Who Invented Christianity?

That is a question that Christians answer in a very different way than someone like Dr. Ehrman.   I am reading and reviewing the book by Dr. Bart Ehrman, Jesus Interrupted.

I don’t always read a book straight through because in many books there is much paper giving little information that I want to read.  I move to what I hoped would be an interesting chapter:  Who Invented Christianity? Ehrman starts the chapter with an interesting proposition to Christians:  Why don’t they read their book?   That is a great question—we deserve to have to answer that question seriously and often.

However, overall,  this a very lackluster chapter.  There is nothing new, different, or interesting in this chapter—old arguments many writers have delivered before.  It is a sleeper of a chapter.

“When did Jesus become the Son of God?” is a question that Ehrman asks but I am not sure why he even wants to bring the subject up because we know he does not believe that Jesus is the Son of God.  Christians who know the Bible know that Jesus did not become the Son of God. Dr Ehrman disappoints in this chapter because he showed his lack of understand of the texts, of God, and of Christianity in general.

Dr. Ehrman does assume here that the historical Jewish view (though we know there were variations in Jewish views) was that the Messiah was to be a conquering king.  We can deduce that the reason that they had this view is because they listened to teachers who had this view and who did not integrate key passages of the Jewish Bible into a  theology of the Messiah.   This would explain why many Jews totally missed Jesus as their Messiah.  For all the other reasons, read the New Testament.

God’s Problem or Dr. Ehrman’s Problem

Jesus Interrupted, page 19 “Yet it was the problem of suffering, not a historical approach to the Bible that led me to agnosticism.”

On page 19 Dr. Ehrman says that all this study of the original texts really did not matter to him, but what really got him going away for his god was the issue of human suffering in the world.   I have read his book on this topic:  God’s Problem…, and I have to say here without much explanation that this is probably the weakest work of all his books.  That was the first of his books I read and I was disappointed with the reasoning and logic in it.  Suffering is not God’s problem, it is our problem.   Dr. Bart Ehrman presented no good answers to the problem in the book.  I would assume a man of Dr. Ehrman’s caliber to have thoroughly studied the problem and presented his answer to the problem.  His answer is to enjoy your goods hedonistically and, oh, if you want to you can serve at the local soup kitchen. Is that all that the agnostic community has to offer the world’s biggest problem?  It is the Christian community who is making maximum efforts in the war on suffering.  I welcome a discussion of non-Christian organization’s efforts against human suffering.

 

Heart Language

On Bart Ehrman and Jesus Interrupted:

These is a message in the Bible that speaks to the heart of a man or woman and meets intimate, personal needs of the person who is open to that message.  I know no greater works on love or joy or peace or contentment.  There is also a great felt need on the part of many people to be relieved of the oppression of sin in wickedness found in their hearts.  Many people long to escape the oppression of sins of the heart and the sins from other’s hearts.  The message and the language of the Bible work in these areas of need of the human heart.  Jesus meets the deepest needs of the heart of love, acceptance and forgiveness among many others.

Henri J.M. Nouwen points out what HEART language is all about:

In our world of loneliness and despair, there is an enormous need for men an women who know the heart of God, a heart that forgives, that cares, that reaches out and want to heal. In that heart there is no suspicion, no vindictiveness, no resentment, and not a tinge of hatred. It is a heart that wants only to give love and receive love in response. It is a heart that suffers immensely because it sees the magnitude of human pain and the great resistance to trusting the heart of God who wants to offer consolation and hope.

Henri J. M. Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership (New York: Crossroads, 1989), 24.

Banish the thought that someone missed to message because they stumbled on the grammar or misspellings they find in the Greek manuscript copies. I hope the Dr. Ehrman can get past this in his personal life.

Inerrancy of Scriptural Texts

Seminary professors and church pastors, for that matter, are very careful how they define inerrancy of the scriptures (in Jesus Interrupted).

I don’t see Dr. Ehrman talking about inerrancy in the context I have heard it discussed hundreds of times—that the bible is inerrant in the original languages as it was originally written.  He is right in saying that we only have copies of the original manuscripts now—many thousands of them, by the way, but we don’t have the originals.   Are there additions, maybe subtractions and variances in those copies, absolutely? Do they impact the central message of the Old Testament and of the New Testament—I don’t believe they do.    I believe I can know exactly the major and minor themes of the Old and New Testaments with great certainty.   I believe that Dr. Ehrman’s believes this too.  These themes are not what any of Dr. Ehrman’s books are about.   He is “in the weeds–lost.”   He is down into details as a textual critic of Greek.   I am not sure that he is a textual critic of Hebrew.   But, as I will show later, the very science that he wakes up for every day is the science that leads us back to the “original” words of the Greek and the Hebrew.   Yes, scientists who use the techniques of textual criticism can recover, if necessary, what the original manuscripts stated with great precision given the number of manuscripts that we have available to us of the Greek New Testament.  Dr. Ehrman knows this.   So, we have the original words that God inspired.

