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.