Bart Ehrman is fascinating to listen to as always, so like all of his stuff, this video is worth checking out.
Personally, I've known about the Q Source since my freshman year at Calvin College, where I learned about it in religion 101. But, after watching this video, I've realized that I was actually mistaken in some of my conceptions about Q.
There are sections of Matthew and Luke which are word for word the same, but do not appear in Mark. More specifically, there are a number of sayings of Jesus which are word for word the same, and which furthermore appear in the same order in both Matthew and Luke, but not Mark.... So since the authors of the Gospels Matthew and Luke either didn’t know each other, or mistrusted each other, it is hypothesized by scholars that there must have been some collections of sayings of Jesus (so named as the “Q” source) which both Matthew and Luke were copying from, and which has since been lost to history.
But after watching this Bart Ehrman video, I realize that actually the sayings from the Q source are not in the same order in Matthew and Luke.
I guess this is yet another reminder for me to be careful every time I think I know everything.
But regardless, the video is really interesting, and worth watching
I really should have written this post years ago, given that this information has been living in my head rent free since 8th grade. I've alluded to it or referenced it many times before on this blog (e.g, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). But I've never made a full post properly explaining it. So here we go.
When I was in 8th grade, our 8th grade Bible teacher did a lesson on all of the contradictions in the resurrection account (*1). He told us that if you examine the different accounts of the resurrection in the Bible, they all contradict each other in ways that are impossible to harmonize. He told us that the Church had sometimes tried to produce harmonized accounts of the resurrection story, but that none of those accounts worked. (*2)
He then had us open our Bibles, and read the resurrection accounts in each of the 4 different gospels, and pointed out the contradictions between them. And sure enough, there were big contradictions between them that just couldn't be harmonized with each other. It blew my mind at the time, because it was one of the first times that I realized there were big problems with the biblical narrative (*3).
Now, I don't want to get too much into the weeds here discussing every contradictory detail about the resurrection across all 4 gospels. We'd be here all day. (Wikipedia has a nice chart listing some of the main differences, if you wanted to check there.) So let's just compare Matthew and John as an example.
Here is Matthew 28 from the NIV:
1 After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb.
2 There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. 3 His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. 4 The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.
5 The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. 6 He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. 7 Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.”
8 So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. 9 Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him. 10 Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”
And here is John 20:
1 Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. 2 So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”
3 So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. 4 Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5 He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. 6 Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, 7 as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen. 8 Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. 9 (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.) 10 Then the disciples went back to where they were staying.
11 Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb 12 and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.
13 They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”
“They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” 14 At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.
15 He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”
Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”
16 Jesus said to her, “Mary.”
She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”).
17 Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
18 Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her.
You can see, of course, that they both can't be true. In one version, the women see the angel come down, there's a violent earthquake, they see the stone rolled away, and the angel tells them that Jesus has risen, and the women are filled with joy.
In the second version, Mary Magdalene arrives by herself, she sees that the stone is already gone, and the tomb is empty and (without an angel to tell her what is happening) she assumes that someone has removed Jesus's body, and asks the gardener what he did with the body, before realizing the gardener is Jesus.
In addition to the shock of realizing that the Biblical narrative was contradictory, I remember also being surprised that I had never noticed these contradictions before. Because I had heard both of these stories many times before in Sunday School. I had heard the story about how the angel had come down in front of the tomb to tell the women that Jesus was resurrected. And I had also heard the story about how Mary Magdalene had found an empty tomb, and then mistaken Jesus for the gardener. And I had never before realized that those two stories contradicted each other. Why had I never realized this before? (*4)
Now, believe it or not, our 8th grade Bible teacher was actually a conservative Christian, and his purpose in teaching us about the contradictions in the resurrection account was not to weaken our faith, but rather to make our faith stronger. In his view, these contradictions proved that the resurrection had to be real.
His logic was as follows:
* He said that eye-witness accounts often contain contradictory details. Whenever there is a car accident, eye witnesses who are questioned afterwards often will remember the incident differently.
* He also said claimed that if accounts are too similar, it invites suspicion. People who are looking to perpetuate a fraud will take care to make sure that their stories are all consistent. He mentioned his background working with juvenile delinquents in the past. Whenever they committed any kind of a crime, the first thing they did was to get together to make sure that they all had their "stories straight" in case they got questioned by the police.
Thus, fact that the gospels all have contradictory stories indicate that the apostles weren't trying to create a fraud, because if they had been, they would surely have met together to get their "stories straight". And so, it proves the truth of the resurrection.
In the 30+ years since this lesson, I have often wondered how representative his thinking was of Christian apologetics in general. He was actually the only Christian I ever heard who wanted to talk about the contradictions in the resurrection account. All the other Christians I've known either don't know about the contradictions in the resurrection account, or would prefer not to talk about them.
(That following Sunday, I brought the subject up with my Sunday School teacher, and mentioned the contradictions in the resurrection account, and how they can't be harmonized. She gave me a blank stare, and then just changed the subject to something else.) (*5)
So, I guess I'm not sure who I'm talking to here, but just for the record, let me go through all the reasons why I've come to believe his argument doesn't make sense.
Let's start with the claim that eye-witness accounts often contain differing information. Fine. I'll accept this for some of the minor details. Maybe after witnessing a high speed car-crash, some of the bystanders might have differing recollections on how fast the cars were going, or who hit who first. "Gee officer, it all happened so fast, I'm not sure if the blue car was in the intersection first, or the red car."
But does this work for major details? Can you say, for example, "Gee officer, it all happened so fast, I'm not sure if there was a violent earthquake and an angel came down from heaven and rolled away the stone, or if I came up to the tomb and it was just empty with no one there."
And who are the multiple witnesses in this scenario anyway? If we're assuming the gospels are based on eye-witness testimony (*6), then presumably Matthew and John both are getting their information from Mary Magdalene, right?
But there are even bigger problems. We haven't yet talked about the first appearance of Jesus to the disciples. In the gospel of Luke, Jesus appears to his disciples while they are still in Jerusalem. Some of them doubt he's alive, but Jesus gives them proofs and opens their minds. And then after they believe, Jesus leads them out to Bethany, and ascends to heaven from there.
36 While they were still talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.”
37 They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost. 38 He said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts rise in your minds? 39 Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.”
40 When he had said this, he showed them his hands and feet. 41 And while they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement, he asked them, “Do you have anything here to eat?” 42 They gave him a piece of broiled fish, 43 and he took it and ate it in their presence.
44 He said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms.”
45 Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. 46 He told them, “This is what is written: The Messiah will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, 47 and repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. 48 You are witnesses of these things. 49 I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”
50 When he had led them out to the vicinity of Bethany, he lifted up his hands and blessed them. 51 While he was blessing them, he left them and was taken up into heaven. 52 Then they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy. 53 And they stayed continually at the temple, praising God.
