DGE Review 4: Jesus, Interrupted, by Bart D. Ehrman

"I often have my first year students do a comparison exercise in which they list everything said in each of the four Gospels about the events between the time Jesus was burried and the end of the Gospels," Ehrman says, "There can be no better introduction to the idea of horizontal [critical] reading."

Ehrman has a lot of simple questions, and the Bible has a lot of different answers. What did the voice at Jesus' baptism say? Depends on which book you read. What's Jesus' genealogy? Matthew has one genealogy. Luke has another. They don't agree -- and they don't agree with the same information in the Old Testament either. And let's not even mention the fact that they are the genealogies of Joseph, not Mary. Joseph is not even biologically related to Jesus.

The questions pile up. Bart summarizes the types of problems on page 48:

Who actually went to the tomb? Was it Mary alone (John 20:1)? Mary and another Mary (Matthew 28:1)? Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome (Mark 16:1)? Or women who had accompanied Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem? -- possibly Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and "other women" (Luke 24:1; see 23:55)? Had the stone already been rolled away form the tomb? (as in Mark 16:4) or was it rolled away by an angel while the women were there (Matthew 28:2)? Whom or what did they see there? An angel (Matthew 28:5)? A young man (Mark 16:5)? Two men (Luke 24:4)? Or nothing and no one (John)? And what were they told? To tell the disciples to "go to Galilee," where Jesus will meet them (Mark 16:7)? Or to remember what Jesus had told them "while he was in Galilee," that he had to die and rise again (Luke 24:7)? Then, do the women tell the disciples what they saw and heard (Matthew 28:8) or do they not tell anyone (Mark 16:8)? If they tell someone, whom do they tell? The eleven disciples (Matthew 28:8)? the eleven disciples and other people (Luke 24:8)? Simon Peter and another unnamed disciple (John 20:2)? What do the disciples do in response? Do they have no response because Jesus himself immediately appears to them (Matthew 20:9)? Do they not believe the women because it seems to be "an idle tale" (Luke 24:11)? Or do they go to the tomb to see for themselves (John 20:3)?

The questions multiply. You can read horizontally to do a cross-Gospel comparison yourself of what happens next: to who Jesus appears (if anyone) and when, what he says to them, and what they say in response. On virtually every issue at least one Gospel is out of step

Note that Ehrman is not attacking Christianity. As a prior born-again fundamentalist Christian, as he became an expert in these matters he's simply learned to read his holy book with an eye for historical detail. This caused him to give up the idea that the bible is a literal, word-for-word message from God to man. Although later on he eventually became an agnostic (not knowing what to believe -- we covered this in the second part of our series), he's not out to destroy anybody's faith. In fact, he claims learning how to read critically is something that most all ministers are taught to do in seminary and something that they never teach their congregations.

When you read atheists, it seems they commonly use fundamentalists as their straw man. They're an easy target. As Karen Armstrong points out in her excellent 2001 one "The Battle For God", fundamentalists in all three major faiths share the same set of beliefs: that their religious tradition is word-for-word accurate, like an encyclopedia or newspaper, that the end times are near (or here) and that the faith has gone soft and powerless -- getting back to the "old ways" is what is required of a true believer.

It's a message crafted towards those who, instead of really having a personal faith, need to "know" that their belief system is absolutely without error. Like the author of Matthew, who thought that the Jewish texts predicted a virgin birth for the messiah when it really only predicted that he would be born from a young lady, people bring their own preconceptions about old texts with them. Nobody in ancient times understood what an encyclopedia or a newspaper were -- there was no concept of writing down only the absolute truth. Most texts were more allegorical than factual. Geesh, it wasn't until Herodotus that we even had the idea of writing down something that happened in order to remember it. It was much more common to write in elliptical, metaphorical terms. Nobody had the standards we have now. For instance, it was common practice for people to make up books and assign them to famous people in an attempt to gain readers. One author, Galen, was walking down the boulevard in Rome when he came across a couple of people arguing over which two books of his were actually written by Galen. The funny part was -- neither were! So he wrote a book, "How to tell if a book is written by Galen" that taught people how to spot the fakes.

I think what's clear from reading Ehrman is that when you start organizing a religion you have much different requirements than when you're simply practicing it for yourself. Early Christianity most likely had a more Jewish flavor and consisted of decentralized communal groups without leaders. They spent their time waiting for Jesus to return. This went on for 300 years or more. During this time, many books were written or "discovered" As the religion grew and grew, more and more people believed all sorts of things. When Constantine formalized Christianity in the fourth century, suddenly there was a big question -- just what IS Christianity, anyway? You can't have a formal system adopted by Imperial Rome that doesn't have a good definition. And so a free-form system of faith built around a simple story of a apocalyptic preacher who got whacked by the Romans turned into a formal system of exactly what to believe and why. And yes, I think there are direct parallels between this and the technology management arena, where high-performing teams are eventually stifled and smothered by the same well-meaning rules they create for themselves as they go along in their day-to-day business.

At the end of the day, however, we don't have much in a way of an argument against believing in God. Ehrman, in fact, believes this knowledge will deepen belief and not destroy it. I tend to agree. While I detected a bit of hand-waving from Bart, especially in the guesses as to what happened in the first hundred to two hundred years, he seems mostly on the money to me. Another excellent book.

What we do have is an interesting case study of the nature of people in uncertain situations. Ehrman tells the story of starting off his classes each year by asking his pupils how many of them believe the Bible is the unaltered word of God. Being in the Bible belt, most of them raise their hands. He then asks how many of them have read the latest Harry Potter book. Again most of them raise their hands. Finally, he asks how many of them have read the bible. Usually very few hands go up.

If you really think that you have, in your hands, the word-for-word message from the creator of all time and space, why wouldn't you read it immediately?

It's an excellent question.