I'm Disappointed In Bart Ehrman -- But Should I Be?

That's not one of those weaselly titles with a question in it which is, in the author's mind, already conclusively answered, as has been the case in at least one recently-published, briskly-selling book. If you see a question mark in the title of something I've written, it means I'm really not sure about the answer. If I were sure, the last part of this blog entry's title would read either -- And I Should Be or -- But I Shouldn't Be. Until recently it would've been -- And I Should Be, but I'm always going on about how it's bad to be closed-minded, and now, even though it makes me uncomfortable, I am questioning a belief which I have held firmly for some time: the belief that Bart Ehrman squanders his gifts by lending his name and presence to sensationalistic, non-scholarly projects. (See for example The So-Called "History Channel", ch 1, How Bart Ehrman Makes A Joke Of Himself By Appearing On The So-Called "History Channel".)

Of course, if I didn't think rather highly of Ehrman's abilities, there would be nothing for me to be disappointed about.

(Another belief I've held for a while, but not as firmly, and which I have questioned lately, is that there actually are intelligent biblical scholars. Lately I've wondered whether I might be wrong about that, and whether Ehrman, R Joseph Hoffmann, Eric Meyers, Shaye Cohen and a handful of others might only seem intelligent by contrast to the dullards who are the majority of their colleagues. I go back and forth about that one. But for the present, for the sake of argument, let us proceed assuming that some Biblical scholars, Ehrman included, are bona fide scholars, intelligent, learned, diligent and scrupulous.)

Apparently, Bart Ehrman's last 5 books published by Harper's -- Misquoting Jesus,God's Problem,Jesus, Interrupted,Forged: Writing in the Name of God--Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Areand Did Jesus Exist?have sold a combined 750,000 copies. Those are not the last 5 books Ehrman has published, but only 5 of 12 books he's published since 2005. The other 7 were published by Oxford, are aimed at Ehrman's fellow scholars and presumably have sold much less than 750,000 copies all together. Apparently the general public has a horror of footnotes and bibliographies. I'll never understand that. Footnotes and bibliographies are great. The general public are completely missing the boat on that one. Be that as it may, Ehrman's books for Harper's are the one which have made him famous. They've also surely made him at least $1 million since 2005. Maybe $2 million, or $3 million or even more. (Some authors have much better royalty arrangements with their publishers than others.)

And I don't have a problem with Ehrman making money. I sincerely hope that I myself make 7 figures over the course of the next 9 years -- or 8 figures, or preferably even more.

My problem, the bug up my butt, the disappointment referred to in the title, has to do with how many compromises Ehrman makes in order to make that living and to get those books out there. If Ehrman only wrote the books with the footnotes and the bibliographies -- the really good stuff, that is -- and none of the books "aimed at the general public" by making them much less good -- isn't that extremely condescending toward "the general public"? -- and if he worked as hard at marketing his books for Oxford as he does with his books for Harper, would he still be famous, would he sell hundreds of thousands going on millions of copies of the actual good stuff, or would he be just one more well-respected professor of Biblical Studies who very few people had ever heard of? I guess we'll never know, will we? If Ehrman refused to appear on programs which are absolute crap, and everything the so-called "History Channel" makes is crap -- would he be obscure? Or maybe, just maybe, would there be no "History Channel" if Ehrman and his colleagues had some standards about where and when they gave on-camera interviews, and would there instead be high-quality programs on historical topics everywhere you looked on the tube? We probably won't be testing that hypothesis very soon either, will we?

Ehrman's 6th book "for the general public," How Jesus Became God,was published by Harpers this week. It actually has some footnotes. Does this mean that something somewhat like what's bugging me has begun to bug Ehrman too? Eh. Let's come back down to planet Earth and wait and see. On the same day that Ehrman's book was published, Harper also published a book consisting of 5 negatives responses to itby "evangelical scholars." In quotes because this is the 21st For Crying Out Loud century, and you really have to pick one: evangelical, or scholarly. And these 5 guys have picked the former, and won't let Ehrman or anyone else suggest that Jesus wasn't really our Lord and the Savior of Our Immortal Souls -- won't let him say it without going unchallenged, that is. They can't actually stop Ehrman from writing things which contradict Christian beliefs. Those days are a couple of centuries gone now, nyaa, nya nya nyaaaa nya.

