Ehrman grew up in a fundamentalist, evangelical home, and apostatized in college. Ironically, even though he acts as if he left his fundamentalism behind, he still acts like a fundamentalist. Because either the Bible meets his perfect standard of criteria in his mind of what is true, or it doesn't and therefore can't be trusted.
His fundamentalism has merely been turned on its head.
“He still acts like a fundamentalist”- I think because the ‘fundamentalism’ actually becomes a way of thinking that is not so easily left behind. (Almost like it becomes a part of your DNA!)
C. S. Lewis wrote a whole chapter about this on his book *Miracles*. Here’s a relevant excerpt:
“The ordinary procedure of the modern historian, even if he admits the possibility of miracle, is to admit no particular instance of it until every possibility of ‘natural’ explanation has been tried and failed. That is, he will accept the most improbable ‘natural’ explanations rather than say that a miracle occurred. Collective hallucination, hypnotism of unconsenting spectators, widespread instantaneous conspiracy in lying by persons not otherwise known to be liars and not likely to gain by the lie—all these are known to be very improbable events: so improbable that, except for the special purpose of excluding a miracle, they are never suggested. But they are preferred to the admission of a miracle. Such a procedure is, from the purely historical point of view, sheer midsummer madness unless we start by knowing that any Miracle whatever is more improbable than the most improbable natural event. Do we know this?
“We must distinguish the different kinds of improbability. Since miracles are, by definition, rarer than other events, it is obviously improbable beforehand that one will occur at any given place and time. In that sense every miracle is improbable. But that sort of improbability does not make the story that a miracle has happened incredible; for in the same sense all events whatever were once improbable. It is immensely improbable beforehand that a pebble dropped from the stratosphere over London will hit any given spot or that any one particular person will win a large lottery. But the report that the pebble has landed outside such and such a shop or that Mr. So-and-So has won the lottery is not at all incredible. When you consider the immense number of meetings and fertile unions between ancestors which were necessary in order that you should be born, you perceive that it was once immensely improbable that such a person as you should come to exist: but once you are here, the report of your existence is not in the least incredible. With probability of this kind—antecedent probability of chances—we are not here concerned. Our business is with historical probability.
“Ever since Hume’s famous Essay it has been believed that historical statements about miracles are the most intrinsically improbable of all historical statements. According to Hume, probability rests on what may be called the majority vote of our past experiences. The more often a thing has been known to happen, the more probable it is that it should happen again; and the less often the less probable. Now the regularity of Nature’s course, says Hume, is supported by something better than the majority vote of past experiences: it is supported by their unanimous vote, or, as Hume says, by ‘firm and unalterable experience’. There is, in fact, ‘uniform experience’ against Miracle; otherwise, says Hume, it would not be a Miracle. A miracle is therefore the most improbable of all events. It is always more probable that the witnesses were lying or mistaken than that a miracle occurred.
“Now of course we must agree with Hume that if there is absolutely ‘uniform experience’ against miracles, if in other words they have never happened, why then they never have. Unfortunately we know the experience against them to be uniform only if we know that all the reports of them are false. And we can know all the reports to be false only if we know already that miracles have never occurred. In fact, we are arguing in a circle.”
What a perfect excerpt! Love this. Thank you. I don’t think I’ve ever read Miracles now that I read this…thought I’d read everything Lewis. Further up and in I guess
It’s an excellent book, I highly recommend it. Half of it is apologetics arguing against materialism and in favor of the supernatural, and the other half is an exegetical analysis of the miracles of Jesus.
Ehrman's position is similar to those who deny, say, the Noachian Flood. Such people believe in a kind of steady-state theory that all things continue along without a blip for millions or billions of years. They steadfastly deny any form of catastrophism along the way, despite the geological record (backed by historical and cultural artifacts) providing overwhelming evidence that something huge altered Earth's history. In the end, it is their absolute denial of God or supernatural occurrences that sits at the foundation of their supposed rational analysis of history.
It's always odd to me that people like Ehrman call themselves "skeptical." I think it's unfortunate that the term "skepticism" has come to be limited in meaning to the sort of modernist, positivist, and materialist positions that Ehrman exhibits. I think, in many ways, that Ehrman's rejection of the supernatural is in fact much *less* skeptical than the alternatives.
