Wow, thank you!

Mmmm, well, I have a feeling that Paulogia read some of Ehrman's works before and after.

Also, my respect for Ehrman as a scholar is quite limited.

@@Paulogia "savagely"? lol. He laughed you out of the park!

@@scambammer6102 I can't work out whether this is an amusing reference to Dr Ehrman's tendency to laugh or whether you are making a serious point. Do you think Dr Ehrman rejected Paulogia's thesis wholesale?

It shocked me how accurate the South Park spoof on Mormonism was, as far as I can tell as a total outsider. I assumed they were playing up the visions and interpretations being so far fetched, but I followed up a while later and found out the real history was honestly not that far off? My Mormon friend was always very open and honest, a very nice guy overall, so it seemed a little less wierd before I really bothered to research

500 people making claims to death isn't so probable.

@@MonfangHowlett there aren't 500 people making that claim. There's a single claim that 500 people made that claim.

@@radiofreeutah5328 Do you have evidence to the contrary?

@@MonfangHowlett don't need it. The claim is (i) definitionally hearsay, and (ii) remarkably vague, failing to affirmatively identify any of the 500.

He is humble like the Bible tells the so called Christian’s to be 😂

...to ACKNOWLEDGE when he has been wrong...

They don't believe half of what they say.

@@LukeSumIpsePatremTe right? 😅 But they sure as shit hope we do!

I always thought that was lame that apologists said that too. Especially the 500 in I Cor 15. You might hear an apologist say, “Paul talks about the 500 who saw Jesus risen as if to say, if you don’t believe me, you could ask them!” So lame. Lol

@@ChrisHuntley That 500 is such an obvious pulled out of someone's arse number it's mind-boggling that anyone falls for it.

while I don't understand how.... you've got people who will claim Trump is a saint who never lies.... If you can believe that, you can believe anything. Or pretend to.

Yes indeed 👍

What a pointless comment

@@Josh-mh3kl Talking about pointless comments 😂

Oh my god yes

@@Josh-mh3kl You’re right! How astute and self aware of you to notice, as you’re typing, that your comment would be pointless. Congratulations!

Escapism and Fantasy is beloved by many, and most do not like to ruin the fantasy with rigorous criticism (which is required to reveal difficult/complex reality in an ultimately more simple to understand way).

I'd take one as well.

That's because human (or other) beings have no way to state what objective reality is. To make a statement about reality, we have to rely on two things: 1. Our sensory information, and 2. our brains processing said information. We know very well that both are highly unreliable. What we call reality is just another form of mass hallucination.

To clarify: I'm not referring to the specific context he used the phrase in, that's absolutely right. I'm talking about the phrase as a general statement.

@Mr. Zafner Make sure to get @Paulogia to draw Cartoon Bart on the shirt.

Because BIBLE. But seriously.. yes, that's really it.

The funny thing is that they cannot even get a consistent story about what Paul actually saw, yet it's basically their only remaining evidence that unlike the empty tomb or martyrdom for faith isn't refuted yet.. because it's unfalsifiable. You are simply told to explain what why and how someone else you have no access to FELT and if you cannot therefore the resurrection did happen. 🤔

Because apparently nobody dies for a lie. Please ignore the black and white fallacy. In case of suicide bombing insert special pleading here. I don't know how anybody is able to find this no-martyrdom-for-a-lie narrative convincing. It's fairly wide spread though. I've listened to it in my mothers tongue as well, even outside of youtube that is.

Personal experience really is the basis for all religion huh? :d

@@biedl86 No offence to your mother, but it's such a closed minded thing to say...right off the bat it means the martyrs of the *other* religions...they...well...just don't exist, I suppose? It falls apart instantly under the slightest scrutiny and I don't even have to get my big book of 'A billion reasons people did a billion stupid things, which resulted in their death.' out! Which is handy, because that's one hefty tome!

I wasn't before I deconverted.

Jehovah

@@Paulogia Were you aware of it before you deconverted?

@@David34981 I was. Considered it blasphemous.

