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

[Minimalist]

His book, "Jesus Before the Gospels" starts from what would be a reasonable premise:  That the so-called gospels were not written until some 40-70 years after his presumed death and that any stories about him would have been subject to the vicissitudes of oral transmission.  I'm not even going to quibble about his time line.  It doesn't matter.  With a median life expectancy of 25 years he is effectively allowing for two generations of believers to garble the story.

Here he lays out the premise.

It was just a few years ago that I came to realize that the study of memory, as pursued by scholars who did not work on the New Testament, could provide some valuable and keen insights into such matters. These other scholars work in a number of disciplines well represented in the academy, such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Their insights may be especially relevant to understanding how the earliest Christians told and retold the stories about Jesus after his death but before the Gospels were written. This was a mysterious period of oral transmission, when stories were circulating, both among eyewitnesses and, even more, among those who knew someone whose cousin had a neighbor who had once talked with a business associate whose mother had, just fifteen years earlier, spoken with an eyewitness who told her some things about Jesus.

How were such people—those people at the tail end of the period of transmission—telling their stories about Jesus? Did they remember very well what they had heard from others (who had heard from others who had heard from others)? Were the stories they told accurate reflections of what they heard? Or, more remotely, of what Jesus said and did? Or had their stories been molded, and shaped, or even invented in the processes of telling, remembering, and retelling the stories? During the forty to sixty-five years between Jesus’s death and the first accounts of his life, how much had the stories been changed? How much was being accurately remembered? Modern studies of memory may possibly provide us with some much-needed insights into the question.

He recaps near the end of the section:

Once the ancient Christian eyewitnesses told stories about Jesus, their hearers then repeated the stories—obviously in their own words. Those who heard these new stories told them again, in their own words. And others then told these stories to others—and so on, year after year. The stories of Jesus, in other words, were circulated in the “oral tradition” before our Gospel writers produced their accounts. What do we know about oral traditions as circulated in nonliterate or semiliterate cultures? Do oral cultures tend to preserve their traditions accurately, since they cannot write them down to ensure that they remain the same every time?

This is all fine and good.  Only the dumbest of fundies would argue the point and they can safely be dismissed as lunatics.  But Ehrman refuses to carry his own point to its logical conclusion.  The gospels are fundamentally flawed because they rely on human memory but the story only exists in the gospel of "Mark" ( the others are copies and expansions of it for different audiences)  yet he still insists that we can rely on it at times.  Those times of course are of his own choosing.
Instead of concluding that these stories should be dismissed as simply stories - like so many other Greco-Roman myths at the time - he can't let them go. 

Why the insistence on the 40-65 year after his death?  That death is only depicted in the gospel which he is in the process of dismantling as just flawed human memory of stories which someone heard from someone else and repeated to others.  Why treat that as a "fact?"  I've read enough of Ehrman to know that he will never address this issue.  It would seriously impact book sales!

[Anomalocaris]

If the story is stripped down to only what is plausible, why insist the plausible part must also have no basis in fact?

[Whateverist]

Are you seriously suggesting he should just fold his biblical studies business and seek honest, useful employment?

[The Grand Nudger]

It's the reverse, anom.  Plausibility is not actually an indicator of factuality.  We write all sorts of plausible fiction. Stripping Hecules down to his plausible elements" wont advance the idea of a historical Hercules, nor will stripping Paul Bunyan to it's plausible elements advance the historical Monsieur Bunyan...and in the same fashion, stripping christ to jesus does nothing to establish jesus. The very fact that we have to begin by gutting the story shows how suspect it is. If you spend considerable time demonstrating how unreliable the narrative is, and why, it makes very little sense to then accept the narrative as reliable.

"This story is utter garbage, but I really like this part, so that's the true part!"

[Minimalist]

Are you seriously suggesting he should just fold his biblical studies business and seek honest, useful employment?

No...he still does enough to piss off the fundies.  That's a worthwhile project.  And the rest of us can see through the cherry-picking because we don't have the holy blinders on in the first place.

