I've done experiments with sexists. One time I was hanging around a bunch of males on a regular basis - I was one of the only females around this group. They thought they were superior to everyone because they were (impoverished) "spiritual seekers" on the "right path," euphorically and fanatically following a particular Indian guru. Although they had put out a call for "strong women" to come visit, what they really wanted was ANY woman who would submit to them and build up their egos. (She would have to be pretty strong to push up those inflated things any further.)

Now, imagine their surprise when I went into their midst. Every time I opened my mouth to emit a pearl of wisdom (or even something trite and humorous), they acted as if were retarded and batted my comments away. These unsuspecting characters had no idea about my IQ or education - because I was a "pretty girl," they assumed I was dumb and had nothing of value to say.

So, I did a little experiment. I knew the writings of their guru very well, and I could quote them verbatim. Instead of making observations or answers based on my own thoughts, I decided to quote this esteemed guru verbatim where appropriate. What do you suppose happened?

Yes, that's right - these guys pooh-poohed me every time. They must have wondered what that little smirk was on my face when they did that. Caught red-handed! Laughing heartily, I eventually told them what I had been up to - one would have thought that with their superior intellects they would have recognized these verbatim quotes from their own guru. Hearing my words, they looked like deer in the headlights.

I have noted the same behavior concerning my work - if it comes from me, it's automatically suspect and/or wrong. I could be quoting ANYONE, but if it comes out of MY face, then it must be wrong.

Needless to say, I have not let such mindless bigotry and idiocy dissuade me, although the stupidity of humanity in general does tend to rob me of motivation.

Fortunately, there are good folks and real menschen like Atheist Universe author David Mills, who intelligently recognized and honestly acknowledged this serious and enduring problem, in his great review of my book Who Was Jesus? Fingerprints of The Christ. Says Mills:

D.M. Murdock/Acharya S, like all authors on controversial subjects, has many critics. But they all share one commonality: They don't know what they're talking about. Murdock understands many languages and has a breadth of knowledge her critics cannot match. This fact irks the uninformed. Having given a fair hearing to some of her online detractors and their "rebuttal" videos, I have detected not only a lack of knowledge on the part of her critics, but also, in some cases, a thinly disguised misogyny. Objectively speaking, D.M. Murdock is an attractive and dazzlingly brilliant woman. This is more intimidation than some men can handle, even some atheist men. To those who follow the teachings of the Apostle Paul, who forbade women to even speak in church, it "logically" follows that Ms. Murdock should remain silent as well, especially since she is grieving the Holy Ghost. In plain English, Murdock is dealt criticism that would never befall an ugly old man in a monastery. I would like to think that 21st-century America is beyond such juvenile conduct, but that is sadly not the case.

UPDATE: Facebook has reinstated my account. Thanks to all who may have politely written to them.

My Facebook account has been "disabled," which means, gone are not only my profile, with its 5,000 friends but also my page, with its nearly 5,000 "fans," as well as my others pages, including those for my various books, videos and radio programs. Thousands of hours of work, down the drain, in an account I've had for a number of years. Not exactly unexpected, since Facebook tends to be rather capricious, deleting or disabling accounts at the drop of a hat with no prior warning or notification. Meanwhile, it appears to take great effort to get Facebook to delete pages and profiles full of bigotry, hate speech and calls to violence, depending on the group or cult spewing it. Certain religions, for example, tend to get a pass while engaging in such sociopathy.

I have guesses but no real idea why Facebook disabled my account - they are not forthcoming yet. I have written to their various email addresses, such as: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , with a typical canned response highlighting reasons for disabling accounts in general. Of course, I have not committed any of these egregious transgressions. Perhaps I posted a link and message too many times, like FOUR? Gasp!! (That was the last thing I did before I discovered my account had been deleted. Here is the link in question.)

Here is the message one currently receives when one wishes to log into one's disabled FB account:

Account Disabled

Your account has been disabled. If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page here.

Next, you has to check "Yes" in the question about whether or not you have valid government identification - see the image below. Yes, Facebook wants my driver's license, etc. As the mother of an abducted child (I got him back), I've been advised strongly by various law enforcement agencies not to be tossing around such private data willy-nilly to whoever makes impertinent demands of it.

