Bart Ehrman’s Bad Arguments Go On Tour

Transcript:

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers apologist, Trent Horn, and today I want to talk about the New Testament scholar, Bart Ehrman. So Ehrman was once a conservative Christian and now identifies as an agnostic atheist. He’s been popping up all over YouTube recently with the same faulty arguments that he’s been proposing for decades. But before I share with you what those arguments are, I hope that you’ll help us share this podcast with a lot more people. You can do that by liking this video if you actually do like it, subscribing to the channel if you really don’t want to miss our content, and by becoming a partner with us at trenthornpodcast.com. You get access to my private study series and a weekly patron only livestream every Wednesday night. All that and more at trenthornpodcast.com. All right, so Bart Ehrman is probably one of the most famous biblical scholars in the world.

He’s published numerous bestselling books, including what’s probably his most famous book, Misquoting Jesus. He focuses on textual criticism, which is the science of using biblical manuscripts to restore what the original text of the Bible said because we don’t have the original copies of the gospels or any of the other biblical texts. Now, I notice on YouTube he’s been making the rounds on different atheist YouTube channels. So I just want to highlight a few of the claims that he’s made that Christian philosophers and biblical scholars have addressed and show what’s wrong with them. So first, let’s start off with this clip from a debate that he had on the Unbelievable podcast. It was about Christ resurrection. In this clip, Justin Bass, who by the way, has a great book defending the Resurrection, it’s called the Bedrock of Christianity. Bass asks Ehrman why Ehrman thinks Jesus was not raised from the dead.

Why don’t I think a person got raised from the dead?

Yes.

Oh.

Why don’t you think Jesus got raised from the dead?

I don’t think anybody gets-

Not anybody?

… raised from the dead. Because it’s violates the laws of nature.

Okay. Okay.

I mean-

So you have the kind of a materialist, fundamentalist view?

Well, let me ask this. I mean, you think God raised Jesus from the dead, right?

Yeah.

Do you think God can break the laws of mathematics? Can God make-

God can’t contradict himself. No.

No, right.

Because he is-

Exactly.

… Mathematics is his language.

That’s right. The other language he uses is physics. Can he break the laws of physics?

I mean, I think we’re getting off-

No, we are not getting off. This is precisely… You asked me why I don’t believe it. And the reason I don’t believe it is because it violates the law of physics. And I don’t think God-

He can feed things into his system, for sure.

I don’t think God can break the law of physics anymore than he can break the law of mathematics.

Feeding things into his system to bring a dead person to life is not the same thing as making two plus two five. That’s completely different things.

They’re both laws that have never been broken in history.

Except in the case of Jesus, right?

Justin does a good job pointing out that these two things are not equally impossible because the laws of physics and the laws of mathematics are very different. The laws of mathematics describe an essential feature of reality. They are necessarily true. They’re true in every possible world. God could not have made a world where two plus two equals five any more than he could have made a world with married bachelors or objects that have color but not shape. Seriously, try to think of an object that has color but doesn’t have shape. You can’t, these laws represent logical or metaphysical impossibilities. They’re descriptions of the way reality has to be. But the laws of physics are not descriptions of ways reality has to be. They’re descriptions of how objects in reality tend to behave and objects could have behaved differently. This means the laws of physics are contingent truths.

They’re not necessary like mathematics. God could have made the speed of light different when he made the universe, but he could not have made mathematical axioms different. God can make the speed of light different right now. In fact, the fine-tuning argument for God’s existence rests on the fact that if the constants and conditions and the laws of physics had been set randomly, they should be life prohibiting. But since their life permitting, that’s evidence the laws of physics were purposefully set by a designer. So Ehrman’s objection doesn’t work because the laws of physics do not command the universe. They’re just descriptions of how things in the universe tend to behave.

The fact that objects always behave in the same way is actually evidence for God instilling order and regularity in the universe. But God can intervene and cause objects to behave in different ways, such as by reversing entropy in a dead body coming back to life. So this is nothing like God changing math or logic. Next, in this clip from his appearance on Paolo’s YouTube channel, Ehrman is responding to Protestant philosopher, William Lane Craig’s recent critique of him. Ehrman says, Craig’s approach to the historical Jesus does not work because if you believe based on testimony that Jesus rose from the dead, well why don’t you believe other ancient figures like Apollonius of Tyana or Romulus were raised to heaven or from the dead?

