ردود العلماء على بارت إيرمان Review of Bart Ehrman + متجدد بإستمرار +
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John Warwick Montgomery Refutes Bart Ehrman’s Claim of New Testament Forger
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http://www.tektonics.org/ezine/ijindex.html
Over the years, Bart Ehrman has produced several books; a couple have been relatively non-controversial, but most have not. In those that have provoked controversy, there has always been an underlying lack of forthrightness in the way Ehrman conducts his business.
In some cases Ehrman has abused his authority as a popular author to address topics on which he is not an expert. God's Problem is a classical full-text example of this; Ehrman is not a philosopher and has no business addressing the "problem of evil." In other texts, Ehrman has ranged outside his specialty field (textual criticism) to comment on matters on which he is (compared to other Biblical scholars) badly informed, such as theology and Biblical exegesis. And even when it does come to his specialty, he has repeatedly been dishonest to the extent that he fails to tell the "whole story." This is especially disgraceful inasmuch as a clear dichotomy can be found in how he presents the truth in his more academic works, versus how he presents only as much truth as he wants readers to see in his popular works.
With Jesus, Interrupted Ehrman has stepped far over the line of intellectual honesty and decency, using his platform as a popular author to disseminate much that he surely knows is incomplete and misleading information. The benefit of the doubt is now exhausted. Despite his pretense at scholarship, Bart Ehrman has proven himself, by this book, to be someone not in the least interested in truth, but only in using whatever means are necessary to deconvert as many Christians as possible.
For this reason, I have elected to present as a special edition of the E-Block a thorough refutation of Jesus, Interrupted. Yes, there is also the factor that as predicted, many Skeptics are practically wetting themselves over this one, though it contains nothing new and nothing that has not been refuted before, especially on this site. But primarily, it is Ehrman's lack of intellectual honesty that is the problem here. He is abusing his public trust, and so a response is warranted which publicly shames him for his despicable absues of that trust in Jesus, Interrupted.
Chapter 2: A World of Contradictions -- see a sample here
Chapter 3: A Mass of Variant Views -- see a sample here
Chapter 4: Who Wrote The Bible?
Chapter 5: Liar, Lunatic, or Lord?
Chapter 6: How We Got the Bible
Chapter 7: Who Invented Christianity?
Chapter 8: Is Faith Possible?
Over the years, Bart Ehrman has produced several books; a couple have been relatively non-controversial, but most have not. In those that have provoked controversy, there has always been an underlying lack of forthrightness in the way Ehrman conducts his business.
In some cases Ehrman has abused his authority as a popular author to address topics on which he is not an expert. God's Problem is a classical full-text example of this; Ehrman is not a philosopher and has no business addressing the "problem of evil." In other texts, Ehrman has ranged outside his specialty field (textual criticism) to comment on matters on which he is (compared to other Biblical scholars) badly informed, such as theology and Biblical exegesis. And even when it does come to his specialty, he has repeatedly been dishonest to the extent that he fails to tell the "whole story." This is especially disgraceful inasmuch as a clear dichotomy can be found in how he presents the truth in his more academic works, versus how he presents only as much truth as he wants readers to see in his popular works.
With Jesus, Interrupted Ehrman has stepped far over the line of intellectual honesty and decency, using his platform as a popular author to disseminate much that he surely knows is incomplete and misleading information. The benefit of the doubt is now exhausted. Despite his pretense at scholarship, Bart Ehrman has proven himself, by this book, to be someone not in the least interested in truth, but only in using whatever means are necessary to deconvert as many Christians as possible.
For this reason, I have elected to present as a special edition of the E-Block a thorough refutation of Jesus, Interrupted. Yes, there is also the factor that as predicted, many Skeptics are practically wetting themselves over this one, though it contains nothing new and nothing that has not been refuted before, especially on this site. But primarily, it is Ehrman's lack of intellectual honesty that is the problem here. He is abusing his public trust, and so a response is warranted which publicly shames him for his despicable absues of that trust in Jesus, Interrupted.
This series was begin March 17, 2009 and was completed April 14, 2009.
Chapter 1: A Historical Assault on Faith -- see a sample here
Chapter 2: A World of Contradictions -- see a sample here
Chapter 3: A Mass of Variant Views -- see a sample here
Chapter 4: Who Wrote The Bible?
Chapter 5: Liar, Lunatic, or Lord?
Chapter 6: How We Got the Bible
Chapter 7: Who Invented Christianity?
Chapter 8: Is Faith Possible?
Is There Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus?
Logical Fallacy
History – historical precedent
The Law – legal precedent
Answers to specific claims
http://bit.ly/wccQgH
Is There Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus?
A Debate between William Lane Craig and Bart D. Ehrman
College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts
March 28, 2006
Copyright 2006 William Lane Craig and Bart D. Ehrman. All Rights Reserved.
Ehrman:
What kinds of evidence do scholars look for when trying to establish probabilities in the past?
Well, the best kind of evidence, of course, consists of contemporary accounts; people who were
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close to the time of the events themselves. Ultimately, if you don’t have a source that goes back
to the time period itself, then you don’t have a reliable source. There are only two sources of
information for past events: either stories that actually happened based on, ultimately, eyewitness
accounts or stories that have been made up. Those are the only two kinds of stories you have
from the past – either things that happened or things that were made up. To determine which
things are the things that happened, you want contemporary accounts, things that are close to the
time of the events themselves, and it helps if you have a lot of these accounts. The more the
merrier! You want lots of contemporary accounts, and you want these accounts to be
independent of one another. You don’t want different accounts to have collaborated with one
another; you want accounts that are independently attesting the results. Moreover, even though
you want accounts that are independent of one another, that are not collaborated, you want
accounts that corroborate one another; accounts that are consistent in what they have to say about
the subject.
Testimony is not valid if it is written decades after the event.
What do we have with the Gospels of the New Testament? Well, unfortunately we’re not as well
off as we would like to be. We’d like to be extremely well off because the Gospels tell us about
Jesus, and they are our best sources for Jesus. But how good are they as historical sources? ... Unfortunately, they’re not as good as
we would like. The Gospels were written 35 to 65 years after Jesus’ death—35 or 65 years after
his death,
... They’re not written by Jesus’ Aramaic-speaking followers. They’re written by people living 30,
40, 50, 60 years later.
They’re written many decades
after the fact by people who were not there to see these things happen,
Bill quotes the apostle Paul, just to pick an
example, to indicate that already, just five years after Jesus’ death, Joseph of Arimathea buried
Jesus. Paul wasn’t writing five years after the burial; he was writing 25 years later, and he never
mentions Joseph of Arimathea. Joseph of Arimathea is not mentioned until you get to the Gospel
of Mark, 35 or 40 years after the fact.
Testimony cannot be biased
Genetic fallacy
Argument by popularity
Appeal to authority
Double standard
Moreover, finally, you want sources that are not biased toward the subject matter.
You want accounts that are disinterested. You want lots of them, you want them independent
from one another, yet you want them to be consistent with one another.
First, Bill makes dubious use of modern authorities. Bill constantly quotes modern scholars as if
somehow that constitutes evidence for his point of view. As Bill himself knows, the fact that the
majority of New Testament scholars would agree with his four points is not proof that they are
right. For one thing, the majority of New Testament scholars are believers in the New Testament,
that is, they’re theologically committed to the text, so of course they agree on these points. I
should note that the majority of historians do not agree with Bill’s conclusion. Does that make
those conclusions wrong? No. It simply means that his conclusions are not persuasive to most
historians. Having said that, I’m surprised by some of his so-called authorities that Bill cites, for
the reality is that the majority of critical scholars studying the historical Jesus today disagree
with his conclusion that a historian can show that the body of Jesus emerged physically from the
tomb. Bill might find that surprising, but that would be because of the context he works in – a
conservative, evangelical seminary. In that environment, what he’s propounding is what
everyone believes. And it’s striking that even some of his own key authorities don’t agree. He
10 N. T Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2003),
p. 710.
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quotes a number of scholars, whom I consider to be friends and acquaintances, and I can tell you,
they don’t agree with his views. Does that make him wrong? No, it simply means that his
impressive recounting of scholarly opinion is slanted, lopsided, and fails to tell the real story,
which is that he represents a minority opinion.
Third, and finally, if the only miracles that Bill allows of having happened all belong to the
Judaeo-Christian tradition that he himself personally affirms, I’d like him to address the question
of how that can be historically. How is it that the faith that he adopted as a teenager happens to
be the only one that is historically credible? Is it just circumstance that he was born into a
religious family or a religious culture that can historically be shown to be the only true religion?
Eyewitness claims are necessary but if they oppose one’s worldview, they can be ignored
The Gospels were
written by highly literate, trained, Greek-speaking Christians of the second and third generation.
They’re not written by Jesus’ Aramaic-speaking followers. They’re written by people living 30,
40, 50, 60 years later. Where did these people get their information from?
...These are not eyewitness accounts. So where did they get their stories from?
...The authors were not eye witnesses; they’re Greek-speaking Christians living 35 to 65 years after the events they narrate.
The resurrection has to be taken on faith, not on the basis of proof.
Anyone who’s intimate with Mark’s Gospel would have no
difficulty at all seeing why, 35 years after the event, he or someone in his community might have
invented the story.
We don’t know if Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea.
We don’t know if his tomb was
empty three days later. We don’t know if he was physically seen by his followers afterwards.
Hume was talking about the
possibility of whether miracle happens. I’m not talking about whether miracle can happen. I
don’t accept Hume’s argument that miracles can’t happen. I’m asking, suppose miracles do
happen, can historians demonstrate it? No, they can’t demonstrate it.
My final point is a very simple one. Even if we want to believe in the resurrection of Jesus, that
belief is a theological belief. You can’t prove the resurrection. It’s not susceptible to historical
evidence. It’s faith. Believers believe it and take it on faith, and history cannot prove it.
Dr. Ehrman, can historians verify a miracle if there were eyewitnesses
of evidence that a miracle took place? Given your historical method, has any miracle ever
occurred, and if so, which ones? And if not, might it be that you willfully refuse to believe in
miracles?
Answer from Dr. Ehrman: Good, good question! Thank you! Let me try it again. “Even if you
have eyewitnesses”. Suppose from the 1850s, we have an account of a pastor of a church in
Kansas who walked across this pond during the fourth of July on a celebration, and there were
twelve people who saw him do it. The historian will have to evaluate this testimony and have to
ask, did he probably do it or not? Now these eyewitnesses might have said that he did it. But
there are other possibilities that one could imagine. There might be stones in the pond, for
example. He might have been at a distance, and they didn’t see him. There were other things
that you could think of. If you were trying to ask for probabilities, what is the probability that a
human being can walk on a pond of water unless it’s frozen? The probability is virtually zero
because in fact humans can’t do that. And if you think humans can do that, then give me one
instance where I can see. None of us can do it. No one on the face of this planet can do it.
Billions of people who have lived cannot do it. And so is the historian going to conclude that
probably Joe Smith, the pastor of this church probably did it? I don’t think so. Historians aren’t
going to conclude that because the miracle simply is a violation of the way nature typically
works. And so you can’t ever verify the miracle on the basis of eyewitnesses. Let me say,
secondly, though, we’re not talking about somebody in 1850s. We’re talking about somebody
who lived 2000 years ago, and we don’t have eyewitness reports at all. And the reports we have
are from people who believed in him. They’re not disinterested accounts. They’re contradictory
accounts, and they’re accounts written 30, 50, 60 years later.
Noneyewitness accounts take precedence over eyewitness testimony and circumstantial evidence
The noncanonical pagan sources in fact never refer to the resurrection of Jesus until centuries later. Jesus actually never appears any non-canonical pagan source until 80 years after his death. So clearly he didn’t make a big impact on the pagan world. The Jewish historian Josephus mentions Jesus but didn’t believe in his resurrection. There are non-canonical Christian sources that talk about the resurrection, but unfortunately virtually all of them that narrate the event, although they are non-canonical Gospels, narrate the event in a way that disagrees with Bill’s reconstruction. They don’t believe that Jesus was physically, bodily raised from the dead. For evidence of that simply read the account of the Second Treatise of the Great Seth or read the account the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter; just go down the line.
Theory takes precedence over eyewitness testimony and circumstantial evidence
The resurrection has to be taken on faith, not on the basis of proof.
Let me illustrate by giving you an alternative scenario of what happened to explain the empty
tomb. I don’t believe this. I don’t think it happened this way, but it’s more probable than a
miracle happening because a miracle by definition is the least probable occurrence. So let me
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give you a theory, just one I dreamt up. I could dream up twenty of these that are implausible
but are still more plausible than the resurrection.
Historians, I’m sorry to say, have no access to God.
The cannons of historical research are by their very nature restricted to what happens here on this
earthly plane. They do not and cannot presuppose any set beliefs about the natural realm. I’m not
saying this is good or bad. It’s simply the way historical research works.
Let me give you an analogy. It’s not bad that there can be no mathematical proof for the
existence of an anti-Semitic polemic in The Merchant of Venice. Mathematics is simply
irrelevant to purely literary questions. So too, historical research cannot lead to theological
claims about what God has done.
But there’s the problem with miracle. It’s not the philosophical
problem with miracle discussed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It’s a historian’s
problem with miracle. Historians cannot establish miracle as the most probable occurrence
because miracles, by their very nature are the least probable occurrence.
When Paul indicates that Jesus was buried, he may just as
well have meant that he was buried in a communal grave, which is what far more frequently
happened with crucified criminals. Paul said he got buried; he may simply have been tossed into
a communal grave.
Anyone who’s intimate with Mark’s Gospel would have no
difficulty at all seeing why, 35 years after the event, he or someone in his community might have
invented the story. Mark’s Gospel is filled with theological reflections on the meaning of the life
of Jesus; this is Mark’s Gospel. It’s not a datasheet; it’s a Gospel. It’s a proclamation of the good
news, as Mark saw it, of Christ’s death and resurrection. One of Mark’s overarching themes is
that virtually no one during the ministry of Jesus could understand who he was. His family didn’t
understand. His townspeople didn’t understand. The leaders of his own people didn’t understand.
Not even the disciples understood in Mark—especially not the disciples! For Mark, only
outsiders have an inkling of who Jesus was: the unnamed woman who anointed him, the
centurion at the cross. Who understands at the end? Not the family of Jesus! Not the disciples!
It’s a group of previously unknown women. The women at the tomb fit in perfectly with Mark’s
literary purposes otherwise. So they can’t simply be taken as some kind of objective historical
statement of fact. They too neatly fit the literary agenda of the Gospel.
The same can be said of
Joseph of Arimathea. Anyone who cannot think why Christians might invent the idea that Jesus
had a secret follower among the Jewish leaders is simply lacking in historical imagination.
Bill infers that Paul must have believed in
the empty tomb, because he talked about Christ’s appearances. Christ appeared, so the tomb
must be empty! This is a highly problematic view. For ancient people, as opposed to post21
Enlightenment thinkers like Bill, an appearance does not need to mean reanimation of the
physical body. According to the Gospels, Moses and Elijah appeared to Jesus, James, and John.
Are we to believe that these men, Moses and Elijah, came back to life? That Moses’ body was
reconstituted and raised from the dead and that they appeared from heaven? Or was this a vision?
Surely it was a vision; they disappear immediately. Ancient people had no trouble believing that
bodies can be phantasmal, not physical. Evidence for this is found abundantly throughout all of
our ancient sources – Jewish, pagan, and Christian. Pagan sources from the 8th century Homer to
the 2nd century Homeric hymns; from pagan myths to pagan novels to pagan poets to pagan
philosophers, they’re all replete with accounts of God appearing to humans in human form. But
these are appearances, visions; they’re not real human bodies. The pagan holy man, Apollonius
of Tyana, appears to his followers after his death, but it’s an appearance, a vision, not the
reanimation of his body. Jewish texts are the same. For angels and archangels and demons and
devils appear to people bodily, but they aren’t real bodies.
In short, Bill makes the mistake by assuming that if the disciples claimed to see Jesus alive
afterwards, they necessarily believed or knew that this was his actual physical body. That’s a
modern assumption, not an ancient one. The texts we’re dealing with are ancient texts, not
modern ones. Ancient people have no difficulty at all thinking that a divine appearance was not
an actual physical appearance. A body could be buried and the person could appear alive
afterwards without the body leaving the tomb.
Moreover, Jesus’ body after the resurrection does things that bodies can’t do. It walks into rooms
that are behind locked doors. It ascends to heaven. Is Bill seriously going to argue on historical
grounds that Jesus’ resurrected body could do this? This is a theological claim about Jesus, not a
historian’s claim. Historians are unable to establish what God does. That’s the work of the
historian. So, too, with his concluding inference that God raised Jesus from the dead. This is a
theological conclusion. It’s not a historical one. It’s a statement about God. If he wants to mount
mathematical evidence for what God probably did in the world, I have to say it’s not going to be
convincing to most mathematicians and certainly to most historians. Historians have no access to
God. The historian can say that Jesus died on the cross, but he cannot say that God accepted his
death as an atonement. The historian can say that the apostle Paul claimed to have a vision of
Jesus after his death; he cannot tell you that God raised him from the dead.
I think I’m most struck by Bill’s refusal to deal with the historical alternative that I’ve given to
his claim that God raised Jesus from the dead.
other historical options—for
example, the one that I’ve already laid out that he’s ignored, that possibly two of Jesus’ family
members stole the body and that they were killed and thrown into a common tomb. It probably
didn’t happen, but it’s more plausible than the explanation that God raised Jesus from the dead.