The thing is, Ehrman co-operated in this publishing stunt. It's not unusual for a volume to come out dedicated to refuting some book of Ehrman's. But the way it generally works it that the refutation is published a year or two after the book it purports to refute. Ehrman and these 5 evangelicals showed each other their work in advance of publication in order to let Harper's publish the 2 books at the same time. It's very much like the Ham-on-Nye debate. And my first reaction was to be disappointed in Ehrman for participating in this simultaneous-publication stunt, because it makes it look as if he considers the arguments of evangelicals, that Jesus was divine, and sent to Earthy by Almighty God to save our souls -- as if all of that stuff which we all get shoved down our throats every day rose to the level of deserving to be invited to a debate with him. And maybe Ehrman does think so, and for all I know he actually debates these same 5 people in lecture halls and whatnot, all the time.

But maybe, maybe, the Ham-on-Nye really helped the cause of science and rational thinking. I know that it confirmed many people in what they already believed, but maybe, maybe, Ham looked ridiculous to some people who hadn't thought he was going to look ridiculous. Maybe some minds were changed. And if that's the case, I don't suppose I can really consider Ham-on-Nye to have been a waste. And if the comparison of Ehrman's book to this book by these 5 yokels has a similar effect, and if Ehrman is having such effects not by accident, but because he knows what he's doing -- well in that case I would have been wrong to be so disappointed in him.

I still don't think it's certain that Jesus existed, of course, and Ehrman apparently still does. But reasonable people can disagree from time to time.

An Open Letter to Professor Bart D Ehrman

Dr Ehrman, it has been less than a year since I began to pay more than passing attention to your work. I read Did Jesus Exist? which was the number-one topic of conversation among my circle of acquaintances for months, and then The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, which I think is greatly admired by everyone I know who's read it, and now I've started in on your new book, Forgery and Counterforgery.

I left graduate school, not for the first time but for the last, in 1992, and since then I have continued pursuits very similar to what would be considered academic. You might say that I'm in Independent Studies -- so independent that I can no longer officially involve a university in my work. In 2007, only because I was fortunate enough to know a psychologist personally who specialized in diagnosing autism, who for years had persistently suggested I undergo testing, I was diagnosed as autistic -- which explained many things in retrospect, including my difficulties in pursuing an academic career despite my passionate interest in academic subjects. Since 1992 I have been an autodidact, studying a wide range of subjects, most especially Latin literature of all eras. My Latin is completely self-taught. How good is my Latin? In the complete absence of tests to measure my progress, instructors to criticize my work and fellow-students against whom to measure myself, it's very hard to say. But having studied German and French as a student, the process of language acquisition was not entirely foreign to me. How many languages can I read, write or speak? As with anyone, the answer depends on how low the bar is set. My native language is English, I'm fluent in German, and I know some Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and a little bit of some other languages.

Including, lately, Greek and Hebrew, because in 2010, entirely by chance, I happened upon some Internet communities made up of academic Biblical scholars and academics in related fields and interested amateurs, and I feel I must become more familiar with the primary languages of the Bible in order to be able to participate with anything approaching competence in some of the discussions going on among my new acquaintances. Up until then I knew the Bible almost entirely in the form of the Vulgate and the KJV and the Greek Church fathers hardly at all. I had already been dipping my toe, lazily, into the study of Greek, because the more I knew of pre-Christian Latin literature the more keenly I felt my lack of knowledge of Greek, because the literature and other aspects of the culture of the ancient Romans is to such a large degree merely an imitation of and homage to that of Greece.

But of course the beginnings of Christianity are recorded almost entirely in Greek. And now that I've suddenly met all of these people who seriously study Greek and Hebrew, I must make an attempt to keep up. I've reached that wonderful stage of language study where it truly is more fascination than drudgery, and on those occasions when I still become weary of it, I just think of I F Stone: began a course of study in ancient Greek in his 60's, and at the time of his death in his early 80's, so the story goes, he had begun energetically to study Hungarian.