@@Paulogia I get that. I was a fan before my deconversion, but I was never particularly conservative/evangelical. I was raised in a non-denominational church with a much more compatibilist mentality. I always thought you were taking yourself way too seriously if you couldn't laugh at yourself. 😂🤣

You got Lyingkunt surname wrong Pal.

7:20..Bart is being very dishonest here ...as we have both several written literally sources and from archeological evidence of exactly what happens to Crucifixion victims in Judea....and a rotting on the Cross, devouring by dogs, and Garbage pit burial; are not among them...we found a Tombs...Why not Ask Flat Barney Rubble where his "burial Pit, just outside of Town is? ... I know he is just a typical demi-ignorant intent atheist/enthusiast...But Ehrman knows better....

Going to read that ASAP.

@@michaeljames4509 You really should, it's fascinating.

I'm definitely reading Bart's book on that topic

Yes. The very fact that people like Licona (who seems a nice fellow) and Habermas (not so much) are called ‘historians’ by other apologists is telling. They are never cited, other than in an adversarial fashion, by classicists or non-Theist scholars. They both do things like including unprovenaced ‘supernatural’ claims in their net of ‘evidence’ for positions on the NT. That is apologist or sectarian exposition, not scholarly research.

@@davethebrahman9870 them holding up the whole criteria of embarrasment as if It's an active proof is so mind numbing

@@unknowndane4754 that would be criterion of embarrassment and it is a valid literary critical technique

@@scambammer6102 That might be, but the way I have seen apologists present it is wholely unconvincing to me; "Why didn't the Romans ever mention Jeusus directly? Oh clearly because they wanted to cover up their mistake"

Not to mention that it could just as easily have been ‘Paul’ seeing Peter’s group and, like most good con artists, repackaging it and selling it to the mass market. And since he became so prominent, the original group didn't dare try to out him from fear of splitting the church.

@@Lobsterwithinternet Paul took up collections in his churches for the saints in Jerusalem. Franchise operations? Hush money? Corrupt televangelist long before television? I am sure they didn't think of it that way. They would have had a rationalization.

who said there isn't skepticism about Paul's story? But skepticism =/= rote dismissal. There are a lot of mundane facts in Paul that are just as reliable as most historical texts. When he says he went to Jerusalem and met Peter and James, there's no particular reason to doubt it. If anything the incident is underplayed. There's no reason he would invent a disagreement with other church leaders about the treatment of gentiles, and his emotional reaction to that dispute looks authentic. Somehow Christianity spread throughout the Mediterranean. If it wasn't Paul, it was people like him, doing much the same stuff he describes.

@@scambammer6102 From what I read of his post, he isn't discounting that Paul existed or the entire story is fake. He's simply expressing skepticism of his origin story in Acts. Something I as well have.

@@Lobsterwithinternet Well yeah Acts is fan fiction.

Nice to see you here

I couldn't agree with you more. _When Prophecy Fails_ should be required reading for people who think the circumstances of early Christianity were special. Heck, Dorthey Martin even had her own Paul of Tarsus by the name of Bertha Blacksky.

The more I see about the origins of Christianity the more it seems like it was a cult (like modern day branch Davidians,Heaven's Gate, or Scientology) that existed at just the right time where it could gain a foothold in it's society and eventually be seen as a legitimate religion.

Religion=Cult + Time + Legitimacy

The difference between a cult and a religion is with a cult the founder knows it’s bullshit. In a religion that guy’s been dead along time. -George Carlin

Interestingly, a similar reason for the trajectories of people like William Lane Craig.

@@don_5283 Do you really think Craig is in it for profit? He strikes me as seeperate to believe, rather than motivated by self-interest.

@@davethebrahman9870 I think given the alternative of facing public mockery for his gullibility and/or deceit and having to figure out how to make a real living, one can be powerfully motivated to be desperate to believe. Of course, that's not the only possible reason there. It just struck me as a likely explanation, for him as well as for many others of his ilk.