Historical Assault on Faith or Contemporary Eclipse of Historical Text

 

I am reading the first chapter of the book, A Historical Assault on Faith, and reading issue after issue with the text of either the Hebrew or the Greek and then Dr. Ehrman goes into the plagues in Exodus and list a couple of references.  I decide to pick up a reputable translation of the Hebrew and look up those references: Exodus 9:5 and Exodus 9:21-22 (page 10 in the book).  Oh no,  those texts don’t say anything close to what Ehrman just stated that they say and that is the first thing I have checked.  He totally distorted the texts and said verse 21-22 talk about livestock present when all the livestock in Egypt has been destroyed in Exodus 9:5.  The problem is that 9:5 did not say that all the livestock were destroyed.  Verse 5 makes the point that the Israeli livestock were spared in spite of the plague coming upon the Egyptian livestock.  This is not a matter of knowing the Hebrew—it is very clear what is said here about livestock.  I am going to have to scrutinize Dr. Ehrman much closer as I go through the rest of this book!!

In this first chapter he also gets right to a hot topic for textual critics and complainers against the Gospels:  the accounts of the events immediately following the Resurrection of the body of Jesus Christ.  I will concede to him that these accounts, on the surface, appear to contradict each other but he simply concludes that they are contradictory accounts and does not explore the possible harmonizing of these accounts.  That is what they are, differing accounts,  and the variances make one big statement about the authors of the gospels—there was absolutely no collusion or conspiracy in the writing of these Gospels.  They were written by 4 different men for different audiences.  They stand on their own because they are historic, truthful and accurate.  There is something important that Dr. Ehrman missed here.  If you read any one of these accounts you will see that women were the first to discover that the tomb was empty.  Given the status of women in the Jewish culture at that time, if the disciples were fudging these accounts, they would have never stated that women were the first to discover the empty tomb.  In that culture, this was an embarrassment and would have been covered up if these men were not telling the truth.

It’s important to note that because these post resurrection accounts are told by at least 3 of the Gospel writers, the accounts have been reconciled by many scholars who have studied them in great detail.

(Dr. Ehrman fails is to inform his readers that many scholars studying these resurrection passages have reconciled the accounts of the events immediately following the bodily resurrection of the Christ.)

Bart Interrupted Jesus — life of Bart Ehrman

I picked up the book, Jesus Interrupted, because I saw the video on Amazon and because there was so much hoop-la about Misquoting Jesus, an earlier book by Dr. Bart Ehrman.

The book, Jesus Interrupted, is very revealing about the life of Bart Ehrman.   I believe I see into his heart somewhat.  No one can ever know what goes on in someone’s heart, but the way he speaks of his past is telling.

He says he has a “born again” experience in high school on the first page of the book.  He puts quotes around born again.  What does he mean by the quotes?—that it was pseudo and not real.   That could explain everything about the rest of his life.   In fact, I believe as he probably does believe that it was pseudo, that is, that it never happened.  He never was born again as Jesus explains the concept to Nicodemus in John 3.  I have what I believe is telling evidence of his belief about his own history and what I now believe about his history.  As he reveals his story throughout the book (check this)  he never says that he put his faith in Jesus.  He DOES say that he put his faith in the Bible (e.g., page xi, top), as the inspired, infallible and inerrant word of God.   It is this book that he pursued in his life and ultimately in his career and not the person of the book—Jesus.

A person who has been in evangelical circles knows that for someone who personally knows Jesus, they, very often, speak of Him by His first name.  I don’t see Dr. Ehrman doing that here.   Again, this is very subjective, of course, but it may point to the fact that he had an emotional experience-a pseudo born again experience, like so many other people in this world, and did not meet the real person.  Jesus knew of that type of person and said that they would be around.  See the Gospel of Mark, chapter 4 and the Gospel of John, chapter 6.

More of Dr. Bart Ehrman

It has been some time since I was out here and I see than my last post was about Misquoting Jesus, his book here: http://wp.me/pphUC-7r .    I want to continue some commentary on him.  He is still on my mind.  I have read other books by him lately.

