Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible

by Bart D. Ehrman

  God himself was a kind of myth for me. I certainly thought he existed, but his existence could not be proved or disproved. He was the force of goodness and awe and wonder in the world. He was the one who was above all else, far beyond what we could imagine, as we gaze out into the evening sky and consider the billions of stars and the billions of galaxies. He was above and beyond it all, a force of good and goodness in the world.

  It would take a book to describe my theology as it developed at the time. My point here is that I came to think that the historical-critical approach to the New Testament had not destroyed my faith; it had deepened my faith and made me more sophisticated in the way I thought and talked about God, his world, his Christ, and his salvation. Yes, this way of thinking about the world was human-made. But what kind of thinking is not human-made? We are humans! Of course we will think like humans. No one can think any other way—not even people (some of them reading this now) who claim that they think the thoughts of God as God has revealed them. Even that notion is a human idea—an idea that people have because it was handed down by other people living before them, since the time that a person made it up.

  Leaving the Faith

  And so I did not leave the Christian faith because of the inherent problems of faith per se, or because I came to realize that the Bible was a human book, or that Christianity was a human religion. All that is true—but it was not what dismantled my acceptance of the Christian myth. I left the faith for what I took to be (and still take to be) an unrelated reason: the problem of suffering in the world.

  There came a time in my life when I found that the myths no longer made sense to me, no longer resonated with me, no longer informed the way I looked at the world. I came to a place where I could no longer see how—even if viewed mythically—the central Christian beliefs were in any sense “true” for me, given the oppressive and powerful reality of human suffering in the world. That is the subject of another book.4 For here it is enough to say that it was because of this particular shift in my thinking (not because of my historical-critical views of the Bible) that I left the church. Most of my friends have not done so. Almost all of these friends are academics who agree with me when it comes to the historical understanding of the Bible and the Christian faith. But for them the myths still work and resonate with them. These friends find a kind of solace and power in their faith. They appreciate the rich historical heritage given to them by the centuries of Christian thinkers and theologians. They are passionate about the Christian hymns and Christian liturgies and services of worship. They believe that truth is much deeper than what you can say, historically, about the Bible or the development of the Christian religion in the first four centuries.

  Even now, as I type these words, I’m on a beach holiday with two of my closest, most intimate friends, two people whom I love dearly and who would do anything for me, and I for them. As it turns out, they are both smarter than I, better read than I, more sophisticated philosophically than I (we can’t all be intellectual superstars). They both would have, and do have, no problem with the historical information I have laid out in this book. And they both unashamedly call themselves Christian. Ask them if they believe in God, they would say yes. Think Christ is God? Yes. Think he is the Lord? Yes. Faith is not a matter of smarts.

  The Theological Value of Historical Criticism

  It is my firmly held view that a historical understanding of the Bible does not necessarily lead to the kind of agnosticism that I myself have adopted. This will strike a lot of people as so obvious that they won’t understand why I even need to say it. I feel compelled to say it is because there are a lot of other people—especially evangelical Christians—for whom this would be news.

  At the same time, I would like to insist that those who continue to remain in the faith should not discount the theological importance of the historical approach to the New Testament. In fact, rather than acting as if historical criticism is irrelevant to faith, scholars, teachers, and their students should explore more fully the theological significance of historical criticism. Let me give just two examples, one obvious and the other less so.

  The obvious example is a negative one: if the findings of historical criticism are right, then some kinds of theological claims are certainly to be judged as inadequate and wrong-headed. It would be impossible, I should think, to argue that the Bible is a unified whole, inerrant in all its parts, inspired by God in every way. It can’t be that. There are too many divergences, discrepancies, contradictions; too many alternative ways of looking at the same issue, alternatives that often are at odds with one another. The Bible is not a unity, it is a massive plurality. God did not write the Bible, people did. Many of these people were inspired in the sense that they wrote works that can inspire others to think great and important thoughts and to do great and important deeds. But they were not inspired in the sense that God somehow guided them to write what they wrote.