@@don_5283 Certainly possible. I think it is much more likely in the case of Habermas. He gets extremely flustered and testy when questioned, which at least indicates a degree of doubt as to the rightness of his position. He also carefully constructs his case so that it it takes attention away from the weakness of his evidence; this seems very intentional rather than mistaken. Craig’s arguments, by contrast, are rarely evidence-based; but they lay out philosophical propositions that can take a fair bit of work to undermine; whereas any competent historian can knock down Habermas or Licona in a quarter of an hour.

@@davethebrahman9870 Both of those are fine examples as well. Habermas just looked awful talking to PineCreek in particular.

👍🏼😃

Which gospels say they were explicitly written to convert and where? I need this badly for my discussions with Christians. As a non-believer, I try to get the believer's to start thinking critically about the Bible.

As to your conclusion: " if we are going to reject the miracles of the gospels, which non-Christian historians do, why are we going to accept the premises of the events that are written to explain (by the gospel authors) those miracles??" I think you can think different about it. Let's take a televangelist today. You hear about miracles, scandals, that he is visiting here or there, that he said this or that. What do you think is true (of all that)? It is easy to believe most of the MUNDANE information (where he was, what he said etc.), but when it comes to the miraculous stuff .. not so much! Of course, you can choose to believe that people who lie about SOME things, cannot tell the truth about ANYTHING. That's fine (but not necessary) Conclusion: people tend to AMPLIFY stories, not make them up out of whole cloth when they pass them off as true (in my experience)

Obviously there's no hard evidence. But if the guy got crucified, he caught Rome's attention. There's nothing particularly implausible about it being due to a commotion in Jerusalem. Rome was primarily concerned with keeping the peace in its major urban centers. And we know an early church formed in Jerusalem shortly after his death.

@@busylivingnotdying This is fair but you're assuming direct transmission from a first hand source rather than the game of telephone that is oral traditions. We don't really have a way of saying what is or isn't a popular insertion meant to be more convincing/entertaining/relatable/whatever.

@@soonerarrow The beginning of Luke, and the end of John.

Makes sense, kind of how some pentecostal churches right now require speaking in tongues as proof of the having received the holy ghost, aka, being saved.

Actually, not many people claimed to have seen Jesus. We only have firsthand eyewitness testimony from Paul.

@@elainejohnson6955 It's my hypothesis for Paul's claim about 500 witnesses. Even though I think it's an exaggeration, I'm sure plenty claimed to have seen the risen Jesus just to belong

You're one of those who thinks you know what happened huh? Just like this video, your comment is pure speculation. Countless Harvard Historians of Greek language agree that it makes a lot of sense that the biblical accounts from the dead sea scrolls are accurate accounts and make sense. Marianne Meye Thompson is one of the women who translated KJV into NIV and acceptable team I suppose. You can see her say some interesting things about scriptures on the veritas forum.

@@peacepipe6695 What!? I wrote "I'm one of those who think", as in it's a hypothesis I happen to find plausible. Noone knows what happened. We're all speculating. I'm just casting my vote for this hypothesis. Afaik, the dead sea scrolls contain nothing about Jesus or the early christians so thy are irrelevant to this.

for me the debate is over. All the existing "evidence" has already been presented and it is pathetic IMHO. For a God that wanted to save people he sure did not leave much of a calling card!

Yeah exactly! I don’t watch atheist programs that much because it’s so settled in my mind it feels like I’m wasting time watching reruns.

was there a controversial part?

Even if Jesus was a real person, he was just an ordinary human who died and never rose again. It's a win win situation for a non believer.

I don't know to what extent you've really heard his arguments, but if you've heard a good bit of them, I suppose that would mean you believe some first(?) century Jews(?) decided to make up a very unmessianic untriumphant messianic figure and they kept trying to justify his humiliating death which they also made up instead of just putting him in heaven like Elijah or making him wander the earth? Is it really that much harder to believe there was once a Jewish apocalyptic preacher and messiah claimant whose name is rendered Ἰησοῦς in Greek, who managed the very feasible and historically recurring feat of being crucified by the Romans? You might be mixing up Bart's personal beliefs concerning Jesus and the evidence and arguments concerning the actual circumstances of his life, which are by their very nature much less convincing. (I'm asking you this but this isn't to say I fully disregard the possibility that you're perfectly familiar with the arguments for his existence and you just won't accept them. That is certainly possible and you wouldn't be alone in that.)

