Reddit reviews How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus' Divine Nature---A Response to Bart D. Ehrman
We found 8 Reddit comments about How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus' Divine Nature---A Response to Bart D. Ehrman. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Zondervan
Firstly, I wanted to thank you for your interest and hope that you find the answers to your questions. If not, there's plenty of people on this sub that would be happy to help.
In terms of shedding light, there are a number of non-canonical accounts of Jesus, even early ones that were not included into the canon. Many give vastly different accounts of Jesus' nature and teachings, which ultimately is one of the reasons they became rejected, along with dating of when they were written, who by, integrity of the teachings, etc. I think the Didache is a little misrepresented though, many of our early Church fathers were not only aware of it, but clearly reference it.
Ultimately, though our early accounts of Jesus do offer a divine incarnation from the get go, our earliest Gospel, Mark includes many such references as do our earliest writings, the epistles of Paul, hence why the notion of Jesus as merely a human is widely rejected (though there some who self-identify as Christian and might accept a human-only Jesus, this wouldn't be considered orthodox though).
If looking into the historical evidence and various accounts of Jesus as human as well as further reading material you might be better poking your head into /r/AcademicBiblical. You could also look into the companion books How Jesus became God and How God became Jesus to get a good grasp for arguments on both sides.
Peace be upon you!
I have not read the book, but a response was made particularly to this very book from Ehrman by some Christian scholars.
How God Became Jesus
How God Became Jesus was an evangelical critique of Ehrman's How Jesus Became God.
If Bart Ehrman is a Christian apologist, then I might as well be Jesus! Ehrman is an agnostic atheist, and about as far from being an apologist as you can get (you can tell because some Christians write books trying to refute him). He is a highly respected New Testament scholar and has written standard university textbooks in biblical studies. You can find a complete list of his books here. The formation of the biblical canon is a massive topic, but for the New Testament Ehrman has written something of a three-part series: Misquoting Jesus, Jesus, Interrupted, and Forged (which I'm reading right now and highly recommend). These are all books aimed at a general audience and are easier to grok than his academic texts.
This will probably start a flamewar, but I should also point out that Richard Carrier's views are pretty far off the beaten path. There's nothing wrong with that, but crucially, they seem to be motivated by his personal ideology as an atheist more than objective scholarship. (Yes, Jesus did exist, and no, you can't use Bayes' Theorem to prove he didn't).
As a side note, Yale has free online courses about the [Old Testament](http://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-145
) and [New Testament](http://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-152
), along with books to go with them. These lectures really are incredible in framing the history of the Bible within its ancient context. I finished watching them a few weeks ago, and they have completely changed my perspective on the Bible, Judaism, and Christianity. You can find content of a similar nature in r/AcademicBiblical, which is a sub devoted to biblical scholarship. Cheers!
Bowman wrote: This one God is the single divine being known in the OT as Jehovah or Yahweh (“the LORD”).
Put simply: Bowman was just saying how Yahweh was translated. I was wondering how long you were going to chase your tail on this one!!!
>If you would like to give an example of something Ehrman giot wrong feel free. Be specific.
I gave you specific verses on how where the Bible reveals that Jesus shares the honors due to God, Jesus shares the attributes of God, Jesus shares the names of God, Jesus shares in the deeds that God does, Jesus shares the seat of God's throne. All of those you just ignore.
As well as the one where the Holy Spirit is called God. The one where you say it is "figurative" but never, even when explicitly asked, say why one should come to that conclusion. Which you continue to ignore
So sure I'll show what Ehrman got wrong, just so you can ignore it as well
For case in point, let’s consider Ehrman’s use of the “criterion of dissimilarity,” which on his account dictates that a given unit in the Gospels is historically authentic if “it is dissimilar to what the early Christians would have wanted to say about him.” This criterion is well-known and has received a devastating barrage of criticism to the point that I am, to be frank, at a loss as to why Ehrman continues to use it. In extreme cases some scholars looked for a double dissimilarity, whereby a tradition is authentic when it is dissimilar to both Judaism and to the early church. Ehrman wisely uses it in its less extreme form and only applies it to dissimilarity from the early church.
But even then it verges on the ludicrous. Think about it. A story about Jesus or as a saying attributed to Jesus is only historical if it does not sound anything like what the church was saying about Jesus. What historian would say that the historical Plato is different from what the platonic school said about Plato? Who would say that reliable information about the Teacher of Righteousness who founded a community by shores of the Dead Sea can only to be found when material attributed to him in the Dead Sea Scrolls sound nothing like the Dead Sea Scrolls? Who thinks that the real John Wesley can only be retrieved by searching for un -Wesleyan things that Wesleyans said about John Wesley?
The criterion of dissimilarity posits a huge rupture between a movement founder and his or her subsequent movement that is simply absurd. You end up with a Jesus who said, thought, and did nothing that his earliest followers believed that he said, thought, and did. Jesus becomes a free-floating iconoclast artificially insulated from the movement that took its name from him, claimed to follow his teachings, and memorialized his deeds and actions.
No wonder, then, that the criterion of dissimilarity has been near universally abandoned and replaced with something far more credible , like a criterion of historical plausibility. We can regard a unit in the Gospels as claiming a high degree of historical authenticity when a saying or event attributed to Jesus makes sense within Judaism (i.e., plausible context) and also represents a starting point for the early church (i.e., a plausible consequence). Rather than try to drain the theological dross from the historical silver in the Gospels through several fallible criteria, more recently scholars have been interested in the application of social memory research to the study of the historical Jesus.
In other words, how did the things Jesus said and did create a memory in his followers, a memory that was faithfully transmitted, yet also refracted according to the theological framework that the early church was developing. In which case, we cannot hope to penetrate the impregnable bedrock of the church’s interpretation and proclamation of Jesus found in the Gospels and discover a deeper layer of historically accurate data laid beneath.
At the end of the day the best way to read the Gospels responsibly and historically is to narrate the story of Jesus in a way that has realism and explanatory power — a story that makes Jesus fit plausibly into his Jewish context, that brings all of the sources together, that explains the shape and direction of the early church, and that accounts for why and how the Gospels are what they are. Allison again puts it well: As historians of the Jesus tradition we are storytellers. We can do no more than aspire to fashion a narrative that is more persuasive than competing narratives, one that satisfies our aesthetic and historical sensibilities because of its apparent ability to clarify more data in a more satisfactory fashion than its rivals. Ehrman’s entire approach to historical Jesus studies does not commend itself as a good way of doing history*. source
So go ahead and ignore this as well, it is your best tactic.
Which should be read in tandem with How God Became Jesus :)
>If you haven't read the book, how do you know you've seen his arguments elsewhere?
As I said, I've seen parts of his book referenced, and read the title. I've heard others claim that Jesus did not believe Himself to be God, but I've seen just as many claims to the contrary.
>here may be some disagreement, but the basis of his argument is considered fact by scholars
Did or did not Jesus believe Himself to be divine? I would think if there was a wide a consensus on that question as you state, Wikipedia probably wouldn't say this. Here is one article that goes into depth debating one of the basis of Erhman's claims. There is an entire book devoted to rebutting Ehrman's claims. So, if one wants to claim Jesus did not believe Himself to be divine, you would not find a scholarly consensus.
>As for my argument, it was more than simply one sentence. I pointed out the reasoning for my argument, which is a historical argument. As I argue, Jesus is first seen as a religious leader, and eventually is said to be God. So Jesus eventually becomes God.
There are good reasons to believe this, but many other good reasons to not. You can not claim this definitively.
There have been various responses to 'How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee' by Bart Ehrman including two books published the same day! -