withallyourmind.net

This is part 4 of a critical review of Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus.

First of all, let me be clear, mistakes were made in transcription. No knowledgeable Christian of whom I am aware claims that the scribes made errorless copies. Michael Kruger, a New Testament professor at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte. in his review, makes two responses to Ehrman’s assertions. First, if the overall copying of texts was as bad as Ehrman makes it out to be, we have no grounds to believe anything of ancient history. This would be especially the case, seeing how we have so few copies of secular works when compared with copies of Scripture. Furthermore, Ehrman bolsters his claims with quotes from ancient manuscripts, which he has already asserted are so full of errors that it is difficult to trust them. It seems Ehrman is quite selective about what texts he believes present accurately the words of the author.

Second, Kruger states that Ehrman must be able to show that Christian copying was worse than the efforts of others. Ehrman fails in this task, instead presenting us with a false dichotomy by claiming either copying was done by formal scriptoriums which were most accurate in their work or with haphazard, non-professional copying filled with errors. We have reason to believe that early Christian copying was reliable. Respected papyrologist, T. C. Skeats, claims that scribal features such as the nomina sacra (a method of abbreviating criticized by Ehrman) show…

… a degree of organization, of conscious planning, and uniformity of practice among the Christian communities which we have hitherto had little reason to suspect, and which throws a new light on the early history of the church.

Craig Blomberg, professor of New Testament at Denver Seminary, in his review, claims…

… the actual textual evidence of the second and third centuries, though notably sparser than for later centuries, does not demonstrate the sufficiently greater fluidity in the textual tradition that would be necessary to actually support the hypothesis that we cannot reconstruct the most likely originals with an exceedingly high probability of accuracy…

Gundry also makes the point:

Nor does he take account of the possibility, even probability that multiple copies of the originals were made and that in the 2nd century the originals themselves were still available for checking.

This is Part 3 of a critical review of Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus.

So, what is to be made of Ehrman’s thesis and the reasoning which led him to embrace it? Well, let me begin with a quick word about the large amount of autobiographical data in the book. Some have taken issue with its inclusion in a scholarly work, although I was not bothered by it. Misquoting Jesus was written for laymen, according to the author. In fact, I think the presence of this material provides added insight into the goal of the author in the publishing of this book. His goal is not just to inform, but to convince his readers that they should follow his lead, by denying the evangelical viewpoint and become “happy agnostics.” Robert H. Gundry, in his review of the book, states:

He (Ehrman) makes it quite clear his further and ultimate purpose to dysangelize them – in other words, to proclaim New Testament textual criticism as bad news to all who believe the Bible to be God’s word.

New Testament scholar, Ben Witherington, in his review, claims…

… he is trying now to deconstruct orthodox Christianity, which he once embraced, rather than do ‘value neutral’ text criticism.

Ehrman is certainly not a dispassionate observer of the facts, but is presenting a viewpoint to which he is “fully committed.”

Now, I proceed to Ehrman’s main arguments. Ehrman’s first contention is that the early scribes were incompetent and unable to accurately copy and transmit the text of scripture. He makes several claims, however, which fail to stand up under scrutiny. Regarding copying of texts in general during the first few centuries, Ehrman claims…

… that this process could be maddeningly slow and inaccurate, that the copies produced this way could end up being quite different from the originals.

The process was worse for Christians, asserts Ehrman:

Because the early Christian texts were not being copied by professional scribes, at least the first two or three centuries of the church, but simply by educated members of the Christian congregations…, we can expect that in the earliest copies, especially, mistakes were commonly made in transcription.

Next, what to make of Ehrman’s claim?

This is Part 2 of a series reviewing Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus.

In the first two chapters, Ehrman lays out his first main argument, that is, that the early scribes were incapable of accurately copying and transmitting the texts of scripture. Most Christians, he claims, were illiterate, and the non-professional scribes who copied scripture were error-prone and incompetent.

In chapters three to five, Ehrman’s goal is to show how the manuscripts which exist today are utterly unreliable and filled with scribal errors. He asserts the errors number in the hundreds of thousands, making it impossible to trust the accuracy of the manuscripts. Additionally, he asserts that…

in my judgment the translations available to most English readers are based on the wrong text, and having the wrong text makes a real difference for the interpretation of these books.

Starting in chapter six, Ehrman presents his third main point, that is, that…

… the texts of the New Testament were modified for theological reasons.

Scribes intentionally made changes in the text to make certain theological points. At times, they did this simply to clarify a passage, or at least to make it clear what they think it means. At other times, they did this to counter heretical ideas with which the church was dealing at that time.

