Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible

by Bart D. Ehrman

  ACCEPTING THE HISTORICAL-CRITICAL METHOD

  Like lots of other seminary students, once I came to see the potential value of historical criticism at Princeton Seminary, I started adopting this new (for me) approach, very cautiously at first, as I didn’t want to concede too much to scholarship. But eventually I saw the powerful logic behind the historical-critical method and threw myself heart and soul into the study of the Bible from this perspective.

  It is hard for me to pinpoint the exact moment that I stopped being a fundamentalist who believed in the absolute inerrancy and verbal inspiration of the Bible. As I point out in Misquoting Jesus, the key issue for me early on was the historical fact that we don’t have the original writings of any of the books of the Bible, but only copies made later—in most instances, many centuries later. For me, it started making less and less sense to think that God had inspired the very words of the text if we didn’t actually have these words, if the texts had in fact been changed, in many thousands of places, most of the changes insignificant but many of them of real importance. If God wanted us to have his words, why didn’t he preserve his words?

  At about the time I started to doubt that God had inspired the words of the Bible, I began to be influenced by Bible courses taught from a historical-critical perspective. I started seeing discrepancies in the text. I saw that some of the books of the Bible were at odds with one another. I became convinced by the arguments that some of the books were not written by the authors for whom they were named. And I began to see that many of the traditional Christian doctrines that I had long held to be beyond question, such as the doctrines of the divinity of Christ and of the Trinity, were not present in the earliest traditions of the New Testament but had developed over time and had moved away from the original teachings of Jesus and his apostles.

  These realizations had a profound impact on my faith, as I think they did on that of many of my fellow seminarians at the time and continue to have on many seminarians today. Unlike most of my seminarian friends, though, I did not revert to a devotional approach to the Bible the day after I graduated with my master’s of divinity degree. Instead I devoted myself even more wholeheartedly to learning more about the Bible from a historical perspective, and about the Christian faith that I had thought was taught by the Bible. I had started seminary as a born-again fundamentalist; by the time I graduated I was moving toward a liberal form of evangelical Christianity, one that still saw the Bible as conveying important teachings of God to his people, but also as a book filled with human perspectives and mistakes.

  As time went on my views continued to evolve. I did not go from being an evangelical to an agnostic overnight. Quite the contrary: for some fifteen years after I had given up on my views of the verbal inspiration of the Bible, I continued to be a faithful Christian—a churchgoing, God-believing, sin-confessing Christian. I did become increasingly liberal in my views. My research led me to question important aspects of my faith. Eventually, not long after I left the seminary, I came to the place where I still believed completely in God, but understood the Bible in a more metaphorical, less literal, sense: the Bible seemed to me to contain inspired literature, in that it could inspire true and useful thinking about God, but it was still the product of human hands and contained all the kinds of mistakes that any human undertaking will bring.

  There came a time when I left the faith. This was not because of what I learned through historical criticism, but because I could no longer reconcile my faith in God with the state of the world that I saw all around me. This is the issue I deal with in my book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer. There is so much senseless pain and misery in the world that I came to find it impossible to believe that there is a good and loving God who is in control, despite my knowing all the standard rejoinders that people give.

  That is the subject of another book, but it is of some relevance to the present book because over the fifteen years between the time I gave up my evangelical commitments and the time I became agnostic, I was intimately involved with the historical criticism of the Bible, especially the New Testament. Here I want to stress a point that I will be reiterating, with vigor, in my final chapter. I decidedly do not think that historical criticism necessarily leads to a loss of faith.

  All of my closest friends (and next-to-closest friends) in the guild of New Testament studies agree with most of my historical views of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, the development of the Christian faith, and other similar issues. We may disagree on this point or that (in fact we do—we are, after all, scholars), but we all agree on the historical methods and the basic conclusions they lead to. All of these friends, however, have remained committed Christians. Some teach in universities, some in seminaries and divinity schools. Some are ordained ministers. Most are active in their churches. Historical-critical approaches to the Bible came to many of them as a shock in seminary, but their faith withstood the shock. In my case, historical criticism led me to question my faith. Not just its superficial aspects but its very heart. Yet it was the problem of suffering, not a historical approach to the Bible, that led me to agnosticism.

  This book is not, then, about my loss of faith. It is, however, about how certain kinds of faith—particularly the faith in the Bible as the historically inerrant and inspired Word of God—cannot be sustained in light of what we as historians know about the Bible. The views I set out in this book are standard fare among scholars. I don’t know a single Bible scholar who will learn a single thing from this book, although they will disagree with conclusions here and there. In theory, pastors should not learn much from it either, as this material is widely taught in seminaries and divinity schools. But most people in the street, and in the pew, have heard none of this before. That is a real shame, and it is time that something is done to correct the problem.

