He was recently on Ross Douthat's Interesting Times podcast, and there was some discussion of the historicity of the gospels, the resurrection, and other issues related to Easter. There are too many problems with Ehrman's claims for me to address all of them here, but I want to talk about some of them.
He dates the gospels to the 70s and later and refers to how accounts of Jesus circulated orally prior to that time. But he and many other scholars have argued that the gospels made use of earlier sources, like Q, and those sources include written ones. The opening of Luke refers to "many" earlier sources. Since it's less common for many people to contribute to one account than for many people to each compose an account of his own, it's unlikely that Luke is thinking of one account produced by many people. Rather, he's probably thinking of many accounts produced by the many individuals he refers to. And there's widespread agreement that Luke used Mark as a source, and there's no early report of many people being involved in the composition of Mark. If Mark was among Luke's sources, then there apparently wasn't just one account involved. That's further reason to think Luke had many accounts and many individuals in mind, not just one account. Luke compares his document to the efforts of those earlier sources, and that comparison makes more sense if at least a portion of those sources, probably a majority or all of them, were in written form. Furthermore, the nature of the subject matter, "the things accomplished among us" (Luke 1:1), is more likely to be written than oral. It's a large and complicated topic, as the gospel of Luke illustrates, something more suited for writing than oral communication. Even if some of the many accounts Luke refers to were oral, it's likely that most were written. And even if Luke used both Mark and Matthew, it's unlikely that two documents would motivate Luke to refer to "many". There probably were some written sources other than Mark and Matthew that Luke had in mind. And the widespread use of writing prior to the 70s among Christians, as we see reflected in Paul's letters, adds to the probability that material like we have in the gospels was written down earlier than the timeframe in which Ehrman places the gospels. For more about the presence of written sources in the earliest decades of Christianity, including documents no longer extant, see here.
In addition to the evidence for written material before the 70s, Christianity has traditionally appealed to more than the normal means of preserving information (e.g., John 14:26). Ehrman doesn't accept that traditional Christian view, but arguments have been offered for it, and his comments on Douthat's program don't interact with those arguments or even acknowledge that Christians have maintained that more than the normal means of preserving information is involved in the accuracy of the gospels and other early Christian sources. So, Ehrman is wrong about the normal means, and he doesn't even acknowledge or argue against the other means of accurately preserving information.
He's also wrong about the dating of the gospels. In an attempt to explain why Acts ends where it does, he brings up the theme of how unstoppable Christianity and Paul are in Acts. Ehrman comments, "this is a movement that cannot be stopped. Paul in particular cannot be stopped." Allegedly, ending Acts with Paul continuing to advance Christianity makes sense in light of that theme, even if the book was written after Paul's death. Read the opening of the gospel of Luke. Read the opening of Acts. There's nothing there about the unstoppable nature of Christianity or Paul. We don't hear anything about Paul in the third gospel, and he doesn't appear in Acts until several chapters into the book. When the author tells us what he's addressing in his two-volume work, he refers to "the things accomplished among us" (Luke 1:1) and "all that Jesus began to do and teach" (Acts 1:1). There's an implication that Acts would address what Jesus went on to do and teach, including through the apostles and the church. So, the author is writing about the history of the Christian movement. The best explanation for why he ends Acts where he does is that those were the latest significant events as of the time of his writing. Acts probably was completed in the early to mid 60s. The earliest external evidence addressing the dating of the two-volume work is 1 Timothy 5:18, which has the gospel of Luke circulating while Paul is still alive. And 1 Timothy does so regardless of what view you hold of the authorship of the document. Thus, the explanation of the scope of the two-volume work offered at the beginning of the third gospel, the explanation of the scope of Acts offered at the beginning of the document, and the earliest external evidence all favor a date for Luke/Acts during Paul's lifetime. Ehrman ignores and contradicts all three of those lines of evidence and proposes a reason for Acts' ending that the author never states, that can't be verified, and that poorly explains how Acts ends.
Even if the author had wanted to focus on the unstoppable nature of Christianity or Paul's efforts in particular, he could have narrated Christianity's ongoing growth throughout the world after Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed, the apostle John's ongoing work long after Paul died, Paul's influence after his death (much as Jesus continued to be influential after his death), etc. To make the unstoppable nature of Christianity or Paul's advancement of Christianity as of the timeframe in which Paul was imprisoned in Acts 28 the focus - even though the descriptions of the scope of Luke's work in the opening of each document make no mention of those themes - doesn't make sense. Luke's work isn't primarily about that unstoppable nature Ehrman appeals to, and both Christianity and Paul's advancement of it continued beyond his imprisonment in Acts 28. If you want to focus on the unstoppable nature of Paul, why not end with him getting out of prison and continuing his work with more freedom, his martyrdom and his presence in heaven as he continues to influence the world to advance Christianity after his death, etc.? Ehrman is turning from the purpose of Luke/Acts described in Luke 1:1-4 and Acts 1:1, redirecting our attention to the lesser theme of the unstoppability of Christianity, narrowing that down further to the unstoppability of Paul's efforts to advance Christianity in particular, then narrowing that further to Paul's unstoppability up to the time of the Acts 28 imprisonment, but not after. That's pretty ad hoc. By the time you go down the path of all of Ehrman's whittling down of the scope of Luke's work, you're a long way from what Luke tells us he's going to do. Ehrman is disregarding what the author of Luke/Acts tells us about the scope of his work and substituting a different scope that's unverifiable and poorly explains why Acts ends where it does. For further evidence of the earliness of Luke/Acts, go here.
