James White vs Bart Erhman
21 June 2008
2 Comments
Website: www.aomin.org
Post debate stuff:
Response from www.bible.org re John 1:18:
http://bible.org/article/text-and-grammar-john-118
Full debate transcript in PDF format here:
http://mp3.aomin.org/805Transcript.pdf
DVD of the debate here:
MP3 of the debate here:
James White totally lost this debate! And this is very interesting considering that he is the foremost apologist in the United States after William Lane Craig of course!
James White has never given very good reasons for accepting the New Testament. Even in his debate against Muslim opponent Shabir Ally , he never gave positive reasons for accepting the New Testament.
Read a review of his debate with Ehrman below. This is very telling.
http://kentbrandenburg.blogspot.com/2009/02/first-impressions-of-ehrman-white.html
By the way James White will not debate Jim Ross on regeneration before faith!
I have just listened to the full debate, and I hardly came away thinking that White “totally lost” as you state. (The MP3s and full transcript are for sale for about $6 USD on http://www.aomin.org.) White *should* have been out of his league against Ehrman since Ehrman is a full-time scholar in this field while White is an apologist and this is just one of his areas. I was really surprised at how well White did against Ehrman given their respective backgrounds.
As for why we should accept the NT — as White pointed out, the skeptic should be on the one bearing the burden of proof re changes in manuscripts, and if Ehrman applied the same level of skepticism to ALL ancient books, then we would be unable to know anything meaningful about most works of antiquity since some (not sure how many) have only a single manuscript that is hundreds of years after the fact. The NT on the other hand has c.5300 manuscript fragments IIRC.
I think this was a very useful debate for all concerned as it is such a fundamental issue upon which our Bibles are based. I would rate it 5 stars.
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