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Just When Ehrman Was Out… Craig Pulled Him Back In (feat Dr Bart Ehrman)
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On the verge of retirement, Bart Ehrman delivers his final lecture—only to find himself at the center of sharp criticism from William Lane Craig. What follows is a tense, fascinating clash over biblical manuscripts, archaeology, and contradictions, as Ehrman responds point-by-point to claims that many Christians take for granted.
(original post May 4, 2026)
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How significant is the scholarly career of Bart Ehrman? I think he's relatively insignificant. He really misleads innocent laypeople. He simply trots out the fallacious argument. Honestly, Kevin, I find it so ironic that it would be Bart Ehrman of all people saying that it teaches us how to construct arguments and evaluate evidence. Because this is one of his great weaknesses.
SPEAKER_06Well, I know someone who's not gonna like that. Welcome to Pologia, where a former Christian takes a look at the claims of Christians. And today I'm gonna do one of my favorite things, and that's exposing world-renowned Bible scholar Bart Ehrman to the world of Christian apologetics. Especially when there's beef. Bart has an upcoming course called Through the Eye of a Needle. Jesus' teaching on wealth and their modern relevance. It seems particularly poignant right now. And I'd encourage you to check it out at the link in the description, but we'll talk about that later. First, we need to bring out friend of the channel, Dr. Bart Ehrman. How are you, Bart? All right, good. So, Bart, congratulations on your retirement. I haven't had a chance to speak with you since that happened. So, congratulations. Yeah, thank you. And I was so sad that I wasn't able to attend your final lecture. There was a family commitment that didn't let me come down, but it looked like that was quite a fun event.
SPEAKER_08It was great. It was a lot of fun. Yeah, it was really a nice way to go out.
SPEAKER_06Well, it was it was nice to you, but it wasn't nice for everyone. Uh our good friend William Lane Craig also watched your final lecture and has some notes, shall we say, on your final lecture. And I was hoping that we could go over those today.
SPEAKER_02That's fantastic. Great. Bill, after more than 40 years in the classroom, including 37 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dr. Bart Ehrman is retiring from UNC. Uh while he'll still be speaking and giving interviews and so on. Bart delivered his final public lecture at UNC on December 7th, 2025. And he spoke on the most significant discovery in the history of biblical studies. Now, one can tell from listening to this final lecture what's important to him, what he really wants to communicate. Um I have some key excerpts from that address, but first, in your opinion, Bill, how significant is the scholarly career of Bart Ehrman? What are some of his contributions?
SPEAKER_05His contributions to establishing the Greek text of the New Testament are uh very important. Um, but I think he's relatively insignificant as a historical Jesus scholar. He's a popularizer of historical Jesus studies, the best-selling religious author with Oxford University Press. And so it's his popular-level books that have made him famous.
SPEAKER_08Yes, I do try to reach a wide audience, and I don't write, I have not written academic books on the historical Jesus. I'm thoroughly well trained in the historical Jesus and completely knowledgeable of all his scholarship, and I would venture to say far more than William Lane Craig.
SPEAKER_04I think he touts himself as a New Testament scholar sometimes. I would need to take off my New Testament scholar's hat and put on my philosopher's hat. You kind of wonder, okay.
SPEAKER_02Let's go to the first clip. What is the most significant discovery in the history of biblical studies?