You cannot use the kind of criteria that he uses for the historic with Jesus to do ancient history or to do medieval history or any other kind of history. Look, you have stories about Apollonius of Tyana going to heaven and being seen going to heaven and coming back, an eyewitness account. You have an eyewitness firsthand account of Romulus going to heaven. So look, somebody said so. Okay, is that your kind of evidence?

This makes it sound like the evidence for Apollonius, Romulus, and Jesus are all the same quality, but they’re not. Apollonius was a first century philosopher and alleged wonder worker from the town of Tyana in what’s now modern day Turkey. The only source we have for Apollonius is the Life of Apollonius written by Philostratus 150 years later in the third century. The wife of the Roman Emperor at the time commissioned Philostratus to write the biography about Apollonius, probably to compete with Christianity. Scholar Maria Dzielska notes that the Apollonius legend grew, “Thanks to a governor of Bithynia, Sossianus Hierocles, who used Philostratus’s work none too popular in the third century to combat Christianity.” Philostratus’s main source is an alleged disciple of Apollonius named Dames who was said to have written a memoir about Apollonius. But some scholars think that Dames never even existed and that Philostratus invented him.

To make the evidence for Jesus similar to Apollonius, you’d have to have Christianity rest entirely on Tertullian writing two centuries later at the request of a Roman emperor to combat Mithraism and say that Tertullian was writing a biography of Jesus using one gospel as a source, but that gospel is now lost.

In that scenario, I would say Jesus’s resurrection is probably a legend because we only have an allegation of a firsthand source written centuries later, not like the actual evidence we have like firsthand accounts from Paul who said that he saw the risen Jesus as well as Paul’s corroboration of having met other people who saw the risen Jesus. So the evidence for Jesus and Apollonius is completely different. Now when it comes to Romulus, the differences are even more extreme. Romulus was the supposed founder of Rome and he lived in the eighth century BC. The earliest sources we have for Romulus are Ovid and Virgil from the first century about 700 years later, and Quintes Fabius Pictor who wrote in the third century or 500 years after Romulus allegedly lived. Once again, this would be like Christians saying, Jesus rose from the dead because Pope Gregory the Great said that he did 500 years after the fact, and we don’t have an earlier source.

This is not comparable, as I said to the evidence we have from Paul, as well as the gospels, which are not lost documents cited centuries later, but we can reconstruct the actual documents and see what they said and know that they were written within a few decades after Jesus’s resurrection. Next we have Ehrman’s recent appearance on Cosmic Skeptics podcast, Alex O’Connor, who I’ve debated multiple times in the past. In this part of the discussion, Ehrman cast doubt on the New Testament ever describing Jesus claiming to be God. He does say Jesus claims to be God in the Gospel of John. And this is a useful point to bring up if you’re discussing the Bible with a Jehovah’s witness or a Muslim who says that the New Testament never teaches Jesus’s God, sends Ehrman who’s an agnostic, even admits that John’s gospel certainly does teach that Jesus claimed to be God.

Jesus never calls himself God. All of our earliest sources where Jesus starts calling himself God is the Gospel of John, our last source. But in this particular case, in John 8:58, when he says before Abraham was, “I am.” He doesn’t say I am something else, just, “I am.” That’s significant because in the Old Testament, in Exodus 3 where Moses is being told by God to go to the Israelites and tell them that they’re going to be set free and go to the Pharaoh and demand that he lets his people go, he says, “Well, if they ask me what’s your name, what am I supposed to say?” And God replies, “I am. Tell them I am has sent you.” And so that comes to be taken as the basis for the name of God. I am. And so if Jesus says I am and he is referring to himself, he seems to be claiming the name of God from the name of Yahweh in the Old Testament. And so his Jewish opponents take up stones to stone him to death.

Death. But Ehrman also says, this claim is not historical because he says it is only found in the Gospel of John and that Jesus never explicitly or implicitly claims divinity in the other gospels. And this isn’t recorded in the letters of Paul.

It seems to me completely implausible that six authors would describe the sayings of Jesus, knowing that he called himself God and neglect to mention that part.

Ehrman should know that arguments from silence can be really tricky. Ehrman himself has taken Mythicist to task for saying that Jesus never existed at all because Paul doesn’t describe Jesus’s miracles or other aspects of his earthly ministry. Since Paul doesn’t discuss these important stories, it’s not surprising that Paul doesn’t talk about authority claims that Jesus made during his earthly ministry.