There have been many reviews of Misquoting Jesus that I find attractive so I will list some of them here.

Dr. Daniel Wallace

Fellow WordPress blogger

A Collection of Scholarly Reviews

Check these out for more in depth analysis.

Misquoting Jesus…Horsefeathers

I have read a review Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus, by Robert H. Gundry 2 times and got a kick out of it both times so I thought I would share it here.

[ Post-Mortem
Death by hardening of the categories.
Robert H. Gundry | posted 9/01/2006 by Christianity Today]

The first thing to say about Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus is that it has little to do with misquoting Jesus.

I agree with Gundry if only based on my definition of inerrancy which is very different from Ehrman’s apparent definition.  In fact, I would venture that the masses of Christiandom do not have a good grasp on a definition of inerrancy that aligns with the way the Greek books of the new testament were written down. But this is not about inerrancy per se, this is about Gundry’s assessment.

I love Gundry’s succinct summary or take on the work of Ehrman.

As an introduction to New Testament textual criticism for lay people, Misquoting Jesus is very informative and often entertaining. But for more than one reason, such people are liable to get a misimpression from the book. The blurbs on its dust jacket talk about “the multitude of mistakes and intentional alterations … made by earlier translators [sic, 'copyists'],” “mistakes and changes” that Ehrman shows had “great impact … upon the Bible we use today,” thus “making the original words difficult to reconstruct,” so that “many of our cherished biblical stories and widely held beliefs concerning the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and the divine origins of the Bible itself stem from both intentional and accidental alterations by scribes—alterations that dramatically affected all subsequent versions of the Bible.” Horsefeathers! So what if John 1:18 originally read in reference to Jesus “the unique Son” rather than “the unique God”? “The Word,” who’ll be identified with “Jesus Christ” (1:17), has already been called “God” in 1:1; and doubting Thomas will call him “my Lord and my God” in John 20:28 (to make nothing of the fact that the King James Version, which “was based on corrupted and inferior manuscripts” [so the dust jacket], translates what Ehrman considers the original reading in 1:18). So what if “the Johannine Comma” in 1 John 5:7–8 (“the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one”) represents a copyist’s inference of the Trinity from authentic New Testament texts, not an authentic New Testament text itself? We have those authentic texts for our own inferring of the Trinity. And it’s simply false that “for the first time Ehrman reveals where and why these changes were made” and that he “reveals” the inferiority of the manuscripts underlying the King James Version. We’ve known about this inferiority for a long, long time. It hasn’t led to revolutions in church teaching, nor has it needed to. And though their text-critical judgments don’t always match Ehrman’s, the contemporary translations used nowadays by lay people don’t depend on the inferior manuscripts. (I grant, however, that these translations deserve censure when they include—in any format whatever—Mark’s long ending [16:9–20] and the story about the woman taken in adultery [John 7:53–8:11]; for those passages have poorer manuscript support than many readings completely overlooked in such translations.)

I agree with Gundry–Horsefeathers!!!–Ehrman is a sensationalist in some respects.  To give him credit, he has taken dry, unpalatable tasks involved in text criticism and made the masses aware of the discipline involved–but at what cost.   To sell copy, he has extended his findings into unsupported conclusions.  Back to Gundry, this is about his analyses.

Ehrman also hardens the categories of literary genre, quotation, and copying to such a degree that he seems to think divine inspiration of the Bible would necessarily have produced historicity without admixture of unhistorical elements, quotations that always conform to originally intended meanings, and errorless copying. There’s no room for nuance, free play, or ambiguity. For scriptural inspiration to have worked, everything would have to have been cut and dried. As Ehrman says, “Given the circumstance that [God] didn’t preserve the words [which have 'been changed and, in some cases, lost'], the conclusion seemed inescapable to me that he hadn’t gone to the trouble of inspiring them.”

This quote is key because it shows where Ehrman is really coming from.  He apparently schooled himself to idealistically believe that, for instance, every manuscript copy, if God is truly involved and superintends, will compare letter for letter to every other manuscript copy of the same passage or text.  Again horsefeathers!!!  Many people come out of Moody Bible Institute understanding inspiration, human involvement in recording scriptures, inerrancy and infallibility in a different light than Ehrman.