They do say we can cover up our address and license number, for example, which is okay, except that they will still know what state our license is in. A passport doesn't have an address at all, so that's not as bad. We may be at a loggerheads with FB. In the meantime, check here. Also be sure to join my Google+ account. I don't care all that much for Google+ - I've been on there for quite some time but am in fewer than 500 circles, while almost no one ever comments on my posts there - but it will do in a pinch.

One lesson here: Do not post anything to Facebook that you don't have saved elsewhere, such as notes, etc., if you wanted to keep those. Fortunately, I didn't post all that much original material as concerns essays to my FB page - thousands of comments, of course. And I put in a huge amount of time in that account, so FB really simply behaves badly when it does something like that.

Here is a contact form to fill out if Facebook disables your account.

The question dared to be asked and answered in a new book by the indefatigable Robert Spencer: Did Muhammad Exist? And he does a great job of answering that question, very scientific, based on serious documentation. He has all the bases covered well, indeed, from what I have seen, which is mostly a video debate he and David Wood did with Anjem Choudary and Omar Bakri. In that debate, the Christians (Spencer-Wood) mopped the floor with the Muslims (Choudary-Bakri), the latter of whom surprisingly didn't go ballistic at the very question of whether or not Mohammed existed. All they could do, however, other than present a few "facts" that Spencer easily swatted away, was to state over and over again that Mohammed existed because the Koran says so!

The argument here, of course, is that the Koran is the inerrant Word of God, infallibly dictated to the illiterate Mohammed by the archangel Gabriel while the "prophet" was in a cave. This Word of God was then passed along orally for years to decades, before being collected by later generations - with the result that much of it was lost. One would have thought that the omniscient and omnipotent Allah might have foreseen such a development and guaranteed that nothing would be lost by securing the transmission in writing in the first place. Or - better yet! - he could have simply made everyone instantly a perfect Muslim with the snap of his all-powerful fingers! Why rely on passing along, century after century, parts of a book probably recorded imperfectly?

In any case, at the review of Spencer's book from The Blaze, a few Muslims are getting into it with numerous Christians, both factions defending their own cults against ridicule. The book itself is being pushed by a number of Christian and Jewish organizations with somewhat unrestrained glee.

Love how all these Christian and Jewish organizations are jumping all over this one, while steadfastly ignoring the even bigger elephant in the room!

As Robert Spencer succinctly put it concerning Mohammed: "Legendary elaboration of a mythical figure."

Hello! That's exactly how we can truthfully describe the "Jesus Christ" of the New Testament! And Jesus mythicists have done an equally great and scientific job analyzing the data concerning the Christian founder as Spencer has done here.

So, where's all the media attention for that subject? (Despite Ehrman's new book?)

*cue crickets*

Note also that on my forum we have been discussing for years whether or not Mohammed is a mythical figure.

(We welcome FTN guestwriter and fellow mythicist Frank Zindler, editor of American Atheist Magazine and Director of American Atheist Press, rebutting the "historical" Jesus of Bart Ehrman's rendering in his recent book Did Jesus Exist?)

Bart's Subtitle

By Frank R. Zindler
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The subtitle of Bart Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist? promises The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. This leads prospective readers to expect that the Jesus of concern in the book is to be associated with the "town" of Nazareth and that it is this identifying tie between Nazareth and Jesus that will be the major investigative concern of the book. One would expect to find evidence supporting the historical existence of not just any-old Jesus. Rather, one anticipates learning the evidence supporting the existence of a Jesus who lived in a place called Nazareth at the turn of the era.

Evangelical and fundamentalist readers might further expect to learn whether or not the Nazareth from which Ehrman’s Jesus came was the place described in the gospels—a town big enough to have a synagogue placed "on the brow of the hill" (Luke 4:28-30).

Alas, the Jesus of Nazareth found in Bart's subtitle is almost completely absent from the book. Only eleven times in the 360-page book can we find the expression "Jesus of Nazareth," although the word "Nazareth" occurs 87 times. Three of the 11 appearances of "Jesus of Nazareth" occur on the title page, the copyright page, and a section heading. He appears two more times in the references at the back of the book, leaving a total of six places in the book where the phrase "Jesus of Nazareth" is actually employed by Ehrman himself. This averages one occurrence per every 60 pages! This fact does not promote the impression that Jesus of Nazareth is the actual character whose historical existence Ehrman intends to establish.

