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Friday, April 27, 2012

"Oh no! Ehrman is giving the Christians ammunition!"

Those who frequent the web sites of anti-Christian atheists have lately come across many comments of this sort, by a guy named Steven:

"Bart is now claiming that a story of a girl being raised from the dead dates from very early because , wait for it, some of it is written in Aramaic.

"John Loftus is going to really struggle in his job of debunking Christianity now that apologists can wheel out Bart Ehrman claiming there is multiple independent early attestation of stories of people being raised from the dead, stories which date back very early.

"And that this (according to Bart) the scholarly consensus.

"Sorry John, but Bart has handed your opponents a really big stick to hit you over the head with.

"Look forward to a lot of Christians saying to you 'But even a sceptic like Bart Ehrman says.....'"

Don't sweat it, Steve. What you should sweat are the facts, which Ehrman does little more than recognizes, in some cases. I've been using the Jesus Seminar, and Morton Smith, radical as they are, to argue for the truth of the Gospels, for years. I'm less inclined to use Ehrman for that purpose, maybe because he's not radical enough.  Also, he's focused too much on minor issues, like whether minor books in the New Testament were written by their putative authors, their scribes, the scribes of their disciples, or just a good forger who wanted to give some solid Christian instruction to a random church in Anatolia. 

Get your head around this: 'All truth is God's truth.'  Translate that into atheist-speak, and you'll have a principle to live by.

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