The author Gerd Lüdemann is who was the Professor of New Testament at the University of Göttingen, Germany and Director of the Institute of Early Christian Studies. He has also served as Visiting Scholar at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, Tennessee, and as co-chair of the Society of Biblical Literature Seminar on Jewish Christianity. His many books include The Resurrection of Jesus, The Great Deception, The Unholy in Holy Scripture, and Heretics: The Other Side of Early Christianity. He is also research fellow of the Westar Institute and the Jesus Seminar. With all that said he is a bad historian and theologian who is part of a number of liberal scholars with advanced degrees in biblical & religious studies who have denied the faith and use the guise of biblical criticism to grind there axe against the church and the bible.

In his book The Unholy In Holy Scripture - The Dark side of the Bible, which was originally written in german then translated for broader english audience. Lüdemann has become one of the most prominent and sharpest critics of the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus with a provocative hypothesis that early Christian belief in Jesus’ resurrection was the product of hallucinatory experiences originally induced by guilt-complexes in Peter and Paul. This rebuttal to this argument is provided in an article by Dr. William Lan Craig titled “Visions of Jesus: A Critical Assessment of Gerd Lüdemann’s Hallucination Hypothesis.” Craig in the past debated with Ludeman on this topic in the past Jesus’ Resurrection: Fact or Figment? which was published.

The pages of the this book are full of bad anti-apologetics and is biased and he states presuppostions for his arguements without any evidence or historical background. Inturn his statements are straw men not able to withstand the the winds of imposing question by the reader. Obvious he sounds like he has an axe to grind against the church and the bible. The worst bit is the part about New Testament exgesis of selective text. To make a long story short, here is an example of Ludemann’s type of “reasoning”: he just lines up a sample of anti-jewish polemic out of the New Testament (ignoring completely the context), puts it along with some nasty bits by Eusebius and Luther, and here we go. And this man (who, nervetheless, did some good job in the past) pretends to be a serious historian. He sets up these straw men titled by his two man attacks on scripture Unholy Violence against others covering the wars of Israel against surrounding tribes especialty the canaanites. The other being Anti-Judaism in the New Testament which he aspires to explain how Paul and the scriptures teach a theology of hate towad the Jews for the murder of Jesus and those who would follow him. Some of the anti-thetical statements he make in his book are stated.

In other words, the gulf betwen historical fact and its alleged meaning, between history and proclamation, between the actual history of Jesus and the variegated picture of his history in the NT, makes it impossible o continue to argue seriously that the writings of the New Testament are inspired, or even to indentify the Word of God with Holy Scripture. Page 2

“It is high time to understand the Bible in a human way, to arouse it like a sleeping beauty and thoroughly to do away with the monopolistic claim which the Christian churches and large areas of so-called academic theology have successfully established in their highly selective biblical exegesis.” Page 26

So the fact remains that there are thousands of Christ, i.e. human pictures of a super-earthly Son of God, but only one Jesus…..But the divinised Christ has little to do with Jesus. Page 132

In the end Ludemann was expelled from his chair on the theology faculty at the University of Göttingen by reason of the content of his academic writing and lecturing on the history and theology of earliest Christianity. He was expelled from his post as professor of New Testament and assigned a professorship of the history and literature of Early Christianity thereby losing all his academic rights and being forced into a ghetto existence within the theological faculty. The expulsion of professor from his academic post came as a public consequence of his poor scholarship. Sadly Ludeman denies the faith he grew up studying and taught in a the halls of theological lecture halls in Germany. ( )