SPEAKER_08What do I consider to be the most significant discovery ever made in its history, in the history of the discipline? That's what I want to talk about. So our flawed manuscripts. Whoever wrote the books of the New Testament, the various books, wrote them at some time, mainly in the first century. Uh and you just take an example, like whoever wrote the Gospel of Matthew uh sat down at one point and wrote it out, maybe in around the eighty year eighty or eighty five. He wrote he wrote his gospel, and he had other sources, and but he wrote something down on papyrus, and that was that was sometime in the in the first century. And we you can call that the original thing, the thing that he wrote, and then like he started passing around for people to look at, and and then after a while somebody wanted a copy of it, right? And so uh somebody made a copy of it, and then somebody copied the copy, and then some somebody copied the copy of the copy, and then somebody copied the copy of the copy of the copy, and it went on like that. It went on like that for centuries, and that thing that the person wrote doesn't exist anymore, and neither do the cop the first copies, or the copies of the copies. But we we don't have we don't have a copy, a full copy of Matthew until about 300 years after it was written. Okay, so that's just the way it is. Um and that's that's not like unique for the New Testament. That's like all the books of the ancient world are like that. It's just how it was. And so you don't have originals, you've got later copies. The problem is that scribes make mistakes. Today, we have more than 100 manuscripts. Today, we know of over 5,800 manuscripts. How many variants do we know about? How many do we know about? We don't know how many we know about. The recent estimates are around 500,000 differences. Having said that, most of these differences simply show that ancient scribes could spell no better than students can today. You misspell a word, it's a difference. So most of them don't matter, but some of them matter a lot. Some of them actually change what a verse means, or what a chapter means, or what a book means. Sometimes they change the theology of the whole thing. It's ah, that really does matter. But that's not the most significant discovery in the history of biblical scholars.
SPEAKER_05The irony is that the very multiplicity of the variants and the abundance of manuscripts enables scholars to reconstruct the text of the original autographs with well over 97% accuracy. And Bart Ehrman knows this.
SPEAKER_08Could you ask him sometime where he gets the statistic of 97%? So it's not like 97.2 or it's not 95, it's 97. So 97. Don't know 3% that we aren't sure. Well, where do people come up with things like this? It's like I'll tell you where. I think somewhere Bruce Metzger probably said something like 96 or something, but he was just he he knew you you cannot do that. I don't know if that's where he got it, or I don't know where people come up as nine. They're making stuff up. So I don't know if William Lynn Craig has ever even collated a manuscript before. So, you know, my early interest was collating manuscripts, which is where you take two manuscripts and you compare them. Not just like passage by passage or verse by verse, but word for word. Word for word.
SPEAKER_06Word for word.
SPEAKER_08And you do this for hours. And I spent hours in front of microfilms back before they had things digitized, collating manuscripts, comparing manuscripts. My PhD dissertation was on statistical relationships among manuscripts. You know, the reality is, as my mentor, Bruce Metzger said, whom I'm sure William Lane Craig reveres, that there are more mistakes in our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament. And people get on my case for saying it, I got it from Metzger. So let's put it that way. Let's say you've got a passage that has 50 words in it, and let's say that there are one and a half words to make 97%, as opposed to 96 or 98, that are off. What if one of those words is the word not? Right? That's one word out of 50, man. That is so this is this manuscript, this is 98% right, but if the word not is missing, and it's in the Ten Commandments. Oh my God. So, so okay. So again, I don't know where the the figure comes from. I think that I've always said that most of the differences we have are immaterial and insignificant, and they don't matter for anything. I said that, probably said it in the lecture.
SPEAKER_07So most of them don't matter, but some of them matter a lot.
SPEAKER_08But there are differences that matter a lot for understanding an individual author, for understanding his theology, for understanding the theology of the New Testament. They matter. So if you want to pretend they don't matter, it's just a matter of sticking your head in the sand, in my opinion.
SPEAKER_02But Bart continues with the most significant discovery.
SPEAKER_08The findings of archaeology. Both Old Testament and New Testament uh are texts that people read and study and analyze. But um at some point people realize, you know, uh there probably should be some like evidence that these things happened, like material evidence, like archaeological evidence. Well, like what? Well, in the ancient history of Israel, we have the account in uh the Old Testament, the book of Exodus, of the children of Israel becoming enslaved uh by the Egyptians for uh for centuries and uh growing to be a great people, and then God raises up Moses to bring them out of their slavery in Egypt, and God works miracles through Moses, and so uh they escape from Egypt, they go through the Sea of Reeds, or they're called the Red Sea, and uh they escape, and the entire Egyptian army is destroyed in the map, and and they escape, and we're told that there were 600,000 of these Israelites who were uh military-age men. So it's not counting women, not counting children, not counting the elderly. So we're talking two and a half or three million people. So with big events like this, you kind of think there might be some like archaeological evidence that they happened. These accounts are not historical as described in in the Bible. They're probably not historical as described in the Bible. But as you just saw, this too is not the most significant discovery of biblical studies.