Let me give you another explanation, just off the top of my head from last night, sitting around
thinking about it. You know we have traditions from Syriac Christianity that Jesus’ brothers,
who are mentioned in the Gospel of Mark, one of whom was named Jude, was particularly close
to Jesus and that one of these brothers, Jude, otherwise known as Judas Thomas, was Jesus’ twin
brother. Now I’m not saying this is right, but that is what Syrian Christians thought in the second
and third centuries, that Jesus had a twin brother. How could he have had a twin brother? Well, I
don’t know how he could have a twin brother, but that’s what the Syrian Christians said. In fact,
we have interesting stories about Jesus and his twin brother in a book called the Acts of Thomas,
in which Jesus and his twin brother are identical twins. They look just alike, and every now and
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then Jesus comes down from heaven and confuses people: when they’ve just seen Thomas leave
the room, there he is again, and they don’t understand. Well, it’s because it’s his twin brother
showing up. Suppose Jesus had a twin brother—nothing implausible! People have twins. After
Jesus’ death, Judas Thomas and all others connected with Jesus went into hiding, and he escaped
from Judea. Some years later one of Jesus’ followers saw Judas Thomas at a distance, and they
thought it was Jesus. Others reported similar sightings. Word spread that Jesus was no longer
dead. The body in the tomb by that time had decomposed beyond recognition. The story became
more widely accepted that Jesus had been raised from the dead, and in the oral traditions more
stories started up and told about the event, including stories about them discovering an empty
tomb. That’s an alternative explanation. It’s highly unlikely. I don’t buy it for a second, but it’s
more likely than the idea that God raised Jesus from the dead because it doesn’t appeal to the
supernatural, which historians have no access to.
Yes, Mary Magdalene was a follower of Jesus, but his own argument was that
nobody would invent the women because they were marginalized, because men didn’t think
highly of women. My response is, that’s precisely why Mark would invent the tradition, because
in Mark’s Gospel, it’s the marginalized who understand who Jesus is, it’s not the male disciples.
That’s why you have the story of the women discovering the tomb.
I think the theological modes of knowledge are perfectly acceptable
and legitimate as theological modes of knowledge. But I think theological claims have to be
evaluated on a theological basis. For example, you know the idea that these four facts that Bill
keeps referring to showed that God raised Jesus from the dead. You could come up with a
different theological view of it. Suppose, for example, to explain those four facts that the God
Zulu sent Jesus into the 12th dimension, and in that 12th dimension he was periodically released
for return to Earth for a brief respite from his eternal tormentors. But he can’t tell his followers
about this because Zulu told him that if he does, he’ll increase his eternal agonies. So that’s
another theological explanation for what happened. It would explain the empty tomb, it would
32
explain Jesus appearances. Is it as likely as God raised Jesus from the dead and made him sit at
his right hand; that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has interceded in history and
vindicated his name by raising his Messiah? Well, you might think no, that in fact the first
explanation of the God Zulu is crazy. Well, yeah, O.K., it’s crazy; but it’s theologically crazy.
It’s not historically crazy. It’s no less likely as an explanation for what happened than the
explanation that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob raised Jesus from the dead because
they’re both theological explanations; they’re not historical explanations. So within the realm of
theology, I certainly think that theology is a legitimate mode of knowledge. But the criteria for
evaluating theological knowledge are theological; they are not historical.
The Ancient ********s Rule can be ignored
I should point out that
the Gospels say they’re written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But that’s just in your
English Bible. That’s the title of these Gospels, but whoever wrote the Gospel of Matthew didn’t
call it the Gospel of Matthew. Whoever wrote the Gospel of Matthew simply wrote his Gospel,
and somebody later said it’s the Gospel according to Matthew. Somebody later is telling you
who wrote it. The titles are later additions. These are not eyewitness accounts. So where did they
get their stories from?
[See Francis J. Lamb, Greenleaf]
Misrepresenting testimony is allowable
See also Theory takes precedence over eyewitness and circumstantial evidence
How do you convert somebody to stop
worshipping their God and to start worshipping Jesus?
... The authors were not eye witnesses; they’re Greek-speaking
Christians living 35 to 65 years after the events they narrate.
The Jewish historian Josephus mentions Jesus but didn’t believe in his resurrection.
Yes, Mary Magdalene was a follower of Jesus, but his own argument was that
nobody would invent the women because they were marginalized, because men didn’t think
highly of women. My response is, that’s precisely why Mark would invent the tradition, because
in Mark’s Gospel, it’s the marginalized who understand who Jesus is, it’s not the male disciples.
That’s why you have the story of the women discovering the tomb.
Let me conclude by telling you what I really do think about Jesus’ resurrection. The one thing we
know about the Christians after the death of Jesus is that they turned to their ******ures to try and
make sense of it. They had believed Jesus was the Messiah, but then he got crucified, and so he
couldn’t be the Messiah. No Jew, prior to Christianity, thought that the Messiah was to be
crucified. The Messiah was to be a great warrior or a great king or a great judge. He was to be a
figure of grandeur and power, not somebody who’s squashed by the enemy like a mosquito. How
could Jesus, the Messiah, have been killed as a common criminal? Christians turned to their
******ures to try and understand it, and they found passages that refer to the Righteous One of
God’s suffering death. But in these passages, such as Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22 and Psalm 61, the
one who is punished or who is killed is also vindicated by God. Christians came to believe their
******ures that Jesus was the Righteous One and that God must have vindicated him. And so
Christians came to think of Jesus as one who, even though he had been crucified, came to be
exalted to heaven, much as Elijah and Enoch had in the Hebrew ******ures. How can he be Jesus
the Messiah though, if he’s been exalted to heaven? Well, Jesus must be coming back soon to
establish the kingdom. He wasn’t an earthly Messiah; he’s a spiritual Messiah. That’s why the
early Christians thought the end was coming right away in their own lifetime. That’s why Paul
taught that Christ was the first fruit of the resurrection. But if Jesus is exalted, he is no longer
dead, and so Christians started circulating the story of his resurrection. It wasn’t three days later
they started circulating the story; it might have been a year later, maybe two years. Five years
later they didn’t know when the stories had started. Nobody could go to the tomb to check; the
body had decomposed. Believers who knew he had been raised from the dead started having
visions of him. Others told stories about these visions of him, including Paul. Stories of these
visions circulated. Some of them were actual visions like Paul, others of them were stories of
visions like the five hundred group of people who saw him. On the basis of these stories,
narratives were constructed and circulated and eventually we got the Gospels of the New
Testament written 30, 40, 50, 60 years later.
Oral tradition is not reliable and can be ignored
You have to tell stories about Jesus. So
you convert somebody on the basis of the stories you tell. That person converts somebody who
converts somebody who converts somebody, and all along the line people are telling stories.
The way it works is this: I’m a businessman in Ephesus, and somebody comes to town and tells
me stories about Jesus, and on the basis of these stories I hear, I convert. I tell my wife these
stories. She converts. She tells the next-door neighbor the stories. She converts. She tells her
husband the stories. He converts. He goes on a business trip to Rome, and he tells people there
the stories. They convert. Those people who’ve heard the stories in Rome, where did they hear
them from? They heard them from the guy who lived next door to me. Well, was he there to see
these things happen? No. Where’d he hear them from? He heard them from his wife. Where did
11
his wife hear them from? Was she there? No. She heard them from my wife. Where did my wife
hear them from? She heard them from me. Well, where did I hear them from? I wasn’t there
either.
Stories are in circulation year after year after year, and as a result of that, the stories get changed.
How do we know that the stories got changed in the process of transmission?
... The accounts that they narrate are based on oral traditions that have been in circulation for decades. Year after year Christians trying to convert others told them stories to convince them that Jesus was raised from the dead. These writers are telling stories, then, that Christians have been telling all these years. Many stories were invented, and most of the stories were changed. For that reason, these accounts are not as useful as we would like them to be for historical purposes. They’re not contemporary, they’re not disinterested, and they’re not consistent.
What we have
are Gospel stories written decades later by people who had heard stories in circulation, and it’s
not hard at all to imagine somebody coming up with the story.
Solutions to allegedly conflicting testimony can be ignored
How do we know that the stories got changed in the process of transmission? We know the
stories got changed because there are numerous differences in our accounts that cannot be
reconciled with one another. You don’t need to take my word for this; simply look yourself. I tell
my students that the reason we don’t notice there’s so many differences in the Gospels is because
we read the Gospels vertically, from top to bottom. You start at the top of Mark, you read
through to the bottom, you start at the top of Matthew, read it through the bottom, sounds a lot
like Mark, then you read Luke top to bottom, sounds a lot like Matthew and Mark, read John, a
little bit different, sounds about the same. The reason is because we’re reading them vertically.
The way to see differences in the Gospels is to read them horizontally. Read one story in
Matthew, then the same story in Mark, and compare your two stories and see what you come up
with. You come up with major differences. Just take the death of Jesus. What day did Jesus die
on and what time of day? Did he die on the day before the Passover meal was eaten, as John
explicitly says, or did he die after it was eaten, as Mark explicitly says? Did he die at noon, as in
John, or at 9 a.m., as in Mark? Did Jesus carry his cross the entire way himself or did Simon of
Cyrene carry his cross? It depends which Gospel you read. Did both robbers mock Jesus on the
cross or did only one of them mock him and the other come to his defense? It depends which
Gospel you read. Did the curtain in the temple rip in half before Jesus died or after he died? It
depends which Gospel you read.
Or take the accounts of the resurrection. Who went to the tomb on the third day? Was it Mary
alone or was it Mary with other women? If it was Mary with other women, how many other
women were there, which ones were they, and what were their names? Was the stone rolled
away before they got there or not? What did they see in the tomb? Did they see a man, did they
see two men, or did they see an angel? It depends which account you read. What were they told
to tell the disciples? Were the disciples supposed to stay in Jerusalem and see Jesus there or were
they to go to Galilee and see Jesus there? Did the women tell anyone or not? It depends which
Gospel you read. Did the disciples never leave Jerusalem or did they immediately leave
Jerusalem and go to Galilee? All of these depend on which account you read.
You have the same problems for all of the sources and all of our Gospels.
Bill asserts that the story of the
women going to the tomb would never have been invented by the early Christians. I should point
out, Paul never mentions the women at the tomb, only the later Gospels, Mark and following.
Below from The Trial of Jesus from a Lawyer’s Standpoint, Vol. 1 by Walter M. Chandler. New York: 1925, pp. 29-33.
In considering the subject of discrepancies it should be constantly kept in mind that contradictions in testimony do not necessarily mean that there has been falsehood or by faith on the part of the witnesses. Every lawyer of experience and every adult citizen of average intelligence knows that this is true. Men of unquestioned veracity and incorruptible integrity are frequently arrayed against each other in both civil and criminal trials, and the record reveals irreconcilable contradictions in their testimony. Not only do prosecutions for perjury not follow, but, in many instances, the witnesses are not even suspected of bad faith or an intention to falsify. Defects in sight, hearing, or memory; superior advantage in the matter of observation; or a sudden change in the position of one or both the parties, causing distraction of attention, at the time of the occurrence of the events involved in litigation – all or any of these conditions, as well as many others, may create discrepancies and contradictions where there is a total absence of any intention to misrepresent. A thorough appreciation of this fact will greatly aid in a clear understanding of this phase of the discussion.
Again, an investigation of the charge of discrepancy against the Gospel writers shows that the critics and skeptics have classified mere omissions as contradictions. Noting could be more absurd than to consider an omission a contradiction, unless the requirements of the case show that the facts and circumstances omitted were essential to be stated, or that the omission was evidently intended to mislead or deceive. Any other contention would turn historical literature topsy-turvy and load it down with contradictions. Dion Cassius, Tacitus, and Suetonius have all written elaborately of the reign of Tiberius. Many things are mentioned by each that are not recorded by the other two. Are we to reject all three as unreliable historians because of this fact? Abbott, Hazlitt, Bourrienne, and Walter Scott have written biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte. No one of them has recited all the facts recorded by the others. Are these omissions to destroy the merits of all these writers and cause them to be suspected and rejected? Grafton’s Chronicles rank high in English historical literature. They comprise the reign of King John; and yet make no mention of the granting of Magna Charta. This is as if the life of Jefferson had been written without mention of the Declaration of Independence; or a biography of Lincoln without calling attention to the Emancipation Proclamation. Notwithstanding this strange omission, Englishmen still preserve Grafton’s Chronicles as valuable records among their archives. And the same spirit of generous criticism is everywhere displayed in matters of profane literature. The opponents of Christianity are never embarrassed in excusing or explaining away omissions or contradictions, provided the writer is a layman and his subject secular. But let the theme be a sacred one, and the author an ecclesiastic – preacher, priest, or prophet – and immediately incredulity rises to high tide, engulfs the reason, and destroys all dispassionate criticism. Could it be forgotten for a moment that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were biographers of the Christ, a sacred person, no difficulties would arise in the matter of inconsistencies, no objections would be made to their credibility. The slight discrepancies that undoubtedly exist would pass unnoticed, or be forever buried under the weight of an overwhelming conviction that they are, in the main, accurate and truthful.
But the Evangelists were guided by inspiration, the skeptics say; and discrepancies are inconsistent with the theory of inspiration. God would not have inspired them to write contradictory stories. But the assumption is false that they claimed to be guided by inspiration; for, as Marcus Dods truthfully says, “none of our Gospels pretends to be infallible or even inspired. Only one of them tells us how its writer obtained his information, and that was by careful inquiry at the proper sources.”*
* An opposite doctrine seems to be taught in Luke 12:11-12; 24:48-49.
A more pertinent observation upon the Gospel discrepancies has not been made than that by Paley in his “Evidences of Christianity,” where he says:
I know not a more rash or unphilosophical conduct of the understanding, than to reject the substance of a story by reason of some diversity in the circumstances with which it is related. The usual character of human testimony is substantial truth under circumstantial variety. This is what the daily experience of courts of justice teaches. When accounts of a transaction come from the mouths of different witnesses, it is seldom that it is not possible to pick out apparent or real inconsistencies between them. These inconsistencies are studiously displayed by an adverse pleader, but oftentimes with little impression upon the minds of the judges. On the contrary, a close and minute agreement induces the suspicion of confederacy and fraud. When written histories touch upon the same scenes of action; the comparison almost always affords ground for a like reflection. Numerous, and sometimes important, variations present themselves; not seldom, also, absolute and final contradictions; yet neither one nor the other are deemed sufficient to shake the credibility of the main fact. The embassy of the Jews to deprecate the execution of Claudian's order to place his statute, in their temple, Philo places in harvest, Josephus in seed time; both contemporary writers. No reader is led by this inconsistency to doubt whether such an embassy was sent, or whether such an order was given. Our own history supplies examples of the same kind. In the account of the Marquis of Argyle's death, in the reign of Charles the Second, we have a very remarkable contradiction. Lord Clarendon relates that he was condemned to be hanged, which was performed the same day; on the contrary, Burnet, Woodrew, Heath, Echard, concur in stating that he was beheaded; and that he was condemned upon the Saturday, and executed upon the Monday. Was any reader of English history ever skeptic enough to raise from hence a question whether the Marquis of Argyle was executed or not? Yet this ought to be left in uncertainty, according to the principles upon which the Christian history has sometimes been attacked.*
* Evidences of Christianity, p. 319. (Presented here in Appendix Two.)
The reader should most carefully consider the useful as well as the damaging effect of Gospel inconsistencies in the matter of the credibility of the Evangelists. A certain class of persons have imagined the Gospel writers to be common conspirators who met together at the same time and place to devise ways and means of publishing a false report to the world. This is a silly supposition, since it is positively known that the authors of the Evangelical narratives wrote and published them at different times and places. Moreover, the style and contents of the books themselves negative the idea of a concerted purpose to deceive. And, besides, the very inconsistencies themselves show that there was no “confederacy and fraud”; since intelligent conspirators would have fabricated exactly the same story in substantially the same language.
A priori reasoning is allowed
These are not
historically reliable accounts.
... But even if these stories were the best sources in the world, there would still be a major obstacle
that we simply cannot overcome if we want to approach the question of the resurrection
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historically rather than theologically. I’m fine if Bill wants to argue that theologically God raised
Jesus from the dead or even if he wants to argue theologically that Jesus was raised from the
dead. But this cannot be a historical claim, and not for the reason that he imputed to me as being
an old, warmed over 18th century view that has been refuted ever since. Historians can only
establish what probably happened in the past.
Historians cannot establish miracle as the most probable occurrence
because miracles, by their very nature are the least probable occurrence.
God
does things all the time, and so there’s nothing implausible at all about God raising Jesus from
the dead.
Well, that presupposes a belief in God. Historians can’t presuppose belief in God. Historians can
only work with what we’ve got here among us. People who are historians can be of any
theological persuasion. They can be Buddhists, they can be Hindus, they can be Muslims, they
can be Christians, they can be Jews, they can be agnostics, they can be atheists, and the theory
behind the canons in historical research is that people of every persuasion can look at the
evidence and draw the same conclusions. But Bill’s hypothesis requires a person to believe in
God. I don’t object to that as a way of thinking. I object to that as a way of historical thinking,
because it’s not history, it’s theology.
does the report of
occurrence of miracles over time increase the probability? I’d say the answer is probably “no”
because in every single instance you have to evaluate whether it’s a probable event or not. And
it never can be a probable event. So that, if one thinks so, that it is a probable event, what I
would like Bill to do is to tell us why he doesn’t think that Muhammad did miracles because we
certainly have reports of that. Why doesn’t he think Apollonius of Tyana did miracles? He
quoted Larry Yarbrough, who, in fact, probably has never read the Life of Apollonius. I know
this because I had an argument with Larry Yarbrough about it. He has never read the texts. I
don’t know if Bill has read the texts. They’re very interesting; they are Greek texts; they are
widely available. They report Apollonius of Tyana did many of things that Jesus did; he could
cast out demons, he could heal the sick, he could raise the dead, at the end of his life he ascended
to heaven. And Apollonius of Tyana was just one of the hundreds of people about such things
were said in the ancient world. So if we allow for the possibility of Jesus, how about allowing
the possibility for Apollonius? Or Honi the Circle-Drawer or Hanina ben Dosa or the Emperor
Vespasian? Or you could name the list as long as your arm of people. Now the reason we don’t
know about these people is because, of course, the only miracle-working Son of God we know
about is Jesus. But in fact in the ancient world there are hundreds of people like this, with
hundreds of stories told about them. We discount them because they’re not within our tradition.
