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Dunkleosteus
- Jul 29, 2010
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Bart Ehrman is a fairly solid scholar, from what I've heard. I'm not really troubled particularly by the fact that we don't have absolute certainty regarding who wrote some of the Bible's various books, although I would argue for at least some of the traditional attributions (Luke's gospel, for instance, has similarities to the type of proto-scientific treatise a physician would have been familiar with at the time). I feel that Ehrman likely has a pre-existing tendency to discredit belief in the supernatural, so I wouldn't read too much into his belief that the Gospels are heavily fictionalized. It's an article of belief, whether one accepts the Gospels as fact or not. Ehrman chose not to.
I believe that the Gospels were almost certainly written in the mid to late 1st century, so I see no reason to disbelieve that the authors had contact with some of the individuals who knew Jesus while He was alive, including the Apostles. Luke, particularly, seems to have put a focus on having contact with first-hand witnesses (if he was Greek, as tradition asserts, or if he was a more Hellenized Jew, he may have had some knowledge of the historiographic writings of such early writers as Thucydides and may have wanted to craft his writing in a similar fashion). At some point, it does become a matter of faith. It's impossible to prove that the Gospels are accurate, although I would say that it's possible to prove that the authors believed what they were saying to be accurate and got their information from individuals who also believed that it was accurate.
Paul's writings, which I'm sure that Ehrman also challenges, have largely been challenged on the grounds of containing phrases which could sometimes been distinct from one another. Paul, however, almost certainly composed his texts with a scribe doing the actual writing (at least one of them has a section where Paul initially included his own writing in large letters to separate it from the work of the scribe, a suggestion that Paul may have had vision problems). Depending on the scribe and the one who was dictating, there could have been enough fluidity between what was said and what was written that textual discrepancies could have come from a different scribe. Other issues taken generally tend to assume that the writing was too advanced in terms of theological development to have been from Paul, but this assumes a priori that modern orthodox Christianity is not the religion founded by Jesus.
Bart Ehrman's biggest problem, in my mind, comes with his assertion that early Christians were divided into Gnostic and Proto-Orthodox camps, and that the latter evolved into modern Christianity. Taking patristic writings (those of the early Church fathers) into account, this position seems difficult to advance. As early as Ignatius of Antioch, who was a disciple of the Apostle John, a belief existed that Jesus was God. This shows that the belief goes back to the first century. Other early Christian writers suggest that a spiritual line of descent traced back to the Apostles also existed among Church leadership, whether you want to call it Apostolic Succession as the Catholics do or not. You can find this in the Bible itself (with reference to the laying on of hands in appointing new leaders, a symbolic passing of authority), and you can find it in the writings of Clement, an early Christian bishop of Rome from the first century who wrote a letter to a community farther east telling them that their leaders were in this line of succession and couldn't be deposed without good reason.
As early as the writings of Irenaeus of Lyons (a Christian bishop in Gaul), this was being used to prove that the Christian Church had inherited its tradition from the Apostles, while the Gnostics had not. Gnostic belief also suggested that the Apostles had passed down secret teachings, something which could suggest that they were trying to explain why the Apostles had never publicly made a statement to the effect of what they believe. Gnosticism, in addition, is a purely Hellenistic philosophy. Christianity, at its heart, is Jewish in its view of the Universe. While Gnostics tended to deny the goodness of the physical world, the Jewish view affirmed the goodness of physicality, and this view of a good physical existence would have been Jesus' message on the topic as a Jew. What Ehrman terms as Proto-Orthodox Christians held this idea whether they were Jewish or Greek, whereas Gnostics did not. This suggests a separate origin for Gnosticism, and I believe that it suggests that Gnositicism had origins in earlier beliefs and simply co-opted Judeo-Christian terminology in a sort of syncretism (mixing two religious systems).
If you have any more specific problems, I can try to help you with those. I'm a third year history student graduating in December of this year and hoping to get into a PhD program next spring, so I might be able to give you some good answers.
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