SPEAKER_05Now, I am not an Old Testament scholar, can't speak to the question of the Exodus, but what is amazing to me is that we have so many archaeological remains from New Testament times that confirm the reliability of the Gospels. Certainly the most important archaeological find of all is the tomb of Jesus that lies beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The claim of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to be uh located on the site of Jesus' tomb, which has been excavated, is very strong. And so incredibly we have this archaeological remain of the very tomb in which Jesus' body was laid after his crucifixion.
SPEAKER_08He thinks the church of the church of the sepulchre is where we know where the tomb is. Yes, that's he has he studied this kind of thing? What? Okay, okay, yeah. Well, we we know about the history of the tomb of the sepulchre, and uh we know when it was determined to be a Jesus burial place, and we know why, and we know the de facts about it. And okay, if if if he thinks the he's a brilliant historian in going on that kind of information. Okay, so there's that. Yes. We do know there was a Caiaphas and we do know there was a James. There's archaeological discoveries for that. I've never denied that. I've in fact talked about it, how exciting it is to know these things. What does that have to do with whether Jesus multiplied the loaves? Good question. I mean, if you talk about inaccuracy apart from names and places, what's the evidence for the stories in the New Testament happening based on archaeology? I mean, archaeologists have discovered Nazareth. Archaeology has done enough to show there was a Jesus, I think. I mean, yeah, I think there was a Jesus. They've dug up Nazareth. One of the mythicist arguments against the historical Jesus is that there was no Nazareth. And yeah, that's wrong. That is wrong. That is so wrong. So I agree with that. But you know, it doesn't show that the events that are described in the New Session happened.
SPEAKER_02You know, I've read that there is a lot of work being done on the Exodus Bill. So and by the way, um, most of us know that absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence.
SPEAKER_05Yes. Well, as I explained a moment ago, it is very difficult to identify successfully what archaeological remains ought to be discovered. And so arguments from silence are not very powerful. Uh, it would have to be highly probable that there would be remains. And then, secondly, highly probable that if there were remains, then they would have been excavated and discovered by us. Uh and therefore, as you say, arguments based on the absence of evidence are very tenuous and uncertain.
SPEAKER_08According to the Book of Numbers, when the people of Israel left Egypt, they traveled in the wilderness and they spent about thirty-eight of the years in Katahnea, which is a kind of an oasis that we know of. We have. Archaeologists have carefully dug Kadesh Barnea have found no signs of extensive habitation there by people living in that period. So there's nothing left, no archaeological evidence. So would there have been? Yes, there would have been. Is it an argument from silence? Well, people who've tried to find any evidence of the Exodus haven't found it. And it isn't just like it's a little thing that's been missed somewhere. According to the Book of Numbers, there were four hundred and three thousand Israelite men who were of army serving age who left Egypt. So that's not counting the elderly man, men, it's not counting any of the women, it's not counting any of the children. And so say two and a half million. These two and a half million did not leave a single thing anywhere that they've dug, including the cities that they're said to have been in. And so you could say it's just, oh, they just haven't found it yet. But that's like, you know, it's a little bit like saying you haven't found the weapons of mass destruction yet in Iraq. I mean, it's true. It's true, we haven't found them yet. But I mean, really? You still think they're there?
SPEAKER_06Now I'm gonna get demonetized. Oh man.
SPEAKER_02Mark continues his speech in this next clip. What is the most significant discovery in biblical studies?
