is it a sponsor?

You should def do something with all the Christian and especially Islamic references in Dune 2

Dr. Ehrman always strikes me as much more of an "ex-evangelical" than as an atheist/agnostic or anything else. He knows a lot more about the Bible than most people - myself included, and it seems that he thinks this knowledge more or less directly translates into expertise on Christianity, about which he seems to not know that much, and could even be said to be misguided. Kudos to RfB for nudging him on this vis a vis the role of syncretism in the Church! It would be truly sad if we lived in a world, as he described, where those who insisted on an orthodoxy with the most inflexible, least dynamic boundaries were destined to always emerge victorious - not only for Christians, but for all people. What he is describing is a world pre-destined for authoritarian totalitarianism.

What about the 50 Constantine Bibles? Lost to time, but wouldn't the pressure of that canon count as an early canon?

The Amazing Qur'an by. Dr. Gary Miller 👍

Derek from Mythvision is the Nick Fury of this Universe.

@@arnulfo267lmao that is pretty accurate

@@arnulfo267 Perfect analogy

They've made videos together before, on Andrew's second channel

So who is the Thanos of this universe?

Bart is a liar 😂

@@random-JCompelling argument!

random-J is a liar 😂

They were not objective as they didn't mention that the new testament cannon are the earliest writings.

Oh you love scholar that confirm your doubts😉

@@marioicon Oh you love making pointless remarks with emojis 😉

Ehrman is a liar. All his contentions aren’t really detrimental to the Christian faith. Watch Jimmy Akins debate with Ehrman if you want to see him get destroyed

​@@HangrySaturn🦃

​@@marioicon I have never had doubts about Christianity, Islam, and all other religions, but it is very interesting to listen to extremely knowledgeable scholars on those subjects. Especially if they were once members of those religions.

Careful with that. He's very biased in his approach. I'd suggest studying the books he has his theories from. Stuff like Albert Schweitzer, "The quest of the historical Jesus" or David Friedrich Strauß "The Life of Jesus" or Rudolf Bultmann. So you first have a solid foundation on which to build. Remember that Ehrman is an ex-evangelical who still thinks along those lines.

@@MrSeedi76 "Remember that Ehrman is an ex-evangelical who still thinks along those lines." Do you have examples of it affecting his thinking? I've heard things that contradict that idea. Thanks for those other references, though.

The Amazing Qur'an by Dr. Gary Miller 👍

The closest making the cut were mentioned in the video. 1-2 Clement, Barnabas, and the Shepherd of Hermas. The level below that would have been the Acts of Paul, Revelation of Peter (some local churches preferred this over the Revelation of John) and the Didache. The almost entirely lost Gospel of the Hebrews/Ebionites was also held as authoritative by some communities but we're not sure if it was one document with several names or several competing Jewish-Christian gospels. The Protoevangelium of James was incredibly popular but I'm not sure anyone took it to be scripture. As for the *very* spurious, they're too numerous to list. Just look at the table of contents for J. K. Elliott's Apocryphal New Testament to get a feel for how many parascriptural documents were in circulation in the early church, and none of this even touches on the litany of Gnostic Christian writings

@@chris_wick Now I'm imagining a Canon formed out of the most spurious texts, rather than ones we know. And what Christianity might have looked like.

​@Koopyspappynobody's worshipping written word. We worship Jesus who's the word of God but we only know about Him through scripture.

​@@jeffmacdonald9863there might be a compilation of all these texts. There is one in German called "Das Neue Testament und frühchristliche Schriften" by Klaus Berger which compiles all of the texts that we have discovered including all of the canonical texts, too, in one book. Not sure there is something similar in English though.

My experience was the opposite. As a Ph.D student of Religion, I was already familiar with Dr. Ehrman's work, and was excited when they mentioned him on EarBiscuits

Also at Hippo 393, Carthage 397, 419 and Florence 15th century.

The problem with that is that this synod was a local affair by the bishop of Rome and not universal. It was not the end point of canon building, it was one step in a long process, and other books remained canonical or disputed in other parts of Christendom.

@@varana However, the North African Synods were all sent to the Bishop of Rome for Approval. So the North African Churches from what is modern Libya and Tunisia were in agreement with Rome. In addition, Pope Innocent in 405 AD wrote a Letter to the Catholic Bishops in Gaul (Modern France) confirming the same 73 book Canon that the Catholic Church has today. So we have by the early 5th century, a uniform Canon in the Latin Church from North Africa all the way to Gaul (France) all in agreement with the Church of Rome.

I'm interested in knowing where I could find the information you are stating. Would love to have this information for future reference.

​@varana I would suggest that setting a canon for the Latin Vulgate was, nevertheless, tremendously important.

/Undergrad/ thesis defense? A thesis to get a B.A.?