Finding Ehrman's arguments unconvincing (like I do) does not support "I don't think Jesus was a real person." It supports "I don't know."

Jesus was just mad cause he didn't have a table

the best part was the magic dragon

Your of course assuming that if they turned around and said they made it up it would magically get them off the punishment, if your gonna get executed regardless ...

@@LiEnby But it might have. The Romans were often willing to let recanters off.

@@scambammer6102 source

@@LiEnby numerous. Bart Ehrman for one. Most martyr accounts include an offer to recant. You really don't know this?

Seriously. The entirety of the evidence boils down to "Anonymous author claims that an unnamed source related to him a story about other unnamed individuals who supposedly witnessed a risen Jesus". That is literally as good as it gets: third-hand hearsay.

@@drlegendre Paul isn't anonymous. That's the source. The gospel accounts are worthless. They are just repeating remote hearsay.

@@scambammer6102 Paul never witnessed a risen Jesus in the flesh. He had a "vision", what we might call a theophany, that he took to be Jesus.

@@drlegendre I discount Paul’s “vision” but he also went to Jerusalem and met (and argued with) other church leaders. That’s what makes him a source, and he isn’t anonymous.

It really isn't a mystery. Dead people do not come back to life, period. Using that as a starting premise helps a lot.

Hope you enjoyed it!

@@Paulogia how could I not, you're honest search for the truth, the ability to refine your position on new information, your dedication to your craft and mostly your honourable conduct when it comes to friend and foe alike is admirable, I've learnt a lot from you and hope to learn more.

Oh, definitely. Watching the interpersonal relationships and conflicts between the many competing sects of early Christianity is much more exciting to me than the generic gospel stories as they are taught.

@@Lobsterwithinternet Says you. Speak for yourself guy.

@@peacepipe6695 I am. Which is why I'm saying anything at all.

@@Lobsterwithinternet careful with those pinchers

he wouldn't have given one

yep this sounds like a more plausible scenario to me. Anyway the gospel writers knew nothing about it. They are just making stories out of urban legends.

you will get the presents when you are roasting over a pit dude s/

Well, you've just described the ideal debate. Now if only people could actually live up to this ideal, that would be great.

anybody arguing that resurrection is a real thing is nuts.

...Ehrman also lied through his teeth about no Archeological evidence of what happens to Crucifixiton Victims...when the real truth is we have way too much for his current lame position..

He is not totally free from his religious upbringing. He takes the gospels way too seriously.

@@scambammer6102 ...No actually ...just the opposite ... the gospels are History...in fact some of the best history we have from the 1st century is from them.....Bart and every real historian, are very well aware of all that ...that is, except for a handful of academically unemployable internet wing nuts...like "flat Fred Flintstone" here- Polly-ogia the cartoon HAThEist ...he's "all theories" and not a stick of actual evidence... my God ...but you atheists are a gullible bunch... What Ehrman is not free from...are wide-eyed Hatheist speculations... based on Zero historical evidence...he takes those too seriously ... For instance ...Oh where?... oh where? are all of Ehrman's (and Polly-olgias) Mass garbage dump graves ???...(to be fair actually Bart frankly admits repeatedly that "he really doesn't know"- ...unfortunately enthusiastic HAThEists, like yourself and Polly -golia...just gloss right by that stunning admission.... ...in the meantime there is a mountain of actual evidence...in the 4 gospels and far beyond ...including ankle bones from two crucifixion victims...both crucifixion victims received decent burials ...one ankle with nail was found over 50 years ago in a bone ossuary in a tomb in Jerusalem... the other victim discovered a few years ago, also received decent single burial in Italy ... See.. that is real what evidence looks like (and it agrees with the gospels)... ..as for pathetic secular doubts...they are not- "Evidence" at all..other than clear historical evidence of the general level of gullibility among postmoderne' skeptics...

Fortunately, he doesn't really feature in this video.

@@Paulogia thank goodness.

100% agree. He behaves like a charlatan.

@@wingedlion17 Don't most apologists...