Acts (the companion book to Luke) offers a slightly different account in which Jesus stayed with his disciples for 40 days in Jerusalem.
But in the gospel of Matthew, Jesus told Mary to tell the disciples to meet him at Galilee, and so the surviving 11 disciples went to Galilee, and Jesus appeared to them there. In Matthew, this is obviously the first time Jesus is appearing to his disciples, because some of them are still doubting that he's alive.
16 Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. 17 When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.
So again, you can see why you can't just explain this away by assuming confused eye-witnesses. "Gee officer, it all happened so fast, I'm not sure if Jesus appeared to us that night in Jerusalem, and then stayed with us in Jerusalem for 40 days, or if we had to hike all the way out to Galilee to see him for the first time."
So there's that.
Secondly, it struck me even as an 8th grader that my teacher was using backwards logic by assuming that the lack of similarities meant that the Gospel stories had to be true.
Follow me on this:
The logic is that police are more likely to believe an alibi if the story is consistent across multiple people. This is because if the police know that if the preparators all tell different stories, then it is likely that they are lying. The juvenile delinquents know this, therefore they make sure to make their stories consistent.
...therefore we have to assume that consistent stories are unreliable, and contradictory stories are true? Is that the logic? I mean, that's kind of backwards, right? The reason criminals take such trouble to get their stories straight is because the police know that consistent stories are more likely to be true than inconsistent ones.
Imagine two policeman are working on the case:
1st policeman: Well, they must be telling the truth.
2nd policeman: What do you mean? Their stories don't match up at all.
1st policeman: Yeah, that proves they were telling the truth. If they were lying, they would have tried to get their stories straight before they came in here.
2nd policeman: But none of the details lined up. They couldn't even agree on what town it took place in. One of them said Jerusalem, the other one said Galilee.
1st policeman: That just proves they must have been telling the truth all along.
And then, there's the synoptic problem. I didn't know this in 8th grade, but it turns out that scholars believe that Matthew and Luke were both copying from Mark, because a number of passages are word for word identical--I explained all about the synoptic problem in this previous post here.
So, if the argument is that different and contradictory accounts are reliable, and similar reports are unreliable, then what to do about all the stories in Matthew, Mark and Luke that are exactly the same?
But wait, you might ask, if Matthew and Luke are both copying from Mark, then why do they have different accounts of Jesus appearing to his disciples after the resurrection?
And the answer is that Mark's Gospel actually originally ended at verse 8 with the angel in the empty tomb, and the women running out. Verses 9-20 were added later.
4 But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. 5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed.
6 “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’”
8 Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.
[The earliest manuscripts and some other ancient witnesses do not have verses 9–20.]
So, Matthew, Mark and Luke produce similar versions up until the point of the angel in the empty tomb. But because Mark's gospel ends here, Matthew and Luke each had to make up their own separate stories about Jesus appearing to the disciples. So Matthew makes up one story about Jesus appearing to his disciples in Galilee, and Luke makes up a story about Jesus appearing in Jerusalem (*7)
So... what to make of all this?
Bart Ehrman's explanation actually makes a lot of sense to me.
Bart Ehrman points out that our earliest accounts of the resurrection come from Paul. (Scholars believe Paul wrote his letters before the gospels were written.)
Ehrman points out that Paul mentions Jesus appearing to several people, but Paul doesn't know any of the stories that are in the gospels. Paul just mentions that Jesus appeared to people. See 1st Corinthians 15:
3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. 6 After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8 and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.
Ehrman also points out that Paul doesn't mention anything about an empty tomb or a stone rolled away. In fact, Paul doesn't mention anything about a tomb at all. Going off of Paul's account, it's not even clear Jesus was buried in a tomb.
Ehrman believes that after Jesus died, Jesus' disciples began to have visions of him. Ehrman points out that this is a fairly common phenomenon, that people often have visions of their loved ones after they died. Based on Paul's writings, that Jesus just "appeared" to various people, this seems plausible.
By the time we get to Mark's gospel, which was written in 70 AD, the story has expanded. Now we have an empty tomb.
Matthew and Luke are both copying from Mark, and expanding on Mark, so the story gets expanded yet again. Now we have stories of Jesus appearing to and interacting with his disciples.
And then finally we get John, which scholars believe is the last gospel to be written, in which these stories are even more developed. (*8) , (*9)
That makes the most sense to me of anything.
If that doesn't make sense to you, then fair enough. But then, let me know, how do you make sense of the contradictions in the resurrection account?
(*1) I grew up in the Christian school system, so we studied the Bible as one of our core subjects.
(*2) Some years ago, I linked to an article written by someone making fun of the Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties (A) attempts to harmonize the 4 different resurrection accounts. After going through the harmonization narrative beat by beat she concludes:
And there you have it. The tomb is a kind of Grand Central Station. Mary Magdalene is an idiot. The disciples need a whole lot of telling. Jesus is a master of disguise. And harmonization is a specially dishonest form of special pleading, but also – well, a bit of a joke.
I've not actually encountered any other attempts at harmonizing the resurrection accounts. If someone knows of something out there, let me know.
(*4) I had a similar feeling many years later when I learned that there are two contradictory accounts of creation in Genesis: there is the 6 day account in Genesis 1 (in which animals were created before man) and the Adam and Eve creation story in Genesis 2 (in which Adam was created first, and then the animals). I had heard both of these stories so many times, why had I never realized they contradicted each other?
(*5) One of the reasons I've held off on writing this post over the years is that I thought it was silly to write a long rebuttal to something someone said to me once in 8th grade, unless I got more evidence that this is something that was widely believed by more people than just my 8th grade teacher. But, like I said at the top of the post, this lesson has been living rent free in my head for so many years, I suppose I might as well write about it.
As to not knowing how widespread these beliefs are in Christian circles, I suppose it's somewhat on me for not reading more Christian apologetics over the years. If I was more widely read, maybe I'd have more of an idea of what the official conservative Christian line on this is.
As I mentioned in my review of The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel, Lee Strobel dips his toe into the water here and suggests that perhaps the contradictions in the resurrection account might prove the lack of collusion between the disciples. But then, on the very next page, Lee Strobel goes on to also say that properly understood, there are no contradictions in the resurrection account. This is something that is typical of Lee Strobel (as I complained about in my review). He'll often try to advance two contradictory arguments at once. Also, Lee Strobel does absolutely no work to try to prove that the resurrection accounts don't contradict each other. He just claims that they don't. Declaring something without evidence is also something that's very typical of Lee Strobel, as I also complained about in my review.
To be fair, I guess I should acknowledge that there's one other Christian writer I know who dealt with the contradictions in the resurrection story: Peter Enns in The Bible Tells Me So. Peter Enns' book was an attack on the inerrantist position from a liberal Christian perspective, so Peter Enns was very good at pointing out all the contradictions in the Bible. But, in my opinion, Peter Enns was not very good at giving the reader any other alternative framework. It's like, okay, so, all the gospels have contradictory accounts of the resurrection. So what am I supposed to do with this information? Do I still believe in the resurrection now, or what?