Now, when we look at the earlier gospels, the synoptic gospels, the lack of Jesus’s explicit claims to divinity don’t disprove that he never claimed it at all. Now, when we call these synoptic gospels, by the way, it’s because Matthew, Mark and Luke tell a very similar story. I would argue that they do describe Jesus acting in a way that communicates his divinity to others just not as explicitly. Now, Ehrman anticipates this reply and says that these implicit testimonies to divinity on Jesus’s behalf, these stories are actually misinterpreted by Christians. One example that he gives is Mark 2:5, where Jesus says, “Your sins are forgiven.” Ehrman says that in this story, Jesus is not claiming to be God and having the ability to forgive sins, rather he’s making an anti-priestly polemic and he’s saying the ability to forgive sins lies outside of the priests in the Jewish temple.

It’s Jesus enemies who say that only God can forgive sins. That’s an important point.

Yes.

Second point, Jesus does not say in order to show him God, take up your pallet and walk. He says, “In order to show that the son of man has authority to forgive sins.” Well who’s given him the authority?

Yeah.

God has.

And in fact, at near the end of the gospel narratives, we have Jesus sending his disciples to spread his message, but also giving them the power to forgive sins.

Yep. And that’s the thing. If you have authority, somebody’s given you the authority. And the other point that most people wouldn’t have any way to know, is that as the great New Testament scholar EP Sanders pointed out, in the temple, when Jewish priests would perform a sacrifice… Somebody would bring a lamb or something, there’d be a sacrifice. Once the sacrifice was performed, the priest would pronounce that their sins had been forgiven. They had that authority as priests. What Sanders argued is that what Jesus is claiming is not to be God. He’s claiming to have greater authority than the priests, that this is an anti-priestly polemic. It’s got nothing to do with Jesus calling himself God.

But there is a detail in Mark’s gospel that Ehrman is overlooking, that distinguishes it from the delegation to forgive sins that Jesus gives the apostles in John’s Gospel. Remember that Ehrman said he claimed Jesus’s opponents said only God can forgive sins.

And Jesus sees the man, sees their faith that they know he can heal him, and he looks at the man and says, “Your sins are forgiven.” And the Pharisees say, “Wait a second, only God can forgive sins.” It’s Jesus enemies who say that only God can forgive sins.

But that’s not what Mark describes. Read the passage carefully. And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “My son, your sins are forgiven.” Now, some of the scribes were sitting there questioning in their hearts, why does this man speak to us? It is blasphemy. Who can forgive sins but God alone? And immediately Jesus, perceiving in his spirit that they thus question within themselves said to them, “Why do you question thus in your hearts? Which is easier to say to the paralytic, your sins are forgiven or to say, rise, take up your pallet and walk?” Jesus knows what people think in their hearts, which is something only God knows. In 1 Kings 8:39, Solomon prays to God saying, “Thou only know us the hearts of all the children of men.” And Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:11, “For what person knows a man’s thoughts except the spirit of the man which is in him?”

In other words, only a person can know his own thoughts and no other human being can know them. The only other being who could know inner thoughts is God since 1 Chronicles 28:9 says, “The Lord searches every mind and understands every plan and thought.” And when you look at Jesus’s parables in the synoptic gospels, you see he presents himself as not just another human prophet. In the parable of the wicked tenants, the vineyard represents the people of Israel and the owner of the vineyard represents God. Jesus identifies himself not with the owner’s servants who were sent and rejected by the tenant farmers of Israel. He identifies with the son of the owner of the vineyard, the son of Yahweh. All of this shows that Jesus in the synoptic gospels has a very high view of his own relationship with God. That makes sense if he is God’s son by nature or that he’s equally divine with the Father. In fact, a point that Ehrman makes about what Jesus almost certainly said in the synoptic tradition supports the view that Jesus had a divine self-identity.

What scholars do is they go through every saying of Jesus. They go through every line, they go through every word to try and figure out, did this happen or not? Did he say this or not? There’s this one saying that almost certainly Jesus said, I think, which is, he’s talking to the 12 disciples. You get this in Matthew and Luke. I think in the Matthew version, he says to them that, “You 12…” Speak to the 12 disciples. “When the kingdom comes, you 12 will be seated on 12 thrones ruling the 12 tribes of Israel.”

12?

12. I think Jesus must have said this because Judas is one of the 12 he is talking to. And a later Christian, if you’re trying to ask what would a Christian make up a Christian are not going to make up a later saying where Jesus is saying-

That Judas-

… that Judas is one of the going to be one of the 12 rulers. So I think the same probably goes back to Jesus.

But why did Jesus choose 12 disciples? In his book, Jesus Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, Ehrman writes, “Why did Jesus choose 12 disciples? Why not nine or 15? The 12 disciples represent the true Israel, the people of God who would enter into his glorious kingdom when the Son of man arrives.”