So. Yeah. I'm about polyglotism. So you could dismiss my point by telling yourself that I'm crazy, if you don't know very much about autism, or that I'm obsessed, if you know a little more about it. Just laying out some options for you, trying to be helpful here, before getting to my point, and yes I have rambled a bit before getting to my point. Here it comes now: On page x of Forgery and Counterforgery you mention that originally you had intended to leave all citations of non-English texts untranslated in the main body of the page, with translations consigned to footnotes, but that everyone who talked to you about this was against it, and so you relented, and non-English citations are now in the footnotes and translation in the main text.

I wish that you had gone against the advice of every single person who advised you on this. As you point out on page x, Forgery and Counterforgery is, indeed, a scholarly book. But many more non-scholars read your scholarly books than read most of the scholarly books published in your field. Was this an argument for consigning the non-English passages to the footnotes? For me, it's an argument that you should have done what you wanted to do, and left them in the main text. You and Crossan and Paigels and a few others are the public face of your academic specialty. For centuries, academics in the English-speaking world, and especially academics in the United States, have steadily, disastrously followed a course toward monolingualism. (Thankfully, in the past few decades more and more English-speaking Americans are acknowledging that the US is multilingual, seeing at the very least that tens of millions of Americans speak Spanish as their native language, and realizing some of the benefits of learning at least a little Spanish, and sometimes other languages still. This is happening outside of academia as well as inside, I'm not sure how much credit academics can take for this healthy and natural trend.) Not so many decades ago every Bachelor of Arts in the US, or almost every single one, was still expected to have passed some courses in foreign languages. Now Biblical studies is one of a rapidly-shrinking number of disciplines in which monoligualism is still unacceptable. Yes, many non-academics will read this book. It would have been very good if you had emphasized to them the multilingual character of your work to them, the importance of not relying on translation. If you had shown them a truly scholarly example in the best sense of the term.

Best regards, and Forgery and Counterforgery still seems so far like an excellent book. Like apparently absolutely everyone I know personally who's read it, I found Orthodox Corruption to be excellent. I forgive you for Did Jesus Exist? and for appearing as a talking head on at least one program produced especially for the so-called "History Channel."

Dan Brown and the Templars and the Grail

For at least a few years now, due to Dan Brown, very many people have been thinking about the Templars in association with the Holy Grail. Whether Brown alone is responsible for the dimensions of this current fascination, or whether he has just been riding a wave of great popular interest before him, I don't know.

I do know that at least partly due to Brown, and to people like those at the History Channel riding Brown's wave, many people have gotten the idea that the Grail, or at least the idea of the Grail, goes way back in time into the early Dark Ages, if not actually into antiquity, if not actually all the way back to Jeebus Himself, when in fact the Grail originated in 12th-century fiction. Dingbats like Brown and the folks working for and consulted by and associated with the History Channel are spreading the notion that the Grail is nonfictional, whether it's a jeweled chalice as in the popular Arthurian stories, or some sort of magic stone, or Jesus' great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter. There's all this awful bullshit about the Mysteries of the Grail, when there's no mystery, and therefore also no need for any self-described genius to come along and solve the mystery. Any decent introductory course in Medieval French literature solves the mystery by informing the student that Chrétien de Troyes invented the Grail in his epic poem Perceval. There ya go, folks, Grail mystery solved, yr welcome.

Lately it occurred to me to wonder how many people may have been mislead in the opposite direction: they already knew that the Grail was fictional, either because they had attended a competent class in Medieval literature or because they generally pay attention, and now, having never heard of the Templars before this aside from their mention in fiction, the widespread hoopla about the Grail and the Templars has led them to assume that the Templars are fictional, that they also never existed.

I get the impression that a large portion of the public, and of the reporters of the mainstream public, have first heard of mythicists via Bart Ehrman's recent book-length attempt to discredit them. If this is correct then it may mean that Ehrman's attempt has in fact been quite successful.

