Bart Ehrman on the Crucifixion: What He Actually Grants
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About this video
Bart Ehrman is an agnostic New Testament scholar and probably the best-known skeptic of the resurrection writing today. He does not think Jesus rose. He's said so at length.
He also grants the starting points. Ehrman has written that the crucifixion of Jesus on the orders of Pontius Pilate is among the most certain facts of ancient history. And in How Jesus Became God he sets out what he thinks historians can know: that some of Jesus' followers believed he had been raised, that they believed it because some of them had visions of him after the crucifixion, and that this belief reshaped everything they thought about who he was.
Notice where the actual disagreement sits. It isn't over whether Jesus died, or whether his followers sincerely believed they had seen him alive afterward. Ehrman grants both. The disagreement is over the explanation.
That's worth knowing before you argue with anyone. If you think the skeptic's position is "it never happened and the disciples made it up," you're arguing with someone who isn't in the room.
Full episode: https://youtu.be/SG5W2DtZZ9M
Transcript (show)
Fact one, Jesus of Nazareth was crucified by the Romans under Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem around AD30. This is confirmed inside the New Testament. It is also confirmed outside the New Testament by the Roman historian Tacitus writing around AD 116 and by the Jewish historian Josephus in the first century. Bart Aramman, one of the most well-known skeptical New Testament scholars alive, writes that the crucifixion of Jesus is one of the most certain facts of ancient history. Now, some people ask, did Jesus actually die?
Yes. In 1986, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a peer-reviewed article walking through the physiology. Their conclusion, and I quote, "Modern medical interpretation of the historical evidence indicates that Jesus was dead when taken down from the cross.
Transcript from the video's captions on YouTube.
