Bart Ehrman's Absolutely Insane Theory of History

In Which The World Is Not Allowed to Begin

Last week, Bart Ehrman took an interview with Ross Douthat’s "Interesting Times” to chat about his latest book, “Love Thy Stranger”, which makes the case that Jesus’ followers are not actually all that interested in Jesus’ ethic.

There are so many claims made in the podcast, it’s a little overwhelming to address them one by one. So much so, that I’m calling on my friend and historian Dr. Tim Lecroy to help me sift through everything Ehrman said. Stay tuned for a conversation between us in a week or two.

To be clear…even though I think taking Ehrman’s thoughts to their logic ends leads us to an insane place, I do think Ehrman is a really smart guy. He’s formidable. Most of Ehrman’s claims, at face value, look pretty clean and shiny. I found myself scratching my head a few times, at least. Lots to untangle.

Most of the claims that puzzled me were in areas somewhat outside my expertise. For example, Ehrman often claims to be think simply as “a historian”. Most of his claims come from a posture of what sounds like net neutrality, a calm and cool, purely academic response to the overblown claims of evangelicals.

Listen to some of the cool logic he offers for his views:

Ehrman: Well, historians by their very nature are skeptical because they’re dealing with sources that they have to evaluate. This isn’t a thing about Jesus, per se — it’s about how history works, that you’ve got to evaluate your sources.

I’ve never gone into my scholarship trying to disprove things. It’s just that you try to figure out what happened in the past…I think saying “historical skepticism” is a tautology. History is skeptical. It’s not that you’re doing historical skepticism — you’re doing history…I think what the historian does is they look at the miracle story and they judge whether it probably happened or not, because that’s what you do with history generally.

Who can object to this? Just a historian doing history, really. Historians are skeptical. What’s a guy to do?

And, naturally, that’s why a historian can never believe in a miracle.

Wait…what?

Yeah, of course. Naturally. Not saying it didn’t happen. Just saying, the historian can never establish it happened. Impossible to know.

Here’s a little window into the debate:

Ehrman: And so what’s the probability of Jesus walking on the water? How do you establish that as a historically ——

Douthat: That’s a very good question. How do you establish that historically?

Ehrman: You cannot.

Douthat: OK.

Ehrman: It doesn’t matter who you’re studying in history…So a historian looks at the accounts of Baal Shem Tov doing things like sticking his finger up against a tree and making it come on fire to warm themselves up or whatever. And you have all of these accounts, and you ask: How do we account for this story?

Well, how do you establish things happening in the past? What kind of criteria do you use as a historian to figure out whether something likely happened or not? And you have a set of criteria. For example, do you have independent witnesses? Is it something that’s plausible? Is it something that has ever happened, ever, in the history of the universe before?

Suppose you’ve got a story and you’re not sure if somebody made it up or if it actually happened. Like Jesus walking on the water — did it actually happen or did somebody make it up? Now, has anybody ever made up a story of a miracle that didn’t happen? Yeah, yeah, it happens all the time. Has anybody ever actually walked on water? Well, no, not in recorded history. In other words: What is the likelihood?

So I’m not saying it’s impossible. I’m not saying it’s impossible that Jesus walked on the water. I’m saying that if it did happen, there’s no way for us to establish it historically because other explanations are always far more likely.

Okay. Hmm. Let’s pause here. These, allegedly, are the criteria of a historian doing history, even though they sound suspiciously like the criteria of the philosopher David Hume who’s theory of history has long been disregarded as untenable, but I’ll set that aside for now.

Let’s just say Ehrman is right. Let’s say the historian can never establish something happened, if it is a truly unique event in history. He gives the example of someone violating the second law of thermodynamics:

Ehrman:…Let me give you a different example, just to kind of explain this for people who are not quite following this. It is impossible for you to take your coffee — your black coffee — and to pour half-and-half into it and stir it, enough that the half-and-half comes out of it. I mean, it’s basically the second law of thermodynamics; it can’t happen. At least, it never has happened.

So, suppose somebody from 1950 says that they saw somebody in 1920 do this. And suppose you’ve got five people who say: Yeah, 30 years ago we saw this person stir the coffee, stir the milk in the coffee, and they stirred it right out of it.

What’s the likelihood that those five people would be right? I’d say the likelihood is virtually zero. Is it likely somebody could have made it up, that somebody could have seen something that they thought was that, that it was a magician, that it was somebody’s sleight of hand? Do those things ever happen?

