https://apologeticspress.org/APContent.aspx?category=13&article=2827
Jesus, Rudely Interrupted
Criticism of the Faith is nothing new. Whether big-budget
documentaries, bestselling books, or blockbuster movies, the media is
glutted with criticism aiming to overturn the faith of millions. It
seems that every year a new angle emerges during the seasons when people
step back to reflect upon their faith. As believers consider the truths
of Christianity, hostile criticism attempts to revamp, revise, and
rewrite what Christians have believed for two millennia. Christmas and
Easter are perennial target release dates for books, articles, and
television documentaries promising to reveal secrets that will turn
Christianity upside down.
One of the most recent contributions of New Testament scholar and textual critic Bart Ehrman is a book entitled,
Jesus, Interrupted. Released in 2009, this book picks up where his earlier work,
Misquoting Jesus,
leaves off. Ehrman continues his assault on the Christian Faith,
assuring believers that his criticism does not controvert Christianity,
but informs it. Since this information started him on the journey to
agnosticism, it is easy to see how his assertions could be construed as
disingenuous.
PARDON THE INTERRUPTION
Raised in a “fundamentalist” Christian home, Ehrman graduated high
school and attended the conservative Moody Bible Institute. He continued
his studies at Wheaton College in Illinois, and later received his
Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary under the watch of Bruce
Metzger, one of the foremost textual scholars of the 20th century.
Somewhere along the way, he became increasingly disenchanted with the
Christian Faith. Although he was a denominational minister during his
time in graduate school, Ehrman has now left his Christian upbringing
far behind. He now considers himself a “happy agnostic” (2005, p. 258).
Jesus, Interrupted
goes farther than his previous work, claiming not only that the Bible
is full of scribal errors, but that the gospel accounts are fraught with
contradictions and late inventions. In this sense, according to Ehrman,
the story of Jesus—the historical man—was “rudely interrupted” by late
insertions into the text. Though it has been well received on the
popular level, Ehrman’s work has not met with approval from those best
quipped to evaluate his claims. In his blog, respected New Testament
scholar Ben Witherington III critiques Ehrman’s book, saying,
It is mystifying however why he would attempt to write a book like Jesus, Interrupted which frankly reflect [sic] no in-depth interaction at all with exegetes, theologians, and even most historians of the NT
period of whatever faith or no faith at all. A quick perusal of the
footnotes to this book, reveals mostly cross-references to Ehrman’s
earlier popular works, with a few exceptions sprinkled in.... What is
especially telling and odd about this is Bart does not much reflect a
knowledge of the exegetical or historical study of the text in the last
thirty years. Even in a work of this sort, we would expect some good up
to date bibliography for those disposed to do further study, not merely
copious cross-references to one’s other popular level books.... The
impression is left, even if untrue, that Ehrman’s actual knowledge of
and interaction with NT historians, exegetes, and theologians has been and is superficial and this has led to overly tendentious and superficial analysis (2009, emp. added).
Ehrman spends a great deal of time demonstrating what he considers to
be problems with the gospel accounts. The discussion includes the nature
of authorship, supposed inconsistencies and contradictions, and the
idea that the gospel accounts present different accounts of events in
Christ’s life. This includes the assertion that no one knows who wrote
the gospel records. It was not Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as
tradition claims, because Jesus’ disciples consisted of “[l]ower-class,
illiterate, Aramaic-speaking peasants from Galilee” (2009, p. 106).
Someone else far removed from the original historical setting must have
written them.
Ehrman overplays the old chestnut that the gospel accounts were written anonymously. They are considered
formally anonymous
because none ever identifies their author. John’s gospel account gives
the “Beloved Disciple” as the one responsible for its writing, and many
believe that Mark mentions himself as the young man who runs away while
Jesus is arrested (cf. Mark 14:51). Authors in the ancient world often
referred to themselves indirectly in their work, and this is as close as
any of the gospel accounts come to identifying their authors.