My final point is a very simple one. Even if we want to believe in the resurrection of Jesus, that
belief is a theological belief. You can’t prove the resurrection. It’s not susceptible to historical
evidence. It’s faith. Believers believe it and take it on faith, and history cannot prove it.
I don’t believe that history is an
objective discipline to start with. It sounded from your question that you agree with this, but we
need to talk more about your take on postmodern theory. My view is that the historian does have
to back up any presuppositions that he or she has. But my point is that for the historian to do his
or her work, requires that there’d be certain shared assumptions. And it’s fine to say what those
assumptions are, but there are some assumptions that have to be agreed on by people of various
theological persuasions. And they have to be assumptions that are rooted in things that can be
observed. God can’t be observed. So we might very well disagree on important historical events.
There are people who, for example, in our world deny the holocaust, who say the holocaust
never happened. Well, how does one demonstrate that the holocaust happened? Well, one gets
together materials of eyewitness reports and photographs and movies, and you get information
that historians agree is valid information, and you try to make a case. But it has to be the kind of
information that historians of every stripe agree is valid information, such as eyewitness
testimony. And appeals to the supernatural are not accepted in the historical community as being
valid criteria on which to evaluate a past event.
My final point is a very simple one. Even if we want to believe in the resurrection of Jesus, that
belief is a theological belief. You can’t prove the resurrection. It’s not susceptible to historical
evidence. It’s faith. Believers believe it and take it on faith, and history cannot prove it.
Non-eyewitness testimony is as valid as eyewitness testimony
Ancient people have no difficulty at all thinking that a divine appearance was not
an actual physical appearance. A body could be buried and the person could appear alive
afterwards without the body leaving the tomb. If Bill doubts this, then I suggest he read some
more ancient texts to see how they talk about the matter. He might start with the Christian texts
of the second century, such as the Acts of John or the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter or the Second
Treatise of the Great Seth, or he might consider the arguments used by Basilides, who was the
disciple of the follower of Peter. For ancient people, post-death appearance was not the same as
the reanimation of the body.
Circumstantial evidence can be ignored
Yes, Mary Magdalene was a follower of Jesus, but his own argument was that
nobody would invent the women because they were marginalized, because men didn’t think
highly of women. My response is, that’s precisely why Mark would invent the tradition, because
in Mark’s Gospel, it’s the marginalized who understand who Jesus is, it’s not the male disciples.
That’s why you have the story of the women discovering the tomb.
Presumption of innocence can be ignored
See also Theory takes precedence over eyewitness and circumstantial evidence
Year after year Christians
trying to convert others told them stories to convince them that Jesus was raised from the dead.
These writers are telling stories, then, that Christians have been telling all these years. Many
stories were invented, and most of the stories were changed. For that reason, these accounts are
not as useful as we would like them to be for historical purposes. They’re not contemporary,
they’re not disinterested, and they’re not consistent.
What we have
are Gospel stories written decades later by people who had heard stories in circulation, and it’s
not hard at all to imagine somebody coming up with the story.
Third, and finally, if the only miracles that Bill allows of having happened all belong to the
Judaeo-Christian tradition that he himself personally affirms, I’d like him to address the question
of how that can be historically. How is it that the faith that he adopted as a teenager happens to
be the only one that is historically credible? Is it just circumstance that he was born into a
religious family or a religious culture that can historically be shown to be the only true religion?
Mythological claims have equal validity to historical claims
For ancient people, as opposed to post21
Enlightenment thinkers like Bill, an appearance does not need to mean reanimation of the
physical body. According to the Gospels, Moses and Elijah appeared to Jesus, James, and John.
Are we to believe that these men, Moses and Elijah, came back to life? That Moses’ body was
reconstituted and raised from the dead and that they appeared from heaven? Or was this a vision?
Surely it was a vision; they disappear immediately. Ancient people had no trouble believing that
bodies can be phantasmal, not physical. Evidence for this is found abundantly throughout all of
our ancient sources – Jewish, pagan, and Christian. Pagan sources from the 8th century Homer to
the 2nd century Homeric hymns; from pagan myths to pagan novels to pagan poets to pagan
philosophers, they’re all replete with accounts of God appearing to humans in human form. But
these are appearances, visions; they’re not real human bodies. The pagan holy man, Apollonius
of Tyana, appears to his followers after his death, but it’s an appearance, a vision, not the
reanimation of his body. Jewish texts are the same. For angels and archangels and demons and
devils appear to people bodily, but they aren’t real bodies.
I’d like him to
discuss the evidence of other miracle workers from Jesus’ day outside the Christian tradition. Is
he willing to admit on the same historical grounds that these other people also did miracles? I’m
referring to the tradition of miracles done by Apollonius of Tyana, Hanina ben Dosa, Honi the
Circle-Drawer, Vespasian. Is Bill willing to acknowledge that Apollonius appeared to his
followers after his death or that Octavian ascended to heaven? Or he can pick any other miracle
worker form the pagan tradition he chooses.
does the report of
occurrence of miracles over time increase the probability? I’d say the answer is probably “no”
because in every single instance you have to evaluate whether it’s a probable event or not. And
it never can be a probable event. So that, if one thinks so, that it is a probable event, what I
would like Bill to do is to tell us why he doesn’t think that Muhammad did miracles because we
certainly have reports of that. Why doesn’t he think Apollonius of Tyana did miracles? They’re very interesting; they are Greek texts; they are
widely available. They report Apollonius of Tyana did many of things that Jesus did; he could
cast out demons, he could heal the sick, he could raise the dead, at the end of his life he ascended
to heaven. And Apollonius of Tyana was just one of the hundreds of people about such things
were said in the ancient world. So if we allow for the possibility of Jesus, how about allowing
the possibility for Apollonius? Or Honi the Circle-Drawer or Hanina ben Dosa or the Emperor
Vespasian? Or you could name the list as long as your arm of people. Now the reason we don’t
know about these people is because, of course, the only miracle-working Son of God we know
about is Jesus. But in fact in the ancient world there are hundreds of people like this, with
hundreds of stories told about them. We discount them because they’re not within our tradition.
That’s why my alternative explanation of Zulu sounded implausible to Bill because in his
tradition it’s the God of Jesus, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who must be involved in
the world. And, of course, people from other religious traditions say other Gods are involved. So
this isn’t just a question about whether God is involved. Which God is involved? And as I
pointed out earlier, it’s just a very happy circumstance that it happens to be the God, the God that
Bill can historically demonstrate its existence, who happens to be the God that he converted to
when he was 16.
Visions can be shared
For ancient people, as opposed to post-Enlightenment thinkers like Bill, an appearance does not need to mean reanimation of the
physical body. According to the Gospels, Moses and Elijah appeared to Jesus, James, and John.
Are we to believe that these men, Moses and Elijah, came back to life? That Moses’ body was
reconstituted and raised from the dead and that they appeared from heaven? Or was this a vision?
Surely it was a vision; they disappear immediately.
Ancient people had no trouble believing that bodies can be phantasmal, not physical. Evidence for this is found abundantly throughout all of our ancient sources – Jewish, pagan, and Christian. Pagan sources from the 8th century Homer to the 2nd century Homeric hymns; from pagan myths to pagan novels to pagan poets to pagan philosophers, they’re all replete with accounts of God appearing to humans in human form. But these are appearances, visions; they’re not real human bodies. The pagan holy man, Apollonius of Tyana, appears to his followers after his death, but it’s an appearance, a vision, not the reanimation of his body. Jewish texts are the same. For angels and archangels and demons and devils appear to people bodily, but they aren’t real bodies.
The existence of hostile eyewitnesses as a corrective can be ignored
Double standards in the evaluation of historical ********s is allowed
To sum up, the sources we have are not as good as we would like.
First, Bill makes dubious use of modern authorities. Bill constantly quotes modern scholars as if
somehow that constitutes evidence for his point of view. As Bill himself knows, the fact that the
majority of New Testament scholars would agree with his four points is not proof that they are
right. For one thing, the majority of New Testament scholars are believers in the New Testament,
that is, they’re theologically committed to the text, so of course they agree on these points. I
should note that the majority of historians do not agree with Bill’s conclusion. Does that make
those conclusions wrong? No. It simply means that his conclusions are not persuasive to most
historians. Having said that, I’m surprised by some of his so-called authorities that Bill cites, for
the reality is that the majority of critical scholars studying the historical Jesus today disagree
with his conclusion that a historian can show that the body of Jesus emerged physically from the
tomb.
Burden of proof standard is ignored
Ehrman vs. Logic, History, and the Law
Logical Fallacy
History – historical precedent
The Law – legal precedent
Answers to specific claims
http://bit.ly/wccQgH
Is There Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus?
A Debate between William Lane Craig and Bart D. Ehrman
College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts
March 28, 2006
Copyright 2006 William Lane Craig and Bart D. Ehrman. All Rights Reserved.
Ehrman:
What kinds of evidence do scholars look for when trying to establish probabilities in the past?
Well, the best kind of evidence, of course, consists of contemporary accounts; people who were
10
close to the time of the events themselves. Ultimately, if you don’t have a source that goes back
to the time period itself, then you don’t have a reliable source. There are only two sources of
information for past events: either stories that actually happened based on, ultimately, eyewitness
accounts or stories that have been made up. Those are the only two kinds of stories you have
from the past – either things that happened or things that were made up. To determine which
things are the things that happened, you want contemporary accounts, things that are close to the
time of the events themselves, and it helps if you have a lot of these accounts. The more the
merrier! You want lots of contemporary accounts, and you want these accounts to be
independent of one another. You don’t want different accounts to have collaborated with one
another; you want accounts that are independently attesting the results. Moreover, even though
you want accounts that are independent of one another, that are not collaborated, you want
accounts that corroborate one another; accounts that are consistent in what they have to say about
the subject.
Testimony is not valid if it is written decades after the event.
What do we have with the Gospels of the New Testament? Well, unfortunately we’re not as well
off as we would like to be. We’d like to be extremely well off because the Gospels tell us about
Jesus, and they are our best sources for Jesus. But how good are they as historical sources? ... Unfortunately, they’re not as good as
we would like. The Gospels were written 35 to 65 years after Jesus’ death—35 or 65 years after
his death,
... They’re not written by Jesus’ Aramaic-speaking followers. They’re written by people living 30,
40, 50, 60 years later.
They’re written many decades
after the fact by people who were not there to see these things happen,
Bill quotes the apostle Paul, just to pick an
example, to indicate that already, just five years after Jesus’ death, Joseph of Arimathea buried
Jesus. Paul wasn’t writing five years after the burial; he was writing 25 years later, and he never
mentions Joseph of Arimathea. Joseph of Arimathea is not mentioned until you get to the Gospel
of Mark, 35 or 40 years after the fact.
Testimony cannot be biased
Genetic fallacy
Argument by popularity
Appeal to authority
Double standard
Moreover, finally, you want sources that are not biased toward the subject matter.
You want accounts that are disinterested. You want lots of them, you want them independent
from one another, yet you want them to be consistent with one another.
First, Bill makes dubious use of modern authorities. Bill constantly quotes modern scholars as if
somehow that constitutes evidence for his point of view. As Bill himself knows, the fact that the
majority of New Testament scholars would agree with his four points is not proof that they are
right. For one thing, the majority of New Testament scholars are believers in the New Testament,
that is, they’re theologically committed to the text, so of course they agree on these points. I
should note that the majority of historians do not agree with Bill’s conclusion. Does that make
those conclusions wrong? No. It simply means that his conclusions are not persuasive to most
historians. Having said that, I’m surprised by some of his so-called authorities that Bill cites, for
the reality is that the majority of critical scholars studying the historical Jesus today disagree
with his conclusion that a historian can show that the body of Jesus emerged physically from the
tomb. Bill might find that surprising, but that would be because of the context he works in – a
conservative, evangelical seminary. In that environment, what he’s propounding is what
everyone believes. And it’s striking that even some of his own key authorities don’t agree. He
10 N. T Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2003),
p. 710.
20
quotes a number of scholars, whom I consider to be friends and acquaintances, and I can tell you,
they don’t agree with his views. Does that make him wrong? No, it simply means that his
impressive recounting of scholarly opinion is slanted, lopsided, and fails to tell the real story,
which is that he represents a minority opinion.
Third, and finally, if the only miracles that Bill allows of having happened all belong to the
Judaeo-Christian tradition that he himself personally affirms, I’d like him to address the question
of how that can be historically. How is it that the faith that he adopted as a teenager happens to
be the only one that is historically credible? Is it just circumstance that he was born into a
religious family or a religious culture that can historically be shown to be the only true religion?
Eyewitness claims are necessary but if they oppose one’s worldview, they can be ignored
The Gospels were
written by highly literate, trained, Greek-speaking Christians of the second and third generation.
They’re not written by Jesus’ Aramaic-speaking followers. They’re written by people living 30,
40, 50, 60 years later. Where did these people get their information from?
...These are not eyewitness accounts. So where did they get their stories from?
...The authors were not eye witnesses; they’re Greek-speaking Christians living 35 to 65 years after the events they narrate.
The resurrection has to be taken on faith, not on the basis of proof.
Anyone who’s intimate with Mark’s Gospel would have no
difficulty at all seeing why, 35 years after the event, he or someone in his community might have
invented the story.
We don’t know if Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea.
We don’t know if his tomb was
empty three days later. We don’t know if he was physically seen by his followers afterwards.
Hume was talking about the
possibility of whether miracle happens. I’m not talking about whether miracle can happen. I
don’t accept Hume’s argument that miracles can’t happen. I’m asking, suppose miracles do
happen, can historians demonstrate it? No, they can’t demonstrate it.
My final point is a very simple one. Even if we want to believe in the resurrection of Jesus, that
belief is a theological belief. You can’t prove the resurrection. It’s not susceptible to historical
evidence. It’s faith. Believers believe it and take it on faith, and history cannot prove it.
Dr. Ehrman, can historians verify a miracle if there were eyewitnesses
of evidence that a miracle took place? Given your historical method, has any miracle ever
occurred, and if so, which ones? And if not, might it be that you willfully refuse to believe in
miracles?
Answer from Dr. Ehrman: Good, good question! Thank you! Let me try it again. “Even if you
have eyewitnesses”. Suppose from the 1850s, we have an account of a pastor of a church in
Kansas who walked across this pond during the fourth of July on a celebration, and there were
twelve people who saw him do it. The historian will have to evaluate this testimony and have to
ask, did he probably do it or not? Now these eyewitnesses might have said that he did it. But
there are other possibilities that one could imagine. There might be stones in the pond, for
example. He might have been at a distance, and they didn’t see him. There were other things
that you could think of. If you were trying to ask for probabilities, what is the probability that a
human being can walk on a pond of water unless it’s frozen? The probability is virtually zero
because in fact humans can’t do that. And if you think humans can do that, then give me one
instance where I can see. None of us can do it. No one on the face of this planet can do it.
Billions of people who have lived cannot do it. And so is the historian going to conclude that
probably Joe Smith, the pastor of this church probably did it? I don’t think so. Historians aren’t
going to conclude that because the miracle simply is a violation of the way nature typically
works. And so you can’t ever verify the miracle on the basis of eyewitnesses. Let me say,
secondly, though, we’re not talking about somebody in 1850s. We’re talking about somebody
who lived 2000 years ago, and we don’t have eyewitness reports at all. And the reports we have
are from people who believed in him. They’re not disinterested accounts. They’re contradictory
accounts, and they’re accounts written 30, 50, 60 years later.
Noneyewitness accounts take precedence over eyewitness testimony and circumstantial evidence
The noncanonical pagan sources in fact never refer to the resurrection of Jesus until centuries later. Jesus actually never appears any non-canonical pagan source until 80 years after his death. So clearly he didn’t make a big impact on the pagan world. The Jewish historian Josephus mentions Jesus but didn’t believe in his resurrection. There are non-canonical Christian sources that talk about the resurrection, but unfortunately virtually all of them that narrate the event, although they are non-canonical Gospels, narrate the event in a way that disagrees with Bill’s reconstruction. They don’t believe that Jesus was physically, bodily raised from the dead. For evidence of that simply read the account of the Second Treatise of the Great Seth or read the account the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter; just go down the line.
Theory takes precedence over eyewitness testimony and circumstantial evidence
The resurrection has to be taken on faith, not on the basis of proof.
Let me illustrate by giving you an alternative scenario of what happened to explain the empty
tomb. I don’t believe this. I don’t think it happened this way, but it’s more probable than a
miracle happening because a miracle by definition is the least probable occurrence. So let me
13
give you a theory, just one I dreamt up. I could dream up twenty of these that are implausible
but are still more plausible than the resurrection.
Historians, I’m sorry to say, have no access to God.
The cannons of historical research are by their very nature restricted to what happens here on this
earthly plane. They do not and cannot presuppose any set beliefs about the natural realm. I’m not
saying this is good or bad. It’s simply the way historical research works.
