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Commentary

What does Bart Ehrman really believe about New Testament reliability?

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Here’s a post from Cross Examined that cites the appendix of Ehrman’s own book.

Excerpt:

Here’s what Ehrman says in an interview found in the appendix of Misquoting Jesus (p. 252):

Bruce Metzger is one of the great scholars of modern times, and I dedicated the book to him because he was both my inspiration for going into textual criticism and the person who trained me in the field. I have nothing but respect and admiration for him. And even though we may disagree on important religious questions – he is a firmly committed Christian and I am not – we are in complete agreement on a number of very important historical and textual questions. If he and I were put in a room and asked to hammer out a consensus statement on what we think the original text of the New Testament probably looked like, there would be very few points of disagreement – maybe one or two dozen places out of many thousands.  The position I argue for in ‘Misquoting Jesus’ does not actually stand at odds with Prof. Metzger’s position that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.

So why does Ehrman give one impression to the general public and the opposite to the academic world?  Could it be because he can get away with casting doubt on the New Testament to an uninformed public, but not to his academic peers? Does selling books have anything to do with it?  I don’t know.  I just find the contradiction here quite telling– the man who gets all the attention for casting doubt on the text of the Bible, upon further review, doesn’t really doubt it himself.

Wow. That’s funny. He doesn’t say that when he’s trying to sell books. He sounds more like Dan Brown when he’s trying to sell books. I always lump Bart Ehrman and Dan Brown together. Dan Brown. Bart Ehrman. Dan Brown. Bart Ehrman. Does Dan Brown fill in for Bart Erhman when Bart Ehrman is on sabbatical? Is Bart Ehrman secretly a ghost-writer for Dan Brown? Are they the same person?

Further study

The top 10 links to help you along with your learning on this issue and related issues.

  1. How every Christian can learn to explain the resurrection of Jesus to others
  2. The earliest source for the minimal facts about the resurrection
  3. The earliest sources for the empty tomb narrative
  4. Who were the first witnesses to the empty tomb?
  5. Did the divinity of Jesus emerge slowly after many years of embellishments?
  6. What about all those other books that the Church left out the Bible?
  7. Assessing Bart Ehrman’s case against the resurrection of Jesus
  8. William Lane Craig debates radical skeptics on the resurrection of Jesus
  9. Did Christianity copy from Buddhism, Mithraism or the myth of Osiris?
  10. Quick overview of N.T. Wright’s case for the resurrection

Debates are a fun way to learn

Three debates where you can see this play out:

Or you can listen to my favorite debate on the resurrection.

Extra stuff

A lecture on Bart Ehrman by William Lane Craig.

News

Why should you vote for the Republicans in November?

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Because it will be mean and vengeful, according to this Politico article.

Excerpt:

Republicans are planning a wave of committee investigations targeting the White House and Democratic allies if they win back the majority.

Everything from the microscopic — the New Black Panther party — to the massive –- think bailouts — is on the GOP to-do list, according to a half-dozen Republican aides interviewed by POLITICO.

Republican staffers say there won’t be any self-destructive witch hunts, but they clearly are relishing the prospect of extracting information from an administration that touts transparency.

And a handful of aggressive would-be committee chairmen — led by Reps. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Lamar Smith (R-Texas) — are quietly gearing up for a possible season of subpoenas not seen since the Clinton wars of the late 1990s.

And then the article lists six possible investigations:

  • Jobgate: Issa has made no secret of his interest in getting to the bottom of muddled, mishandled White House attempts to force Democratic Senate candidates Joe Sestak and Andrew Romanoff from races in Pennsylvania and Colorado.
  • Bailoutgate: No investigation poses a more significant political danger to Obama than a no-holds-barred GOP probe into TARP, the AIG bailout, the Freddie-Fannie sinkhole and the administration’s de facto takeover of GM and Chrysler.
  • Mortgagegate: Sen. Chris Dodd’s embarrassing placement on the company’s VIP mortgage list played a major role in the Connecticut Democrat’s involuntary retirement earlier this year.
  • Black-Panthergate: Smith, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, has already pressed Holder to look into charges that members of the New Black Panther Party intimidated voters at a Philadelphia polling place in 2008.
  • ACORNgate: A whole host of Republicans — led by Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Steve King (R-Iowa) on the party’s right wing — have demanded an investigation into the defunct community organizing group’s ties to the Obama campaign.
  • Gulf-Spillgate: Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has admitted MMS officials were asleep at the switch in monitoring BP’s Deepwater Horizon platform before it blew up. But Issa is bent on finding out which Obama administration officials were responsible for missing the warning signs and why clean-up and response efforts didn’t take place more quickly.

