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]

[Pat Mustard]

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]