Do You Want to Know a Secret? Do You Promise Not to Tell?

Well, this is a mess. The advertised subject, "The Original Jesus Was Hidden in Mark" never turns up. Ehrman keeps getting distracted, but then I know from his podcasts that he's eminently distractable.  So is Derek the interviewer.  It makes for a toxic combination.

I've now watched a number of Bart Ehrman's podcast videos, and one or two interviews he's given other podcasters. Even on his own turf he is a poor speaker, badly organized, prone to fits of maniacal giggling. I wonder what he was like in the classroom, but the lecture he gave when he retired suggests that he can do better than he does in his podcasts. I would expect, however, based on my own experience speaking to college classes from the 1970s to the 2010s, that Erhman would have organized his thoughts on a basic and familiar topic that he must have covered in his undergraduate classes over decades. Instead he sounds as if this is all new to him and he's never talked about it before. The same applies to interviews.  Interviewers love to distract their subjects, if only because of their own ignorance, and someone who gives interviews regularly should learn how to push the discussion back in the direction he wants to go. With all due immodesty, I think I could do a better job on this topic than Ehrman did here.

But going with where Erhman let himself be led: I agree that the empty tomb is a legend; I figured that out soon after I began studying the New Testament and the scholarship in the early 1980s. I suspect that Mark invented the legend, though of course there's no evidence either way and we'll probably never know.

The stuff about "the Jews expected a military messiah and couldn't cope with Jesus being all peace-and-love-and-shit" motif was popular in mid-20th century New Testament scholarship, and I see it's still with us. It's not necessary to invoke it to explain the disciples' cognitive dissonance, though. Mark shows Jesus preaching the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God, and most scholars agree that there's no reason to think he was at odds with the normal messianic expectations of his day, though it's not certain what those were.  There's a famous old article by Morton Smith, "What Is Implied by the Variety of Messianic Figures?" (Ehrman surely knows it),* which shows that a wild variety of contradictory messianic expectations were current and not grounds for serious dispute. That article is still often cited.  According to Mark and the rest of the New Testament, Jesus expected the Kingdom to arrive with violence and the punishment of poorly-defined evildoers. But the cognitive dissonance came from the fact that the Kingdom not only didn't arrive, its announcer was crucified. (Mark's stories about Jesus predicting his death are also probably legends, as I think Ehrman would agree.)

What I was expecting from this video was some discussion of Mark's theme of secrecy around Jesus and his mission, which has been much discussed, especially since Wilhelm Wrede's 1901 book The Messianic Secret,** though Wrede has frequently been misunderstood and misrepresented. His discussion is detailed and complicated, which helps to explain the misunderstandings.  For example, he often paraphrases other scholars' attempts to explain the problems he discusses, then refutes them, so I think some of his readers mistook the paraphrases for his own position.  I'm rereading it right now, so I was interested in Ehrman's take on secrecy in Mark.  Not enough to pay money for the lecture series, though, sorry. His endless cackling and preacher-style jokes are just too annoying.

Ehrman has written about Wrede and the messianic secret on his blog, I see. I think he got it wrong, partly because of the need to simplify for his non-academic fanbase; under one of those posts, a commenter asks "Isn’t it your view that Jesus did think he was the messiah and only told his inner circle about this? So in a sense it is historical that he kept it a secret?" and Ehrman replies "Yup." I disagree, but neither of us knows for sure, because there's no reliable evidence about it.

Briefly, in Mark's gospel Jesus goes around exorcising demons and healing the sick and dying. The demons he drives out recognize him as the Son of God, and he tells them to shut up. Several though not all of his healing miracles are done privately, with only his inner group of disciples (Peter, James, John) present, and he then tells the people he's healed not to tell anyone about his work. Naturally, they tell everybody.  The more he tells them not to, the more they do it anyway.  And some of his miracles are done in public, so I don't know who he was trying to kid. The theme continues through Peter's recognition that Jesus is the messiah, which Jesus also orders to keep secret, until Jesus' triumphant entry into Jerusalem just before his arrest and execution; but he still has some secrets, like the prediction the Temple would be destroyed and he would come on clouds of glory within a generation.  Because Matthew and Luke left out most of this secrecy, I suspect that most Bible readers just assume that Jesus did everything in public; but Mark said otherwise.  If this interests you, try reading the gospel of Mark yourself - it's not very long - and pay attention to its depiction of Jesus' secrecy.

