澄清一下. Dr. Bart Ehrman 从未做过神职人员

他是个学者. 他的著作也都是关于他的研究. 他现在任北卡罗莱纳大学(University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)宗教研究系主任.

Bart D. Ehrman is a New Testament Scholar and an expert on Early Christianity. He received his Ph.D and M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary where he studied under Bruce Metzger. He currently serves as the chairperson of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was the President of the Southeast Region of the Society of Biblical Literature, and worked closely as an editor on a number of the Society's publications. Currently, he co-edits the series New Testament Tools and Studies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_D._Ehrman

我之所以说他象ICLL是指他们都曾经是虔诚的信徒, 而在不断的学习后导致放弃信仰的.

Bart Ehrman 放弃信仰是因为: 1) 圣经无误说是他曾经信仰的基石之一, 当他通过自己的学习发现事实不是这样时, 另一位圣经学者点评说:"因为过于把信仰建立在圣经无误上....他也许觉得受到了欺骗, 反应如此激烈,
以致于放弃了曾经的信仰; 2) 他通过自己的学习和研究, 成长为历史学家,专门于早期基督教历史, 在对前三世纪基督教历史的研究中, 他发现, 从历史学家的角度, 根本没有耶酥复活的历史证据, 我想这才是对他曾有信仰的最致命的一击.

这里有一段他和一个福音学者William Lane Craig 辩论有无耶酥复活历史证据中的话(Is There Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus?):

http://www.holycross.edu/departments/crec/website/resurrection-debate-tran.pdf

I want to say at the outset something similar to what he said at the beginning of his speech. I used to believe absolutely everything that Bill just presented. He and I went to the same evangelical Christian college, Wheaton, where these things are taught. Even before that I went to a yet more conservative school, Moody Bible Institute, where "Bible" is our middle name. We were taught these things there even more avidly. I used to believe them with my whole heart and soul. I used to preach them and try to convince others that they were true. But then I began studying these matters, not simply accepting what my teachers had said, but looking at them deeply myself. I learned Greek and started studying the New Testament in the original Greek language. I learned Hebrew to read the Old Testament. I learned Latin, Syriac, and Coptic to be able to study the New Testament manus and the non-canonical traditions of Jesus in their original languages. I immersed myself in the world of the first century, reading non-Christian Jewish and pagan texts from the Roman Empire and before, and I tried to master everything written by a Christian from the first three hundred years of the church.

I became a historian of antiquity, and for twenty-five years now I have done my research in this area night and day. I'm not a philosopher like Bill; I'm a historian dedicated to finding the historical truth. After years of studying, I finally came to the conclusion that everything I had previously thought about the historical evidence of the resurrection was absolutely wrong.

Dr. Bart Ehrman观点很明确, 从历史学角度看, 没有耶粟复活的历史证据. 要接受耶粟复活,那也只能是从神学意义上的接受, 一个人能凭借的只有"信心".

历史学家无法让历史在眼前重现, 唯一能做的是根据历史资料, 建立历史上"最可能(most probably)"发生过什么. 耶酥复活作为一个"奇迹(miracle)", 因为是和自然常识违背的, 所以发生的几率是极低的, 我们什么时候见过死人复活? 所以, 在看到他墓穴空了以后, 可能的各种解释中(尸体被盗等等), 复活是几率最低的一种. 几率高也就不是"奇迹(miracle)"."奇迹(miracle)"之所以为奇迹, 就是因为它有违自然规律, 是超自然的.

而且除新约福音外, 没有其他历史资料能证明耶酥复活. 而新约福音都是写于耶酥死后几十年的, 作者没有一个是耶酥的直接目击者, 新约福音内容其实是记录的早期基督徒的口头流传的传统, 记录的是一个"legend"传说!
所以没有历史证据证明耶酥复活.

要接受耶粟复活,一个人能凭借的只有"信心".

这是个很简化而未必精确的对Dr. Bart Ehrman观点的摘要. 那场辩论非常精彩, 就是太长了. 有兴趣的可以自己读下记录.

