Bart D. Ehrman has written a brief article for The Huffington Post titled “Did Jesus Exist?” as a way of promoting his new book Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. In it he challenges a group of people known as mythicists who argue that Jesus of Nazareth is a fabricated character. Ehrman affirms that Jesus was a real person. This is his “gloves off” paragraph:

“Few of these mythicists are actually scholars trained in ancient history, religion, biblical studies or any cognate field, let alone in the ancient languages generally thought to matter for those who want to say something with any degree of authority about a Jewish teacher who (allegedly) lived in first-century Palestine. There are a couple of exceptions: of the hundreds — thousands? — of mythicists, two (to my knowledge) actually have Ph.D. credentials in relevant fields of study. But even taking these into account, there is not a single mythicist who teaches New Testament or Early Christianity or even Classics at any accredited institution of higher learning in the Western world. And it is no wonder why. These views are so extreme and so unconvincing to 99.99 percent of the real experts that anyone holding them is as likely to get a teaching job in an established department of religion as a six-day creationist is likely to land on in a bona fide department of biology.”

This is the first time is recent memory that Christians will be rooting for Ehrman (e.g. see the evangelical response known as “The Ehrman Project”) while some opponents of Christianity will be upset with him.