  TWO

  A World of Contradictions

  When students are first introduced to the historical, as opposed to a devotional, study of the Bible, one of the first things they are forced to grapple with is that the biblical text, whether Old Testament or New Testament, is chock full of discrepancies, many of them irreconcilable. Some of these discrepancies are simple details where one book contradicts what another says about a minor point—the number of soldiers in an army, the year a certain king began his reign, the details of an apostle’s itinerary. In some cases seemingly trivial points of difference can actually have an enormous significance for the interpretation of a book or the reconstruction of the history of ancient Israel or the life of the historical Jesus. And then there are instances that involve major issues, where one author has one point of view on an important topic (How was the world created? Why do the people of God suffer? What is the significance of Jesus’ death?), and another author has another. Sometimes these views are simply different from one another, but at other times they are directly at odds.

  In this chapter I will talk about some of the important and interesting discrepancies of the Bible that emerge when it is examined from a historical perspective. Since my specialty is the New Testament, I will be dealing with the kinds of problems that are found there. But you can rest assured that very much the same problems can be found in the Old Testament as well—in fact, even more so. Whereas the New Testament, consisting of twenty-seven books, was written by maybe sixteen or seventeen authors over a period of seventy years, the Old Testament, the Jewish Scriptures, consists of thirty-nine books written by dozens of authors over at least six hundred years. There is a lot of room for differing perspectives, and if you look for them, you will find them in droves.

  My point is not simply that the Bible is full of contradictions, as I explain more fully at the end of the chapter. My students sometimes suspect that this is the ultimate point—that the Bible is riddled with problems and therefore “cannot be believed.” But this is not the ultimate point—even though the discrepancies in the Bible do create certain problems for people with a cer
tain kind of Christian faith (not for all Christians, however). But there are other reasons for discovering that the Bible contains contradictions. It is best to provide these reasons at the end of the chapter, however, rather than the beginning; one should always know what the data are before deciding too quickly what the data mean.

  My goal is not to point out every discrepancy that can be discovered in the New Testament, but only some of the most interesting or important ones. I will start with the Gospels and then move on to Paul. Throughout this discussion I will not be dealing with the very important question of who the authors of these books really were (disciples of Jesus? companions of the apostles? later Christians?). That is the subject of a later chapter. For now it is enough to note that whoever wrote these books, they sometimes stand at odds with one another.

  Why is it that casual, and even avid, readers of the Bible never detect these discrepancies, some of which may seem obvious once they are pointed out? My view is that it has to do with the way people read these books. Most people simply read here and there in the Bible—open it up, choose a passage, read it, and try to figure out what it means. There is little or no effort to make a detailed comparison with other, similar passages, in other books. You read a snippet here, a snippet there, and it all sounds like the Bible. To engage in a historical study of the text, however, requires that you read and compare the texts carefully, down to the minute details.

  Yet even careful readers of the Bible often fail to detect differences among its books, again because of the way they read them. Most general readers, unlike those who read the Bible critically from a historical point of view, read the books in sequence. That makes sense—it is, after all, how we read most anthologies. And so, if you want to read the New Testament, you start with Matthew and you begin with chapter 1, verse 1, and you read the book from beginning to end, to get a sense of what he is trying to say about the life of Jesus. Then you read Mark, starting at the beginning and reading to the end—and it sounds a lot like Matthew. A lot of the same stories, often in the same words—a few things left out here and there, maybe, but basically the same kind of book. Then you read Luke, beginning to end. Here again: same or similar stories, similar words. When you read John you might notice some differences, but basically it all sounds the same: stories about the things Jesus said and did before he traveled to Jerusalem, was betrayed, arrested, crucified, and raised from the dead.

  This is the most natural way of reading any book, from beginning to end. I call this approach “vertical” reading. You start at the top of the page and move to the bottom; start at the beginning of the book and move to the end. There is absolutely nothing wrong with reading the Gospels this way, as this is no doubt how they were written to be read. But there is another way to read them: horizontally. In a horizontal reading you read a story in one of the Gospels, and then read the same story as told by another Gospel, as if they were written in columns next to each other. And you compare the stories carefully, in detail.1

  Reading the Gospels horizontally reveals all sorts of differences and discrepancies. Sometimes the differences are simply variations on a story, possibly significant for knowing what one or the other Gospel writer wanted to emphasize, but not contradicting one another. For example, in the accounts of Jesus’ birth in Matthew and Luke, a horizontal reading shows that Matthew tells the story of the wise men coming to worship Jesus, whereas Luke tells the story of the shepherds coming to worship him. There are no shepherds in Matthew and no wise men in Luke. This is not a contradiction: Matthew wants (for important reasons, as it turns out) to tell the story of the wise men, and Luke (for other reasons) wants to tell the story of the shepherds.

