Ehrman and Reader Presuppositions
When I first heard Bart Ehrman on Fresh Air I was surely shaken: here's an ex-evangelical turned 'happy agnostic' after years of critical NT scholarship, primarily textual scholarship, but also studies in gnosticism and Christian origins. Fear poured through my body like heavy water.
Then I sat down (in Barnes and Noble, natch) and read chunks of Misquoting Jesus and thought, this is it? Ehrman stirs up the emotional pot and then actually notes himself that almost all of these textual variants mean absolutely nothing? And the ones he fixates on...I noted these have nothing to do with anything I believe or consider essential.
But it's Dan Wallace's review HERE which lays Ehrman's book out for what it is. I try to avoid polemic here (and Dan, may I say, does a fine job in his review of not blasting) and so I'll leave it at that. But in terms of NT scholarship, I find MJ almost without interest, amateur that I am.
What is most interesting is that Ehrman never let go of his fundamentalist black-and-white thinking, as Wallace notes. A few errors or shifts in the biblical text and his entire faith begins to go. Though Ehrman also discussed suffering in the radio interview, and his belief the Bible provides inadequate responses to the problem of human suffering. Suffering is a powerful question, and I wish he'd written a book about it instead.
But what Ehrman's example shows to me most of all is the power of presuppositions when approaching the Bible or history, of seeing what we want to see or what we can only see. Even a briliant critic can make almost unbelievable assumptions. I have strong reactions myself when reading: I've focused on the Tanakh in purely human terms, though passages of it, like Abraham's aborted sacrifice, have left me near breathless when laid alongside the teachings of the NT. In short (and my time is short at the moment) I know my mind must remain open as I continue to explore my faith. I took a while getting to that thesis in this post, but there it is: I can't let my knee-jerk reactions to the stories in the OT determine all that I will eventually think about it. A post-modern 21st century Christian reading a book by and for an ancient tribal cultus...there are some barriers.
None of us approach texts neutrally. Bacon, with his Four Idols, and Kant, with his categories (not the mention the slew of literary critics lately) both understand the shaping power of mind. Trying to get meaning from the Hebrew Bible is tricky. I know that Jesus was a Jew, and so I must continue to try, but surely...the contrast between the human scriptures and the Living and Walking Word, the Voice, is jarring. That may always be true. But I have to remember that my own mind is a critical part of both sides of that experience for me; I can't believe I alone perceive total textual truth every time I pick up the Bible. Surely I don't. And I must respect the experiences of others.
It's also true, and my priest has said it as does Wallace here: the Christian life is about embracing the risen Christ, not about a book. That's a mystery, how Christ reveals himself through the book and outside it, but it's one of many in this life.
The one place this becomes critical is when the Bible is used to bash people or to understand things way beyond its (and our) ken. How exactly the universe and men were created. Or with homosexuality: sure the Bible talks about it, but if we're willing to lump sex during the menses and women wearing head coverings in church together with the passages on homosexual sex in Leviticus and Paul, I'll listen. Of course, we don't. There are other means to truth than our book.
Yet we must love our neighbor as ourselves, that I know, this idea informs all the theology and I reach for, and I got it from the Book!
Gotta run. Picking up the Am. Lit. finals and heading to EFM.
Love to all. We need all we can get on this violent planet.
Then I sat down (in Barnes and Noble, natch) and read chunks of Misquoting Jesus and thought, this is it? Ehrman stirs up the emotional pot and then actually notes himself that almost all of these textual variants mean absolutely nothing? And the ones he fixates on...I noted these have nothing to do with anything I believe or consider essential.
But it's Dan Wallace's review HERE which lays Ehrman's book out for what it is. I try to avoid polemic here (and Dan, may I say, does a fine job in his review of not blasting) and so I'll leave it at that. But in terms of NT scholarship, I find MJ almost without interest, amateur that I am.
What is most interesting is that Ehrman never let go of his fundamentalist black-and-white thinking, as Wallace notes. A few errors or shifts in the biblical text and his entire faith begins to go. Though Ehrman also discussed suffering in the radio interview, and his belief the Bible provides inadequate responses to the problem of human suffering. Suffering is a powerful question, and I wish he'd written a book about it instead.