While the evangelists did not sign their work, this is a far cry from
not knowing who wrote the gospel accounts. There was virtually no
dispute in the early church over who wrote each one. If they had truly
been written anonymously, there would be no end to the debate. In one
sense we could compare the book of Hebrews to the gospel accounts. Like
the gospel records, it, too, is formally anonymous. However, no one
really knows who wrote it, and no less than a half dozen possibilities
are cited as potential authors. If the gospel accounts were truly in the
same category, the debate over their authorship would have continued to
the present.
Ehrman notes that, “[s]tories were changed with what would strike us
today as reckless abandon.... They were modified, amplified, and
embellished. And sometimes they were made up” (2006, p. 259). He never
explains why he chooses to believe that the stories concerning Jesus are
legendary or fictitious. Biography, legend, and fiction are different
genres, each with its own distinguishing characteristics. This is common
fare for Christianity’s critics: to announce the Bible as fiction,
legend, myth, or fairy tale without justification or supporting
evidence. Ehrman notes:
For nearly twenty-five years now I have taught courses on the New
Testament in universities, mainly Rutgers and the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. In all this time, the lesson that I have found
most difficult to convey to students—the lesson that is the hardest to
convince them of—is the historical-critical claim that each author of
the Bible needs to be allowed to have his own say, since in many
instances what one author has to say on a subject is not what another
says. Sometimes the differences are a matter of stress and emphasis;
sometimes they are discrepancies in different narratives or between
different writers’ thoughts; and sometimes these discrepancies are quite
large, affecting not only the small details of the text but the very
big issues that these authors were addressing (2009, pp. 98-99).
One of the episodes Ehrman cites as a bona fide “error” in the gospel
records is Christ’s cleansing of the Temple. John locates this event in
the Passion Week, while the Synoptics present the incident early in
Jesus’ ministry. So which is it? Which one made the mistake? Actually,
it never would have crossed the minds of the ancient audience. The
ancients did not insist on chronological accuracy in the same way
moderns do. Ancient authors often arranged their material
chronologically, but they also arranged it topically, and, in the case
of the gospel accounts, theologically. To force an ancient work written
in another culture to conform to modern Western standards is scholastic
arrogance at its worst.
Many moderns put the Bible under a literary microscope, analyzing every
chapter, every verse, every word. In the eyes of hostile critics, even
the tiniest difficulties balloon into monumental testaments to the
inaccuracy and unreliability of the Bible. Ben Witherington makes an
interesting point in this regard. He says that we can think of the
authors of the four gospel accounts much like painters. Each painted a
portrait of Jesus based on his own perspective, as well as the purpose
and rationale intended by the Holy Spirit. They selected the material to
include in their work, a selectivity that is individualistic in nature.
That the gospel writers would highlight different events, or give
different angles on the same events, is expected. Modern biographers
work the same way. Critics expect the authors to record the life of
Jesus with a high-resolution, all-seeing lens. Rather than holding the
biblical books to the same standards in use during the time they were
produced, critics insist on modern standards in a way that is as
unreasonable as it is irrational. To force the ancient text to conform
to modern standards is bad interpretive method. It is a fundamental
building block of reading ancient literature—the Bible included, of
course—that one must seek to understand the context in which the
literature is written. One cannot read ancient Greco-Roman literature by
modern standards any more than one should read a modern newspaper with
the same frame of mind as a citizen of ancient Rome. To continue
Witherington’s analogy, this would be like criticizing Leonardo Da Vinci
for not using a digital camera to photograph the Mona Lisa.
To point out one supposed contradiction highlighted in
Jesus, Interrupted,
Ehrman argues there is an irreconcilable difference concerning the
death of Judas as recorded in Matthew and Acts. Matthew says that Judas
hanged himself and the place became known as the Field of Blood because
it was purchased with blood money (Matthew 27:3-9). In Acts, Luke claims
that the Field of Blood is called that because, as Ehrman puts it,
Judas burst open and bled all over the place. The reading in Acts is not
as different as Ehrman suggests. Both accounts agree that the property
is purchased with Judas’ money. Luke is ambiguous as to why the field
was named the Field of Blood, while Matthew is explicit. Ehrman barely
gives a passing nod to suggested attempts to reconcile the two, and
downplays them accordingly. It is highly likely that Judas hanged
himself, and after death, when the immune system is no longer working,
bacteria began to multiply and produced gases that bloated Judas’ body.
