geomancer
04-09-2009, 06:16 PM
Salon.com | Jesus is just alright with him (https://www.salon.com/env/atoms_eden/2009/04/03/jesus_interrupted/print.html)
Jesus is just alright with him
To the author of "Jesus Interrupted," the man from Galilee was a radical Jewish prophet, not God. But in an interview, Bart Ehrman says history doesn't have to undermine Christian faith. By Gary Kamiya
Apr. 03, 2009 |
Bart Ehrman's career is testament to the fact that no one can slice and dice a belief system more surgically than someone who grew up inside it. Raised as a not particularly devout Episcopalian in 1950s Kansas, the best-selling Bible scholar had a "born-again" experience as a high school sophomore and asked Jesus into his heart. Eager to study Holy Scripture full-time, he entered the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago -- motto: "Moody Bible Institute, where Bible is our middle name" -- where every professor and student had to sign a statement attesting that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, a divinely inspired document from its first page (Genesis 1:1) to its last (Revelation 22:21).
But almost immediately, Ehrman ran into a problem. It was an intellectual problem at first, but it soon became larger and harder to quarantine. In one of the first classes he took at Moody, he learned that none of the original texts of the New Testament exist. All we have are copies, made years later -- usually, many centuries later. In fact, the copies are copies of copies, and they're filled with errors or intentional changes made over decades or centuries by scribes. Burning with fervor to discover the true word of God, the authentic divine voice that had been obscured or changed by all-too-human writers, Ehrman decided to begin a serious study of the New Testament. He completed his undergraduate studies at Wheaton College, where he began studying ancient Greek, the original language of the New Testament. But there was still no answer to his original question: How could we know what the word of God was if all we had were error-riddled copies?
So Ehrman decided to plunge all the way in and immerse himself in the academic study of the texts of the New Testament. He entered the Princeton Theological Seminary, home to the world's leading authority in the field, Bruce Metzger. His literalist faith in and his devotional approach to the Bible were under increasing strain, but he managed to hold onto them for a while -- until a professor jotted a casual comment on one of Ehrman's papers. Ehrman was attempting to explain a passage from the Gospel of Mark in which Jesus refers to an event that took place "when Abiathar was the high priest." The problem is that the book in the Old Testament that Jesus is referring to states that not Abiathar but his father Ahimelech was the high priest. Ehrman came up with a convoluted argument to reconcile the contradiction, using Greek etymology to prove that Mark did not mean what he apparently said. Ehrman believed that his professor, a beloved and pious scholar named Cullen Story, would appreciate his argument as a fellow believer in biblical inerrancy.
Story's response, Ehrman wrote in his best-selling 2005 book "Misquoting Jesus," "went straight through me." "Maybe," Story scrawled at the end of Ehrman's paper, "Mark just made a mistake."
Story's comment proved fatal for Ehrman's belief that the Bible was the inerrant word of God. Realizing that his own argument was unconvincing, he was forced to acknowledge that yes, maybe Mark did make a mistake. "Once I made that admission, the floodgates opened," Ehrman wrote. "For if there could be one little, picayune mistake in Mark 2, maybe there could be mistakes in other places as well. Maybe, when Jesus says later in Mark 4 that 'the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds on the earth,' maybe I don't need to come up with a fancy explanation for how the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds when I know full well it isn't. And maybe these 'mistakes' apply to bigger issues. Maybe when Mark says that Jesus was crucified the day after the Passover meal was eaten (Mark 14:12, 15:25) and John says he died the day before it was eaten (John 19:14) -- maybe that is a genuine difference."
The dike of Ehrman's literalist belief had been breached, and no divine intervention would turn back the floodwaters. He came to believe that the Bible was "a human book from beginning to end. It was written by different human authors at different times and in different places to address different needs. Many of these authors no doubt felt they were inspired by God to say what they did, but they had their own perspectives, their own beliefs, their own views, their own understandings, their own theologies ... Mark did not say the same thing that Luke said because he did not mean the same thing as Luke."