(Steeples fingers) Mwahahahahahaaaa! I mean – that’s interesting.

News

Should Al Gore be arrested for inciting eco-terrorist hate crimes?

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Al Gore inspired this eco-terrorist
Al Gore inspired this eco-terrorist

Consider the Democrat position on free speech that “may” incite violence, as stated in the bill they passed that criminalized free speech.

Excerpt:

The crime bill — which would broaden the protected classes for hate crimes to include sexual orientation and “gender identity,” which the bill defines as a victim’s “actual or perceived gender-related characteristics” — passed the House earlier this year as a stand-alone measure. But it’s never had the votes to succeed by itself in the Senate. So over the summer Democrats, with the power of their 60-vote majority, attached it to the defense bill.

Republicans argued that the two measures had nothing to do with each other. Beyond that, GOP lawmakers feared the new bill could infringe on First Amendment rights in the name of preventing broadly defined hate crimes. The bill’s critics, including many civil libertarians, argued that the hate crimes provision could chill freedom of speech by empowering federal authorities to accuse people of inciting hate crimes, even if the speech in question was not specifically related to a crime.

That’s their view – free speech that may incite a crime should be criminalized.

Whose free speech inspired the eco-terrorist?

From the Instapundit.

Excerpt:

ECO-TERRORISM? Gunman who took hostages at Discovery Channel inspired by Al Gore. “Lee appears to have posted environmental and population-control demands online, saying humans are ruining the planet and that Discovery should develop programs to sound the alarm. . . . Lee said he experienced an ‘awakening’ when he watched former Vice President Al Gore’s environmental documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’”

Won’t Al Gore please stop it with his extremist, eliminationist rhetoric before he inspires still more violence?

Al Gore’s speech did affect the views of the eco-terrorist. Is Al Gore’s speech to blame for this crime?

NO, I don’t think Al Gore should be blamed for inciting the eco-terrorism. The eco-terrorist is to blame for his eco-terrorism. I believe in free speech, even for eco-fascists like Al Gore. But Democrats don’t believe in free speech that is critical of their views – that’s why they banned free speech that disagrees with their views in their hate crime bill.

So what should we do to stop this from happening?

The problem with the loony left, (mainstream news media, Hollywood, unions, Democrats, non-quantitative academic departments), is that they always want to teach their view, and their view alone, in the schools. And they want to demonize anyone who disagrees with them using words like racist, sexist, homophobe, etc. They don’t to debate with the other side, because the other side is just EVIL. Not even worth listening to.

So how about we do this instead – let’s teach both sides of every issue, so that loonies like James Lee know the arguments on the other side as well as he knows the arguments on his side. Now that would be teaching tolerance and diversity. That would moderate the craziness of people on MSNBC and eco-terrorists and the UN IPCC.

More on the writings of the Al-Gore-inspired left-wing Democrat eco-terrorist at Hot Air and Michelle Malkin.

Darwinism and atheism

Evolution News takes a look at some of the eco-terrorist’s writings.

The eco-terrorist wrote:

Develop shows that mention the Malthusian sciences about how food production leads to the overpopulation of the Human race. Talk about Evolution. Talk about Malthus and Darwin until it sinks into the stupid people’s brains until they get it!!

And the eco-terrorist also wrote:

Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down!

Is this connection a surprise?

Witness the recent examples of Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter James von Brunn, Columbine High School shooter Eric Harris, Jokela High School shooter Pekka Eric Auvinen. Historical figures who drew inspiration, if indirectly, from Darwinian theory include Charles Manson, Mao Tse-tung, Joseph Stalin, Josef Mengele, and of course Adolf Hitler.

You don’t derive an ethic of love and compassion from Darwinian moral relativism and the doctrine of survival of the fittest.

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