But it's so hard to really know what the general public thinks. Public-opinion polls, even when they're done well, and Lord knows they aren't always, have serious shortcomings. Presidential elections less so -- but wait, how do I know that? Well, of course, I don't. I'm just guessing and speculating and poking around in the dark all over the place here, as is anyone who tries to gauge public perceptions. At least some of us know we're just guessing. Above I assumed that mainstream-media reporters had been pretty ignorant of the historicist-mythicist debate until Bart Ehrman recently succeeded in leading them astray -- but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the publishers and editors of mainstream media deliberately keep the sharper reporters far away from any stories about religion. That would be both bad and good news: bad, of course, because it would mean that media bosses are deliberately misleading us more than we might imagine, and good because it could mean that their nefarious attempts to keep us in the dark are not as successful as they or anyone else thinks.

Sometimes public opinion is suddenly and surprisingly revealed, in a good and reassuring way. When I was in the 8th grade it was assumed that either a certain rich girl, daughter of a physician, my primary-care physician as it happened, although the term "primary-care physician," to my knowledge, was not yet in use, would be elected homecoming queen, or one of two other members of her clique. Because they were the popular girls. Or so everyone assumed. But no, the other girl surprisingly on the dais with them as a finalist, not a rich girl, dressed much more like the rest of us because she couldn't afford to dress like the rich cliques, none of us could, was announced the winner and the place went nuts. Conventional wisdom was proved wrong.

Don't accept conventional wisdom just because it's conventional. And don't assume that the assholes and idiots have quite as tight a hold on public perceptions as Time magazine and The New York Times may have you believe. I'm not denying that things are often awful, just suggesting that maybe, maybe, good sense is more widespread than it may appear. bubbling under the surface. For goodness' sake, vote to re-elect President Obama.

I Accuse You, You Cowardly Closeted Academic Mythicists!

After writing a post yesterday in this blog responding to Bart Ehrman's emphatic expression of his lack of any doubt that Jesus existed, delivered with a healthy portion of disdain for all who do entertain such doubts, stating that their number currently includes not a single legitimate professor in a relevant field in the Western world, I was made aware that Richard Carrier had also responded to Ehrman's article. Carrier's response to Ehrman is much longer, more authoritative and detailed than mine, but we share a dislike of the way Ehrman attempts to declare the question closed of whether or not Jesus existed, and to discourage, and disparage, any further discussion of it. We both call Ehrman out for closed-mindedness.

Near the beginning of his blog post, Carrier makes the following remarkable statement:

I personally know a few professors who [...] feel this way: they do not touch this topic with a ten foot pole, precisely because they fear the kind of thing Ehrman is doing and threatening. They do not want to lose their jobs or career prospects and opportunities. They do not want to be ridiculed or marginalized.

So, Ehrman and Carrier are asserting two very different things: Ehrman says that no credible scholar believes that doubts of Jesus' existence are serious enough to be worth discussing, while Carrier maintains that such a discussion would be serious, but is squelched by professors' fears that they would hurt their careers by opening it.

They fear to be honest, because it might hurt their careers. If this is true, then in my opinion it ought to make very many people very angry. Generally speaking, in academia free and open discussion is supposedly prized. If a meteorologist or a geologist deliberately falsified their findings, or deliberately hindered open debate in their fields, or twisted their interpretation of data to give the appearance that they believed things which they did not believe, one thinks, it would much more likely be cause of damage to their careers than advancement. (Unless, of course, they were to leave academia altogether and work as shills for the petrochemical industry.) If what Carrier is saying is accurate, that in the faculties of New Testament studies and Christian theology one of the central questions, perhaps the most central question, is being systematically repressed, and that people's careers often depend on their consciously-dishonest complicity in that repression, yes, I think that ought to make people very angry indeed. What struck me most about Carrier's statement about professors willingly engaging in duplicity to cover their asses is how similar it is to statements made by Rudolf Augstein, founder and publisher of Der Spiegel for over half a century and its editor for almost that long, in his book Jesus Menschensohn and in interviews about that book: theologians and Biblical scholars, quite prominent ones, had told Augstein privately, so he said, that the party line of there being no doubt that Jesus was a real historical figure, as real as Julius Caesar or Otto von Bismarck, did not convince them. That they had doubts. Private doubts. But they kept their doubts private, and so the party line thrived, and dissenters continued to be relegated to outsider status and routinely mocked by the mainstream.

