Why Bart Ehrman Pisses Me Off..... sometimes

[Minimalist]

So you are putting the clearing the money-lenders out of the temple tale into the Utter Bullshit category.  Yes?

[Anomalocaris]

So you are putting the clearing the money-lenders out of the temple tale into the Utter Bullshit category.  Yes?

I put it in the category of blubber looking thing so salted as to be unsafe to eat. But there could have been some small piece of real blubber there.

[vorlon13]

Knocking over tables and chasing people with a whip is one of my favorite Jesus things.

And yet in our modern era, no mainline denom or church incorporates a whip into their liturgy.  Looks like I've identified another instance of "they're not doing it right" !!

[Anomalocaris]

Down boy! Down!

[Cyberman]

So you are putting the clearing the money-lenders out of the temple tale into the Utter Bullshit category.  Yes?

I put it in the category of blubber looking thing so salted as to be unsafe to eat. But there could have been some small piece of real blubber there.

Yet so mundane as to be inconsequential. Using the same criteria for reportage, we would see the astonishing comic book adventures of Clark Kent (Look, across the street - it's an accountant! It's a solicitor! No; it's Clark Kent, jobbing newspaper reporter! "You'll believe a man can take a dead-end 9 to 5 job to pay his rent!")

How about Peter Parker, the amazing Man-Man?

Or my favourite, the incredible Visible Man.

[Minimalist]

Knocking over tables and chasing people with a whip is one of my favorite Jesus things.

And yet in our modern era, no mainline denom or church incorporates a whip into their liturgy.  Looks like I've identified another instance of "they're not doing it right" !!

You're not looking hard enough, V.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morn...fa4e3d2f3a

Minn. pastor beat boy, 12, with electrical cord because child ‘wanted to test God,’ police say

The crazy motherfuckers are out there.

[GUBU]

Straw man about the math.

Why would you stake your larger position on asserting something to have not happened that is plausible, and who actual occurrence can not be verified one way or another because evidence that can conceivably gathered would be inconclusive one way or another?

What larger position?  My position is simple.  Theres nothing in the story, and no valid means of implication..that would establish that any part of it were true..not the miracles, not the relatively mundane shit.  Nada.  There s..however, a massive and compelling set of arguments and evidence to the contrary.

"Inconclusive" is just where people retreat to.  I;m not having any trouble at all reaching a conclusion.  There's nothing about any jesus the man, in the NT, that's reliable...much of what is considered plausible..when you really look at it, is no less miraculous than raising the fucking dead.  Tell me jesus so much as tipped some tables and castigated the jews..and I'll remind you that aint nobody gonna let some loon run through the mall knocking over stands...even that is a thematic story meant to support the fable.  So is the carpenter bullshit.  He was building his fathers house, you see.  The claimed virgin birth..not an adulterous looking to cover her ass...a way to keep a god from being born of a man.  The crucifixion by rome..lol, tell me more about the great beast that will swallow the earth and fling stars out of the heavens in a massive war.

The born of a virgin idiocy was a retcon to get around the fact that the christians' godboy fulfilled exactly none of the prophesies of the jewish messiah he was supposed to be.

Pity, then they adopted a mistranslation of a prophesy already fulfilled (if you believe Isiah wasn't post hoc mythologising) by the time of Jesus' alleged birth.

[The Grand Nudger]

There are alot of mundane parts of the narrative that serve nothing other than to satisfy prophecy, or what the authors took to be prophjecy.  Can we trust that a hypothetical jesus the man's father was a guy named Joe of the line of Dave?  

No, ofc not, this is prophecy fulfillment in the narrative. So that's 0/2 on a hypothetical jesus the man's parents. It's unlikely that there was any mary who claimed to be a virgin married to a jospeh from the line of david..these are simply requirements of the narrative.

So we don't really know who his parents were, or what he did for a living, or that he preached a proto-christian doctrine and railed against teh jews, or that he reached his end at the hands of the romans...and that's assuming for the sake of discussion that theres a man to know in the first place. All of that, as "plausible" as it may seem, is explicitly mythical.

Shall we address the circumstances, location, and date of his purported birth, next?

[Minimalist]

The born of a virgin idiocy was a retcon to get around the fact that the christians' godboy fulfilled exactly none of the prophesies of the jewish messiah he was supposed to be.

Commonplace shit in the ancient world.

"What an absurdity! Clearly the christians have used the myths of Danae and the Melanippe, or of the Auge and the Antiope in fabricating the story of Jesus' virgin birth."


"After all, the old myths of the greeks that attribute a divine birth to Perseus, Amphion, Aeacus and Minos are equally good evidence of their wondrous works on behalf of mankind- and are certainly no less lacking in plausibility than the stories of your followers."

  -- Celsus c 180 AD

[Minimalist]

Ehrman gets into the field of psychology when considering memory or the vagaries thereof.  This puts him out of his field so he must quote other experts which makes for some interesting reading.  He comments about a test conducted in the early 20th century in Berlin.  There is a write up, here.

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Munster/Wi...memory.htm

A few years ago a painful scene occurred in Berlin, in the University Seminary of Professor von Liszt, the famous criminologist. The Professor had spoken about a book. One of the older students suddenly shouts, "I wanted to throw light on the matter from the standpoint of Christian morality!" Another student throws in, "I cannot stand that!" The first starts up, exclaiming, "You have insulted me!" The second clenches his fist and cries, "If you say another word --" The first draws a revolver. The second [p. 50] rushes madly upon him. The Professor steps between them and, as he grasps the man's arm, the revolver goes off. General uproar. In that moment Professor Liszt secures order and asks a part of the students to write an exact account of all that has happened. The whole had been a comedy, carefully planned and rehearsed by the three actors for the purpose of studying the exactitude of observation and recollection. Those who did not write the report at once were, part of them, asked to write it the next day or a week later; and others had to depose their observations under cross-examination. The whole objective performance was cut up into fourteen little parts which referred partly to actions, partly to words. As mistakes there were counted the omissions, the wrong additions and the alterations. The smallest number of mistakes gave twenty-six per cent. of [sic] erroneous statements; the largest was eighty per cent. The reports with reference to the second half of the performance, which was more strongly emotional, gave an average of fifteen per cent. more [sic] mistakes than those of the first half. Words were put into the mouths or men who had been [p. 51] silent spectators during the whole short episode; actions were attributed to the chief participants of which not the slightest trace existed; and essential parts of the tragi-comedy were completely eliminated from the memory of a number of witnesses.

Thus rises the question that even if there had been "eye-witnesses" to any of this jesus shit how reliable would such accounts be?