5. See especially James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001).
6. I am not saying that Christianity is to blame for the Holocaust. I am saying that if it had not been for Christianity, the history of the Jewish people would have been completely different. The hatred of the Jews that came down through the history of Western Europe and that led to the Holocaust originated in Christian circles. There are a large number of books written about the early relations of Jews and Christians; three that have become classics in the field are Marcel Simon, Verus Israel: A Study of the Relations Between Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire, 135–425, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Rosemary Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Seabury Press, 1974); and John Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes Toward Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
7. J. Louis Martyn, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), and Raymond Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple (New York: Paulist Press, 1979).
8. For an accessible discussion of the Arian controversy, see Richard Rubenstein, When Jesus Became God: The Epic Fight over Christ’s Divinity in the Last Days of Rome (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999).
9. See my discussion in Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), pp. 80–82.
10. See my book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008), chapter 2.
11. See ibid., chapter 6.
12. To call Christianity an invention is not to make a claim as to whether it should be thought of as true or not. Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity was an invention (no one had come up with it before), but a theory is right or not irrespective of the person who first came up with it and the social, cultural, and intellectual processes that led him to do so.
CHAPTER 8: IS FAITH POSSIBLE?
1. See especially the recent book by Dale Martin, Pedagogy of the Bible: An Analysis and Proposal (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008).
2. For years I left open the possibility that it could also be a very divine book.
3. See the preceding note.
4. See God’s Problem.
5. I am not claiming that the message of any book of the Bible is self-interpreting and that its meaning is somehow obvious on a simple reading—that somehow the meaning inheres in the words of the texts. Texts don’t tell us their meaning. They have to be interpreted, and they are always interpreted by living, breathing human beings with loves, hates, biases, prejudices, worldviews, fears, hopes, and everything else that makes us human. All of these factors affect how texts are interpreted, and they explain why intelligent people can have such radically different interpretations of the same text. Even so, some texts, interpreted according to standard practices that we use to interpret, are more obviously relevant and germane to our human condition today than others.
6. Even, that is, after they have engaged in the difficult act of interpretation. See the preceding note.
About the Author
BART D. EHRMAN is the author of more than twenty books, including the New York Times bestselling Misquoting Jesus and God’s Problem. Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and is a leading authority on the Bible and the life of Jesus. He has been featured in Time magazine and has appeared on NBC’s Dateline, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, CNN, The History Channel, major NPR shows, and other top media outlets. He lives in Durham, North Carolina. Visit the author online at www.bartdehrman.com.
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Also by Bart D. Ehrman
God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: Betrayer and Betrayed Reconsidered
Studies in the Textual Criticism of the New Testament
Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend
Truth and Fiction in the DaVinci Code: A Historian Reveals
What We Can Really Know about Jesus, Mary, and Constantine
A Brief Introduction to the New Testament
Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Become the New Testament
The Apostolic Fathers
Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium
After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity
The New Testament and Other Early Christian Writings: A Reader
The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings
The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament
Didymus the Blind and the Text of the Gospels
Copyright
JESUS, INTERRUPTED: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them). Copyright © 2009 by Bart D. Ehrman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Mobipocket Reader February 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-186329-5
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