  Then there are differences that may not represent flat-out contradictions but that do seem to stand somewhat at odds with each other. I have already mentioned the cleansing of the Temple in Mark 11 and John 2. In Mark it happens a week before Jesus dies; in John it is the first public event of his three-year ministry. Strictly speaking this difference is not a contradiction: if you are creative enough, you can figure out a plausible explanation for both accounts being right. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, maybe Jesus cleansed the Temple twice, once at the beginning and once at the end of his ministry. On the other hand, this does seem a bit far-fetched, as the question suggests itself: Why wasn’t he arrested the first time? Moreover, it means that in order to make Mark and John fit together you have had to create your own version of the Gospel, one different from both of the ones you are reading, for in your version there are two cleansings of the Temple, not one.

  There are other differences that, in the opinion of a large number of historical critics, simply cannot be reconciled without doing real violence to the text. I’ll be dealing with some of these throughout this chapter, and don’t want to spoil the fun by giving the most interesting examples here. For now my point is that most readers don’t see these differences because they have been trained, or at least are inclined, to read the Bible in only one way, vertically, whereas the historical approach suggests that it is also useful to read it another way, horizontally.

  If you are interested in finding discrepancies yourself, it is in fact very easy to do. Pick a story in the Gospels—for example, Jesus’ birth, the healing of Jairus’s daughter, the crucifixion, the resurrection—most any story will do. Read the account in one Gospel, listing carefully everything that happens in sequence; then read the same story in another Gospel, again taking careful notes. Finally, compare your notes. Sometimes the differences are slight, but sometimes they matter a lot—even if at first glance they seem rather unimportant. That is the case with my first example. The issue at stake is a very simple and basic one, which can be expressed in a seemingly unambiguous question: When did Jesus die? That is, on what day, and at what time of day, was Jesus crucified? It turns out that the answer differs, depending on which Gospel you read.

  AN OPENING ILLUSTRATION: THE DEATH OF JESUS, IN MARK AND JOHN

  This is an illustration of discrepancies within the New Testament that I frequently use with my students.2 It is a “textbook case” because both Mark and John give explicit indications of when Jesus dies. And he dies at different times, depending on which Gospel you read.

  Mark was probably the first Gospel to be written. Scholars have long thought that it was produced about thirty-five or forty years after Jesus’ death, possibly around 65 or 70 CE.3 The first ten chapters of Mark are about Jesus’ public ministry in Galilee, the northern part of Israel, where he teaches, heals the sick, casts out demons, and confronts his Jewish opponents, the Pharisees. At the end of his life he makes a journey to Jerusalem in order to celebrate the Jewish feast of Passover; while he is there he is arrested and crucified (chapters 11–16).

  To make sense of Mark’s dating of the crucifixion (and of John’s, for that matter), I need to provide some important background information. In the days of Jesus, the Passover, held annually, was the most important Jewish festival. It was instituted to commemorate the events of the Exodus that had occurred centuries earlier, in the time of Moses, as recounted in the Old Testament book of Exodus (Exodus 5–15). According to that account, the children of Israel had been enslaved in Egypt for four hundred years, but God heard their cries and raised up for them a savior, Moses. Moses was sent to the Pharaoh and demanded, speaking for God, that he “let my people go.” But the Pharaoh had a hard heart and refused. In order to persuade him, God empowered Moses to send ten horrible plagues against the Egyptians, the last of which was the most awful: every firstborn Egyptian child and animal would be killed by the angel of death.

  The Israelites were given instructions to avoid having their own children slain. Each family was to sacrifice a lamb, take some of its blood, and spread it on the doorposts and lintel of the house where they lived. Then, when the angel of death arrived that night, he would see the blood on the door and “pass over” that Israelite house, moving on to houses without the blood, to murder a firstborn child. And so it happene
d. Pharaoh was struck to the heart, and in anguish he let the Israelites (600,000 men, plus the women and children) leave his land. But after they set out, he had a change of heart, marshaled his army, and chased after them. He tracked them down at the Red Sea—called the “Sea of Reeds” in Hebrew—but God performed yet another miracle, allowing Moses to part the waters of the sea so the Israelites could cross on dry land. When the Egyptian armies followed in chase, God caused the waters to return and drowned the whole lot of them.

  And so Israel was saved from its slavery in Egypt. God commanded Moses that from that time onward the Israelites were to commemorate this great event by a special meal, the annual Passover celebration (Exodus 12). In Jesus’ day, Jews from around the world would come to Jerusalem to celebrate the event. On the day before the celebratory meal was eaten, Jews would bring a lamb to the Jerusalem Temple, or more likely purchase one there, and have it slaughtered by the priests. They would then take it home to prepare the meal. This happened on the Day of Preparation for the Passover.