Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible

by Bart D. Ehrman

  These views eventually came to be crystallized in the creeds—statements of faith—that were written by orthodox Christians of the fourth century, including those that came to be known as the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, which are still recited in churches today.

  By having a set of beliefs that everyone was required to accept and that the bishop enforced, the protoorthodox intended to weed out those who subscribed to what they considered false beliefs. But on what basis did they make their theological decisions? They claimed, at least, to base their views on divinely inspired texts, the books of the canon.

  The Canon

  In a sense, the Christian church, in all its varieties, started out with a body of Scripture. Jesus was a Jewish teacher who taught his Jewish disciples a particular understanding of the Jewish Scriptures. The Jewish Bible was the original Christian canon. It is not completely clear which books that later came to be the Old Testament were accepted as Scripture in Jesus’ day; almost certainly they included the law of Moses (the first five books), the prophets, and a number of the other books, such as the Psalms. Jews were in the process of formulating their canon at the same time as the Christians.

  It was not long after Jesus’ death, however, that Christians started appealing to other authorities as standing on a par with Scripture. Jesus’ words themselves functioned as a kind of scriptural authority for his followers. And writers like Paul, even though he didn’t think of himself as writing the Bible, considered their own writings to have authority over their congregations. Eventually two kinds of Christian authorities emerged: Gospels—containing Jesus’ words, but also much more—and the writings of apostles.

  The problem the protoorthodox had to face from early on was that so many books claimed to be written by apostles. How were they to decide which ones really were apostolic, and therefore authoritative? No one from the early church actually lays out a set of criteria to be followed, but by reading such ancient accounts as Eusebius’s story of Serapion and the account in the Muratorian Canon, it becomes evident that four criteria were particularly important:

  Antiquity. By the second and third centuries it was clear to many of the protoorthodox that even if a recently penned writing was important, useful, and trustworthy, it could not be seen as sacred Scripture. Scriptural books had to be ancient, going back to the original decades of the Christian church.

  Catholicity. Only those books that were widely used throughout the protoorthodox church could be accepted as Scripture. Books that had only local appeal might be valuable, but they could not be considered part of the canon.

  Apostolicity. This is one of the most important of the criteria. For a book to be considered Scripture it had to have been written by an apostle or a companion of an apostle. That’s why the Gospels were attributed to particular people: Scripture was not acceptable if it was anonymous or if it had been written by any ole person. The books needed to have an apostolic origin. In many cases it was difficult to make this judgment. Serapion decided that the Gospel of Peter was not really written by Peter, even though it claimed to be. He did not reach this conclusion by the kind of historical analysis that a modern critic might use. The basis of his decision was quite simple—his preexisting ideas: the book was not sufficiently orthodox, and so could not have been written by Peter.

  Orthodoxy. Serapion’s use of a theological criterion is indicative of how such judgments were typically made. The most important gauge for whether a book could be considered sacred Scripture was whether it promoted a view that the protoorthodox considered to be acceptable theologically. Books that were not orthodox were nonapostolic; and if they were nonapostolic they could not be scriptural.

  In the long and protracted debates over canon, it was not hard for the protoorthodox to weed out books that were clearly unorthodox, including all of the Gnostic Gospels, for example. Even though it was claimed that Gospels had been written by Thomas, Philip, Mary Magdalene, and others, these claims could not be sustained. The evidence was a priori: the books were heretical, and apostles would never write heresy.

  There were numerous other books, too, that stood on the fringes, books that looked perfectly orthodox and that made apostolic claims, but that were not obvious candidates for inclusion. Some of these were the Apocalypse of Peter, the letter of Barnabas, and 1 Clement.

  The first time any author from Christian antiquity lists our twenty-seven books and indicates that they are the only twenty-seven books of the canon comes in the year 367 CE. The author is Athanasius, the famous bishop of Alexandria, Egypt. Years earlier Athanasius had played a role in the Council of Nicaea, the first church council to be called by a Roman emperor, Constantine, to resolve important theological issues in the church. After Athanasius became bishop of the important church in Alexandria, he wrote a letter every year to the congregations under his jurisdiction, in order to inform them when the feast of Easter was to be celebrated that year (they didn’t have years mapped out in advance, like today). In his thirty-ninth “Festal Letter,” Athanasius, as was his wont, gave his readers a good deal of additional pastoral advice, including a list of books that could be read in church. He listed all the books of our New Testament.

  Two points are worth making. This list of Athanasius’s did not end all discussion of the matter. For centuries various churches continued to accept slightly different lists. The Armenian church continued to accept 3 Corinthians as canonical. Even in Athanasius’s own church of Alexandria there were Christian leaders who had somewhat different views.18 But for the most part, moving into the fifth century and later, Athanasius’s canon became the canon of the orthodox church at large. These books and only these books were copied by scribes who reproduced the Scriptures throughout the Middle Ages. And even though no worldwide church council ever ratified Athanasius’s list for over a millennium, popular usage provided a kind of de facto ratification, down to the time of the invention of printing. Once Bibles could be easily printed, after the invention of movable type in the fifteenth century, the canon was a done deal. From here on out there were no doubts concerning which books were to be included, and in which order. Today, wherever you buy a New Testament in the English-speaking world, it will be the same group of books, in the same sequence.

