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Bart Ehrman, bible, biblical exegesis, Book Reviews, God, Jesus, religion, theology
I am a huge fan of Bart Ehrman’s, and have reviewed another of his books here, namely the NYTimes, best seller, Misquoting Jesus. He has, as they say, hit another one out of the ball park with his latest book, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them).
I am indebted once again to HarperOne Publishing for their generosity in sending me a copy for this review.
Bart Ehrman has all the requisite qualifications of a first-class biblical scholar, yet he is able to translate his knowledge into language that the average person can understand. And this is the aim of this book, that the average person in the pew can be informed about what we know about the bible, who wrote it, when, how it came to be collected, and what it really contains.
In this Ehrman has accomplished his task well indeed. While a serious student may not find a huge amount of new information, to those who have always thought, without much thought alas, that the bible was the inerrant word of God dropped from heaven, a shock is in store.
Drawing on scholarship that is decades and sometimes centuries old, Professor Ehrman makes a convincing case that much that we assume about the Bible is simply not true.
First, he discusses the issue of authorship. In fact, we learn that although our various bible books are named, almost none of them were written by the named person, or at least who we think that named person actually was. Of all the books ascribed to Paul for instance, all but a few were not written by him, and we frankly don’t know who did write them. This is of course not particularly new information, yet to the uninitiated it certainly will be new, and Dr. Ehrman makes the case slowly, carefully, and thoroughly.
He then goes on to point out and discuss any number of discrepancies within the texts themselves. Now many of us know this as well, and Ehrman points out that many, if not most are on issues that are minor, dealing with unimportant tiny differences between manuscripts. However, there are some rather major ones that are simply not reconcilable.
One huge one is the fact that there is an irreconcilable difference between Mark and John over the day that Jesus was crucified. Mark has the last meal of Jesus the passover. John has it on the day before the Passover, and this has serious implications for their respective theologies.
Ehrman points out that where we have gone terribly wrong in biblical analysis is to conflate the four Gospels, and then taking the sum total of information as the “picture” of Christ and his mission. When we look at the Gospels horizontally, side by side, the discrepancies pop out much more readily.
For instance in Mark, we are constantly made aware that the miracles of Jesus are hidden. Jesus precisely refuses to do miracles as a means of proving who he is. People must believe based on what he says. Contrarily, in John, the miracles are done exactly for the opposite effect. They are offered by Jesus to prove who he is. The two are simply not reconcilable.
Most valuable to me, was the understanding of the time lines and how the Gospel of John came to be so very different from the others. Written some ten to fifteen or more years after the so-called “synoptics,” most of the early followers of Jesus have died. The promises of Jesus and the Gospel writers, and even Paul that Jesus would return with their lifetimes, had obviously not occurred. John’s community is in some crisis over this.
The result: an entirely new look at the situation. Where Paul and the synoptics seem to look to a heaven on earth sort of result after the Messiah returns, John looks to a heaven in heaven result that occurs upon death. This is an entirely new theology.
To the totally uninitiated in biblical analysis, there is a wonderful chapter on how historians, biblical or otherwise examine documents, and determine what the author means, and what was probably actually said and done. The fact is, the bible should be treated no differently than any other ancient document. We can, Dr. Ehrman assures us determine a lot, and with reasonable accuracy what Jesus said and did, and how his followers interpreted his life and mission.
The chapter on how we got the bible is fascinating and enlightening. We are of course told that the early church gathered and discussed the matter and agreed on a canon. Ehrman shows that this process took literally hundreds of years, and for many years after the canon was officially adopted, some churches still included or excluded various books.
This was the result of the fact that there were many many voices in early Christianity, and they interpreted Jesus quite differently. Although we tend to think of those voices that “lost” as heretics, they were simply the competing Christians who relied on different apocalypses, different epistles, and different gospels for their version of Jesus. The winner, what is now termed “orthodox” got to write the history of Christianity, and of course made it appear that these “heresies” were minor. In fact, in some places, they were by far the majority view.
One area that was especially helpful to me, was the area of what things were not in the bible, but actually developments of the early church. Dr. Ehrman makes a good case that the concepts of “suffering Messiah,” the trinity, the divinity of Jesus, and heaven and hell, were later constructs of the early church, forged in response to so-called heresies or to explain circumstances of the church at that time.
This book is simply jam packed with ideas and new ways of looking at scripture. In closing Bart Ehrman makes it clear that this doesn’t mean that faith is worthless, not by a long shot. He contends that his agnosticism had nothing to do with his views on the bible, and claims that many of his colleagues in biblical scholarship are indeed strong believers. I agree with him in this.
Understanding the truth of what the bible is, what it says, and what it means helps us in knowing how to relate to it. It is, and was never meant to be, a manual for life. We cannot plug in our question and find an “answer.” At best, more often than not, we can get a sense of the standards we should apply in deciding unique issues that were unknown to these early Jesus followers. Moreover, we can learn that there are myriads of ways, not necessarily any of them wrong, in looking at Jesus, his ministry, and his ultimate meaning for us.
Buy the book, read it, and I promise you, you will have gained a wealth of understanding that will better enable you to live your faith in a greater clarity of truth. Bart Ehrman has once again provided us with a great must read for anyone who takes their faith seriously.
Existential Ennui 
I’m sure I’d agree with what he’s written, as I usually do. Not sure that I want to buy another book, though I really appreciated your review on Crossan and Borg’s book about Paul and loved that book.
I have to say, au contraire, I am not a huge fan of Prof. Ehrman. Not that I’ve read his books, just his titles.