Yeah, that happens all the time.

Douthat: Right.

Ehrman: Does anybody do this thing? No, it never happens. So, which is more probable?

Okay, alright then. Yes, of course, no one can violate the second law of thermodynamics, what are we born in the Stone Age? Do we really believe such things could happen, of course we do not believe that. We have all moved past that. Now we know of the Laws, there’s no need to take any other interpretation of reality seriously.

Okay then - but let’s just put this little theory under the microscope, the Theory, that is, that nothing unique in history could ever be proven historically, because the likelihood of that thing happening is so infinitesimally small, because I have some questions about this, and they lead us in a direction I don’t think Dr. Ehrman really wants us to go, in the end.

First, how unique is “unique”?

At first glance, “uniqueness” seems like a cold and calculated historical category, doesn’t it? Cream coming out of coffee. Too unique to have happened.

But uniqueness is not quite as clear cut as it sounds. The birth of George Washington was, in many ways, unique. George Washington had never been born before. Yes, people had been born. But not George Washington. There are some things that are utterly unique about his birth: his parents. The time stamp - every time stamp is utterly unique, after all. The fact that he was going to be the first president of the United States of America - no birth before or after is like that. It’s utterly unique.

“Ah”, says Dr. Ehrman. “But things like that have occurred.” Have they? How like that? Where are you drawing the line on what makes something too unique to have happened?

You see what’s happening, here: what sounds objective, “uniqueness”, is actually subjective: how unique must something be in order to be impossible? Nothing is utterly unique: walking on water is unique. But walking is not unique. A day at the beach with friends is not unique. You see? There is some uniqueness, some continuity. So it is with all events in history.

Is the US using decoy inflatable tanks in WWII for the Battle of Normandy too uniquely weird to be believed?

How about the Battle of Thermopylae and an army that defends its ground against an army nearly 30x its size?

Isn’t the very fact that it’s being recorded in the annals of history a clue that it’s going to be a somewhat unique, utterly unprecedented event in the first place? Isn’t that, like, kind of the wonder and beauty of reading history? We’re not passing down a record of people making peanut butter and banana sandwiches after all. We’re recording things like the burying of Pompeii, not everyday, normal events. How much history could actually believed according to this standard of uniqueness?

At the end of the day, there is no real, objective resource for answering the question, “How unique is too unique?”. It all goes back to our own presuppositions about the way the world is or isn’t. For Ehrman, miracles cross the line. But this does not tell us anything about history. It only tells us about Bart Ehrman.

Second, who gets to say what’s unprecedented?

One of the claims Ehrman makes, above, is that, obviously, nothing like a miracle had ever happened in the history of the world before Jesus.

Well…wait a second. How would you know that? Dr. Bart Ehrman, so far as I know, does not own a Tardis. He has not been to all places in history. And, according to Jewish history, plenty of miracles happened before Jesus walked the earth. People were raised from the dead. Lepers were healed. Thousands were miraculously fed. These miracles are all attested.

So who gets to say what’s unprecedented?

I think what Dr. Ehrman must mean is that these kinds of things are things he has never seen. Which makes the frame of reference much smaller than we were made to believe - the frame of reference is not all of history. The frame of reference is Dr. Ehrman’s own experiences, imposed onto history. His assumption is that nothing like miraculous events occurred before Jesus because that is his assumption. I, personally, could give you accounts of miracles I’ve witnessed. We now have a rising field of study where medical journals are recording miracles as a result of prayer, and the exorcising of demonic forces with supernatural powers. On what basis is Dr. Ehrman refusing to take any of these into his consideration of what has happened in history?

It’s because Ehrman is confusing a philosophy of materialism, here, with a philosophy of history.

As Douthat poignantly asks:

Douthat: But does that mean then that you are essentially taking a kind of a view of miracles that says that there is no scale of historical attestation that could make you say this possibly happened, just because you’ll always default to, by definition, miracles are things that don’t normally happen?

That’s exactly it.

And, I’d add…who gets to say what “normally” happens? And how “normal” is normal? Dr. Ehrman’s own assumptions are determining all of these things, not a cool and collected historical philosophy.

Third…how much evidence is enough to overturn the unprecedented theory?

