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 most of Ehrman's 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 of 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, in his fondness for extreme punishments especially. And 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, as you like. Obama has as much innocent blood on his hands as Trump, but for Boykin and others that fact has to be ignored. 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.