Ehrman's demolition of biblical literalism in "Misquoting Jesus" is neatly summed up by an anecdote. "Occasionally I see a bumper sticker that reads, 'God said, it, I believe it, and that settles it.' My response is always, What if God didn't say it?" A lucid, accessible and entertaining guided tour of biblical scholarship, "Misquoting Jesus" makes it indubitably clear -- unless one simply decides in advance that all logic, scholarship, rules of historical evidence and rational thought do not apply to the Bible -- that God did not"say it." A bunch of human beings said a lot of different things over hundreds of years, a bunch of other human beings wrote down different versions of what they said, and yet another bunch of human beings decided -- also over hundreds of years -- which of these writings should be part of the Holy Book and which should not. This is simply the historical truth.
As Ehrman repeatedly points out, none of what he is saying is the least bit academically controversial. Even scholars who are devout Christians agree, and have for decades. The field of biblical textual studies is 300 years old; Ehrman's books simply present the accepted findings of that field for a mass audience. His own scholarly credentials are impeccable: As the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, he has a deep and extensive knowledge of the field, knows the ancient languages the Bible was written in, and has published widely.
But Ehrman's scholarly standing did not soothe the evangelical Christians who were outraged by "Misquoting Jesus." Angered by what they took to be the book's subversive import, they attacked it as exaggerated, unfair and lacking a devotional tone. No less than three books were published in response to Ehrman's tome. While learned evangelical critics matched Ehrman Greek exegesis for Greek exegesis, the less erudite complained that he was an intellectual snob whose pedantic historical excurses had nothing to do with their living faith.
Ehrman's new book, "Jesus, Interrupted," (https://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FJesus-Interrupted-Revealing-Hidden-Contradictions%2Fdp%2F0061173932%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1238715274%26sr%3D1-1&tag=saloncom08-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325)https://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=saloncom08-20&l=ur2&o=1 will not lead many evangelicals and conservative Christians to invite him to talk to their Bible study groups. Picking up where "Misquoting Jesus" let off, it goes beyond the Bible's textual problems to look at deeper doctrinal inconsistencies and contradictions. Ehrman points out that Mark and Luke had radically different attitudes toward Jesus' death: Mark saw him as in doubt and despair on the way to the cross, while Luke saw him as calm. Mark and Paul saw Jesus' death as offering an atonement for sin, while Luke did not. Matthew believed that Jesus' followers had to keep the Jewish law to enter the kingdom of Heaven, a view categorically rejected by Paul. The conventional response to this is to try to "harmonize" the Bible by smashing all four Gospels together. But as Ehrman argues, this only creates a bogus "fifth Gospel" that doesn't exist.
Ehrman's critique is far from over. He points out that many of the books in the New Testament were not even written by their putative authors: only eight of its 27 books are almost certain to have been written by the people whose names are attached to them. He writes that scholars have tended to avoid the word "forged" because of its negative connotations, but argues convincingly that much of the Bible is, in fact, forged.
Then there's the problem of "which Bible?" As Ehrman notes, there were many other Gospels floating around in the days of the early Christians, many of which claimed to be written by apostles, and there's no historical reason to believe that some of these non-canonical gospels were any less worthy of being part of the Bible than the books that made it in. Later Christians excised some texts and included others for various reasons. Once one begins to look critically at what was left out and why, it becomes impossible to deny that the biblical canon was constructed by humans for human purposes.
Finally, and most devastatingly, Ehrman points out that "some of the most important Christian doctrines, such as that of a suffering Messiah, the divinity of Christ, the trinity and the existence of heaven and hell," were not held by Jesus himself and were not contemporaneous with him. They developed later, "as the Church grew and came to be transformed into a new religion rather than a sect of Judaism." The doctrine of the trinity only appears once in the New Testament, and the doctrine that Jesus is equal but not identical to God is found in none of the four Gospels.
