Book by Bart D. Ehrman
This was an interesting read for sure. Bart Ehrman is a New Testament historical-critical scholar who is also an agnostic atheist. I have read this book at an interesting time in my life because I have had a lot of doubts and questions about the resurrection, whether or not Jesus was God (in the sense of being more equal to God than myself), and what Jesus actually saved us from (since we still live lives full of pain and beauty but definitely not heaven on earth / perfection / sinlessness). I have also read some apologetics this year which helped me keep in mind that there are other writers (and scholars) like Francis Spufford and Justin Brierly who make convincing arguments about their own interpretation and lived experience of Scripture. Not to mention a book I read during Bible college called “Reading Backwards” by Richard B. Hays that contradicts Bart’s idea that the authors of Matthew, Mark and Luke did not believe Jesus was God. So, I’m trying to keep all these things in tension.
But I cannot deny that after reading this book, I think I have become more agnostic than ever. I’m an agnostic-trinitarian-universalist. I resonated with this sentence from the concluding chapter: “I came to think of the Christian message about God, Christ, and the salvation he brings as a kind of religious “myth,” or group of myths—a set of stories, views and perspectives that are both unproven and unprovable, but also un-disprovable—that could, and should, inform and guide my life and thinking.”
I am fortunate that a lot of this material was not new to me. I have a degree in theology and Tabor Bible College did not shy away from teaching me that the Trinity is not in the Bible; the resurrection stories don’t agree about the details; we don’t know the original authors of most books of the Bible etc. I think the material that felt newest to me was Bart’s sceptical views of the gospels. How much can we actually know was true about Jesus: that he lived, that he died, that his teachings had an apocalyptic (end times) focus, and not much else. Bart seemed sure that Jesus didn’t believe himself to be God, though he may have thought of himself as a the “Son of Man”—an earthly ruler under God’s authority. Bart explained that from a historical viewpoint the resurrection is “virtually impossible” and that it takes faith to believe in the resurrection (Justin Brierly argues differently in his book Unbelievable). He pointed out that only Matthew and Luke refer to a virgin birth and place that birth in a different location (Bethlehem) from where Jesus grew up (Nazareth) and was known to come from. Matthew and Luke don’t agree about what brought Jesus’ parents to Bethlehem, they seem to be trying to prove Old Testament prophecy (and could be making the whole thing up).
Bart is critical of trying to harmonize texts like these—amalgamating Matthew and Luke’s Christmas stories—which is something a lot of us grew up doing in church Christmas plays with the shepherds, and the wise men, and the star, and the manger in a stall (and the animals we imagine were there), represented from two completely different gospels about Jesus’ birth. And I found it really interesting when Bart made it sound like, perhaps Jesus didn’t have a clue why he was dying on the cross, and really did feel abandoned by God, because he had thought he would live to see apocalyptic events like the overthrow of the government, and the 12 disciples beginning to rule.
Some other things that stood out to me included the idea that the Gospel of Matthew and the letters of Paul disagree about salvation being achieved by keeping the Jewish law better than the Pharisees, versus salvation by grace alone. Or the fact that both Jesus and Paul were apocalyptic, believing that they were about to see the Kingdom come to earth, or Jesus’ return, or the saints rise from the dead and rule on the earth, in their own lifetimes. Other New Testament books/letters had to grapple with the fact that it wasn’t happening in the first century, or the second, or the third. People were dying and the church wanted to know whether those people were resurrected…so heaven and hell were invented. I totally agree that the concepts of heaven and hell today are far removed from the concepts of Heaven, Gehenna, Sheol, Hades, Tartarus, the Lake of Fire etc. mentioned in the Bible.
Bart shows that over many centuries there were many debates about whether Jesus was God and whether or not there is only one God (or a Trinity, or different modes of being God etc.), I heard a lot of this in Bible College, but Bart does a convicting job of showing just how human the church is. Human beings had to decide which books to include and exclude from the Bible and the people who made these decisions were already centuries removed from the living, breathing Jesus. They created a new religion which, Bart argues, was not the religion of Jesus who was clearly Jewish, but is simply a religion about Jesus.
I wouldn’t recommend reading this book if you don’t want your faith in the Bible to be challenged.
I would recommend this book if you want to deepen your understanding of how we got the Bible, who wrote the various books, what we can glean about the historical Jesus, and that the Bible can continue to navigate us toward love and good deeds if we let it.