Dr. Bart Ehrman的结束语:



Dr. Ehrman's Conclusion

Well, I appreciate very much the personal testimony, Bill. I do think, though, that what we've seen is that Bill is, at heart, an evangelist who wants people to come to share his belief in Jesus and that he's trying to disguise himself as a historian as a means to that end. I appreciate that, but it's not just whether a professional historian can argue something, it's whether history can be used to demonstrate claims about God. I have, in fact, disputed the four facts that he continually refers to. The burial by Joseph of Arimathea I've argued could well be a later invention. The empty tomb also could be a later invention. We don't have a reference to it in Paul; you only have it later in the Gospels. The appearances of Jesus may just as well have been visions of Jesus as they were physical appearances of Jesus because people did and do have visions all the time.

And an earlier point that Bill made was that the disciples were all willing to die for their faith. I didn't hear one piece of evidence for that. I hear that claim a lot, but having read every Christian source from the first five hundred years of Christianity, I'd like him to tell us what the piece of evidence is that the disciples died for their belief in the resurrection.

Going on to talk about why in fact my scenario doesn't work, he says it's more implausible that the family members stole the body than it would be to say that God raised Jesus from the dead. Why? They'd have no motive. Well, in fact, people act on all sorts of motives, and motive is one of the most difficult things to establish. Historically, maybe his family wanted him to be buried in the family tomb. No one knew where he was buried, he says. Well, that's not true; in fact the Gospels themselves say the women watched from afar, including his mother. There wasn't enough time for this to happen. It happened at night. How much time does one need? It doesn't explain the grave clothes. Well, the grave clothes are probably a later, legendary embellishment.

It can't explain the appearances of Jesus. Yes, people have visions all the time. Once people come to believe Jesus' tomb was empty, they come to believe he's raised from the dead, and they have visions. I'm not saying I think this happened. I think that it's plausible. It could have happened. It's more plausible than the claim that God must have raised Jesus from the dead. That is not the most probable historical explanation.

You will have noticed that Bill had five more minutes to answer my questions, and he refused to answer my questions, and one might ask why. Let me conclude by telling you what I really do think about Jesus' resurrection. The one thing we know about the Christians after the death of Jesus is that they turned to their ures to try and make sense of it. They had believed Jesus was the Messiah, but then he got crucified, and so he couldn't be the Messiah. No Jew, prior to Christianity, thought that the Messiah was to be crucified. The Messiah was to be a great warrior or a great king or a great judge. He was to be a figure of grandeur and power, not somebody who's squashed by the enemy like a mosquito. How could Jesus, the Messiah, have been killed as a common criminal? Christians turned to their ures to try and understand it, and they found passages that refer to the Righteous One of God's suffering death. But in these passages, such as Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22 and Psalm 61, the one who is punished or who is killed is also vindicated by God. Christians came to believe their ures that Jesus was the Righteous One and that God must have vindicated him.

And so Christians came to think of Jesus as one who, even though he had been crucified, came to be exalted to heaven, much as Elijah and Enoch had in the Hebrew ures. How can he be Jesus the Messiah though, if he's been exalted to heaven? Well, Jesus must be coming back soon to establish the kingdom. He wasn't an earthly Messiah; he's a spiritual Messiah. That's why the early Christians thought the end was coming right away in their own lifetime. That's why Paul taught that Christ was the first fruit of the resurrection. But if Jesus is exalted, he is no longer dead, and so Christians started circulating the story of his resurrection. It wasn't three days later they started circulating the story; it might have been a year later, maybe two years. Five years later they didn't know when the stories had started. Nobody could go to the tomb to check; the body had decomposed.

Believers who knew he had been raised from the dead started having visions of him. Others told stories about these visions of him, including Paul. Stories of these visions circulated. Some of them were actual visions like Paul, others of them were stories of visions like the five hundred group of people who saw him. On the basis of these stories, narratives were constructed and circulated and eventually we got the Gospels of the New Testament written 30, 40, 50, 60 years later.