When I saw “Misquoting Jesus” on the bookshelf the first time, I was interested and flipped through looking for the Jesus misquotes. Nothin’. Just a starry-eyed popularization of textual criticism, with the shocking assertion that some variations may reflect the opinions of the copyists.
Though I never read the thing, for years afterwards I always asked people who read it for any “Jesus misquotes,” and I’ve yet to hear one. So I’m not impressed.
Not that textual criticism isn’t important and even interesting. I have Metzger’s “Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament,” but for some reason I don’t find the manuscript tradition that shocking.
So now we have something called “Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them).” Except, first, they’re not hidden. They are all right there. Admittedly, you have to actually read the bible to see them, which I guess Ehrman didn’t do much of before graduate school. But all these “contradictions” are apparent to anyone who actually can read. You don’t need Greek.
And “Why We Don’t Know about Them”? Isn’t that a little insulting? He may not have known about them, but they’re apparent to anyone who can read English. Yes, horrors, there are two different lists of Jesus’ forebears, there are different last words, there are chronological differences in the gospels. We are supposed to be shaken by this?
Now there are differences in what to do about these. Those who adhere to a theory of inerrency tend to find them to be contradictions in appearance only. If you go by your local fundamentalist bookstore you’ll find whole books on the subject. It’s not like they didn’t know about them.
Others take a “so what?” approach. Why does it really matter what Jesus’ actual last words were? Each gospel teaches what it teaches. I am no more shocked by contradictions between the gospel accounts of Jesus’ trial than the contradictions between the accounts of Socrates’ trial in Plato and Xenophon.
I am always amused by these books that are occasionally published, with much hoopla, with titles like “What the Bible really Says”–because, typically, they are sold alongside a mountain of Bibles, and if you wanted to know what the bible really says, there’s obviously a more direct approach. The only people who will be shocked by Ehrman’s “Hidden Contradictions” are those who have hidden their bibles away someplace so that they can’t find them. The scandal perhaps is that so few Christians actually read the thing, and then find themselves shocked where someone like Ehrman astonishes them by essentially reading parts of it to them.
Rick I always appreciate your comments, because they are thought out, but I think you’re way off base here. First, you state you don’t like the man’s work, yet you admit not to having read any of it.
You seem to make light of real contradictions as if they don’t exist, but again, if you don’t read the text, how can you make this statement. You can read my review of Misquoting and find a few i believe.
I think to some people these things are shocking. They are not taught these things in sermons or bible classes. They are taught that the Bible is a seamless whole.
Your remarks that anyone can do this is again, said with little evidence. The fact is most people are taught to read the Gospels together, and the stories are conflated to arrive at the “picture”. That is not correct. You have to read horizontally in order to see the discrepancies, and more especially you really need a synoptic reader to do it well.
Again, having not read the books he has written makes it difficult to discuss your errors in your conclusions. What you are missing is that the various writers held very different theologies and those theologies are at odds. They reflect a church struggling to make sense out of how history was playing out quite differently than they had assumed.
Your remarks about Ehrman’s not doing much bible reading before grad school are simply erroneous. He attended first Moody and then Wheaton before going to Princeton and studying under Metzger. He was a full blown fundamentalist and seriously so since his teens.
But enough. Sorry you don’t want to read the book. It might, just might give you a different perspective. But sometimes we are more comfortable with our illusions. I don’t mean that as a slam against you. We all do that to a degree on some things.
Pastors are taught these things, but find sometimes that their congregations don’t want to hear this stuff. I can attest to that. A member of my church suggested that one of our past rectors was brilliant and tried to explain the truth of the bible during his sermons and such, and there were definitely people who “couldn’t handle” the truth. That is exactly what Ehrman speaks of in his book but again you wouldn’t know that.
Blessings Rick. As always its a pleasure.
I think something like this is geared towards the typical Christian, one that doesn’t pore over contradictions, minutiae, etc., because most I know don’t; a springboard to further textual exploration on their own, or someone who isn’t a Christian but is interested in such things from a historical standpoint but doesn’t have the religious background or years of grad school to dive right in to the expert texts from the get go.
Randal, too true. Most people aren’t that interested, and frankly often don’t want their world upset with this truth. Most of us, even those of us who are fairly serious in our reading, often miss a lot of this. Simply because we are not trained to see it. And it does take reading the texts in a very different way than normal. You have to understand the historical critical method and how to use it. Most of us aren’t so trained. Much of what Ehrman says, I’ve read before, but he puts it in a context that was new for me, and helpful in discerning the actual truth. Working on women’s issues and homosexual issues, I really found this helpful in seeing the changes in theology. Thanks for what you said.
Jan, I feel your pain. Too much too read, too little, time, not enough money either! It’s always a difficult choice.
After reading your post yesterday, I went to our county’s library online catalog and found quite a few of Ehrman’s books. The more recent ones have a waiting list. I will request one of his earlier books as a starter. A dear gentleman and Christian scholar/theologian who happens to be a Canon at the Episcopal Cathedral in Little Rock, told me that one should never feel guilty about having questions about God and Christianity in general (I was having a minor spiritual crisis at the the time I sought his counsel.)
The older I get, the more I know how much I do not know, nor understand.
Pat so very true. YOu may read Ehrman and not agree, anyone is free to do that of course. But I talk this stuff over with people in my church a lot, and we all agree, that our faith is enhanced by this truth we find in the corrections of the “record” so to speak. It eliminates so much of the stuff that never really makes sense. As was said by someone else on another post, we grow in the questions. When we accept everything, we stagnate I think.
Plus, unlike a lot of scholars, the dude can write well without being purposely obtuse, and that always helps. 😉
Indeed, he is kinda like the Carl Sagan of biblical studies. lol…