(*7) Technically, scholars don't think Matthew and Luke themselves made up these stories--they believe they were drawing on previous sources. But somebody must have made them up.
(*9) Incidentally, there's a similar thing going on at the beginning of Jesus's life. Neither the letters of Paul, nor the gospel of Mark, mention anything about the birth of Christ, and so both Matthew and Luke come up with their own accounts of how Jesus was born, and both Matthew and Luke create completely different accounts of the birth of Jesus--this was something I wrote about before in a previous post: Historical Problems With the Christmas Story
I re-listened to this lecture series before filming the video, but I didn't script the video ahead of time, and the result is my usual unstructured rambling. Also another consequence of not scripting is a lot of minor mistakes slipping in. For example, at one point I said Bart Ehrman taught at "South Chapel Hill" instead of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I regret that error.
And if you still haven't gotten around to it, you can listen to the lecture series here:
I know, I've already talked a lot about Bart Ehrman on this blog. So there's not much new in this video that I haven't already talked about on this blog before.
But I found the back-and-forth nature of the debate interesting nevertheless.
There wasn't a lot in this podcast I didn't already know. (Having read 4 of Bart Ehrman's books now, I pretty much knew in advance what all his responses would be to Sam Harris's questions.)
Still.... I love listening to Sam Harris, and I love listening to Bart Ehrman, so I found their discussion fascinating.
Subtitle: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth
(Book Review)
Background / My Own Biases
Before I get into the actual book itself, let me just lay out my own biases.
I suspect my own story is something that a lot of people from religious backgrounds will identify with: When I lived in a religious community, I was considered one of the radical liberals. When I got out of that religious community and went into the wider world, I discovered that in some ways my views were conservative.
Specifically, I've always believed in a historical Jesus, despite the fact that I've discovered that many secularists think that there is no good evidence that Jesus ever existed.
Over the years I've transitioned from a Christian to an agnostic. But I've never doubted that Jesus of Nazareth actually existed.
I've doubted that he was the son of God, I've doubted that he performed miracles, and I've doubted that he was raised from the dead. But I've never doubted there must have been some sort of charismatic religious figure in first century Palestine who got crucified by the Romans. For the same reasons that I don't doubt that Buddha or Mohammed existed. Religions don't just spring up spontaneously out of nowhere. There must have been some sort of historical event which started the whole thing.
But...once I moved out into the wider world, I've been surprised by how many people don't think Jesus even existed.
It is a surprisingly widespread view among secularists nowadays.
Over the past 15 years, I've encountered it numerous times in conversation.
Also, to the extent I follow these things online, it's also a very popular view among the secularist community on the Internet.
And for those of us who know anything about history, it is extremely irritating. After all, there are four different Canonical Gospels, several apocryphal Gospels, all the letters of Paul, all the early Church debates--how could people think this just spontaneous sprung out of nothing. Whatever else you might say about the Bible, it is not something that someone made up in a dark room somewhere to fool everyone. So why were people just persisting with this dumb assertion?
Bart Ehrman is in the same position as me. He's not a Christian, he's an agnostic. But he's getting seriously annoyed at the number of secularists who think Jesus didn't even exist.
As Bart Ehrman says, this view is now disturbingly widespread: "For decades it was the dominant view in countries such as the Soviet Union. Yet more striking, it appears to be the majority view in some regions of the West today, including some parts of Scandinavia" (Author's introduction p.3)
And so Ehrman decided to write a book about it.
As Ehrman says in his introduction: "...as a historian I think evidence matters. And the past matters. And for anyone to whom both evidence and the past matter, a dispassionate consideration of the case makes it quite plain: Jesus did exist." (p.6)
Why I'm Reading This Book Now
I already agreed with Bart Ehrman before I even cracked open the cover of this book.
In that respect, I guess there was probably no need for me to buy the book. But if I'm being completely honest, a large part of the reason I handed over the money for this book was the pleasures of confirmation bias--we humans get immense pleasure from reading something which confirms what we already believe.
I thought of all those stupid conversations I'd had in bars where people said, "There's no evidence Jesus even existed," and I thought, "I can't wait to see how thoroughly Bart Ehrman demolishes that dumb argument."
I was also curious, even though I already agreed with its conclusion, to see just how thoroughly the argument could be made for Jesus's existence.
I'm not a very smart or logical guy myself, but I can take a certain pleasure in following someone else's logic, and I wanted to see seeing how Bart Ehrman would use simple logic and the ancient sources to construct his argument.
And as an ancient history nerd, I was interested in the time period.
Finally, this book was of interest for its "Man-bites-dog" factor. Usually Bart Ehrman outrages the Christians, and delights the atheists. It was funny to see the guns turned in the other direction for once, and to see the Bart Ehrman upsetting the atheists.
This book actually came out a few years ago now, but I've avoided picking it up for a while.
In 2013 I read several books by Bart Ehrman: Forged, Misquoting Jesus, and Jesus, Interrupted, all in the same year. I loved each of those books (I reviewed each of them favorably on my blog), but I also noticed that a lot of the same information and examples were getting repeated from book to book.
A friend of mine warned me that Did Jesus Exist? also repeated a lot of the same information. So I thought I'd wait a few years before diving into Bart Ehrman again.
But, now it's 2017, enough time has passed, and when I saw this book in an airport bookstore while waiting for my flight, I snatched it up.
The Review
So, as I mentioned above, I was already on board with Bart Ehrman before I even cracked open the book.
But for what it's worth, I think he makes his case brilliantly. He thoroughly demolishes any argument for Jesus being a myth.
The book is divided into three parts.
Part 1 is on the positive evidence for the historical Jesus.
Although this confirmed what I already thought, it was a brilliant case. Bart Ehrman brings out all the evidence, both from Christian and non-Christian sources.
What's great about this book is how thoroughly it goes into all the evidence.
To give one example of many: there's a much debated passage from Jewish historian Josephus in which Josephus talks about the life of Jesus--the infamous Testimonium Flavianum (W) . Some people think it's authentic, some people think it's a Christian forgery, and some people think it contains some authentic material that Christians later touched up.
Bart Ehrman goes into a lot of detail on this section, giving all the evidence for and against each opinion. If you're enough of a nerd to be fascinated by all this detail (and I am) then it's great stuff.
There's another excellent section on what we can learn from the Gospels and Paul's letters. Although Bart Ehrman is not a Christian, he does a good job of showing what a historian can learn from these documents if they are examined as historical documents and not as religious documents.
It's not narrative history (which is normally my favorite), but for history nerds it's a fascinating look into the way historians use ancient sources, and how historians problem-solve these kind of riddles.
