Yeah. He says a lot of face-palming howlers like that.

It’s all the worse because, not just is he committing the fallacy you just described, which is bad enough, but he is also ignoring literally all major Johannine scholarship of the last twenty years, almost all of it concludes John used Mark and Luke as a source, and is even in argument with Luke. And the evidence for this is extensive. But if we can prove John read Luke, we already know he knew the Nativity story. Ehrman would have to spin a convoluted tale about how the Nativity was added to Luke later (a view some Marcion scholars now do make). But the epicycling of such an approach would at least be apparent and thus not hiding the fact that it’s stretching to get a conclusion, rather than the conclusion being secure.

I recently had to turn off a video with Ehrman when he said that the authors of GJohn “likely” didn’t know about the virgin birth story. Since it wasn’t in John. So they… couldn’t… have known it?

Indeed. That’s one of several effects we should observe. I list more (and give some examples) in OHJ, Ch. 11.

But he’d still need to EXPLAIN this to people asking why he never talks about the Earthly Jesus. He NEVER does so explicitly. That’s just so incredibly unlikely. People would be asking very POINTED questions. ‘Why do all the other apostles tell us what Jesus said and did when he was alive, Paul, but you don’t?” He couldn’t have addressed such questions without it being plain what was being asked.

Ehrman simply presumes, for example (at minute 7:15), that “Paul knew Jesus’s brother”

Do you see any rhetorical value in responding to this with “Well, even better than that – Paul was Jesus’s brother!”?

I suspect this goes straight into the too-clever-by-half bin…

Yes. And I suppose momentum can build quickly. Sometimes even in a positive direction. I guess we would just need the critical mass of consciousness.

It is true that quantum leaps are not a real thing in human history. Progress is slow. And a corrupting resistance is persistent. But net progress is still measurable.

The ups and downs of gay rights over the last two hundred years reflect the point: progress, backlash, progress, backlash; but like global warming, the trend is nevertheless still up. This is most clear when comparing the state of things in 1925 with now (particularly in in socially advanced countries that are not the United States, but even in the United States).

MLK’s analysis was correct: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” It’s just that noticeable progress takes longer than a human lifetime, and not on all fronts at the same time; and people with a moral spirit are justifiably impatient.

That is essentially my point in OHJ, Element 29, on the anthropology of “revolution cults,” which relates to the condition of a recent imperialism by a more advanced civilization upon a traditional one, forcing change in reaction.

But the effect could be expected in other conditions of similar construct. QAnon is in many ways a revolution cult, produced by merging a traditional way of life now increasingly rendered obsolete (Christianity in particular; traditional conservative values in general) with the “ways of the empire” that are making it obsolete (in this case, secularism, scientism, globalism, and social progress), to try and produce something superior to both. It’s delusion all the way down. But so was Christianity, which was just a supernaturalist conspiracy theory, which is now being replaced by secular ones.