Another motif Wrede discussed that I think is important is Mark's frequent alternation between Jesus teaching his disciples in private and Jesus teaching the crowds in public. No matter where he is - in town, by the sea, on a mountaintop - Jesus will suddenly interrupt himself and call the crowd to him, as though hundreds of people were waiting to be summoned and then dismissed.  As Wrede said, this is not plausible or possible, and it shows that Mark isn't writing history but a sort of drama.  My favorite example, though I don't remember if Wrede mentions it, is in Mark chapter 13.  Jesus has taken Peter and James and John and Andrew aside on the Mount of Olives and predicted the bad times to come. Mark (I suppose, but it could be Jesus, why not?) interjects "Let the reader understand" at 13:14 about "the abomination of desolation" that will be set up in the Temple, and finally warns in verse 37, "What I say to you I say to all: Watch."  The crowd is always there, out of earshot but ready to come running at a moment's notice.

The theme of secrecy is bigger than these details, though. Dramatic irony runs throughout Mark, and to some extent through all the gospels. That is, the reader knows from the beginning who Jesus is, and how the story will turn out; but the people, the disciples, the priests and the Pharisees and the scribes, don't know.  Think of Sophocles' Oedipus: the audience knows from the beginning of the play who Oedipus is, what he did and what it all means, but the characters in the play don't.  Mark tells the reader too (1:1, RSV): "The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God."  No surprises there!

In The Cost of Authority (Fortress Press, 1982), Graham Shaw suggested (I think reasonably) that Mark's stress on secrecy may have reflected his own intention (p. 189): 

It was, for example, never intended to be printed, so that everyone might have a copy. The stress on the esoteric within the book suggests that access to the text may itself have been a privilege which the reader could not take for granted. Although it very quickly acquired a public use in the new Christian community, ... a much more private use may have been the original intention.  The injunction 'let the reader understand' (13.14) seems to envisage an individual rather than a colletive audience... The phrase in ch. 13 already quoted assumes that the reader will come to the text well furnished with a knowledge of Christian lore. 

I like this, but I'm not sure about it.  While Mark does stress the esoteric, he also is revealing those secrets, publicizing them, letting the reader into the privileged circle of them who know.  To this day people write similar books; the Amazon algorithm points me to them daily.  These secrets were hidden for thousands of years from everyone but the Elect, but now I am revealing them to you for the price of this book!  

Remember that the Greek word apokalypsis means "revelation," and that Mark includes some typically apocalyptic material.  I still think that Mark could be classified as an apocalyptic book like Daniel, Enoch, or the New Testament Revelation.  One of the things it has in common with Daniel and Enoch is the motif that these truths were kept hidden, secret, sealed until now, which explains why they weren't known before, but also implies that the End has arrived.  The New Testament book of Revelation is different on that: John is told not to seal up the book (Revelation 22:19, RSV): "And [the angel] said to me, 'Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near.'"  Oops!  Well, nobody's perfect.

Matthew and Luke threw open the doors, which indicates a change in the knowledge ordinary Christians were allowed or expected to have. (And not only Christians: by the mid-second century, hostile educated pagans wrote attacks on Christianity based on some knowledge of Christian writings.)  If so, it happened fast, like other developments in early Christianity that we'll never be able to reconstruct now but which are visible in the New Testament writings. Paul, for example, also refers to esoterica in his letters.  Later on, the Gospel of Thomas would begin, "These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down." As with Mark, we're entitled to ask how secret those teachings were by the time they were written down.  This is the sort of stuff I thought Ehrman would touch on in this interview.  No such luck.  But maybe only the truly worthy are given to know the original Jesus who's hidden in Mark.