If the rope broke or Judas’ body fell when others were taking him down,
Judas’ body would have ruptured upon striking the ground. This is not
imaginative speculation, but the practical stuff of elementary biology.
Another problem in
Jesus, Interrupted is the absence of
comparative data concerning manuscript evidence from other ancient
sources. Other Greco-Roman sources ranging from Greek philosophers to
Roman government officials demonstrate far less attestation than the New
Testament. The average classical author may have a work represented in
only a couple of dozen manuscripts. The oldest copy of these works is
often many centuries after the original date of writing. For instance,
in the cases of Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, their
most famous works are represented by a handful of manuscripts dating to
the medieval period. Comparing the New Testament to these writings, the
Bible has well over 5,700 copies. Roughly a dozen date to within a
century of the original authors, and about four dozen exist that date to
within two centuries. The earliest copy of a New Testament text is P
52,
otherwise known as the John Rylands papyrus. Housed in the British
Library, this fragment of John’s Gospel dates to approximately A.D.
115-135. The contrast between the textual evidence of the New Testament
and the manuscript evidence from the classical world could not be more
vivid. The noted historian F.F. Bruce recounts the words of Sir Frederic
Kenyon, former director of the British Museum: “The interval between
the dates of the original composition and the earliest extant evidence
[is] so small as to be negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt
that the scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were
written has now been removed” (Bruce, 1972, p. 20).
THE OTHER SINS OF EHRMAN
Ehrman plays his hand with considerable calculation. In his
The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings,
he asserts, “there is not a single reference to Jesus or his followers
in pagan literature of any kind during the first century” (2008, p. 41).
While technically correct, it is somewhat misleading. Josephus is
Jewish—and therefore not pagan—yet he mentions Christ in two passages in
his
Jewish Wars at the end of the first century, references
which are undisputed among scholars specializing in Josephan studies. If
we were to include the first two decades of the second century, we
would have to include several pagan authors: the Roman historians
Suetonius and Tacitus, along with Pliny the Younger, governor of the
Roman province of Bithynia.
The assertion that no references to Jesus and His followers exist in
the first century has one important qualification that Ehrman seems to
have omitted deliberately. While there are no extant references to them
known to scholars today, Suetonius and Tacitus would have needed
historical records or official documents in order to produce their
biographies of the Roman emperors. While these documents no longer exist
today, first-century records seem to have been readily available to
historians. In other words, these documents
did exist, but have perished with the passing of time. Ehrman’s rather misleading statement should have read, “there are no
surviving references to Jesus or his followers in
strictly pagan literature during the first century A.D.
known to scholars presently.”
New Testament scholar Robert Yarbrough points out in Ehrman’s work the
“traditions of (much later) noncanonical gospels are consistently
privileged vis-à-vis their canonical counterparts; the assumption is
that we must treat their assertions as potential historical fact even
though the assertions were not written down for a century, at least,
after their putative origin” (2000, p. 366). Ehrman tends to elevate the
non-canonical gospel records over those of the New Testament even
though they were written centuries after the life of Christ. The
constant claim that the gospel accounts cannot be trusted because they
were written decades later than the events they describe vanishes, and
the non-canonical gospels are considered relatively trustworthy despite
the fact that the amount of time that separates them from the events
they purport to describe is not decades as with the gospel accounts, but
centuries.