Let me give you an analogy. It’s not bad that there can be no mathematical proof for the
existence of an anti-Semitic polemic in The Merchant of Venice. Mathematics is simply
irrelevant to purely literary questions. So too, historical research cannot lead to theological
claims about what God has done.
But there’s the problem with miracle. It’s not the philosophical
problem with miracle discussed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It’s a historian’s
problem with miracle. Historians cannot establish miracle as the most probable occurrence
because miracles, by their very nature are the least probable occurrence.
When Paul indicates that Jesus was buried, he may just as
well have meant that he was buried in a communal grave, which is what far more frequently
happened with crucified criminals. Paul said he got buried; he may simply have been tossed into
a communal grave.
Anyone who’s intimate with Mark’s Gospel would have no
difficulty at all seeing why, 35 years after the event, he or someone in his community might have
invented the story. Mark’s Gospel is filled with theological reflections on the meaning of the life
of Jesus; this is Mark’s Gospel. It’s not a datasheet; it’s a Gospel. It’s a proclamation of the good
news, as Mark saw it, of Christ’s death and resurrection. One of Mark’s overarching themes is
that virtually no one during the ministry of Jesus could understand who he was. His family didn’t
understand. His townspeople didn’t understand. The leaders of his own people didn’t understand.
Not even the disciples understood in Mark—especially not the disciples! For Mark, only
outsiders have an inkling of who Jesus was: the unnamed woman who anointed him, the
centurion at the cross. Who understands at the end? Not the family of Jesus! Not the disciples!
It’s a group of previously unknown women. The women at the tomb fit in perfectly with Mark’s
literary purposes otherwise. So they can’t simply be taken as some kind of objective historical
statement of fact. They too neatly fit the literary agenda of the Gospel.
The same can be said of
Joseph of Arimathea. Anyone who cannot think why Christians might invent the idea that Jesus
had a secret follower among the Jewish leaders is simply lacking in historical imagination.
Bill infers that Paul must have believed in
the empty tomb, because he talked about Christ’s appearances. Christ appeared, so the tomb
must be empty! This is a highly problematic view. For ancient people, as opposed to post21
Enlightenment thinkers like Bill, an appearance does not need to mean reanimation of the
physical body. According to the Gospels, Moses and Elijah appeared to Jesus, James, and John.
Are we to believe that these men, Moses and Elijah, came back to life? That Moses’ body was
reconstituted and raised from the dead and that they appeared from heaven? Or was this a vision?
Surely it was a vision; they disappear immediately. Ancient people had no trouble believing that
bodies can be phantasmal, not physical. Evidence for this is found abundantly throughout all of
our ancient sources – Jewish, pagan, and Christian. Pagan sources from the 8th century Homer to
the 2nd century Homeric hymns; from pagan myths to pagan novels to pagan poets to pagan
philosophers, they’re all replete with accounts of God appearing to humans in human form. But
these are appearances, visions; they’re not real human bodies. The pagan holy man, Apollonius
of Tyana, appears to his followers after his death, but it’s an appearance, a vision, not the
reanimation of his body. Jewish texts are the same. For angels and archangels and demons and
devils appear to people bodily, but they aren’t real bodies.
In short, Bill makes the mistake by assuming that if the disciples claimed to see Jesus alive
afterwards, they necessarily believed or knew that this was his actual physical body. That’s a
modern assumption, not an ancient one. The texts we’re dealing with are ancient texts, not
modern ones. Ancient people have no difficulty at all thinking that a divine appearance was not
an actual physical appearance. A body could be buried and the person could appear alive
afterwards without the body leaving the tomb.
Moreover, Jesus’ body after the resurrection does things that bodies can’t do. It walks into rooms
that are behind locked doors. It ascends to heaven. Is Bill seriously going to argue on historical
grounds that Jesus’ resurrected body could do this? This is a theological claim about Jesus, not a
historian’s claim. Historians are unable to establish what God does. That’s the work of the
historian. So, too, with his concluding inference that God raised Jesus from the dead. This is a
theological conclusion. It’s not a historical one. It’s a statement about God. If he wants to mount
mathematical evidence for what God probably did in the world, I have to say it’s not going to be
convincing to most mathematicians and certainly to most historians. Historians have no access to
God. The historian can say that Jesus died on the cross, but he cannot say that God accepted his
death as an atonement. The historian can say that the apostle Paul claimed to have a vision of
Jesus after his death; he cannot tell you that God raised him from the dead.
I think I’m most struck by Bill’s refusal to deal with the historical alternative that I’ve given to
his claim that God raised Jesus from the dead.
other historical options—for
example, the one that I’ve already laid out that he’s ignored, that possibly two of Jesus’ family
members stole the body and that they were killed and thrown into a common tomb. It probably
didn’t happen, but it’s more plausible than the explanation that God raised Jesus from the dead.
Let me give you another explanation, just off the top of my head from last night, sitting around
thinking about it. You know we have traditions from Syriac Christianity that Jesus’ brothers,
who are mentioned in the Gospel of Mark, one of whom was named Jude, was particularly close
to Jesus and that one of these brothers, Jude, otherwise known as Judas Thomas, was Jesus’ twin
brother. Now I’m not saying this is right, but that is what Syrian Christians thought in the second
and third centuries, that Jesus had a twin brother. How could he have had a twin brother? Well, I
don’t know how he could have a twin brother, but that’s what the Syrian Christians said. In fact,
we have interesting stories about Jesus and his twin brother in a book called the Acts of Thomas,
in which Jesus and his twin brother are identical twins. They look just alike, and every now and
26
then Jesus comes down from heaven and confuses people: when they’ve just seen Thomas leave
the room, there he is again, and they don’t understand. Well, it’s because it’s his twin brother
showing up. Suppose Jesus had a twin brother—nothing implausible! People have twins. After
Jesus’ death, Judas Thomas and all others connected with Jesus went into hiding, and he escaped
from Judea. Some years later one of Jesus’ followers saw Judas Thomas at a distance, and they
thought it was Jesus. Others reported similar sightings. Word spread that Jesus was no longer
dead. The body in the tomb by that time had decomposed beyond recognition. The story became
more widely accepted that Jesus had been raised from the dead, and in the oral traditions more
stories started up and told about the event, including stories about them discovering an empty
tomb. That’s an alternative explanation. It’s highly unlikely. I don’t buy it for a second, but it’s
more likely than the idea that God raised Jesus from the dead because it doesn’t appeal to the
supernatural, which historians have no access to.
Yes, Mary Magdalene was a follower of Jesus, but his own argument was that
nobody would invent the women because they were marginalized, because men didn’t think
highly of women. My response is, that’s precisely why Mark would invent the tradition, because
in Mark’s Gospel, it’s the marginalized who understand who Jesus is, it’s not the male disciples.
That’s why you have the story of the women discovering the tomb.
I think the theological modes of knowledge are perfectly acceptable
and legitimate as theological modes of knowledge. But I think theological claims have to be
evaluated on a theological basis. For example, you know the idea that these four facts that Bill
keeps referring to showed that God raised Jesus from the dead. You could come up with a
different theological view of it. Suppose, for example, to explain those four facts that the God
Zulu sent Jesus into the 12th dimension, and in that 12th dimension he was periodically released
for return to Earth for a brief respite from his eternal tormentors. But he can’t tell his followers
about this because Zulu told him that if he does, he’ll increase his eternal agonies. So that’s
another theological explanation for what happened. It would explain the empty tomb, it would
32
explain Jesus appearances. Is it as likely as God raised Jesus from the dead and made him sit at
his right hand; that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob has interceded in history and
vindicated his name by raising his Messiah? Well, you might think no, that in fact the first
explanation of the God Zulu is crazy. Well, yeah, O.K., it’s crazy; but it’s theologically crazy.
It’s not historically crazy. It’s no less likely as an explanation for what happened than the
explanation that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob raised Jesus from the dead because
they’re both theological explanations; they’re not historical explanations. So within the realm of
theology, I certainly think that theology is a legitimate mode of knowledge. But the criteria for
evaluating theological knowledge are theological; they are not historical.
The Ancient ********s Rule can be ignored
I should point out that
the Gospels say they’re written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But that’s just in your
English Bible. That’s the title of these Gospels, but whoever wrote the Gospel of Matthew didn’t
call it the Gospel of Matthew. Whoever wrote the Gospel of Matthew simply wrote his Gospel,
and somebody later said it’s the Gospel according to Matthew. Somebody later is telling you
who wrote it. The titles are later additions. These are not eyewitness accounts. So where did they
get their stories from?
[See Francis J. Lamb, Greenleaf]
Misrepresenting testimony is allowable
See also Theory takes precedence over eyewitness and circumstantial evidence
How do you convert somebody to stop
worshipping their God and to start worshipping Jesus?
... The authors were not eye witnesses; they’re Greek-speaking
Christians living 35 to 65 years after the events they narrate.
The Jewish historian Josephus mentions Jesus but didn’t believe in his resurrection.
Yes, Mary Magdalene was a follower of Jesus, but his own argument was that
nobody would invent the women because they were marginalized, because men didn’t think
highly of women. My response is, that’s precisely why Mark would invent the tradition, because
in Mark’s Gospel, it’s the marginalized who understand who Jesus is, it’s not the male disciples.
That’s why you have the story of the women discovering the tomb.
Let me conclude by telling you what I really do think about Jesus’ resurrection. The one thing we
know about the Christians after the death of Jesus is that they turned to their ******ures to try and
make sense of it. They had believed Jesus was the Messiah, but then he got crucified, and so he
couldn’t be the Messiah. No Jew, prior to Christianity, thought that the Messiah was to be
crucified. The Messiah was to be a great warrior or a great king or a great judge. He was to be a
figure of grandeur and power, not somebody who’s squashed by the enemy like a mosquito. How
could Jesus, the Messiah, have been killed as a common criminal? Christians turned to their
******ures to try and understand it, and they found passages that refer to the Righteous One of
God’s suffering death. But in these passages, such as Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22 and Psalm 61, the
one who is punished or who is killed is also vindicated by God. Christians came to believe their
******ures that Jesus was the Righteous One and that God must have vindicated him. And so
Christians came to think of Jesus as one who, even though he had been crucified, came to be
exalted to heaven, much as Elijah and Enoch had in the Hebrew ******ures. How can he be Jesus
the Messiah though, if he’s been exalted to heaven? Well, Jesus must be coming back soon to
establish the kingdom. He wasn’t an earthly Messiah; he’s a spiritual Messiah. That’s why the
early Christians thought the end was coming right away in their own lifetime. That’s why Paul
taught that Christ was the first fruit of the resurrection. But if Jesus is exalted, he is no longer
dead, and so Christians started circulating the story of his resurrection. It wasn’t three days later
they started circulating the story; it might have been a year later, maybe two years. Five years
later they didn’t know when the stories had started. Nobody could go to the tomb to check; the
body had decomposed. Believers who knew he had been raised from the dead started having
visions of him. Others told stories about these visions of him, including Paul. Stories of these
visions circulated. Some of them were actual visions like Paul, others of them were stories of
visions like the five hundred group of people who saw him. On the basis of these stories,
narratives were constructed and circulated and eventually we got the Gospels of the New
Testament written 30, 40, 50, 60 years later.
Oral tradition is not reliable and can be ignored
You have to tell stories about Jesus. So
you convert somebody on the basis of the stories you tell. That person converts somebody who
converts somebody who converts somebody, and all along the line people are telling stories.
The way it works is this: I’m a businessman in Ephesus, and somebody comes to town and tells
me stories about Jesus, and on the basis of these stories I hear, I convert. I tell my wife these
stories. She converts. She tells the next-door neighbor the stories. She converts. She tells her
husband the stories. He converts. He goes on a business trip to Rome, and he tells people there
the stories. They convert. Those people who’ve heard the stories in Rome, where did they hear
them from? They heard them from the guy who lived next door to me. Well, was he there to see
these things happen? No. Where’d he hear them from? He heard them from his wife. Where did
11
his wife hear them from? Was she there? No. She heard them from my wife. Where did my wife
hear them from? She heard them from me. Well, where did I hear them from? I wasn’t there
either.
Stories are in circulation year after year after year, and as a result of that, the stories get changed.
How do we know that the stories got changed in the process of transmission?
... The accounts that they narrate are based on oral traditions that have been in circulation for decades. Year after year Christians trying to convert others told them stories to convince them that Jesus was raised from the dead. These writers are telling stories, then, that Christians have been telling all these years. Many stories were invented, and most of the stories were changed. For that reason, these accounts are not as useful as we would like them to be for historical purposes. They’re not contemporary, they’re not disinterested, and they’re not consistent.
What we have
are Gospel stories written decades later by people who had heard stories in circulation, and it’s
not hard at all to imagine somebody coming up with the story.
Solutions to allegedly conflicting testimony can be ignored
How do we know that the stories got changed in the process of transmission? We know the
stories got changed because there are numerous differences in our accounts that cannot be
reconciled with one another. You don’t need to take my word for this; simply look yourself. I tell
my students that the reason we don’t notice there’s so many differences in the Gospels is because
we read the Gospels vertically, from top to bottom. You start at the top of Mark, you read
through to the bottom, you start at the top of Matthew, read it through the bottom, sounds a lot
like Mark, then you read Luke top to bottom, sounds a lot like Matthew and Mark, read John, a
little bit different, sounds about the same. The reason is because we’re reading them vertically.
The way to see differences in the Gospels is to read them horizontally. Read one story in
Matthew, then the same story in Mark, and compare your two stories and see what you come up
with. You come up with major differences. Just take the death of Jesus. What day did Jesus die
on and what time of day? Did he die on the day before the Passover meal was eaten, as John
explicitly says, or did he die after it was eaten, as Mark explicitly says? Did he die at noon, as in
John, or at 9 a.m., as in Mark? Did Jesus carry his cross the entire way himself or did Simon of
Cyrene carry his cross? It depends which Gospel you read. Did both robbers mock Jesus on the
cross or did only one of them mock him and the other come to his defense? It depends which
Gospel you read. Did the curtain in the temple rip in half before Jesus died or after he died? It
depends which Gospel you read.
Or take the accounts of the resurrection. Who went to the tomb on the third day? Was it Mary
alone or was it Mary with other women? If it was Mary with other women, how many other
women were there, which ones were they, and what were their names? Was the stone rolled
away before they got there or not? What did they see in the tomb? Did they see a man, did they
see two men, or did they see an angel? It depends which account you read. What were they told
to tell the disciples? Were the disciples supposed to stay in Jerusalem and see Jesus there or were
they to go to Galilee and see Jesus there? Did the women tell anyone or not? It depends which
Gospel you read. Did the disciples never leave Jerusalem or did they immediately leave
Jerusalem and go to Galilee? All of these depend on which account you read.
You have the same problems for all of the sources and all of our Gospels.
Bill asserts that the story of the
women going to the tomb would never have been invented by the early Christians. I should point
out, Paul never mentions the women at the tomb, only the later Gospels, Mark and following.
Below from The Trial of Jesus from a Lawyer’s Standpoint, Vol. 1 by Walter M. Chandler. New York: 1925, pp. 29-33.
In considering the subject of discrepancies it should be constantly kept in mind that contradictions in testimony do not necessarily mean that there has been falsehood or by faith on the part of the witnesses. Every lawyer of experience and every adult citizen of average intelligence knows that this is true. Men of unquestioned veracity and incorruptible integrity are frequently arrayed against each other in both civil and criminal trials, and the record reveals irreconcilable contradictions in their testimony. Not only do prosecutions for perjury not follow, but, in many instances, the witnesses are not even suspected of bad faith or an intention to falsify. Defects in sight, hearing, or memory; superior advantage in the matter of observation; or a sudden change in the position of one or both the parties, causing distraction of attention, at the time of the occurrence of the events involved in litigation – all or any of these conditions, as well as many others, may create discrepancies and contradictions where there is a total absence of any intention to misrepresent. A thorough appreciation of this fact will greatly aid in a clear understanding of this phase of the discussion.
Again, an investigation of the charge of discrepancy against the Gospel writers shows that the critics and skeptics have classified mere omissions as contradictions. Noting could be more absurd than to consider an omission a contradiction, unless the requirements of the case show that the facts and circumstances omitted were essential to be stated, or that the omission was evidently intended to mislead or deceive. Any other contention would turn historical literature topsy-turvy and load it down with contradictions. Dion Cassius, Tacitus, and Suetonius have all written elaborately of the reign of Tiberius. Many things are mentioned by each that are not recorded by the other two. Are we to reject all three as unreliable historians because of this fact? Abbott, Hazlitt, Bourrienne, and Walter Scott have written biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte. No one of them has recited all the facts recorded by the others. Are these omissions to destroy the merits of all these writers and cause them to be suspected and rejected? Grafton’s Chronicles rank high in English historical literature. They comprise the reign of King John; and yet make no mention of the granting of Magna Charta. This is as if the life of Jefferson had been written without mention of the Declaration of Independence; or a biography of Lincoln without calling attention to the Emancipation Proclamation. Notwithstanding this strange omission, Englishmen still preserve Grafton’s Chronicles as valuable records among their archives. And the same spirit of generous criticism is everywhere displayed in matters of profane literature. The opponents of Christianity are never embarrassed in excusing or explaining away omissions or contradictions, provided the writer is a layman and his subject secular. But let the theme be a sacred one, and the author an ecclesiastic – preacher, priest, or prophet – and immediately incredulity rises to high tide, engulfs the reason, and destroys all dispassionate criticism. Could it be forgotten for a moment that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were biographers of the Christ, a sacred person, no difficulties would arise in the matter of inconsistencies, no objections would be made to their credibility. The slight discrepancies that undoubtedly exist would pass unnoticed, or be forever buried under the weight of an overwhelming conviction that they are, in the main, accurate and truthful.