No, wait: I don't really mean that. For one thing, I see no reason to believe that Mark knew anything about "the original Jesus", and Ehrman probably would agree, so the title is a misleading come-on. That's complicated by the fact that at times Mark, or some of his sources, show accurate information about first-century Judaism.  That's why this MythVision video is so frustrating: like Mark, Ehrman promises to reveal "the original Jesus hidden in Mark," but it's just a tease.

If, as most scholars think, the gospel of Mark was the first of the four to be written down, its success indicates that it found a market and an audience rather quickly.  Very soon afterward, the authors of Matthew and Luke produced new, improved gospels based on Mark's outline, which overtook it in popularity.  Mark was bumped down to second place, after Matthew, in the emerging canon.  More imitators followed, and "gospel" came to mean a particular kind of book about Jesus.  (Similarly, the success of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings made it the three-volume template for many imitators.)  I don't think the author of Mark foresaw that.

----

*Journal of Biblical Literature 78 (1959): 66-72. 

** English translation published by James Clarke & Co., 1971.

A Diller, A Dollar, A Ten O'Clock Scholar

  

By Grabthar's Hammer, these two are insufferable.  But I see from the comments that many find them adorable.

I'll concede the necessity of providing a general background, but it takes Ehrman far too long to get to the ostensible subject of the video, and then he sort of dances around it in a way that will probably just confuse most of his audience.  If I were going to try to answer the question of whether Paul was an eyewitness to the resurrection of Jesus, I think I'd begin by explaining who Paul was, what he said about the resurrection, compare it to the accounts in Acts, and if there was time, maybe compare the gospels.

There is some useful information here, scattered among the giggling and smirking: the research on memory and eyewitnesses Ehrman refers to, especially, which he wrote about in Jesus Before the Gospels, one of his better books.  I find it hard to believe he spent two years boning up on it, it sounds like a pastor's exaggeration to me, and he's so disorganized that I wonder how many viewers will be able to follow what he's talking about.  (I encountered some of the literature on memory in the 1990s, in the wake of the Ritual Satanic Abuse scare, and much on the Jesus tradition before the gospels in the 1980s and afterward.)  

One thing that has long bugged me is the inexactness of "the resurrection" in Christian discussion of the subject.  It seems to me that it should refer specifically to the restoration of Jesus' body to life on the Sunday after his crucifixion, and by extension to his visits with his followers immediately afterward. In that sense there were no witnesses to the resurrection, at least according to the gospels. (Interestingly, the non-canonical Gospel of Peter depicts the disciple Simon Peter watching as Jesus or a symbolic avatar is carried out of the tomb.  That gospel is not recognized by any church today, and the only existing copy dates from several centuries after Jesus' death.  Some scholars speculate that it may draw on earlier traditions, but nobody knows.)  But after awhile I realized that Christians, including scholars, used "resurrection" to refer to the cosmic fact of Jesus' victory over death, in which his raising is almost incidental. The empty tomb is equated with the resurrection, though it's not the same thing. 

"Witness" has a similar vagueness.  It refers not only to someone who saw the risen Jesus but to anyone at any time afterward who testified that the resurrection had happened.  "Witness" and "testify" (not to mention the Greek martyr, which means "witness" and didn't originally denote someone who died for his or her beliefs) are basically synonyms.  Someone who testifies that he believes that Christ was raised is also a witness to the resurrection, even centuries later.

"Eyewitness" at least seems more exact, though again, no one actually was an eyewitness to Jesus getting up from the slab, shedding his grave wrappings, and emerging (nekkid?) from the tomb. They were eyewitnesses to the appearances (another interestingly vague word) of the risen Lord.  Although the gospels stress the fleshly, meaty substantiality of his risen body, the risen Jesus flits around the vicinity of Jerusalem, popping in and out of locked rooms, sometimes recognized by his followers and sometimes not. According to Paul in I Corinthians 15, however, the risen body was not and could not be of flesh, but of spirit.

So, what about Paul?  One frustrating thing about him is that in his letters he's very coy about his witness to the resurrected Jesus.  Maybe he said more when he was making converts and founding his churches.  In I Corinthians 15 he says he's reminding them of what he preached to them:

3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. 