But what Ehrman's example shows to me most of all is the power of presuppositions when approaching the Bible or history, of seeing what we want to see or what we can only see. Even a briliant critic can make almost unbelievable assumptions. I have strong reactions myself when reading: I've focused on the Tanakh in purely human terms, though passages of it, like Abraham's aborted sacrifice, have left me near breathless when laid alongside the teachings of the NT. In short (and my time is short at the moment) I know my mind must remain open as I continue to explore my faith. I took a while getting to that thesis in this post, but there it is: I can't let my knee-jerk reactions to the stories in the OT determine all that I will eventually think about it. A post-modern 21st century Christian reading a book by and for an ancient tribal cultus...there are some barriers.
None of us approach texts neutrally. Bacon, with his Four Idols, and Kant, with his categories (not the mention the slew of literary critics lately) both understand the shaping power of mind. Trying to get meaning from the Hebrew Bible is tricky. I know that Jesus was a Jew, and so I must continue to try, but surely...the contrast between the human scriptures and the Living and Walking Word, the Voice, is jarring. That may always be true. But I have to remember that my own mind is a critical part of both sides of that experience for me; I can't believe I alone perceive total textual truth every time I pick up the Bible. Surely I don't. And I must respect the experiences of others.
It's also true, and my priest has said it as does Wallace here: the Christian life is about embracing the risen Christ, not about a book. That's a mystery, how Christ reveals himself through the book and outside it, but it's one of many in this life.
The one place this becomes critical is when the Bible is used to bash people or to understand things way beyond its (and our) ken. How exactly the universe and men were created. Or with homosexuality: sure the Bible talks about it, but if we're willing to lump sex during the menses and women wearing head coverings in church together with the passages on homosexual sex in Leviticus and Paul, I'll listen. Of course, we don't. There are other means to truth than our book.
Yet we must love our neighbor as ourselves, that I know, this idea informs all the theology and I reach for, and I got it from the Book!
Gotta run. Picking up the Am. Lit. finals and heading to EFM.
Love to all. We need all we can get on this violent planet.
Comments
I'm not sure that Ehrman it is the case that Ehrman is still as black and white in his thinking as he was as a fundamentalist, but I am sure that that is the version of Christianity that he is responding to. And he is not alone in that. My sparring partners at Debunking Christianity seem incapable of dealing with anything but an already seriously discredited form of Biblical literalism. For them it is almost a strawman, a stand-in for the healthier forms of Christianity. But, of course, their assault on Christianity is much more vehement than Ehrman's.
Anyway, I think that Ehrman is an excellent writer, which is rare for such weighty scriptural scholars. He takes complex arguments and renders them such that almost anyone can understand them. Misquoting Jesus is certainly worth reading for anyone interested in textual criticism, and unless you subscribe to the worst sort of Biblical literalism (which, of course, you don't) it won't do any damage to your faith, even if you assume that he is entirely right in the areas in which he deviates from scholarly consensus.
I think his "deconversion" was more emotional that rational, tossing out all forms of Christianity (and even religion) when the one that he grew up in stopped working for him. I don't mean to say that flippantly. He wrestled with his faith honestly, and his deconversion was not the product of intellectual laziness. But neither does it follow necessarily from a scholarly consensus of Biblical criticism, or even from his own work. I think that at a certain point religion just became too painful for him, and I can appreciate that.
Ehrman is a remarkably lucid and easy to read writer, yet I have issues with his methods in MJ. And what really interests me in all this is the riddle of textual response, of how different people get different things from the Bible, the awe and fear, actually, this phenomenon causes in me.
All I know about Ehrman's loss of faith is from MJ and his radio interview, so surely I've missed pieces he's shared publicly. But while I'll admit human (and other animal) suffering is one of the most difficult puzzles for any believer in a loving God, and respect Ehrman's consternation there, on the other hand, even with his extraordinary training, small discrepencies in the NT puzzle him deeply. On his radio interview he notes that the spiritual insights of the different NT texts, Revelation, Luke, Mark, Galatians, etc., offer irreconciable spiritual insights. This may be true; it may be that some of them complement each other in complex ways (like faith and loving action), but my own reaction to the gospels has been such that I still am in wonder of those who can read, in Ehrman's case, who can study the gospels as closely as he does, and miss what I call the Voice. The Jesus-character who strides throughout the gospels. The same personality made vivid for millions.
Is Jesus angry or compassionate in Mark when he heals? This issue, for me, is close to irrelevant except at the scholarly level. Ehrman sees what is one (or two or three) possible orthodox corruption and then assumes there are many others, that the historical Jesus was lost to poor, even irresponsible, textual transmission throughout the development of the texts which describe him. Where is the evidence?
