Liz was kind enough to get me Bart Ehrman’s newest book, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Didn’t Know About Them), for my birthday. If you’ve read this blog for any amount of time you most likely realize how happy I was to receive it. I love reading Bart Ehrman.
Just like I did with Misquoting Jesus, I thought I would do a chapter by chapter review of the book. I like doing this for Bart Ehrman’s books because I think they are very well written and they are aimed at the non-specialist. I normally agree with much of what Ehrman writes even though I differ with some of his conclusions. He certainly is a scholar at the top of his field and a scholar that students and pastors should familiarize themselves with.
To get a feel for the book I would encourage you to listen to Ehrman’s recent interview on Fresh Air that focuses on this book. Ehrman gives a little of the back story of the book and talks about some of the themes in the book. I thought the interview was very well done.
The introduction provides nothing new for those who are familiar with Ehrman’s story. He recounts his time at Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College, and then his studies under Bruce Metzger at Princeton Theological Seminary. Already, however, Ehrman sets up what I believe to be a false dichotomy. In describing his studies at Princeton, Ehrman writes:
it became clear to me over a long period of time that my former views of the Bible as the inerrant revelation from God were flat-out wrong. My choice was either to hold on to views that I had come to realize were in error or to follow where I believed the truth was leading me. In the end, it was no choice. If something was true, it was true; if not, not.
I understand where Ehrman is coming from as I, also, see the idea of an inerrant Bible to be flat-out wrong. What I don’t see, however, is the ‘either/or’ choice that Ehrman presents. Certainly there are many Christians who hold to the idea of Scripture being infallible, authoritative, and perfect (language from the WCF) without holding to a fundamentalist, Chicago-style of inerrancy (inerrancy, you will remember, is not a term used in the WCF or normally used in church history to describe Scripture). The idea that Scripture is either inerrant or that it is completely wrong is one of the dangers of some of the modern proponents of inerrancy. Ehrman’s current view is the natural conclusion of such thinking.
Ehrman’s next chapter is entitled “A Historical Assault on Faith” and will be reviewed tomorrow.
11 March 2009 at 3.34 pm
Thanks for reviewing this book. I look forward to following along with your discussion.
11 March 2009 at 7.36 pm
I found with Ehrman, even more so after listening to him on Fresh Air the other day, I absolutely agree with his data and then completely disagree with his interpretation of the data. Your inerrancy example here is just one of many. But hey, that’s actually more than I can say for most evangelical scholars I read…I usually disagree with their take on the data and their conclusions. What does that say about me?
11 March 2009 at 9.18 pm
after hearing the fresh air interview, I am excited to read your review. I had the same impression.. he seems to constantly set up false dichotomies to resolve what seem to be personal and/or ‘emotional’ issues with the text or religion in general.
Some of the comments in the interview, while very sincere and not sensationalized, felt as though he was willfully setting up the listener in order to debunk the Gospels. Rather than seeing them as different authors and voices telling a narrative from different perspectives, he used their viewpoints as prooftext to prove inconsistencies from one book to another.
I do not know much about him, but i find it interesting that in an post-modern era focused on meta-narratives, he uses a modernist technique to ‘disprove’ the Scriptures. A post-modernist thinker is much more likely to see different views, as just that, different views of the same picture, but all seeing the same “truth.” bart, on the other hand, puts them in their own intellectual silo’s, but it’s funny how he also emphasizes that by seeing them as a whole, the author’s voice is lost.
12 March 2009 at 11.58 am
People who agree with Ehrman’s facts but avoid the implications are like someone who sees rancid meat and rotten vegetables being put in a stew and then gobbles up a full bowl of it.
The Bible contains a whopping number of contradictions on large and small issues. And yes, that represents “different authors and voices telling a narrative from different perspective.” The most logical explanation is not that God somehow wanted us to be forever confused, but because they were MAKING IT UP AS THEY WENT ALONG, and they had wildly varying beliefs. Just as we do today.
Logically, that doesn’t make it more likely to be true, but more likely to be untrue.
12 March 2009 at 1.46 pm
occam’s toothbrush: It’s always funny to see someone express such strong convictions behind an anonymous name and fake email address, especially when they bring up the topic of contradictions.
Moving on from the irony, behind your comment seems to be an idealistic, positivist, and thoroughly modern idea of what historiography must be in order to be true. If you read any two history books on, say, the Revolutionary War you will find that the historians run into the same difficulties that you believe renders the Gospels useless. Logically that does not make the Revolutionary War less likely to be true, but more likely to be true because there are multiple sources of its occurrence.
I would challenge your idea of “wildly varying beliefs.” Such an assertion is more bombast than truth, as I’m quite sure you cannot prove such a statement. Your hyperbole seems to be a linguistic convention written for the purpose of an emotional response from the reader as opposed to a logical and provable statement. Tsk, tsk.
It would be humorous to find out if you have read Ehrman’s book, because I highly suspect that you have not. The reason I say this is because Ehrman actually speaks against your first paragraph in his work. Ehrman writes:
I thought you might find that interesting.
14 March 2009 at 11.37 pm
I’m glad I happened upon your blog and I’m eager to hear how you reconcile Ehrman’s data with a Reformed worldview. Don’t let me down!
A response to your comment to Occam on historical method:
Say that we have only one early British eye-witness who locates the time of Cornwallis’ surrender at 2 pm, and another American eye-witness who says it happened at noon. We would need some yet unidentified reasons to doubt the historicity of Cornwallis’ surrender, or that it happened during the day, or that something called the American Revolution took place.
Now say history completely forgot about a hidden treasure of the Revolution: the Cornwallis cult, a cult said to have sprang up on American soil after the Revolution which saw Cornwallis as God’s holy warrior and Washington as a minister of Satan. Let’s say that there are 25 separate manuscripts produced by this cult and each with their own author who claims to having been an eye-witness to Cornwallis’ surrender. Now if one of these sources stated that right before Cornwallis’ surrender, General Washington produced a flatus that wiped out 200 British soldiers, and another source wrote that it was three flatuses, and yet other sources replace the flatulence with a belch that was followed by a strong breeze, and three other source corroborate the belch but change the deaths from 200 to 300; if all this was found written just as I have imagined and if the cult exists even today and holds to the same historical doctrines, we would still have serious cause to doubt that any flatulence or any belch wiped out any of Cornwallis’ men.
This is why comparing the historiography of the American Revolution to the historiography of Christianity is quite a hopeless thing for a historian to do because then you’re bound to go believing just about anything written by anyone whose story is only slightly corroborated by another source (i.e. the apocrypha, ancient books like Enoch, the writings of Zarathustra etc.). As a credible historian you simply must take a skeptical stance when you are dealing with ancient sources which display strong religious biases towards their subject matter, as I’m sure you would do if you happened upon the writings of the Cornwallis Cult or even the writings of ancient Islamic sources— rare is the Christian who consistently applies the same historical criteria to all religions, including his own.
20 July 2009 at 8.33 pm
[...] from. If you’re interested in an in-depth analysis of Jesus, Interrupted, feel free to visit Art Boulet’s critique of the [...]