I have previously commented on the "historical" dust-up that centered around Bart Ehrman's latest book but find it necessary to say a few more things. I was rather disappointed by Ehrman's attacks on "mythicists" but there was something else that kept gnawing at the back of my mind that I could not quite consciously identify at the time. After reading the May 1st Unreasonable Faith post "Jesus the Unremarkable Man" it finally formed into a completely recognizable thought.
The zeal with which Ehrman defended the historicity of Jesus seemed very disproportionate to what he was actually defending. Ehrman has always assumed Jesus was a real person but that he was not divine in any way. He has never believed in the Jesus that Christians insist was real. I seriously doubt the theists who rushed to support him have any idea what he has previously written about their beloved messiah. So does this argument really amount to anything? I'm not completely sure. Even if all of us who don't accept the historicity of Jesus concede the possibility of an ordinary human or small group of individuals existed and served as the basis for later myths, most of us already do concede that possibility, it would not change the larger argument. Jesus was not divine. Ehrman's view is only a small step away from the mythicists (ignoring the non-scholarly conspiracy nuts).
Basically, Ehrman actually agrees that the "Jesus" of Christianity is a myth. Whether an human existed that served as inspiration for the later myths is highly debatable but in the end not that important to Christian theology since that individual was not divine and in no way resembles the Jesus of scripture. Why Ehrman felt the need to pick a fight over an ordinary guy is beyond me.
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