Perhaps most surprising, even to readers who have some familiarity with biblical scholarship, is Ehrman's argument -- which, again, is the mainstream position among biblical scholars -- that Jesus did not teach that he was divine. Only in one Gospel, John, does Christ call himself divine, but John's theology is radically different from that in the other three Gospels. To understand Jesus' attitude toward himself, Ehrman argues, we must remember who he was: a radical millenarian Jew. Like other Jewish prophets in the Palestine of his day, Jesus thought that a cosmic judge, the Son of Man, was coming soon to earth. But he did not regard himself as the Son of Man.
The old subversive line goes, "The last Christian died on the cross." But it would be more historically accurate to say that Jesus was not a Christian at all, but a Jewish apocalyptic prophet. It was only with his followers that "Christianity" came into existence. Ironically, Jesus preached a profoundly Jewish religion: It was the later Christians (including John and Paul) who turned Christianity into the virulently anti-Semitic religion it was to become.
As for Ehrman's own attitude toward Christianity, it evolved in a long and complex process. His realization that the Bible is an all-too-human document ended his literalist faith, but did not cause him to leave the church. Instead, he embraced Christianity as a "beautiful myth," in effect taking what he needed from it and leaving the rest. He practiced this "soft" Christianity for years, but abandoned it too. What ultimately led him to leave the church was a more profound issue: the problem of evil, what theologians call theodicy. In his 2008 book "God's Problem," Ehrman explains that he could no longer believe in an all-knowing and all-powerful God in a world in which an innocent child dies of hunger every five seconds.
Ehrman is hard to categorize. He's a bomb-throwing moderate, a non-dogmatic rationalist. Unlike outspoken critics of religion such as Sam Harris, he does not regard organized religion as dangerous, nor does he claim that any rational person of intellectual integrity must embrace the same conclusions he does. He insists that he is not out to convert anyone, and has nothing but respect for his fellow scholars who know the same historical things he does about the Bible, yet continue to be devout Christians.
At the same time, it's hard not to feel that Ehrman shares some of the irreverent glee, and maybe subversive purpose, of Mark Twain, who sent up literalist Christian belief in hilarious stories like "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." There's something delicious (for non-believers, anyway) about the implacable, dispassionate way that Ehrman reveals how the supposedly "divine truth" of Christianity was historically constructed.
Ehrman is a true agnostic. He's sophisticated enough to realize that the realms of rationality and faith may be separate, and he's respectful of the idea of the ineffable. But he himself does not believe in it, and his practice is thoroughly rational. For some of his most brilliant religious friends, Ehrman notes in "God's Problem," "religious faith is not an intellectualizing system for explaining everything. Faith is a mystery and an experience of the divine in the world, not a solution to a set of problems." Ehrman's comment: "I respect this view deeply and some days I wish that I shared it. But I don't."
I reached Ehrman by telephone at his home in Chapel Hill. In conversation, he was affable, thoughtful and unpretentious. I made a conscious decision to steer our conversation away from the specific scholarly arguments he makes in his books and toward his own views of faith and rationality. For me, as someone who regards religions that contain supernatural beliefs as culturally sanctioned superstitions, the idea that the Bible is a document written by non-divinely inspired humans, and that a first-century Palestinian Jew named Jesus was not the son of God, are truisms. I was more interested in Ehrman's thoughts about whether one can reject supernatural beliefs and still be a Christian, and the larger relationship between reason and religion.
"Misquoting Jesus" aroused a lot of controversy. Were you surprised by the reaction?
