Bart Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth

I have to admit to being a Bart Ehrman fan before writing any more. As celebrity academics go, I find that he uses his celebrity both self-interestedly (selling books) but also altruistically: he wants to keep people focused on  what the historical record of early Christianity is rather than letting myth an popular faith rule the world unchallenged.  One gets the impression listening to him that, like the very best of scholars, he's a giant nerd who loves nothing so much as discussing ideas.  Another positive: he publishes both scholarly books and popular books back and forth. Most who reach his status give up the former and concentrate on the latter. But Ehrman will send one book to Oxford University Press and the next to HarperOne. That I find very impressive, indeed. 

I have read just about all of his books, and this new one strikes me as less well done than the others, only because the organization at the front of the book lacks his usual brevity.   There is a very nice section that explains what historians are looking for--multiple, independent, disinterested  sources, and how with ancient history, we must often settle for interested sources and the like.  But the first part of the book is slow, with far too much repetition of the same sources and the same arguments.  The historical case that Jesus existed is fairly straightforward: we have more independent sources about Jesus than we have on a bunch of other people, including Socrates. I think what weighs down the first part of the book may not be Ehrman's fault. He is trying to give a fair description of the arguments that Jesus did not exist, and those are arguments tend to be labored and founded on a great deal of speculation, and there's no way to present them without going into rather a lot of detail.  It may also be that of the various things Ehrman writes about, I'm most familiar with the historical Jesus and so none of his discussion is all that new.

In any case, the book is worth being patient with until you get to the last sections, which I found much more interesting than the first, and for this marvelous bit:

Jesus was inescapably and ineluctably a Jew living in first-century Palestine. He was not like us, and if we make him like us we transform the historical Jesus into a creature that we have invented for ourselves and our own purposes. 

 Jesus would not recognize himself in the preaching of most of his followers today. He knew nothing of our world.  He was not a capitalist. He did not believe in free enterprise.  He did not support the acquisition of wealth or the good things in life.  He did not believe in massive education. He had never heard of democracy.  He had nothing to do with going to church on Sunday. He knew nothing of  social security, food stamps, American exceptionalism, unemployment numbers, or immigration. He had no views on tax reform, health care (apart from wanting to heal leprosy) or the welfare state.