Bart Ehrman

[bec_87rb]

Went to an all-day at the Smithsonian over the weekend, as taught by Bart Ehrman: The New Testament Forgeries. Carmichael Auditorium, because he drew a bigger audience.

Here is Professor Ehrman signing a book for my sweetie:

Comments

[chhinnamasta]

So, did Ehrman convince you of anything?

p.s. who's getting their book signed in the photo?

p.p.s. I, too, am jealous of your access to the Smithsonian. By all reports, it sounds amazing.

[bec_87rb]

The lady standing by is his handler, I think an employee of the Smithsonian. She introduced him and opened the books to signable pages for him

[suegypt]

Is the lecture taken from his latest book? I remember a few years back, my priest telling me about the Pauline letters and the theory that it wasn't all Paul. I'm like you, I'd like to think the parts I like were written by one person, and the parts I don't like were written by another.

from the latest book

[bec_87rb]

My understanding is that this is a book tour, and the lecture is from his latest

Re: from the latest book

[suegypt]

* I totally just sent you a well-thought-out reply and it got et by the 'net*

Oh, well, i'll try to be as pithy. Yes, I got that about his history as an agnostic/evangelical and felt it might be that he was hiding bitter disappointment under the guise of scholarship. I really wanted to know if you thought he was worth reading for the bits of truth he manages to pick up or if it gets swamped by the wishful thinking. I also made the Shakespeare/Bacon connection with regard to lack of relevance in the end. If it's personal to him, that means his argument is with a God in which he professes not to believe.

It's the same reason I can't enjoy Michael Moore anymore. He's intelligent and iconoclastic, and hits some really good points, and then he starts unravelling into conspiracy and lunacy. Just as you've picked out an item of truth to examine, you have to throw it back into the bathwater, because he's just about to throw that baby out.

Re: from the latest book

[bec_87rb]

I'm noT sure I can recommend him as a read or warn you off? I might get something of his from the library to try him out first, because I can see it not floating all boats equally.

Re: from the latest book

[suegypt]

Well, yeah, I guess I was just being lazy. If I want to know what the guy says, I should read the damn book myself, instead of trying to get you to do it for me!

Re: from the latest book

[bec_87rb]

I didn't think you were being lazy, but I didn't read the book, so I'm no help for getting a summary.

[chhinnamasta]

Your biblical references fly over my head m'dear. You're speaking to a heathen, don't forget. I'd have to Bible gateway that shit, in order to catch up. Of course, even us heathens are familiar with I Corinthians "Love is patient, love is kind, yada yada" but, for the back row, can you clue us in to the tight-arsed woman hating fury that is the Timothy letters? I have no idea what I'd find there, and I'm afraid to look now ;^O

Does any of this incongruity shake your faith at all?

Letter to Timothy drips wth contempt

[chhinnamasta]

I Timothy:
11 A woman[a] should learn in quietness and full submission. 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man;[b] she must be quiet. 13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve. 14 And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. 15 But women[c] will be saved through childbearing-if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.
and this one is primo:
9 No widow may be put on the list of widows unless she is over sixty, has been faithful to her husband, 10 and is well known for her good deeds, such as bringing up children, showing hospitality, washing the feet of the Lord’s people, helping those in trouble and devoting herself to all kinds of good deeds

Above was me.

[bec_87rb]

If my belief in God had been founded on literal Biblical truth, I'd be in trouble, I think.

The speaker still seemed kinda stuck on a version of that. He seemed to feel that either God wrote the Bible, which means he dictated it verbatim with no contradictions, or He didn't write it at all. That it's a static rock of truth, not a living document, true then, true now, and that truth is all one thing, and that one monolithic graspable truth 2000 years ago means the same thing today.

I can't get my head around that? My guess would be that if God can do anything, that includes letting scribes commit typoes, and I'm not in a position to tell Him that renders his scriptures moot. Also, I can't imagine if we really had the testimonies of the disciples as dictated from the original Aramaic of everything they remembered about Jesus, we'd have the same view of Jesus and his message, or even that would be what God has in mind.

I just don't think it's useful to submit a concept, God, that we have agreed can do anything to too narrow a set

Re: Above was me.

[chhinnamasta]

Okay. I appreciate what you're saying. Given that view, I can't see how the Bible is particularly relevant, or authoritative. With that view, one is left with the suspicion that careful study of some other book would yield better results in developing a moral center.

Regarding belief in a God who can do anything the sticking point, for me, is (and has always been) how can such a God allow suffering?

Suffering of the innocent = WTF God? Where are you? Out for a whiz?

What is this creation of yours, God, with its perverse moral calculus that dictates a certain amount of bad things must happen to good people? Why not create something else? I mean, if you can do anything... I have a hard time seeing benevolence. Perhaps I just need a different pair of glasses, but children with AIDS? Starving children? Alzheimer's? I dunno, those are really tough ones to understand.

Re: Above was me.

[bec_87rb]

No, no, I don't mean that at all. I'm saying that expecting my religious texts to spoon-feed me concretized rules of behavior and to exist with only one level of meaning makes an assumption about God, and a really interesting assumption about Jesus, given how fond the gentleman was of parables. Jesus loved to give a wry little story and then say, okay, guys, what do you think that means?

Regarding belief in a God who can do anything the sticking point, for me, is (and has always been) how can such a God allow suffering? May I ask: Why wouldn't he

May I ask: Why wouldn't he?

[chhinnamasta]

Well, one of the major points Christian proselytizers approach us heathens with is that God "loves" us. This suggests, to me, a concern with things at this scale. Sure, if you want to tell me that the Christian God is so far removed that It doesn't give a shit about human beings, then that's another story. That suggestion rather flies in the face of that rather popular John 3:16 citation that Christians approach me with as the main reason I should convert, though:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

Okay. So, God loves the world, not the humans in it? God embodied "his" "son" at this scale, because God is unconcerned with things at this scale? Uh, okay.

Look, I agree with you. If there's a God, then I think It absolutely has to be impartial to us -- looking at the world tells me this. I'm just not familiar with this as a non-heretical Christian belief.

I'm probably a heretic, strictly speaking

[bec_87rb]

I have no doubt God loves you and me, too, but where we get into problems is that the kind of love we could have between us, me and you, is by definition very limited, because we are only people.

If God is omnipotent and all-seeing, His love might contain all the elements of love between human beings, but might also contain vaster elements commisurate with His Vastness. Per force, unknowable by us when taken as a whole because we are limited in our love.

So my guess is that the Christians who want to convert you are describing the slice of God's love they can feel or imagine they feel, and all they can imagine is an idealized version of human love? They couldn't describe to you what they can't conceive, right?

Re: I'm probably a heretic, strictly speaking

[chhinnamasta]

You asked why God wouldn't cause human suffering, and my answer was if God cared about humans God wouldn't. Your counter argument appears to be that God sees a Bigger Picture, wherein human suffering is insignificant. How is that consistent with thinking that individual human lives are significant? It isn't. I don't care how Big and Mysterious you are, or how big the picture is, you can't have it both ways. Moreover, most Christians seem to dwell on how much significance we have -- how much God loves each and every one of us, using the metaphor of father and child. We humans, on average, take a pretty dim view of fathers who deliberately torture and/or murder their children. Either God cares about human life, or He doesn't. So, which is it? Do you really accept the existence of a Big-Picture-You-Don't-Understand wherein God both cares about the well-being of individual humans and behaves like a raving psychopath? That's interesting.