I wasn't surprised because a lot of Christians who see the Bible as the fundamental basis for their faith were taken aback to learn that we don't have the original copies of any of the books of the Bible. And not only do we not have any of the original copies, but we don't have any copies that are completely reliable. And that's troubling to people who think the words of the text are the very foundation of their faith. But I was a little surprised by the reaction of evangelical scholars. Nobody objected to any of the information that I presented. They agreed with everything I said but they just thought I made too much of it.
more at <Bart Ehrman, "Jesus Interrupted" | Salon (https://www.salon.com/env/atoms_eden/2009/04/03/jesus_interrupted/?source=newsletter)
Jesus is just alright with him
To the author of "Jesus Interrupted," the man from Galilee was a radical Jewish prophet, not God. But in an interview, Bart Ehrman says history doesn't have to undermine Christian faith. By Gary Kamiya
Apr. 03, 2009 |
Bart Ehrman's career is testament to the fact that no one can slice and dice a belief system more surgically than someone who grew up inside it. Raised as a not particularly devout Episcopalian in 1950s Kansas, the best-selling Bible scholar had a "born-again" experience as a high school sophomore and asked Jesus into his heart. Eager to study Holy Scripture full-time, he entered the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago -- motto: "Moody Bible Institute, where Bible is our middle name" -- where every professor and student had to sign a statement attesting that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, a divinely inspired document from its first page (Genesis 1:1) to its last (Revelation 22:21).
But almost immediately, Ehrman ran into a problem. It was an intellectual problem at first, but it soon became larger and harder to quarantine. In one of the first classes he took at Moody, he learned that none of the original texts of the New Testament exist. All we have are copies, made years later -- usually, many centuries later. In fact, the copies are copies of copies, and they're filled with errors or intentional changes made over decades or centuries by scribes. Burning with fervor to discover the true word of God, the authentic divine voice that had been obscured or changed by all-too-human writers, Ehrman decided to begin a serious study of the New Testament. He completed his undergraduate studies at Wheaton College, where he began studying ancient Greek, the original language of the New Testament. But there was still no answer to his original question: How could we know what the word of God was if all we had were error-riddled copies?
So Ehrman decided to plunge all the way in and immerse himself in the academic study of the texts of the New Testament. He entered the Princeton Theological Seminary, home to the world's leading authority in the field, Bruce Metzger. His literalist faith in and his devotional approach to the Bible were under increasing strain, but he managed to hold onto them for a while -- until a professor jotted a casual comment on one of Ehrman's papers. Ehrman was attempting to explain a passage from the Gospel of Mark in which Jesus refers to an event that took place "when Abiathar was the high priest." The problem is that the book in the Old Testament that Jesus is referring to states that not Abiathar but his father Ahimelech was the high priest. Ehrman came up with a convoluted argument to reconcile the contradiction, using Greek etymology to prove that Mark did not mean what he apparently said. Ehrman believed that his professor, a beloved and pious scholar named Cullen Story, would appreciate his argument as a fellow believer in biblical inerrancy.
Story's response, Ehrman wrote in his best-selling 2005 book "Misquoting Jesus," "went straight through me." "Maybe," Story scrawled at the end of Ehrman's paper, "Mark just made a mistake."
Story's comment proved fatal for Ehrman's belief that the Bible was the inerrant word of God. Realizing that his own argument was unconvincing, he was forced to acknowledge that yes, maybe Mark did make a mistake. "Once I made that admission, the floodgates opened," Ehrman wrote. "For if there could be one little, picayune mistake in Mark 2, maybe there could be mistakes in other places as well. Maybe, when Jesus says later in Mark 4 that 'the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds on the earth,' maybe I don't need to come up with a fancy explanation for how the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds when I know full well it isn't. And maybe these 'mistakes' apply to bigger issues. Maybe when Mark says that Jesus was crucified the day after the Passover meal was eaten (Mark 14:12, 15:25) and John says he died the day before it was eaten (John 19:14) -- maybe that is a genuine difference."
The dike of Ehrman's literalist belief had been breached, and no divine intervention would turn back the floodwaters. He came to believe that the Bible was "a human book from beginning to end. It was written by different human authors at different times and in different places to address different needs. Many of these authors no doubt felt they were inspired by God to say what they did, but they had their own perspectives, their own beliefs, their own views, their own understandings, their own theologies ... Mark did not say the same thing that Luke said because he did not mean the same thing as Luke."