When I first sat down and compared Paul with the resurrection stories in the gospels, I was startled by the differences.  He doesn't mention Mary Magdalene, and only Luke among the gospels mentions Jesus appearing to Peter ("Cephas" comes from the Aramaic for "rock," as "Peter" comes from the Greek, so most scholars believe that Paul is referring to Peter here).  That's odd if Mark's gospel was written from Peter's preaching, as tradition claims; maybe Peter was just too modest ever to mention it?

The Twelve can probably be harmonized with appearances to the Eleven in the gospels, since Judas was no longer with them, but this too is a strange lapse.  Didn't Paul know about Judas?  Some scholars think that the betrayal of Jesus by Judas is a later legend, and I agree, but no one knows.  The appearance to "more than five hundred brothers at one time" has been getting some attention lately from fundamentalist YouTubers, but it's more of an embarrassment: why do none of the gospels mention it?  According to Acts, all of the brothers present after Jesus' ascension into Heaven numbered 120.  What happened to the other 380?

"James" is generally thought to be the brother of Jesus.  Again, this appearance isn't mentioned in any of the gospels or in Acts, though in Acts 15 this James is an authoritative figure in the Jerusalem church.  "All the apostles" is confusing, aside from the fact that it doesn't appear elsewhere either. How many apostles were there?

And then, Paul says, Jesus appeared to him.  As Ehrman asks rhetorically in the video, how did Paul know it was Jesus?  He could have asked the same question about Ananias of Damascus, to whom Jesus appeared "in a vision" in Acts 9 after he appeared to Paul. (So Paul wasn't "last of all" after all.)  Ehrman tosses out several possibilities, none of which seems plausible to me.  In Acts Jesus tells Paul who he is, and would Jesus lie?  (That sort of circularity is popular among apologists.)  Maybe more to the point, does a vision count as "eyewitness"?  Acts isn't a reliable source, but Paul is no help either.

Paul says he "received" the list of resurrection appearances.  Where, from whom, did he receive it?  Most scholars assume that he received it from Peter and James when he met them in Jerusalem.  There are several reasons why this isn't a good answer, such as how Paul preached this stuff during the long period after his conversion but before he went to Jerusalem.  Paul insists in Galatians that he received his gospel directly from Jesus, by revelation.  Even fundamentalists are reluctant to take him at his word, for some reason. Don't they believe that the risen Lord could instruct Paul personally?  I don't, but I'm an infidel.

Again, we'll never know.  I've noticed before that Paul says he "received" his version of the Eucharist, the Christian communion meal, from "the Lord," and again I take him at his word, that this is what he believed even if I don't.  Interestingly, though, his version agrees closely, almost word for word, with the versions in the synoptic gospels. (Mark, Luke, and Matthew.)  Maybe Paul and the gospel writers drew on the same branch of tradition.  If that's the case, then why are their accounts of the resurrection so wildly, impossibly different?  I've been wondering lately if the gospels based their accounts of the Eucharist on Paul's, but if so, why did they ignore his list of resurrection appearances?  I mean "ignore" deliberately: they knew it but didn't feel bound to follow it.  Oral tradition varies a great deal in how well it preserves material.  Sometimes a story will be passed along verbatim very accurately, while other stories are changed freely.  That might have happened here.

I also wonder why Ehrman in his videos seems to be talking about his topics almost for the first time, as if these issues wouldn't have come up often in the courses he taught for decades.  It seems to be his shtick, and I find it annoying. If I were new to biblical studies, I think I would find it confusing and unhelpful.  Judging by the comments, I'm not sure that many of his fans really follow him.  They're impressed by his credentials, which are certainly real enough, and by his opposition to fundamentalist Christianity, but they  seem to miss a lot of what he says, and miss that his positions are as much at odds with their liberal, feel-good vision of Christianity as they are with conservative evangelicals'.  Like C. S. Lewis's fans, they bask in the aura of his superior learning; it's not vital that they themselves learn.

You Keep Using This Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

 

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.” 

