Michael Shermer And Bart Ehrman On Christmas And Christianity

Michael Shermer recently had Bart Ehrman on his YouTube channel. There are too many problems with the comments made by both of them for me to interact with everything. They address a wide range of topics: Jesus' existence, the virgin birth, Trinitarianism, the atonement, the resurrection of Jesus, the problem of evil, etc. But Ehrman was on the program primarily to discuss Christmas issues. He had an online seminar on the subject coming up on December 5, and that was Shermer's main interest. What I want to do in the remainder of this post is respond to some of their comments about Christmas and prophecy fulfillment.

After acknowledging that the absence of any mention of the virgin birth in Mark's gospel isn't a persuasive argument that Mark was unaware of the concept, Ehrman appeals to Mark 3:21-35 to argue that Jesus' family shouldn't have reacted to him as they did in that passage if the virgin birth had occurred. (Ehrman refers to Mark 2, but the passage he has in mind is actually the one I just referenced in chapter 3.) That's a bad argument that's been circulating among critics of the infancy narratives for a long time. It ought to be abandoned. Earlier in Mark's gospel, we read about Jesus' performance of miracles as an adult, and the verse just after the opening one in the passage under consideration refers to those miracles again (Mark 3:22). The passage just cited not only refers to miracles, but also refers to the acknowledgment of those miracles by Jesus' opponents. So, it wasn't a situation in which they didn't think there were any miracles occurring in association with Jesus. People weren't opposing him because of a lack of miracles. They were opposing him for other reasons (his failing to be the sort of Messiah they wanted, the problems he was causing with the Jewish authorities, etc.). It would be absurd to suggest that Jesus' miracles as an adult didn't persuade these people, but that they would have been persuaded if a virgin birth or some other miracle had occurred a few decades earlier. After verse 22, the passage goes on to refer to Jesus' response to the charge that he's empowered by Satan and some comments he made about the blasphemous nature of what his opponents were doing in dismissing his miracles as demonic. That's the context in which his relatives behaved the way Ehrman mentioned. You could argue that the relatives were unaware of the miracles the other people in the same passage were aware of (even as far away as Jerusalem, as verse 22 tells us), but that's an unlikely scenario. It wouldn't make sense to claim that people other than Jesus' relatives could oppose him in spite of his miracles, yet his relatives wouldn't. We have reason to think it's likely that the relatives opposing Jesus knew of his recent miracles as an adult, but even if we didn't have reason to believe that, the possibility that they would behave as they did in Mark 3 while knowing of miracles associated with Jesus is more plausible than Ehrman suggests. If you want to read more on this subject, I've responded to Ehrman's objection at length, as it was formulated by Raymond Brown, here and here.

Shortly after the segment just mentioned, Ehrman goes on to cite John 8:41 as evidence that Jesus' opponents were implying that he was conceived out of wedlock, which allegedly suggests that the author of the fourth gospel wasn't aware of the concept of the virgin birth or rejected it. Actually, if John 8:41 is meant to imply Jesus' illegitimate conception, that would be corroboration of the infancy narratives, which report that the pregnancy was premarital. You'd expect at least some of Jesus' enemies to accuse him of being illegitimate under such circumstances. It doesn't follow that the author of the fourth gospel was unaware of the virgin birth or opposed the concept. Ehrman is interpreting John 8:41 in a way that supports a traditional Christian view of the infancy narratives, yet he's acting as though his interpretation is evidence against such a view. (I'm agnostic about whether John 8:41 is alluding to an illegitimate conception of Jesus. I think the evidence is ambiguous.)

Shermer goes on to raise the common question of why Jews and Muslims don't believe in Jesus if there's good evidence for a Christian view of him. But Shermer thinks there's good evidence for his religious skepticism, for capitalism and other beliefs and practices he considers beneficial, and so on, yet there are many people who disagree with Shermer on those issues. How can that be, if there's good evidence for Shermer's beliefs? There are many issues on which Shermer is in the minority, sometimes a small minority. Given how much Jesus differed from what many ancient Jews wanted the Messiah to be, how Jesus and the early Christians were treated by the Jewish and Roman authorities, etc., it's easy to see why many people would prefer to reject Christianity. The same Jews who opposed Christianity in the ancient world also acknowledged Jesus' performance of miracles (which they often dismissed as demonic), acknowledged his empty tomb, and so on, and Muslims acknowledge Jesus' prophethood and performance of miracles, so it's not as though they reject Christianity because of the sort of lack of evidence that people like Shermer and Ehrman allege.

Ehrman goes on to claim that "Jesus ran completely contrary to all of the [ancient Jewish Messianic] expectations". That's false. Jesus fulfilled some common Messianic expectations (e.g., Davidic ancestry), but also didn't fulfill others. See here for some examples of prophecies Jesus has fulfilled whose fulfillment has occurred through and/or been acknowledged by non-Christian sources. Notice that critics will often claim that something like Jesus' birth in Bethlehem was fabricated to make it seem that Jesus fulfilled a common Messianic expectation, yet there are other occasions, like in this discussion between Shermer and Ehrman, when critics will act as if Jesus "ran completely contrary to all of the expectations", as Ehrman put it.

Though Shermer and Ehrman make much of Jewish rejection of Christianity, they don't address the fact that the Jewish rejection was anticipated in the Old Testament and predicted again in the New Testament, such as when Paul wrote that "a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in" (Romans 11:25). And that's what's unfolded in the history of the world. There's been an ongoing rejection of Jesus among the Jewish people as the kingdom he established has gradually grown in the Gentile world (Psalm 110:1, Daniel 2:35, Matthew 13:31-32). The Messiah was to become a "light to the nations" (Isaiah 49:6), an expectation that was set in the context of Jewish rejection (see verse 4-5 and 7 in Isaiah 49; see, also, Isaiah 52:13-53:12).

See here for Shermer asking how Christianity came to be so influential in the Gentile world. Ehrman then laughs, as if he recognizes how remarkable the growth of Christianity has been, and he comments, "Yeah, yeah, it's quite a story." He then frames the question in terms of how an "unknown preacher from a rural backwater of Galilee" brought about such a transformation of the world. See here regarding Isaiah 9:1 and the significance of Jesus' relationship with Galilee.

So, we've got a couple of skeptics talking about a Jewish Messianic figure who's had a major influence on their culture, and they're having that conversation during a month-long season of celebrating his birth that billions of Gentiles participate in every year. They're objecting that this Jewish Messianic figure has been rejected by the Jewish people, something both the Old Testament and Jesus' earliest followers predicted. They bring up the Holocaust and other forms of anti-Semitism, opposition to Judaism, anti-Israel sentiment, and such in their discussion of the problem of evil. But the prevalence of such views and activities makes the widespread influence of a Jewish Messianic figure in the Gentile world, the survival of the Jewish people, the reemergence of the nation of Israel, and its prominence in the world all the more significant. And neither Shermer nor Ehrman addresses the prophetic significance of such facts. They talk about how an "unknown preacher from a rural backwater of Galilee" has become so influential. Sounds like Isaiah 9:1. The verses that follow haven't been fulfilled in their entirety yet, but the fulfillment that's occurred so far is evidentially significant and gives us reason to expect the remainder to be fulfilled.