Let's remember that those same scholars also regard "paul" as the earliest xtian writings - and we can debate that too - so for the sake of argument let's go with that.  "Paul" doesn't know shit about miracles, parables, Pilate, Mary, Joseph, Caiaphas, Jerusalem, Nazareth, or global darkness and earthquakes.  If that is the "earliest" story what are we to make of the later story with all the bells and whistles added?

[Anomalocaris]

It's the reverse, anom.  Plausibility is not actually an indicator of factuality.  We write all sorts of plausible fiction.  Stripping Hecules down to his plausible elements" wont advance the idea of a historical Hercules, nor will stripping Paul Bunyan to it's plausible elements advance the historical Monsieur Bunyan...and in the same fashion, stripping christ to jesus does nothing to establish jesus.  The very fact that we have to begin by gutting the story shows how suspect it is.  If you spend considerable time demonstrating how unreliable the narrative is, and why, it makes very little sense to then accept the narrative as reliable.

"This story is utter garbage, but I really like this part, so that's the true part!"

I am not saying the story is not garbage. I am saying arguing a plausible story isn’t factual at all is a worthless battle to fight.

[The Grand Nudger]

It's worthwhile if you're interested in a factual history rather than a list of plausible fiction..but otherwise..sure, doesn't matter much.

The point at hand, however, is that a person who goes to lengths to demonstrate how unreliable a story is, regardless of how plausible whatever of it's corpse remains may be, comparatively...has had a huge derp moment, in accepting those bones as a fact.

The logical conclusion of a fundamentally and grossly unreliable story is that the "plausible elements" are no more or less reliable. That we're redacting fiction.

[Minimalist]

What do you consider "plausible?"

[Anomalocaris]

It's worthwhile if you're interested in a factual history rather than a list of plausible fiction..but otherwise..sure, doesn't matter much.

The point at hand, however, is that a person who goes to lengths to demonstrate how unreliable a story is, regardless of how plausible whatever of it's corpse remains may be, comparatively...has had a huge derp moment, in accepting those bones as a fact.

The logical conclusion of a fundamentally and grossly unreliable story is that the "plausible elements" are no more or less reliable.

The degree to which any plausible parts of the jesus story actually had any factual basis is really impossible to assess from this remove.  

However, the more of the story one discard as implausible based on improbability, the more mundane would be the remaining parts of the story and therefore higher the probability that the remaining parts were based to some degree on actual, but mundane, occurrences.

This is what makes a complicated story with many parts of varying plausibility difficult to completely dismiss as totally made up.

It is also why it is a fruitless battle to fight to assert it is completely made up.

The reason why story of Hercules can often be sloppily asserted to be completely made up is simply because there is no pushback, not because it is really prudent or in the best service of discovering all facts to assert it really is totally devoid of all vestige of factual basis for any of its plausible portions.

The best one can say is the parts that made the story special on the eyes of the gullible is made up because those are precisely the implausible parts. Without those the mundane parts signifies nothing, but their bery banality is what made it possible for them to have basis in actual occurrences.

---

What do you consider "plausible?"

A carpenter by trade was lazy, afflicted with dilusion of grandeur, collected a following of dimwits from a malcontented society of gullible, acted out his fantasy in self destructive ways, and came to a predictable end that might be lemanted out of pity but for its insignificance next to the vast and vicious consequences it indirectly engendered.

Persons comparable to him are not hard to find throughout history and in our contemporary society.  There is no need to plant a stake at the indefensible position that another such person could not have existed at the origin of the jesus cult.

[The Grand Nudger]

The degree to which any plausible parts of the jesus story actually had any factual basis is really impossible to assess from this remove.  

Which is a very strong argument -against- considering any of it a fact, particularly after demolishing most of it as fantasy.  

However, the more of the story one discard as implausible based on improbability, the more mundane would be the remaining parts of the story and therefore higher the probability that the remaining parts were based to some degree on actual, but mundane, occurrences.

That's not a valid implication, at all.  It's an assertion by fiat based upon probabilities that, just up above, you seemed to think were a black box.  Show me the math.