The New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman - or more likely, his subliterate social media team - posted this on Facebook a few days ago.  ("'Deconstructed' out of" is new to me, though I've seen some other people talking about "deconstructing Christianity" online.)  It got plenty of comments along the lines of "The earth is not 6000 years old and Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch", which are fine. I began thinking over my own journey, as they say, on this subject.  It's a bit more complicated, and I bet so are other people's stories.

As I've written before, I've been an atheist since I was about ten years old. This distinguishes me from Ehrman and most of his fans, I think, who appear to have had religious upbringings and had to make more dramatic breaks with belief. I was never a fundamentalist, though I grew up in rural northern Indiana in a Christian milieu and I had to start thinking about my relation to religion early on. I didn't begin reading serious biblical scholarship until I was 30, and it was a complicated process as I learned to think historically. But one thing that broke the logjam was Morton Smith's "A Comparison of Early Christian and Early Rabbinic Tradition," Journal of Biblical Literature 1963. It's an article that (like much of Smith's work) has been misrepresented shamefully. It sent me back to compare the resurrection stories in the gospels and 1 Cor 15, and I saw how incompatible they were. I also owe a lot to scholars like Dennis Nineham and James Barr, whom I encountered long before I heard of Ehrman. Almost everything I've read by them was helpful, but Nineham's The Use and Abuse of the Bible and Barr's Fundamentalism stand out, along with Barr's Holy Scripture: Canon Authority Criticism, which I reread a few days ago. These and other scholars seem to me much more thoughtful than Ehrman, but it may be that you need a basic awareness of Bible scholarship to be able to follow them.

In most online discussions about religion, numerous commenters will pipe up sarcastically: "Why would you want to study fairy tales?" There are scholars who study fairy tales, from all cultures, and the problems they deal with are the same that biblical scholars study: oral tradition, turning oral tradition into written forms, where they came from and what they mean. It's questions like these that drive my interest in religious studies. Scholars also study modern religious texts such as Star Wars, Star Trek, and The Matrix.  Many nominally secular people quote those texts as if they were scripture, and many avowed atheists have faith-based theories of morality. (Such as "people should get their morals from their hearts and feelings, not books.")  Thinking is hard: let's go shopping.

I've mentioned before one of the most useful insights I picked up from the philosopher Mary Midgley: that thinking critically or philosophically is not like taking apart a machine, but like disentangling a mass of yarn. You pick at your problem here, then there, and once in a while a big section comes loose; but then you have to return to the detail work.  It described my own engagement with big issues - not just religion, but US foreign policy, literature, and more, but certainly religion and specifically Christianity.  I'd read one book, move to articles and books it cited in the footnotes, and soon one of those would send me off in another direction.  Then I'd write about it.  Sometimes this process was more interesting than at other times, but over time I covered a lot of ground.  This wasn't a sign of my great patience, but of the persistence of the problem. I'd leave the subject for awhile, then pick it up when I found a book that drew me back in.

Come to think of it, the biggest hurdle I had to get over, even as a lifelong atheist, was to recognize that Jesus was not a good person, not a great and wise teacher, not an authority on anything. Apart from being wrong factually, as in his end-times teaching, he was often wrong morally, especially in his fondness for extreme punishments. There was no reason he should have been other than he was. This, I think, is the hurdle that stops even many atheists and other nonbelievers: they want to reject religion and churches, but they still want a Jesus they can admire, a Jesus who'd be their best friend, someone they could have a beer with and laugh at all the stupid Bible-thumpers. This drives a lot of the hatred for Paul, for example the claim that Paul plumb ruint Jesus' beautiful simple teaching of love. Jesus was distorted and misunderstood by the stupid apostles, but they understand him.

It requires determined selective reading of the gospels, which depict Jesus as an end-times prophet, a hellfire and damnation preacher, a faith healer and exorcist who cadged money from his (often wealthy) followers, who taught his followers to break with their families and was hostile to normal human sexuality.  These traits, which non-fundamentalists are aware of in the sects they've left, aren't visible only through the eye of fancy-pants biblical scholarship.  They're right there on the surface of the text, and critical scholarship hasn't really dislodged them. I don't mean to be smug about this: I found them easy to ignore for quite some time, partly because the critical scholars I read didn't dwell on them either.  But since they are emblematic of the Christianities that liberal Christians and secularists alike despise, shouldn't they get more attention?  They don't, though, even when they're pointed out. 

