Ex-Church of Christ Support Board

I just read a lot of Ehrman's "The New Testament" and Strauss's book "Four Portraits of Jesus. Ehrman is an evangelical turned atheist and Strauss is an evangelical. Both are prominent scholars. I did not read all of both books, each of which would take a semester to devour.
My impressions, feel free to disagree with me"
1) First the King James Bible for me is almost impossible to comprehend.
2).There are so many mistakes and things added to the King James Bible it is really hard mentally to remember what is actually in the older texts versus KJ.
3) There are so many contradictions, particularly in the Gospels and so many differences in what Jesus actually said in the gospels and what people think he said. The contradictions are easily proven.
4) No concept of the trinity, believe it or not
5) Jesus did not claim to be "the son of man" or the "son of God". He may have asked whether he was or not.
6. All historians are just making an educated guess about what happened, other than the crucifixion and baptism of Jesus by John everything is inference and the historical evidence for those two isn't that great.
7) Nobody really knows who the books of the Bible were written by.
8) The New Testament is Judiac and not really meant for Gentiles.
9) Very little emphasis on baptism, it is inferred as a requirement for salvation
10) No way to resolve the controversy in the letters whether you are saved by faith or works.
11) Jesus's disciples didn't understand him either and most did not follow him after his crucifixion.
12) There is a record of about six other people performing miracles similar to Jesus in the same timeframe.
13) Consensus is Albert Schweitze's that Jesus said there was going to be another kingdom on earth that would be established by the son of man and it was eminent. Jesus did not claim divinity.
14) Ehrman's work is the best, he is easy to read and understand. I also like Paula Fredriksen.

I had a King James Bible, when I was a child, and it was very hard for me to read and understand. It was the first Bible I ever received. I think it was a gift, and I think there's a family tree inside it as well.
I've also wondered who wrote the books of the Bible; there are conflicting stores in the New Testament especially with regard to Jesus's resurrection.

re (4) No concept of the trinity, believe it or not

N T Wright puts another spin on it. https://ntwrightpage.com/2016/07/12/jesus-and-the-identity-of-god/

...Once we recognize, the “five ways” of speaking about God-at-work-in-the-world in first-century Judaism—something which, as I must stress, neither the study of the OT nor the study of the Fathers would have taught me—then it becomes obvious that the key central christological passages of the NT are all heavily dependent on precisely this way of thinking. They offer a very high, completely Jewish, and extremely early christology, something that is still routinely dismissed as impossible, both at the scholarly and the popular level.

---There is some evidence—cryptic, difficult to interpret, but evidence none the less—that some first century Jews had already started to explore the meaning of certain texts, not least Daniel 7, which spoke of Israel’s God sharing his throne with another (something expressly denied, of course, in Isaiah 42-8).[35] These were not simply bits of speculative theology. They belonged, as more or less everything did at that period, to the whirling world of politics and pressure groups, of agendas and ambitions, all bent on discovering how Israel’s God would bring in the kingdom and how best to speed the process on its way. To say that someone would share God’s throne was to say that, through this one, Israel’s God would win the great decisive victory. This is what, after all, the great Rabbi Akiba seems to have believed about bar-Kochba.

continued below

Re (4) continued from above

...And Jesus seems to have believed it about himself. The language was deeply coded, but the symbolic action was not. He was coming to Zion, doing what YHWH had promised to do. He explained his action with riddles all pointing in the same direction. Recognize this, and you start to see it all over the place, especially in parables and actions whose other layers have preoccupied us. Why, after all, does Jesus tell a story about a yearning father in order to account for his own behavior?

...Let me be clear, also, what I am not saying. I do not think Jesus “knew he was God” in the same sense that one knows one is tired or happy, male or female. He did not sit back and say to himself “Well I never! I’m the second person of the Trinity!” Rather, “as part of his human vocation grasped in faith, sustained in prayer, tested in confrontation, agonized over in further prayer and doubt, and implemented in action, he believed he had to do and be, for Israel and the world, that which according to scripture only YHWH himself could do and be.”[39] I commend to you this category of “vocation” as the appropriate way forward for talking about what Jesus knew and believed about himself. This Jesus is both thoroughly credible as a first century Jew and thoroughly comprehensible as the one to whom early, high, Jewish christology looked back.

Re (10) No way to resolve the controversy in the letters whether you are saved by faith or works.