"The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of heaven upon earth, and died to give his work its final consecration, never had any existence."

But it seems I have miscounted the number of places where Ehrman himself refers to Jesus of Nazareth. One of the six actually turns out to be a quotation from Albert Schweitzer:

"There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus. The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of heaven upon earth, and died to give his work its final consecration, never had any existence…"

It is hard to see how this quotation supports Ehrman's thesis, even though it is true that Schweitzer himself believed in the existence of an historical Jesus from somewhere or other. (In fact, Ehrman nonchalantly comments on page 191, "If Jesus existed, as the evidence suggests, but Nazareth did not, as this [mythicist] assertion claims, then he merely came from somewhere else."

Jesus of Timbuktu!

So there you have it! Ehrman's book proving the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth might actually be proving the existence of Jesus of Hoboken, Jesus of Rancho Cucamonga, or even the Jesus of Timbukthree instead! In the second edition of this book, I would suggest the subtitle be changed to read The Historical Argument for Jesus of Fill-in-the-Blank.

Of the remaining five places where Ehrman uses the phrase "Jesus of Nazareth," one of them is a misrepresentation of the writings of the ancient Jewish historian Josephus:

"In his various writings Josephus mentions a large number of Jews, especially as they were important for the social, political, and historical situation in Palestine. As it turns out, he discusses several persons named Jesus, and he deals briefly also with John the Baptist. And on two occasions, at least in the writings as they have come down to us today, he mentions Jesus of Nazareth."

Contrary to Ehrman's claim, however, Josephus never refers to a "Jesus of Nazareth." (Amazingly, Ehrman actually quotes the two disputed Josephan passages in his book where readers can immediately see that Nazareth does not occur in the passages quoted!) This fact is important, because Josephus, although he refers to forty-five places in Galilee and fortified a town less than two miles from present-day Nazareth, knew nothing of Nazareth itself. Naturally, then, he could not be witness to any character styled Jesus of Nazareth. Moreover, Josephus was from a priestly family. How could he have ignored a polis [city-state] that had a synagogue?

This leaves four references to Jesus of Nazareth for us to examine amidst 360 pages of expectedly well-written prose. One of the three remainders is a rather anecdotal comment about Ehrman's experience at a Humanist conference where many of the participants expressed mythicist leanings:

"…many of them were completely taken aback when they learned that I have a different view, that I think that there certainly was a Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and about whom we can say a good deal as a historical figure."

Formally, this anecdote is merely a reference to personal experience. Even so, it makes the concealed unsubstantiated claim that "we can say a good deal [about Jesus] as a historical figure." One easily can forget that this hidden claim is a wild exaggeration. We can say a good deal about Jesus of Nazareth? Really? Why, then, does Ehrman say virtually nothing specifically pertaining to Jesus of Nazareth in his entire book?

Assorted fallacies

Two of the remaining three references to Jesus of Nazareth are simple instances of the fallacies of informal logic known as the appeal to authority and the ad populum ("three million Frenchmen can't be wrong") fallacies. The first quotation of this sort is from his argument that mythicists generally do not have enough specialized education to qualify them to write about a mythical Jesus of Nazareth. They aren't experts:

"It is striking that virtually everyone who has spent all the years needed to attain these qualifications is convinced that Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical figure."

The second passage embodying these fallacies is found in the section of his book entitled "The Gospels and Their Written Sources":

"Once it is conceded that the Gospels can and should be treated as historical sources, no different from other historical sources infused with their author's biases, it starts to become clear why historians have almost universally agreed that whatever else one might say about him, Jesus of Nazareth lived in first-century Palestine and was crucified by the prefect [Ehrman corrects Tacitus concerning Pilate's title] of Judea."

Simply stating the obvious fact that the vast majority of New Testament specialists are historicists is not evidence for the concealed proposition "Jesus of Nazareth once lived in Roman Palestine and was crucified by Pontius Pilate." That is a statement in need of proof—proof for which mythicists seek in vain in the pages of Ehrman's book.

That fact leaves us with only one passage in the entire book where Ehrman uses the name "Jesus of Nazareth" as an integral part of his argument. This instance is found in his discussion of methodology to separate the miraculous Jesus from the mundane Jesus:

"The reason this line of reasoning is in error is that we are not asking whether Jesus really did miracles and, if so, why they (and he) are not mentioned by pagan sources. We are asking whether Jesus of Nazareth actually existed. Only after establishing that he did exist can we go on to ask if he did miracles. If we decide that he did, only then can we revisit the question of why no one, in that case, mentions him."

