I have read a few Bart Ehrman books on early Christianity. I find his approach very objective, in the sense of sticking to available historical data. Of course every scholar is telling a story and striving to make it compelling, but there is a sliding scale between using data to support your current ideas versus fitting your current ideas to available data. I find professor Ehrman very much on the side of fitting his ideas to the available data.
I listened to his 30 lecture series, available on Audible, through the Great Courses series.
Prof Ehrman asks the question, how did a very small group of people in 30 AD grow into the dominant religion of the empire by 380 AD? This is a very complex subject. How many of us have read the 30 volume writings of Ireanaeus from the second century about the history of the church? That would be a good starting point for all of us who care about where things come from. Add to that the required reading of the Dead Sea Scrolls, New Testament apocrypha, Gnostic Gospels, Source Q, Nag Hammadi library, Josephus, Tacitus. Add to that some diligence to know which sources have been published in modified form, such as was done with some of the works from Essene communities. Well, of course, most of us are not going to do all that.
So we must carefully pick our scholars to do the work for us, and I heartily recommend Prof Ehrman.
Having said that, I only try add what is clearly missing from Prof Ehrman's work which is influence of the invisible and higher, whether from human or divine. His explanations are only from visible history and the ordinary motivations of the "animal-political" man. As a physical scientist, I am very alert to know the boundaries of what I am thinking can cause changes in a system. When I see a behavior that would be extremely difficult to explain from my current toolbox, I call attention to that. After much further research I can even start pointing towards where my toolbox is lacking. I do not know Prof Ehrman personally, but I half hope he is intentionally leading his listeners to see the necessity for other levels of causation beyond politics, fear, vanity, and power. But maybe not. Maybe he thinks those explain everything.
Those aspects of lower human nature are very important, and very powerful. But the universe is so much larger and broader that just that. There have always been forces trying very hard to help raise us up. We can see giant waves, like an enormous carpet upon which all the events of life play out on a daily basis. We call these giant cresting waves Buddhism, Christianity, (whatever word we would use for the three giant waves that swept up ancient Egypt over several thousand years). How do we connect with those helping influences? How do we stay in touch with those influences over several generations? Perhaps that is what Prof Ehrman discusses with his friends when he knows the vultures of mechanistic culture are not watching warily over his every book and lecture. I at least like to think so.
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