Bart great courses lectures are phenomenal

Carrier says there's a 30% chance Jesus was a real historical figure. Whether Jesus is mythical is irrelevant to whether he actually existed. Of course he was mythical. Look at the gospels.

The 'Jewish archangel' arguments seem profoundly weak to me, as does the cosmic sperm bank Carrier believes in. The character of Yeshua the Annointed (High Priest) in Zechariah is specifically given a human lineage in those passages, and we know who he is from other books. He was the first high priest after the return to Judea from Babylonian exile, not an archangel. He's literally introduced as being full of sin and worthy of destruction (representing Judah) and then God forgives him. That does not sound like an archangel to me. Carrier's research has the same vibe as fundamentalists. Start with conclusion, deceptively cherry-pick data out of context to try to fit that narrative.

In particular, he's a textual scholar. He's qualified on the TEXT of the Bible not the CONTENT of the text. That's called higher or historical criticism.

@@dharmadefender3932 Bart does not seem to know the difference.

uh...he is a historian. His degree isn't history, but so what? You think nobody learns anything after college?

A cheap shill? He donates his proceeds to organisations that combat homelessness and poverty. Furthermore, he's raising awareness and reaching a far wider audience. If you don't like it well, too bad.

@@proculusjulius7035 Oh don't get your panties in a bunch. I just said it would be nice if he occasionally showed up when he wasn't selling something.

Are you a mythicists? I find the topic of the entire NT and Jesus being a myth interesting and compelling. I’m not sure any of the people in the Bible existed.

@@joelmouton9365 Well on my limited understanding, and past research - Yes some of the people in the bible existed. Not on the bible's say-so itself, that they can be empirically sourced outside of itself. The various Caesars , described existed for example. However some of the references of Hebrew rulers existed outside of its own source, Hezekiah for example. Though the outside sources pretty much depict the polar opposite of what is described. As for all of the Jesusus (there are thousands because all the stories conflict with one another), cannot have existed at all as the name "Jesus" , because that name is Middle English that did not exist till about the 8th to 10th centuries. This goes for all the English names like John, Paul , Peter, and so on. The names would have been quite a bit different in the Hebrew, or Greek. The closest (that I am aware of) "Historical Jesus" that would have existed (and has historical evidence to support existing) Would be Ptolemy XV, son of "The God" Caesar, and "The Virgin" Cleopatra (thus the trinity myth (as well as the Isis cult)). While a huge amount of XV's exploits are like Jesuses in myth, and legend. This person has supported evidence to show he existed. Albeit a bit earlier than the bible depictions but right about that time. Also he was crucified based on most legends

Without any attempt being made at disregarding you and your knowledge, I think you have a lot of catching up to do. It would be really hard for someone like Ehrman to personally get you up to speed on what the arguments are, so I'd recommend his own books if you want to know more about this particular discussion, they're quite accessible. An argument based on names, for instance, is quite a weak one because newer names often come from older names which appear in inscriptions and fragments. The name Jesus, for instance, is nothing more than the Greek Ἰησοῦς which is attested in papyri from the time and before the time as an adaptation of the Hebrew/Aramaic name Yēšūaʿ or the shorter Yēšūʿ already attested as an alternative form of the name we now render as Joshua in OT translations, this is a perfectly identifiable name with a traceable history, rather than an obscure name which surfaces only in the late Middle Ages. The same goes for the majority of names in the OT. Parts of the NT are also attested from the early second century, the issue is how long it takes to get the whole thing in one codex or even a whole book in one codex. We know at the very least from these early attestations which characters these books concerned, and from their writing style, the verifiable historical events alluded to or mentioned, and the cultural ideas expressed we can know when and where and by what kind of person they were written and what their goals were, what is just luggage from earlier stories and what is novel etc. I once again must take care to state that I don't intend to disrespect or disregard your own knowledge, but you're clearly thoroughly uninitiated on the topic (not that you deny that) and you'd best read about it from Bart, since you're looking for clarification for his own claims, rather than hoping he will write a disorganized and much too lengthy explanation on KZfaq for you that will require much more time and effort and be less effective at getting you up to speed to the main factors in the discussion than his books or the work of any other scholar who transparently lays out what information we have and don't have to work with and suggest what conclusions we may draw from it.