We are left, therefore, with a book that isn't really intended to prove the existence of a god-man who came from a place called Nazareth. Ehrman has hedged his bets and is attempting to prove the existence of any Jesus who can be pressed into service to explain a unitary origin of Christianity.

Why Jesus?

One may fairly ask at this point, "Why should this initiating stimulator have been named Jesus either? Wasn't he named Jesus because the Aramaic equivalent (yeshua‘) means Savior? In Septuagint Greek, the word IESOUS can also represent the name Joshua. Maybe we should be looking for a Joshua instead of a Savior?

But why, exactly, would Ehrman suppose that Jesus is the first name of his putative character, rather than a title or epithet? He knows that Christ is a title, not a name. Why not Jesus? Moreover, wasn't Jesus the ultimate name bestowed upon Paul’s "Christ Jesus" in the so-called Kenosis Hymn (Philippians 2:5-11)?

"Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus...

Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him [Christ Jesus], and given him a name which is above every name: that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth."

Isn't Jesus here a name of magical power given to a being who was called "Christ" before he was titled Jesus? Isn't that why we still find occasional references to Christ Jesus instead of Jesus Christ?

Is it not the case that if - as the consensus of historicist scholarly opinion holds - unlike Hinduism and traditional Egyptian, Greek and Roman religions, Christianity began at a single point in time and was initiated by a single person, couldn't that person have been named Ichabod as well as Savior? Couldn't the name of Savior have been given to him after his death? If we no longer have to think of Christianity as having been founded by a "Jesus of Nazareth," couldn't it have been founded by someone named anything at all?

In Did Jesus Exist? Ehrman claims to have presented evidence for the existence of "Jesus of Nazareth." Mythicists in the rebuttals that will follow me, however, shall look for evidence for the existence of Ehrman's evidence.

Further Reading

Where Jesus Never Walked:

Nazareth is not mentioned even once in the entire Old Testament, nor do any ancient historians or geographers mention it before the beginning of the fourth century. The Talmud, although it names 63 Galilean towns, knows nothing of Nazareth. Josephus, who wrote extensively about Galilee (a region roughly the size of Rhode Island) and conducted military operations back and forth across the tiny territory in the last half of the first century, mentions Nazareth not even once -- although he does mention by name 45 other cities and villages of Galilee. This is even more telling when one discovers that Josephus does mention Japha, a village which is just over a mile from present-day Nazareth! Josephus tells us that he was occupied there for some time. Today, Japha can be considered a suburb of Nazareth, but in Josephus' day, I'll wager, the people of Japha buried their dead in the tombs of the unnamed necropolis that now underlies the modern city called Nazareth....

Pat Condell speaks the frank truth, as always. He calls the Saudi clerics "a bunch of rancid, old closeted homosexuals digging around in scripture to find ways of justifying their infantile fear of women."

This post is off-topic, but I'm partial to cactii and succulents, so my eyes bugged out over these images!

These photos were taken by Tony Agee. I opened my Google+ page and found this first one staring me in the face - stunning! Took my breath away!

For more images, visit Tony Agee's Google+ page

Among the dozen or so criticisms of my book The Christ Conspiracy by Bart Ehrman in his book Did Jesus Exist? (24) appears the following, regarding the time and effort spent on the canonization of the New Testament part of the Bible. In this criticism, Ehrman quotes my book and summarizes another point, commenting in brackets:

"It took well over a thousand years to canonize the New Testament," and "many councils" were needed to differentiate the inspired from the spurious books (31). [Actually, the first author to list our canon of the New Testament was the church father Athanasius in the year 367; the comment about "many councils" is simply made up.]

In this regard, Ehrman himself has done much to demonstrate that the NT canon changed over the decades to centuries, so that point is accepted.

The Muratorian Canon and Athanasius

The oldest extant canon appears to be the Muratorian Fragment, dated at the earliest to around 200, more than a century and a half before the time of Athanasius:

…the Muratorian fragment is evidence that, perhaps as early as 200, there existed a set of Christian writings somewhat similar to the twenty-seven-book NT canon, which included four gospels and argued against objections to them. Thus, while there was a good measure of debate in the Early Church over the New Testament canon, the major writings are claimed to have been accepted by almost all Christians by the middle of the 3rd century.