Ehrman puts great confidence in extrapolating from the limited store of our present experiences to judge whether past events are factual or fictional. I don't see Ehrman having much skepticism toward the validity of empirical reasoning, or the presumption that the past must have been entirely like the present, or the assumption that we have an accurate understanding of what events are factual or fictional in our present moment.
In other words, Ehrman's conclusion (that miracles are unlikely to have ever occurred) has a number of premises that he does not question, which might be listed as:
1. We can know whether or not miracles are occurring right now.
2. If we know that miracles are not occurring right now, then we know that they are unlikely to have occurred in the past.
3. We know that miracles are not occurring right now.
Therefore: We know that miracles are unlikely to have occurred in the past.
None of those three premises are self-evident, even within the limitations of Ehrman's empirical epistemology.
1. We do not have a comprehensive viewpoint of all occurrences within the world, or anything even remotely approaching one (in fact, as our scientific examinations of physical phenomena have grown in power, the horizons of physical phenomena that we know to exist but which we cannot observe have expanded even faster).
2. The idea of empirical continuity is quite a bit more complicated, as the discussion of historical uniqueness indicates. Even more fundamentally, the category of "likeliness" depends a great deal on the timescales, spatial parameters, and frames of narrative that we choose, and on how we choose to define the category of "an event."
3. Many, many people will tell you that they have witnessed miracles happening today. On what basis should we discount their testimony?
I think that believing in miracles is in fact the *more skeptical* philosophical position, as it refuses to foreclose possibilities based on a confidence in both our limited phenomenal data and our powers of empirical extrapolation. I'm happy to call myself a skeptic in those terms.
It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence — it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed. But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say, “Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles,” they answer, “But mediaevals were superstitious”; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles.
The hermeneutic of suspicion has always sat poorly with me. Historians are basically trained to be paranoid schizophrenics, especially with anything deemed supernatural. “The authors of every text are all lying to me and I can only trust the v̶o̶i̶c̶e̶s̶i̶n̶m̶y̶h̶e̶a̶d̶ assumptions of my theory.” I'm probably being a little uncharitable, but not entirely.
The "beginning of the world" argument is clever, but beside the point, because whether or not the world had a beginning is a question that falls beyond the scope of historical methods. The astronomer or cosmologist have methods to investigate this; the historian's inquiries are about the times when things have already started up a bit. The academic discipline of history is not quite coterminous with the study of the past.
The issue with historical miracles is not that they are unique; it is that they are extraordinary. Reported resurrections were hardly unique. According to the Gospels, Jesus himself raised three people from the dead--along with himself. According to the Old Testament Elijah and Elisha collectively raised another three.
So we have at least 7 miracles of the resurrection sort happening over a span of a millennium (and plenty more miracles are recorded) in a land with an estimated population of about 100K at the beginning of the period rising to about 1 million at the end. The geometrical average of these is about 0.3 million. This number of potential observers operating over 1000 years gives an “observer power” of 0.3 billion person-years. This gives one resurrection-scale extraordinary event per 42 million observer-years.
Compare this to the observer power of 5.9 billion observer-years we have available every year with modern smart phone tech. Given the frequency of not less than 1 miracle per 42 million observer years reported in Scripture, we should see AT LEAST 140 similarly extraordinary events every year nowadays given the vastly larger number of observers today, and yet we haven’t seen any. To give a relevant example of this massive observer power, consider the appearance of once-per-century meteor in 2013. Multiple videos of this extraordinary event were put out on the internet right after it happened.
Something we have NOT seen on the internet is multiple videos of close encounters with aliens. Fifty to 80 years ago there were many eyewitness accounts of such events. Once such case happened in Wisconsin, not far from where I grew up: Yet there are none today.
If extraordinary events such a miracles actually happen at anything like their historical frequency we would be seeing hundreds of videos of such things every year. We don’t see any. It is overwhelmingly likely that these historically reported extraordinary events (such as the one in Wisconsin in 1961) simply did not happen as described.
how sure are you of this? I mean, that would be easier to concede if you mean "resurrection", but impossible to agree with if you just mean "miracles".
