by evangelical apologist Rob Bowman, at the Parchment and Pen blog.
He has a nice and fair summary of Ehrman’s book, and he then focuses to a large extent on New Testament issues. He puts his finger on several of the key issues most Christians will have with Ehrman’s theory – places where Ehrman really goes out on a limb. For example,
A second notable weakness in Ehrman’s theory is his claim that Jesus expected to fill the role of the Messiah but not of the Son of Man. This interpretation gets its initial plausibility from the fact that Jesus routinely referred to the Son of Man in the third person. However, even in most of the Synoptic Son of Man sayings, it is quite clear in the immediate context that Jesus is referring to himself (Matt. 8:20; 9:6; 11:19; 12:8; 16:13; 17:22-23; 20:18-19, 28; 26:2, 24, 45; Mark 2:10; 8:31; 9:31; 10:33; 14:21, 41; Luke 5:24; 7:34; 9:22, 44, 58; 19:10; 22:22, 48). The Messiah and the Son of Man are both understood as eschatological figures that receive an eternal kingdom on behalf of God’s people; it is simply not plausible that Jesus, who used the title Son of Man incessantly and rarely used the title Messiah or Christ, claimed to be the latter but not the former.
Bowman also lodges some complaints about the response book, How God Became Jesus. Still, Bowman substantially agrees with it. In his view, the stand-out chapter is Evans’s defense of the accuracy of the NT traditions about Jesus’s burial.
In his review of Ehrman, I think Bowman is too quick to celebrate the agreement of evangelicals and Ehrman that Jesus was soon after his crucifixion view as “a divine figure.” Of course, by that Ehrman means that Jesus was thouht to be a god (basically, a mighty self), whereas Bowman means that Jesus is the one God, the perfect creator of monotheism. (Of course, conceptually, such a God is also himself a god, of the necessity the greatest of those.) Is Bowman just celebrating that what they say sounds similar? (i.e. that Jesus “is God.”) I would’ve thought he’d lament that!
Bowman complains about “Ehrman’s foundational premise of the fluidity of ancient concepts of the divine.” I don’t think “fluidity” (changeability?) is the issue. Rather, we’re talking two different (but logically related) concepts here, as I’ve argued. And one, the generic god-concept is much more vague than the other. This is seen in the ancient sources Ehrman discusses. But it’s also seen all over the place today, in all the religions of the world. In my view, there is much confusion about monotheism and polytheism out there; it’s pervasive in the literatures, I see it too in both of these books, in different ways.
Read Bowman’s whole review here.