In his Easter letter of 367, Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, gave a list of the books that would become the twenty-seven-book NT canon, and he used the word "canonized" (kanonizomena) in regards to them. The first council that accepted the present canon of the New Testament may have been the Synod of Hippo Regius in North Africa (AD 393)... ("Development of the New Testament Canon")

The claim that "the canon" was not finalized for a thousand years refers to the eventual canons of different denominations established at later councils:

… some claim that, from the 4th century, there existed unanimity in the West concerning the New Testament canon (as it is today), and that, by the 5th century, the Eastern Church, with a few exceptions, had come to accept the Book of Revelation and thus had come into harmony on the matter of the canon. Nonetheless, full dogmatic articulations of the canon were not made until the Canon of Trent of 1546 for Roman Catholicism, the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563 for the Church of England, the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1647 for Calvinism, and the Synod of Jerusalem of 1672 for the Greek Orthodox. ("Development of the New Testament Canon")

As we can see, my contention that it took over a thousand years to develop the canon is accurate, as is my claim that such a formation required "many councils."

The many councils

Despite Ehrman's calumny (once again) that I "made things up," the fact remains that there were many councils at which Christian doctrine was hashed out. In The Christ Conspiracy (31), I provided relevant quotes describing how these meetings were conducted, sometimes rather violently and brutally. These gatherings included the well-known First Council of Nicaea (325), as well as the Council of Constantinople (381), First Council of Ephesus (431), Council of Chalcedon (451), Second Council of Constantinople (553), Third Council of Constantinople (680-1), the Quinisext Council (692) and the Second Council of Nicaea (787), this latter serving as the “seventh of the first seven ecumenical councils.” The penultimate council listed here, although not well known, included discussion of the biblical canon, as did earlier councils.

In his thorough analysis of these councils, Voting about God in Early Church Councils (2), Yale University historian Dr. Ramsay MacMullen provides long lists and a map, remarking:

From the two and a quarter centuries post-325, surviving evidence allows the location of 255 councils on the map and in time... Two or three might better be called conferences; and, besides, the great majority of the rest were not focused on theology; rather, on internal government: as, what were the rights of deacons against presbyters? or what office should determine the rites of baptism? Yet their procedures and participation were no different than in those assemblages focused on credal questions. To understand one sort is to understand all.

Again, there were many councils held to discuss Church doctrine and organization, a number of which focused on credal questions, i.e., theological issues. Added to this list is the Council of Trent (1546), the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647) and the Synod of Jerusalem (1672) at which the Catholic and Protestant canons were finalized. To reiterate:

The Christian Biblical canon is the set of books Christians regard as divinely inspired and constituting the Christian Bible. Books included in the Christian Biblical canons of both the Old and New Testament were decided at the Council of Trent (1546), by the Thirty-Nine Articles (1563), the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), and the Synod of Jerusalem (1672) for the Catholic Church, the Church of England, Calvinism and the Orthodox Church respectively. ("Development of the Christian biblical canon")

The bottom line is that, rather than having been set in stone by the infallible finger of God from the beginning, the biblical canon has been changed by men over a period greater than a millennium, and, indeed, to this day remains different in the Catholic and Protestant Bibles. These facts provide evidence that the Bible has a very human origin and does not represent "God's Inerrant Word" filled with "accurate history" written down by "infallibly inspired" scribes.

Further Reading

Does early Church father Justin Martyr quote the gospels?
Does Josephus prove a historical Jesus?
The Jesus Forgery: Josephus Untangled
The Son-Sun pun strawman
Bart Ehrman: 'Mythicist's arguments are fairly plausible'
The phallic 'Savior of the World' hidden in the Vatican
Did Jesus Exist? forum thread
The Late Dating of the Gospels

Here's a brief explanation of the subject of mythicism as it applies to Jesus and others. It is well known that, upon contact with the Greek culture as it spread east, into Persia, etc., during the first centuries surrounding the common era, many cultures began applying attributes of Greek gods and goddesses to their local deities. These cultures also increasingly depicted their deities as anthropomorphized, represented in art as human beings, as had been done by the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians in particular. In this way, their gods - mythical beings - while acquiring greater and more supernatural attributes also became further personalized, to the point where they were depicted as men and women having adventures on Earth.

