It's a great video; anyone who watches/listens to this video cannot possibly have any confidence in "Biblical" Christianity:

No, there's hardly anything (at least in the first 4 or 5 minutes I just listened to) that Christians would need to be worried over. Ehrman 's hypotheses are well outside of mainstream scholarship, and much of what he focuses on in these rants are well outside his area of expertise. Bart's idea of systemic textual recension of the gospels is all but disproved by now. Yes the Pentateuch's systemic textual recension is (conversely) all but an accepted fact, but I don't think people understand that is based on textual scholarship of the OT writings, whereas NT textual scholarship (which is not Bart's area anyway) discredits this idea on its own - with only a handful of exceptions (Mark 16:9-20 as an example). It's certainly not systemic as is claimed by Bart, that fact alone is disproved by the second century manuscripts that exist of Luke and John. If they had been systemically modified where are the earlier editions? Or in absense of this, where is the textual scholarship that has identified the hand of multiple authors as is the case with the Pentateuch. If they haven't found it now, in Greek a relatively easy language to study being that it's a language still used today, and yet scholars can identify it in the Pentateuch written in Hebrew - which is one of the most difficult languages of the ancient world to decipher, then they aren't going to find it.

He's a scholar. He should be able to point to evidence for his claims, that should be no problem for him if his claims have a basis in modern scholarship. But wouldn't you know it, he never does. He behaves as if he's his own evidence: but he isn't qualified to make those assessments of Greek anyway! By that what I mean is that it's not his area of study, and he hasn't published any peer-review literature on THAT topic. He's published things to do with early Christianity and Paul, and on that he is qualified.

Here's a comment from another scholar (Dr Ben Witherington) which perfectly captures what I think about Bart:

"If only he could be equally honest and admit that in his scholarship he is trying now to deconstruct orthodox Christianity which he once embraced, rather than do 'value-neutral' text criticism. In my own view, he has attempted this deconstruction on the basis of very flimsy evidence-- textual variants which do not prove what he wants them to prove."