A while back I wondered why atheists got so heated up about the historical existence of Jesus, even though none of us agree that the man was divine.  That was dumb of me; I should have realized that the existence of even a fully human Jesus would somehow buttress the Christian contention that he was the son of God, born of a virgin, resurrected, and so on. To that end, I suppose it’s meet that we apply the appropriate skepticism to whether there was a real Jesus around whom the miracle stories accreted.  That, of course, is what the argument between Bart Ehrman and Richard Carrier is about.

Reader Justicar called my attention to the fact that the faithful are already appropriating Ehrman’s conclusions in support of their theology. Ehrman, of course, believes that there was a historical Jesus, even though that rabbi was neither divine nor a wonder-worker.  But it doesn’t matter, as we can see in a piece by theologian/debater William Lane Craig, responding to Stephan Law’s piece, “Evidence, miracles, and the existence of Jesus,” which I discussed yesterday.

On Craig’s blog, Reasonable Faith (what an oxymoronic title!) he pats Ehrman on the back and then goes after Law’s call for caution in accepting even a historical Jesus in an essay called “Stephen Law on the non-existence of Jesus of Nazareth.”

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