The middle of the book is part 2, in which Bart Ehrman rebuts the mythicists' claims.
I suppose this section is unavoidable. Bart Erhman can't very well set out to write a book like this and not address the mythicists' claims head on. But for me, it was the most boring part of the book.
Part of the problem is that there is not one mythicist theory, but many mythicist theories.
Bart Ehrman sensibly decides not to bother arguing against every crazy person with an Internet account, and restricts himself to rebutting only mythicist theories that come from credentialed scholars.
But even here, there are several different competing theories, and the whole section has an endless feeling of "This person says this, and here' s why he's wrong, and this person says this, and here's why he's wrong, and this person says this, and..."
Plus, Bart Ehrman had made the positive case for Jesus so thoroughly in the previous section that when he comes to rebutting the mythicists, he is largely just repeating what he already established in part 1.
I'll be honest, my eyes glazed over a bit in Part 2. But I struggled through it, and made it to Part 3.
The good news is that Part 2 can easily be skipped over. None of the information in Part 2 comes back again in Part 3, so if you find yourself getting bored by Part 2 (as I did) then just skip ahead to part 3 and nothing will be lost.
Part 3 is on "Who Was the Historical Jesus?"
Much of Part 3 is ground Bart Ehrman already covered in Jesus, Interrupted, but it is still interesting.
Nitpicks, Addendums, and Other Links
Robert Price
* One of the more famous mythicists that Bart Ehrman argues against in this book is Robert Price. I've never read any of Robert Price's books, but I'm somewhat familiar with him by reputation. I mentioned him briefly before in this post here.
Youtube Debate
* Bart Ehrman recently debated Robert Price in person. The debate took place on October 21, 2016, but only just last month got uploaded onto Youtube. If you want to get a good flavor for the arguments in Bart Ehrman's book, this debate is a great starter. Watch it here.
Dale Martin on the Historical Jesus
* For anyone who's interested, Dale Martin in his lectures on the New Testament also has a great lecture on The Historical Jesus. See here: Lecture 13 - The Historical Jesus . Dale Martin is in agreement with Bart Ehrman, and uses the exact same evaluative criteria as Bart Ehrman, but Dale Martin cites several more examples that Bart Ehrman leaves out of his book. For example, Dale Martin does a good job of explaining in more detail why historians believe Jesus's baptism by John the Baptist must have been historical. (Bart Ehrman mentions this, but Dale Martin explains it better).
Christopher Hicthens on the Historical Jesus
*Atheist Christopher Hitchens, while he does hedge his bets somewhat on this question, does admit that it's precisely the contradictions and problems in the Gospels that actually seem to point to a historical basis for Jesus.
For example, both Matthew and Luke come up with clumsy and contradictory stories to explain why Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Even though Jesus was well-known to have come from the town of Nazareth, it was necessary for the Gospellers to have him born in Bethlehem in order to fulfill the Old Testament prophecies. As Christopher Hitchens points out, the clumsy forgeries themselves are indicative of something. If someone was just making the whole story up from scratch, why not just have Jesus come from Bethlehem and be done with it? (Watch this video from 2:40 to see Hitchens make this point.)
This is something else that Bart Ehrman could have said in his book, but doesn't. (He hints at this, but doesn't make the point nearly as well as Christopher Hitchens does.)
But How Do We Know That Paul Existed?
* In the debate I linked to above, one of the audience members catches Bart Ehrman off guard by asking, "How do we know that Paul existed?" (Watch the video from 2:28:14 ).
In Did Jesus Exist?, Bart Ehrman rests much of his case on the historical evidence of Paul's letters. Ehrman takes it for granted that everyone agrees that Paul existed.
Indeed, anyone with any sort of background in history or Biblical studies takes it for granted that Paul existed, so Bart Ehrman probably thought he didn't need to explain why Paul existed.
But when writing for the general public, you can't take anything for granted. And a lot of skeptics out there are skeptical of everything. (Indeed, one of the criticisms that Erhman's critics make in this video here is that he relies too much on Biblical sources, when the whole debate is calling into question the accuracy of those Biblical sources). So this is one place where I think Ehrman slipped up slightly. When writing for a general audience, Bart Ehrman should have explained why historians believe Paul existed, and why historians believe 7 of Paul's letters are authentic.
But to be fair to Ehrman, he does do a good job in the video of answering the question on the historical Paul once it is brought up. After explaining that historians generally assume people existed unless they have a reason to think otherwise, Ehrman cites all the outside evidence for the existence of Paul.
If one wants to supplement what Ehrman said in the video, a further case for the historical Paul is made by Dale Martin in his New Testament lecture series.
At one point in his lecture, Dale Martin is talking about the letters of Paul. Of the 13 letters of Paul in the New Testament, 3 of them are definitely forgeries, and 3 of them may be forgeries (scholars are still debating), but the remaining 7 letters are universally regarded by scholars as having been authentically written by Paul.
A student asked, "But how do we know that those letters were written by Paul?"
Dale Martin answered that those 7 letters cohere together--both in terms of theology, and in terms of linguistic style--so they appear to be all written by the same author.
"There's a joke in Biblical Studies that the 7 letters must have been written by Paul, or by someone else with the same name," Dale Martin said. "I mean, they could have been written by someone else, but then you have to accept that there was someone else living at the same time, travelling to the same places, who had the exact same concerns." (I'm quoting from memory, but it was something very close to that.)
In addition to this, another reason not to doubt the authenticity of these 7 letters is that Paul appears to be airing out a lot of the Church's dirty laundry.
For example, in Galatians 2, Paul says:
When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him in public, because he was clearly wrong. Before some men who had been sent by James arrived there, Peter had been eating with the Gentile brothers. But after these men arrived, he drew back and would not eat with the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who were in favor of circumcising them. The other Jewish brothers also started acting like cowards along with Peter; and even Barnabas was swept along by their cowardly action
Dale Martin points out that the author of Acts goes through considerable effort in Acts 15 to smooth over this problem and indicate that this was just a minor disagreement that got resolved amicably. But that's not the impression you get from Paul himself.
So once again, the conflicts and contradictions indicate that there must have been a real incident here that needed to be smoothed over. If the early Church was just forging these letters in Paul's name, then why invent this quarrel between Paul and Peter and James? Why not indicate that all the Church fathers got along like one big happy family, as in the book of Acts?
Paul also mentions in 1 Corinthians 1:9 that Peter is taking his wife on missionary trips at Church expense. The tone of the letter is open to interpretation, but some people (like Robin Lane Fox) think that Paul is complaining about Peter in that verse.
To be fair to Bart Ehrman, he does indeed get a lot of mileage out of the references to Peter and James in Paul's letters. Ehrman says (repeatedly) that the fact that we have in Paul's letters an eye-witness account of both Jesus's brother and Jesus's closest disciple is some indication that Jesus probably really did exist. But perhaps Ehrman missed an opportunity to emphasize how Paul's adversarial relationship with Peter and James is another indication that this is not something the early Church would fabricate.