It is based on the idea that people will record extraordinary events with their smart phones and broadcast them on the internet. Being extraordinary it would be news that would spread on social media and all of us would soon learn about it.
As an example of this I used that meteor that crashed into Russia a decade or so ago. Shortly after it happened I had learned about it on the internet and seen video of the event despite the fact that it occurred without warning as lasted all of two seconds., yet there were *multiple* videos. This convinced me that if an extraordinary event like this meteor or a UFO landing were witnessed anywhere in the world I (and everyone else) would soon learn about it and there would be photos and video evidence on the net.
In the years since I have not seen another meteor like that one, leading me to believe that no large object has collided with the earth since then. I have also seen no UFO landings leading me to believe that none have happened. And there have been no miraculous events similar in incredulity to a UFO landings either, leading me to believe that none have happened.
Yet when I was a kid there were many eyewitness accounts of UFO landings and historically there have been a great many eyewitness accounts of miracles. So many of them that we should have seen dozens of spectacular accounts of UFO landings and miracles with real-time video evidence. There would be no question that aliens are visiting the Earth and that miracles happen.
But that hasn't happened, which is strong evidence that these things do not happen today. And if they do not happen today, I don't think those reports of UFO landings and alien abductions from my youth happened either. I put miracles in the same category as UFO landings/alien abductions.
I stopped listening when Ehrman announced his political leanings, because I assumed (fairly or not) that it would devolve into, “I don’t believe in Jesus, but if you do, you must follow him and vote like me.” I heard Paul VanderKlay’s recap a few days later, and it sounded like I was largely correct.
When I was leading a bible study, had one guy who kept on trying to tie Christian faith to his political view. I kept on pointing out: there are plenty of Christians who believe both major sides and a few of the minor extreme views. There is NOTHING inherent to Christianity in any political belief, and Jesus' argument about "render unto" can even be seen as highlighting that.
But he won't reciprocate and acknowledge people who don't agree with him can be Christians.
If we take a Biblical stance on this—a la “there is nothing new under the sun”—then we need not concern ourselves with the specifics of an event in order to consider its plausibility. What has happened before can happen again. The Trojan Horse is plausible, and so it need not have occurred exactly as it was told to be believable—it communicates the efficacy of deceit in warfare and the perceived intellectual inferiority of the enemy. A false surrender that turns the tide to victory is the lesson. That said, there is no real barrier to it having happened much as it was described. Presenting a wooden horse and fleeing would have played on the enemy’s pride: no living horse to reclaim, and apparent cowardice in retreat—both reinforcing their confirmation bias.
The mythos of the Trojan Horse—or even of miracles—can always be explained away. Yet it is often our own pride that prevents us from seeing clearly that something has happened, and that it may be “miraculous” precisely because no better explanation presents itself than the one given by those involved. The Scriptures lean into this tension, describing miracles through varied and almost disjointed means: a shadow passing over someone, touching the hem of a garment, prayer, belief, long-distance healing, even contact with the bones of a dead prophet.
We can attempt to explain these things away, but in doing so we miss that an event is not undone by our inability to comprehend it in the moment. Lazarus walked out of the tomb and was subsequently hunted by religious leaders; Peter’s mother-in-law recovered; the centurion’s daughter rose from what was taken to be death, witnessed even by hired mourners; and Jesus himself walked out of his own tomb, seen by more than five hundred people.
In the end, belief or disbelief does not alter the event itself. It gains or loses us nothing in that sense—just as denying that the world had a beginning does not change the fact of whatever its origin may be. When our explanations aim at control, we risk mistaking description for mastery, and in doing so, we convince ourselves and others that we possess an understanding—and a power—that we do not.
I’m not 💯 sure about the number here, but it illustrates the point: There is a 1 in 400 quadrillion (4x10 to the 17th power) chance that Bart Ehrman would be conceived and born with his exact genetic code.
This reminds me very much of the abuse of the expression, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." It's often slung around with the same assumed objectivity, when in practice "extraordinary" is seldom given anything approaching an objective definition and remains completely founded on a vague intuition.