The conclusion, once again, becomes somewhat autobiographical. He reiterates how his view of scripture has changed. He came to realize that…

… even if God had inspired the original words, we don’t have the original words. So the doctrine of inspiration was in a sense irrelevant… Given the circumstance that he didn’t preserve the words, the conclusion seemed inescapable to me that he hadn’t gone to the trouble of inspiring them.

Next, I begin to evaluate the arguments.

Over the next several posts, I will present a series reviewing a very popular book by Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus. In my previous three posts, I have attempted to provide a very brief explanation of how textual criticism works so that the review of Ehrman’s book might be more effective.

Bart Ehrman, a well-respected New Testament scholar who chairs the department of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, has written this book…

… for people who know nothing about textual criticism but who might like to learn something about how scribes were changing scripture… for anyone who might be interested in seeing how we got our New Testament, seeing how in some instances we don’t even know what the words of the original writers were.

Ehrman does an admirable job explaining how the world of textual criticism works. Where he fails the reader, however, is in the interjection of his own skepticism and in his misleading spin on the facts. The title of the book itself is misleading in that almost nothing discussed in the book has anything to do with misquoting Jesus. In Ehrman’s defense, I understand this was not his preferred title, but that of the publisher.

First of all, let us overview Ehrman’s basic arguments in brief. Misquoting Jesus contains an introduction, conclusion, and seven chapters in between. The introduction is, unexpectedly, a personal testimony of how Ehrman journeyed from an evangelical view of scripture and a commitment to Christ to his present state of agnosticism and his view that the Bible is…

… a very human book. Just as human scribes had copied, and changed, the texts of scripture, so too had human authors originally written the text of scripture. This was a human book from beginning to end.

Next, a continued look at Ehrman’s basic arguments.

I just finished reading The Samurai, a novel by Japanese author Shusaku Endo, and I thought I’d take the time to write a quick review. To start with, the book has become one of my favorites and I’d reccomend it to anyone who likes fiction, especially those who are Christian. Endo was a committed, though at times reluctant, Catholic from a country that is still less than 1% Christian. Many of his writings therefore reflect the struggle of Christians and the Christian religion in Japan and the ostracism and persecution felt by those who convert.

The Samurai is no different and follows the story of a young low-ranking Japanese samurai who is chosen as one of the first official ambassadors to Europe in 1613 and an ambitious Fransiscan missionary who acts as interpreter on the mission. The missionary hopes to bargain for trading privileges with Mexico in exchange for the right to freely proselytize in Japan, where the few Christians are highly persecuted and conversion is increasingly becoming illegal. The journey is long and unendurably difficult as the group travels from Japan to Mexico to Spain to Rome and back. It ultimately ends in failure, and in despair the missionary is forced to deal with his selfish ambition and misreading of God’s will while the samurai returns to a changed Japan and finds that his only comfort is found in the man on the cross that dominated every inch of his visit to Europe and who he still doesn’t understand.

The writing is beautiful, although it sometimes feels a little repetitive, and full of the concise Japanese poetry that I remember from other works I’ve read. For example, it begins with this:

It began to snow.

Until nightfall a faint sunlight had bathed the gravel-covered river bed through breaks in the clouds. When the sky turned dark, an abrupt silence ensued. Two, then three flakes of snow fluttered down from the sky.

As the samurai and his men cut wood, snow grazed their rustic outfits, brushed against their faces and hands, then melted away as if to underscore the brevity of life…

The book is somewhat based on a true story and meticulously historically accurate. I learned a lot about Japan through the reading and despite the difference in time and culture, I could find very much to relate to in the lives of the missionary and the samurai, ranging from doubts and the desire to please others to ambition and the longing to do great things while simultaneously being mistrustful of my real motives. As I said earlier, I would reccomend this to anyone. It is, in my opinion, a masterpiece.

Yesterday, I began a review of Wedderburn’s Beyond Resurrection. I wrote mostly of what he got right. Today, I take issue with much of the remainder of the book.

Wedderburn stumbles, unnecessarily it seems, when he arrives at Paul’s discussion of the resurrection. He, incorrectly, asserts that Paul disagrees with Luke’s description of the resurrection body as being composed of flesh and bones. He supposes that Paul argues for a non-physical resurrection body based on his contrast of the resurrection body with our present body. This conclusion is not justified based on Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 15. There is no difficulty in understanding Paul’s description of the resurrection body in a physical way; in fact, this is to be preferred in light of Paul’s overall teaching. Wedderburn, suddenly opts for a “spiritualization” of the resurrection.

