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Comment by johnny313 | Hacker News Reader

Bart Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at UNC Chapel Hill wrote a decent book on the question of whether or not there was a historical Jesus. He does a good job talking through the arguments on both sides, and covers the history of the argument. He did an interview about the topic on NPR a few years ago: https://www.npr.org/2012/04/01/149462376/did-jesus-exist-a-h...

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I'm currently reading Zealot by Reza Aslan, which doesn't really debate whether or not there was a historical Jesus, but discusses the differences in fact vs the bible.

I highly recommend it.

I read it, and was disappointed. The book could only get so close to Jesus as to speculate what a person living during that time period might have been like, and what some of the prevailing social issues were.

I thought it was a good book, as he says, he's not presenting anything new or controversial to biblical scholars, but I (as a layperson) learned a lot about Christianity, and now understand it better - how it went from being a weird Jewish sect to the imperial religion of Rome.

Just finished The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey, which documents the destruction of statues, temples and artworks by Christians in the years 300-500AD in Europe. Also recommended!

Unfortunately Nixey’s book is terrible. As a classisist she should know better than to regurgitate ideas from Gibbon, ignoring 200 years of scholarship. Instead she goes for sensationalism, “evil Christians destroying classical culture” and links to ISIS and such. Which isn’t needed because the period she describes is interesting enough on its own.

The book is so terrible a collection of reviews from historians can be found here: https://gegrammena.wordpress.com/2017/10/22/reactions-review... .

I especially like this article (https://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2017/10/21/hunting-the-w...), focusing on how she misused a quote from Chrysostom by removing all context, which completely changed the meaning to fit her narrative. Not only that, she clearly didn’t read the original source but borrowed the interpretation from another author, who also misread it.

Is that the guy that misrepresents his credentials?

I know nothing about that but I guess it's entirely possible!

https://youtu.be/E9RmAo6XVAA?t=178 [David Packman]

I'm a fan of Bart Ehrman, but I think Richard Carrier's arguments on the Historicity of Jesus are superior. He also goes through the effort to quantitatively evaluate the evidence for and against, giving only a 1/3 probability that there was a historical Jesus.

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