SPEAKER_08The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. We have for long had very limited knowledge about Judaism in the taste of Jesus. We have very limited, it's strange how little evidence we've had, because most of our Jewish evidence about the ancient world comes from us from Jewish writings that were produced hundreds of years later. Uh the Mishnah, the Talmud, and um, you know, people had some ideas. We have some, we have some, of course, we have Jewish sources from the time of Jesus, especially the Jewish historian Josephus and other things. But we we had fairly limited knowledge, but then a significant discovery, a hugely significant discovery was made in 1947. In 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. Um they were discovered by accident. The first discovery was of a uh of a of a cave that had a uh had had a jar that had a had scrolls in it. And once they found this thing, this jar of scrolls in, they wonder if these other caves, lots of caves around, like lots of caves, hundreds of caves around there. They started exploring caves. They ended up finding 11 caves that had scrolls in them. Some of them were fairly complete scrolls. I mean, the the the Isaiah scroll is is magnificent. It's a copy of Isaiah that is a thousand years earlier than the copy we were relying on up till then. And they vastly improved our understanding of first century Judaism because of the kinds of things they were. We have a description of a war that was soon going to take place. It was going to be the war to end all wars. The apocalyptic end of time was going to come, and we have a scroll that describes it. These scrolls are just absolutely fantastic for enlightening us about one aspect of Judaism that we had very little knowledge of before. And so huge, hugely important, but also for the relevance for understanding Jesus, because these scrolls embody a worldview about the coming judgment of God against this world that's going to happen very soon, to destroy all those who are opposed to God and bring in a good world that God had planned from the beginning. It's very much like the teachings of Jesus. At the same time, in roughly the same area. It's not that Jesus belonged to this community, but it set the context within which to put Jesus' proclamation. Hugely significant. But not the most significant discovery.
SPEAKER_05Well, I think it's right that Jesus did believe that his coming represented the advent of God's reign on earth. But there's no reason to connect this with the community of the Essenes living in the Dead Sea area.
SPEAKER_08I've never said that. I've never thought that. I've argued against it. So that's making stuff up in a different way. It's not that Jesus belonged to this community, but it set the context within which to put Jesus' proclamation.
SPEAKER_05I don't know why you would say I thought that. And as an aside, this Isaiah scroll is very significant with respect to Bart's uh earlier point about the manuscript variants and the copyist errors. This Isaiah scroll, as he said, dates from 1,000 years earlier than the medieval manuscripts of Isaiah that we had. And yet, when you compare the two, over that thousand-year time, virtually no copyist errors were introduced. These Jewish scribes were so careful that the medieval Isaiah scrolls uh are virtually identical to this ancient Isaiah scroll.
SPEAKER_08No, the Isaiah scroll is quite astounding. I mean, it is it's a complete scroll of Isaiah, and it is very close to the Masoretic text that we know about from the 10th century, well, around the year 1000, the critics Leningradensis. He's called that because it's it was in Leningrad, and that it it is our the basis for our Hebrew Bible translations. The problem is that that we we have portions of all the books of the Hebrew Bible except for Esther, found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Isaiah is distinctive both because it's a full scroll and because it's very much like the Leningradensis Isaiah. But why doesn't he talk about the book of Jeremiah? For example, we have a scroll of Jeremiah from Qumran, and it is closer to the Septuagint than it is to the Hebrew text we know from the Lenin Grudensis. In fact, it's 15% different, it's 15% shorter. Wow. So does that show that scribes were accurate when they're leaving out 15%? I mean that's that's that's better than 97%. And and not only that, but you can actually statistically demonstrate that. So no, it doesn't show that scribes were completely accurate.
SPEAKER_02All right, no joking now. Bart declares the greatest discovery in biblical studies.