Today we tend to think of faith as a mental assent to certain doctrines. However, for the 1st century Jew, faith meant trusting in God to keep his covenantal promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. So faith was trust. And acting on that faith -- following God's leadership -- results in good works. So faith and works in this regard are inseparable, just as James said.

In his letter to the Romans, Paul was talking about a different kind of works -- the works of the Law of Moses. Paul was referring to the externals of the Law, the "badges" of the Law -- circumcision, holy days, laws of cleanness. These works of the Law identified the Jews as God's unique people and enforced their separation from the gentiles. There were just a few small congregations in Rome at that time, and the Jewish Christ-followers were refusing to accept the gentile Christ-followers as fellow heirs of Abraham and fellow citizens of God's kingdom -- unless they wore these "badges" of the Law.

Paul starts his letter by arguing that the Law is written on the gentile heart, and goes on to say that both Jew and gentile have failed to live up to the Law. So Paul argues, it is not the works of the Law we should put our trust in (boast about), but rather our trust should be put in God and his promises.

Paul argues that Abraham was a gentile when he was called by God and responded with faith (trust in God and his promises), and the gentile Christ-followers are heirs of Abraham by that same faith (trust in God and his promises). Unsaid because not relevant to Paul's argument -- but implicit in 1st century Jewish thinking -- is the idea that acting on that faith by following God's leadership, will result in good works.

I read Ehrman’s book a few years ago, and I generally agree with what he said. A few of the points made in the first post of this thread seem, to me, to be different from Ehrman’s view. Maybe they came from Strauss’ book, which I haven’t read. Anyway, here they are:

2) The King James version does have some errors. A few verses it incorporates are not in the oldest manuscripts, including, interestingly, Mark 16:16. There are also some errors in translation. But, on the whole, it gives a pretty good idea of what the older texts say. Of course its antiquated English makes it hard to understand.

7) Most scholars think seven of the books attributed to Paul were actually written by him: Romans, I Corinthians, II Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, I Thessalonians, and Philemon. I agree that nobody really knows who wrote the rest of the books of the Bible.

13) The issue of Schweitzer’s ideas is kind of complicated. Yes, he thought that Jesus believed that the new kingdom on earth was eminent. But he also believed that he himself would rule over the new kingdom on earth, and he was dismayed that God hadn’t intervened yet. He went to Jerusalem to deliberately provoke the authorities to get himself crucified, expecting that his crucifixion would provoke God to intervene and establish the new kingdom right away. Contemporary scholars have rejected Schweiter’s belief that Jesus deliberately got himself crucified for this reason, but they are divided on whether Jesus believed that God’s intervention was eminent. One faction, including Ehrman, thinks he did. Another faction, including Marcus Borg, thinks not.

The older I get, and the more I read/think about this (which is hardly a daily thing, however) the more I think that Jesus DID think that if he just showed up in Jerusalem with the right mindset and doing the right things the right way, that God WOULD make it all happen - which makes that 'my God why have you forsaken me?' thing very poignant.

I do NOT think he expected to be crucified. I THINK he expected to simply arrive and be recognized as the true king. The Romans would leave, and he would be crowned in Jerusalem, etc.

You'll say 'that's insane', and I totally agree. I think he was mental. Charismatic, dynamic, mesmerizing, and also nuts.

faithandmore wrote: ↑Tue Jul 25, 2023 11:45 pm I had a King James Bible, when I was a child, and it was very hard for me to read and understand. It was the first Bible I ever received. I think it was a gift, and I think there's a family tree inside it as well.
I've also wondered who wrote the books of the Bible; there are conflicting stores in the New Testament especially with regard to Jesus's resurrection.

I was glad to have grown up reading the KJ version. It helped me rack up some vocabulary points on standardized tests back in the day.

It always bothered me that the New Testament would reference non canonical books or traditions not found in the Bible itself. For example references to I Enoch, Assumption of Moses, the stories of the water giving rock that followed Israel in the desert, hell as a dark place with fire and torture, ideas about Melchizedek.

I personally do think the scholars who suspect Essene influence on Jesus are correct to a point , or at least those who wrote about Jesus in the "New Testament" had Essene influence.

It's also weird Mark, Matthew, and Luke seem to say it was expected for Jesus to return and end time with the fall of Jerusalem but Revelation seems to imply Jesus was going to return and kick the Roman Empires butt then end time.

Ivy wrote: ↑Fri Jul 28, 2023 4:13 pm I was glad to have grown up reading the KJ version. It helped me rack up some vocabulary points on standardized tests back in the day.

Just this week, I used “beget” to win at a couple of wordle-type games