You should be aware, several experts in the field have called Ehrman out for his misbehavior here, including Philip Davies and Justin Meggitt.

I mean your premise that he Ehrman doesn’t want to read your book and doesn’t want to spend much time debating with Mythicists so hence he’s an armchair historian hack. Wow. I mean you could just take him at face value that he doesn’t see the merits in mythicist arguments and just genuinely doesn’t want to spend his time in those discussions.

Ehrman never shows any awareness of what the mythicists arguments even are, and often doesn’t even know we have arguments for the things he says. So he clearly has not read any of our academic work. Even after a decade (you can find interviews of him where he says the most ridiculously ignorant things about our studies). And this is how he chooses to treat us. He deserves to be called out for his actual behavior.

Also I think we get it, you are referencing (and submitting) peer reviewed literature, you don’t need to mention it literally 49 times seemingly as a guise to troll Ehrman.

Note you are coming in at the end of a two-decade long argument, where we keep being denigrated for not passing anything under peer review. We are thus forced by their own argument to mention that their claim to that is false. This is their doing, not ours.

It is particularly insulting to have Ehrman make this point in his own book that was not a peer reviewed academic study but an unvetted popular market book (resulting in quite a large number of errors).

You should not mistake this for any belief that peer review is confirmation. We have never said that. That is a false accusation made against us by our opponents. We have always maintained that all peer review does is establish a study meets the standards of the field and thus should be taken seriously, not that it is correct.

It is them who keep dismissing our positions and arguments as not really peer reviewed, instead of taking it seriously by reading it and engaging with what it actually says.

I mean I’ve been bouncing between Bart’s blog and yours and though yours is far longer and contains a lot of substance (the quality of which I won’t make a claim in either direction) Ehrman’s tone comes across as someone annoyed and impatient to move on and a bit dismissive and yours comes across as a petulant child again more akin to an internet troll.

I mean your premise that he Ehrman doesn’t want to read your book and doesn’t want to spend much time debating with Mythicists so hence he’s an armchair historian hack. Wow. I mean you could just take him at face value that he doesn’t see the merits in mythicist arguments and just genuinely doesn’t want to spend his time in those discussions.

Also I think we get it, you are referencing (and submitting) peer reviewed literature, you don’t need to mention it literally 49 times seemingly as a guise to troll Ehrman. To apply your own level of skepticism, do you know he doesn’t read other peer reviewed literature? Where’s your proof there. I guess it makes a 50/50 but like you I’ll say 2/3rds he does. If so then it’s just yours and the ones you referenced he doesn’t want to read. Just because it’s peer reviewed doesn’t make it absolutely true. Certainly BIblical scholarship has to have quite a bit of peer reviewed literature that one can’t read them all, certainly if people have their own initiatives. “peer reviewed” isn’t in and of itself a weapon you can just brandish constantly pretending to have the high ground. “peer reviewed” scholarship in any field commonly contradicts and disagrees with each other… yet it feels like you wield that term like your peer reviewed work and those that you cite are the only legitimate ones. That all other scholarship is inferior. Almost like the fundamentalist Christians I left many years ago, brandishing labels like “the word” or “scripture.” I mean if someone were to find a “peer reviewed” scholarship that contradicts your readings of Galatians does that immediately invalidate your “peer reviewed” scholarship.

I mean your tone here is insane. You really almost had me going, thinking about buying your book, diving deeper… though now I get why you get treated the way you do. From seeing this vs the videos I’ve seen you have a split personality. On videos you act significantly more respectful and when someone is a bit dismissive and doesn’t want to read your book (and yes is a bit petty themselves) you go into full troll mode on them in your blogs.

A recent study by Reidar Aasgaard found Paul uses that word 122 times and only twice does he mean it literally—conveniently, the very two times historicists need him to be. This is contrary to usual probability logic. Normally that would signal it is unlikely he means it literally those two times.

I’m not sure what you mean, but English instances of the article won’t correspond perfectly to Greek instances, because it doesn’t translate that way. There are many cases where in English we have to leave the definite article out because it violates English syntax, yet the definite article is still there in Greek (because it doesn’t violate Greek syntax). And sometimes it’s vice versa.

I cite verse examples in the cited note.

Also every other example using that prefix uses human names, “the Lord” is a mythical title, Paul continually uses term “Jesus IS Lord” or that Jesus is our slave master? & James is the brother of the slave owner/ sir?

Translation ἀδελφόν brother is used by Paul to describe non siblings;
Romans 14:10, 1 cor 8:13, 2 cor 8:18 in fact majority he uses that term brother = followers not sibling

I’ve also pointed out using Biblehub the prefix historicists claim is used 155 other times in NT, including Paul to describe Brothers in both context, it’s not uniquely as they claim sibling

I’m not sure what you mean.

I cover all this in Ch. 11.10 of OHJ. So I can only recommend you consult that.

There is no record of Jesus having brothers before the Gospel of Mark invented them; and he has Jesus renounce them (showing no knowledge of any of them even becoming Christians, much less leaders). They aren’t even in the public history of Acts (no brothers of Jesus ever appear or play any role in the public history of the church beginning at Acts 2; Acts 1 depicts nothing public, or plausible, and just expands on the material in the Gospels).

Everything else just gets the info from Mark (all Gospels, any other authors who might mention them later, etc.).

As to the question of assuming the James in both Gal. 1 and Gal. 2 is the same, that is indeed just a theological assumption. Ehrman says if they were different they would be labeled differently—and they are: one is identified as a rank-and-file Brother of the Lord; the other as the Pillar. The Pillar is never called the Brother of the Lord; and the Brother of the Lord is never called the Pillar.

Indeed, as Trüdinger showed, the whole point of Paul’s convoluted grammar in Gal. 1:19 (see Galatians 1:19, Ancient Grammar, and How to Evaluate Expert Testimony) is to make clear this is not any Apostle of that name. He is, in other words, specifically telling us this is not the James of Gal. 2. Thus every scholar who agrees James the Pillar is an Apostle and that the James in Gal. 1 is not an Apostle agrees with me that they are not the same people. Trüdinger cites examples.

At any rate, since Ehrman’s prediction (that if Paul meant them to be different, he’d say so) logically compels him to agree with me (because Paul says so). But Ehrman disdains logic; he does not obey its dictates. So he won’t admit any of this. And that’s why it is futile to argue anything logical with him.

So I asked him on his blog about that:
https://ehrmanblog.org/carrier-and-james-the-brother-of-jesus/#comment-158129
and found that he is even more crazy than I thought.

In this case, you said the Myth hypothesis is weaker because it needs to defend “the brother of the Lord” as a kind of title. Agree. But the historicist position looks untenable. Do you agree?

From all Christian’s literature or not, I have counted 8 ref. to brothers and sisters of Jesus:
2 in Mark (6:3, 3:21;31-35) copied in Matt and the second in Luke, 2 in John (2:12, 7:3-5;10) and 1 at the beginning of Acts (1:14),
2 possibly in the Epistles (Gal. 1:19 and 1 Corinthians 9:5) (but contested)
1 possibly in Josephus (but interpolated?)
many in Hegesippus (too late)

Do we really have nothing else?
Justin Martyr, Polycarp, Papias, Irenaeus, Theophilus, Tatian, Athenagoras, Minucius Felix, Didache, Shepherd of Hermas…

I don’t see any relevance of your remarks here to anything I said.

Obviously not everyone believes everyone’s visions. That’s not at issue. And obviously real people also got deified. So did mythical people. That’s not at issue either. The question is, which people are we talking about regarding any given point, and how often were deified people real vs. mythical. These questions can only be answered empirically.