Community Reviews
I am quite familiar with the arguments of New Testament scholar Bert Ehrman. I have heard a few of his lectures, seen/heard a few of his debates and read "Forged". Despite my many, many disagreements with his conclusions, he is an engaging speaker and clearly a very good in his field of textual criticism. Though he usually gets the facts correct, at least in textual criticism, his conclusions are biased and way off.
This book by Andreas Kostenberger, Darrell Bock and Josh Chatraw is an excellent response to some of the claims Dr. Ehrman has made throughout the years. They address various topics such as the reliability of the New Testament (Corruption and alleged contradictions), why variety of "Christianities" in the early church and alleged forgeries in the New Testament. The latter two were the best chapters in the book, though Dr. Kostenberger and Dr. Koger gave a much deeper analysis of the dishonest and poor historical work of Dr. Ehrman view on there being no consistent orthodox belief in the early church in their book called "The Heresy of Orthodoxy". An excellent book.
I say Dr. Ehrman is dishonest because he either barely interacts with opposing views or just ignores them completely. For example, the authors of this book mentioned (pg 62) that Dr. Ehrman never addresses Richard Baukman's excellent work on Christology, "Jesus and The Eyewitnesses", in his book "How Jesus became God". How often have I read conservative biblical scholars interacting with the ridiculous, hypothetical "Q" document that liberal biblical scholars consistently bring up? The fair treatment is rarely given to the other side.
The chapter "Are many New Testament documents forged?" was quite difficult to get through, but easily the best chapter. It was difficult due to the almost amateurish arguments that Dr. Ehrman puts out in his book "Forged". Dr. Ehrman is excellent in his field, but as an exegete of scripture, he is not. His reasoning to exclude Ephesians, for example, from the Pauline corpus is because there are really long sentences. He states there are 90 or so new words in that epistle in comparison to an equal length Pauline written Philippians. However, the authors of this book careful pick that apart mentioning that Ephesians is actually 33% longer than Phillipians, which Ehrman thinks is Pauline, AND Phillippians has 6.2 terms per page used only once in the New Testament, while Ephesians has 4.6 terms per page. (page 151).
Dr. Ehrman is a hyper-skeptic, almost in the lines of the Dr. Robert Price from the Jesus Seminary. When asked, during a debate with Dr. Dan Wallace, on how much evidence he would he need to trust in the reliability of the New Testament, this was his answer (pg 104):
"Well if we had early copies, if we had copies of Mark..suppose next week, there is an archaeological find in Egypt, say, it's in Rome, an archaeological find in Rome, and we have reason to think that these 10 manuscripts that are discovered were all copied within a week of the original copy of Mark, and they disagreed in 0.001% of their textual variation, then I would say, that's good evidence and that's precisely what we don't have"
Wow.
This book by Andreas Kostenberger, Darrell Bock and Josh Chatraw is an excellent response to some of the claims Dr. Ehrman has made throughout the years. They address various topics such as the reliability of the New Testament (Corruption and alleged contradictions), why variety of "Christianities" in the early church and alleged forgeries in the New Testament. The latter two were the best chapters in the book, though Dr. Kostenberger and Dr. Koger gave a much deeper analysis of the dishonest and poor historical work of Dr. Ehrman view on there being no consistent orthodox belief in the early church in their book called "The Heresy of Orthodoxy". An excellent book.
I say Dr. Ehrman is dishonest because he either barely interacts with opposing views or just ignores them completely. For example, the authors of this book mentioned (pg 62) that Dr. Ehrman never addresses Richard Baukman's excellent work on Christology, "Jesus and The Eyewitnesses", in his book "How Jesus became God". How often have I read conservative biblical scholars interacting with the ridiculous, hypothetical "Q" document that liberal biblical scholars consistently bring up? The fair treatment is rarely given to the other side.
The chapter "Are many New Testament documents forged?" was quite difficult to get through, but easily the best chapter. It was difficult due to the almost amateurish arguments that Dr. Ehrman puts out in his book "Forged". Dr. Ehrman is excellent in his field, but as an exegete of scripture, he is not. His reasoning to exclude Ephesians, for example, from the Pauline corpus is because there are really long sentences. He states there are 90 or so new words in that epistle in comparison to an equal length Pauline written Philippians. However, the authors of this book careful pick that apart mentioning that Ephesians is actually 33% longer than Phillipians, which Ehrman thinks is Pauline, AND Phillippians has 6.2 terms per page used only once in the New Testament, while Ephesians has 4.6 terms per page. (page 151).
Dr. Ehrman is a hyper-skeptic, almost in the lines of the Dr. Robert Price from the Jesus Seminary. When asked, during a debate with Dr. Dan Wallace, on how much evidence he would he need to trust in the reliability of the New Testament, this was his answer (pg 104):
"Well if we had early copies, if we had copies of Mark..suppose next week, there is an archaeological find in Egypt, say, it's in Rome, an archaeological find in Rome, and we have reason to think that these 10 manuscripts that are discovered were all copied within a week of the original copy of Mark, and they disagreed in 0.001% of their textual variation, then I would say, that's good evidence and that's precisely what we don't have"
Wow.
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