The sixth chapter of Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God is entitled, “The Beginning of Christology: Christ as Exalted to Heaven.” As the title suggests, the chapter attempts to essentially trace the development of early Christian Christology regarding just who Jesus was. Remember, the title of the book is How Jesus Became God—and what Ehrman…
In chapter 5 of his book, How Jesus Became God, Bart Ehrman discusses “what we can know” about the resurrection of Jesus. Of course, given the fact that in the previous chapter where Ehrman makes the argument that there probably wasn’t an empty tomb because Jesus probably wasn’t even given a proper burial, one would…
The earliest Christians didn’t claim Jesus was physically resurrected. There is no way to know if there was an empty tomb. There probably wasn’t even a tomb to begin with because Jesus probably was either never buried at all or was thrown into a mass grave with other people who were executed by the Romans….
In chapter 4 of Bart Ehrman’s book, How Jesus Became God, focuses on what Ehrman believes we cannot know about the resurrection of Jesus. Early on in the chapter, Ehrman makes the distinction between belief in the resurrection of Jesus and the actual resurrection of Jesus. Thus, even though Ehrman correctly says, “Belief in Jesus’s…
When it comes to assessing which parts of the Gospels are historically credible and which aren’t, Bart Ehrman adheres to the generally accepted methods of biblical scholarship that, in and of themselves, are perfectly fine and reasonable. In a nutshell, the criterion Ehrman uses is the following: The Criterion of Independent Attestation: If a story…
After a temporary diversion into addressing Richard Carrier and the “mythicist movement,” I am now getting back to my extended book analysis of Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God. In this post, I will begin to look at chapter 3 in HJBG, where Ehrman discusses whether or not Jesus believed he was God. Well then,…
Up until about three weeks ago, I really hadn’t paid much attention to Richard Carrier and the “mythicist movement.” I knew a little bit about his claims, but simply didn’t feel it was worth the hassle. And then (as I mentioned in the first post of this series) I got into a rather silly and…
We now come to the third post of my series on Richard Carrier and the “mythicist movement” which claims there was no historical person named Jesus, and that the Gospels are just myth. Of course, as I said in my first post, Carrier doesn’t define “myth,” and it becomes apparent that what he means is…
In my last post, I began to look at Richard Carrier’s claims that Jesus probably never existed and that the Gospels were, in fact, a myth. I noted that several problems with those claims: not only did he fail to even properly define “myth,” his interpretation of various biblical texts smacks of wooden literalism and…
Last week I got into a little bit of a “Twitter war” over the issue of whether or not Jesus was a historical person. As often happens on social media like Twitter or Facebook, you might intend to just make one comment, but then you find yourself roped into the equivalent of WWE’s Royal Rumble,…