But the Evangelists were guided by inspiration, the skeptics say; and discrepancies are inconsistent with the theory of inspiration. God would not have inspired them to write contradictory stories. But the assumption is false that they claimed to be guided by inspiration; for, as Marcus Dods truthfully says, “none of our Gospels pretends to be infallible or even inspired. Only one of them tells us how its writer obtained his information, and that was by careful inquiry at the proper sources.”*
* An opposite doctrine seems to be taught in Luke 12:11-12; 24:48-49.
A more pertinent observation upon the Gospel discrepancies has not been made than that by Paley in his “Evidences of Christianity,” where he says:
I know not a more rash or unphilosophical conduct of the understanding, than to reject the substance of a story by reason of some diversity in the circumstances with which it is related. The usual character of human testimony is substantial truth under circumstantial variety. This is what the daily experience of courts of justice teaches. When accounts of a transaction come from the mouths of different witnesses, it is seldom that it is not possible to pick out apparent or real inconsistencies between them. These inconsistencies are studiously displayed by an adverse pleader, but oftentimes with little impression upon the minds of the judges. On the contrary, a close and minute agreement induces the suspicion of confederacy and fraud. When written histories touch upon the same scenes of action; the comparison almost always affords ground for a like reflection. Numerous, and sometimes important, variations present themselves; not seldom, also, absolute and final contradictions; yet neither one nor the other are deemed sufficient to shake the credibility of the main fact. The embassy of the Jews to deprecate the execution of Claudian's order to place his statute, in their temple, Philo places in harvest, Josephus in seed time; both contemporary writers. No reader is led by this inconsistency to doubt whether such an embassy was sent, or whether such an order was given. Our own history supplies examples of the same kind. In the account of the Marquis of Argyle's death, in the reign of Charles the Second, we have a very remarkable contradiction. Lord Clarendon relates that he was condemned to be hanged, which was performed the same day; on the contrary, Burnet, Woodrew, Heath, Echard, concur in stating that he was beheaded; and that he was condemned upon the Saturday, and executed upon the Monday. Was any reader of English history ever skeptic enough to raise from hence a question whether the Marquis of Argyle was executed or not? Yet this ought to be left in uncertainty, according to the principles upon which the Christian history has sometimes been attacked.*
* Evidences of Christianity, p. 319. (Presented here in Appendix Two.)
The reader should most carefully consider the useful as well as the damaging effect of Gospel inconsistencies in the matter of the credibility of the Evangelists. A certain class of persons have imagined the Gospel writers to be common conspirators who met together at the same time and place to devise ways and means of publishing a false report to the world. This is a silly supposition, since it is positively known that the authors of the Evangelical narratives wrote and published them at different times and places. Moreover, the style and contents of the books themselves negative the idea of a concerted purpose to deceive. And, besides, the very inconsistencies themselves show that there was no “confederacy and fraud”; since intelligent conspirators would have fabricated exactly the same story in substantially the same language.
A priori reasoning is allowed
These are not
historically reliable accounts.
... But even if these stories were the best sources in the world, there would still be a major obstacle
that we simply cannot overcome if we want to approach the question of the resurrection
12
historically rather than theologically. I’m fine if Bill wants to argue that theologically God raised
Jesus from the dead or even if he wants to argue theologically that Jesus was raised from the
dead. But this cannot be a historical claim, and not for the reason that he imputed to me as being
an old, warmed over 18th century view that has been refuted ever since. Historians can only
establish what probably happened in the past.
Historians cannot establish miracle as the most probable occurrence
because miracles, by their very nature are the least probable occurrence.
God
does things all the time, and so there’s nothing implausible at all about God raising Jesus from
the dead.
Well, that presupposes a belief in God. Historians can’t presuppose belief in God. Historians can
only work with what we’ve got here among us. People who are historians can be of any
theological persuasion. They can be Buddhists, they can be Hindus, they can be Muslims, they
can be Christians, they can be Jews, they can be agnostics, they can be atheists, and the theory
behind the canons in historical research is that people of every persuasion can look at the
evidence and draw the same conclusions. But Bill’s hypothesis requires a person to believe in
God. I don’t object to that as a way of thinking. I object to that as a way of historical thinking,
because it’s not history, it’s theology.
does the report of
occurrence of miracles over time increase the probability? I’d say the answer is probably “no”
because in every single instance you have to evaluate whether it’s a probable event or not. And
it never can be a probable event. So that, if one thinks so, that it is a probable event, what I
would like Bill to do is to tell us why he doesn’t think that Muhammad did miracles because we
certainly have reports of that. Why doesn’t he think Apollonius of Tyana did miracles? He
quoted Larry Yarbrough, who, in fact, probably has never read the Life of Apollonius. I know
this because I had an argument with Larry Yarbrough about it. He has never read the texts. I
don’t know if Bill has read the texts. They’re very interesting; they are Greek texts; they are
widely available. They report Apollonius of Tyana did many of things that Jesus did; he could
cast out demons, he could heal the sick, he could raise the dead, at the end of his life he ascended
to heaven. And Apollonius of Tyana was just one of the hundreds of people about such things
were said in the ancient world. So if we allow for the possibility of Jesus, how about allowing
the possibility for Apollonius? Or Honi the Circle-Drawer or Hanina ben Dosa or the Emperor
Vespasian? Or you could name the list as long as your arm of people. Now the reason we don’t
know about these people is because, of course, the only miracle-working Son of God we know
about is Jesus. But in fact in the ancient world there are hundreds of people like this, with
hundreds of stories told about them. We discount them because they’re not within our tradition.
My final point is a very simple one. Even if we want to believe in the resurrection of Jesus, that
belief is a theological belief. You can’t prove the resurrection. It’s not susceptible to historical
evidence. It’s faith. Believers believe it and take it on faith, and history cannot prove it.
I don’t believe that history is an
objective discipline to start with. It sounded from your question that you agree with this, but we
need to talk more about your take on postmodern theory. My view is that the historian does have
to back up any presuppositions that he or she has. But my point is that for the historian to do his
or her work, requires that there’d be certain shared assumptions. And it’s fine to say what those
assumptions are, but there are some assumptions that have to be agreed on by people of various
theological persuasions. And they have to be assumptions that are rooted in things that can be
observed. God can’t be observed. So we might very well disagree on important historical events.
There are people who, for example, in our world deny the holocaust, who say the holocaust
never happened. Well, how does one demonstrate that the holocaust happened? Well, one gets
together materials of eyewitness reports and photographs and movies, and you get information
that historians agree is valid information, and you try to make a case. But it has to be the kind of
information that historians of every stripe agree is valid information, such as eyewitness
testimony. And appeals to the supernatural are not accepted in the historical community as being
valid criteria on which to evaluate a past event.
My final point is a very simple one. Even if we want to believe in the resurrection of Jesus, that
belief is a theological belief. You can’t prove the resurrection. It’s not susceptible to historical
evidence. It’s faith. Believers believe it and take it on faith, and history cannot prove it.
Non-eyewitness testimony is as valid as eyewitness testimony
Ancient people have no difficulty at all thinking that a divine appearance was not
an actual physical appearance. A body could be buried and the person could appear alive
afterwards without the body leaving the tomb. If Bill doubts this, then I suggest he read some
more ancient texts to see how they talk about the matter. He might start with the Christian texts
of the second century, such as the Acts of John or the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter or the Second
Treatise of the Great Seth, or he might consider the arguments used by Basilides, who was the
disciple of the follower of Peter. For ancient people, post-death appearance was not the same as
the reanimation of the body.
Circumstantial evidence can be ignored
Yes, Mary Magdalene was a follower of Jesus, but his own argument was that
nobody would invent the women because they were marginalized, because men didn’t think
highly of women. My response is, that’s precisely why Mark would invent the tradition, because
in Mark’s Gospel, it’s the marginalized who understand who Jesus is, it’s not the male disciples.
That’s why you have the story of the women discovering the tomb.
Presumption of innocence can be ignored
See also Theory takes precedence over eyewitness and circumstantial evidence
Year after year Christians
trying to convert others told them stories to convince them that Jesus was raised from the dead.
These writers are telling stories, then, that Christians have been telling all these years. Many
stories were invented, and most of the stories were changed. For that reason, these accounts are
not as useful as we would like them to be for historical purposes. They’re not contemporary,
they’re not disinterested, and they’re not consistent.
What we have
are Gospel stories written decades later by people who had heard stories in circulation, and it’s
not hard at all to imagine somebody coming up with the story.
Third, and finally, if the only miracles that Bill allows of having happened all belong to the
Judaeo-Christian tradition that he himself personally affirms, I’d like him to address the question
of how that can be historically. How is it that the faith that he adopted as a teenager happens to
be the only one that is historically credible? Is it just circumstance that he was born into a
religious family or a religious culture that can historically be shown to be the only true religion?
Mythological claims have equal validity to historical claims
For ancient people, as opposed to post21
Enlightenment thinkers like Bill, an appearance does not need to mean reanimation of the
physical body. According to the Gospels, Moses and Elijah appeared to Jesus, James, and John.
Are we to believe that these men, Moses and Elijah, came back to life? That Moses’ body was
reconstituted and raised from the dead and that they appeared from heaven? Or was this a vision?
Surely it was a vision; they disappear immediately. Ancient people had no trouble believing that
bodies can be phantasmal, not physical. Evidence for this is found abundantly throughout all of
our ancient sources – Jewish, pagan, and Christian. Pagan sources from the 8th century Homer to
the 2nd century Homeric hymns; from pagan myths to pagan novels to pagan poets to pagan
philosophers, they’re all replete with accounts of God appearing to humans in human form. But
these are appearances, visions; they’re not real human bodies. The pagan holy man, Apollonius
of Tyana, appears to his followers after his death, but it’s an appearance, a vision, not the
reanimation of his body. Jewish texts are the same. For angels and archangels and demons and
devils appear to people bodily, but they aren’t real bodies.
I’d like him to
discuss the evidence of other miracle workers from Jesus’ day outside the Christian tradition. Is
he willing to admit on the same historical grounds that these other people also did miracles? I’m
referring to the tradition of miracles done by Apollonius of Tyana, Hanina ben Dosa, Honi the
Circle-Drawer, Vespasian. Is Bill willing to acknowledge that Apollonius appeared to his
followers after his death or that Octavian ascended to heaven? Or he can pick any other miracle
worker form the pagan tradition he chooses.
does the report of
occurrence of miracles over time increase the probability? I’d say the answer is probably “no”
because in every single instance you have to evaluate whether it’s a probable event or not. And
it never can be a probable event. So that, if one thinks so, that it is a probable event, what I
would like Bill to do is to tell us why he doesn’t think that Muhammad did miracles because we
certainly have reports of that. Why doesn’t he think Apollonius of Tyana did miracles? They’re very interesting; they are Greek texts; they are
widely available. They report Apollonius of Tyana did many of things that Jesus did; he could
cast out demons, he could heal the sick, he could raise the dead, at the end of his life he ascended
to heaven. And Apollonius of Tyana was just one of the hundreds of people about such things
were said in the ancient world. So if we allow for the possibility of Jesus, how about allowing
the possibility for Apollonius? Or Honi the Circle-Drawer or Hanina ben Dosa or the Emperor
Vespasian? Or you could name the list as long as your arm of people. Now the reason we don’t
know about these people is because, of course, the only miracle-working Son of God we know
about is Jesus. But in fact in the ancient world there are hundreds of people like this, with
hundreds of stories told about them. We discount them because they’re not within our tradition.
That’s why my alternative explanation of Zulu sounded implausible to Bill because in his
tradition it’s the God of Jesus, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who must be involved in
the world. And, of course, people from other religious traditions say other Gods are involved. So
this isn’t just a question about whether God is involved. Which God is involved? And as I
pointed out earlier, it’s just a very happy circumstance that it happens to be the God, the God that
Bill can historically demonstrate its existence, who happens to be the God that he converted to
when he was 16.
Visions can be shared
For ancient people, as opposed to post-Enlightenment thinkers like Bill, an appearance does not need to mean reanimation of the
physical body. According to the Gospels, Moses and Elijah appeared to Jesus, James, and John.
Are we to believe that these men, Moses and Elijah, came back to life? That Moses’ body was
reconstituted and raised from the dead and that they appeared from heaven? Or was this a vision?
Surely it was a vision; they disappear immediately.
Ancient people had no trouble believing that bodies can be phantasmal, not physical. Evidence for this is found abundantly throughout all of our ancient sources – Jewish, pagan, and Christian. Pagan sources from the 8th century Homer to the 2nd century Homeric hymns; from pagan myths to pagan novels to pagan poets to pagan philosophers, they’re all replete with accounts of God appearing to humans in human form. But these are appearances, visions; they’re not real human bodies. The pagan holy man, Apollonius of Tyana, appears to his followers after his death, but it’s an appearance, a vision, not the reanimation of his body. Jewish texts are the same. For angels and archangels and demons and devils appear to people bodily, but they aren’t real bodies.
The existence of hostile eyewitnesses as a corrective can be ignored
Double standards in the evaluation of historical ********s is allowed
To sum up, the sources we have are not as good as we would like.
First, Bill makes dubious use of modern authorities. Bill constantly quotes modern scholars as if
somehow that constitutes evidence for his point of view. As Bill himself knows, the fact that the
majority of New Testament scholars would agree with his four points is not proof that they are
right. For one thing, the majority of New Testament scholars are believers in the New Testament,
that is, they’re theologically committed to the text, so of course they agree on these points. I
should note that the majority of historians do not agree with Bill’s conclusion. Does that make
those conclusions wrong? No. It simply means that his conclusions are not persuasive to most
historians. Having said that, I’m surprised by some of his so-called authorities that Bill cites, for
the reality is that the majority of critical scholars studying the historical Jesus today disagree
with his conclusion that a historian can show that the body of Jesus emerged physically from the
tomb.
Burden of proof standard is ignored
التعديل الأخير:
Bart Interrupted--- A detailed Analysis of 'Jesus Interrupted' Part One
Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted, (San Francisco: Harper One, 2009), xii +292 pages. Part One ( the first 60 pages)
Bart Ehrman is both a gifted writer and a gifted lecturer. Perhaps his best gift is the ability to distill difficult and complex material down to a level that undergraduates and ordinary lay folk can understand. It is thus understandable that his popular level books on the New Testament and cognate subjects have been well and widely read, and in age disposed to ‘dis’ the Bible anyway, which is to say, in a generally Biblically illiterate age, Bart’s work has been seen as confirming suspicions already long held by the skeptical or those prone to be skeptical about the Bible and Christianity.
One of the problems however with some of Bart’s popular work, including this book, is that it does not follow the age old adage--- “before you boil down, you need to have first boiled it up”. By this I mean Bart Ehrman, so far as I can see, and I would be glad to be proved wrong about this fact, has never done the necessary laboring in the scholarly vineyard to be in a position to write a book like Jesus, Interrupted from a position of long study and knowledge of New Testament Studies. He has never written a scholarly monograph on NT theology or exegesis. He has never written a scholarly commentary on any New Testament book whatsoever! His area of expertise is in textual criticism, and he has certainly written works like The Orthodox Corruption of ******ure, which have been variously reviewed, not to mention severely critiqued by other textual critics such as Gordon D. Fee, and his own mentor Bruce Metzger (whom I also did some study with). He is thus, in the guild of the Society of Biblical Literature a specialist in text criticism, but even in this realm he does not represent what might be called a majority view on such matters.
It is understandable how a textual critic might write a book like Misquoting Jesus, on the basis of long study of the underpinnings of textual criticism and its history and praxis. It is mystifying however why he would attempt to write a book like Jesus, Interrupted which frankly reflect no in-depth interaction at all with exegetes, theologians, and even most historians of the NT period of whatever faith or no faith at all. A quick perusal of the footnotes to this book, reveal mostly cross-references to Ehrman’s earlier popular works, with a few exceptions sprinkled in—for example Raymond Brown and E.P Sanders, the former long dead, the latter long retired. What is especially telling and odd about this is Bart does not much reflect a knowledge of the exegetical or historical study of the text in the last thirty years. It’s as if he is basing his judgments on things he read whilst in Princeton Seminary. And that was a long time ago frankly.
It is not sufficient to reply that Bart is writing for a popular audience and thus we would not expect much scholarly discussion even in the footnotes. Even in a work of this sort, we would expect some good up to date bibliography for those disposed to do further study, not merely copious cross-references to one’s other popular level books. Contrast for example, my last Harper book What Have They Done with Jesus? The impression is left, even if untrue, that Ehrman’s actual knowledge of and interaction with NT historians, exegetes, and theologians has been and is superficial and this has led to overly tendentious and superficial analysis. Again, I would be glad to be proved wrong about this, but it would certainly appear I am not. This book could have been written by an intelligent skeptical person who had no more than a seminary level acquaintance and expertise in the field of NT studies itself. And I do not say this lightly, for this book manifests problems in all areas, if one critiques it on the basis of NT scholarship of the last thirty or so years. There are methodological problems, historical problems, exegetical problems, theological problems, and epistemological problems with this book, to mention but a few areas.
My grandmother used to say, “if you can’t say anything nice about a person, then don’t say anything at all.” So let me start the more detailed part of this discussion by saying something positive--- I believe Bart Ehrman is an honest person, who really has been a truth seeker when it comes to the Bible and Christianity. His preface to this latest volume reflects that, and I applaud his honesty and forthrightness, while at the same time pointing out that I was a person who went through the same process of deep study and inquiry whilst in college and seminary and came to very different conclusions than Bart, and it wasn’t because I checked my brain at the door or ceased being a critical thinker on these subjects along the way. Bart and I are different in that I did not come out of a fundamentalist past at all, but we do share not only UNC and Bruce Metzger in common, we also both did English literature degrees in college, which explains to some degree the ability to write and the tendency to do it frequently.
