Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible

by Bart D. Ehrman

  This view of the eternal and bodiless existence of the soul is not found in the earliest Christian writings, but only in writings that appeared later. For example, it is set forth in the Apocalypse of Peter (discussed in chapter 6). In that text, Peter is given a guided tour of the realms of the blessed and the damned. Souls are in ecstasy in the world above while others are in torment in the world below. The text envisions eternal life not as a bodily existence to be lived here on earth after the resurrection, but as a spiritual existence in which your soul is destined for one place or another after you die. It is an eternal spiritual existence with eternal rewards or punishments, depending on how you have lived your life and whether you have accepted the salvation of God.

  In short, with the passing of time, the apocalyptic notion of the resurrection of the body becomes transformed into the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. What emerges is the belief in heaven and hell, a belief not found in the teachings of Jesus or Paul, but one invented in later times by Christians who realized that the kingdom of God never would come to this earth. This belief became a standard Christian teaching, world without end.

  CONCLUSION

  What we might think of as traditional Christianity did not simply drop from the sky, full grown and fully developed, soon after the ministry of Jesus. Nor did it emerge directly and simply from his teachings. In many ways, what became Christianity represents a series of rather important departures from the teachings of Jesus. Christianity, as has long been recognized by critical historians, is the religion about Jesus, not the religion of Jesus.

  All of the aspects of traditional Christianity that I have considered in this chapter can be thought of as creations of the early church. When some scholars look at these developments they see strong lines of continuity with what came before in the teachings of Jesus. Christian theologians may detect the hand of God at work behind all these developments. Other scholars are more impressed by the discontinuities, and are struck by how each of these “orthodox” Christian views emerged less as necessary consequences from the teachings of Jesus and his early followers than as doctrines that developed largely because of historical and cultural factors that influenced later Christians. These later views eventually became widespread and even “commonsensical” in subsequent periods of the church (whether or not there was a God involved in the process).

  Whether one stresses the continuities or the discontinuities in the development of early Christianity, it is clear that the beliefs and perspectives that emerged among Jesus’ later followers were different from the religion of Jesus himself. Paul was not the only one responsible for this set of theological innovations, this invention of what we think of as Christianity. He may not even bear the greatest responsibility among those who transformed the religion of Jesus into the religion about Jesus. There were numerous Christians involved in these transformations, the vast majority of them lost in the mists of antiquity, unnamed Christians thinkers and preachers who reinterpreted the traditions of Jesus for their own time, whose reinterpretations were guided and molded by historical and cultural forces that we, living later, can sometimes only surmise and ponder.

  Christianity as we have come to know it did not, in any event, spring into being overnight. It emerged over a long period of time, through a period of struggles, debates, and conflicts over competing views, doctrines, perspectives, canons, and rules. The ultimate emergence of the Christian religion represents a human invention—in terms of its historical and cultural significance, arguably the greatest invention in the history of Western civilization.12

  EIGHT

  Is Faith Possible?

  On the final day of my undergraduate course on the New Testament, I give my students a writing assignment. All semester we have been taking the historical-critical approach to the New Testament, discussing its many different perspectives on key theological issues, its historical problems, its internal discrepancies, the fact that many of its books were written by people who were not who they claimed to be, and so on. My students, most of whom come from conservative Christian backgrounds, have had a range of personal reactions to this material. But for the entire semester I have kept their noses to the grindstone, teaching the historical approach to early Christianity instead of the devotional approach that most of them were raised on.

  At the end of the term I want them to reflect on what they have been doing and to say what they really think about it all. And so I ask them to write a two-page response to an intentionally provocative question, drawn from a hypothetical discussion. Here are my instructions:

  You’re talking to someone about religion and, as sometimes happens, she turns on the steam. “Look,” she says, “the New Testament is full of contradictions; we can’t know what the man Jesus actually did; the apostle Paul turned Jesus’ simple preaching of the coming Kingdom into a complicated theological system of sin, judgment, and redemption; and most of the NT writers actually believed that the end was coming in their own lifetime. This book is misogynist and anti-Semitic and homophobic and has been used to justify all sorts of horrendous acts of suppression over the ages: just listen to some of the televangelists! This is a dangerous book!”

  How do you respond?

  Our final discussion of the semester is based on what the students write. Their responses, as you might imagine, are extraordinarily broad-ranging. A few students will argue that everything this woman says is flat-out wrong: that there are no contradictions in the Bible, that Paul and Jesus were preaching exactly the same thing, and so on. Not many students will argue this (though they certainly would have done so at the beginning of the semester), because they have seen the evidence and they know that there are historical problems with the New Testament.

  Other students will take just the opposite view, and argue that the woman is right up and down the line, that the Bible is so much a product of its own time that it has done more harm than good, leading people to act in hateful ways in advancing their own personal agendas and ideologies.

