Dear Friends,

This is my fourteenth post of direct commentary on How Jesus Became God, by Dr. Bart Ehrman. Check here for my introductory comments.

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In today’s post, the problems with Dr. Ehrman’s latest text of choice closely parallel the problems with his other chosen texts. This should be a quick one! 

Woefully incomplete preservation + late citation = little (if any) relevance!

In his quest to radically reinterpret what early Christians believed about Jesus, Dr. Ehrman now appeals (page 50 of 302) to The Exagoge, a 2nd or 3rd century BC (1) work by Ezekiel the Tragedian. Although his appeal immediately prior (expand the “series outline” above and click Ehrman post #14) was to a highly respected text called The Book of Sirach, he now returns to his grab bag of very obscure, poorly sourced texts. Here are his comments about Ezekiel’s work:

“Some authors think of [Moses] as even greater than the angels, as in a book attributed to a person known as Ezekiel the Tragedian, who indicates that Moses was given a scepter and summoned to sit on a thrones, with a diadem placed on his head, so that the ‘stars’ bowed down to him. Recall: stars were considered superior angels. Here they bow down in worship to Moses, who has been transformed into a being even greater than they.”

It’s pretty heady stuff, but here are the two major problems I see with his usage of this text:

• Only 20-25% of this work has been preserved (1)
  • If this work reflected the views of a significant portion of the early Christians, why was so little of it preserved?
• The first extant citation of this work is from 198 AD (1), (3)
  • If this work reflected the views of a significant portion of the early Christians, why don’t we have any citations of it until a century after they all died?

So, in my opinion, this is another highly speculative move by Ehrman. To evaluate Ehrman’s claims about the Apostle Paul’s beliefs, I’m going to need evidence based on Paul’s actual writings…not based on The Exagoge, or The Prayer of Joseph, or any other non-canonical text that was poorly preserved and only cited a long time after Paul died.

If you want to see my discussion of the other mangy texts that Ehrman is appealing to, expand the “series outline” above, and click the links for Ehrman posts #7 and #10-13.

God bless and thanks for reading!

TFOTF

Links:

1. Ezekiel the Tragedian on Wikipedia
2. Ezekiel the Tragedian on Britannica (psych! Britannica doesn’t even have an article for him)
3. The Stromata by Clement of Alexandria on Wikipedia
4. The Stromata by Clement of Alexandria at New Advent (if you want to read Clement’s Ezekiel reference)

God bless,

TFOTF