Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | S | Skeptic (Altadena, CA)

The word of the Lord?

Article Excerpt
A review of Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman. Harper San Francisco, 2005. 256 pp. $24.95. ISBN: 0060738170.

BART EHRMAN'S LATEST BOOK throws into high relief the problems faced by those trying to establish just what Jesus actually said. Assuming that the tradition that he was put to death ca. CE 30 is reasonably correct, the earliest account of his life and teachings was not written until nearly 40 years later. This is the Gospel of Mark. We can figure this out by our understanding of the relationships between the gospels and by clues within Mark, Matthew and Luke.

By common agreement among Bible scholars of all stripes, John is the fourth Gospel not only in biblical, but chronological order. Of the other three--the Synoptic Gospels--Mark is dearly the oldest, most primitive and least elaborate. It lacks the Nativity stories of Matthew and Luke, many of the sayings of Jesus, and gives only a terse, unsatisfying account of the Resurrection. The term "Synoptic" means "seen together," and the Synoptic Gospels are "seen together" because Matthew and Luke each incorporate Mark whole, virtually word for word, along with sayings of Jesus from a hypothetical source referred to as "Q" (from Quelle, the German word for "source") and their own material, called respectively "M" and "L".

We can establish that Mark had to have been written after the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans at the end of the Jewish revolt in CE 70 because of the reference to the destruction of the Temple in Mark 13:2. This could only be either divinely inspired prophecy or history written after the fact. The reason we know it is the latter is that Mark 8:38-9:1 predicts the return of Jesus, coming in "the glory of his Father with the holy angels," which can only refer to the Second Coming in the lifetime of his own generation. This obviously didn't happen, ergo, the prophecy is false, and taints the validity of any other prophecy in Mark.

Bart Ehrman brings an evangelical background to his work, which he details in the introduction. Raised in Lawrence, Kansas, Ehrman was an Episcopalian and thus not exposed to the rigors of (exclusively) Bible-based religion until he was a sophomore in high school. When he joined a Campus Life Youth for Christ club, he was convinced by its leader that the void he felt in his heart was from not having Christ in his heart (although Ehrman humorously interjects: "We were teenagers! All of us felt a void!"). Ehrman had a born-again experience, and the club leader convinced him to study scripture full-time at the Moody Bible Institute. Moody was so conservative that when he moved from there to Wheaton College, the home of Billy Graham, Ehrman was warned by his mentors at Moody that he might have trouble finding "real Christians" at Wheaton. Ehrman went from Wheaton to Princeton Theological Seminary. There, though still under the tutelage of committed Christians, he met professors willing to ask question about the Gospel texts.

Once he was open to the idea that the gospels could contain mistakes, even small ones, Ehrman found that heavily defended positions of biblical inerrancy fell one after another. When Mark said that Jesus was crucified the day after Passover, and John said he was crucified the day before Passover, Ehrman could see that they simply disagreed, where before intricate, indeed tortured, reasoning had been required to explain why they really were saying the same thing. Of...