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Loading...Here I pick up from my previous post about evangelicals misunderstanding my journey of faith, first by repeating its final paragraph:
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My sense is that there is a simple reason that a lot of evangelical apologists think I “threw the baby out with the bathwater” (the baby of faith with the bathwater of fundamentalism). I might be wrong about this, but my sense is that taking this view allows them to explain why I left the faith without compelling them to address the ACTUAL reasons I did for themselves. It is easier to caricature me and what happened and to point out my “mistake.” I do not think that’s true of Kurt Jaros (see my previous post). I think he has simply misread what I said. And I can see how that misunderstanding is understandable, so to say. Here’s why:
In Misquoting Jesus, I say the following:
This kind of realization coincided with the problems I was encountering the more closely I studied the surviving Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. It is one thing to say that the originals were inspired. But the reality is that we don’t have the originals – so saying they were inspired doesn’t help me much, unless I can reconstruct the originals. But the vast majority of Christians for the entire history of the church have not had access to the originals, making their inspiration something of a moot point. Not only do we not have the originals – we don’t have the first copies of the originals. Or the copies of the copies of the originals. Or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later – much later. In most instances, copies made many centuries later. And these copies all differ from one another, in many thousands of places. As we will see later in this study, these copies differ from each other in so many places that we don’t even know how many differences there are. Possibly it is easiest to put it in comparative terms: there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament.
Most of these differences are
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Yes. Innumerable variants between the copies of the manuscripts, making it arguably impossible to know what the author actually wrote/dictated. The manuscripts cannot be trusted, therefore one should reasonably leave the faith – because of the problem of suffering.
As I have become acclimated to critical scholarship, my understanding and definition of inspiration has changed radically. I dare say yours did too over time. It had to. And at some point, you ostensibly believed it wasn’t inspired by God at all, and finally that there was no God at all. Simultaneously there’s the suffering problem. Is this your progression? I don’t see any correlation between the two, but surely critical scholarship moved you off the rock of the faith of your youth?
It certainly did mine 😊
It is interesting how people can believe in God and have such a variety of reasons to hold onto their faith. It is reasonable to think that any God worth one’s faith would not allow the suffering we see in the world.
The theology of Sun Myung Moon’s Divine Principle that I believed for a decade explained that humankind fell from grace and must struggle back to God (with messianic help). Otherwise, humans would be robots, not creatures with Free Will (suffering is expected).
Being gay forced me to reexamine my beliefs – how I could be gay if Divine Principle were true (which demands a binary view of sexual identity). Free Will didn’t explain it. The discrepancy between my beliefs and my reality led me in other directions. Anthropology and biology, the philosophy of science, attracted me. It became clear that humans are creatures like all animals, different by degree by not in kind.
We evolved the ability to form abstract ideas, communicate with symbols, and create varied cultures. We cease to exist at death – perhaps belief in an afterlife made death seem less frightening to emerging self-awareness and complex theologies followed.
I wonder if part of the reason your opponents psychologize you incorrectly is that you claim so strongly that your view of inerrancy had absolutely nothing to do with your deconversion. For people who hold a strong view of inerrancy, it seems all too convenient that your position on it became much weaker before you jumped ship for other reasons. I would guess many of your detractors dismiss your claims of even being a Christian when you held what they would view as a weak position on inerrancy.
For a fundamentalist, it would be pretty hard to imagine deconverting while still holding a strong view of inerrancy. For them, it would seem that letting go of inerrancy was a necessary pre-condition for deconverting and so your claim that it had nothing to do with your deconversion rings false to them. Of course, once they view you as dishonest regarding this, they feel free to distrust your other claims that you are not out to destroy all of Christianity.
God doesn’t actually need to exist to have inspired the Bible, in much the same way that Batman needn’t exist to inspire the film “The Dark Knight.” An emotional connection to an idea is all that’s needed for inspiration.
