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LINK Why A Top Religious Studies Scholar Is Now An Atheist

The future looks ominous for social liberals, even devout Christian ones, religious studies scholar and best-selling author Bart Ehrman warns in a thoughtful interview in the latest edition of American Atheist magazine.

...Invented history?
“The question is whether somebody sat down and plotted it out and said, ‘I think I’ll make this up,’ or if it happened as a rumor — somebody just tells a story, and somebody else tells a story, and after a while nobody knows where it came from. In either event, the census did not happen.”...

“Many Christians don’t want to hear this, but the reality is that there are lots of other explanations for what happened to Jesus that are more probable than the explanation that he was raised from the dead. None of these explanations is very probable, but they are more probable, just looking at the matter historically, than the explanation of the resurrection.”...

Lukian 8 July 12
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I also like this quote from Biblical scholar Dr. Hector Avalos: "My own opinion, as an academic biblical scholar, is that there is not enough evidence to settle the question one way or the other. I am an agnostic about the existence of the historical Jesus."

His assessment is correct, although I'm in the minority (mythicists) that thinks the preponderance of evidence leans away from him being a real, discrete historical character.

Of course it presents zero problem for me as an agnostic atheist, either way. It's just an interesting topic to me. Nothing can change the fact that the gospels are anonymously-authored, conflicting, fabulist, mythos-building documents -- not historical documents or eyewitness accounts as is so often touted.

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Dr. Bart Ehrman is among the most respected of Scholars. I highly recommend his works. I'm quite sure it was not that Bart wanted to know why he believed what he did and how that measured up to reality. I think the devil made him do it!

@VictoriaNotes It was not until just a few years ago that I knew that there was an athiest movement, videos or books! I thought that the word athiest was just for the haters yousee on TV. Now I have my own YouTube channel!

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My degree is in Religious Studies. This covers many disciplines including literature, philosophy, art, history, geography and more. There is no single lens focus on Christianity as there is in Theology. It was part of the pack. I was agnostic when I started as I had always been, and at the end of the degree I knew why I was agnostic.

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There is a great opportunity to become knowledgeable about Christianity for free on YouTube. The professor is a guy named Dale Martin and the lectures come from Yale. His counterpart for the Old Testament is Christine Hayes and she is super too.

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