You're still missing the entire point of the argument. I'm asking you why adults shouldn't be expected to make a distinction that even small children can make.
Do you believe that religious texts can use parables or not? Yes or no?
I think there's a chance it's mythological, it is portrayed very differently than the rest of the gospels. But I'm not tied to either view - it seems to me that it was believed as true from a very early period though.
I don't think the same sort of dichotomy existed in that period and culture - it's a Western imposition. Things can be true whether or not they happened historically because there is a truth to lessons and moral tales that goes far behind the abstracted detailing of events. Look at Native American myths - do you believe that the average Native American listening to those myths spent mental energy worrying about whether they were "historical" or not? That's a worry that entered when Western mindsets were imposed.
Looking at Christian history, you can look back at least as far as St. Augustine (4th century) and see him insisting that much of the Old Testament is allegorical. (Augustine, of course, was quite Western in his philosophical background).
That doesn't make any sense. First off, we don't rely on Paul for anything we believe about Jesus. And second, Paul knew the closest followers of Jesus intimately - first as their prosecutor, later as their close companion - so he certainly had information about Jesus from firsthand witnesses.
As others have pointed out, the central message of nearly all of his popular books is, "This is why the Christian message is false, and I should know because I used to be one, but I realized the truth and rejected it." For the most part, his books don't even have a consistent theme otherwise - his book on textual varients is based on an entirely different type of scholarship than his book on attributing authorship, and both of those are completely different than his book on the question of evil. But every time, no matter how different the book, the answer in the end is always, "And THIS is why I don't believe in Christianity!"
Just four examples for now:
1. He frequently makes the claim, "Scholars believe that...." when what he really means is "The scholars that I agree with believe that...." His criteria for accepting the scholarship of others is not whether there is a consensus, or even a majority, widely-accepted position, but whether he likes their conclusions.
2. He frequently gives his opinion on a passage, without backing himself up with academic citations or using only very limited backing, and then proceeds from there assuming his opinion is true and using that opinion as the underlying proof for his further arguments.
3. He puts a ton of weight on his statement, "There are 400,000 errors in the Bible!" and many, many other claims about the sheer # of textual variants. No serious scholar would put any importance at all on those numbers, he full well knows that 99% are simple minor differences in spelling and grammar that have no impact on faith at all. Languages are imprecise and evolve, and humans aren't perfect. Even the differences that actually bear any sort of theological importance are relatively minor and few in number. How does that bear any relation on whether or not the Christian God exists?
4. He often implicitly argues his points as if he is responding to a fundamentalist Christian position, and then when he takes down that position he fails to give weight to the far more reasonable positions in the middle, acting as if in dismissing the fundamentalist position he's already done most of the work to dismiss Christianity entirely.
Here's a rather long essay by a different New Testament scholar which covers a lot of the various reasons that I don't put much weight on Ehrman's polemics.
Finally, in this last of a five part series, reviewing Bart Ehrman’s Forgery and Counterforgery, I want to play a bit of “devil’s advocate.” What if Bart Ehrman is correct a…
sharedveracity.net
I could keep