  The less obvious example is the positive flip side of the preceding one. There are many views in the Bible. Each of these views was written in a specific historical and cultural context and was completely shaped by the context within which it was written. None of these views can be removed from its original context, plopped down into a different context, such as twenty-first-century America, and be expected to communicate an inerrant revelation to us today. But since there are so many different messages in the Bible, often about the same subject, the reader of the Bible can evaluate the appropriateness of this message or that, and see what relevance it may have for life in the present. Some messages will be more appropriate for certain contexts than others. And readers of the Bible should not be afraid to proclaim one message instead of another.5

  I hope that everyone will agree that Jesus’ teaching as it relates to children (“Let the little children come unto me”) provides a more useful guide than the teaching of Psalm 137 (“Blessed is he who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rocks”). Similarly, some biblical views of women are superior to others. And so the apostle Paul’s attitude about women is that they could be and should be leaders of the Christian communities—as evidenced by the fact that in his own communities there were women who were church organizers, deacons, and even apostles (Romans 16). That attitude is much better than the one inserted by a later scribe into Paul’s letter of 1 Corinthians, which claims women should always be silent in the church (1 Corinthians 14:35–36), or the one forged under Paul’s name in the letter of 1 Timothy, which insists that women remain silent, submissive, and pregnant (1 Timothy 2:11–15).

  In thinking about which parts of the Bible have something to say in the modern context, it is important to recall the historical view that the biblical authors were all living in a different world from ours and reflected the assumptions and beliefs of people in their world. Their world, to pick a particularly cogent example, had no concept of what we think of as homosexuality. To put it differently, homosexuality didn’t exist in that world. Why? Not because men didn’t have sex with men (they did) or women with women (they did), but because there was no sense of sexual orientation in that world, or any world, until the notion of sexual orientation developed among Western thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a result, the very assumptions that lie behind the apostle Paul’s denigration of same-sex relations are very different from the assumptions that people in the modern world have about themselves as sexual beings. You cannot very well take Paul’s instructions on same-sex relations, remove them from the assumptions that Paul had about sex and gender, and transplant them onto a different set of assumptions.

  This is true for everything found in the Bible. It was written in a different world, a different context. The idea that “Jesus is coming back” is built on the idea that above us, in the sky, over the clouds, is a space where God lives, and that Jesus has gone up there to live with Him. He ascended bodily and he is coming, bodily, back down. No one any longer thinks that above the clouds is a place where God and Jesus live. Abo
ve the clouds is more of the atmosphere, and above that is space, and beyond that are billions of stars—and that’s just our own galaxy. If the very notion that Jesus is coming back down assumes that there is an “up”—what does one do with that idea in a universe such as ours where there is, literally, no up and down, except in relation to where you happen to be standing at the moment? You obviously need to translate the idea into some kind of modern idiom for it to make sense. Or, put another way, you need to remythologize the myth of Jesus’ return. Otherwise you are forced to accept not only the idea that Jesus is coming back but the cosmology on which it is based.

  So, too, with all the Bible’s teachings—about women, about same-sex relations, about extra-marital sex, about capital punishment, about war, about wealth, about slavery, about disease, about…well, about everything.

  Some people may think that it is a dangerous attitude to take toward the Bible, to pick and choose what you want to accept and throw everything else out. My view is that everyone already picks and chooses what they want to accept in the Bible.6 The most egregious instances of this can be found among people who claim not to be picking and choosing. I have a young friend whose evangelical parents were upset because she wanted to get a tattoo, since the Bible, after all, condemns tattoos. In the same book, Leviticus, the Bible also condemns wearing clothing made of two different kinds of fabric and eating pork. And it indicates that children who disobey their parents are to be stoned to death. Why insist on the biblical teaching about tattoos but not about dress shirts, pork chops, and stoning?

  In my opinion, people need to use their intelligence to evaluate what they find to be true and untrue in the Bible. This is how we need to live life generally. Everything we hear and see we need to evaluate—whether the inspiring writings of the Bible or the inspiring writings of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or George Eliot, of Ghandi, Desmond Tutu, or the Dalai Lama.

  Then Why Study the Bible?

  Probably the one question I get asked more than any other, by people who know that I am an agnostic scholar of the New Testament, is why I continue to study and teach the New Testament if I no longer believe in it?

  This is a question that has never made much sense to me. The Bible is the most important book in the history of Western civilization. It is the most widely purchased, the most thoroughly studied, the most highly revered, and the most completely misunderstood book—ever! Why wouldn’t I want to study it?

  I have friends who teach medieval English. They don’t believe in Chaucer, but they think Chaucer is important, and so they spend their lives studying and teaching and writing about Chaucer. The same is true of my friends who teach the classics—Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Livy, Martial, and Plautus. These are all important authors whose works all deserve the devotion of a scholar’s life, irrespective of whatever the scholar’s personal beliefs happen to be. The same goes for my friends who study and teach Shakespeare, John Donne, Charles Dickens, or T. S. Eliot.

  And it’s the same with scholarship devoted to the Bible. The only difference with the Bible is that so many people in our world actually believe in the Bible. I do not belittle anyone who continues to cherish the Bible as an inspired text, but in addition to reading the Bible devotionally there is a value in reading it historically. To be sure, a historical reading can show many of the shortcomings of the Bible—discrepancies, contradictions, faulty claims, impossible statements, and harmful ideologies. But a historical reading can open up entirely new vistas in our understanding of the Bible and its multifarious messages.