SPEAKER_08The single most discovery, I'm now gonna tell you. But I'm gonna tell you first, it's gonna seem rather banal, minor, uninteresting, not exactly headline news, but it revolutionized the field. And it forever changed our understanding of the Jewish and Christian scriptures. It is that the Bible's not a single book. The most discovery, the most important discovery, I'm gonna argue, is this. Let me explain why this rather banal observation is has made such a huge impact. The reality of the canon. You've got 66 of these books, but people treat them as a book because they're between two covers. That's a problem. It looks like one book. And when you read a book, you expect it to be consistent. It doesn't occur to you that the author's gonna flat out contradict himself in the next page. You don't expect it, and if you don't expect it, you don't look for it. If you don't look for it, you don't see it. I should simply have my students do a very basic exercise that I recommend you all do. Uh just read Genesis 1 and list everything that happens in order, then read Genesis 2, which is also part of the creation guide and list everything that happens in order. Just do it. Compare your lips. It's okay. Yeah, good luck. The point of the contradictions is not so you can go home and tell your parents that I now know the Bible's full of contradictions, I'm not going to go to church anymore. You know, it's not the point, it's not the contradiction. The point is that if you see the contradiction, it makes you understand what this thing is that you're reading, that otherwise you think is one book. It shows that these are stories that are being told. The accounts of Genesis 1 and 2 are literary, they're not scientific treatises, they're not necessarily historical in the sense of things that really happen. They're stories that are trying to convey meaning. If you modernize them so they fit with modern Signance, or you're harmonize them so that they fit together, you're robbing each of these stories of their own literary integrity, which means you're misinterpreting it. And if you think the Bible is valuable, then you probably should not want to misinterpret it. Paul is the hero of an act. And he's regularly misrepresented in acts. If you compare what Act says about Paul with what Paul says about Paul about the same thing. Like they talk about the same thing, and Acts will describe something, Apollo will describe it years before Acts is written, and you'll see they're in loved with each other. Paul doesn't give too many monobiographical things in his letters, but he does say something in Galatians 1 about what happened after he came to believe in Jesus. And what he explicitly says is you can look this up, he says, I did not consult with flesh and blood, I did not talk to anybody about it, and I did not go confer with the apostles in Jerusalem. And Paul's trying to say, no, I didn't even talk to them. It's three years before I went to talk to them, he says. And that's what happens. He makes a beeline to Jerusalem to talk to them.
SPEAKER_05Well, it's certainly true that the Bible is not just one book, it's a collection of uh diverse sorts of literature by different authors who have different perspectives on things. Um, just to give one example, isn't it interesting that the Gospel of John has no account of the baptism of Jesus or of Jesus' institution of the Last Supper? Now, these were doubtlessly historical events which are related in the synoptic gospels. Yeah.
SPEAKER_08There's very little that you can't doubt. I mean, if you try hard enough, you can doubt most anything. So every incident in the life of Jesus needs to be examined. And you can't put statistical probabilities of this happened. You know, there's a 73% chance this actually happened. You can't do it like that. I'd say it's relatively certain that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist for a variety of reasons that I we can talk about if you want. I think it's relatively certain Jesus ate something the night before he was arrested. So he had a meal. But I don't think I think it's you're hard-pressed to say that we know what he said at the meal or what the meal entailed. And it's a very different between the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, in relationship to John. John's is not a Passover meal. He doesn't institute the Lord's Supper. It's a very, very different account.
SPEAKER_05But as for the examples that Bart gives, I don't think that there are any significant inconsistencies in the accounts of the creation of the world in Genesis one, and the account of the creation of mankind in Genesis 2. The only inconsistencies concern whether or not uh man is created before or after the vegetation and the animals. And in these two different stories, the the order in which these are created uh is different. It's hardly uh something that is significant and undermines the central teaching of the doctrine of creation.
SPEAKER_08If he's saying that Genesis 1 and 2 agree that God created the world, then that's right. They do agree on that. The question is not whether they agree on that, the question is whether they agree in the details. And if he doesn't want to talk about details, okay, but then there's no discussion of contradictions any longer. You could say that the Quran and the Old Testament and the New Testament all agree that there's one God, and therefore there's no contradictions. They all have the same message. There's one God. Sure. Why not? Okay. So and anybody who's listening to this who wants to just do the exercise yourself. You don't need William Lane Craig or me to tell you. Just make a list of what happens in Genesis 1 and make a list of what happens in Genesis 2. If the order doesn't matter, why do they give us order? In fact, they both emphasize the order. And so if they're emphasizing the order, it's probably important. So just make your list of what happens first, second, third, fourth, and Genesis 1. Then do the same thing in Genesis 2 and compare your lists. It's not complicated.
SPEAKER_05Now, as for uh Paul and the Acts, uh, I don't know what version of the book of Acts uh Bart is reading because in my Bible it certainly does not say that he made a beeline for Jerusalem. Here's what Acts 9 says. But Saul increased all the more in strength and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Christ. When many days had passed, the Jews plotted to kill him. But their plot became known to Saul. They were watching the gates day and night to kill him. But his disciples took him by night and let him down over the wall, lowering him in a basket. And when he had come to Jerusalem, he attempted to join the disciples, etc., etc. There is no inconsistency there between what Paul says and what Luke, who was after all a traveling companion of Paul, says concerning Paul's activities after his conversion on the road to Damascus.