And I do believe Ehrman intentionally stirs up his readers, especially lay-readers, gives the very large number of minor textual variations we have, and then only later notes that almost all of these are insignificant. I find it poor argumentation, even, I'll say it, irresponsible writing, biased, on the part of a scholar writing a lay text. His own loss of faith agenda, I assume, informs his writing as my own faith agenda informs my own writing. But at the risk of sounding like a dork, I read argument for a living, and Ehrman is in fact arguing in portions of his book, and weakly in my view.
Not only does he make assumptions, he doesn't tell his lay-readers exactly what he is doing. You, as a scholar, can appreciate the useful content (and it is there) and leave the rest aside, but an ordinary reader can't necessarily do that, let alone the tens of thousands who never go beyond his radio interview to actually read the book.
His teaching series, advertised in Scientific American, for example, doesn't even have to be purchased to encourage the intellectual position of skeptics: the ad is enough.
Why should I care? What about free speech? Academic discourse? What else should Ehrman do? It is surely true that my own struggles with doubt increase my anger here, but if someone is going to attack my faith, frankly, I would like to see them do a thorough and honest job. But of course I believe Ehrman genuinely believes what he writes, and that is the spookiest thing for me.
I can think of another, very different example: Julia Sweeney. Her story (which again, I know only from her NPR interview and her bio on her website) is a sad one: A woman wanting to return to her childhood Catholic faith who is put off by the biblical texts enough to lose all faith.
Her issues with the HB are one thing; surely that is a complicated and ancient collection which can be read from many different directions (and my own confusion comes through my assessment here). But she is also very put off by Jesus' anger when he curses the fig-tree, for example, or sends the demons into the swine. And why? Does she believe these accounts historical, including the clear miraculous content? Or is Jesus' anger a sure sign these are fabrications? It doesn't seem to matter. She didn't find what, or who, she was looking for. What does she make of the massive parabolic content in Luke, the lost sheep, the coin, the prodigal son, the Samaritan? What about the many healing miracles which are clearly compassionate? Further, does she understand the cleansing of the temple was probably a prophetic, eschatological gesture? That the cursing of the fig tree accompanies it? That both are likely a statement against the purity code, the priestly hierarchy, the exclusion of so many from full participation in the cultus? It may not make a difference. Her tolle lege was not my tolle lege; she did not find what millions over two millenia have found. It may be she gave up too quickly, that she did not look hard and long enough, but who am I to argue that? You note Ehrman did look long and hard enough; perhaps he did. What to make of this?
I think back to my own attempts to read the Bible before I began to read it again in my early 30's. I felt judged on every page. I'd read Matthew's Sermon on the Mount and hear nothing but the judgement, not see the grace of Christ behind, the inability of any to keep the law, the audience those harsh words are addressed to. Why did God gradually open my eyes (assuming he did)? Because I didn't quit? Maybe. Maybe for some other reason. My prayer is that he keeps them open and opens them further.
(I think, oddly, of Michael Sherman in the Gallapagos: the survival of life in that harsh environment, the adaption, is clear evidence of natural selection for him, of what we might call random, as opposed to theistic, natural selection. But why didn't God make life adatable? What about the biological and even quantum balance and complexity of each unit? He misses all of that).
There are atheist or skeptic writers I find strong. It is possible Ehrman is strong in other books. But I dislike some of what he does in MJ. Further, much more chilling to me is his loss of faith. I'm not angry at him for losing faith, but I am puzzled and sad, and above all, feel something of what the Psalmists call the fear of God.
There's a great passage from Ecclesiastes 5:
Do not be quick with your mouth,
do not be hasty in your heart
to utter anything before God.
God is in heaven
and you are on earth,
so let your words be few.
God is in heaven and I'm on earth, let my words be few....
Is my attraction to this passage part of my overactive superego? Probably. But if God made this vast and energetic universe then I find fear of God makes more sense than respect alone. Is it my own traits which have led me to faith or God's movement? I don't know; I can't know.
But when I see someone like Ehrman falling away, or Sweeney never quite making it (yet, at least) I feel how small I truly am in the cosmos. And when I find Ehrman, or anyone, discounting the faith publicly without meaningful evidence, frankly, I get angry.
All the best S. You are quite a dialogue partner. That is a compliment, of course.
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