  Other students will agree with a lot of what the woman says, but will argue that the Bible is still a book that for them is inspired and that contains important guidelines for how they should live their lives. Most of these students do not think that the Bible is inerrant or that it can be somehow taken from its first-century context and plopped down into our own context as if we shared the worldviews and perspectives of the different authors. And they will acknowledge that different parts of the Bible have different (even contradictory) things to say on important topics. Their view is that one needs to evaluate these different biblical messages and see which ones are particularly germane to their own situations, as American Christians living in the twenty-first century, not Palestinian Jews, say, living in the first.

  Students are often surprised to learn that I am completely sympathetic to this final point of view. The goal of my class is not to attack the Bible or to destroy the students’ faith. One of my goals is to get them to think about issues that many of them care deeply about and that ultimately matter.

  Historical Criticism and Faith

  So, too, with this book. Some readers will find it surprising that I do not see the material in the preceding chapters as an attack on Christianity or an agnostic’s attempt to show that faith, even Christian faith, is meaningless and absurd. That is not what I think, and it is not what I have been trying to accomplish.

  I have been trying, instead, to make serious scholarship on the Bible and earliest Christianity accessible and available to people who may be interested in the New Testament but who, for one reason or another, have never heard what scholars have long known and thought about it.

  One of my subsidiary purposes has been to point out that none of the information presented here is news to scholars or their students, many of whom have attended top-level seminaries and divinity schools throughout North America and Western Europe. The historical-critical approach to the New Testament is taught in all these schools. To be sure, different scholar
s and teachers will disagree with me on one point or another—on whether a particular view of Luke stands at odds with the view of Mark, whether the Gospel of John contains a historically accurate datum at one point or another, whether Paul should be seen as the author of 2 Thessalonians or not, and so on. But the basic views that I’ve sketched here are widely known, widely taught, and widely accepted among New Testament scholars and their students, including the students who graduate from seminaries and go on to pastor churches. Why do these students so rarely teach their congregations this information, but insist instead on approaching the Bible devotionally rather than historical-critically, not just in the pulpit (where a devotional approach would be expected) but also in their adult education classes? That has been one of my leading questions since I started writing this book.

  Some pastors, of course, do try to convey their historical-critical knowledge of the Bible to members of their congregations—often with mixed results. Some parishioners are eager to learn all they can about what scholars are saying about the Bible, and others simply don’t want to hear about it, perhaps because it is too complicated or, even more likely, too threatening to their faith.

  But my sense is that most pastors get the strong impression from their parishioners that examining historical-critical material is not a priority in light of other pressing concerns facing the congregation. Or, simply, pastors don’t know where to begin. Possibly this is because of the way they themselves were trained in seminary, where they learned the Bible in their biblical studies courses, their theology in their theological courses, and their pastoral duties in their pastoral courses—without ever having any classes that showed how these areas should be closely related to one another. In particular, most prospective pastors never learn in seminary how the historical-critical approach taught in one course can be of any relevance to the theology they are taught in another.1 That’s a pity, because historical criticism can have serious theological payoffs, and these should be embraced and proclaimed.

  Or perhaps pastors are afraid that if the person in the pew learns what scholars have said about the Bible, it will lead to a crisis of faith, or even the loss of faith. My personal view is that a historical-critical approach to the Bible does not necessarily lead to agnosticism or atheism. It can in fact lead to a more intelligent and thoughtful faith—certainly more intelligent and thoughtful than an approach to the Bible that overlooks all of the problems that historical critics have discovered over the years.

  This view may come as a surprise to some of my readers, who know that I myself have gone from evangelical Christianity to agnosticism. It is true that historical criticism did more or less shatter my evangelical views of the Bible. But it did not lead me to become an agnostic. Something else was responsible for that, years after I had given up an evangelical understanding of the Bible: my inability to understand how a good and loving God could be in control of this world given the miserable lives that most people—even believers—are forced to endure here.

  My views of the Bible as the inerrant Word of God changed years earlier, and for completely different reasons. As soon as I came fully to grips with the reality that we don’t have the actual inspired words of God in the Bible—since we no longer have the originals, and in some places don’t know what the originals said—it opened the door to the possibility that the Bible is a very human book.2 This allowed me to study it from a historical-critical perspective. And doing so led to all the results we have seen in this book.

  I came to see that there were flat-out discrepancies among the books of the New Testament. Sometimes these discrepancies could be reconciled if one worked hard enough at it with pious imagination; other times the discrepancies could not, in my judgment, be reconciled, however fanciful the explanation (Jesus dies on different days in Mark and John).

