Conservatives were not slow to provide scholarly response, see How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus' Divine Nature-A Response to Bart Ehrman, Michael F. Bird, Dr. Craig A. Evans, Simon Gathercole, Charles E. Hill, Chris Tilling (Zondervan Academic; 2014).
Michael Bird's chapter includes a revealing admission, given that he is trying to defend the historical reliability of the gospel of John from scholarly attack: From pp. 67-68
Michael Bird's chapter includes a revealing admission, given that he is trying to defend the historical reliability of the gospel of John from scholarly attack: From pp. 67-68
Bird is admitting that what we get in John's gospel are traditions that have been "truly interpreted through a pronounced theological lens". Notice the underlined portion too.
Bird makes a similar but slightly more revealing claim at Patheos:
The Johannine Gospel yields a creative blend of memory, mystery, and midrash.See here.
Exactly where does the skeptic become "unreasonable" in arguing that conservative Christian scholars, while in the process of defending John's historical reliability from scholarly attack, would never made such admissions about John unless they felt the typical fundamentalist "gospels = videotape" viewpoint was false?
What did we skeptics miss? Maybe Michael Bird doesn't know what he's talking about, or is just a liberal wolf among conservative sheep? No, you can get his bio and more from the video wherein he debates Bart Ehrman on the subject "How Jesus Became God". See here. Wikipedia refers to Eternity Magazine calling him a "heavy-hitter" and says Bird is a member of the Evangelical Theological Society, Society of Biblical Literature, and Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas. Clearly he has no other interest except to serve the devil.
This post does not pretend to delve into the myriad scholarly justifications for tossing John's resurrection testimony in the trash, it is simply to correct a profound misunderstanding that most Christians have, namely, that you can never be "reasonable" to believe position X merely because your opponent admits it is true.
In a court of law, this is called "admission of party opponent" and is particularly devastating where admissible, as common sense says your opponent would never admit to any truth-claim you also believe in, unless they seriously thought the claim had a lot of merit.
I'm not saying Bird admitted Jesus didn't rise from the dead. I'm merely saying Bird's admissions about the non-historical elements in John justify the skeptic to conclude that not even "accepting Jesus" , becoming "born again", and obtaining one's Ph.d in a gospel-related field, will do anything to help keep alive the simpleminded fundie view that Jesus actually spoke every statement placed in his mouth by John.
If a skeptic is an amateur, they are reasonable to simply accept such concessions from the likes of Bird, Evans, etc, and conclude personally that John's gospel offers nearly nothing of serious historical value to help in the problem of Jesus' resurrection.
That would not be sufficient for the skeptic who knows their bible very well and goes around making scholarly claims in opposition to Christianity...like me. We know about the more detailed arguments conservatives make in the effort to make John's gospel appear as much like a verbatim transcript of a video as possible. Skeptics like us would a greater duty than the amateur skeptic to answer such arguments. I have, but I haven't posted most online because I disagree with other authors who make their book content available for free in various posts online.
You would figure that if the historical reliability of John and his Christ-sayings were such an obvious fact of reality, we wouldn't be finding conservative evangelical Christian scholars making the opposite claim as they go about defending John's historical reliability from Ehman's attacks.
