Go ahead bro
Undermine my faith, my book and religion, your only achivement will be undermining your own faith, book and religion.
Notice that nowhere does the Koran undermine the Injeel! Your attempt to follow anti-Christian scholars convince me that you have let yourself be influenced by the party of unbelievers.
You despise lessons, well let me give you a lesson on theology, especially secular or liberal theology, which the professor of yours is following.
I have read some of his material and heard his lectures. Do you assume that his conclusion will somehow convince me?
There is no problem for Christianity that Bart Ehram was born in a Christian family and even underwent some theological studies. The Bible does speak about apostasy those who let themselves get infected by false teaching or those leave their faith due to the pleasure of the world.
In my home town we had a so called Christian who began undermining the Christian faith, both attacking and insulting it. What we discovered was his hope to become a famous football player, which somehow in my culture does not go very much a long a radical Christian lifestyle. Before such a move could be taken he had to systematically convince himself that Christianity was questionable.
This same reality is typical when we look at the whole arena of what we call liberal theology, that is theology that questions and attack the Bible.
I am a theologian myself, or at least studying theology, I have been studying the Bible, its teachings, contexts, background, history for 19 years.
14 years ago I began studying Biblical criticism, and I began debating atheists and Muslims on various issues.
Last 6 years my academic studies have followed very much a long the line of liberal structure of studies.
There are two ways to approach it.
1. You can simply swallow everything you read, particularly because you scholars are so academically experienced and most be correct in whatever they propose
2. Or you can assess it and question the scholars and their propositions and sources in the same way as they tell you to question the Bible
If you follow the second approach, the conclusion is remarkable
So why do I say that we are to be questionable about liberal Western theology?
Well liberal Western theology basically began 300 years ago as a result of the Enlightenment Period. The new philosophy gave birth to various groups who wanted God excluded from society. From now on the paradigms of society, science and education were to subjected naturalism.
Two groups particularly negative of religion were the Deists and the Atheists. The Deists had no problem with the concept of God, but God in their view, was completely separated from the universe, he merely inaugurated the creation, via a Big Bang or something else, the universe then evolved through evolution.
In addition there were no miracles, revelations, holy books or prophets.
After a few decades the Deists subjugated the theological studies of the universities, and their motive were rather obvious exclude religion, promote naturalism.
Herman Reimarus (1694-1768) in his book Fragmente eines Ungenannten, is probably one of the first to propose that Jesus was only a political activist and a teacher who predicted a future glorious kingdom and his resurrection. He suggested a conspiracy, that the apostles stole his body and claimed that Jesus resurrected. However, Reimarus material, despite its enormity and details reveals no sources but merely theories; and his motive naturalism.
Several more of these individuals arose such as Strauss and Weiss, Schleiermacher and Bultmann, just to mention a few. All these individuals laid the foundation for critical theology; what however becomes significant is their lack of evidence, lack of sources, and their assumption that their theories were simply correct.
What becomes even more frightening is that these individuals and others initially substituted the lack of sources and evidences and themselves became the evidence of Biblical criticism.
Why?
Well think about it, if one movement or philosophy of thinking subjects the realm of academic theology and excludes any influence of faith, which has been the situation now for centuries then it is understandable that theology becomes negative, first and most because its scholars are non-Christian and highly anti-Christian and Bible, secondly because they have a motive.
When I study theology I have to differenciate between the scholar and the source. What a scholar proposes is not necessarily a evidence but a theory, and these theories change every decade, as they build upon previous theories. These theories are unfortunately categorized as evidences.
My approach is simply to read the books with an open heart, and then ask for the sources, and this is where liberal theology falls short.
For example, 50 years ago critical scholars considered the Gospels to be written in 2-3 or 4th century; that is not longer the case.
Evidences where none and soon history would debunk their proposition.
Today liberal scholars such as Sanders and Casey consider the Gospels to be the writings of the first century church. The change of the attitude has originated because of the discoveries of Biblical manuscripts and the history behind the writings.
Today the challenge set by these scholars is whether the Gospels where written by the actual apostles or authors or by the church as a whole.
Another example is that of Jesus and the Myths, such as the Biblical Jesus originating from the Mithra or Osiris religions. Yet again when you read the books by Archyia and others who propose these theories, you certainly become impressed by their amount of details; yet their theories fall short when you check out the sources for their claims, because there are none; e.g. Mithra is never described to be dead, hence he was never crucified, neither did he resurrect.
Which again shows the importance of distinguishing between scholars and their sources.
A second motive in Liberal theology is money. Christians constantly challenge the liberals and theories perpetually get debunked. There is the need of new theories new scholars and new material.
This is effectively obtained by the PhD degrees, in which a student has three years to present a new idea out of all previous theories. Does this ring a bell? A new theory can make you very very rich, especially if it supports the cause of liberal theology; yet they are only theories in most cases and in most fields wrong.
Personally, I have already (for fun) proposed ridiculous theories (in my own head of course), they are worthless, yet could provide me a fortune if my motive was anti-Christian and a pursue for money or one of them.