@@deividdantas8938 I understand for the most part where he comes from, however the fundamental flaw in the logic (as I see it) Is the following reasons: Everything he is siting is Post-diction, as-in well after any alleged events take place. Not only is it well after, it is generations afterwards. For example the earliest physical document of any of the New testament at all would be "Fragment p52" from around 100 to 125 CE potentially And this is not even by an original author, and only contains perhaps a few dozen words. this is approximately an 8th o 15th generation reprint of the "original" story, assuming someone said it around 30 to 35 CE. In other words, it is not an eye-witness, it is 1 person saying something in let's say 30 CE, then a second person relating it to another 10 years later, and so on, and so forth. Rumors and story-tellings always change between each generation of retelling. In conclusion - my point is simple - How can anyone do a claim on validity, of an 8th to 1000th generation retelling of a story?

@@graffffik I obviously underestimated your knowledge based on the weight you put on names and the high figures you gave for the dates on the traditions as they are attested. That being said, I think there are many more factors in a text that contribute to its dating and the stock it draws its traditions from, that includes anachronisms, mention or seeming awareness/ignorance of historical events (see how the Book of Daniel betrays its awareness of the Maccabean Revolt by giving details about it indirectly as though they were prophecies then moving on to what should happen next, thereby dating it no earlier than the historical events alluded to but no later than the events that had been contradicted or new developments which would otherwise have been central to it and likely accounted for in the supposed prophecy set hundreds of years earlier) the level of relevancy of the figures mentioned e.g. Pilate and Caiaphas who are very unlikely to be included in the text by, say, a 3rd century Jew, who might opt for an unnamed High Priest and Prefect in the trials, just as the earlier Hebrews opted for an unnamed Pharaoh in Exodus where they hadn't a clue who would've been the king of Egypt in the vaguely defined historically dubious Exodus timeline. The ideas in the Gospels also show high affinity with contemporary Judaism often mythicists end up appealing to an unverified/unverifiable cultural exchange that took a sudden turn have more gradual, logical explanations that complement one another, instead of Jesus starting out with all of the now popular ideas about him such as the Virgin Birth and the Trinity. There is much more natural development to be derived from those things that leads you back to Judaism, so why start a theorical chain of cultural exchange that doesn't contribute to our understanding and seems random and out of place, when there are natural developments that lead to the result we see and gradually develop as shown by the progression of these ideas in Christian texts? This is the kind of thing Ehrman's whole field of textual criticism is about, the text constantly betrays information about the author and his audience and circumstances and the periodic additions to the mythos show the kinds of discussion that were happening within the community. There is also linguistic evidence, ancient people are not known to have a great capicity of fully emulating people of other eras, take for instance Ecclesiastes, supposed to have been written by a "son of David" but written in very late Biblical Hebrew from when the monarchy had long collapsed. Same thing goes for Daniel and its would-be prophecies, it's clear the book wasn't written a hundred years earlier like it claims from this, too. The text constantly betrays its writer and what kind of person they were and when they were writing and to whom and any lengthy interpolations stick out like a sore thumb because every person has their own style of writing and vocabulary they stick to. These things (among others) all come together to give us the dates you're familiar with and and the information about the authors, for instance Mark 13 pulls a Daniel with the First Jewish-Roman War being alluded to and the either imminent or already real destruction of the temple, but then proceeding to make a failed prophecy which should already be held as automatically untrue and disproven if it was written much after. If I proposed I had predicted the outcome of the last US election, would I have said that Donald Trump won despite the fact that, as a person making that claim in 2022, I know that's not true? That would just make me incurably wrong, no one would put that on the table as a retroactive previous prophecy if it didn't come true. Many modern-day prophets did claim it would happen before it did, though, and that makes much more sense than retroactively attributing a wrong prophecy to your prophet. Edit: I speak of the Jewish context but it's worth noting that I'm not denying the external influence, just the full borrowing of the core story fully formed just changing the names and my perceived undermining of its gradual development.