User:Pandeist/EL

Australian Religious Studies scholar Raphael Lataster objects to the common tactic whereby New Testament specialists will bolster their arguments concerning Jesus of Nazareth by appealing to hypothetical sources. That is, sources that no longer exist, and may never have existed. One such scholar, Bart Ehrman, uses this approach to argue that the woefully unreliable Gospels are at least accurate in describing the existence of a Historical Jesus - something that Lataster express considerable doubts over. As such, Lataster named the ‘law’ after Ehrman. Says Lataster:

“The law states that if your preferred theory is not well aligned to the available evidence, you may simply invent as much evidence as is required, and you may further proclaim the unquestionable reliability of your imagined sources. The law also requires you to make grand claims about how this new evidence supports your – and only your – theories and to ridicule others who try to do likewise.” JDNE p59

Lataster points out several problems with this approach in [ref JDNE] and [associated conference paper], with one of the most galling being that Christian apologists can - and do - use it to argue for the Christ of Faith (JDNE p. 60). He also notes that the less mainstream scholars who deny Jesus’ historicity (JDNE p. 335-336) could also thusly ‘prove’ that Jesus did not exist, through some long lost letter of Paul or some other early Christian.

Ehrman’s law can easily be likened to the source of form criticism that yielded the Documentary Hypothesis. Lataster notes, however, that this approach tends to invalidate the claims made by the scriptures, in direct contrast to Ehrman’s inexcusably deriving positions of certainty therefrom (JDNE p. 59).

Lataster is not alone in criticising New Testament scholars for appeal to non existing sources. Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner is similarly critical, partocuallry with regards to hypothetical oral sources, as revealed in his (Rabbinic Literature and the New Testament: What We Cannot Show, We Do Not Know (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2004))