He then, incorrectly concludes that the outcome of this historical investigation is a disquieting one. Rather than reason to the best explanation of the events, he capitulates to a “historical agnosticism” which seems to require absolute certainty. Although there are other explanations for the events surrounding the resurrection they are fraught with immense difficulties. The best explanation is the actual physical resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Rather than accept this conclusion, Wedderburn incredulously declares a …

… dead end for our understanding of the Christian faith and of God, with a coming to terms with the loss of what had previously been thought to be the firm basis for so many traditional assertions about God, Jesus and the world.

After firmly establishing that the resurrection is the foundation and cornerstone of Christian faith and then concluding that we cannot know if the resurrection actually occurred or not, Wedderburn rapidly degenerates into an attempt to salvage some positive outcome from this depressing conclusion. He frankly admits to not only going well beyond what Biblical writers say regarding the subject of the resurrection, but also to contradicting the New Testament scriptures. He states:

Having let go of this datum may prove to be a liberating experience for theology… one is free to formulate a view of God that is based on everyday religious experience instead of taking as its starting-point that which is quite unique.

Wedderburn’s God becomes whatever we wish it to be. A Christian, Buddhist, or Hindu conception is equally valid. Wedderburn finds some misplaced consolation in a God who is no longer omnipotent, but a mysterious “suffering” God who is struggling right along with the rest of us.

Wedderburn seems to look at the evidence, ignore the evidence, throw up his hands into a “we can never be sure” posture, and proceed to make up his own story that brings him comfort. We have no reason to accept nor find any comfort in anything he says about what God is since he has no basis from which to make any claims except that this is how God seems to him. He does not present a convincing argument to deny the historicity of the resurrection. He also does not present a convincing argument that anything can be salvaged from Christianity if the resurrection did not occur. Wedderburn starts out asserting that the resurrection is essential for Christianity, the he denies the resurrection, but then he attempts to salvage Christianity in some form of his own making. But, he fails. As Paul stated:

If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is empty, and your faith is empty…If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, you are still in your sins (1 Cor 15: 14, 17).

That is why the early Christians died for their testimony of Christ’s resurrection.

A. J. M. Wedderburn wrote an influential book in 1999 called Beyond Resurrection, in which he examines the Christian doctrine of the physical resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Wedderburn is correct when he identifies the resurrection of Christ as “the bedrock and the sine qua non of Christian faith.” He quotes Moltmann, agreeing that the Christian faith:

…stands or falls with reality of the raising of Jesus from the dead by God… A Christian faith that is not resurrection faith can therefore be called neither Christian nor faith.

He is also correct when he asserts that the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, or at least some parts of it, is open to historical investigation. There are many who would deny any historical access to the resurrection, but this is surely wrong. Wedderburn argues that such issues as what happened to Jesus’ body and what events gave rise to the early Christian belief that Jesus was raised from the dead are issues which can be approached historically. He disagrees that because God (the subject of this action), by definition, lies beyond the scope of historical investigation, we cannot have historical access to these events. Wedderburn agrees with Ludemann, who states that it is:

…appropriate and indeed necessary to treat the question of Jesus’ resurrection as a historical one.

Christianity is a historical faith which makes historical claims and to attempt to remove Christian faith from historical judgments is highly problematic. Having asserted the access of the resurrection to historical inquiry, he then goes about looking at this event historically. He discusses, first of all, apparent discrepancies in the resurrection stories. He rightly concludes that these discrepancies could serve to weaken the argument that Jesus was raised from the dead, but also that this disunity may actually strengthen the argument. This lack of “coherence” indicates that the stories were independent witnesses whose accounts do not all stem from a single original and are not carefully concocted “official versions.” Wedderburn also convincingly presents several arguments which compel us to take the resurrection-event seriously: the coming to faith and transformation of the disciples, the emergence of the Christian faith, the celebration of the resurrection by the church on the first day of the week, the role of the women in the story, the failure of anyone to produce Jesus’ body, the absence of a cult around his grave.

So far, so good. In my next post, I take issue with Wedderburn.

I just finished reading Hugh Hewitt’s book In, But Not Of: A Guide to Christian Ambition and the Desire to Influence the World, and so I thought I’d post a brief review.

Prior to reading this book, I’d never read anything by Hewitt and I’m still yet to hear his radio show. In fact, my only knowledge of him at all was from hearing his name mentioned from time to time on Stand to Reason’s weekly program. But once I saw the book laying on my dad’s end table last time I visited and read the title, my interest was piqued and I stole it from him (temporarily).