What About the Ressurection?
* Bart Ehrman believes that there really was an historical Jesus, but that he was just a man, and that he didn't rise from the dead.
The challenge, then, for people like Bart Ehrman is to explain how Jesus came to be regarded as God if he was just a man. Without that piece of the puzzle, the evidence for a historical Jesus is incomplete.
Very little of that information is in Did Jesus Exist?, although that's by design.
Bart Ehrman says in the introduction that he wanted to write a book about how Jesus became God, but that first he had to establish that Jesus existed in the first place.
And indeed, a couple years later, Bart Ehrman did publish How Jesus Became God (A).
I've not read that book yet, but Bart Ehrman discusses some of this in Jesus, Interrupted, which I have read, and which I'll borrow from below.
The earliest Christian documents are Paul's letters (30-50 A.D) followed by the Gospel of Mark (70 AD) followed by Matthew and Luke (somewhere around 80 AD) followed by John (around 90 AD or later).
If you put all the resurrection stories in order of when they were written, you can see the myth gradually become bigger and bigger.
In Paul's letters, the only information we have is that Jesus appeared to his disciples after his death. We have none of the stories about Jesus being in a physical body, and no stories of an empty tomb. All we know is that the some people claim to have seen Jesus after he died. Bart Ehrman suggests that this was just some sort of vision they had (perhaps similar to Elvis sightings nowadays).
Not until the Gospel of Mark in 70 AD do we get the story of the empty tomb.
And not until Matthew, Luke and John do we get any stories of Jesus appearing to his disciples in a physical body after the resurrection. And Matthew, Luke and John each have a completely separate and contradictory stories about Jesus's post-resurrection appearances in which none of the details are mutually collaborated (they can't even agree in which city the resurrected Jesus appeared) which would seem to suggest that these post-resurrection stories are just inventions by their authors.
So although there is good evidence for a historical Jesus, there is not good evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. Bart Ehrman on Papias
* Even though I'm in agreement with Bart Ehrman's argument, I still feel like I've got to nitpick him on the details.
Regular readers of Bart Ehrman may feel a bit of whiplash when reading this book. Bart Ehrman doesn't outright contradict himself (as far as I can remember) but the tone of the book does shift here. In his previous books, Misquoting Jesus and Jesus, Interrupted , Bart Ehrman gave the impression that Church tradition is unreliable.
In Did Jesus Exist?, Bart Ehrman bases a lot of his case on Church tradition.
The most glaring example is the Church Father Papias. As I wrote in a previous post:
As Bart Ehrman points out in Jesus, Interrupted, Papias is problematic to use as a source because he had a credibility problem. The Church historian Eusebius (W) called Papias “a man of very small intelligence.” Papias also seems to have believed in a lot of crazy stuff. Papias believed that after Judas betrayed Jesus, Judas was cursed to bloat up, becoming so fat that eventually he couldn’t walk down the street because his head couldn’t fit between buildings, and eventually exploded and died. Ehrman cites other writings of Papias (surviving in Eusebius’s records) in which Papias quotes bizarre sayings of Jesus that no one today takes seriously at all. Papias claimed that these sayings came from via the same church elders who vouched for Mark’s authorship. As Bart Ehrman notes, the only reason Christians ever bring up Papias is to establish the authorship of the Gospels. Other than that, everything else he wrote is completely disregarded. But, Erhman asks, if we can’t trust Papias on any of his other writings, why trust him about the authorship of the Gospels?
And yet in Did Jesus Exist?, Bart Ehrman is citing the testimony of Papias as more evidence that a historical Jesus actually existed.
In the video linked to above, Robert Price pulls Ehrman up on this, and points out all the other crazy things Papias says.
Fortunately for Ehrman, the testimony of Papias is not crucial to Ehrman's argument. So one can easily disregard Papias and still agree with Erhman's overall thesis.
History and Myth
* Reading over what I've written above, it strikes me that I might be exaggerating my own credulity. So I should make this clarification. It is certainly not the case that everyone who appears in the Bible is ispo facto a historical figure.
Scholars are pretty much universally agreed that the Exodus and the Conquest of Canaan never took place (see HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE), and so consequently all of the Old Testament narrative that takes place during the Exodus and the Conquest, and before it, belong more to myth than history. And so Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses and Joshua probably did not exist.
Also historians doubt the existence of some later figures: the books of Ruth, Esther and Daniel all appear to be historical fiction.
But that's the "glass-is-half-empty" way to view the historical accuracy of the Bible. On the glass is half full side, historians think that the narrative in 1 & 2 Kings is based on real history. (The history is adjusted to fit Old Testament polemic, of course, but there was probably a historical basis at its core). And we have outside evidence for some of these figures--the house of David (if not David himself), the house of Omri, Jehu, Jeconiah, et cetera.
The point being, I guess, is that each case has to be judged on its own merits. You can't say everything in the Bible is a myth, or that everything in the Bible is historical. You have to look at the evidence for each case.
....On a related note: one of the thing that Bart Ehrman stresses both in his book and in the radio interview is that there is very little debate among scholars that much of the New Testament is under false names. Mainstream Catholic and Protestant Universities also teach that Peter and Paul couldn't have possibly have written many of the letters claiming to be from Peter and Paul. The only debate is whether this constitutes outright forgery (as Ehrman claims) or whether it was simply just an accepted ancient practice (as many Christian seminaries claim).
This was my own experience as well--at Calvin College (a conservative protestant school) I was taught that some of the letters of Paul and Peter were written by other people under false names. This was shocking to me at the time, but interestingly enough it turns out, according to this article here, that John Calvin himself thought that 2nd Peter couldn't possibly have been written by the apostle Peter--or at the very least that Peter couldn't possibly have written it directly himself. So I guess it should be no surprise that Calvin College taught the same thing.
John Calvin thought that the letter must have been written at least under the direction of Peter because: If it be received as canonical, we must allow Peter to be the author,
since it has his name inscribed, and he also testifies that he had lived
with Christ: and it would have been a fiction unworthy of a minister of
Christ, to have personated another individual. So then I conclude,
that if the Epistle be deemed worthy of credit, it must have proceeded
from Peter; not that he himself wrote it, but that some one of his
disciples set forth in writing, by his command, those things which the
necessity of the times required.
If I'm following John Calvin's logic correctly, he thinks that because the book is canonical, it must be inspired by God. And because it is inspired by God, it can not contain a falsehood. The fact that the author not only claimed to be Peter, but claimed to have lived with Christ, is a falsehood unworthy of Christianity, therefore the letter can not have been a complete forgery, but must have been written under Peter's direction even if he didn't write it directly himself.
