Hello Meister,

Thanks for taking the time to comment.

You certainly tapped into Ehrman’s style of writing — for good and for bad.

This is indeed how Ehrman writes. He stacks assumption on assumption, doubt upon doubt, building a case without using any concrete information while dancing around all the concrete information that goes against his wishes.

You didn’t respond to a single direct claim in my article. You tried to undermine them by appealing to doubts and making nebulous appeals to authority, but you ignored all the arguments themselves. This is a common tactic of the skeptical community.

Mark’s Gospel is remarkably solid, historically. It has impeccable manuscript support. The red herring of the last few added verses means little, as those verses simply summarize information already presented in the other Gospels.

Likewise, Mark’s original ending proclaims Jesus’ Resurrection and anticipates His appearing. It’s misleading entirely to try to cast it as lacking the Resurrection.

Therefore, when Jesus repeatedly claims to be God in Mark, and proves it beyond doubt, we must listen, if we strive to be intellectually honest. There is no historical or archaeological reason to doubt Mark’s accuracy. By your own words, it is the record of direct eye-witness testimony by a man who continually risked his life to deliver that message.

You accurately reflected Ehrman’s style of argument: ignore the hard evidence, try to cast doubt on the reliability of the text despite its superior reliability, appeal to vague and misleading statements about scholarship, and dance around the direct message of the text.

Yet none of that presents any real challenge to Jesus’ continual claim to be God.