Bible Critic Bart Ehrman Excerpts


Compiled by Gun Lap
Bart, Smart Guy Smart Book

Introduction:

Bart Ehrman is a Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he has taught since 1988. Ehrman is a former fundamentalist Christian, and an expert in the field of Bible criticism. He has authored over twenty books, some of which are best sellers.

Excepts from an article in The Humanist, Nov/Dec 2011:

  1. ... the Bible wasn’t written in English, it was written in Greek. So when you’re reading it in English, you’re reading it in translation. Not only that, but Jesus spoke Aramaic. And there are some things in Aramaic that can’t be represented in Greek, and then there are things in Greek you can’t represent in English. You’re getting it third hand and things get changed with translations, so it ends up mattering.

  2. ... I’m trying to get people to think, whether they’re religious people or not. This is one of my goals as a scholar, to get people to think—to question what they believe, so that they can liberate themselves from whatever forms of ideology or religion may be preventing them from living life to the fullest and from showing love and concern for the wellbeing of others.

  3. Even though I’m not opposed to religion, I am opposed to strident ideology and to every kind of fundamentalism. I myself was a fundamentalist, and it took me a long time to be over it. When I was seventeen I attended the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, a bastion of fundamentalism where my fellow students and I believed that the Bible was inerrant in everything it said. There were no mistakes in the Bible of any kind. This is what we were taught and this is what we believed.

    4. As far as internal contradictions in the Bible, we could reconcile anything at the Moody Bible Institute, and we did. The fact that there are two accounts of creation in Genesis that are completely at odds with each other? No problem. The fact that the Gospel of Mark says Jesus cleansed the temple as the final act of his public ministry before being arrested, whereas in the Gospel of John, he did it at the very beginning of his ministry three years earlier? No problem. He did it twice, beginning and end. Sometimes the reconciliations got a bit ridiculous. Jesus tells Peter that he’s going to deny him three times before the cock crows according to the Gospel of Matthew. According to the Gospel of Mark, he says, “You’ll deny me three times before the cock crows twice.” Well, which is it, before the cock crows or before the cock crows twice? Easy solution: Peter denied Jesus six times—three times before the cock crowed, and three more times before the cock crowed twice.

  4. But once I started reading the New Testament in Greek, I started finding problems. And what’s interesting to me now looking back is that I could deal with the big problems, the conflicts with science and other big contradictions. What ended up getting me were those little problems, the details.

  5. Other little details became chinks in my fundamentalist armor. Did Jesus die the day before the Passover meal was eaten as he did in the Gospel of John, or the day after the Passover meal was eaten as he did in the Gospel of Mark? To me these were quite different and couldn’t be reconciled.

  6. I try to make ... public what scholars have long been saying about the Bible. Most of my popular books that fundamentalists have found so offensive are books in which I simply lay out what scholars, even Christian scholars, have been saying for centuries.

  7. My view is that most fundamentalists migrate away from fundamentalism slowly over time based on tiny doubts that seep into their consciousness.

  8. I’m actually not interested in making everybody either an agnostic or an atheist. I am interested in getting people to think and become more intelligent about their views of the world, whatever their views are. And I’m interested in seeing people reject religion that is harmful and oppressive.

  9. I think everybody has the right to know which [Bible] views can’t be squared with the findings of science. People have the right to know that we don’t have the original writings of the New Testament but only later copies, all of which have mistakes in them. People have the right to know that there are discrepancies in the Bible, both major and minor, scattered throughout the entire thing, Old Testament and New Testament. People have the right to know that the historical Jesus appears to have predicted that the end of history as we know it was going to occur in his own generation. People have the right to know that many of the stories about Jesus in the New Testament were fabricated by well meaning but misguided Christians who wanted others to believe in him. People have a right to know that a large number of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, as many as eleven or twelve of them, were not written by their alleged authors, the Apostles, but are in fact forgeries written by other people lying about their identity in order to deceive others.

  10. These aren’t the wild claims of a particularly liberal agnostic scholar ... they’re also the findings of historians and are supported by critical scholars of most tribes—Christian, Jewish, agnostic, and so forth.


Note: I plan to add more excerpts later.