Tag Archives: Resurrection

Commentary

Is Bart Ehrman interested in encouraging critical thinking?

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From one of my favorite historians Darrell Bock. (H/T Lex Communis)

Basically, Ehrman in one of his widely-used books, gives a case against Mark being the author of the gospel of Mark, but he doesn’t take into account the criterion of embarrassment, which is one of the ways you can decide if historical claims are accurate. If a claim or tradition embarrasses the author of the tradition or claim, then it’s likely to be true. For example, the discovery of the empty tomb by women is very likely to be authentic, because the testimony of women was not highly regarded in that time and place. The church would not have invented female discoverers of the empty tomb – because it made their witness less effective.

Darrell Bock writes:

I am quite aware that many think the internal evidence is against such an authorship claim for Mark (and Ehrman does present those arguments). Those arguments can be addressed. So given a fair debate over the issues that lead one to think about who wrote a gospel, here is a point the claim Mark did not write the gospel has to deal with. What commends Mark as the author, if we are going to simply pick someone to enhance the reputation of a gospel when no one supposedly who knows the author is (which is what the alternative view claims is the situation)? What is Mark’s reputation? He failed to survive the first missionary journey and caused a split between Paul and Barnabas according to Acts. So how does randomly attaching his name to the book enhance that gospel’s credibility? Such a theory does not work here.

Mark’s reputation, such as it was, on its own does not enhance the credibility of the work. More than that, the tradition also consistently associated Peter with Mark, so why was this gospel not simply called the Gospel of Peter, if one is free to name any author the church could choose? Given a choice between Peter and Mark on the basis of reputation, Peter would be the obvious choice.

Something else must be at work, namely, a tradition careful about who it called an author, naming someone who in this case had an otherwise less than stellar resume. Arguments like the ones I just noted go completely ignored in his volume (and these are fair historical questions). So user beware that if you are being asked to use this text in a college class, some key points are not even being raised.

What I like about this is that I know Lex Communis is a Catholic blog, yet here he is citing Darrell Bock, an evangelical Christian! That’s good.

Actually, the Lex Communis post says:

I originally like Bart Ehrman’s work.  I thought that his courses on the Teaching Company were very good.  However, as I’ve listened to Ehrman’s popular stuff, such as his debates and interviews, I’ve come to wonder how much I can trust Ehrman.  Simply put, Ehrman says stuff that he knows is either overstated or wrong.

It’s not just me who says this.  William Lane Craig points out that there is a “Good Bart” and a “Bad Bart.”  “Bad Bart” will make the claim in popular circles that there are more errors in the Bible than there are words, and will foster the impression that we really can’t know for sure what the original text said.  However, when called out on it, “Good Bart” will forthrightly admit that we actually do know what the original text said and that the “errors” can be corrected or aren’t all that significant.

I cataloged the actual “variants” of substance that Bart listed in a debate when Peter Williams challenged him on it, a while back. There were four variants, and none of them mattered. He’s made a whole career on marginal trivia because bashing Christianity pays big bucks. He’s not a scholar, he’s a propagandist.

This is why it is important to watch people like Bart Ehrman, Dan Brown and Michael Moore in formal academic debates. These people aren’t honest seekers of truth. And the only way to catch them in their misrepresentations and counterfactual assertions is to have someone there to challenge them.

Further study

The top 10 links to help you along with your learning.

  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.

Podcasts

Audio and video from the recent Licona vs Carrier debate

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Mike Licona just e-mailed me about his re-match with internet infidel Richard Carrier, who takes an extremely skeptical view of the New Testament.

The audio and video are linked here on 4truth.net.

Details:

On February 11, 2010, Michael Licona and Richard Carrier faced each other in debate for a second time. Topic: Did Jesus rise from the dead? The debate occurred at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas in front of an estimated audience of 750. There are two video segments. The first is the main part of the debate (opening statements and six inquiry periods lasting 10 minutes each). The second is the audience Q & A.

Links:

UPDATE: Brian Auten writes:

The full MP3 (debate and q/a) can be found here. The MP3 links at 4truth are not actual MP3s as of this moment.

This is a cross-examination debate, so it should be very fun to watch/hear.

Polemics

Psychology Today features atheists who think that they are moral

22 Comments

I noticed that someone had posted a link to me from this post, so I left the comment below. (I made a few tiny changes below, but it’s basically the same as what I submitted). So far, the long comment has not been published, probably because it was mean, snarky and TOO LONG! So, I’ll show the comment below, but first here’s a word about the post itself. I left a new comment linking to this post, and we’ll see if that one stays up. I understand why they would not approve my comment, if they don’t – and so will you when you read below.

The post on Psychology Today

Notice the title “The Many Voices of the Happily Godless”. It shows two things about morality on atheism. One – that there is safety in numbers. Atheists get their standard of right and wrong from watching other people. That’s why they hate religion and want it banished from the public square, and why they resent Christians voting. They think that right and wrong is decided by counting votes, just like in Nazi Germany or pre-abolition England. So long as lots of people agree, then whatever the society decides is right for them, e.g. – abortion. Cultural relativism.

