I received my copy of Brother Bart's new book, and this is good.
You may recall how Bart Ehrman originally promised us that: "
With respect to Jesus, we have numerous, independent accounts of his life in the sources lying behind the Gospels [...] that can be dated to within just a year or two of his life [...]. Historical sources like that are is pretty astounding for an ancient figure of any kind". But could he deliver? You bet!
What Brother Bart does is simply astounding. He takes the Gospels of Saints Matthew and Luke and cuts them into little pieces. All the pericopes that are shared by Luke and Matthew he then labels "Q", all the material that's unique to Matthew is called "M", and Luke's material is called "L".
I know this sounds a bit odd, and even sacrilegious, but there's method in the madness: Instead of two gospels, Bart Ehrman now has
three gospels, and since these are
sources of the gospels, they are one generation
older and closer to Jesus.
This process is reiterated and each time Brother Bart scientifically extracts the text, we get
more and more gospels, each of which has multiple sources, and each time we get closer and closer to the original words that dripped from Sweet Baby Jesus' lips.
I'll let Brother Bart explain about all these wonderful gospels that we now have:
Within a couple of decades of the traditional date of his death, we have numerous accounts of his life found in a broad geographical span. In addition to Mark, we have Q, M (which is possibly made of multiple sources), L (also possibly multiple sources), two or more passion narratives, a signs source, two discourse sources, the kernel (or original) Gospel behind the Gospel of Thomas, and possibly others. And these are just the ones we know about, that we can reasonably infer from the scant literary remains that survive from the early years of the Christian church. No one knows how many there actually were. Luke says there were “many” of them, and he may well have been right.
(Did Jesus Exist?)
Isn't that fantastic? Thanks to Bart Ehrman's scientific approach we now have ancient gospels that
we don't even know about and they all point straight back to a historical Jesus Christ.
I'd like to see the Jesus-deniers answer that one.