Part of the explanation for this, I think, is the normal human tendency (which I share) to view others in either-or terms, as totally good or totally bad.  Either Jesus was, at the very least, a supremely good man and a moral visionary, or he was a totally evil person, as in C. S. Lewis' "Lord, Liar, or Lunatic" trilemma from his Mere Christianity. I'm not going to discuss it here, maybe another time, but for now it's relevant for the problem of how to evaluate our heroes. If people have trouble dealing with the clay feet of people who are unquestionably merely human, then it will be even harder to assess someone who stands at the apex of Western civilization.  Even those who reject the churches want to use his prestige, and they'll work very hard to preserve it in their own minds, by their own standards.

So, for example, this post by gay African-American former Clinton staffer Keith Boykin, which the Facebook Memories feature sent my way recently:

I think they both are equally God-fearing Christians. Or neither, if you like. Obama has as much innocent blood on his hands as Trump, but Boykin and others have to ignore it.  It's fair and reasonable to try to evaluate both of them based on the evidence, but for the true believer, Obama fan or MAGA, it's unacceptable and indeed unthinkable.

At this point I insist that we don't have enough reliable information about the "historical Jesus" to evaluate him at all.  We probably never will. People who want to be Jesus' BFFs usually seem to have a good grasp of the problem; at best they believe that since the Bible is not a reliable historical source, they can pick the parts they like and dismiss the rest as inauthentic.  That's not how it works, but of course they have the First Amendment right to believe what they like, if not to demand that others accept their version of Jesus. It's why I stress the less appealing traits Jesus is assigned in the gospels, and which they ignore -- except quite often to accept the hell-and-damnation part for people they hate. Recognizing that the world wasn't created in 4004 BCE or that Moses didn't write the Pentateuch isn't enough; it's barely a beginning.

Jesus Was Way Cool

A friend sent me the link to this CNN story on Bart Ehrman, who's becoming more and more well-known as a popularizer of New Testament scholarship. The title, "Former fundamentalist 'debunks' Bible" is misleading, not least because neither Ehrman nor anyone quoted in the article uses the word "debunks" about his work. He's a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his specialty is New Testament textual criticism -- that is, the study of the manuscripts that contain the oldest copies of the New Testament writings.

I've read several of Ehrman's books, though not yet the new one, Jesus, Interrupted, that is evidently clinching its author's newfound notoriety. The first one I read was Jesus: the apocalyptic prophet of the new millennium (Oxford, 1999), which I happened on in a used bookstore; I wanted to catch up with scholarship on the "End Is Near" aspects of early Christianity, and Ehrman did a nice job on his subject, but nothing he said was new to me. But I went on to read his debunking of The Da Vinci Code (2004), his book on textual criticism Misquoting Jesus (2005), and Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene (2006), his book on three especially well-known early Christian figures. Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code is especially worth reading if you've read Dan Brown's book (I have, with plenty of Dramamine at hand), seen the movie (I haven't -- there isn't enough Dramamine in the world), or read any of the debunking books by reactionary scholars Catholic or Protestant (so far I've read just one, Ben Witherington III's The Gospel Code: novel claims about Jesus, Mary Madgalene and Da Vinci [InterVarsity Press, 2004]). For Brown's fans no less than his critics, it must be hard to wrap one's head around the fact that someone like Ehrman would reject The Da Vinci Code's reconstruction of Christian history. Since Ehrman is not only a better historian but a better writer than Dan Brown, I'd strongly recommend that you read Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code if you have any interest in the subject.