I didn't know about this interview with Ross; I'll have to go give it a watch! I appreciate your wading into these types of conversations with persistence. I find, for myself, that I go into these conversations with some trepidation. What if I come across a perspective, an argument, or a logical proposition that finally knocks the legs out from under my Christocentric worldview? My heart bounds, I read or listen with rapt attention, fearing to hear some philosophy or elemental tradition that just crumbles my entire narrative. But, as of yet (and as you are pointing out in this interview review), I haven't found anything of the sort. Philosophical materialism is one of those heavyweight champions that always comes into the ring with a sort of calm sophisticated air, then gets pummeled by phenomenology. Each time I read something like what Ehrman iterates, I come away with renewed vigor and hope that what we've come to is actually everlasting, actually true.
Thank you for this. There are people who have turned this guy’s work (and Marcus Borg’s) into their gospel of “the religion of Jesus,” denouncing Christianity as a made up “religion about Jesus” fabricated by the ruling class to oppress the working class. Utter nonsense. You get the “religion of Jesus” by conveniently ignoring things you can’t account for and poo-pooing the rest as “unreliable.”
Ehrman is pretty much on record at one point, if I remember correctly, that one of the personal goals of his UNC class is to destroy the faith of every Christian student who sits in that lecture hall/classroom. That automatically is a red flag that screams bias, and that every word Ehrman utters should be viewed with the tint of skepticism, because he is so overtly hostile to the Christian faith in particular.
I tried, note TRIED, reading one of his books one time. I gave up as it wasn't worth my time. Half of the arguments were tired old, easily countered retreads that a first year apologetics student could address. I would rather read the grandfather of the Christian left/Progressive Christianity, Marcus Borg, than Ehrman, and while Ehrman has clearly rejected Christianity, there are things he advocates that has a following among Progressive Christians, whose most ardent promoters are not Christians themselves either, so no wonder they and Ehrman at times align.
Ehrman grew up in a fundamentalist, evangelical home, and apostatized in college. Ironically, even though he acts as if he left his fundamentalism behind, he still acts like a fundamentalist. Because either the Bible meets his perfect standard of criteria in his mind of what is true, or it doesn't and therefore can't be trusted.
His fundamentalism has merely been turned on its head.
This happens more often than not when people reject the fundamentalism of their youth.
“He still acts like a fundamentalist”- I think because the ‘fundamentalism’ actually becomes a way of thinking that is not so easily left behind. (Almost like it becomes a part of your DNA!)
This is a good insight.
C. S. Lewis wrote a whole chapter about this on his book *Miracles*. Here’s a relevant excerpt:
“The ordinary procedure of the modern historian, even if he admits the possibility of miracle, is to admit no particular instance of it until every possibility of ‘natural’ explanation has been tried and failed. That is, he will accept the most improbable ‘natural’ explanations rather than say that a miracle occurred. Collective hallucination, hypnotism of unconsenting spectators, widespread instantaneous conspiracy in lying by persons not otherwise known to be liars and not likely to gain by the lie—all these are known to be very improbable events: so improbable that, except for the special purpose of excluding a miracle, they are never suggested. But they are preferred to the admission of a miracle. Such a procedure is, from the purely historical point of view, sheer midsummer madness unless we start by knowing that any Miracle whatever is more improbable than the most improbable natural event. Do we know this?
“We must distinguish the different kinds of improbability. Since miracles are, by definition, rarer than other events, it is obviously improbable beforehand that one will occur at any given place and time. In that sense every miracle is improbable. But that sort of improbability does not make the story that a miracle has happened incredible; for in the same sense all events whatever were once improbable. It is immensely improbable beforehand that a pebble dropped from the stratosphere over London will hit any given spot or that any one particular person will win a large lottery. But the report that the pebble has landed outside such and such a shop or that Mr. So-and-So has won the lottery is not at all incredible. When you consider the immense number of meetings and fertile unions between ancestors which were necessary in order that you should be born, you perceive that it was once immensely improbable that such a person as you should come to exist: but once you are here, the report of your existence is not in the least incredible. With probability of this kind—antecedent probability of chances—we are not here concerned. Our business is with historical probability.