  The second point to make is rather obvious. It took at least three hundred years of debate before the question of the canon even began to reach closure. The decisions that were eventually made were not handed down from on high, and they did not come right away. The canon was the result of a slow and often painful process, in which lots of disagreements were aired and different points of view came to be expressed, debated, accepted, and suppressed. Whatever Christian theologians and other believers might maintain about the divine impetus and guidance behind the canonization of Scripture, it is also clear that it was a very human process, driven by a large number of historical and cultural factors.

  CONCLUSION

  Sometimes when I give lectures on the formation of the Christian canon, I am asked whether there are any books that I would like to see removed from the canon, and any that I would like to see added. It’s a delightful question to think about, but my first response is always to say that no matter what scholars say, the canon is never going to change. The New Testament has twenty-seven books now and it will always have twenty-seven books, world without end.

  When pressed I do admit that there are a few books that I would not mind seeing omitted. At the top on my list would probably be 1 Timothy, forged in Paul’s name by someone living later, who was so vehemently opposed to women actively involved in the churches that he ordered them to be silent and to “exercise no authority over a man.” If they want to be saved, he indicates, it will be through “bearing children.” That’s great—women have to be silent, submissive, and pregnant. Not exactly a liberated view, and one that has done a world of damage over the years. I wouldn’t be sorry to see it taken out.

  What would I put in? It’d be nice to have a giant Jesus and a walking-talk
ing cross, but the Gospel of Peter carries too much other baggage, including a scary dose of anti-Judaism. Maybe I would include one of the infancy Gospels, where Jesus works his miraculous powers, often with more than a touch of mischievousness, starting as a five-year-old. But that, too, would probably start getting people upset. At the end of the day, the canon is the canon, and there’s little point in thinking how we might want to change it. Better to figure out how to encourage interpretations of it that don’t lead to sexism, racism, bigotry, and all kinds of oppression.

  When I started studying the Bible as a teenager, with more passion than knowledge (lots of passion; no knowledge), I naturally assumed that this book was given by God. My early teachers in the Bible encouraged that belief and drove it home for me, with increasingly sophisticated views about how God had inspired Scripture, making it a kind of blueprint for my life, telling me what to believe, how to behave, and what to expect would happen when this world came to a crashing halt, soon, with the appearance of Jesus on the clouds of heaven.

  Obviously I no longer look at the Bible that way. Instead I see it as a very human book, not a divinely inspired one. To be sure, a good many parts of it are inspiring, but I no longer see God’s hand behind it all. We don’t have the originals that any of these authors wrote, only copies that have been changed by human hands all over the map. And the books that we consider Scripture came to be formed into a canon centuries after they were written. This was not, in my opinion, the result of divine activity; it was the result of very human church leaders (all of them men) doing their best to decide what was right.

  Most believing Christians and Christian theologians see the process differently, insisting that God’s hand was constantly at work behind the long, drawn-out process. As a historian I have no real way, ultimately, to evaluate that claim. What I can say is that however divine the process was (or was not), it was certainly a very human one, with the decisions being made by humans who based their decisions on a lot of factors. They wanted the churches to be unified in the face of opposition from the outside. They wanted everyone in the church to agree on important aspects of Christian doctrine. They didn’t want troublemakers in their midst. They wanted to be assured that they had the one orthodox teaching that had been handed down by Jesus to his apostles and on to posterity. They wanted to know they were right.

  Their desires for certainty butted up against some unfortunate historical realities. There were other people who also wanted to know that they were right, and these other people had beliefs that stood directly at odds with what they themselves believed. Who, really, was right? The formation of the canon is in some sense a movement to decide that issue. The final decisions were not a foregone conclusion. For centuries there continued to be Christians who insisted that this, that, or the other book had a rightful place in the canon. But eventually, by the beginning of the fourth century, the options were narrowed in protoorthodox circles; somewhat later there were no options at all. Because of a series of historical, cultural, political, and social factors that informed and guided the debates, one canon of Scripture finally emerged, centuries after the process began. It is still the canon we have with us today, and it will be the canon of the church for as long as the church survives.

  SEVEN

  Who Invented Christianity?

  In the American South, where I live, Christianity is very much about the Bible. Most Christians come from churches that preach the Bible, teach the Bible, adhere (they claim) to the Bible. It is almost “common sense” among many Christians in this part of the world that if you don’t believe in the Bible you cannot be a Christian.