Of course there's no evidence that the letter was written under Peter's direction--that's just wishful thinking on John Calvin's part. (And indeed, many of the problems with 2nd Peter--that it copies from the letter of Jude, and that it refers to the apostolic age as something in the past--are not solved by this explanation). But I think Calvin's framing of the problem still stands. If the letter is forged under Peter's name by a different author, then this is a falsehood unworthy of a minister of Christ.
Moses didn’t
actually the Pentateuch. Parts of the
book of Isaiah could not possibly have been written by the prophet Isaiah. The books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John
were not actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and in fact were not
eye-witness accounts at all. Paul did
not write 1st and 2nd Timothy, but a later writer forged these books under Paul’s
name. 2nd Peter (and probably 1st Peter)
could not have been written by the apostle Peter, but was written by a
Christian living much later.
All this
was not from a skeptic or an unbeliever, but from the religion department of a conservative
Christian school affiliated with a conservative Christian seminary.
And yet
this was completely different to everything I had been taught in 12 years of
Christian schools, 2 years of Confirmation, and a lifetime of weekly
church and Sunday School.
And then I
realized, this was just one semester in an introductory class. My pastor had gone through 4 years of
seminary. He must know all this information.
Why had he never bothered to tell us before?
This same
question is what drove Bart Ehrman to write the book Jesus, Interrupted: Why is there such a huge gap between what is
taught in seminaries, and what is taught at church every Sunday?
Because of
my own personal experience, I could identify with what Ehrman writes in his
introductory chapter.
Every year,
Ehrman asserts, first year students all across the country are shocked, just as
I was, to learn what is really being taught at mainstream protestant
seminaries.
“[Christian] students are in for a rude
awakening. Mainline Protestant
seminaries in this country are notorious for challenging students’ cherished
beliefs about the Bible….These seminaries teach serious, hard-core Bible
scholarship. They don’t pander to piety….
The approach taken to the Bible in
almost all Protestant (and now Catholic) mainline seminaries is what is called
the “historical-critical” method….
A very large percentage of
seminarians are completely blind-sided by the historical critical method. They
come in with the expectation of learning the pious truths of the Bible so that
they can pass them along in their sermons, as their own pastors have done for
them. Nothing prepares them for historical criticism. To their surprise they learn, instead of
material for sermons, all the results of what historical critics have
established on the basis of centuries of research. The Bible is filled with discrepancies, many
of them irreconcilable contradictions. Moses did not write the Pentateuch (the
first five books of the Old Testament) and Matthew, Mark, Luke and John did not
write the Gospels. There are other books
that did not make it into the Bible that at one time or another were considered
canonical…The Exodus probably did not happen as described in the Old Testament.
The conquest of the Promised Land is probably based on legend. The Gospels are
at odds on numerous points and contain nonhistorical matter. It is hard to know
whether Moses actually ever existed and what, exactly, the historical Jesus
taught. The historical narratives of the
Old Testament are filled with legendary fabrications and the book of Acts in
the New Testament contains historically unreliable information about the life
and teachings of Paul. Many of the books
of the New Testament are pseudonymous—written not by the apostles but by later
writers claiming to be the
apostles. The list goes on.”
(p.3-6).
But then,
curiously, once these students graduate from seminary, and become pastors, they
never communicate their historical knowledge of the Bible to their
congregations.
To quote
from Bart Ehrman again:
“One of the most amazing and perplexing
features of mainstream Christianity is that seminarians who learn the
historical-critical method in their Bible classes appear to forget all about it
when it comes time for them to be pastors.
They are taught critical approaches to Scripture, they learn about the
discrepancies and contradictions, they discover all sorts of historical errors
and mistakes....They learn all this, and yet when they enter church ministry
they appear to put it back on the shelf….pastors are, as a rule, reluctant to
teach what they learned about the Bible in seminary” (p. 13-14).
Ehrman also
talks about his own experience teaching an Introduction to the New Testament
Course.
“The information and perspectives I present
in the class are nothing radical. They are the views found among critical
scholars who approach the Bible historically—whether the scholars themselves
are believers or unbelievers, Protestants, Catholic, Jewish, agnostic, or
whatever else. They are the views I
learned in seminary and the views that are taught at divinity schools and
universities throughout the country. But
they are views that my students have never heard before, even though most of
these students have spent a good deal of their lives in Sunday School and
church” (p. 14).
The purpose
of Ehrman’s book, then?
“[Most Americans] are…. almost completely in
the dark about what scholars have been saying about the Bible for the past two
centuries. This book is meant to help
redress that problem. It could be seen as my attempt to let the cat out of the
bag.” (p.2)
The rest of
the book follows this theme. It covers a
number of disparate subjects, but all of them fit around the theme
of New Testament scholarship that is widely known in seminaries, but never
taught in churches.
Chapter 2
is devoted to all the factual contradictions in the New Testament.
Chapter 3
explains all the theological contradictions between different New Testament
books.
Chapter 4
tells why scholars believe most of the New Testament books were not written by
their supposed author.
Chapter 5
explains current scholarship on who the historical Jesus was, and what it is
possible to know about him.
Chapter 6
talks about the very human process by which the canon of the New Testament was
eventually decided.
And Chapter
7 explains how the churches doctrines (the divinity of Christ, the Trinity,
heaven and hell) evolved over time during the first 4 centuries of
Christianity.
Chapter 8 addresses
the problem Is Faith Possible. (I’ll
deal with this in more detail below.)
(Because
Ehrman is a New Testament scholar, he focuses only on the New Testament. He hints at the historical problems in the
Old Testament in his introduction, but then completely ignores the Old
Testament for the rest of the book. Anyone seeking information on the historical
accuracy of the Old Testament will have to look elsewhere—I recommend The Unauthorized Version by Robin LaneFox, combined with the Yale University Old Testament lectures by Christine Hayes.)
As Bart
Ehrman himself makes very clear throughout, there is no new scholarship in this
book. This is what is currently being
taught in seminaries across the country.
But how much of this information will be new to readers, and how
shocking it will be to them, obviously depends on their background
In my case,
I actually learned a lot from this book.
Although I was aware that some of these issues existed, I was aware of
it only in the vaguest of terms, and it helped to see Bart Ehrman lay out all
the issues as clearly as he does.
I’ve heard
other people say this is Bart Ehrman’s best book, and I would have to
agree. If you’ve got the time and
inclination, then Misquoting Jesus is
also worth reading, but if you’ve only got it in you to read one
Bart Ehrman book, this is the one to go for.
It’s an excellent and readable crash course in all the historical and
theological problems with the New Testament.
If you don’t know a lot about New Testament scholarship, and you want to
be knowledgeable, this book is a must read.
Other Notes
* On the whole, I think this book is really a must read. But that being said, there were one or two
points that could have been explained better.