Ehrman's demolition of biblical literalism in "Misquoting Jesus" is neatly summed up by an anecdote. "Occasionally I see a bumper sticker that reads, 'God said, it, I believe it, and that settles it.' My response is always, What if God didn't say it?" A lucid, accessible and entertaining guided tour of biblical scholarship, "Misquoting Jesus" makes it indubitably clear -- unless one simply decides in advance that all logic, scholarship, rules of historical evidence and rational thought do not apply to the Bible -- that God did not"say it." A bunch of human beings said a lot of different things over hundreds of years, a bunch of other human beings wrote down different versions of what they said, and yet another bunch of human beings decided -- also over hundreds of years -- which of these writings should be part of the Holy Book and which should not. This is simply the historical truth.
As Ehrman repeatedly points out, none of what he is saying is the least bit academically controversial. Even scholars who are devout Christians agree, and have for decades. The field of biblical textual studies is 300 years old; Ehrman's books simply present the accepted findings of that field for a mass audience. His own scholarly credentials are impeccable: As the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, he has a deep and extensive knowledge of the field, knows the ancient languages the Bible was written in, and has published widely.
But Ehrman's scholarly standing did not soothe the evangelical Christians who were outraged by "Misquoting Jesus." Angered by what they took to be the book's subversive import, they attacked it as exaggerated, unfair and lacking a devotional tone. No less than three books were published in response to Ehrman's tome. While learned evangelical critics matched Ehrman Greek exegesis for Greek exegesis, the less erudite complained that he was an intellectual snob whose pedantic historical excurses had nothing to do with their living faith.
Ehrman's new book, "Jesus, Interrupted," (https://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FJesus-Interrupted-Revealing-Hidden-Contradictions%2Fdp%2F0061173932%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1238715274%26sr%3D1-1&tag=saloncom08-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325)https://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=saloncom08-20&l=ur2&o=1 will not lead many evangelicals and conservative Christians to invite him to talk to their Bible study groups. Picking up where "Misquoting Jesus" let off, it goes beyond the Bible's textual problems to look at deeper doctrinal inconsistencies and contradictions. Ehrman points out that Mark and Luke had radically different attitudes toward Jesus' death: Mark saw him as in doubt and despair on the way to the cross, while Luke saw him as calm. Mark and Paul saw Jesus' death as offering an atonement for sin, while Luke did not. Matthew believed that Jesus' followers had to keep the Jewish law to enter the kingdom of Heaven, a view categorically rejected by Paul. The conventional response to this is to try to "harmonize" the Bible by smashing all four Gospels together. But as Ehrman argues, this only creates a bogus "fifth Gospel" that doesn't exist.
Ehrman's critique is far from over. He points out that many of the books in the New Testament were not even written by their putative authors: only eight of its 27 books are almost certain to have been written by the people whose names are attached to them. He writes that scholars have tended to avoid the word "forged" because of its negative connotations, but argues convincingly that much of the Bible is, in fact, forged.
Then there's the problem of "which Bible?" As Ehrman notes, there were many other Gospels floating around in the days of the early Christians, many of which claimed to be written by apostles, and there's no historical reason to believe that some of these non-canonical gospels were any less worthy of being part of the Bible than the books that made it in. Later Christians excised some texts and included others for various reasons. Once one begins to look critically at what was left out and why, it becomes impossible to deny that the biblical canon was constructed by humans for human purposes.
Finally, and most devastatingly, Ehrman points out that "some of the most important Christian doctrines, such as that of a suffering Messiah, the divinity of Christ, the trinity and the existence of heaven and hell," were not held by Jesus himself and were not contemporaneous with him. They developed later, "as the Church grew and came to be transformed into a new religion rather than a sect of Judaism." The doctrine of the trinity only appears once in the New Testament, and the doctrine that Jesus is equal but not identical to God is found in none of the four Gospels.
