A Mass of Variant Views, part 1

On page 177 of Jesus Interrupted, Dr. Ehrman says that “the earliest reference to Jesus’ tomb being empty is in the Gospel of Mark, written forty years later by someone living is a different country who had heard that it was empty.”

This is not true and I believe that Dr. Ehrman knows that the statement is not true.   Dr. Ehrman knows that Paul wrote much earlier than Mark.  He dealt extensively with the resurrection data and yet he did not mention Paul’s documentation in I Corinthians.  That documentation is the most important documentation because it is much earlier than Mark and for other reasons.

The Apostle Paul writes about the resurrected Jesus in I Corinthians and perhaps in other letters also.  The I Corinthians documentation is especially important because Paul is not the source of the evidence. Followers of Jesus early on, within 10 years, developed a creed which they repeated to one another and perhaps in worship services.  This creed summarized specific data about the life of Jesus Christ that they wanted to remember.  Here are the statements in that creed from one of the latest English translations based on the largest body of manuscripts available today.

that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,

that he was buried,

that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,

and that he appeared to Peter,

and then to the Twelve.

after that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.

then he appeared to James,

then to all the apostles

The first generation Jesus followers were quoting this creed to one another with a few years after Jesus ascended.  That this is a creed from these followers is well documented.  And the text of I Corinthians 15 indicates that:  “for I delivered to you as of first importance what I also receive.”  Paul said this primary statement he received from other believers, probably through his visits to Jerusalem, and passed it on to the Corinthians just as he had received it from the early Jesus followers.

This creed documents several essential beliefs about Jesus.  Jesus died for the sins of humanity. Jesus was buried in a grave by Joseph of Arimethea.  He was then raised from the dead three days after he was put in the grave in fulfillment of His own prophesy and of Old Testament prophesies.   He made several appearances after His resurrection. The most phenomenal appearance was to a group of 500 hundred believer/followers at one point.  According to Paul, most of those 500 were still alive as eyewitnesses to the life and post-resurrection appearance of Jesus.  The point that can be made here is that these 500 people could be contacted because they were still alive to get first hand information about Jesus’ appearance.

So this was a significant omission from the book and I can only conclude that it was omitted because it does not support Dr. Ehrman’s theses.

Mood and Conjecture

In Jesus Interrupted, page 102: “John and Matthew were both written by earthly disciples of Jesus, why are they so very different, on all sorts of levels?”   Because they were not written to you, a person in the 20^th century and they were written by two different men to very different audiences and cultures.  That is why they are different.  They used different teachings of Jesus to support the message they conveyed.  Matthew is more of a synoptic gospel, i.e., a chronology if teachings and events where John’s focus was more towards the identity of the person of Jesus and was written to a Jewish community.

By the way,  I need to note Ehrman’s admission on the last page of the book in a footnote (p. 292) “I am not claiming that the message of any book of the Bible is self-interpreting an that its meaning is somehow obvious on a simple reading—that somehow the meaning inheres in the words of the texts.  Texts don’t tell us their meaning.  They have to be interpreted, and they are always interpreted by living, breathing human beings with loves, hates, biases, prejudices, worldviews, fears, hopes, and everything else that makes us human.  All of these factors affect how texts are interpreted, and they explain why intelligent people can have such radically different interpretations of the same text.  Even so, some texts, interpreted according to standard practices that we use to interpret, are more obviously relevant and germane to our human condition today than others.”

Galilee or Greek

Dr. Ehrman in several places in Jesus Interrupted makes a big point of the Galilean disciples of Jesus being illiterate, or presumed to be illiterate.  I don’t think though that he deals specifically with Jesus and the passage in Luke 4 where Jesus stands in the Nazareth synagogue and reads from the Isaiah scroll.   Jesus knew how to read.  How was he trained to read, when he also comes from this poor region of Israel, Galilee?  Dr. Ehrman does not deal with the issue because he has no answer for why Jesus can read.

Whether the disciples read or write is not the issue that Dr. Ehrman makes it out to be in Jesus Interrupted.  What is interesting about this time in history are these facts:  1.  Rome ruled and so there was peace during this time in Israel.  2.  Rome had previously conquered Greece and Greek had become the dominant language of the Roman Empire.  3.  The literacy in the Roman Empire was very high and thus when the Gospels and Net Testament letters were written and copied a few years later, many people under Rome’s domain could read them.  This makes the era and ideal time for the Messiah to come and for His Message to be communicated.

I am sorry that Dr. Ehrman can not see this.  As historian he would be served by a broad survey 1st century history.  Researching Greek words in the New Testament or extra-New Testament literature may never get him to where he needs to be.

 

 

Who Wrote the Bible?

I moved on to the chapter, “Who Wrote the Bible?”   That is a misnamed.  He only deals with New Testament books.   I thought that I might glean real meat here but I got to his conclusion and was very disappointed.   He makes points about books not being written by the names ascribed to them and at the end answers his own dilemma.

