A sensitive, thorough and fair review

I liked this very much. Especially as a Christian who is interested in the truth about Jesus and his ministry. More please …

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Makes you think

A lot of alternative ideas about Christianity and the bible, enough to upset some people and make others thing long and hard about their faith.
A good book.

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Thank one of the gods for Bart Ehrman

What made the experience of listening to The Greatest Controversies of Early Christian History the most enjoyable?

For me, Bart Ehrman makes very deep subjects easy to understand and this set of lectures is very well broken down so the various topics are easy to access and replay as required.

What did you like best about this story?

It's not a story as such. As an atheist myself I liked the wealth of knowledge obtained from this to discuss with my Christian friends.

Have you listened to any of Professor Bart D. Ehrman’s other performances? How does this one compare?

I've several books by him...they're always wonderfully narrated and clear to understand. This is certainly one of my favourites.

If you made a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

A film to hopefully make Christians actually read their books and think

Any additional comments?

If you are religious or an atheist like me, I recommend everything by Bart Ehrman.This is maybe not the best starter though.

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2 people found this helpful

Easy way to learn important history

Answers pretty much every major question i had about the subject. Easy to understand for religious and non-religious people.

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A respectful challenge to Christian beliefs

Loved this book. a great piece of work wonderfully presented. interesting and challenging. not for the faint hearted Christian though, as your core beliefs will be challenged in a way that keeps you engaged. But stick it out to the end. It's worth the journey.

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4 people found this helpful

Horizontal thinking

It is good to hear how thinking about Christianity was shaped, why and what actually happened in the life of Christ as can be gleaned from the gospels and other written evidence.

It will be interesting to follow this theme with more investigation.

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Very well researched

Great research and held my attention throughout and doesn't duck the obvious questions except that if God is masculine what about the feminine God etc

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Not really historical analysis

This has lots of interesting facts about what it says in the Bible. However, although the lecturer made a point of talking about the distinction between historical fact and religious belief he didn't practice what he preached. He was very ready to accept things as having really happened without sufficient evidence, for example because they occurred in early gospels or seemed the most likely of several unlikely theories. If someone did this with works about Heracles or Robin Hood no one would claim it was scholarship. Compared with other Great Courses it was unsophisticated and not academically rigorous.

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1 person found this helpful

A bit stale

So, I like Bart Ehrman, I've read a lot of his books and listened to several of his lecture series from the great courses, and he is, to be sure, an interesting guy with a broad knowledge base. Consistent too, really good when talking about forgeries and redaction criticism, but when his subject is 'The Historical Jesus,' his arguments seem a little... I don't know - tired maybe. Sometimes he asserts certain things are incontestable, and I can't help thinking, "Strange, I've heard other scholars contesting exactly this point, and being very convincing about it too." If you're new to the search for the historical Jesus then you'll find a lot of the basically-intetesting-but-a-little-pedestrian stuff here. A little familiarity with the field, however, and you may find that Bart's just a warm up act for folks like Richard Carrier & Robert M Price.

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The only course by Ehrman I can't recommend

This course is a lesson in not judging a book by its title. I'd naively supposed that it would cover information about controversies in early Christian history, such as the many debates by early leaders of the various churches as to what Christian dogma and ethics should be and who should be tasked with establishing and circulating them. Instead, it's a series of lectures on whether common pop factoids about Jesus and his apostles are historically accurate (spoiler alert: given that we can't even conclusively prove that Jesus ever existed, you can draw your own conclusions).

I persevered with the course because my mama didn't raise no quitter, but it just doesn't get better. The information provided can be charitably described as superficial - I covered most of it in Junior High, so I cannot understand how this can qualify as "university level" course. The information that isn't provided is just as damning: the author mentions apocryphal works a number of times, but never qualifies what "apocryphal" means, or how the early Church came to choose the works that comprise the modern canon. He invites the reader to carry out a parallel reading of the four Gospels, but doesn't bother to mention that the differences between them can be attributed to differences in the intended audiences. All the time he saves in this manner is devoted to endless repetitions of what a historian cannot do (TL/DR: guesswork), intersected with long, vivid chapters where the author does precisely that.

To cap it all, the author somehow managed to have an entire career lecturing on a subject whose name ends in S without ever learning that the possessive " 's " is omitted in writing in those circumstances, but is pronounced. "Jesus' death" is turned into "Jesus death", "Jesus' mother" into "Jesus mother", and so on and so forth. This may sound petty, but having to hear it time and time again makes it flat out excruciating.

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1 person found this helpful