The book is mainly aimed at those who want to be like Hewitt - people with J.D. degrees who want to live in big cities and interact in some direct way with the federal government. This fact seems to have turned away or annoyed many in the various reviews I read of the book, but I don’t think it should. 99% of the advice Hewitt gives in the book is applicable to every Christian, no matter the profession, who wants to influence the world through that profession.

The book is small and a quick read, made more so by Hewitt’s direct and to-the-point writing style. The chapters are short enough that they can each be read in just a few minutes. I read it chapter by chapter, one every morning, and this made it seem almost like a devotional book to me. The main presupposition of the book is that western democracy and the freedom it allows are good things, making it much easier to spread the gospel. In the introduction, Hewitt says:

The effective and mass communication of the gospel depends upon the freedom to proclaim it. Though it is possible to proclaim the gospel in the face of persecution, the unfettered freedom to do so is much, much to be preferred.

If that is true, then our democracy is worth defending and allows those with ambition a greater opportunity to influence the world for good.

After that presuppostion is established, the rest of the book is essentially made up of short chapters of inspiration, encouragement, and advice. The advice includes things like knowing the basic outline of western history, getting into good habits, always showing gratitude, not talking badly about others at work, staying out of debt, and being slow to be offended. Not all of the advice is equally applicable to everyone, and none of it is particularly groundbreaking, but it is all useful nonetheless. As Hewitt says in the concluding chapter, “the very best how-to books are extended restatements of the obvious.” This is one of the better ones that I’ve read, and I reccomend it to anyone who wants to influence the world and needs some tips and inspiration. I know that I hope to put as much as his advice into practice as possible.

I’ve just completed reading Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. This best seller was originally published in 1987. Allan Bloom is not a Christian, nor does he appeal to any uniquely Christian arguments. However, he persuasively paints a picture of American society (the American university, in particular) as a society with closed minds.

As one makes his way through the book, one realizes that the American mind is not closed because it claims to have the truth and will not consider other possibilities or alternative opinions. The American mind is closed because it considers all beliefs to be equally valid and lacks the discriminatory effort to decide if one belief is better than another. The only absolute in American culture is the absoluteness of freedom to believe what one wishes to believe. Bloom states:

Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason’s power. The unrestrained and thoughtless pursuit of openness…has rendered openness meaningless.

He further claims that there are two kinds of openness; the openness of indifference, and the openness that “invites us to the quest for knowledge and certitude”. Of all people, Christian’s should manifest that openness which searches for knowledge and certitude. The moral relativism of our day has closed the minds of many to even acknowledge that there is a truth. This book by Bloom attempts to open those closed minds by asserting that we must examine competing claims and see whether one is more correct than the other. That is one of the objectives of this web site, to help weigh the claims of competing world views and show that the Christian world view best makes sense of the world in which we live.

I’ve just read How Should We Then Live? by Francis Schaeffer. I thought I would take a moment to provide a brief review of this excellent work.

Schaeffer’s goal in this book is to make the reader aware of the presuppositions upon which one lives out his life and the impact of those presuppositions on how actually does live out his life. In several instances, he points to the profundity of the quotation, “As a man thinketh, so is he”. Our worldview affects who we are and how we act.
Schaeffer asserts that our world view has direct bearing on our strength to hold up to life’s pressures. This is not only true for individuals, but also for cultures. In the first nine chapters of this book he examines the worldviews of the ancient Romans, the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and on into our modern times. He deftly uses art, music and culture to illustrate the worldviews of the times. Rather than romanticizing Rome, he shows that it was “cruel and decadent as it came to the logical conclusion of its world view” (p.23). The Christians were hated in the Roman Empire because they stood for absolute universal values that were grounded in a rational, personal God. This made them dangerous for the totalitarian, authoritarian state of Rome.
In the Middle Ages, Schaeffer describes how humanism began to inject itself into the Christian faith as the authority of the Church took precedence over the Bible’s teachings and as salvation began to emphasize man’s ability to merit Christ’s merit, rather than salvation in Christ alone. This conflict between a humanistic base for culture and a base consisting of Christian principles of absolutes was to be played out for the next two millennia, up to the present day.
While not able to describe all Schaeffer had to say regarding this phenomenon, it is important to note his description of the contrast of Reformation thought and Renaissance thought. Renaissance thought found full expression in Enlightenment thought. Those cultures which were influenced primarily by Enlightenment thought based their society on the principle of the belief that man is basic to all things. Those influenced by Reformation thought remained, at least somewhat, based on absolutes and a God who is supreme. A worldview based on man’s supremacy leads to chaos, relativism, and authoritarianism. One based on Christian principles provides the basis of a coherent, stable, flourishing society. The way an individual views the world will also have a profound influence on his stability and well-being.