  Furthermore, even those of us who do not believe in the Bible can still learn from it. It is a book that deserves to be read and studied, not just as a document of faith but also as a historical record of the thoughts, beliefs, experiences, activities, loves, hates, prejudices, and opinions of people who stand at the very foundation of our civilization and culture. It can help us think about the big issues of life—why we are here, what we should be doing, what will become of this world. It can inspire us—and warn us—by its examples. It can urge us to pursue truth, to fight oppression, to work for justice, to insist on peace. It can motivate us to live life more fully while yet we can. It can encourage us to live more for others and not only for ourselves. There will never be a time in the history of the human race when such lessons will have become passé, when the thoughts of important religious thinkers of the past will be irrelevant for those of us living, and thinking, in the present.

  Notes

  CHAPTER 1: A HISTORICAL ASSAULT ON FAITH

  1. From the way John 4:54 gets translated, some readers have been confused into thinking that it refers only to the second sign performed in Galilee; a more appropriate translation is that this is Jesus’ second sign, one that he performed after coming from Jerusalem to Galilee.

  2. I certainly do not think that pastors should preach the results of historical criticism from the pulpit in their weekly sermons (although I think sermons should definitely be rooted and based on sound scholarship). But there are numerous opportunities in churches, outside the weekly sermon, for pastors to teach their parishioners what scholars have long said about the Bible. And in most churches this simply is never done.

  CHAPTER 2: A WORLD OF CONTRADICTIONS

  1. A very useful tool for students of the Bible is a Bible Synopsis, in which the stories of the Gospels are literally placed in parallel columns next to each other, for easy comparison. Many professors have a Bible Synopsis as a required textbook for their classes on the New Testament. One of the most popular is edited by Kurt Aland, Synopsis of the Four Gospels (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2006).

  2. It is the lead example that I provide in my college-level textbook on the New Testament, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 262–65.

  3. See the discussion on pp. 144–45.

  4. In this Gospel, the Passover day coincided with the Sabbath, so that here too he is crucified on a Friday.

  5. Some scholars have argued that John’s account is more historically probable than ark’s, since otherwise Jesus’ trial before the Jewish authorities would have had to take place on the day of the Passover festival, in violation of (later?) Jewish law. If this is right, then Mark would have changed the date, possibly in order to portray Jesus’ last meal as a foreshadowing of the Christian practice of the Lord’s Supper. Most scholars are not persuaded by this view, however, and think that John, writing some thirty years after Mark, is more likely to be the one responsible for changing the date.

  6. Unlike modern engagements, ancient Jewish espousals required a divorce to be terminated.

  7. Some scholars have tried to resolve the contradiction by invoking the complicated rules of “levirate marriage,” where a man marries his brother’s wife after his brother had died. This solution does not, in fact, solve the problems of the different genealogies, as demonstrated in the authoritative account of Raymond Brown, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives of Matthew and Luke (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1977), vol. 1, pp. 503–04.

  8. If you read the 1 Chronicles passage, bear in mind that Uzziah is called Azariah in this book, as can be seen by comparing 2 Kings 14:21 with 2 Chronicles 26:1.

  9. See my discussion in Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), pp. 158–61.

  10. The first three Gospels are called the Synoptic Gospels because they have so many stories in common that they can be placed in parallel columns and “seen together”—the literal meaning of “synoptic.”

  11. Most biblical scholars are convinced that Luke and Acts were written by the same person; read Luke 1:1–4 and Acts 1:1–5 and you’ll see why.

  12. The reasons for thinking that Mark himself did not write the last twelve verses are so compelling that most modern Bible translations include them in brackets with a footnote indicating that they are
not the original ending. For one thing, they are not found in our oldest and best manuscripts. Also, these verses are in a writing style and use vocabulary not found elsewhere in Mark. Furthermore, the transition from verse 8 to verse 9 does not make sense when read in the Greek. For a fuller discussion, see my Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), pp. 65–68.

  13. For a discussion of some of these methods, see chapters 6–11 in my The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

  CHAPTER 3: A MASS OF VARIANT VIEWS

  1. Of course when trying to understand these different points of view we need to engage in the work of interpretation. Contrary to what some people assume, texts don’t speak for themselves. They must be interpreted. And this can never be done “objectively,” as if we, the readers, were robots; texts are interpreted subjectively by humans. From a historical-critical perspective, though, each author of the New Testament should be read and interpreted on his own terms, without having some other author’s terms imposed on him.