It is only fitting to quote Gundry’s Postscript to the review and first footnote:

Postscript: Despite the foregoing criticisms, my sympathies often lie with Ehrman. The rigidity of the fundamentalism in which I grew up far exceeded anything he has described concerning his own experience. His inveighing against homogenizing the distinctive messages of biblical authors for the sake of historical harmony strikes in me a resonant chord. And at an early stage of my doctoral research on Matthew’s use of the Old Testament, what increasingly seemed to count as misquotations—the usual suspects: reversing Micah’s description of Bethlehem as small into a strong denial of that description (2:5–6), quoting Hosea’s reference to Israel’s exodus from Egypt as though it predicted the Messiah’s stay in Egypt and exit from there (2:15), and so on—led me at one point to say aloud in the privacy of my study, “God, it’s not looking good for you and your book.” So why didn’t I arrive at Ehrman’s “dead end”? I have no explanation except to say that “by the grace of God” (the phrase Ehrman judges a textual corruption in Hebrews 2:8–9) I was spared a hardening of the categories through which Scripture is perceived. Or since they were already hard—unreasonably hard—I should rather say that the Spirit of God softened my categories so as to give them an elasticity that accommodates the human features of Scripture without excluding its ultimately divine origin. I pray that Ehrman and all others like him may enjoy such a softening.

1. During a session at the 2005 meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society for Biblical Literature, Ehrman publicly reproached his publisher for giving his book this title. But the average reader has no way of knowing that, nor did I when writing this review.

Sidenote:  we have textual criticism of the Greek New Testament down!!   No,  Bart Ehrman did not contribute much, if anthing,  to the discipline.  But,  between the Germans, English, Israelis, Americans, the original words of sacred texts have been elucidated.

Bart Ehrman

I’ve been reviewing the reviews of Bart Ehrman’s books, mostly Misquoting Jesus.  The reviews are good.   He is out with another edition — more of the same in, Jesus Interrupted.

Ehrman is capitalizing on the coming out of atheists in a day when people are groping for justification of their selfishness and thinking regarding the future and eternity.  Many people just don’t want to think about concepts beyond their own personal interests and so Ehrman and others like him are the excuses to conclude:  ”Okay, I go about my business as I see fit because those words from the Bible or other literature considered sacred, are not sacred nor accurately transmitted.”

What I have found from the reviews has bolstered my initial take on Bart Ehrman.  Ehrman has discovered nothing new.  What he thought he discovered has been know for over 100 years and has been adequately analyzed by many text critics of the past.

So, from my view,  Ehrman’s analysis does not change the New Testament, make it less palatable, challenge it’s authenticity, nor decrease it’s significance and relevance to life in the 20th century.

A new thought I have is that with the discipline of textual criticism, introduced to the public by Ehrman’s books,  critics  determine what happened to certain parts of the Greek over time.  The developement of this discipline points to the fact that through the criticism process,  we can get back to the original Greek words and be confident that we have the original Greek words of the authors.  Contrary to what Ehrman infers but does not demonstrate conclusively, none of the variants he describes affect our view of Jesus, core doctrines about Him and His teachings.

Yes, we Christians, need to wrestle with infallibility and inerrancy.  I believe our struggle will bring us to better understand the scriptures and the person they describe.

Also

Sorry, these polls have different styles–I am learning how to insert polls.

More Tears

It has been awhile since I’ve been writing but I am back at it.  The summers bring different activities for almost everyone and I certainly had mine.

It was so good to get back to London this summer–expensive though it is.  The reason I like London is because you can go to one city and see the world.  Yes,  many, mnay ethnic groups are represented in this city.

Yes I got down to see some of the sites but I went this time to minister to missionaries and a couple of ethnic groups in West London.  I encountered Sikhs, Hindus, Jaines, Muslims, Punjabis, Gujaritis, Pakistanis and Somalis to name a few.  They were all enjoyable, even adorable.

There is another ethnic group that is adorable in God’s eyes:  the Jews.  I come to the Jews because I have been reading a very good book outlining a great case for the historical Jesus by Lee Strobel called The Case for the Real Jesus.

Today I get to the chapter where Lee interviews Dr Michael Brown–one of my favorite apologists for the faith.   In his interview he reflected back to a conference which occurred 150 years ago and words of a Scots Presbyterian who answered the question:  “To reach out to the Jews, what’s the most pressing need?”  “More tears” came the reply.  That response reflects the attitude needed to reach out to Jews–not that they in any way are a target–and that is to humbly show them what is stated in the Old Testament or Tanakh about the Messiah.  It is amazing what is there and as one reads it, the fulfillment of many passages in the Tanakh are seen in the person of Jesus.

I plan to cover more coming from the interview with Michael Brown who has been professor at several major universities and now heads his own organization for training and equipping Christians for ministry.