SPEAKER_06The author of Luke was a traveling companion of Paul, so he should know.
SPEAKER_08Craig knows me, and he doesn't seem to know me very well. So do you do you really think that people who are friends of someone else and know all the details of their lives? Or I mean just whatever. Apart from that, we could talk about that. But in terms of not making beelines, so yeah, okay, after many days, he goes to Jerusalem. What does Paul say? He says, I did not go to Jerusalem after I converted. I waited three years. So I guess that's many days.
SPEAKER_06That's what he's thinking. Yeah, it's like a thousand days, it's fine. Paul said he Yeah.
SPEAKER_08And so he went to the Nabataean kingdom, he went to he went to the Nabataean kingdom to Arabia and then came back. And so that yeah, so nice try. I mean, that's what people say. Of course, William Lyncraig isn't like you know coming up with an intelligent response that he's thought of. And this is just what people have said forever. And most historical scholars just think it's you know it's problematic.
SPEAKER_06And I trust you wouldn't necessarily agree that the author of Acts was a traveling companion of Paul.
SPEAKER_08I've written at length about this, actually, in my somewhat in my book Forged, which is for a popular audience, but especially in my book Forgery and Counterforgery, the issue has to do with the four passages in the book of Acts that go into the first person plural we. The author starts to talk about what we did in connection with Paul. And so that's often taken to show that he must have been a traveling companion of Paul. And it's there are much com much debated passages, obviously. But those who think that Luke was a companion of Paul base it on these passages, and I think there are better explanations for it, because there are actually problems with thinking, there are real problems with thinking this guy was a traveling companion of Paul. One is he gets almost everything Paul says different from what Paul himself says. Just I mean his basic gospel message differs in the book of Acts from what Paul himself says. In the book of Acts, Paul never preaches about atonement. He never talks about Jesus' death bringing an atonement for sins. That's all and in like read 1 Corinthians sometime or or Romans or Galatians. It's all about atonement. And so and anytime they have similar, they're talking about similar things, like going to Jerusalem, or like going to Athens, or whenever they overlap in what they talk about, there's always these discrepancies and sometimes just contradictions. So, you know, if he was a traveling companion, he wasn't paying attention.
SPEAKER_02So how does he end his final lecture?
SPEAKER_08One of the reasons I valued and continue to value teaching biblical studies in the modern university is because it's a way of getting people to think about how you construct arguments and what you consider to be evidence. This is very important in all the fields of the humanities. English, history, philosophy, classics. List your field. These fields are important for giving us information and for learning substance, learning data, but they're especially important because they teach you how to think. And if you don't think, well, okay. They still let you vote. The humanities are vital to this country. And at the time when we need people to be able to see the difference between truth and falsity, when we know what is right and what is wrong, when we know whether an argument is any good, when we look to see if the evidence is actually there. Those are the things taught in the humanities, and it's precisely at the moment that we are cutting humanities in our universities. This is the worst time in the history of the planet to be cutting the humanities. These students are going to be voting. And among the humanities, religious studies, more than any other, because in the South, because of this thing, drives people to think because the kinds of things I've been talking to you run contrary to what they've always thought. They're going to fight against it, and they're going to find evidence for their view, or they're going to finally succumb to what I am telling you is the truth.
SPEAKER_05Well, certainly I second and endorse his advocacy of the humanities and the importance of critical thinking skills. But honestly, Kevin, I find it so ironic that it would be Bard Ehrman of all people saying that it teaches us how to construct arguments and evaluate evidence. Because this is one of his great weaknesses. Look at his debate with me at the College of the Holy Cross on the resurrection of Jesus. And he simply trots out the fallacious argument of David Hume against miracles. And when I expose the error in this, he doesn't even understand it. He thinks I'm trying to use mathematics to prove the existence of God, when in fact I'm exposing the demonstrative logical fallacy of his argument against miracles. So while the humanities are important in teaching us to evaluate arguments and assess evidence, I fear that that is a skill that Bart has not yet mastered.
