As part of our commitment with theOoze viral bloggers here is out take on the latest book by Bart Ehrman. The promo materials have this to say:

...in Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them), Bart Ehrman goes even further, suggesting not only that the Bible is riddled with inconsistencies and outright forgeries, but that many of Christianity’s fundamental stories and doctrines don’t actually exist within its pages-they were later inventions by people trying to make sense of a disconnected collection of texts. The Scriptures did not come down to us through the ages in one, harmonious, unbroken version. The story of Jesus was, in fact, interrupted.

Although the man will be crucified by the religious right his story his perhaps more interesting than his book. This review will do more to engage briefly with the major topics--the historicity of the NT--and less to do with a blow by blow account.

Ehrman recounts his personal journey:

In my mid 20s, I left the evangelical fold, but I remained a Christian for some twenty years—a God-believing, sin-confessing, church-going Christian, who no longer held to the inerrancy of Scripture but who did believe that the Bible contained God's word, trustworthy as the source for theological reflection. And the more I studied the Christian tradition, first as a graduate student in seminary and then as a young scholar teaching biblical studies at universities, the more sophisticated I became in my theological views and in my understanding of the world and our place in it.

Consistently in the book he repeats a similar journey. This is his experience, the way he journeyed to the place he is now (or at least the rational explanation since his rationality was not the only contributor to his loss of faith). The post-modern voice would say his experience is valid, and let's face it, interesting as well. However, the problem we'll encounter, especially for modernist agnostics or atheists, is when we treat his journey/process as normalized expectation.

Although I can't speak for Ehrman, the way he consistently refers back to his process of reaching a 'higher level' of truth (my words not his) presupposes that within the academy today one can get closer to a subjective truth by consuming more and more knowledge. The more you know, the better you can reason, the more you can prove, the less you require 'mystical faith or truth' and the more you can rely on your own individualistic expectations and discoveries as foundational truths.

Whether this is what he thinks or not I don't know, but the assumptions still remain: the more we know the closer we get to some form of utopian bliss, a purer form of objectivity, a more refined and defined understanding of how 'things' work.

This type of approach is applied to his theories and conclusions. Not to say they are outlandish and downright wrong, but I hesitate to call them the final authority on all issues Jesus....

It is that same modern rational system of never ending knowledge that provides us with the problems that contributed to Ehrman's eventual exit from the Christian faith--the continued development of evil in a world that has the propensity for so much good. (Another post for another time, I'll drag NT Wright into the dialogue....)

This world keeps getting worse although we have systems in the academy that we can continually evolve our knowledge (reason) to capture better understandings of how things work.

Obviously, Ehrmans is smarter than this and by reading more of his materials elsewhere he is aware that rationality alone cannot solve the world's problems, but it certainly lead him down major paths to conclude, at least in rhetoric, some of his major propositions about God (or the lack thereof).

With this in mind, his theories, conclusions, and suggestions were not paradigm blowing alternatives. I had to skip forward through a number of pages because he was repeatedly saying the same things: either recounting his journey from protestant conservative to liberal atheist via the pursuit of knowledge and rationality, or repeatedly outlining the distrust for historicity of biblical events (most all from the NT).

Having said that, it should be noted that the book IS about challenging the claims of the Bible being a trustworthy source of history so having numerous examples of where it may not be is the purpose. I just found the repetition boring after a few examples.

Nonetheless, I think the book will do some good for those who have placed the bible on a pedestal over and above the Christ. Take that thought for what it's worth.

There are, however, two issues I want to briefly mention specifically about his arguments. Firstly, when we look at the infallibility of documents (that is the complete trustworthiness of them), I believe the Bible stands alone at the top. There are a few reasons why:

1. We have a massive influx of writings within a short period of time from events to writings. Given the reliability of oral testimony (you can't compare the telephone game today with kids who have terrible memories with an ancient culture that relied so heavily upon it,) we can put quiet a bit of credence to the fact writings arrived so soon after their events. This increases the Bible trustworthiness.

2. Along with being trustworthy we have to factor in the community. I don't mind saying we don't know who wrote the writings exactly. But how they came to be trusted is another. To suggest a committee decided by vote on the books of the bible as if it was a democratic process is only part of the story (this is not a topic in his book).

The canonization merely confirmed what the Christian community had believed. Now, there wasn't uniformity across the board, but there was unity with key dogmas such as incarnation and resurrection. Heresy was easily routed because the community as a whole did not accept certain teachings.

3. The book obviously deals with the NT exclusively, however, Ehrman spends time around pages 175 talking about the importance of following the evidence of history. More evidence helps us confirm events of find out what actually happened. The story he paints for the NT is not great, he cites the generation in between writings and events as too long, and thus untrusted.

I would be curious to know how Ehrman approaches the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Until the discover in the 20th century the earliest manuscripts we had of the OT were around 1000 years old. Along came the DSS discovery and we have manuscripts dating back around the intertestamental period. From my understanding the agreement between the two manuscripts separated by over 1000 years was incredible (incredibly good).

Does this 'evidence' now lend additional credence to the Hebrew Bible (OT)? Rather than a generation we're talking 1000 years, yet the agreement between texts was exceptional.

I think we have to revisit the inerrancy of scripture, it gets us into trouble, but I don't think we need to assume that more scholarship on the issue necessary means we arrived closer to an unbiased truth of what is really historical (assuming historicity in NT documents).

As I've noted, this was perhaps the biggest issue I had with Ehrman (and obviously others). Maybe it's just the post-modern in me, but because you read more books doesn't necessarily draw you closer to a final conclusion. It may make you an authority in a field and open your eyes to new ideas or perspectives. But honestly we do not approach history with any level of neutrality. In fact, all we have for history is perspectives built on perspectives. (The anti-foundationalist would even conclude that all of history cannot be trusted since it's merely the perspective of the writer.)

As such we shouldn't be so hasty to dismiss the entirety of important themes in, in this case, the NT such as resurrection (how it was reported varies, the important factor I believe is that all four gospel have the event). Conversely, we should not suspect we can read anything we want into the texts because they are the inerrant 'word of God'.

In the least, Ehrman made me get the rest of his books, but he also turned me on to NT Wright which I would highly recommend instead