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.

 

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.