Ehrman tells us that the gospels don't claim to be written by eyewitnesses, and he objects to the third-person language of the gospels, which he cites as evidence against eyewitness authorship. Christians only claim that two of the gospels were written by eyewitnesses, so those are the only two that are relevant here.
And John 19:35 and 21:24 are most naturally taken as references to the author as an eyewitness. For more about the subject, see here. The references to presently testifying in both passages make the most sense if the author is the one doing the testifying. It's simpler to think of one source being involved instead of having some second source testifying independently at the same time that the author is testifying by writing the document. And both passages allude to what Jesus said about his eyewitness disciples in John 14-16, meaning that the author is suggesting that his writing of the fourth gospel is a fulfillment of what Jesus predicted. Therefore, he's claiming to be one of those disciples. For more about that John 14-16 material, see my post here. John 21:24 refers to the Beloved Disciple as the author of the gospel. Likewise, 1 John, which has language and themes highly similar to those of the fourth gospel and likely comes from the same author, identifies the author in question as an eyewitness of Jesus (1:1-3). For more about that evidence from 1 John, see here.
And the fourth gospel illustrates the weakness of Ehrman's objection to third-person language. The document identifies the author as the Beloved Disciple, as discussed above, but also refers to "we" (21:24) and follows it with "I" (21:25). Similarly, Paul sometimes refers to himself in the third person in his letters (e.g., 2 Corinthians 12:2-5). The fact that the first and fourth gospels were so widely attributed to apostles so early on provides further evidence that there was a widespread recognition at the time that an author could write of himself in the third person. For a discussion of the many lines of evidence that the first gospel was written by Matthew, see here.
Luke wasn't an eyewitness of Jesus, but he was an eyewitness of Paul and some of Paul's miracles. Those miracles are evidence for a Christian view of Jesus and his resurrection. Luke refers to himself as an eyewitness in the "we" passages in Acts (16:10, etc.). For a discussion of those passages and the evidence for a traditional Christian understanding of them, go here.
Though Ehrman could appeal to alternative interpretations of John 19:35, 21:24, 1 John 1:1-3, and the "we" material in Acts, he has to take every one of those passages in a less natural way in order to do so. And I've argued for a traditional reading of those passages, like in the posts linked above.
His claim that "there's no way for us to establish it [a miracle] historically" and "other explanations are always far more likely" than a miraculous explanation depends on certain assumptions he hasn't adequately argued for and other factors involved that he hasn't addressed. If you're examining, say, a claim that a rich man gave his only child a car on his sixteenth birthday, you can't just ask how often fathers give their children cars, bring up the fact that no car was given for the son's previous birthdays, etc. You have to also take into account the fact that the father is rich, which puts him in a different category than the average father, the fact that a car is far more appropriate for a sixteenth birthday than for earlier ones, and so on. What Ehrman does in discussions like these is single out factors that he thinks are favorable to the prior probability he wants to assign to the resurrection while ignoring or underestimating factors that go the other way. Every type of historical event has a first of its kind at some point. There's a first time you hear of a volcano erupting, a first time you hear about airplanes, etc. There's no overwhelming improbability that each event has to overcome the first time you hear of it. Far more than frequency is involved in determining a prior probability, so you can't conclude that something is highly unlikely just because it's unprecedented or rare. In the context of Jesus' resurrection, we take into account Jesus' being a prominent religious leader, his identity claims, the evidence for miracles other than the resurrection that are affiliated with him, the fact that whether God raised somebody from the dead is a different issue than how often resurrections naturally occur, and so forth. For example, I've argued for Jesus' supernatural fulfillment of prophecy, such as Isaiah 9:1-7, the Servant Songs in Isaiah, and Psalm 22. Christians have given many reasons, like what I've just outlined, for thinking that the prior probability of a resurrection of Jesus is much higher than the prior probability of a resurrection of the average person, the average religious leader, or some such thing. Ehrman could bring up other factors to strengthen his own side, such as the problem of evil, which he discussed with Douthat. But Christians have provided answers for the problem of evil, and it's about the nature of one of the beings powerful enough to produce something like a resurrection, not the existence of such a being. And what else would Ehrman appeal to? Nothing Ehrman has brought up, in his discussion with Douthat or anywhere else I'm aware of, justifies the degree of prior improbability he assigns to the resurrection. And the sort of evidence we have for Jesus' resurrection is enough to outweigh even a high prior improbability.
Another problem is that people like Ehrman apply too little scrutiny to their own alternatives to the resurrection claim. There's going to be an extremely high improbability to any skeptical hypothesis that combines skeptical explanations of at least a few (probably more) former opponents of Christianity claiming to have seen the risen Jesus, Peter's having had at least a few different resurrection experiences, a dismissal of the empty tomb reports, etc. It's one thing to observe that people sometimes hallucinate, under particular circumstances (when under the effects of certain drugs, under some forms of sleep deprivation, etc.). It's something else to claim that a large percentage of people within a particular context, a much higher percentage than there normally would be, were all hallucinating around the same time and in the same way while not under the conditions that normally produce a hallucination. When Ehrman strings together such a large number of such scenarios, that involves an extremely high improbability, one much higher than any prior improbability he's demonstrated for a resurrection.
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