The more I think about it, the more I appreciate how brilliant of a marketing move this has been for Ehrman. He’s been repackaging the same ideas for years now (with good reason - they sell, and they are mostly accepted by secular scholars in the area), but to move books off the shelf he’s got to keep adding new flavors, like a chef who cycles through the spice cabinet to do something with the same old whitefish week after week.

Still, that some of the “new atheists” are so hot about whether there really existed a man who could be identified as the (source of the stories about the character of) Jesus bar Joseph of Nazareth is telling.