SPEAKER_08He did accuse me of simply using Hume, and for him, that's a four-letter word. If I remember, this debate was many years ago, and I refuse to debate him afterwards because he spent a lot of time just mocking me, as he's as he's doing here. And I don't mind debating people who you know who are nice. But I don't want to debate people who think mockery is a form of debate. So but he brought up the Hume thing, and instead of explaining why he thought it was a problem, he said that you know he's just bringing up Hume again. And like that's supposed to be somehow an argument against what I was saying. What I was saying was that when a historian so again, this is years ago, so I I'm if I'm misreconstructing it, that would that would be why. But anybody can watch the debate, I'm sure it's available in YouTube. That what I was trying to say was that almost any explanation for Jesus' resurrection that is a natural explanation has more probability than the probability of a miracle happening.
SPEAKER_07It's not likely, but it's more likely than a miracle, which is so unlikely that you have to appeal to supernatural intervention to make it work.
SPEAKER_08I was in that debate, I was not arguing that Jesus was not raised from the dead. My argument was that if he was raised from the dead, you can't show it on historical grounds, because historians can only establish with about establish what probably happened in the past, including the resurrection. What probably happened to explain the data that people agree with, that disciples said that there was a that they saw him afterwards, and sent and and decades later they said there was an empty tomb, and it wasn't there before Jesus, it was after Jesus. You agree that at least some of the disciples came to believe in the resurrection? So if you've got these data that we agree on, how do you explain them? And Craig believes that the preponderance of probability is that the miracle happened, as opposed to other explanations, because the other explanations are so unlikely. Okay, so let's grant that all those things are unlikely. Okay. Those are I agree, they're they're unlikely. How many times have those things ever happened? How many times have people stolen things they shouldn't have stolen and lied about it? How many times have people lied? How many people times have people seen someone they thought they saw somebody, it wasn't that person at all. It was somebody else. How many people had dreams that they thought actually happened? How many people have had hallucinations? These things happen thousands and thousands of times every day. How many times has somebody been raised from the dead to immortality? Well, if it happened to Jesus, it happened once. So what's more likely? Something that's never been established as having happened ever on scientific grounds or historical grounds, or something that happens all the time, even though it's unusual, which is more likely. So that's my argument. It's just, you know, if you're just interested in what probably happened, that's it. And his response is, oh, that's just Hume. Okay. What's your argument against it exactly? I don't know if he meant to confuse us or maybe, but he went on to give a statistical argument. He used Bayes' theorem to give to because he says that Bayes' theorem can demonstrate on statistical grounds that Jesus was probably raised from the dead. And you can't do that. I'm sorry. Bayes' theorem. And I think I pointed out in the debate that the only other person I knew who used Bayes' theorem to try to talk about the historical Jesus was Richard Carrier, who uses the same theorem, the same formulae, in order to prove that Jesus never existed. So which is it? One of them either can't do math or there's a problem with using it for these things.
SPEAKER_06So Wow, good point.
SPEAKER_08Yeah. I'm looking what I dealt with in the lecture runs completely contrary to what he himself personally believes. He thinks that he can prove what he believes, and therefore he has to say that I don't know what I'm talking about. I've had lots of people accuse me of things, and a lot of people who have objected to me. I don't know of anybody who says I don't know how to construct a logical argument. They might disagree with my argument, they might have counterarguments, but I tend to think in logical terms, and I I tend to believe in solid evidence, I believe in arguments. So he can think that if he wants. And clearly he clearly wants.
SPEAKER_06All right. So my now, I in your retirement now, it seems like Bart, you you've been selling courses, and I've seen this happen over and over. Influencers sell courses, and they inevitably they become finance people and they start selling Bart crypto. I see that you're doing this. You've now got this course about Bart's personal finance tips. Uh, this is a hard, this is a hard left. Tell me about this. And is it is it crypto? What's happening here?