Let me start then with a general criticism about Bart’s entire approach. He begins in his first chapter by bemoaning the fact that the general populus including the church, has been left in the dark about what “scholars have been saying” for lo these many years (over a hundred actually) about the Bible. He puts it this way “the perspectives that I present in the following chapters are not my own idiosyncratic views of the Bible. They are the views that have held sway for many, many years among the majority of serious critical scholars teaching in universities and seminaries of North America and Europe”(p.2).
Now it is always a danger to over generalize when we are dealing with as important a matter as the ‘truth about the Bible’. And frankly it is simply untrue to say that most scholars or the majority of Bible scholars or the majority of serious critical scholars would agree with Bart Ehrman in his conclusions about this or that NT matter. NT scholarship is a many splintered thing, and Ehrman’s position certainly does not represent a majority view, or the critical consensus about such matters. At best, one has to say yes and no repeatedly to what Bart takes as the critical consensus about such matters. Bart Ehrman, like the more radical members of the Jesus Seminar (e.g. Robert Funk cf. Robert Price) represents a minority position which has indeed been very vocal in proselytizing for their point of view. So this book should have come with a caveat emptor--- “Buyer Beware: Hyperbolic claims about what most or the majority of critical scholars of the NT think will be frequent in this tome”. The appeal to authority or expertise in any case does not really settle much. The issue is—what is the evidence and why should we draw this or that conclusion? The other issue is--- why mislead the general public about what “the majority of serious critical scholars” have been saying? Perhaps an end run has been done from the outset--- you define a small circle of scholars as the serious ones, the critical ones, the real scholarly thinkers, the real historians, and then having defined your own group narrowly enough, you then say—“the majority of such people think…” Evangelicals are sometimes just as guilty of this ploy as others, but in any case, it does not help when one misrepresents the actual state of play of things among scholars to the general public.
Bart reminds us early on that the method of studying the Bible taught in most mainline seminaries is “the historical critical method”. It is also, in fact perhaps the main method of teaching the Bible in evangelical seminaries today as well. And two of the major things one is taught, quite correctly in the study of this method are: 1) ancient historical texts must be studied in their original historical contexts to be properly understood; and 2) modern post-Enlightenment historiography is at odds with the historiography of most ancients, particularly when it comes to the issue of God’s involvement in human history.
There is a further corollary—in order to understand the Gospels or Acts, or Paul’s letters, or Revelation, one needs to understand the features and characteristics of such ancient literature—in short their respective genres. The Gospels are written like ancient biographies, not modern ones, or in the case of Luke-Acts like an ancient work of Hellenistic (and Septuagintal) historiography. Unless one knows the conventions and limitations that apply to such literature, one is in no position at all to evaluate whether there are “inconsistencies” “errors” or other problematic features of such literature. Error can only be assessed on the basis of what an author is attempting to do and what literary conventions he is following. Let us take an example Bart uses from p. 7 of his book—the fact that in John the cleansing of the temple comes early in the Gospel account, whereas in the Synoptics it is found in the Passion narrative. He is right of course that some modern conservative Christians have attempted to reconcile these differences by suggesting Jesus did the deed twice--- once at the beginning and once at the end of the ministry. The problem is, that this conclusion is just as anachronistic (and genre ignoring) as the conclusion that the Gospels contradict each other on this point. What do I mean?
If you actually bother to read ancient biographies (see e.g. Tacitus’s Life of Agricola, or Plutarch’s famous parallel lives) you will discover that the ancients were not pedants when it comes to the issue of strict chronology as we are today. The ancient biographical or historiographical work operated with the freedom to arrange there material in several different ways, including topically, geographically, chronologically, to mention but three. Yes they had a secondary interest in chronology in broad strokes, but only a secondary interest in that.
If one studies the Fourth Gospel in detail and closely in the Greek, comparing it to other ancient biographies what one learns is that it is a highly schematized and edited product, and the sign narratives are arranged theologically not primarily chronologically. And whilst this might cause a modern person some consternation, it is not a reason to say that John contradicts the Synoptics on this Temple cleansing matter. The Fourth Gospel begins by showing that Jesus replaces the institutions of Judaism with himself—a theological message (he is the Passover lamb, he is the Temple where God’s presence dwells etc.). The Synoptic writers are likely presenting a more chronologically apt picture of when this event actually happened. But strict chronology was not the major purpose of the Fourth Evangelist, we should not fault him for not giving us information we might want to have, or for focusing on the theological import of the event, rather than its timing. Such was the freedom, within limits, of ancient biographies and histories. I must disagree with the conclusion then when Bart says “Historically speaking, then, the accounts are not reconcilable.” (p. 7). False. This is only so if one insists on a flat modern anachronistic reading of the text which pays no attention to what the authors are attempting.
The Gospel of John probably tells us nothing about this chronological issue, the Synoptics probably do, and judged on their own terms and on the basis of their ancient genre, one cannot draw the conclusion Bart does. Period. And unfortunately, this is a mistake Bart makes over, and over again, judging ancient texts on the basis of modern presuppositions about history writing, and what counts as truth or error. In fact, it is not entirely erroneous to say that Bart reads the Bible with the same sort of flat literalistic hermeneutic that he would have used before he did his scholarly study of the text. And I find this passing strange.
Let’s take his next pet example--- the three denials of Christ by Peter, and the cock crows. I quite agree with his critique of those who come up with six denials of Christ by Peter. No Gospel says that, any more than any Gospel mentions two cleansing of the Temple. Bart points to the difference between Matthew and Mark, the latter saying Peter will deny Christ before the cock crows twice, whilst in Matthew it says ‘before the cock crows”. He then asks--- “which is it?” The assumption is: 1) these Gospel writers were trying to be very precise; and 2) these two options are mutually contradictory; and 3) we should ask these sorts of detail questions of ancient historical ********s because we have a right to assume that modern historical ways of analyzing this material will help us to get to the bottom of such matters and find the historical truth.
In the first place let’s consider point 2). In fact, if Peter denied Christ three times before the cock crowed at all, then he certainly denied Christ three times before the cock crowed twice!!! But suppose the Gospels writer were not much concerned to give us precise information about the intricate relationship and intercalation between denials and cock crows. Suppose, in terms of historical information they just wanted to make clear that there were three denials and there were cock crows? Of course this is maddening to those who think that we must have precision on such matters, but in fact if an author wants to be general let him be general, and if he wants to be more specific, let him be more specific. Mark may simply have wanted to be more general in his account. And since I think, with most scholars that the First Evangelist is using Mark’s account, he probably knew far more about the Markan intent than we do, and decided to be more specific. He edits his Markan account according to his own presentation of things. I could go through Bart’s examples one by one explaining how insufficient attention has been paid by him to the ancient conventions of such genre of literature, but I agree with him that over-harmonizing on the basis of modern anachronistic considerations is wrong, just as wrong as claiming there are obvious contradictions based on a modern literalist reading of the same texts. And herein lies a very fundamental problem with the ex-fundamentalist readings of Bart Ehrman.
The Gospels are not, and never were intended to be inspected as if they were ancient photographs of Jesus taken with a high resolution, all seeing lens. On the contrary these ********s are much more like portraits, and portraits always are selective, tendentious, perspectival. Let me illustrate this point.
One of my favorite Impressionist painters is Claude Monet, and I really love his series of painting done of Rouen Cathedral. These paintings were done in the late 1890s and they depict the front face of the Cathedral from slightly different angles of incidence, and in different lighting. But in each case it is recognizably the same cathedral with the same basic shape, from the same basic ***** of reference. Let us suppose for a minute then that the Gospels are like these paintings. Now it would be totally pedantic to have an argument that went as follows: “In this painting Monet depicts the color of the front façade of the cathedral as being gray, but in this picture he paints it as being a yellowish shade, and in this picture a pinkish shade.” Which is it? Surely one must be right and the other depictions wrong.” Of course the proper response to this silly discourse is that they are all right, because they attempt to depict the appearance of the building at different times of day from slightly different angles. And no art critic in their right mind would think of suggesting that one painting was in error compared to the other. My point is simple. The Gospels are not works of modern biography or historiography and they should not be evaluated by such canons.
Nor for that matter are we much helped by evaluating the Gospel traditions on the basis of the canons of modern German form criticism which is grounded in notions about the passing on of oral traditions which simply do not apply to the first century A.D. and in the Jewish setting of the Gospels and Acts (on this point see Richard Bauckham’s fine study Jesus and the Eyewitnesses). Various of Bart’s comments presuppose that most NT exegetes and historians assume that the Bultmannian conclusions about oral history and oral tradition are correct. This is certainly not true now in the way it might have been said to be true specifically in mainline schools in the 70s. On the contrary, there is now a lively discussion about oral history that makes clear that the notion that there was likely a long gap between the events and their being written down, or between eyewitness testimony and their being written down is probably false.
Equally pedantic and unhelpful is Bart’s analysis of Genesis 1 and 2(pp. 9-10), which are generally agreed to be two different ways of telling the story of creation, one more general, and one more focused on the creation of humankind. Besides the fact that Genesis 1 falls into the category of poetry or poetic prose and should not be analyzed on the basis of it being some sort of scientific account of creation, it is frankly not fair game to compare and contrast these two chapters as if they were attempting to say the same thing in the same way writing like modern historians. They are not. Ancient narratological conventions come into play (see now Bill Arnold’s fine commentary on Genesis in the Cambridge series I edit). And now we begin to see why Biblically illiterate folk who are skeptical about the Bible are drawn to the Ehrman analysis. It appears to take the text at face value, and evaluate it by comparison and contrast, without taking into consideration at all issues of literary context or conventions. In other words, it approaches the matter as if one could simply read the English translation of the text without any knowledge of ancient writing conventions and come to important conclusions about historical truth and error. But in fact, this is not only not proper, in most cases it is not possible. The real truth seeker knows that a text without a context is just a pretext for whatever you would like it to mean.
Let’s take another example--- Bart’s treatment on pp. 10-11 of Psalm 137. In the first place this is a song, and so should not be treated like a theological or ethical treatise. In the second place, what this song is a revelation of is what is on the heart of the psalmist. In the psalms, human beings speak to, pray to, implore their God in various ways. It is a very truthful and accurate reflection of various things on and in the human heart, including the desire for vengeance. What the psalms are generally not is a revelation of what is in God’s heart or character. But Bart seems oblivious to this point which is commonly enough recognized by commentators on the Psalms. More in depth study of the psalms could have led to the avoidance of this sort of error.
Let’s take now an example from the second chapter (pp. 24ff). Here Bart is comparing and contrasting the relationship between the events that lead up to Jesus’ death as told in Mark and as told in John, and trying to synch that up with the Jewish liturgical calendar in regard to the celebration of Passover, and the Day of Preparation.
A few historical remarks are in order. 1) despite what Bart says, no Gospel suggests Jesus was crucified on Passover, which is to say between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday on April 7 A.D. 30 (or less possibly in A.D. 33); 2) the meal described in John 13 is definitely not the same meal as that described in Mark 14 and the other Synoptics. John 13 is very clear about this--- John 13.1 reads literally “But before the festival of the Passover…” The text does not say how long before. This could easily be a meal at the beginning of the week when the feast of Passover transpired, rather than near its end. And nothing whatsoever is said in John’s story about sharing the Passover elements. This is a striking difference from the accounts in the Synoptics, and I would say the differences are great enough that we must take them to indicate we are dealing with different stories here. 3) Most scholars who have written commentaries on the Synoptics do indeed think that Jesus celebrated his last supper with his disciples on Thursday night, which is to say, on the beginning of the Day of Preparation rather than on Passover day. There was precedent for this in early Judaism in some cases, and some scholars have even argued that Jesus was following the Galilean rather than the Judean liturgical calendar, which is certainly possible and believable. Whether this is so or not, it is notable that there is no mention at all about Jesus and his disciples eating lamb….in any of the accounts. This has led some to conclude, wrongly in my judgment, that even the Thursday night meal was not a Passover meal. 4) one of the major issues in determining when Jesus actually died is the question of which clock an Evangelist is running on--- is it the Roman way of keeping time, or a Jewish and Oriental one? Which hour is the third, sixth and ninth hours, according to the respective Evangelists? Mark’s seems to be based on the Roman way of time keeping, but this may not be the case in John. In any case, all the Gospels in fact are in agreement that Jesus died before sundown on Friday, which is to say, before Passover actually begun, which is to say on the Day of Preparation. 5) in A.D. 30 the day of preparation for the Sabbath was in fact the day of preparation for Passover. It was one and the same day. Therefore, Mk. 15.42 does not in any way disagree with John when it says that Jesus died on the day of Preparation. Correct— and this was Friday before sundown when both Passover and Sabbath began that year. John did not need to change a historical datum to make a theological point that Jesus was the Passover lamb. The point is inherent in a theological interpretation of the actual day Jesus died. In this case, Bart is busily finding contradictions in the text which are a chimera. They are not really in evidence.
Bart carries on in much the same vein in his analysis of the birth narratives. What is of concern to us is not where he sees differences in Matthew and Luke’s accounts, but rather where he finds what he deems to be actual discrepancies. The first of these is that Bart claims that what Luke says in Lk.2.1-3 is clearly historically in error (pp. 34-35). What however does the Greek text of Lk.2.2 actually say--- “this registration happened first/prior to the governing of Syria by Quirinius.” The issue here is the function of the word prote. What it seems to indicate is that the census in question took place prior to when Quirinius was governor of Syria. There was indeed a famous and indeed notorious census which led to the rebellion of Judas the Galilean in A.D. 6, and so Luke would be distinguishing that census from the earlier one when Mary and Joseph were enrolled. Bart also deems the notion of such enrollments as historically improbable, at least in the way Luke tells the story. There are however very clear examples from the province of Egypt of such census taking done for the purpose of taxation. And in fact, the evidence suggests a link with one’s ancestral home. I see no reason why the Romans would do it any differently with the province of Judea. Furthermore, when Augustus decide to go for the full blown Empire deal, he needed much more money for many more troops and armaments.
While Luke may be using rhetorical hyperbole when he says all the oikomene was being enrolled, a rhetorical usage common in Hellenistic historiography influenced by rhetoric, what Luke is referring to is the inhabited Roman empire, outside of Rome itself. In other words, his audience would likely have understood the reference quite easily and naturally. Bart also takes exception to the story of the wise men following the star. He says nothing of the fact that ancients often thought stars were living beings, the heavenly hosts, and it is more than likely that what Matthew is describing is the leading of the heavenly host or angels, of these persons to the birth place. Here again however some latitude must be allowed for ancient story tellers to present their narrative in ways that their audience would understand. While Matthew’s account does not tell us that Nazareth was Mary and Joseph’s hometown, his account is compatible with this fact, which Luke does tell us. The absence of an explanation does not a discrepancy make nor should it lead one to conclude the author thought something different, especially when Matthew tells us that eventually the holy family did go to Nazareth, and why would they pick that wide place in the road out of the blue if they had no prior associations with it? No good reason. The ******ure fulfillment text in Matthew is a midrashic attempt to explain the fact that Nazareth was their home. It did not generate such an idea.
Lastly, Bart wants to argue that both Matthew and Luke made up the notion of a trip to Bethlehem independently of one another based on Micah’s prophecy, in order to indicate Jesus’ messianic origins, rather than suggesting he was born in a one horse town in Galilee. The problem with this is that Bethlehem itself was also a one horse town in Jesus’ day, and among other things, the slaughter of the innocents is perfectly in character with Herod’s paranoia as described in Josephus. It was hardly necessary for a messianic figure to come from Bethlehem unless one wanted to insist he was a descendant of David, but as we know from Qumran, there were other Jewish traditions that did not associate messiah with the Davidic line. In regard to the oft parodied story of the slaughter of the innocents, we are only talking about a handful of infants at most in such a tiny village anyway, perhaps 6-8. There is nothing improbable about a birth in Bethlehem at all or a slaughter of a few infants. Jesus was called Jesus of Nazareth because he grew up there from infancy.
Differences there are indeed in the accounts of the birth of Jesus in Matthew and Luke. And they are not explained by denying their existence, or resorting to false harmonizing tactics and exegetical gymnastics. We are not however talking about direct contradictions at all here. These narratives are quite compatible in all their essential details, and it is remarkable that two such independent accounts would in fact emphasize the same crucial points--- a virginal conception and a birth in Bethlehem. This did not happen because they were both creative exegetes. It happened because they both relied on historical sources of information about these events. Ehrman’s conclusion that “there are historical implausibilities and discrepancies that can scarcely be reconciled” (p. 34) is saying far more than he knows or the evidence suggests. Had Luke said Jesus was born in Nazareth and Matthew said no he was born in Bethlehem, then we would have a contradiction. But we find nothing like a contradiction in these two accounts—differences do not necessarily equal discrepancies much less equal disagreements. One has to come up with much better examples than this if one wants to claim the accounts can’t be explained or reconciled.
It is the task of a historian, which Bart Ehrman says he is, to get his facts straight. When he takes on the differences in the genealogies there are a few crucial facts he either ignores or is ignorant of. The first of these crucial points is that in Jewish law, if a man adopted a son, that son was entitled to be considered a descendant of his adoptive father, including being a descendant of his step-father’s ancestors. The genealogies in both Matthew and Luke are strange in part precisely because of this legal issue, and more to the point they are strange because both writers want to include the notion of the virginal conception in their accounts, indeed Matthew includes it right in his geneaology, and this may be the only known genealogy where the wife is included in the husband’s geneaology like this!