“Ever since Hume’s famous Essay it has been believed that historical statements about miracles are the most intrinsically improbable of all historical statements. According to Hume, probability rests on what may be called the majority vote of our past experiences. The more often a thing has been known to happen, the more probable it is that it should happen again; and the less often the less probable. Now the regularity of Nature’s course, says Hume, is supported by something better than the majority vote of past experiences: it is supported by their unanimous vote, or, as Hume says, by ‘firm and unalterable experience’. There is, in fact, ‘uniform experience’ against Miracle; otherwise, says Hume, it would not be a Miracle. A miracle is therefore the most improbable of all events. It is always more probable that the witnesses were lying or mistaken than that a miracle occurred.
“Now of course we must agree with Hume that if there is absolutely ‘uniform experience’ against miracles, if in other words they have never happened, why then they never have. Unfortunately we know the experience against them to be uniform only if we know that all the reports of them are false. And we can know all the reports to be false only if we know already that miracles have never occurred. In fact, we are arguing in a circle.”
What a perfect excerpt! Love this. Thank you. I don’t think I’ve ever read Miracles now that I read this…thought I’d read everything Lewis. Further up and in I guess
It’s an excellent book, I highly recommend it. Half of it is apologetics arguing against materialism and in favor of the supernatural, and the other half is an exegetical analysis of the miracles of Jesus.
Ehrman's position is similar to those who deny, say, the Noachian Flood. Such people believe in a kind of steady-state theory that all things continue along without a blip for millions or billions of years. They steadfastly deny any form of catastrophism along the way, despite the geological record (backed by historical and cultural artifacts) providing overwhelming evidence that something huge altered Earth's history. In the end, it is their absolute denial of God or supernatural occurrences that sits at the foundation of their supposed rational analysis of history.
It's always odd to me that people like Ehrman call themselves "skeptical." I think it's unfortunate that the term "skepticism" has come to be limited in meaning to the sort of modernist, positivist, and materialist positions that Ehrman exhibits. I think, in many ways, that Ehrman's rejection of the supernatural is in fact much *less* skeptical than the alternatives.
Ehrman puts great confidence in extrapolating from the limited store of our present experiences to judge whether past events are factual or fictional. I don't see Ehrman having much skepticism toward the validity of empirical reasoning, or the presumption that the past must have been entirely like the present, or the assumption that we have an accurate understanding of what events are factual or fictional in our present moment.
In other words, Ehrman's conclusion (that miracles are unlikely to have ever occurred) has a number of premises that he does not question, which might be listed as:
1. We can know whether or not miracles are occurring right now.
2. If we know that miracles are not occurring right now, then we know that they are unlikely to have occurred in the past.
3. We know that miracles are not occurring right now.
Therefore: We know that miracles are unlikely to have occurred in the past.
None of those three premises are self-evident, even within the limitations of Ehrman's empirical epistemology.
1. We do not have a comprehensive viewpoint of all occurrences within the world, or anything even remotely approaching one (in fact, as our scientific examinations of physical phenomena have grown in power, the horizons of physical phenomena that we know to exist but which we cannot observe have expanded even faster).
2. The idea of empirical continuity is quite a bit more complicated, as the discussion of historical uniqueness indicates. Even more fundamentally, the category of "likeliness" depends a great deal on the timescales, spatial parameters, and frames of narrative that we choose, and on how we choose to define the category of "an event."
3. Many, many people will tell you that they have witnessed miracles happening today. On what basis should we discount their testimony?
I think that believing in miracles is in fact the *more skeptical* philosophical position, as it refuses to foreclose possibilities based on a confidence in both our limited phenomenal data and our powers of empirical extrapolation. I'm happy to call myself a skeptic in those terms.
Very well said, Ethan. And great to hear from you!
It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence — it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed. But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say, “Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles,” they answer, “But mediaevals were superstitious”; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles.
-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
The hermeneutic of suspicion has always sat poorly with me. Historians are basically trained to be paranoid schizophrenics, especially with anything deemed supernatural. “The authors of every text are all lying to me and I can only trust the v̶o̶i̶c̶e̶s̶i̶n̶m̶y̶h̶e̶a̶d̶ assumptions of my theory.” I'm probably being a little uncharitable, but not entirely.
The "beginning of the world" argument is clever, but beside the point, because whether or not the world had a beginning is a question that falls beyond the scope of historical methods. The astronomer or cosmologist have methods to investigate this; the historian's inquiries are about the times when things have already started up a bit. The academic discipline of history is not quite coterminous with the study of the past.
