Bert Erhman has been mentioned pretty frequently in the continuing conversation on Dave’s post about why he’s not an atheist.
Other than the fact that his surname is an anagram of Herman I didn’t really know who Ehrman was, or much about him. But luckily, Stephen Colbert, America’s most trusted news hound, has interviewed him…
So now I know all about him. And that he’s wrong.
The answer is that he’s an atheist writer who questions the validity of the claims that the gospels represent an accurate history of who Jesus is.
Comments
Just a brief point, but unless something has changed very recently, Mr. Erhman is an agnostic and not an atheist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_D._Ehrman
If you are ever inclined to read something about higher criticism, I would encourage you try reading at least one of his works. Jesus Interrupted or Misquoting Jesus would be good works to check out. He covers his move from evangelical to agnostic in the book God's Problem.
Hi Brian,
You may be right. It's been a couple of days since I watched this video – I just haven't had time to post it. I'll rewatch it in the morning and correct myself if I'm wrong…
You've posted this before ;)
Same guy, same interviewer… different episode and different interview…
I've listened to a lecture he gave ( http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=397006836… ) and he is actually a lot wittier than he comes across here. I enjoyed the lecture – he didn't exactly say anything I didn't already know, nor that couldn't be found by looking in the margin of a modern bible translation. The problem I have is that he overplaying the manuscript differences – most of them are insignificant (things like spelling mistakes etc) and because of the vast amount of manuscripts we can compare and eliminate most of the errors.