Well, it's Anno Domini MMXII. It's high time to end such medieval, Inquisition-style crap. It's time for these cowards to be outed. We trust them with the education of our young men and women. They're supposed to be role models. They're supposed to have more integrity than shills for the petrochemical industry. Biblical studies and theology continue to claim that they are fully modern academic disciplines and not medieval warrens of deceit. Richard Carrier, will you out these worms? Augstein died a decade ago, he can't do it, not unless something is found among his papers...

Of course, you cowardly little worms, this would all be so much more dignified if you would out yourselves. Think of Bruno Bauer. Think of Friedrich Nietzsche. Think of Karlheinz Deschner. Look at your own damned selves in your mirrors, if you can. Think of your children. Man and woman up. It's 2012, God damn it.

It's Settled! (Not!)

Bart Ehrman, James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has for a few years been very popular among atheists interested in the early history of Christianity, having written a few books for popular audiences on New Testament textual criticism, New Testament apocrypha and the rise of Christianity. He's been popular with the atheists in part because he's more open about his agnosticism than many other agnostic and atheist Biblical scholars and theologians, in part because of his talent for finding cameras making TV shows and documentaries and placing himself in front of them, and partly because he's generally an affable, likeable guy. But it appears that he just went and ticked off a large part of his audience, the part who didn't realize that he was firmly of the opinion that Jesus existed. The firmness of that opinion could be said to be the subject of Ehrman's newest book, Did Jesus Exist? I was never a big fan of Ehrman's, it always seemed to me that many atheists overestimated the distance between him and the theological-Biblical-historical mainstream and overlooked the sensationalism inherent in much of his work -- for example, the way he suggested to unwary lay readers in his book Lost Scriptures that New Testament apocrypha represented an entire alternate history of early Christianity, while greatly underplaying the dates of these apocryphal books from the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and even 6th centuries. By the 6th century it's beginning to be a stretch to talk about "early" Christianity, whether established or alternative. Ehrman hyped this non-existent alternate universe much like History Channel likes to do.

Back to Ehrman's latest book, about the historical Jesus. Ehrman is firmly convinced that Jesus was a real man and not a fictional character. This is not a change for Ehrman, he's held that opinion all along, but it appears that many of his atheist fans who are not of the same opinion were not yet aware of this. Indications of shock and disappointment are widespread. But it's more than just Ehrman making his opinion on this matter book-length clear. What stings even more for those who so long ago were his adoring atheist fans is that Ehrman doesn't state it as an opinion but as a fact: "Jesus certainly existed."

I was surprised by this too. If Ehrman had merely said that he was firmly convinced, implying that reasonable people may hold different opinions on the matter but that it seemed clear to him, that would have been one thing. But in the manner of traditional Christian theology and New Testament scholarship, Ehrman states that there is no controversy, no uncertainty.

But it's not merely that Ehrman declares the discussion to be over: he states as well, on no firm basis whatsoever if you ask me, that no accredited professor in the Western World "who teaches New Testament or Early Christianity or even Classics" disagrees with him. That already puts Ehrman into no-true-Scotsman territory. But he doesn't stop there. He compares those who disagree with him and the theological mainstream with Holocaust deniers and birthers.

Ehrman is quite simply wrong when he states that it's certain that Jesus existed. That's the part that hurts his admirers so. But in the larger context the more serious problem is that Ehrman is right when he states that the vast majority of his academic discipline agrees with him. He's wrong when he claims that this virtual unanimity extends to all academics with any competence in any fields related to ancient history. Flat wrong. But when it comes to Christian theology and New Testament studies, he's right that they're almost all on his side. And they almost all state their opinion not as an opinion but as a certainty. and many of them, perhaps not all, also verbally abuse anyone with the temerity to actually want to discuss the matter as if it were not settled.