Bart is right about various of the differences in these genealogies. But he does not correctly explain some of the reasons for the differences. In the first place ancient royal genealogies often were prone to leaving the skeletons out of the list, and so offering an edited version of the ancestry. Something like this is happening in Matthew who wants to suggest Jesus is the seventh son of a seventh son of David, namely the perfect descendant of David. In other words, the form of the genealogy reflects not just historical but also theological interests. The same can be said for Luke’s genealogy and his concern to show that Jesus is not merely son of David son of Abraham, but also son of Adam, and more crucially, son of God. The issues here are not purely historical and it is a form of reductionism to treat them in a purely historical manner. But they were not intended to answer purely historical questions. One needs to read them in light of the conventions of such ancient genealogies, not in the light of modern historical conventions.
Scholars have long debated why these two genealogies differ, and Bart may be right that they both are genealogies connected to Joseph, rather than Luke’s being connected to Mary’s family. But even if this is true, one of them could offer some part of Joseph’s paternal ancestry and the other some part of Joseph’s maternal ancestry. We honestly cannot say. What we can say is there is no basis for the confidence that Bart shows that we have clear contradictions here. More would need to be known about ancient genealogy composition to come to that conclusion. We could carry on with this sort of dialogue with Bart’s list of complaints but we have already dealt with what he takes to be some of the more famous parade examples of clear contradictions. Some of his other examples are much weaker, and can be explained on the basis of the differing editorial tendencies different Gospel writers had, or in Luke’s Acts accounts on the basis of what were the conventions of rhetorical history writing in the first place. About such things Bart says little or nothing, because he seeks to read the text on the basis of modern historiographical conventions, a signal mistake. Ancient texts must be evaluated on their own terms and without demanding of them a precision they never were intended to have.
It is interesting that as the book moves along, Bart stresses here (and later in this study) that he does not think that historical critical study of the Bible should necessarily or will necessarily lead to a loss of Christian faith. I quite agree with this. In fact, I would say in my case that it is precisely the historical, contextual study of the Bible that has strengthened my faith in its truth telling on various subjects of import, not the least of which is the need for and possibility of human salvation. I also quite agree with Bart that teaching students to think and do critical thinking about life and the Bible is a good thing. On these two conclusions we would simply agree. What is interesting is that the more I studied the Bible the less I was prone to accuse the Bible of obvious historical errors and stupid mistakes, including theological errors about a matter as profound as human suffering and evil. To the contrary, I found the Bible rich, complex, varied, and helpful and truthful in dealing with precisely such life and death matters. It would be appropriate then to ask---why exactly did studying the Bible in the same way at seminary and during doctoral work lead Bart Ehrman and myself to such different conclusions? In my case, my faith in the Bible was strengthened, but the opposite seems to have been the case with Bart. “This is a mystery and it calls for profound reflection”. Some of this clearly has to do with presuppositions. Let’s take a theological one that seems to be at the root of some of the differences.
Bart seems to assume that a God who is both almighty and a God of love, would not allow the hideous amount of suffering that goes on in this world. Now this is by no means an uncommon objection to Biblical revelation, but what it seems to assume is a particular sort or deterministic or even extreme Calvinistic view of God, God’s sovereignty, and human life. I can see how extreme suffering and evil is a major problem for such a view of God. It would seem to make God the author of suffering and evil, or at least an uncaring deity in too many cases. Suppose however that God has not pre-determined all things? Suppose God chose to create us in his image with a measure of freedom of choice, the power of contrary choice? Suppose God relates to us relationally and not on the basis of divine decrees? Suppose the vast majority of suffering in the world is a result of human misbehavior or stupidity or sin? Suppose in addition that God does repeatedly intervene in human history to aid and rescue us, without taking away our ability to make viable choices that have moral consequences? It seems to me that part of the issue here is that Bart and I have very different views of the Biblical God and how God actually operates.
Here’s another quandary and quagmire. It appears to me that Bart and I disagree profoundly about the import of textual variants. As Bruce Metzger who taught us both once said--- we know what about 92% of the NT said in its original manu******s with a rather high degree of certainty. As for the other 8%, very little of theological or ethical consequence is at stake. For example, the Trinity is not at stake if 1 John 5 did not mention it. The deity of Christ is not at stake just because some NT ********s do not mention it directly, and some unscrupulous scribes added some clarity to this matter in other manu******s in ways that distorted some NT manu******s.
We also disagree rather strongly on the degree of flux in belief and in the handling of NT ********s early on. It is simply not true to say that many of the primary Christian doctrines were not affirmed widely until centuries after the time of Christ. It is also not true that any such doctrines hang on only late copies of this or that NT book. When it comes to the issue of textual variants, the development of the textual tradition, and the theological import of such variants, Bart simply over-reads the evidence, or as the British say, over-eggs the pudding.
Now I think I understand why he does this. He rightly gets peeved with those fundamentalists who want to stick their heads in the sand and say, there are no such issues or problems even in the least. But an over-reaction is just that--- an over-reaction. Throughout this book, the real boogeyman that Bart is trying to refute is fundamentalists who hold to a certain wooden and very literal view of inerrancy which hardly takes ancient historical considerations into account at all. I would actually have as many problems with the same people as I have with Bart’s views.
He also does not do justice to a reading of these texts in light of ancient genre, conventions, purposes, history writing and the like, but for very different reasons. The reasons seem to include that he is a ardent convert from fundamentalism to a very narrow and all too modern form of historical critical analysis of these texts-- a form that starts with an inherent skepticism about the supernatural among other things, and assumes that critical thinking equals the ability to doubt this, that or the other ancient datum. I call this justification by doubt. It is no more a valid starting point for evaluating the NT than blind fideism is. Indeed, I would argue that to actually understand an ancient author you must start by giving them the benefit of the doubt and hear them out, doing one’s best to enter creatively into their own world and thought processes before understanding can come to pass. To approach the text with a hermeneutic of suspicion is to poison the well of inquiry before one even samples the water in the old well.
Bart and I furthermore disagree on the issue of pseudonymity in the canon. It is one thing to say there are anonymous ********s in the NT, which there are. Hebrews would be a good example. It is another thing to say that there are pseudonymous ********s in the NT, forgeries. I and many other critical scholars think this is not so, but Bart is right that many scholars think otherwise. My point is simply this--- there is a healthy debate about that issue amongst scholars. It is not a “well assured result of the historical critical method” on analyzing the NT. I have pointed out at length in my Letters and Homilies of the NT, series the problems that pseudonymity raised in the first century A.D. for both Greek and Latin writers, never mind writers of ********s supposed to convey God’s truth. The Gospels as we have them are formally anonymous in terms of their internal evidence, though the Fourth Gospel tells is that the Beloved Disciple (not specifically identified) is the source of the material in that Gospel. We can discuss the merits of the attributes later appended to these Gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke, John), but in my view the testimony of Papias is important, and makes evident these attributions already existed in the first century, and in some cases during the time when there were still eyewitnesses. They cannot be dismissed with a wave of a hand, but at the same time one needs to ask--- what were the conventions when it came to appending names to composite ********s? This deserves more discussion. In the second part of this post, we will pick up the discussion with Chapter Three. Stay tuned.
Bart Ehrman is both a gifted writer and a gifted lecturer. Perhaps his best gift is the ability to distill difficult and complex material down to a level that undergraduates and ordinary lay folk can understand. It is thus understandable that his popular level books on the New Testament and cognate subjects have been well and widely read, and in age disposed to ‘dis’ the Bible anyway, which is to say, in a generally Biblically illiterate age, Bart’s work has been seen as confirming suspicions already long held by the skeptical or those prone to be skeptical about the Bible and Christianity.
One of the problems however with some of Bart’s popular work, including this book, is that it does not follow the age old adage--- “before you boil down, you need to have first boiled it up”. By this I mean Bart Ehrman, so far as I can see, and I would be glad to be proved wrong about this fact, has never done the necessary laboring in the scholarly vineyard to be in a position to write a book like Jesus, Interrupted from a position of long study and knowledge of New Testament Studies. He has never written a scholarly monograph on NT theology or exegesis. He has never written a scholarly commentary on any New Testament book whatsoever! His area of expertise is in textual criticism, and he has certainly written works like The Orthodox Corruption of ******ure, which have been variously reviewed, not to mention severely critiqued by other textual critics such as Gordon D. Fee, and his own mentor Bruce Metzger (whom I also did some study with). He is thus, in the guild of the Society of Biblical Literature a specialist in text criticism, but even in this realm he does not represent what might be called a majority view on such matters.
It is understandable how a textual critic might write a book like Misquoting Jesus, on the basis of long study of the underpinnings of textual criticism and its history and praxis. It is mystifying however why he would attempt to write a book like Jesus, Interrupted which frankly reflect no in-depth interaction at all with exegetes, theologians, and even most historians of the NT period of whatever faith or no faith at all. A quick perusal of the footnotes to this book, reveal mostly cross-references to Ehrman’s earlier popular works, with a few exceptions sprinkled in—for example Raymond Brown and E.P Sanders, the former long dead, the latter long retired. What is especially telling and odd about this is Bart does not much reflect a knowledge of the exegetical or historical study of the text in the last thirty years. It’s as if he is basing his judgments on things he read whilst in Princeton Seminary. And that was a long time ago frankly.
It is not sufficient to reply that Bart is writing for a popular audience and thus we would not expect much scholarly discussion even in the footnotes. Even in a work of this sort, we would expect some good up to date bibliography for those disposed to do further study, not merely copious cross-references to one’s other popular level books. Contrast for example, my last Harper book What Have They Done with Jesus? The impression is left, even if untrue, that Ehrman’s actual knowledge of and interaction with NT historians, exegetes, and theologians has been and is superficial and this has led to overly tendentious and superficial analysis. Again, I would be glad to be proved wrong about this, but it would certainly appear I am not. This book could have been written by an intelligent skeptical person who had no more than a seminary level acquaintance and expertise in the field of NT studies itself. And I do not say this lightly, for this book manifests problems in all areas, if one critiques it on the basis of NT scholarship of the last thirty or so years. There are methodological problems, historical problems, exegetical problems, theological problems, and epistemological problems with this book, to mention but a few areas.
My grandmother used to say, “if you can’t say anything nice about a person, then don’t say anything at all.” So let me start the more detailed part of this discussion by saying something positive--- I believe Bart Ehrman is an honest person, who really has been a truth seeker when it comes to the Bible and Christianity. His preface to this latest volume reflects that, and I applaud his honesty and forthrightness, while at the same time pointing out that I was a person who went through the same process of deep study and inquiry whilst in college and seminary and came to very different conclusions than Bart, and it wasn’t because I checked my brain at the door or ceased being a critical thinker on these subjects along the way. Bart and I are different in that I did not come out of a fundamentalist past at all, but we do share not only UNC and Bruce Metzger in common, we also both did English literature degrees in college, which explains to some degree the ability to write and the tendency to do it frequently.
Let me start then with a general criticism about Bart’s entire approach. He begins in his first chapter by bemoaning the fact that the general populus including the church, has been left in the dark about what “scholars have been saying” for lo these many years (over a hundred actually) about the Bible. He puts it this way “the perspectives that I present in the following chapters are not my own idiosyncratic views of the Bible. They are the views that have held sway for many, many years among the majority of serious critical scholars teaching in universities and seminaries of North America and Europe”(p.2).
Now it is always a danger to over generalize when we are dealing with as important a matter as the ‘truth about the Bible’. And frankly it is simply untrue to say that most scholars or the majority of Bible scholars or the majority of serious critical scholars would agree with Bart Ehrman in his conclusions about this or that NT matter. NT scholarship is a many splintered thing, and Ehrman’s position certainly does not represent a majority view, or the critical consensus about such matters. At best, one has to say yes and no repeatedly to what Bart takes as the critical consensus about such matters. Bart Ehrman, like the more radical members of the Jesus Seminar (e.g. Robert Funk cf. Robert Price) represents a minority position which has indeed been very vocal in proselytizing for their point of view. So this book should have come with a caveat emptor--- “Buyer Beware: Hyperbolic claims about what most or the majority of critical scholars of the NT think will be frequent in this tome”. The appeal to authority or expertise in any case does not really settle much. The issue is—what is the evidence and why should we draw this or that conclusion? The other issue is--- why mislead the general public about what “the majority of serious critical scholars” have been saying? Perhaps an end run has been done from the outset--- you define a small circle of scholars as the serious ones, the critical ones, the real scholarly thinkers, the real historians, and then having defined your own group narrowly enough, you then say—“the majority of such people think…” Evangelicals are sometimes just as guilty of this ploy as others, but in any case, it does not help when one misrepresents the actual state of play of things among scholars to the general public.
Bart reminds us early on that the method of studying the Bible taught in most mainline seminaries is “the historical critical method”. It is also, in fact perhaps the main method of teaching the Bible in evangelical seminaries today as well. And two of the major things one is taught, quite correctly in the study of this method are: 1) ancient historical texts must be studied in their original historical contexts to be properly understood; and 2) modern post-Enlightenment historiography is at odds with the historiography of most ancients, particularly when it comes to the issue of God’s involvement in human history.
There is a further corollary—in order to understand the Gospels or Acts, or Paul’s letters, or Revelation, one needs to understand the features and characteristics of such ancient literature—in short their respective genres. The Gospels are written like ancient biographies, not modern ones, or in the case of Luke-Acts like an ancient work of Hellenistic (and Septuagintal) historiography. Unless one knows the conventions and limitations that apply to such literature, one is in no position at all to evaluate whether there are “inconsistencies” “errors” or other problematic features of such literature. Error can only be assessed on the basis of what an author is attempting to do and what literary conventions he is following. Let us take an example Bart uses from p. 7 of his book—the fact that in John the cleansing of the temple comes early in the Gospel account, whereas in the Synoptics it is found in the Passion narrative. He is right of course that some modern conservative Christians have attempted to reconcile these differences by suggesting Jesus did the deed twice--- once at the beginning and once at the end of the ministry. The problem is, that this conclusion is just as anachronistic (and genre ignoring) as the conclusion that the Gospels contradict each other on this point. What do I mean?
If you actually bother to read ancient biographies (see e.g. Tacitus’s Life of Agricola, or Plutarch’s famous parallel lives) you will discover that the ancients were not pedants when it comes to the issue of strict chronology as we are today. The ancient biographical or historiographical work operated with the freedom to arrange there material in several different ways, including topically, geographically, chronologically, to mention but three. Yes they had a secondary interest in chronology in broad strokes, but only a secondary interest in that.
If one studies the Fourth Gospel in detail and closely in the Greek, comparing it to other ancient biographies what one learns is that it is a highly schematized and edited product, and the sign narratives are arranged theologically not primarily chronologically. And whilst this might cause a modern person some consternation, it is not a reason to say that John contradicts the Synoptics on this Temple cleansing matter. The Fourth Gospel begins by showing that Jesus replaces the institutions of Judaism with himself—a theological message (he is the Passover lamb, he is the Temple where God’s presence dwells etc.). The Synoptic writers are likely presenting a more chronologically apt picture of when this event actually happened. But strict chronology was not the major purpose of the Fourth Evangelist, we should not fault him for not giving us information we might want to have, or for focusing on the theological import of the event, rather than its timing. Such was the freedom, within limits, of ancient biographies and histories. I must disagree with the conclusion then when Bart says “Historically speaking, then, the accounts are not reconcilable.” (p. 7). False. This is only so if one insists on a flat modern anachronistic reading of the text which pays no attention to what the authors are attempting.
The Gospel of John probably tells us nothing about this chronological issue, the Synoptics probably do, and judged on their own terms and on the basis of their ancient genre, one cannot draw the conclusion Bart does. Period. And unfortunately, this is a mistake Bart makes over, and over again, judging ancient texts on the basis of modern presuppositions about history writing, and what counts as truth or error. In fact, it is not entirely erroneous to say that Bart reads the Bible with the same sort of flat literalistic hermeneutic that he would have used before he did his scholarly study of the text. And I find this passing strange.
Let’s take his next pet example--- the three denials of Christ by Peter, and the cock crows. I quite agree with his critique of those who come up with six denials of Christ by Peter. No Gospel says that, any more than any Gospel mentions two cleansing of the Temple. Bart points to the difference between Matthew and Mark, the latter saying Peter will deny Christ before the cock crows twice, whilst in Matthew it says ‘before the cock crows”. He then asks--- “which is it?” The assumption is: 1) these Gospel writers were trying to be very precise; and 2) these two options are mutually contradictory; and 3) we should ask these sorts of detail questions of ancient historical ********s because we have a right to assume that modern historical ways of analyzing this material will help us to get to the bottom of such matters and find the historical truth.
In the first place let’s consider point 2). In fact, if Peter denied Christ three times before the cock crowed at all, then he certainly denied Christ three times before the cock crowed twice!!! But suppose the Gospels writer were not much concerned to give us precise information about the intricate relationship and intercalation between denials and cock crows. Suppose, in terms of historical information they just wanted to make clear that there were three denials and there were cock crows? Of course this is maddening to those who think that we must have precision on such matters, but in fact if an author wants to be general let him be general, and if he wants to be more specific, let him be more specific. Mark may simply have wanted to be more general in his account. And since I think, with most scholars that the First Evangelist is using Mark’s account, he probably knew far more about the Markan intent than we do, and decided to be more specific. He edits his Markan account according to his own presentation of things. I could go through Bart’s examples one by one explaining how insufficient attention has been paid by him to the ancient conventions of such genre of literature, but I agree with him that over-harmonizing on the basis of modern anachronistic considerations is wrong, just as wrong as claiming there are obvious contradictions based on a modern literalist reading of the same texts. And herein lies a very fundamental problem with the ex-fundamentalist readings of Bart Ehrman.
