Bart Ehrman is one of those “biblical scholars” who has little good to say about the Bible. His latest book is called JESUS INTERRUPTED, and in a recent blog entry Ben Witherington takes Bart apart. Witherington concludes one post this way:
“The attempt to trace radical diversity back into the New Testament period is doomed to failure because it is not grounded in a fair historical reading of the original source documents. Equally unfair and historically inaccurate is the notion that high Christology or Trinitarian orthodoxy was something only cooked up in centuries subsequent to the New Testament era, particularly in the fourth and fifth centuries. To the contrary, we already see a proto-orthodox theology in the New Testament itself in Paul, in John, in Hebrews, in Revelation. Christ is already viewed as deity by Paul and other New Testament writers; and already in various places we hear about Father, Son and Spirit all being called God in the New Testament. That this high Christology and Trinitarian theology is further developed after the New Testament era is beyond dispute. But those developments were founded on and grounded in the orthodoxy that already existed in the apostolic era. “Let me be clear. If you do not like these Christian ideas, that is fine. But what you cannot do is say that the earliest Christians did not believe things like the deity of Christ or the virginal conceptions. The attempt to make fourth-century Christians the inventors of high Christology imposes a myth of origins on Christianity that amounts to a rewriting of history in a false way. Distaste for this or that theological idea should not be allowed to lead to a truly biased and unhelpful interpretation of the historical facts about what the earliest Christian believed. The transcript of their faith is found in the New Testament itself, a collection of apostolic and sub-apostolic documents. One is free to disagree with their theological perspectives, but one is not free to say they didn’t hold such views or to suggest that there were widely divergent and contradictory beliefs about such subjects amongst early orthodox Christians. This is simply not true.”
________
http://www.preachingmagazine-info.com/mlskqiux_vztcjvzf.html