[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by jeffporfirio

Read Misquoting Jesus, but his arguments are flawed. Yes, I know we all played the telephone game, but for an oral tradition culture like found in the middle east in the time of Jesus, changing anything passed on would be inconceivable.

This is patently false. Studies of modern oral cultures demonstrate rather definitively that there are multiform and frequent changes to traditions occurring all the time.

People in those times could not read nor write, the printing press wasn't even invented, oral tradition was all they had.

This idea is usually drawn from the incorrect assertion that illiterate persons and communities had exceptional powers of memory by virtue of necessity, and this is simply not true. In actual fact what we see is that the threshold for "accuracy" within oral cultures is fundamentally different than for literate cultures. Changes that we would recognise as fundamental or obvious within a written document are quite often viewed as perfectly accurate re-presentations within an oral culture.

Still though, as mentioned in my post non-Christian historians wrote about Jesus, and that alone debunks most of Erhman's points.

Can you be more specific? Especially in the light of Ehrman's strong commitment to the existence of an historical Jesus, I fail to see what any of the recollections of ancient historians would "debunk" anything that he has written.

Add to that the letters of St Paul and other early church Fathers.

You have made an argument from incredulity: "Surely the testimony of the apostles and the early church must be true because of how much they suffered for their beliefs." I recommend that you go back and read Ehrman, because his rather convincing argument is that the first and second century Christian claims of persecution are exaggerated.