  Most Christians in other parts of the world—in fact, the vast majority of Christians throughout the history of the church—would find that common sense to be nonsense. For most Christians, Christian faith is about believing in Christ and worshipping God through him. It is not about belief in the Bible. When I tell people that in churches here I’m often met with firm disbelief—how could so many Christians, they wonder, get it so wrong. But it’s true. Just look at the Christian creeds that are still recited throughout the world today, the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed. Not a word about the Bible. In traditional Christianity the Bible itself has never been an object of faith.

  In the South, it is true, more people revere the Bible than read it. This became clear to me a few years ago when I started asking my undergraduate classes about their views of the Bible. I get the same response every year. The first day of class, with over three hundred students present, I ask: “How many of you would agree with the proposition that the Bible is the inspired Word of God?” Whoosh! Virtually everyone in the auditorium raises their hand. I then ask, “How many of you have read one or more of the Harry Potter books?” Whoosh! The whole auditorium. Then I ask, “And how many of you have read the entire Bible.” Scattered hands, a few students here and there.

  I always laugh and say, “Okay, look. I’m not saying that I think God wrote the Bible. You’re telling me that you think God wrote the Bible. I can see why you might want to read a book by J. K. Rowling. But if God wrote a book…wouldn’t you want to see what he has to say?” For me it’s just one of the mysteries of the universe: how so many people can revere the Bible and think that in it is God’s inspired revelation to his people, and yet know so little about it.

  Throughout this book I’ve been talking about historical-critical problems with the Bible: contradictions in details, discrepancies on major points of view, authors claiming to be apostles when they weren’t, historical problems in the reconstruction of the life of Jesus, and so on. These are not problems that I have made up or discovered on my own. They are problems that scholars have been talking about for two hundred years, that professors in universities and seminaries have known and taught for as long as any of us has been alive, that most pastors learn in seminary. These are problems that are well known to anyone who has engaged in serious research into the Bible but that the average person on the street or the average person in the pew has never heard of.

  My overarching argument has been that the Bible, my field of study and expertise, is a very human book. For the past twenty years, though, much of my serious research has been devoted to a different but related field—the development of Christianity in the second and third Christian centuries, after the books of the New Testament were written.

  And so in this final chapter I want to go further afield to look not just at the New Testament (although that will be part of this examination as well) but also at the formation of the Christian religion more generally. My thesis here is that not only is the Bible a very human book, but that Christianity as it has developed and come down to us today is a very human religion.

  The Christian claim that their religion is also divinely inspired is a theological view that historians have no way of evaluating; historians don’t have access to God, only to what happens here on earth in front of our eyes—or in front of someone else’s eyes. I personally do not accept this view any longer (though I once did); but as you will see in the final chapter, the historical findings I am discussing here do not necessarily lead to my personal agnostic conclusions. But they should lead all people to see the human element in the development of the Christian religion.

  We saw in the previous chapter that the canon of Scripture was a human creation, as Christians struggled over the question of which books to include in the New Testament, struggles that involved long, protracted, and often heated debates over what was the proper form of belief (orthodoxy) and what was improper (heresies). What else did Christians invent on the way to making Christianity into the religion it became? In this chapter I will consider some of the key aspects of the Christian religion and see how they emerged historically. All of these are extremely important identifying features of the emergent Christian religion.

  A SUFFERING MESSIAH

  The belief in a suffering Messiah is absolutely central to the Christian religion. The term “Messiah” is simply the Hebr
ew equivalent of the Greek term “Christ.” I have to tell my students this because some of them think that Christ was Jesus’ last name—Jesus Christ, born to Joseph and Mary Christ. Christ eventually did become such a common designation for Jesus that it started to function as his name, but originally “Jesus Christ” meant “Jesus is the Messiah.”

  Christians’ Views of the Messiah

  Calling Jesus the Messiah seems so natural and obvious to many Christians that they don’t understand why Jews don’t accept him as the Messiah. In the Christian tradition it is believed that the prophets of the Jewish Bible constantly and repeatedly make predictions about what the Messiah would do, be like, and experience, and Jesus fulfilled all of these prophecies. It was predicted that he would be born of a virgin (and for them, Jesus was), that he would be born in Bethlehem (Jesus was), that he would be a great healer (Jesus was), that he would ride into Jerusalem on a donkey (Jesus did), that he would be rejected by his own people (Jesus was), that he would suffer a horrible death by execution (Jesus did), and that he would rise from the dead (Jesus did).

  For many Christians, since all of these predictions of the prophets of the Old Testament were fulfilled by Jesus, it is obvious that he must be the Messiah. Many Christians wonder why Jews refuse to believe it. How can Jews fail to accept the claims of Christ? Why don’t they believe? Are they just being stubborn? Are they hard-headed? Can’t they read? Are they stupid?

  Jewish Expectations of the Messiah

  Why is it that the vast majority of Jews has always rejected that Jesus is the one who was predicted—a savior sent from God in order to suffer for others, so as to bring salvation, and then be raised from the dead?