Yup, the nature of these religions is inherently imperialistic. These theocracies used the power of both the state to spread their faith. Their whole doctrine revolves around the conformity of the masses, and the hedging out of other believes. It's almost comical in a way how people want to give these faiths a pass for their 'moral merits' when the history of their diffusion among our species has been anything but that.

@@Magus_Union christianity is exist before constantine, before constantine they were prosecuted so doubt there is any central figure who decide which book is canon. And even after constantine he didnt become christian himself and roman didnt turn into christianity yet it only didnt prosecuted them and treat christianity just like any other religion under roman empire

There is no book of Enoch in the old testament. Do you mean the influence of the Enochic literature on the newer testament?

He’s done videos of Enoch in the past, def worth the watch :)

Check out Esoterica!

Exclusivity isn't really that scary I would think. Truth is exclusive. Any scientist to say that flat earthers "just have their own truth, no big deal," is gonna be pretty rare. Right is right. Christians believed themselves to be right.

I mean it shouldnt really be that outlandish of a concept? You are likely already part of an incredibly exclusionary griup (a nation state). Most religions are extremely inclusive in comparison to most citizenships.

In those days, the whole family would adhere to one sect, so an expansionist leader merely needed to forbid his followers to marry the children of his opponents. That succeeded in making most small sects go extinct. With the death of the nuclear family, that ploy fails.

​​@@capnbarky2682that's not a suitable analogy. Citizenship is a matter of law, religion is a metter of belief. Your citizenship does not exclude other people, is just about you. But when you impose your beliefs onto other people you expand those beliefs, you can not expand your own citizenship to other people.

@@luis_sa78 i wasn't making an analogy

Islam has always been subject to both internal and external Orientalist criticism. You can see this by the questionable mention of Uthman(Ra) in the introduction.

@@bristolrovers27 no it hasn’t 😂, people have been threatened with death for trying to criticise it! Don’t be dishonest

Well, we need to be clear what we're talking about: *among scholars* and in academia, these criticisms have been going on forever. It is true that general criticism is politically charged, but we'd also be being dishonest is we didn't recognize that along with the militant Muslims who lash out at this stuff, there are also some pretty militant anti-Muslim groups out there as well.

@@saberswordsmen1they haven’t though really have they, not in the mainstream. Scholars who have tried to crticise Islam and the Qur’an etc have faced death threats, attacks, and had to go into hinding! Also, we’re not talking about anti-Muslim groups, what’s that got to do with anything? This isn’t a sympathy discussion. It’s to do with allowing free and open criticism of all religions, including Islam.

@@mannya3248 I bring it up because it's part of what has made nuanced discussion difficult. Because we've had some pretty strong anti Muslim bigotry since 9/11, some people will dismiss even good faith criticism of Islam as being from a position of bigotry. When most of the discussion you hear takes place in that context, it's understandable to be suspicious of one that brings them up. It isn't about a pity party, it's about how both groups have acted to undermine the possibility of nuanced discussion by adding the baggage of their own politics. I honestly don't know what you mean by "in the mainstream". Academics and scholars aren't rock stars, they're rarely paid any attention by the mainstream. Bart and Reza Aslan are the only two I can think of with any note in the last 10-20 years. Who do you feel was sleeping on that job? I guess Reza certainly has room to criticize, but he's hardly representative of anything wider.

Hahahaha. Yeah that'd go down well.

Same here. Very strange.

Yeah, he might have lost the faith but he never deconstructed. He still thinks fundamentalist evangelical Christianity is 'true Christianity', and he barely mentions Catholic or Orthodox viewpointswhen discussing early Church history.

He also has not much of a concept of mainstream Lutheran Protestantism.

It's refreshing indeed but that's been apart of Christian History from the beginning.

most "Christians" don't properly practice their religion, let alone understand their religions history, geography, and culture; most "Christians" simply identify with their religion, and identification won't get you far.

Why do you say “finally” as if this is some new phenomenon? You must be looking in the wrong place if you haven’t seen scholarly discussions of this before

These conversations have been around for some time. Great that the algorithm and this channel in specific, has brought them to your attention! 🎉

Read David Friedrich Strauß "The Life of Jesus" or Albert Schweitzer "The quest of the historical Jesus" and you'll find about 90 % of the theories Ehrman espouses.

Hippocrates too. Many works attributed to him are now regarded as "School of ..." and some are not from his school at all. Galen wrote so much that he did not need fanfiction writers.