Perhaps most surprising, even to readers who have some familiarity with biblical scholarship, is Ehrman's argument -- which, again, is the mainstream position among biblical scholars -- that Jesus did not teach that he was divine. Only in one Gospel, John, does Christ call himself divine, but John's theology is radically different from that in the other three Gospels. To understand Jesus' attitude toward himself, Ehrman argues, we must remember who he was: a radical millenarian Jew. Like other Jewish prophets in the Palestine of his day, Jesus thought that a cosmic judge, the Son of Man, was coming soon to earth. But he did not regard himself as the Son of Man.
The old subversive line goes, "The last Christian died on the cross." But it would be more historically accurate to say that Jesus was not a Christian at all, but a Jewish apocalyptic prophet. It was only with his followers that "Christianity" came into existence. Ironically, Jesus preached a profoundly Jewish religion: It was the later Christians (including John and Paul) who turned Christianity into the virulently anti-Semitic religion it was to become.
As for Ehrman's own attitude toward Christianity, it evolved in a long and complex process. His realization that the Bible is an all-too-human document ended his literalist faith, but did not cause him to leave the church. Instead, he embraced Christianity as a "beautiful myth," in effect taking what he needed from it and leaving the rest. He practiced this "soft" Christianity for years, but abandoned it too. What ultimately led him to leave the church was a more profound issue: the problem of evil, what theologians call theodicy. In his 2008 book "God's Problem," Ehrman explains that he could no longer believe in an all-knowing and all-powerful God in a world in which an innocent child dies of hunger every five seconds.
Ehrman is hard to categorize. He's a bomb-throwing moderate, a non-dogmatic rationalist. Unlike outspoken critics of religion such as Sam Harris, he does not regard organized religion as dangerous, nor does he claim that any rational person of intellectual integrity must embrace the same conclusions he does. He insists that he is not out to convert anyone, and has nothing but respect for his fellow scholars who know the same historical things he does about the Bible, yet continue to be devout Christians.
At the same time, it's hard not to feel that Ehrman shares some of the irreverent glee, and maybe subversive purpose, of Mark Twain, who sent up literalist Christian belief in hilarious stories like "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." There's something delicious (for non-believers, anyway) about the implacable, dispassionate way that Ehrman reveals how the supposedly "divine truth" of Christianity was historically constructed.
Ehrman is a true agnostic. He's sophisticated enough to realize that the realms of rationality and faith may be separate, and he's respectful of the idea of the ineffable. But he himself does not believe in it, and his practice is thoroughly rational. For some of his most brilliant religious friends, Ehrman notes in "God's Problem," "religious faith is not an intellectualizing system for explaining everything. Faith is a mystery and an experience of the divine in the world, not a solution to a set of problems." Ehrman's comment: "I respect this view deeply and some days I wish that I shared it. But I don't."
I reached Ehrman by telephone at his home in Chapel Hill. In conversation, he was affable, thoughtful and unpretentious. I made a conscious decision to steer our conversation away from the specific scholarly arguments he makes in his books and toward his own views of faith and rationality. For me, as someone who regards religions that contain supernatural beliefs as culturally sanctioned superstitions, the idea that the Bible is a document written by non-divinely inspired humans, and that a first-century Palestinian Jew named Jesus was not the son of God, are truisms. I was more interested in Ehrman's thoughts about whether one can reject supernatural beliefs and still be a Christian, and the larger relationship between reason and religion.
"Misquoting Jesus" aroused a lot of controversy. Were you surprised by the reaction?
I wasn't surprised because a lot of Christians who see the Bible as the fundamental basis for their faith were taken aback to learn that we don't have the original copies of any of the books of the Bible. And not only do we not have any of the original copies, but we don't have any copies that are completely reliable. And that's troubling to people who think the words of the text are the very foundation of their faith. But I was a little surprised by the reaction of evangelical scholars. Nobody objected to any of the information that I presented. They agreed with everything I said but they just thought I made too much of it.
more at <Bart Ehrman, "Jesus Interrupted" | Salon (https://www.salon.com/env/atoms_eden/2009/04/03/jesus_interrupted/?source=newsletter)