Originally posted by Dee Dee Warren
Now, Deeds, you know that's over the top. The "values his life" bit was a joke, in the graveyard humor genre. The real reason he doesn't engage on the Qur'an the way he does on the Bible is because he hasn't spent his entire academic career studying the Qur'an, learning the languages relevant to its creation, and working with relevant texts from contemporary societies, not that there's anything like the same richness of material associated with the Qur'an.
And he's hardly a hyperskepticalist. If you're going to pin that label on him, whatever are you going to do with Robert Price? Besides, as any number of apologists have been quick to point out, as Ehrman himself has confessed directly, the major critical themes he presents in his popular books are both well-known and uncontroversial in scholarly settings. In fact, he's barely a skeptic at all. His claim to fame amongst evangelicals is solely that he's brought the scholarship into the pews from out of the ivory towers.
Moreover, until the breakup of the Catholic Church, anyone engaged in textual criticism, by, say, arguing against Mosaic authorship, had best be doing so from somewhere outside the reach of the Catholic Church. There's nothing the Muslims do with Qur'anic critics today that wasn't once done by Christians to Biblical critics prior to the Protestant Reformation. It was all too easy to get burned at the stake, with a spike through your tongue back then.
The "Why don't you go after the Muslims?" thing is achingly close to a plea to Christians to return to that kind of atrocity.
As ever, Jesse
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