Making friends on internet

I would love to spend more time on this blog.

But as everyone knows: I’m an internet hardass. If you cross my path, I will spank your ass cheeks blood red. And I’ve been doing a lot of spanking in overtime.

Ask anyone on the streets, “what do you think of when world renowned shitposter Beau Montana comes to mind?”. And every last one of them will say, VERBATIM: “he’s one of the premier armchair historians of our age in the field of the historical Jesus and early Christianity, particularly in regards to the Gospel of Mark.”

So when such an honor is bestowed upon you, you can’t let transgressions like this go unpunished:

Bart Ehrman…noted atheist and academic…vehemently argues for the existence of the historical Jesus.

Perhaps the Instagram poster thought: “it’s common knowledge that Bart Ehrman argues for the historical existence of Jesus, so maybe my audience will think this meme will be ATTACKING Ehrman by using his own words against his claims.”

OR, as is most likely, the poster has no idea what Bart Ehrman actually argues, and lazily reposted this image which makes Ehrman look like he’s arguing against the historical Jesus.

That’s intellectual laziness and I’m not having it, especially since the public places their trust in me to provide valuable information and analysis.

To vent my frustrations, I took to the newest invention from our Lord and Savior Mark Zuckerberg, THREADS.

The result has been my most interacted with content I have ever posted to social media. Unfortunately I can’t link to it because it appears that Threads is still only in app form. But I’m proud of myself for adequately defending mine and Ehrman’s position with such gems as:

And

So rest assured that in this age of misinformation you still have people like me defending the truth with all the intellectual rigor required of a true scholar

was Jesus an ascetic?

I don’t know man, I wasn’t there.

I’ll say this though: Jesus at least dabbled in asceticism. Any hard evidence for this? No. And none will ever turn up. BUT the two earliest accounts of Jesus’s life, the Gospel of Mark and the hypothetical “Q source” (which survives in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew) mention Jesus turning to the wilderness after his baptism from John the Baptist.

John the Baptist’s existence can be independently confirmed by Josephus, a first century Jewish historian. This is partly why it is universally agreed upon that the baptism of Jesus by John is a real historical event. The other reason why historians believe this is due to the criterion of embarrassment, which simply means that Jesus’s associations with John the Baptist would have been well known enough that it had to of been accounted for by early Christian writers, despite Jesus’s superiority to John.

It’s difficult to establish any degree of certainty from this period. Was John the Baptist an ascetic? It certainly appears that he had those tendencies from the surviving texts. It’s has even been suggested that he was an Essene, a “semi-ascetic” Jewish sect from the first century. Could Jesus have been a follower of John? We know that they met at least once, and the Gospels (whatever their historical worth) say that Jesus immediately did something ascetic-like after that meeting.

I like questions like these because it helps contextualize this era. I personally think that Jesus did ascetic-like things and might’ve ran with a few ascetic groups. But I don’t think he thought of himself ascetic or even monastic. Like I said, the historical information contained in the Gospels are dubious and hard facts will likely never appear, but I think it’s important to look at the language of the Gospels.

Mark and the “Q” source (or possible sources) seem to address a rural audience, meaning that Jesus likely focused his mission on the poor or “working class”. There are obvious problems with this assumption, the main one being that the entire New Testament is written in Koine Greek while the poor in Galilee and Judea, including Jesus, spoke Aramaic (plus the Gospels are written 40 years after the crucifixion of Jesus). How much of Jesus’s message was changed between his death and the written accounts is impossible to determine. Despite these problems though, I do think that Mark and Q are more than likely correct in Jesus’s focus.

So as I’ve said before, I think that Jesus was a religious-populist figure, and as we often find in populist movements, leaders often take a “postmodern” turn by becoming (as Apostle Paul later found out) “all things to all people”. This is why so many people can have so many different interpretations on what happened.

im stupid

I don’t always agree with Bart Ehrman.

He’s an excellent biblical scholar, but a little too conservative for my tastes as a historian. This occurred to me while I was watching him get ambushed by both Christians and atheists during a Zoom call.

If I’m correct in my understanding…and remember I’m a dumbass…then Ehrman’s argument regarding our access to the original intentions of the New Testament texts are completely lost. We cannot know what “Mark”, for example, originally wrote. Not only would this be true for all biblical texts, but virtually ALL ancient texts as well.

In my view, this is an extreme form of skepticism which throws our understanding of history out the window. The entire historical record would be in jeopardy, a point which Ehrman himself seemingly concedes (unless, of course, the record can be confirmed by other sources i.e. archeological, DNA, etc.)

I guess this sounds extreme-having to take the accuracy of ancient historical accounts basically on faith (especially when they sound plausible, but lack supporting evidence)-but what other option do we have until the facts prove otherwise?

I suppose this line of reasoning is how Ehrman can reconcile his certainty that Jesus existed with his extreme skepticism of the historical accuracy of the Gospels.