He's not the only author I've read regarding the history of early Christianity, but I seem to have an affinity for his scholarship. To me, his appeal on the topic is similar to that of Carl Sagan to astronomy; an effective communicator of the basics.
I don't get the sense that he's necessarily trying to be controversial. Certainly he has an agenda but a lot of it is trying to push the boundaries of how people think about Christianity. And scholarship is just scholarship. Sure, there's good scholarship and bad scholarship, and with a controversial topic as Christianity in fact is, a lot comes down to opinion.
There may be a progression to Bart Ehrman's books. These two books I bought may be more his branching out beyond the basics. The basics are in his earlier books like "Misquoting Jesus" and "Jesus Interrupted" among others.
I might even suggest that his books seem to reflect the progression of his own personal discovery that his initial beliefs as a young, totally converted, Bible-thumping evangelical Christian were wrought with contradictions and inconsistencies. For God's telling of the ultimate truths of the universe, that shouldn't be so. It should be a neat little package that was incontrovertible, and the only people who could possibly disagree were certainly accursed heathen.
As his studies into Christianity continued with an intent to enter the ministry, he was introduced to the scholarly historical reality of Christianity beyond dogma and blind faith. He did what most Christians don't do. He thought for himself and found the package wasn't so neat.
His early books are straight-forward. You can follow what he's saying because you can verify with your own Bibles (yes, even without a Christian bone in my body, I have two of my own copies of the Bible in New Jersey) what he considers problems. From there you can accept or reject his thesis, but it's pretty solid scholarship and logic as far as I'm concerned.
"Lost Christianities" and "How Jesus Became God" are more his branching out beyond the basics. They probe into areas that are necessarily more speculative. The former investigates the extant evidence of what "other" Christians believed before the Roman takeover of the religion. The power of the Roman Empire makes it easily credible that other understandings of Christianity would be effectively and efficiently suppressed and disposed of.
The latter looks at the development of early Christology and how it may have been influenced by existing or contemporary myths of the interplay between humans and gods. The idea of Jesus becoming God or being God wasn't wholly unique based on the wholly unique circumstances of the stories being told about him. They were formed within a context to explain what they didn't understand.
One point that Ehrman likes to pick at is how ultimately the Romans, in creating an orthodoxy, synthesized various contradictory ideas without explaining them. A big one is the assertion that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine; separate views originally held by different groups of Christians.
My personal snark on that contradiction boils down to whether Jesus shat and peed like the rest of us. Since he was fully human, of course he shat and peed. That's what humans do. And would Jesus's pee qualify as holy water? But the Romans also insisted Jesus was fully divine. So that must mean God shits and pees, too. Wonder what it smells like. I imagine floral bouquets, but that doesn't make sense. It must just smell like shit.
I don't know why I'm at all fascinated by the truth of Christianity; that it is largely based on myth and has only a little to do with the actual teachings of Jesus. Maybe I've always felt threatened by U.S. Christian hegemony which I didn't buy into, and it feels good to debunk it and knock it off its ideological throne.
Part of me wonders whether it's a past-life resonance where maybe I was Christian. Maybe it harkens all the way back to the few centuries after Jesus when the debates about his message were passionate and diverse.
His early books are straight-forward. You can follow what he's saying because you can verify with your own Bibles (yes, even without a Christian bone in my body, I have two of my own copies of the Bible in New Jersey) what he considers problems. From there you can accept or reject his thesis, but it's pretty solid scholarship and logic as far as I'm concerned.
"Lost Christianities" and "How Jesus Became God" are more his branching out beyond the basics. They probe into areas that are necessarily more speculative. The former investigates the extant evidence of what "other" Christians believed before the Roman takeover of the religion. The power of the Roman Empire makes it easily credible that other understandings of Christianity would be effectively and efficiently suppressed and disposed of.
The latter looks at the development of early Christology and how it may have been influenced by existing or contemporary myths of the interplay between humans and gods. The idea of Jesus becoming God or being God wasn't wholly unique based on the wholly unique circumstances of the stories being told about him. They were formed within a context to explain what they didn't understand.
One point that Ehrman likes to pick at is how ultimately the Romans, in creating an orthodoxy, synthesized various contradictory ideas without explaining them. A big one is the assertion that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine; separate views originally held by different groups of Christians.
My personal snark on that contradiction boils down to whether Jesus shat and peed like the rest of us. Since he was fully human, of course he shat and peed. That's what humans do. And would Jesus's pee qualify as holy water? But the Romans also insisted Jesus was fully divine. So that must mean God shits and pees, too. Wonder what it smells like. I imagine floral bouquets, but that doesn't make sense. It must just smell like shit.
I don't know why I'm at all fascinated by the truth of Christianity; that it is largely based on myth and has only a little to do with the actual teachings of Jesus. Maybe I've always felt threatened by U.S. Christian hegemony which I didn't buy into, and it feels good to debunk it and knock it off its ideological throne.
Part of me wonders whether it's a past-life resonance where maybe I was Christian. Maybe it harkens all the way back to the few centuries after Jesus when the debates about his message were passionate and diverse.