One of the things I remember very clearly about my own religion 101 class was the professor’s explanation of the Synoptic problem. The professor explained the reasons why it
looks like Matthew and Luke were both copying from Mark. And since according to Church tradition
Matthew was an eyewitness of Jesus’ ministry, and John Mark was not, it didn’t
make sense that an eyewitness was copying from someone who wasn’t even
there. The professor concluded this was
reason to doubt the traditional authorships of the Gospels.
Bart Ehrman
also believes Matthew and Luke were copying from Mark, and he says as much, but
he never explains how scholars arrived at this conclusion. Since Bart Ehrman is writing for the general
public, I’m a little worried that someone without background knowledge of the
Synoptic problem might miss the significance of this.
To be
fair, Ehrman does address this elsewhere.
In his lecture series on the New Testament, Ehrman does a very
good job of clearly explaining why it is impossible for Matthew, Mark, and Luke
to be all independently write passages that are word for word identical unless
someone is copying from someone else. He
still doesn’t explain in that lecture why scholars believe in Markan priority, but since that information is readily available elsewhere
I suppose it doesn’t matter all that much. (In fact a quick google search shows a number of informative websites that clearly detail the reasons why scholars believe Mark was written first, and Matthew and Luke were both copying from Mark--see HERE for the wikipedia article on Markan priority, and for more hard hitting linguistic analysis see HERE and HERE.)
* I previously gave a mixed review to one of Bart Ehrman’s
later books, Forged . And after reading this book, I’m even more
puzzled as to why Bart Ehrman felt the need to write Forged. Chapter 4 of Jesus, Interrupted,Who Wrote the Bible, contains essentially all of the major
arguments that Bart Ehrman would later repeat in Forged, making Forged
redundant and unnecessary.
There are
one or two points interesting points in Forged
that are not in this book, but it’s not worth wading through 300 pages to get
only one or two new points. (And
actually there are some points in this book about the authorship of the Gospels
that Ehrman does not repeat in Forged. If an editor combined the relevant parts of
both books, and cut out all the filler, maybe one interesting book on Biblical
authorship could have been made. But
unless you like a lot of repetition in your reading, I wouldn’t recommend
anyone to read both books.)
Contradictions in the
Bible (Some Personal Reflections)
Not only
does the Bible contradict historical and archeological records (the
census in Luke, the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan,
et cetera), it also contradicts itself quite often. And yet, as Bart Ehrman points out, most
people never even notice these internal contradictions.
“It’s amazing how internal problems like
these, if you’re not alerted to them, are so easily passed by when you read the
Gospels, but how when someone point them out they seem so obvious. Students often ask me, “Why didn’t I see this
before.” (p.8)
….
“Why is it that casual, and even avid,
readers of the Bible never detect these discrepancies, some of which may seem
obvious once they are pointed out? My
view is that it has to do with the way people read these books. Most people simply read here and there in the
Bible—open it up, choose a passage, read it, and try to figure out what it
means. There is little or no effort to
make a detailed comparison with other, similar passages, in other books. You read a snippet here, a snippet there, and
it all sounds like the Bible.” (p.20-21)
I’m glad to
hear Bart Ehrman say this. I used to
think it was just me.
In 8th
Grade, our Bible teacher pointed out to us how all 4 of the Gospels
contradicted each other on the resurrection account. At first I didn’t believe him, but he went
through and showed us methodically how all of the accounts were contradictory
to each other, and then my next thought was, “Why did I never notice this
before?”
The thing
that got me was that I knew each of these stories individually. After years of Sunday School, I knew the
story of how the women came to the empty tomb, and an Angel told them that
Jesus was not there because he had been raised.
But I also
knew equally well the story from John when the women went to an empty tomb, and
there was no angel to explain to them what was happening, so Mary Magdalene was
outside crying until Jesus started talking to her, but Mary thought he was the
gardener so she told him, “They have taken my Lord away, and I do not know
where they have put him!” And then she
suddenly realized the gardener was Jesus.
And yet,
despite knowing both of these stories independently of each other, I never put
two and two together and realized the contradiction until it was pointed out to
me.
I felt even
stupider years later when I was in my late 20s, and listening to a lecture on
great literature that talked about some of the contradictions in the Old
Testament. Before this, I had never
realized that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 were completely different contradictory
stories, even though I knew both stories intimately.
I knew the
story in Genesis 1 about how God had created the whole world in 6 days, and
that the order of creation was plants, fish and birds, animals, man. (Theistic evolutionist Christians, which
included many of my teachers, are fond of using this order to show that
evolution and the Bible are not incompatible.)
But I also
knew equally well the story in Genesis 2 of how Adam was created first, and how
God created the animals later because Adam was lonely. I had heard this story many times before in
Sunday School and in children’s Bible story books.
I’m embarrassed
to say I never realized the contradiction on my own, even though it seems so,
so, so obvious now.
So I’m
relieved to hear Bart Ehrman say this kind of experience is not uncommon.
What was
everyone else’s experience like? Any
similar stories out there? Or were you
brighter than me and realized these contradictions on your own?
Is Faith Possible?
(I’ve saved this section for last
because I think it is the most difficult to untangle. Feel free to skip over it.)
The last
chapter of this book poses a very interesting question: Is Faith Possible? Does the knowledge of all the internal
contradictions and historical problems of the Bible destroy faith?
Despite
what you or I might conclude about this, the answer is apparently yes—faith
must still be possible—because the seminaries already know about these problems
and teach them to their students, and yet Christianity continues to exist. (Indeed as I already related above, the very
people who first taught me about many of these issues were Christians.)
Bart Ehrman
himself says he remained a practicing Christian for many years after he became
aware of the historical problems with the Bible. (He claims he eventually lost his faith not
because of historical issues but on a different issue altogether—the problem of
suffering.) And Ehrman still has many
friends and colleagues who know everything he does and the Bible, but continue
to believe.
Describing
his friends, Bart Ehrman: “they [my two
friends] are both smarter than I, better read than I, more sophisticated
philosophically than I…..They both would have, and do have, no problem with the
historical information I have laid out in this book. And they both unashamedly call themselves
Christians. Ask them if they believe in
God, they would say yes. Think Christ is God? Yes. Think he is the Lord? Yes.
Faith is not a matter of smarts” (p. 278).
In
concluding his chapter on the contradictions in the Bible, Ehrman writes: “Does this [all the Bible’s
contradictions] mean that it is
impossible any longer for a person to be a Christian? Only Christians of a
certain persuasion—such as many of those among whom I live, in the American
South—would ever think to ask such a question. But the answer, again, is
decidedly no. A Christian dependent on the inerrancy of the Bible probably
cannot survive the reality of discrepancies. But there are lots of other forms
of the Christian faith, many of them unscathed by the fact that the Bible is
not a completely prefect book. I will
deal with this at greater length in my final chapter.” (p. 59)
When the
final chapter finally comes around, however, the answer is disappointing.
