April 22, 2009

For those who have read Bart Ehrman's other books, his newest Jesus, Interrupted provides nothing new, and lots of it. One is tempted to think that he really doesn't have anything more to say, but realizes that there's a lot of money in saying it. Jesus, Interrupted follows Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus as another New York Times bestseller.

Setting aside any pecuniary motives, his stated motive in writing Jesus, Interrupted is to inform people in the pews about the good news from scriptural scholars—news, he maintains, that is being kept from them by their pastors, ministers, and priests, who all learned it when they went to graduate school. The good news is that the Bible is, in Ehrman's well-worn words, a merely human book, and further, that Christianity is a merely human invention.

Ehrman presents this message as an intellectual fait accompli, the equivalent of someone announcing to uneducated 18th century French provincials that Copernicus had proven two centuries prior that the earth went around the sun. He insists that he is presenting nothing new or radical, but only "standard scholarly material," carefully worked out by academics over the last two hundred years, and "taught in seminaries for over fifty years." He doesn't want to destroy all of faith, but only "the faith in the Bible as the historically inerrant and inspired Word of God."

How does he go about doing it? Same old path he trod in his previous books: we don't have the original manuscripts of the Bible; the Bible is full of contradictions; the Biblical canon was decided upon by mere humans who had less than honorable intentions; Christian doctrinal claims about the Holy Trinity and Christ's divinity are not in the Bible, but add-ons by some later Christians trying to buttress their particular views against other perfectly legitimate views of different Christians, and so on. "But most people in the street, and in the pew, have heard none of this before," laments Bart. "That is a real shame, and it is time that something is done to correct the problem."

Really? As I was reading his book, I thought quite the reverse. It is high time that something is done to correct Bart Ehrman. Let's begin with his assertion that he's not really saying anything new, but merely reporting the consensus of the majority of biblical scholars, one that rests on two hundred years of solid, objective scholarship.

Well, I certainly agree that Ehrman is saying nothing new, but he stands in need of correction in two related points, chronologically and intellectually. First, as far as his pedigree goes, he is off by about a century and a half. Modern biblical criticism began in the Radical Enlightenment in the latter part of the 17th century (not, as he suggests, the early 19th). But that leads to a second error, his intellectual pedigree. The assumptions of much of modern biblical criticism are not neutral, that is, they aren't themselves the result of some kind of objective science. They were in large part formed by radical Deists and Quakers in England and the Netherlands who had as their goal the removal of Christianity as an obstacle to secular progress, or its collapse into a kind of mystic spiritualism devoid of doctrine. There is nothing in Bart Ehrman's books that can't be found in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651), Clement Writer's Fides Divina (1657), Samuel Fisher's Rustick's Alarm to the Rabbis (1660), Lodewijk Meyer's Philosophia S. Scripturae Interpres (1666), Baruch Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise (1670), and John Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious (1696). That's only a partial list.

Let's call these folks, collectively, the fathers of modern scriptural scholarship. They are the ones that hammered out the assumptions that would later form the foundation of the historical-critical method, the method that Ehrman claims demonstrates that the Bible is a merely human document and that Christ Himself was not divine.

Here's the difficult point that must be understood. These fathers of modern scriptural scholarship wanted to prove that the Bible was merely a human document and that Christ Himself was not divine, and purposely devised a method of approaching the Bible that would achieve their goal. In the service of this goal, they set out to maximize and manufacture contradictions, stun the faithful with textual variants from multiple manuscripts, wipe out the miraculous as ridiculous, and break apart the unity of texts by focusing on fragments. These were, we must emphasize, strategies meant to undermine the authority of the Bible, and these strategies became enshrined in the historical-critical method.

That's a serious claim and a serious charge. Why, you might well ask, would the fathers of modern scriptural scholarship writing in the latter half of the 17th century want to destroy the authority of the Bible? There is one rather obvious reason, if we stand back and look at what was happening in the first half of the 17th century. During this period, Europe was ravaged by the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), that is, by wars caused, in part, by doctrinal divisions among Christians. What's the best way to stop such carnage? To stop wars rooted in differences in doctrine? You eliminate them at their source: the Bible. If the Bible is a mass of contradictions cobbled together out of scraps of originally disconnected documents, and furthermore, if Jesus Himself was merely a human being, then there's nothing to fight about.

The aim of the fathers of modern scriptural scholarship was to make the world safe from Christianity. The intended effect of their approach to Scripture is exactly the effect that learning the historical-critical method had on Bart Ehrman in Princeton Theological Seminary where he was transformed from a devoted fundamentalist Christian to a very liberal Protestant on his way to becoming an agnostic. Now he funnels all his energies into causing the same transformation in others, a perfect son of such distant fathers, an apple fallen straight down from the same tree.

Benjamin Wiker holds a Ph.D. in Theological Ethics from Vanderbilt University, and has taught at Marquette University, St. Mary's University (MN), Thomas Aquinas College (CA), and Franciscan University (OH).

He is a full-time writer, husband, and father. Dr. Wiker is a Senior Fellow of Discovery Institute and a Senior Fellow at the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology.

Dr. Wiker has written seven books, his newest are Answering the New Atheism: Dismantling Dawkins' Case Against God (Emmaus, co-authored with Scott Hahn), Ten Books that Screwed Up the World(Regnery), and coming soon, The Darwin Myth: the Life and Lies of Charles Darwin (Regnery).