A more interesting question would be, why didn’t Jesus choose 11 disciples? If he had, Jesus would’ve had the role of being one of the tribes of Israel like Levi, and so he too would sit on one of the thrones judging Israel. But it seems clear that Jesus thought of himself as Yahweh. He represents Yahweh who first gathered the 12 tribes, and so Jesus will have this same divine authority in the new kingdom of God. That’s why Jesus says in Luke 22:29-30, “As my father appointed a kingdom for me, so do I appoint for you that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones judging the 12 tribes of Israel.” Ehrman might say that the earliest sources show us that Jesus only saw himself as a messenger and the person who would lead the 12 would not be Jesus, but another person called the Son of Man.

Ehrman holds the view that when Jesus says the Son of Man would come to judge the world, Jesus was talking about another person. He writes, “In multiply attested traditions, Jesus did use the phrase, Son of Man to refer to a cosmic judge of the earth. He seems to be referring to someone other than himself.” But this doesn’t make sense of the blasphemy charge made against Jesus at his trial. In the interview with O’Connor, Ehrman brushes over this point saying Jesus was executed by the Romans merely for political reasons because he claimed to be the king of the Jews.

Because he’s actually not crucified for calling himself God. His divine claims have no relationship to any of the crucifixion narratives, and so it’s not that that’s going to get him in trouble.

So I mean, what is it the-

Oh, it’s pretty clear. When you read the trial narratives, Pontius Pilate kills him for claiming to be the-

King of Jews.

… king of Jews. And that’s a political claim. And so Pilate isn’t concerned about Jewish theology.

The Romans did execute him as a political threat, but the trial Ehrman refers to can’t just be the Roman trial. We also have to wonder why was Jesus arraigned at the Jewish trial under the Sanhedrin. And it is here that Ehrman admits his theory about Jesus’s identity does not explain why Jesus was sentenced to death.

He writes the following in his book, “The real problem though is that it is difficult to understand the trial proceeding if it actually happened as narrated. In our earliest account. The high priest asked Jesus if he is in fact the Messiah, the Son of the blessed.” So far so good. “But when Jesus affirms that he is and says that the high priest will see the son of man coming on the clouds of heaven saying that in themselves coincide perfectly well with Jesus’s teachings elsewhere, the high priest cries out blasphemy and calls for his execution. The problem is that if this in fact is what Jesus said, he didn’t commit any blasphemy. It was not blasphemous to call oneself the Messiah. This simply meant that you understood yourself to be the deliverer ruler of your people. Other Jews made this claim about themselves and about others, both before Jesus and afterward, never with the charge of blasphemy. Nor was it blasphemous to say that the son of man was soon to arrive. This was simply to acknowledge that the book of Daniel had predicted something that would happen in your own day, something other apocalyptic prophets were saying as well, without being found blasphemous. It seems unlikely then that the trial proceeded the way that it’s described in Mark our earliest source.”

Ehrman then writes the following in a footnote to this section. He writes, “One explanation for Mark’s narrative is that since Mark understood that Jesus himself was the Son of Man, he assumed that the high priest inferred this as well and so thought that Jesus was claiming to be the divine judge of the earth, a claim that he found blasphemous. If this is right, though it’s a view that makes sense in terms of Mark’s gospel written many years later and from a Christian perspective. It makes less sense historically as something that actually happened when Jesus was confronted by the Jewish high priest.”

Or maybe it does make sense because it explains all the details related to the trial and to Jesus’s radical claims of having an intimate relationship with Yahweh. Perhaps what should be reconsidered is the assumption that Jesus was just a mortal apocalyptic prophet. Finally, we have Bart Ehrman talking on Genetically Modified Skeptics channel about New Testament variants in the manuscripts. There’s not a specific criticism I have here, and he does give a nice history about the development of textual criticism and studying manuscripts and copies of the Bible. My general criticism is that when Ehrman talks about textual criticism and manuscript variants to a popular audience, he gives the impression that this huge number of variants is a big problem. We can’t really know what the original text of the New Testament said and that it causes a big problem for Christian doctrine.

But then it caused a huge fear because he quoted 30,000 places where these manuscripts are different from each other. And so scholars are doing all sorts of things that are problematic for faith. But this was the beginning of it. When scholars started realizing that the very words of the text were problematic, that there are differences, and that sometimes it’s hard to know what the author originally wrote. And there are disagreements and there are places where we don’t know which words the author wrote.