  I further came to see that these differences related not just to small details here and there. Sometimes different authors had completely different understandings of important issues: Was Jesus in doubt and despair on the way to the cross (Mark) or calm and in control (Luke)? Did Jesus’ death provide an atonement for sin (Mark and Paul) or not (Luke)? Did Jesus perform signs to prove who he was (John) or did he refuse to do so (Matthew)? Must Jesus’ followers keep the law if they are to enter the Kingdom (Matthew) or absolutely not (Paul)?

  In addition, I came to see that many of the books of the New Testament were not written by the people to whom they are attributed (Matthew and John) or by the people who claimed to be writing them (2 Peter, 1 Timothy). Most of these books appeared to have been written after the apostles themselves were dead; only eight of the twenty-seven books are almost certain to have been written by the people traditionally thought to be their authors.

  The Gospels for the most part do not provide disinterested factual information about Jesus, but contain stories that had been in oral circulation for decades before being written down. This makes it very difficult to know what Jesus actually said, did, and experienced. Scholars have devised ways to get around these problems, but the reality is that the Jesus portrayed in the Gospels (for example, the divine being become human in the Gospel of John) represents a later understanding of who Jesus was, not a historical account of who he really was.

  There were lots of other Gospels available to the early Christians, as well as epistles, Acts, and apocalypses. Many of these claimed to be written by apostles, and on the surface such claims are no more or less plausible than the claims of the books that eventually came to make up the New Testament. This raises the question of who made the decisions about which books to include, and of what grounds they had for making the decisions. Is it possible that nonapostolic books were let into the canon by church leaders who simply didn’t know any better? Is it possible that books that should have been included were left out?

  The creation of the Christian canon was not the only invention of the early Church. A whole range of theological perspectives came into existence, not during the life of Jesus or even through the teachings of his original apostles but later, as the Christian church grew and came to be transformed into a new religion rather than a sect of Judaism. These include some of the most important Christian doctrines, such as that of a suffering Messiah, the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, and the existence of heaven and hell.

  And so, just as I came to see the Bible as a very human book, I came to see Christianity as a very human religion.3 It did not descend from on high. It was created, down here on earth, among the followers of Jesus in the decades and centuries after his death. But none of this made me an agnostic.

  History and Myth

  You might think that someone who came to realize that Christianity was a human creation would decide to opt out of the Christian faith, quit the Church, and start doing something else with his Sunday mornings. But it didn’t work that way for me, and it hasn’t worked that way for lots and lots of other scholars like me, who started out as strong evangelicals, came to realize the persuasiveness of the historical-critical perspectives on the New Testament, but continued in one way or another to be people of faith. Some of my closest friends teach in divinity schools and seminaries, training Christian pastors. And they agree up and down the line with most of what I’ve said in these chapters. A number of them use my textbook on the New Testament for their introductory courses, a book that spells out many of the views discussed here.

  In my case, when I came to realize that Christianity was a human creation, I felt the need to evaluate what I thought about its claims. And I came to think that they resonated with me extremely well—with how I looked at the world and thought about my place in it. I came to think of the Christian message about God, Christ, and the salvation he brings as a kind of religious “myth,” or group of myths—a set of stories, views, and perspectives that are both unproven and unprovable, but also un-disprovable—that could, and should, inform and guide my life and thinking.

  I continued to believe in a literal God, though I was less and less sure what cou
ld actually be said about him (or her or it). And I continued to believe that Jesus himself certainly existed. But the religion built up around God and Jesus was based, I came to believe, on various myths, not historical facts. Jesus’ death was not a myth, but the idea that it was a death that brought about salvation was a myth. It could not be historically proved or disproved, but it was a powerful story that I thought could and should govern the way I look at the world and live my life. The death of Jesus was, for me, an act of self-giving love. According to this myth, Jesus was willing to live, and die, for the sake of others. This was an idea that I found to be both noble and ennobling. I believed that his example of self-sacrifice made Christ a being worthy of worship, and I felt that his was an example for me to emulate. This was not because I could prove his self-sacrifice as a historical fact but because I could resonate with it personally.

  The resurrection of Jesus was not a historical event that could be proved or disproved, since historians are not able, by the nature of their craft, to demonstrate the occurrence of a miracle. It was a bold mythical statement about God and the world. This world is not all there is. There is life beyond this world. And the horrible actions of humans, such as crucifying an innocent man, are not the end of the story. Evil does not have the last word; God has the last word. And death is not final. God triumphs over all, including death itself.

  Salvation, for me, became less and less a question of whether I would go to heaven or hell when I die. I came to realize that these concepts were also, in a sense, myths. There is not literally a place of eternal torment where God, or the demons doing his will, will torture poor souls for 30 trillion years (as just the beginning) for sins they committed for thirty years. What kind of never-dying eternal divine Nazi would a God like that be? Heaven meant having a right standing before God and being assured that at the end, when we die, we will in some sense be united with Him. We therefore have nothing to fear in death. Hell was not a literal place of torment, but an alienation from God that kept one from ever having true peace.