The Quest for the Useable Jesus

Here is an excellent refutation of one of the leading lights of the "historical Jesus" movement.

My degree's in history, which requires training in historiography, the nuts-and-bolts work of historians.

I first encountered Ehrman's work in the very first course I ordered from The Teaching Company, entitled "The Historical Jesus". When it comes to history, Ehrman's a hack. His thesis in that particular course was that one could only presume plausible those facets of Christianity which factored into all gospel accounts, excepting perhaps those which drew upon the same source material.

This is a standard of proof which does not hold for any other historical figure, say, for instance, Alexander the Great. We do not discount large swaths of tradition concerning Alexander simply because our incomplete extant sources may be single sources. Yet Ehrman pushes the ludicrous notion that 4 (or more, given his embrace of the Gnostic and other non-canonical writings) eyewitness accounts of a person's life and ministry must match for them to be believed. Were that the case, we wouldn't be able to say Napoleon Bonaparte existed, much less conquered Europe.

Ehrman's simply one of those Jesus Seminar academics who have a firm view in mind of who Christ was (non-divine quasi-Marxist ur-hippie being the favored formulation today) and work backward to point to evidence they like and discard conflicting evidence as corrupt or unbelievable.

If you caught the Ted Koppel Q&A following The Discovery Channel's crockumentary "Lost Tomb of Jesus" you saw the exact same nonsense from Jim Tabor of Ehrman's sister school University of North Carolina - Charlotte.

Archaelogy is best practiced by archaelogists, history crafted by historians, theology reasoned out by theologians. Why would one presume that someone who's spent most of their career in textual criticism would be an authority in fields only tangentially-related to their own?

Enough people do that Ehrman is no doubt laughing all the way to the First National Bank of Dan Brown.