When you read Ehrman’s popular works, you see the same attitude. He writes in misquoting Jesus. Not only do we not have the originals, we don’t have the first copies of the originals. We don’t even have the copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later, much later. In most instances, they are copies made many centuries later, and these copies all differ from one another in many 1000s of places. Possibly it is easiest to put in comparative terms. There are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament. First, the reason there are so many variants is because there are so many manuscripts. For example, suppose that each of the 20,000 manuscripts of the New Testament we possess has 20 variants in it. This adds up to 400,000 variants, but this huge number of variants is distributed across a huge number of manuscripts.

We’re left actually with individual manuscripts that might contain only a few dozen variants, and those variants themselves are not problematic. But let’s make a contrast though. Consider the first six books of the Annals of the Roman Historian Tacitus. This is one of our primary historical sources about ancient Rome. There’s only one copy of this section of the Annals. It was written 1000 years after the original. There are no textual variants because there are no other copies to compare it to. That’s actually a bad thing. We have no way of knowing what is original in this because we can’t do textual criticism on it. But a New Testament with many variants distributed across many manuscripts is more reliable than a New Testament with few variants that are distributed only across a few or a single manuscript. And as I said, the variants, the differences are almost always trivial.

A name might be misspelled or the order of the names might be swapped. But this isn’t a problem for people that know that John has only one N in it. The biblical scholar, Craig Blomberg says the following of the 100s of 1000s of variants in the New Testament manuscripts. “Only about a 10th of 1% are interesting enough to make their way into footnotes in most English translations. It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that no orthodox doctrine or ethical practice of Christianity depends solely on any disputed wording. There are always undisputed passages one can consult that teach the same truths. Tellingly, in the appendix to the paperback edition of Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman himself concedes that essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variance in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.” It is too bad that this admission appears in an appendix and comes only after repeated criticism. Second, in his more academic work, Ehrman is much more reserved in his conclusions. Many years ago, William Lane Craig gave a talk on Bart Ehrman where he also made the same observation.

What has happened, I think, is there are really two Bart Ehrmans that are on display. Dan Wallace, who is a textual scholar at Dallas Theological Seminary likes to distinguish between what he calls the scholarly Bart Ehrman and the popular Bart Ehrman. The scholarly Bart Ehrman knows that the text of the New Testament has been established to 99% accuracy. That is to say the original wording of the New Testament is now established to about 99%, so that the degree of uncertainty in the text of the New Testament is only about 1%. Good Bart knows that the text of the New Testament is virtually certain. Bad Bart deliberately misrepresents the situation to lay audiences to make them think that the New Testament is incredibly corrupted and uncertain.

Here’s an example of scholarly or good Bart being more reserved. In a book he wrote with the conservative New Testament scholar, Bruce Metzger called The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption and Restoration, Ehrman and Metzger say of the church father’s commentaries on scripture that, “So extensive are these citations that if all other sources for our knowledge of the text of the New Testament were destroyed, they would be sufficient alone for the reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament.” Craig also offers this anecdote of a radio interview he heard with Ehrman that shows how people can get the wrong idea from his popular scholarship.

And it’s very interesting that when the bad Bart is pressed on this issue by someone, he’ll come clean and admit this. For example, I heard Bart Ehrman interviewed on a radio show some time ago about misquoting Jesus, and the interviewer was talking to him about how uncertain the text of the New Testament, all the 1000s and 1000s of variants that there are and how uncertain it is.

And finally the interviewer said to him, “Well, Dr. Ehrman, what do you think the text of the New Testament originally really said?” And Ehrman replied, “Well, I don’t understand what you mean. What are you talking about?” And the interviewer said, “Well, the text of the New Testament, it’s been so corrupted as it’s been copied. What do you think the original text actually said?” And Ehrman said, “Well, it says pretty much what we have today, what it says now.” And the interviewer was utterly confused. He said, “Well, I thought it was all corrupt.” And he says, “Well, we’ve been able to reestablish the text of the New Testament as textual scholars.” So he knows, and when pressed, admits that the text in the New Testament is 99% established.

All right, that’s all I have today, though. I’m sure Ehrman’s work will come up in future episodes since he’s published so much on the Bible and Christianity. If you’d like more great resources on this, I recommend the anthology, How God Became Jesus that was published in response to Ehrman’s book, How Jesus Became God, Daniel Wallace’s anthology, Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament: Manuscript, Patristic and Apocryphal Evidence, and also the debate that my colleague, Jimmy Aiken had with Bart Ehrman on the reliability of the gospels. You can check that out on the Catholic Answers Channel. But thank you guys so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.

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