Maybe that’s right, I don’t know. More of a logical point though, in the end
The issue with historical miracles is not that they are unique; it is that they are extraordinary. Reported resurrections were hardly unique. According to the Gospels, Jesus himself raised three people from the dead--along with himself. According to the Old Testament Elijah and Elisha collectively raised another three.
So we have at least 7 miracles of the resurrection sort happening over a span of a millennium (and plenty more miracles are recorded) in a land with an estimated population of about 100K at the beginning of the period rising to about 1 million at the end. The geometrical average of these is about 0.3 million. This number of potential observers operating over 1000 years gives an “observer power” of 0.3 billion person-years. This gives one resurrection-scale extraordinary event per 42 million observer-years.
Compare this to the observer power of 5.9 billion observer-years we have available every year with modern smart phone tech. Given the frequency of not less than 1 miracle per 42 million observer years reported in Scripture, we should see AT LEAST 140 similarly extraordinary events every year nowadays given the vastly larger number of observers today, and yet we haven’t seen any. To give a relevant example of this massive observer power, consider the appearance of once-per-century meteor in 2013. Multiple videos of this extraordinary event were put out on the internet right after it happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor
Something we have NOT seen on the internet is multiple videos of close encounters with aliens. Fifty to 80 years ago there were many eyewitness accounts of such events. Once such case happened in Wisconsin, not far from where I grew up: Yet there are none today.
https://substack.com/@librarianofcelaeno/p-138130701
If extraordinary events such a miracles actually happen at anything like their historical frequency we would be seeing hundreds of videos of such things every year. We don’t see any. It is overwhelmingly likely that these historically reported extraordinary events (such as the one in Wisconsin in 1961) simply did not happen as described.
"we haven’t seen any"
how sure are you of this? I mean, that would be easier to concede if you mean "resurrection", but impossible to agree with if you just mean "miracles".
It is based on the idea that people will record extraordinary events with their smart phones and broadcast them on the internet. Being extraordinary it would be news that would spread on social media and all of us would soon learn about it.
As an example of this I used that meteor that crashed into Russia a decade or so ago. Shortly after it happened I had learned about it on the internet and seen video of the event despite the fact that it occurred without warning as lasted all of two seconds., yet there were *multiple* videos. This convinced me that if an extraordinary event like this meteor or a UFO landing were witnessed anywhere in the world I (and everyone else) would soon learn about it and there would be photos and video evidence on the net.
In the years since I have not seen another meteor like that one, leading me to believe that no large object has collided with the earth since then. I have also seen no UFO landings leading me to believe that none have happened. And there have been no miraculous events similar in incredulity to a UFO landings either, leading me to believe that none have happened.
Yet when I was a kid there were many eyewitness accounts of UFO landings and historically there have been a great many eyewitness accounts of miracles. So many of them that we should have seen dozens of spectacular accounts of UFO landings and miracles with real-time video evidence. There would be no question that aliens are visiting the Earth and that miracles happen.
But that hasn't happened, which is strong evidence that these things do not happen today. And if they do not happen today, I don't think those reports of UFO landings and alien abductions from my youth happened either. I put miracles in the same category as UFO landings/alien abductions.
I stopped listening when Ehrman announced his political leanings, because I assumed (fairly or not) that it would devolve into, “I don’t believe in Jesus, but if you do, you must follow him and vote like me.” I heard Paul VanderKlay’s recap a few days later, and it sounded like I was largely correct.
We’re always on thin ice when we associate a political candidate or party with Christianity
sore point for me.
When I was leading a bible study, had one guy who kept on trying to tie Christian faith to his political view. I kept on pointing out: there are plenty of Christians who believe both major sides and a few of the minor extreme views. There is NOTHING inherent to Christianity in any political belief, and Jesus' argument about "render unto" can even be seen as highlighting that.
But he won't reciprocate and acknowledge people who don't agree with him can be Christians.