To begin
with, I have trouble understanding how someone can be a Christian and still
believe the Bible is full of errors.
I was
brought up to believe in an inerrant view of the Bible. (More or less. Some of my teachers sympathetic to theistic
evolution would say that Genesis 1 & 2 were supposed to be metaphors, but
this was not taught as an error in the Bible.
This was God making a conscious choice to avoid overloading ancient
peoples with too much science.)
I know
there are Christians out there who aren’t inerrantists, but I don’t
really understand how their thinking works.
(Perhaps this is just because of my upbringing--that I was never exposed to the anti-inerrantist position, and so may not have a full understanding of it. But my general view is that if I'm going to believe that the Bible is full of historical and factual errors anyway, than I might as well just be an agnostic and limit my beliefs to what there is reasonable evidence for.)
This is
probably a subject for a whole different book, but I don’t think Bart Ehrman
did a very good job of explaining or defending Christian faith minus
inerrantism. (Perhaps now that Bart Ehrman has moved on to
officially become an agnostic, he can’t really defend a faith he no longer
has. Maybe someone else needs to pick up
the mantle and defend a scholarly view of Christian faith.)
I have a
co-worker who is a strong Christian and fond of quoting Bible versus to
me. And whenever I point out
contradictions or errors in the Bible to him, he just smiles and says, “Sorry
Joel, that’s not going to work on me. I’m
not an inerrantist. I believe that
because humans were involved in copying down the Bible, human mistakes were
made.”
And yet he
still believes (strongly) that homosexuality is wrong. He still preaches to the rest of us about
sexual morality and abstinence. He still
believes Christ died on the cross to forgive our sins, and he still believes
all non-Christians are damned for all eternity in hell.
I’ve never
understood how he can be so sure about any of this given that he admits human
errors are in the Bible.
And
regarding the Gospels, how could you say to people: “We have these four anonymous
documents from sometime in the late first century. We don’t know who wrote them, but we’re sure
they weren’t eye-witnesses. And all four
of them contradict each other and have completely different theologies. But the fate of your soul for all of eternity
rests on whether or not you believe in them.”?
Again, I
know these types of Christians are out there. I just can’t wrap my head around their
thinking.
Bart Ehrman
describes his own views during the period after he lost his belief in the inerrancy
of the Bible, but before he left the church altogether: “I came
to think of the Christian message about God, Christ, and the salvation he
brings as a kind of religious “myth,” or group of myths—a set of stories,
views, and perspectives that are both unproven and unprovable, but also
un-disprovable—that could, and should inform and guide my life and thinking.
I continued to believe in a literal
God, though I was less and less sure what could actually be said about him (or
her or it). And I continued to believe
that Jesus himself certainly existed. But the religion built up around God and
Jesus was based, I came to believe, on various myths, not historical
facts. Jesus’ death was not a myth, but
the idea that it was a death that brought about salvation was a myth. It could not be historically proved or
disproved, but it was a powerful story that I thought could and should govern
the way I look and the world and live my life….
Salvation, for me, became less and
less a question of whether I would go to heaven or hell when I die. I came to realize that these concepts were
also, in a sense, myths. There is not
literally a place of eternal torment where God, or the demons doing his will,
will torture poor souls for 30 trillion years (as just the beginning) for sins
they committed for 30 years. What kind
of never-dying eternal divine Nazi would a God like that be?...
God himself was a myth for me. I certainly thought he existed, but his
existence could not be proved or disproved. He was the force of goodness and
awe and wonder in the world. He was the
one who was above all else, far beyond what we could imagine, as we gaze out
into the evening sky and consider the billions of stars and the billions of
galaxies. He was above and beyond it
all, a force of good and goodness in the world.” (p275-277)
This is
what Ehrman was describing himself as when he was still a Christian—albeit
after he lost his initial inerrant fundamentalist faith—but before he became an
agnostic.
However, to
me this sounds like what I feel as an agnostic now. Maybe some of the myths in the Bible are
true, but who can be sure? Maybe there
is a sort of God who acts as a force for good in the universe, but it can’t be
proved or disproved.
I’m not
really sure how you could call this faith.
You certainly couldn’t launch missionary efforts with this kind of
attitude. (Where I live in Cambodia, I occasionally overhear missionaries talking to each other about
church issues at Western style restaurants and coffee shops, reminding me that
there is still a whole profession of people who think converting others to
their religion should be their life’s work.)
To be sure,
there is the possibility that God exists.
But acknowledging the possibility of something is different than having
faith in something. To have faith in something,
you need to be absolutely sure.
And while
all the historical problems of the Bible don’t disprove the central message of
Christianity per se, wouldn’t they at least introduce a strong element of doubt?
All 4
Gospels contradict each other on Jesus’ resurrection. Therefore, at the very least, 3 of them must
be wrong. And if we admit that 3 of the
accounts are wrong, then might not all of them be wrong? You have to at least consider the
possibility, no?
And this
gets all the stickier when you consider that Christianity isn’t the only game
in town. You don’t have to be a Christian—if the internal contradictions in
Christianity become too much for you, you can always convert to Buddhism,
Hinduism, Judaism, or Islam. In order to
keep faith in Christianity you not only have to argue that it’s better than nothing,
but that it’s better than all the alternatives.
When
attempting to have a logical talk about these issues, part of the problem is
that, inspite of all the work churches have done over the centuries to nail
down doctrines, no two people define their Christian faith the same way. Some Christians may believe that the Bible
contains no errors and everyone who disbelieves it will go to hell. Some believe it contain human errors, but is
still necessary for salvation. And some
Christians believe that salvation is extended to other religions as well, and
that faith and religion are separate issues.
But my
experience of Christianity is that it lays forth specific doctrines which are
predicated on a belief that God intervened in human history.
Well then,
did these events happen, or didn’t they?
And if they happened, then what is the historical evidence? And if there historical evidence is questionable,
then I think agnosticism is the only option.
That’s not
to say that there aren’t some very smart people who believe in
Christianity. I have a lot of friends
from my religious school days who were (and are) smarter than me and continue
to believe. And my religious professors
were a lot smarter than I am (to put it mildly).
But then,
the same could be said about any religion. There are some extremely smart
people who are Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Atheists, and even Mormons.
For better
or for worse, human beings are not robots, and we simply do not change our
whole world view overnight just because we get some new information. As long as Christianity is meeting someone’s
emotional needs, they are very unlikely to leave the church simply because they
discover historical problems with the Bible.
This is how
we humans operate, but it doesn’t mean it’s right. A lot of very intelligent people are also
Mormons: professors, doctors, lawyers, congressman, and republican nominees for
President. It doesn’t mean that the many
historical problems with Mormonism should be any less relevant to the truth of
the faith.