Ehrman makes a big deal about the disciples being illiterate by quoting some statistics about literacy rates in Israel during this era.  These men were from Galilee and were less apt to be trained or literate than if from other parts of Israel.  After running down this trail, he poses what I am sure he considers to be a profound proposition that these men couldn’t write so why are so many of the books in the New Testament attributed to them.  Well, actually there are not many books or letters attributed to the disciples of Jesus.

More importantly, however, is Dr. Ehrman’s own discovery and admission at the end of the chapter.  On page 155, speaking of I Peter: “It is sometimes argued that Peter had someone else write the letter for him, for example, Silvanus, who is named in the letter (5:12).  But the letter itself doesn’t say that. And if someone else wrote the letter, wouldn’t he, rather than Peter, be the real author?”

Do you get what Dr Ehrman is alluding to here?   He has just called some of the New Testament books forgeries because someone dictated a letter and someone else wrote the letter on parchment—and, this is the presumption throughout the chapter on who “wrote” to books.  I am astounded at his logic.

My wife is a secretary and she types dictation every day she works for her boss.  Do you think she signs that dictation with her name.  No, the boss signs the letters and then they are mailed or faxed.

So, Dr. Ehrman’s premise here explains his own dilemma about the disciples not being able to write Greek, if in fact they were not able to write Greek.  They could have easily dictated the books or letters and had a learned person write it down.  It is not a forgery to put the name of the person on the letter who dictated it.

We have an example of this scenario in Paul’s case.  Galatians was almost certainly dictated to someone else except for chapter 6, verse 11 and maybe 12 where Paul indicates that he is now writing in “large letters”.  So Paul authored Galatians though someone else may have written it down for him when perhaps his sight was failing.

Ehrman does not give one specific example of why the attributed authors did not write the books that are attributed to them. He only speaks in generalities about use of different words and styles of writing.  Now I will concede to him Hebrews. I realize there is still debate in scholarly circles of whether the Apostle Paul wrote the book.  But he never discusses the point that even if the author of a book is not known precisely, that there is merit to trusting it’s inclusion in the set of divinely inspired works.  The early church fathers knew who the authors were and they made the choices within the Christian community who were reading and listening to the Gospels and letters.  Also I believe they all were aided by God’s guidance.

This is not something that anyone today can go back and redo and make the included books a different set of letters and gospels.  Many do not realize that specific principles  guided the early church community in their understanding of which writings were inspired by God and which ones were not inspired.

(Jesus Interrupted)

Contradictions or Apparent Contradictions

I moved back to the front of the book, Jesus Interrupted to the chapter,  A World of Contradictions.  I note here that Ehrman begins to set up “straw men” in an attempt to create contradictions.   A scholar rightly treating these texts would at least start out referring to them as apparent contradictions because they may be that but they are not “absolutely” known to be contradictions.  However, the “contradiction” comes because of the timelines artificially created by Dr. Ehrman and because he does not want to give the gospel writers: Matthew, Mark Luke, and John the liberty to include or exclude what they want to emphasize about the life of Christ.  Matthew, Mark, Luke and John just simply don’t “agree” to his satisfaction because they are providing salient points adapted for the original audience of each writer.

Ehrman states several times throughout the book that to make sense of the gospels we have to take what is given and create our own version of the Gospel.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Most of what we need to know is right there in the texts.  He may have trouble, as anyone would, because we are 20^th century readers reading 1^st century authors and many times we don’t understand the nuances of their 1^st century culture and customs.

I need to note that in his hurriedness Dr. Ehrman has the wrong reference of a genealogy on page 37.  He lists Luke 1:23 when in fact the genealogy starts in Luke 3:23.  That points to another issue with the book.  This book appears to be a hurriedly put together document and there is no index here.

Dr. Ehrman covers the events leading to Jesus’ death recorded in Mark and John.  He appears to nail an irreconcilable difference in timing of the death but actually makes a unconvincing case.   I would love to refer him to someone who is probably his friend, Dr. James Tabor, right there in North Carolina where Dr. Ehrman lives.  Dr. Tabor has done his own research and has a very plausible explanation and reconciliation of these accounts in his book The Jesus Dynasty starting on page 198.

In this chapter I noted that Ehrman calls all the points he makes about discrepancies, “minor, irreconcilable differences.” (page 41)  My conclusion here is that though the chapter is called “A World of Contradictions,” none of the apparent ones are dealt with in depth nor convincingly.  The minor points he is able to find don’t cast dispersions on the great themes of the text nor the plot.

The reader must always remember that Dr. Ehrman is speaking about copies of the autographs and not the autographs themselves.  The discipline of textual criticism allows scholars to recreate the original words of the autographs with a high degree of invariability from the copies containing variances in spellings, side notes, omissions and additions.

 

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.)