Second, the purpose of life on atheism is not to be a good person – there is no such thing as good and evil on atheism. They are trying to be happy. So they can define abortion as “good” and “moral” because murdering the weak isn’t wrong so long as it makes them happy. That’s what they mean by morality – what a person chooses to do in order to have feelings of happiness. The very concept of doing something because it is RIGHT, independently of what anyone thinks – as with abolitionists and pro-lifers and defenders of children’s rights with respect to traditional marriage – is foreign to them. (I know that some atheists are pro-life, but most aren’t!)

So they basically re-invent an accidental universe and an ethic of subjective selfish hedonism and then call that “morality”, even though it is the complete opposite of morality. And then they cloister together in the ivory tower with a few sheltered social studies majors who agree with them, read only the New York Times, and watch only MSNBC, listen only to NPR, and then titter nervously to each other about the immoral masses who think that unborn children have a right to life that trumps the “right” to have irresponsible sex and then escape the (financial) consequences of their own risky behavior.

That’s atheist “morality”. There is no objective right and wrong, and no rational argumentation about morality – morality on atheism is an illusion, as atheist Michael Ruse says. You can do anything that you are powerful enough to do in order to have good feelings. Because you can. And you try to pass laws and elect candidates to silence anyone who makes you feel bad for being selfish. And if people disagree with you, then you use the law to silence them, as at the University of Calgary with the pro-life students.

I am not saying that atheists MUST do evil, I am saying that the only reason they have not to do evil is because they can gain pleasure or avoid pain. And that is not morality, that’s just self-interest. Hedonism.

The comment I left that they did not publish

So anyway, I left the comment below and it didn’t appear. I wrote this in a single long edit and didn’t spell-check it or proof-read it before I hit post. This is from the hip, so I hope it makes sense to you.

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It’s not like this is even a close debate, by the way. The concept of rationally-grounded prescriptive morality is totally alien to an atheistic worldview.

1) There are no OBJECTIVE moral values on atheism, moral values independent of what humans think

2) There are no OBJECTIVE moral duties on atheism, moral duties independent of what humans think

3) There is no effective MORAL ACCOUNTABILITY on atheism, especially for powerful committed atheists like Stalin who can escape detection and consequences

4) There is no libertarian free will on atheism, due to materialism and biological determinism. You need the ability to choose in order to make MORAL CHOICES.

5) There is no ultimate significance to our actions on atheism, which undermines the rationality of self-sacrificial moral behavior when it goes against self-interest.

Self-interested hedonism is not “morality”, it’s self-interested hedonism. See the difference? You are not going to get people sacrificing their happiness for the lives of others on atheism, as with Christian abolitionists like William Wilberforce, because self-sacrifice is not rational on atheism. Self-interested hedonism is rational on atheism. The only reason to do anything on atheism is because it makes you feel good or to escape punishment from your society. That’s not morality, it’s the law of the jungle. Morality is sacrificing your life to free slaves when it gives you no feelings of happiness to do so, because you believe that every human being was born with a right to life, and a duty to know God personally.

Atheists can say the words “I’m moral” but what they mean is “I conform my behavior to my own personal preferences or to my society’s arbitrary fashions in this time and place when it coincides with my selfishness or when I am sure I won’t caught”. There is no real way we ought to be on atheism. The universe is an accident and so are we. Doing what makes you happy is not morality – it’s selfishness. Morality means doing the right thing, especially when it goes against your self-interest. But in an accidental universe without design, there is no way we ought to be. You do what you can get away with. That’s atheist “morality”.

And that’s why atheistic communists murdered 100 million people in communist regimes last century, tens of millions more with abortion, and tens of millions more on environmentalist overpopulation fads like banning DDT. Just look at the arguments and count the bodies. If you can’t ground an objective right to life, then these things are possible. Killing those who diminish your happiness is consistent with atheism – survival of the fittest. It is NOT consistent with the teachings of Jesus – love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you.

Atheism is a psychological disfunction that results when a person jettisons the demands of their conscience because they want to pursue pleasure in an unrestrained way, or because they expect God to make them happy and he doesn’t. That’s how people become atheists – it’s just immaturity. Atheists invent unscientific myths like the steady-state universe, the multiverse, aliens causing the origin of life, materialist conceptions of mind, unobservable pre-Cambrian fossils, etc. later, in order to disguise the pre-rational rebellion against God and the demands of the objective moral law. The whole point of atheism is to create an excuse for immoral, self-interested hedonistic behavior.

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I wrote a series of posts a while back in which I suggested 13 questions that you can use to understand WHERE atheists are coming from when it comes to morality. I also defined the minimal requirements for objective, rational, prescriptive morality, and explained why none of the requirements are grounded rationally by atheism, but ALL are grounded by Christian theism.

Lastly, you can look at just a few reasons why God exists, and some responses to just a few common objections.

A few reasons for Christian theism

Responses to a few common objections to Christian theism

Some debates on God and morality