As an example of his approach, Ehrman notes that the
Gospel of Peter
features “[a] giant Jesus and a walking, talking cross,” adding, “It’s
hard to believe that this Gospel was ever lost” (2009, p. 209). He seems
to think that Christianity was like any other religion, accepting the
fantastic with little regard for reality. Many of the extracanonical
gospels Ehrman prizes demonstrate the same features. The
Infancy Gospel of Thomas
has a number of odd miracle stories. The author appears to enjoy
telling fantastic stories of weird happenings during the fictional
childhood of Jesus, and the more bizarre the better. This provides a
vivid contrast with the canonical gospel accounts, which record the
happenings of Jesus’ life in sober fashion. It should be no wonder why
the Christians dismissed the tall tales of gospels like
Peter and
Thomas. They preferred believable biographies to other “gospels” that were the ancient equivalent of science fiction.
THE HERMENEUTIC OF SUSPICION
As a text critic, Ehrman is quite good. As an interpreter he is
abysmal. He insists on a rigidly literal interpretation of the text that
does not allow for nuances or for passages from one book to complement
those from another. In some cases, individual authors may state
components of a biblical doctrine individually, but Ehrman forces them
into different camps. It seems almost as if his method aims to pit the
biblical authors against one another rather than allowing them to work
together. In this way, Ehrman is able to create contradictions where
none actually exist. In some places, he appears to deliberately distort
the theological viewpoint of the biblical authors in order to
manufacture divergent viewpoints. He typically notes that scholars have
attempted to reconcile these positions, unsatisfactorily as far as he is
concerned. After explaining what appear to be perfectly legitimate and
convincing solutions to each problem he discusses, Ehrman then reverts
to an unorthodox reading of the text and pronounces the difficulty
unsolvable.
For Ehrman, the ultimate reason why more people do not know about these
supposed contradictions is because the population is largely
ignorant—the very problem he seeks to remedy. In his view, scholarship
has not written popular-level books, and seminary-trained ministers are
unwilling to share this information with their church members. When
discussing his view that most of the New Testament books were not
written by the actual authors, he asks with incredulity, “why isn’t this
more widely known? Why is it that the person in the pew—not to mention
the person in the street—knows nothing about this? Your guess is as good
as mine” (2009, p. 137). It never seems to cross his mind that
seminary-trained ministers and biblical scholars who know about these
views find that
they fail to agree with the evidence.
Yarbrough makes a powerful point about the cavalier attitude Ehrman
takes toward the biblical text: “the early Christians who supposedly
invented stories about Jesus...and then believed them were not
deconstructionists engaged in teaching careers in comfortable university
positions but tradesmen and professionals who knew the daily struggle
for survival and were willing to die for their convictions” (2000, p.
370). For those living in the first century, the Christian faith was not
a detached system of belief that could be adopted or discarded without
consequence. Mistrust, discrimination, and even persecution ever loomed
above the heads of the early Christians. Making the choice to follow
Christ was a genuine commitment that had real—and often highly
unpleasant—consequences.
The reader of
Jesus, Interrupted must be careful to sort
through Ehrman’s arguments. He is an accomplished textual critic, but
allows preconceptions and personal bias to color his conclusions.
Rarely, if ever, does Ehrman engage the opposing viewpoint. He seems to
delight in manufacturing biblical contradictions and then refuses to
allow them to be solved. His work makes it seem as if he has uncovered a
secret hoard of biblical knowledge previously denied to all others. To
those who are academically equipped to evaluate the truthfulness of
Ehrman’s claims, this treasure trove of trade secrets is nothing more
than fool’s gold.
REFERENCES
Bruce, F.F. (1972),
The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press).
Ehrman, Bart (2005),
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San Francisco: HarperSanFransicso).
Ehrman, Bart (2006),
Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend (New York: Oxford University Press).
Ehrman, Bart (2008),
The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (New York: Oxford University Press).
Ehrman, Bart (2009),
Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them) (New York: HarperOne).
Witherington, Ben (2009), “Bart Interrupted—A Detailed Analysis of ‘Jesus Interrupted’ Part 1,” [On-line], URL: http://benwitherington.blogspot.com/2009/04/bart-interrupted-detailed-analysis-of.html.
Yarbrough, Robert (2000), “The Power and Pathos of Professor Ehrman’s New Testament Introduction,”
Perspectives in Religions Studies, Winter, 27[4]:363-370.