SPEAKER_08I ain't going into crypto. Let me tell you. And I so my next book was supposed to be on the issue of how we got the canon of the New Testament, 27 books. And as opposed to other books, you know, why why didn't other books make it in? And it I am going to write that book. But when I released Love Thy Stranger just a few weeks ago now, my book on the ethics of Jesus, my publisher called me. They wanted me to write a book on Jesus in relationship to capitalism. And so I thought about it, and I think it it's it'd it's an interesting topic. There are a lot of books like that out there by people who don't know much about the historical Jesus. And certainly, you know, books out there people don't know a lot about capitalism. I'm not a I'm not an economist, but I am going to write this book. And it isn't arguing that Jesus was So the Course is kind of a pre-predecessor to that. The course is going to be dealing with Jesus' views of money in relationship to his broader world, what we know about the economies of antiquity, what we know about the demographics of antiquity, both in terms of wealth and poverty and in terms of location, urban areas, rural areas, and occupations and things. So setting it in his own context and in his own Jewish context, what Jewish authors say about wealth, etc. And then dealing with the teachings of Jesus about wealth, including very difficult sayings that are really hard to understand. There are parables and things that people kind of scratch their heads and try and figure out what's that all about? And the deal dealing with money. I'll be talking about that. Trying to set out what Jesus' views were and then deal with the issues. Can we talk about him in terms of modern economic policy or not?
SPEAKER_06Okay. But what will the course do for those of us who are skeptical that any particular red letter passage is really the words of Jesus or would be inclined to take his advice even if they were?
SPEAKER_08In my case, I'm interested in, especially today, in Christians who claim Jesus for their side for their own social agendas and political issues. And I think that's important even for those of us who are atheists, that there are Christians around us who are using the teachings of Jesus as weapons for their own struggles against people who they oppose, and including economic issues. People quote Jesus to justify war.
SPEAKER_00America's Secretary of Defense is today a global laughing stock. After quoting a fake Bible verse, it did not take the press here and around the world very long to figure out that Pete Higgsith was not exactly quoting the Bible at a Pentagon prayer service. It wasn't the gospel of Matthew or Mark or Luke or John. What it really was, what it actually was, was a take from the gospel of Quentin Tarantino.
SPEAKER_01I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother.
SPEAKER_03Those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers.
SPEAKER_08Amazing, right? And they used to quote them to justify slavery and oppression of women and issues related to abortion, but also in support of capitalism, or in support of Marxism, or in support of socialism. And so if these are major issues for us today, poverty and wealth are issues for us today. And our our views emerge out of a culture that was century after century after century was Christian, it's worthwhile knowing what was the actual views of things at the beginning of Christianity with the with the founder, Jesus. So when I talk about what Jesus' views are, I have to justify this is actually something that goes back to Jesus and not something put on his lips by somebody later. I absolutely have to do that. But it's still important, I think, to know because many Christians misrepresent their views when they weaponize Jesus. And it's worthwhile for other people to recognize that they are misusing these passages or the these ideas.
SPEAKER_06So probably what's important for someone like me taking the course would be we interact daily with people who use Jesus to justify decisions about all these kinds of things, including policy. And so if we want to have conversations with them, we should be well versed in what Jesus actually said so that when they say Jesus said X, Y, or Z, we know if that's correct.
SPEAKER_08If you're debating, say, a conservative Christian or you're having a discussion with a conservative Christian who is reeling out all these arguments and you don't know enough to counter those arguments, you won't have a very effective discussion. You have to know what they're talking about in order to deal with them. But if you want to talk to them, you've got to understand and you've got to understand why they're wrong. It isn't just that you think they're wrong. You gotta understand why. And for that it requires knowledge.
SPEAKER_06Excellent. Well, now I'm sold. If you want to join me in equipping yourself thusly, sign up today at tinyurl.com slash spartcoin. You you heard me.tinyurl.com slash spartcoin. Or find the link in the description. And by using that link, you'll be helping the mission of this channel, which I greatly appreciate. Bart, thank you once again for enduring an apologist with us.
SPEAKER_08You're always so mean spirited towards me. So that's great.
SPEAKER_06Thank you. No, I always hear it.
SPEAKER_08Thanks. Thanks.
SPEAKER_06And for more Bart Ehrman Pology at Team Ups, where former Christians take a look at the claims of Christians, tap on the thumbnail on screen now, and I'll see you over there. Until next time. Later.