The Gospels are not, and never were intended to be inspected as if they were ancient photographs of Jesus taken with a high resolution, all seeing lens. On the contrary these ********s are much more like portraits, and portraits always are selective, tendentious, perspectival. Let me illustrate this point.
One of my favorite Impressionist painters is Claude Monet, and I really love his series of painting done of Rouen Cathedral. These paintings were done in the late 1890s and they depict the front face of the Cathedral from slightly different angles of incidence, and in different lighting. But in each case it is recognizably the same cathedral with the same basic shape, from the same basic ***** of reference. Let us suppose for a minute then that the Gospels are like these paintings. Now it would be totally pedantic to have an argument that went as follows: “In this painting Monet depicts the color of the front façade of the cathedral as being gray, but in this picture he paints it as being a yellowish shade, and in this picture a pinkish shade.” Which is it? Surely one must be right and the other depictions wrong.” Of course the proper response to this silly discourse is that they are all right, because they attempt to depict the appearance of the building at different times of day from slightly different angles. And no art critic in their right mind would think of suggesting that one painting was in error compared to the other. My point is simple. The Gospels are not works of modern biography or historiography and they should not be evaluated by such canons.
Nor for that matter are we much helped by evaluating the Gospel traditions on the basis of the canons of modern German form criticism which is grounded in notions about the passing on of oral traditions which simply do not apply to the first century A.D. and in the Jewish setting of the Gospels and Acts (on this point see Richard Bauckham’s fine study Jesus and the Eyewitnesses). Various of Bart’s comments presuppose that most NT exegetes and historians assume that the Bultmannian conclusions about oral history and oral tradition are correct. This is certainly not true now in the way it might have been said to be true specifically in mainline schools in the 70s. On the contrary, there is now a lively discussion about oral history that makes clear that the notion that there was likely a long gap between the events and their being written down, or between eyewitness testimony and their being written down is probably false.
Equally pedantic and unhelpful is Bart’s analysis of Genesis 1 and 2(pp. 9-10), which are generally agreed to be two different ways of telling the story of creation, one more general, and one more focused on the creation of humankind. Besides the fact that Genesis 1 falls into the category of poetry or poetic prose and should not be analyzed on the basis of it being some sort of scientific account of creation, it is frankly not fair game to compare and contrast these two chapters as if they were attempting to say the same thing in the same way writing like modern historians. They are not. Ancient narratological conventions come into play (see now Bill Arnold’s fine commentary on Genesis in the Cambridge series I edit). And now we begin to see why Biblically illiterate folk who are skeptical about the Bible are drawn to the Ehrman analysis. It appears to take the text at face value, and evaluate it by comparison and contrast, without taking into consideration at all issues of literary context or conventions. In other words, it approaches the matter as if one could simply read the English translation of the text without any knowledge of ancient writing conventions and come to important conclusions about historical truth and error. But in fact, this is not only not proper, in most cases it is not possible. The real truth seeker knows that a text without a context is just a pretext for whatever you would like it to mean.
Let’s take another example--- Bart’s treatment on pp. 10-11 of Psalm 137. In the first place this is a song, and so should not be treated like a theological or ethical treatise. In the second place, what this song is a revelation of is what is on the heart of the psalmist. In the psalms, human beings speak to, pray to, implore their God in various ways. It is a very truthful and accurate reflection of various things on and in the human heart, including the desire for vengeance. What the psalms are generally not is a revelation of what is in God’s heart or character. But Bart seems oblivious to this point which is commonly enough recognized by commentators on the Psalms. More in depth study of the psalms could have led to the avoidance of this sort of error.
Let’s take now an example from the second chapter (pp. 24ff). Here Bart is comparing and contrasting the relationship between the events that lead up to Jesus’ death as told in Mark and as told in John, and trying to synch that up with the Jewish liturgical calendar in regard to the celebration of Passover, and the Day of Preparation.
A few historical remarks are in order. 1) despite what Bart says, no Gospel suggests Jesus was crucified on Passover, which is to say between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday on April 7 A.D. 30 (or less possibly in A.D. 33); 2) the meal described in John 13 is definitely not the same meal as that described in Mark 14 and the other Synoptics. John 13 is very clear about this--- John 13.1 reads literally “But before the festival of the Passover…” The text does not say how long before. This could easily be a meal at the beginning of the week when the feast of Passover transpired, rather than near its end. And nothing whatsoever is said in John’s story about sharing the Passover elements. This is a striking difference from the accounts in the Synoptics, and I would say the differences are great enough that we must take them to indicate we are dealing with different stories here. 3) Most scholars who have written commentaries on the Synoptics do indeed think that Jesus celebrated his last supper with his disciples on Thursday night, which is to say, on the beginning of the Day of Preparation rather than on Passover day. There was precedent for this in early Judaism in some cases, and some scholars have even argued that Jesus was following the Galilean rather than the Judean liturgical calendar, which is certainly possible and believable. Whether this is so or not, it is notable that there is no mention at all about Jesus and his disciples eating lamb….in any of the accounts. This has led some to conclude, wrongly in my judgment, that even the Thursday night meal was not a Passover meal. 4) one of the major issues in determining when Jesus actually died is the question of which clock an Evangelist is running on--- is it the Roman way of keeping time, or a Jewish and Oriental one? Which hour is the third, sixth and ninth hours, according to the respective Evangelists? Mark’s seems to be based on the Roman way of time keeping, but this may not be the case in John. In any case, all the Gospels in fact are in agreement that Jesus died before sundown on Friday, which is to say, before Passover actually begun, which is to say on the Day of Preparation. 5) in A.D. 30 the day of preparation for the Sabbath was in fact the day of preparation for Passover. It was one and the same day. Therefore, Mk. 15.42 does not in any way disagree with John when it says that Jesus died on the day of Preparation. Correct— and this was Friday before sundown when both Passover and Sabbath began that year. John did not need to change a historical datum to make a theological point that Jesus was the Passover lamb. The point is inherent in a theological interpretation of the actual day Jesus died. In this case, Bart is busily finding contradictions in the text which are a chimera. They are not really in evidence.
Bart carries on in much the same vein in his analysis of the birth narratives. What is of concern to us is not where he sees differences in Matthew and Luke’s accounts, but rather where he finds what he deems to be actual discrepancies. The first of these is that Bart claims that what Luke says in Lk.2.1-3 is clearly historically in error (pp. 34-35). What however does the Greek text of Lk.2.2 actually say--- “this registration happened first/prior to the governing of Syria by Quirinius.” The issue here is the function of the word prote. What it seems to indicate is that the census in question took place prior to when Quirinius was governor of Syria. There was indeed a famous and indeed notorious census which led to the rebellion of Judas the Galilean in A.D. 6, and so Luke would be distinguishing that census from the earlier one when Mary and Joseph were enrolled. Bart also deems the notion of such enrollments as historically improbable, at least in the way Luke tells the story. There are however very clear examples from the province of Egypt of such census taking done for the purpose of taxation. And in fact, the evidence suggests a link with one’s ancestral home. I see no reason why the Romans would do it any differently with the province of Judea. Furthermore, when Augustus decide to go for the full blown Empire deal, he needed much more money for many more troops and armaments.
While Luke may be using rhetorical hyperbole when he says all the oikomene was being enrolled, a rhetorical usage common in Hellenistic historiography influenced by rhetoric, what Luke is referring to is the inhabited Roman empire, outside of Rome itself. In other words, his audience would likely have understood the reference quite easily and naturally. Bart also takes exception to the story of the wise men following the star. He says nothing of the fact that ancients often thought stars were living beings, the heavenly hosts, and it is more than likely that what Matthew is describing is the leading of the heavenly host or angels, of these persons to the birth place. Here again however some latitude must be allowed for ancient story tellers to present their narrative in ways that their audience would understand. While Matthew’s account does not tell us that Nazareth was Mary and Joseph’s hometown, his account is compatible with this fact, which Luke does tell us. The absence of an explanation does not a discrepancy make nor should it lead one to conclude the author thought something different, especially when Matthew tells us that eventually the holy family did go to Nazareth, and why would they pick that wide place in the road out of the blue if they had no prior associations with it? No good reason. The ******ure fulfillment text in Matthew is a midrashic attempt to explain the fact that Nazareth was their home. It did not generate such an idea.
Lastly, Bart wants to argue that both Matthew and Luke made up the notion of a trip to Bethlehem independently of one another based on Micah’s prophecy, in order to indicate Jesus’ messianic origins, rather than suggesting he was born in a one horse town in Galilee. The problem with this is that Bethlehem itself was also a one horse town in Jesus’ day, and among other things, the slaughter of the innocents is perfectly in character with Herod’s paranoia as described in Josephus. It was hardly necessary for a messianic figure to come from Bethlehem unless one wanted to insist he was a descendant of David, but as we know from Qumran, there were other Jewish traditions that did not associate messiah with the Davidic line. In regard to the oft parodied story of the slaughter of the innocents, we are only talking about a handful of infants at most in such a tiny village anyway, perhaps 6-8. There is nothing improbable about a birth in Bethlehem at all or a slaughter of a few infants. Jesus was called Jesus of Nazareth because he grew up there from infancy.
Differences there are indeed in the accounts of the birth of Jesus in Matthew and Luke. And they are not explained by denying their existence, or resorting to false harmonizing tactics and exegetical gymnastics. We are not however talking about direct contradictions at all here. These narratives are quite compatible in all their essential details, and it is remarkable that two such independent accounts would in fact emphasize the same crucial points--- a virginal conception and a birth in Bethlehem. This did not happen because they were both creative exegetes. It happened because they both relied on historical sources of information about these events. Ehrman’s conclusion that “there are historical implausibilities and discrepancies that can scarcely be reconciled” (p. 34) is saying far more than he knows or the evidence suggests. Had Luke said Jesus was born in Nazareth and Matthew said no he was born in Bethlehem, then we would have a contradiction. But we find nothing like a contradiction in these two accounts—differences do not necessarily equal discrepancies much less equal disagreements. One has to come up with much better examples than this if one wants to claim the accounts can’t be explained or reconciled.
It is the task of a historian, which Bart Ehrman says he is, to get his facts straight. When he takes on the differences in the genealogies there are a few crucial facts he either ignores or is ignorant of. The first of these crucial points is that in Jewish law, if a man adopted a son, that son was entitled to be considered a descendant of his adoptive father, including being a descendant of his step-father’s ancestors. The genealogies in both Matthew and Luke are strange in part precisely because of this legal issue, and more to the point they are strange because both writers want to include the notion of the virginal conception in their accounts, indeed Matthew includes it right in his geneaology, and this may be the only known genealogy where the wife is included in the husband’s geneaology like this!
Bart is right about various of the differences in these genealogies. But he does not correctly explain some of the reasons for the differences. In the first place ancient royal genealogies often were prone to leaving the skeletons out of the list, and so offering an edited version of the ancestry. Something like this is happening in Matthew who wants to suggest Jesus is the seventh son of a seventh son of David, namely the perfect descendant of David. In other words, the form of the genealogy reflects not just historical but also theological interests. The same can be said for Luke’s genealogy and his concern to show that Jesus is not merely son of David son of Abraham, but also son of Adam, and more crucially, son of God. The issues here are not purely historical and it is a form of reductionism to treat them in a purely historical manner. But they were not intended to answer purely historical questions. One needs to read them in light of the conventions of such ancient genealogies, not in the light of modern historical conventions.
Scholars have long debated why these two genealogies differ, and Bart may be right that they both are genealogies connected to Joseph, rather than Luke’s being connected to Mary’s family. But even if this is true, one of them could offer some part of Joseph’s paternal ancestry and the other some part of Joseph’s maternal ancestry. We honestly cannot say. What we can say is there is no basis for the confidence that Bart shows that we have clear contradictions here. More would need to be known about ancient genealogy composition to come to that conclusion. We could carry on with this sort of dialogue with Bart’s list of complaints but we have already dealt with what he takes to be some of the more famous parade examples of clear contradictions. Some of his other examples are much weaker, and can be explained on the basis of the differing editorial tendencies different Gospel writers had, or in Luke’s Acts accounts on the basis of what were the conventions of rhetorical history writing in the first place. About such things Bart says little or nothing, because he seeks to read the text on the basis of modern historiographical conventions, a signal mistake. Ancient texts must be evaluated on their own terms and without demanding of them a precision they never were intended to have.
It is interesting that as the book moves along, Bart stresses here (and later in this study) that he does not think that historical critical study of the Bible should necessarily or will necessarily lead to a loss of Christian faith. I quite agree with this. In fact, I would say in my case that it is precisely the historical, contextual study of the Bible that has strengthened my faith in its truth telling on various subjects of import, not the least of which is the need for and possibility of human salvation. I also quite agree with Bart that teaching students to think and do critical thinking about life and the Bible is a good thing. On these two conclusions we would simply agree. What is interesting is that the more I studied the Bible the less I was prone to accuse the Bible of obvious historical errors and stupid mistakes, including theological errors about a matter as profound as human suffering and evil. To the contrary, I found the Bible rich, complex, varied, and helpful and truthful in dealing with precisely such life and death matters. It would be appropriate then to ask---why exactly did studying the Bible in the same way at seminary and during doctoral work lead Bart Ehrman and myself to such different conclusions? In my case, my faith in the Bible was strengthened, but the opposite seems to have been the case with Bart. “This is a mystery and it calls for profound reflection”. Some of this clearly has to do with presuppositions. Let’s take a theological one that seems to be at the root of some of the differences.
Bart seems to assume that a God who is both almighty and a God of love, would not allow the hideous amount of suffering that goes on in this world. Now this is by no means an uncommon objection to Biblical revelation, but what it seems to assume is a particular sort or deterministic or even extreme Calvinistic view of God, God’s sovereignty, and human life. I can see how extreme suffering and evil is a major problem for such a view of God. It would seem to make God the author of suffering and evil, or at least an uncaring deity in too many cases. Suppose however that God has not pre-determined all things? Suppose God chose to create us in his image with a measure of freedom of choice, the power of contrary choice? Suppose God relates to us relationally and not on the basis of divine decrees? Suppose the vast majority of suffering in the world is a result of human misbehavior or stupidity or sin? Suppose in addition that God does repeatedly intervene in human history to aid and rescue us, without taking away our ability to make viable choices that have moral consequences? It seems to me that part of the issue here is that Bart and I have very different views of the Biblical God and how God actually operates.
Here’s another quandary and quagmire. It appears to me that Bart and I disagree profoundly about the import of textual variants. As Bruce Metzger who taught us both once said--- we know what about 92% of the NT said in its original manu******s with a rather high degree of certainty. As for the other 8%, very little of theological or ethical consequence is at stake. For example, the Trinity is not at stake if 1 John 5 did not mention it. The deity of Christ is not at stake just because some NT ********s do not mention it directly, and some unscrupulous scribes added some clarity to this matter in other manu******s in ways that distorted some NT manu******s.
We also disagree rather strongly on the degree of flux in belief and in the handling of NT ********s early on. It is simply not true to say that many of the primary Christian doctrines were not affirmed widely until centuries after the time of Christ. It is also not true that any such doctrines hang on only late copies of this or that NT book. When it comes to the issue of textual variants, the development of the textual tradition, and the theological import of such variants, Bart simply over-reads the evidence, or as the British say, over-eggs the pudding.
Now I think I understand why he does this. He rightly gets peeved with those fundamentalists who want to stick their heads in the sand and say, there are no such issues or problems even in the least. But an over-reaction is just that--- an over-reaction. Throughout this book, the real boogeyman that Bart is trying to refute is fundamentalists who hold to a certain wooden and very literal view of inerrancy which hardly takes ancient historical considerations into account at all. I would actually have as many problems with the same people as I have with Bart’s views.
He also does not do justice to a reading of these texts in light of ancient genre, conventions, purposes, history writing and the like, but for very different reasons. The reasons seem to include that he is a ardent convert from fundamentalism to a very narrow and all too modern form of historical critical analysis of these texts-- a form that starts with an inherent skepticism about the supernatural among other things, and assumes that critical thinking equals the ability to doubt this, that or the other ancient datum. I call this justification by doubt. It is no more a valid starting point for evaluating the NT than blind fideism is. Indeed, I would argue that to actually understand an ancient author you must start by giving them the benefit of the doubt and hear them out, doing one’s best to enter creatively into their own world and thought processes before understanding can come to pass. To approach the text with a hermeneutic of suspicion is to poison the well of inquiry before one even samples the water in the old well.
Bart and I furthermore disagree on the issue of pseudonymity in the canon. It is one thing to say there are anonymous ********s in the NT, which there are. Hebrews would be a good example. It is another thing to say that there are pseudonymous ********s in the NT, forgeries. I and many other critical scholars think this is not so, but Bart is right that many scholars think otherwise. My point is simply this--- there is a healthy debate about that issue amongst scholars. It is not a “well assured result of the historical critical method” on analyzing the NT. I have pointed out at length in my Letters and Homilies of the NT, series the problems that pseudonymity raised in the first century A.D. for both Greek and Latin writers, never mind writers of ********s supposed to convey God’s truth. The Gospels as we have them are formally anonymous in terms of their internal evidence, though the Fourth Gospel tells is that the Beloved Disciple (not specifically identified) is the source of the material in that Gospel. We can discuss the merits of the attributes later appended to these Gospels (Mark, Matthew, Luke, John), but in my view the testimony of Papias is important, and makes evident these attributions already existed in the first century, and in some cases during the time when there were still eyewitnesses. They cannot be dismissed with a wave of a hand, but at the same time one needs to ask--- what were the conventions when it came to appending names to composite ********s? This deserves more discussion. In the second part of this post, we will pick up the discussion with Chapter Three. Stay tuned.
- الحالة