Ironically, Jesus preached a profoundly Jewish religion:

I haven't read Jesus Interrupted yet, but the above statement is false in the sense of Jewish practice at the time or today.

Many people don't understand the history at the time, when Jesus throw out the money lenders at the Temple, this is a direct assault on Jewish religious leadership, it's overthrowing the concept of purity as the heart of the religion. (It has little to do with money, pure money had to be exchange for unpure money, so that pure money could be donated).

At least with respect to the monotheistic religions, because he lacks a belief in those gods. The misuse of the word agnostic in this way makes life difficult for everyone. Technically speaking, agnostic and atheist are answers to different questions. The theist - atheist axis is in response to the question "Do you believe in any god?" The gnostic - agnostic axis is in response to the question "Can we know/prove that any god exists?"

One can be a combination of both, i.e. an agnostic theist would believe in a god while not believing that such a proposition could be proven, while a gnostic atheist would believe that no god exists and such can be proven.

From reading the interview, my sense is that Ehrman is an agnostic atheist, i.e. he doesn't believe in any gods, but doesn't not believe that it can be known for sure or proven that there are no gods.

I know Jesus was a man. He said so. A lot of Christians know and believe this. A lot of Christians know and believe the Bible was written by fallible humans. The Gnostic Gospels are interesting too - they contain some of the testaments that didn't make the editorial cut into 'The Bible'.

When Jesus said 'I am the way, the truth and the life, no one goes to the father but through me' (paraphrase) he was saying through the Christ - the divine aspect of man, the spiritual sensibility we all possess, our Christ consciousness.

Jesus said he was the son of God. He also, repeatedly and in many different ways, said we are ALL the children of God. 'Our father, who art in heaven' for eg. 'Don't you know it's your father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom,' is another example.

Jesus of Nazareth was a man. The Christ is something we can all aspire to. Therefore I sign off this post ...

...LauraBB Christ, daughter of God

'Testament' should be viewed as 'Covenant'. Jesus threw out the whole Jewish covenant: bris, kashrut, shabbos, the entirety of Jewish ritual, faith and thought.

"I don't think the church is either holding the world together or causing it to fall apart."

A perfectly apt statement. Agnostics are those bright people that don't ring your doorbell but will always feed your cat and water your lawn while you're at Disneyworld.

I suspect this is a well thought-out book, really I do. But this concept of Jesus as the man-prophet has been an integral part of the American landscape since its inception. Thomas Jefferson frequently attended Joseph Priestly's church, the first Unitarian church in the US. And at the heart of Unitarianism is the non-divinity of Jesus.

If anyone thinks that it was an accident that the nation was founded on very non-Trinitarian and only vaguely religious documents and ideals, it most certainly was not.

I won't even bother to talk about the subject of evil and eternal damnation, because that was the purview of the Universalists, who felt is was a lot of rot. (A religion, by the way, that takes us back to the very earliest days of the United States.)

Ultimately, the real problem here is that the average American is so poorly educated about religious history of any kind that we are doomed to repeat these "revelations" forever.

Didn't John Shelby Spong and the Jesus Seminar cover this "radical" ground in about 1993? Next you'll be telling us about this neeet advanced computer program called hypercard...

Here's the thing about faith: it has a dimension that goes beyond proofs, texts, and historical verification. If you have it, you'll understand this. If you don't, well, I'd imagine you don't.

Clement Attlee, widely regarded by historians as the best Prime Minister (1945 - 1951) of the 20th Century:

..............

Q: Do you mean you have no feeling about Christianity, or that you have no feeling about God, Christ and life after death?

Attlee: Believe in the ethics of Christianity. Can't believe the mumbo-jumbo.

Q: Would you say you are an agnostic?

Attlee: I don't know.

Q: Is there an afterlife, do you think?

Attlee: Possibly.

...............

If you believe in Christianity because the teachings of Jesus are the right thing to do, it makes no difference what is said about Jesus's divinity or what happened on the first Easter.

If you're a Christian because you want to save your ass in the afterlife, then I suppose those questions become important.

I find the letters almost as interesting as the article preceding them. It's amazing to me that anyone can claim to know that Bart Ehrman is wrong, unless, of course, they have the academic, scholarly background he possesses.

As it is? is it opening day yet? Because the book and the review both seem to have a decent amount of spin on them.

2% of the world's population is Jewish. That would be LESS than marginal, no? So this book is HUGELY obscure and borderline, going by the numbers..?

So it's more a tool... a compound...

Is "mainstream Christianity" what is taught at Harvard and Yale Divinity Schools and most of the mainline Protestant ones? Then Ehrman isn't telling us anything about the Bible we didn't already know. Learning that the Bible doesn't contain a clear statement of the Trinity: that's Week One in Divinity School. That doctrine developed, that the Bible is contradictory, that Jesus most certainly didn't say or think everything attributed to him? We knew all that too.

For decades, it seems, this information hits the popular media twice a year, at Christmas and Easter. The rest of the year its kept hidden in the biblical studies departments of these institutions, and under the hat of the minister down the street. I wonder why.