It was seen differently. Also, the gospel authors had no concept of writing a "contradiction free" text. Or take Paul's letters - he doesn't think along the lines of modern logic (which in itself presupposes quite a few things you need to hold true before being able to apply classical logic). I've rarely seen anything in theology (I studied theology myself) that addressed these problems of "mindset" except for the German catholic theologian Georg Koepgen in "Die Gnosis des Christentums" ("The Gnosis of Christianity") which ended up on the catholic index of forbidden books but was later rehabilitated. Maybe the most important theological book I ever read, despite the fact that I'm not catholic. Unfortunately there probably is no English translation.

Today's historical fiction puts words into past people's mouths all the time. I am not sure how I feel about that either.

That’s a nice thought but sadly unprovable as being a “heavenly law”.

Christianity offers better things.

Well, a lot of them were forced under threat by state or military power, a tradition which continued into modern history with Western colonialism.

The goal of placation is also a characteristic of the Abrahamic religions. A covenant is literally a bargain/agreement.

Except the ancients, the various societies of the ancient Mediterranean, DID worship their deities the same as we do know, I mean, what do you _think_ a rank-and-file Christian is doing exactly that they're praying to the Big Man Upstairs such that they're, well, _making a request of their deity,_ beseeching them and/or their associative powers in supplication such that they (the Christian in this case) achieve a specific result/are given something? We (I'm speaking of the Abrahamics here) compose and sing songs of praise to the god, we've houses of worship at sites such as are reputed to be places that were, for lack of a better word, "touched" by the god/by associates and/or descendants of the god here on earth, St. Peter's Basilica as lies over the site of the saint's tomb; the Church of the Holy Sepulcher; the various sites shrines(?) in Shi'a Islam dedicated to companions and/or blood relations of the Prophet Mohammed such that they lie over the sites of their birth/tomb, etc. The ancients prayed to their gods, made libations and other such offerings to them that they believed them to be very real forces acting upon the word, just as we Abrahamics do, so _yes,_ they "worshipped" them. To argue otherwise I would say is just this needlessly trite playing at semantics, unnecessary hand-rigging, a way to mark Christians and/or if not the other Abrahamics as *special,* that they're not _like_ the other theistic religions, as is encapsulated in the age-old “It's not a ReLiGiOn, it's a RElaTiOnShip WiTh GaWwwwwd.”, like, you and _every other theistic religion,_ that you seek to further cultivate a relationship with your god through the enactment of rituals and/or sacrificial offerings, you're not special. T_T

It seems a bit strange to say this when ancient civilizations devoted demonstrably large amounts of public resources to worshipping their pantheons.

Roman Catholics do just that when they pray to a saint related to their concern of the moment. Many visit a particular shrine more often than they would go to mass to pray to Big Daddy or the Virgin Mary. That may not be what priests and theologians do, however.

​@@faithlesshound5621Catholics wouldn't have their saint venerations without Africa; nor would they have their prayers without India.

They wouldn’t disagree in this area.

Not correct. The Council of Nicea in 325 dealt with Arianism (Christological issue) and issued the Nicene Creed as the Dogmatic rule of Faith.

@@HH-pv9ex I agree, Nicea dealt with Arianism in 325 AD when Emperor Constantine was around. Constantinople added the additional Creedal statements regarding the Holy Spirit, but the Council of Constantinople was not given ecumenical status till Chalcedon in 451 AD.

@@HH-pv9ex Yes, the Ethiopian Orthodox have and 81 book Canon, the largest Canon of any Apostolic Church. The other Oriental Orthodox (Coptic, Syriac, Armenian and Syro-Malabar) do not hold to the same canon as the Ethiopian and Eritrean, yet they are in full Communion with each other.

This is because they are taking the concept of Sola Scriptura to its most extreme.

It's a simple fact as there was no church yet when the old testament was written. And the gospels and letters were written by people who thought the world will end within their lifetime. They had no concept of a church that would endure 2000 years.

So did the Protestants until the 18th century

@@michaelfuller34 before 1666 all king James Bibles included books labeld " apocrypha ". After the glorious revolution in 1690 when western Europe was saved from Rome many copies being printed just removed the apocrypha . Some are absolutely worth reading , some not so much. Like the infancy gospel of Thomas is pointless but old testament apocrypha is pretty interesting and some of the gnostic gospels and letters. 👍🏼

Sure, canon is a big deal! Why don’t we have The Gospel of Thomas in our Bibles? Right:)

It should be😂

because the opposite side of scholarship is idiocy. Academics usually have a consensus, and if not then all ideas that weight are shared.

Depends who you ask. Some believe the Bible is also fully divine. Scholars within both religions challenge that narrative.

​@@kylewilliams8114 Christians historically have never believed that the Bible literally came down from heaven as a single book like Muslims believe about the Qur'an.

We in the West have nothing to do with the Quran hence our lack of awareness around it's Canonical issues

I'm afraid the brief mention of The Quran here missed information from the "unaltered Quran" school of thought and repeated unproven Orientalist claims.