The same process occurred with the Jewish god Yahweh, who acquired attributes from the Greek gods: For example, the Jerusalem temple was shared by Yahweh and Zeus during the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (c. 215-c. 154 BCE). As this pantheon of anthropomorphized gods increased with the expansion of the Roman Empire, which reached from Great Britain to the Near East and included an enormous amount of deities, the Jewish priesthood (and others) did the same thing that everyone else was doing: It anthropomorphized its god, turning the long-awaited messiah of the Old Testament into "God's son," just as Zeus had a supernatural son, Hercules. This fictional Jewish godman then served as a "historical" competitor with these other gods, acquiring their various attributions, in order to reign supreme.

Hopefully, that explanation clarifies the process by which the mythical composite figure of "Jesus Christ" in the New Testament came to be. The mythical, spiritual and allegorical was made into the "historical," not the other way around.

Well, this turns out better than we thought. LOL. Extreme leftist atheists might want to rethink their alliances. Islam is not a friend to freethought and atheism.

Just in case you can't get enough of this peaceful and loving group of people, here's another one!

I don't know about you, but such beauty, grace and benevolence really makes me want to convert!

In his new book Did Jesus Exist? (23), referring to my discussion in The Christ Conspiracy of the second-century dating of the New Testament gospels, Bart Ehrman summarizes a contention in my work about whether or not the early Church father Justin Martyr (fl. 150 AD/CE) mentioned or quoted the gospels, thus providing proof that they existed in his time. After presenting the contention, Ehrman then comments (in brackets):

The second-century church father Justin never quotes or mentions any of the Gospels (25). [This simply isn't true: he mentions the gospels on numerous occasions; typically he calls them "Memoirs of the Apostles" and quotes from them, especially from Matthew, Mark and Luke.]

Firstly, it should be noted that what Ehrman has "cited" here is not a quote from my book and nothing that I personally state on p. 25 therein. As I have observed elsewhere, it appears again as if Ehrman was working from "Cliff Notes" of my book, provided to him by his assistants, because the sentence he cites, "The second-century church father Justin never quotes or mentions any of the Gospels," is a summary of quotes I provided in The Christ Conspiracy ("Christ Con" or "CC") by John E. Remsburg and Charles Waite. In these quotes, the authors follow their assessment with sound commentary, a fact that Ehrman has evidently chosen to ignore—if he even read these paragraphs in the first place.

Secondly, if Ehrman had followed up on my work or even on my citations in Christ Con, he would have discovered that his claim concerning Justin Martyr, while shared by many, ranks as false and inaccurate. A closer look at Justin's writings reveals not what scholars and Christian believers want to find but what is really there: No verbatim quotes or unambiguous citations from the canonical gospels as we have them appear anywhere in Justin's extant works. Nor does Justin Martyr name any of the evangelists in any known text, an erroneous impression given by Ehrman’s wording here. In other words, Matthew, Mark and Luke are never named by Justin; nor is John.

"No verbatim quotes or unambiguous citations from the canonical gospels as we have them appear anywhere in Justin's extant works."

In addition to providing some evidence in Christ Con (25, etc.), in my books Suns of God ("SOG") and Who Was Jesus? I have written extensively about the issue of when the canonical gospels as we have them appear in the historical record, including whether or not Justin knew of them. As I demonstrate in CC and SOG (419ff), Justin is careful in his citations from the Old Testament; yet, he does not quote any gospel verbatim or cite any evangelist by name.

In this regard, in his book The Christ: A Critical Review and Analysis of the Evidence of His Existence - in a quote I provided in Christ Con on the very page cited by Ehrman - Remsburg remarks:

The Four Gospels were unknown to the early Church Fathers. Justin Martyr, the most eminent of the early Fathers, wrote about the middle of the second century. His writings in proof of the divinity of Christ demanded the use of these Gospels, had they existed in his time. He makes more than 300 quotations from the books of the Old Testament, and nearly one hundred from the Apocryphal books of the New Testament; but none from the four Gospels. Rev. Giles says: "The very names of the Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, are never mentioned by him (Justin)—do not occur once in all his writings."

As we can see, there is more to this story than meets the eye.