Biblical expert Bart Ehrman discussed contradictory views about the life of Jesus Christ, and the creation of the Bible.
Biography:
Bart
D. Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He came to UNC in 1988,
after four years of teaching at Rutgers University. At UNC he has served
as both the Director of Graduate Studies and the Chair of the
Department of Religious Studies.
A graduate of Wheaton College
(Illinois), Professor Ehrman received both his Masters of Divinity and
Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary, where his 1985 doctoral
dissertation was awarded magna cum laude. Since then he has published
extensively in the fields of New Testament and Early Christianity,
having written or edited twenty-one books, numerous scholarly articles,
and dozens of book reviews.
Wikipedia
Ehrman has written
widely on issues of New Testament and early Christianity at both an
academic and popular level, with over twenty books including three New
York Times bestsellers (Misquoting Jesus, God's Problem, and Jesus,
Interrupted). Much of his work is on textual criticism and the New
Testament. His first book was Didymus the Blind and the Text of the
Gospels (1987) followed by several books published by the Oxford
University Press, including The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, and a
new edition and translation of The Apostolic Fathers in the Loeb
Classical Library series published by Harvard University Press. In God's
Problem Ehrman discusses the problem of evil and suffering, the issue
which he says led him to become agnostic. His book Jesus, Interrupted
critically assesses the New Testament documents and early Christianity.
In his book Forged which was released in 2011, he asserts that 11 or
more books of the Christian New Testament were essentially politically
expeditious forgeries, intended to advance various theological positions
and were in fact not written by the authors traditionally ascribed to
them.
In 1999 Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium
was released as a study on the historical Jesus. Ehrman argues that the
historical Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher, and that his apocalyptic
beliefs are recorded in the earliest Christian documents: the Gospel of
Mark and the authentic Pauline epistles. The earliest Christians
believed Jesus would soon return, and their beliefs are echoed in the
earliest Christian writings. In this, Ehrman follows the dominant
scholarly consensus among secular scholars since Albert Schweitzer
advanced a version of that thesis in 1905. In his foreword to the book,
Ehrman notes that there are many popular books for the layman advancing
various minority theories, such as Jesus as a wisdom-sage, shaman,
magician, or even founder of a mushroom cult, but few popular books for
laymen advancing the dominant scholarly consensus. This book was
intended to correct that gap.
Much of Ehrman's writing has
concentrated on various aspects of Walter Bauer's thesis that
Christianity was always diversified or at odds with itself. Ehrman is
often considered a pioneer in connecting the history of the early church
to textual variants within biblical manuscripts and in coining such
terms as "Proto-orthodox Christianity." Ehrman brought this
counter-traditional thesis, and textual criticism in general, to the lay
public through his popular-level work, Misquoting Jesus.
In
2012, Ehrman published Did Jesus Exist? defending the thesis that Jesus
of Nazareth existed in contrast to the mythicist theory that Jesus is an
entirely mythical or fictitious being woven whole-cloth out of
legendary material. He states he expects the book to be criticized both
by some atheists as well as fundamentalist Christians. In response,
Richard Carrier published a lengthy criticism of the book in April 2012,
particularly questioning both Ehrman's facts and methodology. Ehrman
replied to Carrier's criticisms on his website, primarily defending
himself against Carrier's allegations of factual errors.
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