Hi everyone. I have been reading form Bart Erhmans work how Paul had a completely different view of the Gospel as compared to the initial Gospel. I also know there are some fringe movements such as JesusWordsOnly that assert that only the synoptic Gospels and non Pauline epistles are good. I’m trying to understand this because it does seem that Paul is way off compared to what Jesus said in M,M,L,J. If he’s wrong, why would the church include all of his stuff in the bible? How do we know what salvation really is?
Hey, you posted this in the education forum. If you post it in the main forum I suspect you will get a lot more responses.
Looks like some spam atop the educator forum as well.
Thanks Vinnie. The educator forum doesn’t get much attention, so appreciate you pointing that out.
Can you quote anything specific? Bart Ehrman is a qualified and informed Biblical scholar but he has made it his life’s work to dismantle and knock down Christianity. He has also become more skeptical over the years in some of his views. His scholarly works (few and far between) are generally quite good but his popular level books, blogs and YouTube videos use provocative language and abuse Biblical consensus to the point of misinformation. Typical Christians will not know how to counter a lot of what Bart says because they are not immersed in the field of NT research.
For now I will simply point out that Paul knew many of the original followers of Jesus and noted that he was relaying what was passed on to him. Instead of long articles I am going to try making a few video casts on important issues. Here are a few screenshots of something I am working on pertaining to gospel reliability:
Continued:
These are modern, heavyweight, and well known works by well respected authors.
That Paul taught some radically new gospels would seem to be a misunderstanding of Paul and an example of sensationalism that sells books at the cost of truth. Paul used formal terms for handing on tradition a number of times.
You should ask this author three questions:
What was the original Gospel and how do you know this?
What was Paul’s Gospel and how do you know this?
How are they at odds with one another?
Vinnie