Alright so let’s just say Dr. Ehrman is correct about history, which I don’t think he is. Let’s say we simply cannot say something abnormal ever happened as a historian. We can never agree that unique events in history happened, no matter how much evidence abounds that they did.

So, in that case, how, according to Dr. Ehrman’s theory of history, could the world have begun in the first place? Obviously, we are talking about something utterly, utterly unique. There was no beginning of the world before, and none since. Something coming from nothing violates every known law in the universe. Obviously, we cannot go back in time infinitely, or we’d never reach the present moment, and so there must have been a beginning to the material world.

“Yes, well, obviously it did have a beginning,” Dr. Ehrman might counter, “because we are here. Nothing could be more obvious.”

Okay then. Great. So there actually is a point where we must admit, based on the evidence, that something utterly unique has happened in the world. At some point, the data is so overwhelming and obvious that something utterly unique happened that it makes more sense to believe something unique happened - however unlikely it may be - than that it didn’t happen.

And obviously, the world had a beginning. Something utterly unprecedented happened. The evidence is too strong and obvious to contradict this. Which means that Dr. Ehrman actually does - if he believes we, in fact, exist - have a criteria for considering an utterly unique event in history to have happened. And while it may be convenient to say that we just must rule out the resurrection of Jesus out-of-hand because of it’s uniqueness, and that no amount of evidence could ever change our minds because we just can’t ever establish unique events, by that standard strictly speaking…we leave ourselves in the absurd position of having to deny that the world itself had a beginning.

So once again, the cool and calculated positions of the historian turn out to be moving signposts, positioned against the supernatural, and toward the materialistic.

Fourth, Are We Willing to Apply These Standards Across the Board?

When I first asked my friend Dr. Tim Lecroy to offer a rebuttal to the Ehrman/Douthat podcast, he pointed out that Ehrman’s critique of the resurrection is actually a double-edged sword.

Yes, if Jesus rose from the dead, that is an utterly unique event. Ehrman says that for this reason, we must rule the resurrection out as an explanation.

But, as Dr. Lecroy points out, that actually leaves Ehrman in a sticky place…because whatever explanation he offers for the resurrection would also be an utterly unique event in history. Here’s the way Tim put it:

[Ehrman] says that it is absolutely the case that some of his disciples believed they saw Jesus after his death—that at least some of his disciples believed that he was raised from the dead. He says that he agrees there were some people who had visions. His sense was that there were some people who had visions; he doesn’t know how many people had visions, but some of them did. However many people had visions, they were able to convince the others. And so they came to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead. They were convinced of it, they started proclaiming Jesus resurrected, and that is the beginning of Christianity. He says, “If you’re a Christian, it’s perfectly fine to believe that these are true, but if you’re not a Christian, it’s also perfectly fine to think that they were visions or delusions.”

Ehrman says that he was giving a lecture and he thought someone in the first row was his dad, who had died 15 years earlier. Ross counters: this was one person who had a mistaken identity, but the New Testament claims that over 500 people had it. And this is my main point: that all these people had the same vision. What is the evidence in history—again, Ehrman keeps going back to history and historical evidence—what is the evidence in history of a mass delusion like this? Especially a mass delusion where people refused to deny that it was a mass delusion to their death? And there is no example of that. There is no example of a mass delusion where people went to their death because they refused to deny that it was a mass delusion.

Okay, so we are at a crossroads, aren’t we? Ehrman says we cannot believe in the resurrection because it is utterly unique.

And yet, his explanation for the resurrection is also utterly unique. And, as Tim points out, Ehrman doesn’t even really bother to justify, historically, his point of view that all of these people were martyred for a mass delusion.

[Ehrman] says he doesn’t believe that Jesus appeared to 500 people—that the mass delusion happened to 500 people. He says he thinks that Paul had some sort of vision, that Peter had some sort of vision, that Mary Magdalene had some sort of vision; that’s all he claims to have happened. Again, I would ask: what is the historical evidence for those claims being inaccurate? He doesn’t say; it is simply his opinion. That’s it. He doesn’t give any other evidence, any other historical evidence, any other manuscript evidence. Is there variance that questions these things? No, it’s just what he thinks.

So, what are we dealing with, here?

Are we dealing with cold, cool history?

Or are we dealing with a philosophy of materialism, imposed upon history?

There’s obviously much, much more to discuss here. Stay tuned for Tim and my conversation about the whole podcast.