If we take a Biblical stance on this—a la “there is nothing new under the sun”—then we need not concern ourselves with the specifics of an event in order to consider its plausibility. What has happened before can happen again. The Trojan Horse is plausible, and so it need not have occurred exactly as it was told to be believable—it communicates the efficacy of deceit in warfare and the perceived intellectual inferiority of the enemy. A false surrender that turns the tide to victory is the lesson. That said, there is no real barrier to it having happened much as it was described. Presenting a wooden horse and fleeing would have played on the enemy’s pride: no living horse to reclaim, and apparent cowardice in retreat—both reinforcing their confirmation bias.
The mythos of the Trojan Horse—or even of miracles—can always be explained away. Yet it is often our own pride that prevents us from seeing clearly that something has happened, and that it may be “miraculous” precisely because no better explanation presents itself than the one given by those involved. The Scriptures lean into this tension, describing miracles through varied and almost disjointed means: a shadow passing over someone, touching the hem of a garment, prayer, belief, long-distance healing, even contact with the bones of a dead prophet.
We can attempt to explain these things away, but in doing so we miss that an event is not undone by our inability to comprehend it in the moment. Lazarus walked out of the tomb and was subsequently hunted by religious leaders; Peter’s mother-in-law recovered; the centurion’s daughter rose from what was taken to be death, witnessed even by hired mourners; and Jesus himself walked out of his own tomb, seen by more than five hundred people.
In the end, belief or disbelief does not alter the event itself. It gains or loses us nothing in that sense—just as denying that the world had a beginning does not change the fact of whatever its origin may be. When our explanations aim at control, we risk mistaking description for mastery, and in doing so, we convince ourselves and others that we possess an understanding—and a power—that we do not.
Well said, Daniel
I’m not 💯 sure about the number here, but it illustrates the point: There is a 1 in 400 quadrillion (4x10 to the 17th power) chance that Bart Ehrman would be conceived and born with his exact genetic code.
Yet … here he is! Spouting nonsense!
Nah … never happened…
I would love to put Ehrman and Carlos Eire (“They Flew”) in a room to see what would happen. 😄
This was really good. I liked the way you framed it and your writing is really easy to follow. Thanks for this.
This reminds me very much of the abuse of the expression, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." It's often slung around with the same assumed objectivity, when in practice "extraordinary" is seldom given anything approaching an objective definition and remains completely founded on a vague intuition.
Correct, sir
I didn't know about this interview with Ross; I'll have to go give it a watch! I appreciate your wading into these types of conversations with persistence. I find, for myself, that I go into these conversations with some trepidation. What if I come across a perspective, an argument, or a logical proposition that finally knocks the legs out from under my Christocentric worldview? My heart bounds, I read or listen with rapt attention, fearing to hear some philosophy or elemental tradition that just crumbles my entire narrative. But, as of yet (and as you are pointing out in this interview review), I haven't found anything of the sort. Philosophical materialism is one of those heavyweight champions that always comes into the ring with a sort of calm sophisticated air, then gets pummeled by phenomenology. Each time I read something like what Ehrman iterates, I come away with renewed vigor and hope that what we've come to is actually everlasting, actually true.
Great comment, Caleb
Thank you for this. There are people who have turned this guy’s work (and Marcus Borg’s) into their gospel of “the religion of Jesus,” denouncing Christianity as a made up “religion about Jesus” fabricated by the ruling class to oppress the working class. Utter nonsense. You get the “religion of Jesus” by conveniently ignoring things you can’t account for and poo-pooing the rest as “unreliable.”
“any other scenario—no matter how unlikely—is more likely than the one in which a great miracle occurred.”
- Dr Bart Ehrman
Ehrman is pretty much on record at one point, if I remember correctly, that one of the personal goals of his UNC class is to destroy the faith of every Christian student who sits in that lecture hall/classroom. That automatically is a red flag that screams bias, and that every word Ehrman utters should be viewed with the tint of skepticism, because he is so overtly hostile to the Christian faith in particular.
I tried, note TRIED, reading one of his books one time. I gave up as it wasn't worth my time. Half of the arguments were tired old, easily countered retreads that a first year apologetics student could address. I would rather read the grandfather of the Christian left/Progressive Christianity, Marcus Borg, than Ehrman, and while Ehrman has clearly rejected Christianity, there are things he advocates that has a following among Progressive Christians, whose most ardent promoters are not Christians themselves either, so no wonder they and Ehrman at times align.