170 years ago the Prussian government withdrew Bruno Bauer's permission to teach in their universities because he published works stating his opinion that Jesus may have been every bit as much a mythical construct as Abraham. In those 170 years much has changed for the better in freedom of expression. But Bart Ehrman has made it very clear how far theology and Biblical studies continue, not only to lag behind that progress, but to stifle it. Academics in those fields are not inclined to discuss the historicity of Jesus, and many of them are perfectly willing to behave with crude, medieval contempt toward anyone who does.

Ancient Literary -- No, I Won't Call Them Forgeries. Plenty of Others Will -- Misattributions

Dr Bart Ehrman and some other Biblical scholars have caused a lot of agitation in the general public lately with the news -- news more to the general public than to specialists in New Testament studies -- that some passages in Paul's letters, and some entire letters, some of the shorter books in the New Testament, were not actually written by Paul.

Ehrman is extremely popular in some segments of the "militant" atheist population -- excuse me, but I have to stop the essay for a moment. This use of the word "militant" is really ridiculous. We do not brandish Kalashnikovs. We do not bomb buildings. We do not kidnaps heiresses. We post sharply-worded opinions in Internet social venues. No-one is in danger of physical harm -- and within that segment and the segment of the pious who do the Itchy & Scratchywith us, Ehrman has created quite a ruckus with this news that not all of what we've traditionally thought of as Paul's writings are by Paul. As often happens in these sorts of discussions -- Really. We're discussing things. "Militant." sheesh! -- I feel a bit off to the side, because what interests me in the immediate topic at hand is not the theological implications which are exciting most of the discutants, but the textual transmission.

And just this morning it occurred to me -- aside from the theological implications which, yes, no doubt, are immense. I just can't get excited about it. I find theology to be excruciatingly boring -- that Paul was hardly unique among prominent ancient authors in having spurious works attached to his name. On the contrary. Take Homer. The Homeric Question,that is, whether there really was a poet or singer named Homer who wrote or sang the Iliad and the Odyssey, and if so the details of his biography and the degree of similarity of his creation to the Iliad and Odyssey we know today, is still debated today, but even those, a dwindling minority for the moment, it seems, who are convinced that Homer existed and that he made both poems very much as we know them, tend to agree that he had nothing to do with the creation of the so-called Homeric Hymns, so-called because for a very long time people assumed that he had written them. Take the Appendix Vergiliana, so-called because they were erroneously taken for the juvenalia of Vergil. The poem Halieutica is now generally agreed not to have been written by Ovid, but it's still included in this volumeof Ovid's works, along with a few other bits and pieces, because they were associated with Ovid for so long that this is the natural place to put them. And because they're short. For similar reasons, a lot of fragments probably not of Hesiod's writings, and some surely not by him, are included in this collection of his actual works, while this collection of the works of Sallust include an oration supposedly by Sallust against Cicero which he probably never made, and Cicero's equally-ficticious replay, and short commentaries on Caesar's Alexandrian, African and Spanish Wars, commentaries traditionally attributed to Caesar but now nobody knows for sure who wrote them, are thrown in with this edition of Caesar's account of the Civil War.

And also some of Plato'sdialogues were not really written by Plato. And on and on. And these are not unusual cases. They're typical: if you were a famous ancient author in Latin or Greek, some stories not by you would get attached to your actual work, sometimes by someone deliberately perpetrating a fraud for nefarious or pecuniary purposes, sometimes by accident, sometimes deliberately but with no malicious intent, because some admirer of the famous author thought it would be a nice tribute to write something and sign the famous guy's name to it. Yes, some simpletons back then really wouldn't have seen the harm. Or maybe not even such simple guys, which may strain your credulity unless you realize that customs and attitudes change greatly over time, and that was a long time ago. And then typically a century or two or three ago some scholar would say Hey wait a minute and compare style and content and comments by contemporaries of the ancient authors and other considerations and prove, either that this or that piece is not really by who we thought it all was, or that we must now gravely doubt that it is. This is typical. In a way, if it hadn't also happened to Paul, it would've been embarrassing for him, it would've made him stick out like a sore thumb from all the other literary bigshots.

So that's the textual-critical skinny on that. I know, I know, the theological implications of Paul's not actually having written that short letter to Titus are -- yawn Oh, excuse me! -- are huge. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled, excruciately-boring theological uproar.