I'd had the impression that historical-Jesus studies has been largely spinning its wheels for the past couple of decades, and Bart Ehrman's work largely supports that view. As the CNN story reports, "Some scholarly critics say Ehrman is saying nothing new." Well, yeah. He's a popularizer, not an innovator, and he's explicit about that. In the preface to Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, for example, he says that he's presenting "the view shared probably by the majority of scholars over the course of this century, at least in Germany and America" (ix), and he's right about that. In the introduction to Misquoting Jesus he notes that the text of the New Testament "has been a topic of sustained scholarship now for more than three hundred years," yet "there is scarcely a single book written about it for a lay audience -- that is, for those who know nothing about it, who don't have the Greek and other languages necessary for the in-depth study of it, who do not realize there is even a 'problem' with the text, but who would be intrigued to learn both what the problems are and how scholars have set about dealing with them" (15). While he goes on to say that he writes "based on my thirty years of thinking about the subject, and from the perspective that I now have," Ehrman's views are well within the mainstream of New Testament scholarship, though near the more "liberal" end of the spectrum. (I put "liberal" in quotes because it's not really the right word, but I don't know of a better one. "Skeptical"? "Critical"?) Even the most conservative academic New Testament scholars I've read agree in substance with much of what Ehrman says.

The only one of Ehrman's "critics" quoted by name in the CNN story,

Bishop William H. Willimon, an author and United Methodist Church bishop based in Alabama, says he doesn't like the "breathless tone" of Ehrman's work.

"He keeps presenting this stuff as if this is wonderful new knowledge that has been kept from you backward lay people and this is the stuff your preachers don't have the guts to tell, and I have," Willimon says. "There's a touch of arrogance in it."

Breathlessness and arrogance may be in the eye of the beholder. I don't agree with Willimon on any of his points. As my quotations from Ehrman show, he doesn't present his material as anything new, nor as something that has been withheld from laypeople. I wouldn't be surprised if many of his readers react that way, much as some of Michael Moore's or Noam Chomsky's do ("I'm so glad that somebody has finally had the guts to tell the truth!"), reading their own conspiracy theories into his work.

On the other hand, as far as I can tell it's true that most Christians (as well as most unbelievers) know little or nothing of what serious Bible scholarship could teach them. In his critique of The Da Vinci Code, for example, Ben Witherington III complains that we live "an age of biblical illiteracy, even within the church" (140); I agree, except that I'd substitute "especially" for "even." (In the same book Witherington asks rhetorically why "millions are buying tickets to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ if the miraculous heart of the Gospel is not believed by “most” Americans?" [143]. Uh, maybe because we live in an age of biblical illiteracy?) That's why it's important that a mainstream scholar like Bart Ehrman is writing accessibly about the subject. It would be good if his readers would then read other writers too, to understand that experts in the field (like any other), disagree with each other. I'd recommend James Barr's Beyond Fundamentalism (Westminster, 1984), or, what the hell, Witherington's The Gospel Code, once you've read Ehrman's Truth and Fiction. You won't have much trouble finding such books at your public library or bookstore. Compare them, see how they agree or disagree with each other. Witherington has written a long critique of Ehrman, but he's really much closer to Ehrman on the scholarly questions than he is to most lay Christians.

Read the Bible too, at least the New Testament; for one thing, as Bart Ehrman says, "he immerses himself in the Bible, though he doesn't believe in its infallibility, because it's the most important book in Western civilization." I've read it, and I wouldn't disagree. For another thing, you may be surprised at how different the gospels are from the bits and pieces you've heard read in church, or seen in the movie versions or other retellings. Back when Martin Scorsese's film The Last Temptation of Christ was churning up controversy, I told Christians who objected to it that if someone filmed any of the gospels verbatim, faithful to the text, many Christians would be offended by it, because the portrayal of Jesus in the Bible is very different from the way modern orthodoxies see him. How would you direct that scene in Mark where, when Jesus is arrested, there's a young man with him dressed only in a linen sheet, who escapes naked when the soldiers grab the cloth to try to stop him? Or the exorcisms? Or Jesus' refusal to meet with his family? Remember to cast someone "MiddleEastern"-looking as Jesus, not another of the endless string of Northern European goyim we get in most Jesus movies; we don't really know what Jesus looked like, but it's a cinch he wasn't a WASP. The trouble with The Last Temptation of Christ was that it wasn't really disturbing enough.