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"His laughter is directed against the ignorance of the world, which thinks it knows him."
Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed, pg 111
Fun fact, Yoshua/Jesus never laughs in the canon Newer Testament gospels. He does so four times in the Gospel of Judas, and various other times in various other Gnostic texts.
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Mary [Magdalene] may not have been Jesus’ lifetime partner, spouse, and lover; she may not have had children with him; she may not have been the reformed prostitute of later legend who became a model of chastity for women to imitate and follow. But it could be argued that she was the most important person in the early history of Christianity, that without her declaration of Jesus’ empty tomb, the male disciples themselves may never have been inspired to proclaim the new religion.
Peter, Paul, & Mary Magdalene - The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend, by Bart Ehrman
I'm close to finishing this book called "How Jesus Became God" by scholar Bart Ehrman, which is about how ideas about What Jesus' Deal Was evolved after his death until we eventually get the trinity.
I was preparing to chortle about how silly the trinity is (because it is) but what surprised me the most about this book is like. You can see where they get it from.
Before Jesus, there ALREADY was this stuff about how the Angel of the Lord both is and isn't God, and there were other concepts that were considered to be both God and also independent beings (God's Word, God's Wisdom, God's Spirit). So when Christianity's wild west days arrived, literally all four of these were ready-to-go options for Jesus' Real Identity.
My favorite ideological path to the trinity is as follows: Jesus is a dude -> You know how God's SPIRIT both is and isn't God?? Well Jesus is that -> ........No wait the Spirit is still here too, all three of them are God ig
In this episode of Misquoting Jesus, Dr. Bart D. Erhman talks about how he came to realize that the gospels aren't pure historical fact, discusses the difference between myth, legend, and history, and talks about how we can tell where the Gospels (or any document that seems to record history) might actually contains real history, or whether it contains something else.
I strongly suggest watching the whole thing, but here's a summary of the steps to separate fact from myth and legend that Bart Ehrman talks about:
Look for multiple independent attestation - corroboration without collaboration. Determine whether it's likely one or more source borrowed something from another (or whether they all borrow from another source), or whether their claims are more likely to be independent.
Look for mention of events that don't quite align with what the writer wants you to believe and take away. These are more likely to be historical because the writer probably wouldn't have made them up.
Look out for anachronisms - things that didn't exist or happen at the time the narrative is supposedly taking place.
"It is a modern myth that there were lots of accounts of people being born of virgins, on December 25, that they were crucified, that they were buried and raised from the dead - it's actually a modern myth. Mithras was not born on December 25, his mother was not a virgin; Osiris was not raised from the dead. People say that, but people who say that don't know the ancient sources. The ancient sources do not bear that out. I know in the crowds you all run around with it's commonly thought that Jesus did not exist. Let me tell you: once you get out of your conclave, there's nobody. This is not even an issue for scholars of antiquity. There is no scholar in any college or university in the western world who teaches classics, ancient history, New Testament, early Christianity, any related field, who doubts that Jesus existed. If you want to go where the evidence goes, I think that atheists have done themselves a disservice by jumping on the band wagon of Mythicism because, frankly, it makes you look foolish to the outside world." - Bart Ehrman, an agnostic/atheist on Christ Myth theory
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"What sorts of things do pagan authors from the time of Jesus have to say about him? Nothing. As odd as it may seem, there is no mention of Jesus at all by any of his pagan contemporaries. There are no birth records, no trial transcripts, no death certificates; there are no expressions of interest, no heated slanders, no passing references -- nothing. In fact, if we broaden our field of concern to the years after his death -- even if we include the entire first century of the Common Era -- there is not so much as a solitary reference to Jesus in any non-Christian, non-Jewish source of any kind. I should stress that we do have a large number of documents from the time -- the writings of poets, philosophers, historians, scientists, and government officials, for example, not to mention the large collection of surviving inscriptions on stone and private letters and legal documents on papyrus. In none of this vast array of surviving writings is Jesus' name ever so much as mentioned." -- Bart Ehrman
How can believers claim to have "found Jesus" when nobody in history has been able to?
Atheits who get degrees in theology and Christian history or whatever are so interesting like girl why are hyper fixating on that 😭
Continuing my reading of Jesus, Interrupted by Bart Ehrman, I'm on chapter two now where he's discussing contradictions in the Bible. He's not presenting an exhaustive list, but rather ones that "in the opinion of a large number of historical critics, cannot be reconciled without doing real violence to the text."
I'm excited to have some specific examples because as a Christian I would have this concern thrown at me every now and then by nonbelievers I had conversations with. "The Bible is full of contradictions!" they would say and I would ask for one to be named. And every single time no one would be able to give me an actual contradiction, which of course leaves the point at a dead end.
First up on Ehrman's list:
Mark and John say that Jesus died on different days
Mark, the earliest gospel, says that Jesus was crucified at nine in the morning on Passover (Mark 15:25). John has Jesus crucified around noon on the day of preparation for Passover (John 19:14) which is a day before. It is still the day of preparation when the Roman soldiers find Jesus dead (John 19:31-34).
For clarity, the day of preparation ended Friday night as the Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday. Meaning that Mark has Jesus crucified on Saturday morning and John has Jesus crucified Friday afternoon.
Ehrman posits that since John was written later, it's likely that the author changed the time of death to make a theological point: Jesus is the Lamb of God. John is the only gospel to give Jesus the title of Lamb of God. Jesus dying on the day of preparation for Passover means he's dying with all the lambs being ritualistically sacrificed as the Jews remember passover. The timing drives home the notion that Jesus is dying as a sacrifice so that others may be spared.
In my opinion, what we are left with at minimum is the certainty of irreconcilable differences between the gospel accounts that leave the door wide open for being able to doubt their accurate accounting of events. The impact of this could be pretty severe, when you believe that the Bible is completely inerrant with no inaccuracies or contradictions. If I was still a Christian, it would give me a lot to think about.