People will object that this is not what’s meant by “inspiration” in the context of theology, but then how could we actually find out which sort of inspiration was involved in the writing of the Bible? What sort of evidence could be brought to bear? Perhaps it’s a matter of faith, but in that case what’s required is not just a positive faith about the Bible—it also requires a negative faith that other scriptures such as the Bhagavad-Gita, the Qur’an, the Enuma Elish, and so forth were *not* inspired in this way (as they have very different conceptions of God). It’s easy enough to see why a Christian would want to believe this, but difficult to imagine how they could be in a position to know it. This insistence that the Bible alone is the product of God whispering in peoples’ ears looks almost offensively provincial when we take a broader cross-cultural view of scripture.
Hi Bart
Looking forward to your 7 hr! debate with Mike Licona. I like Mike personally, but I don’t think there is any arguments that he can make that has not been made in the past. I keep thinking how many people come back to life after being dead for a few days. None that I can think of.
Off topic. How to you feel about UNC chances against UCLA? Tough game.
Tough game. Not sure if they can sustain the focus. We’ll see!
If you have read it, what do you think of the ideas in Thomas Jay Oord’s book “God Can’t……” (I can’t remember the rest of the long title!) Glenn Siepert refers to it a lot.
I’m afraid I haven’t read it.
It basically says because God is spirit he can’t do stuff. I think he believes God influences but not controls. He also says God can’t do stuff because he is love and love does not control, down to not controlling any of creation. A version of the free will argument I think. But then I may have misunderstood the whole thing. I found it hard to grasp.
Just an observation:
I assume the existence of an external entity is a philosophical subject, and it is a paradox to disprove it by theology because this requires the theology to be proven first.
Also, statement A: “there is suffering in the world, therefore, God doesn’t exit” has missing terms in it, and the logic doesn’t seem to flow smoothly here.
Statement B: “there is suffering in the world, therefore, God doesn’t care” is logically more aligned than A, but it does have missing terms, which could be supplied as follows:
C1. An able King who sees the suffering and doesn’t act is careless.
C2. God is the King of the universe.
C3. There is a lot of suffering in the world.
C4. Therefore, (by C1) God doesn’t care.
But the validity of C4 is in question as it is based on anthropomorphism: Applying the laws of a closed system (our universe) to an external entity might produce bizarre contradictions. This was the logical fallacy of the Greek when they tried to determine the properties of “The One”.
So, the logic in C might flow better than A, but there are serious questions about the validity of C4.
Why did your recognition of the problem of suffering cause you to disbelieve in God altogether, rather than causing you to believe in a God who is just evil, negligent, or uninvolved in the details of human life?
Because I didn’t see any reason to believe in a God whatsoever.
The thing that I’m confused about is: what changed?
As I understand your story, Younger Bart believed that God existed, and that that God was good and just. You must have had some reason for that belief.
Older Bart, recognizing the problem of human suffering, stopped believing that a good and just God could exist. I follow your reasoning up to that point.
But it seems, logically, that when human suffering undermined your belief in God’s goodness and justice, that would have left you with a belief in the existence of God–a God who was not good and just. My question: what was the reason for your previous belief in the EXISTENCE of God, and how did that turn into you seeing no reason to believe in a God whatsoever?
By the way, thank you for sharing your personal beliefs. I absolutely do not think that scholars should have to do that, and I recognize the downsides. But I do think that, on balance, it a good thing, and I appreciate it a lot.
I was raised with a belief in God, so it was my default position. I didn’t have a *reason* to believe it. When I started looking for rasons to believe, I instead found reasons not to believe. What’s the reason to belief in an evil and unjust God?
Oh, I see. That makes sense. Thanks. I don’t see any reason to believe in an evil God myself. I was just trying to understand how you got from point A to point B in your thought process. The main reasons I can think of to believe in a God at all are (1) one believes factually that God exists; or (2) one finds utility in believing in God. For the first one, I could imagine somebody believing in a malevolent God. It’s harder to imagine what the utility would be in believing in a malevolent God–although people certainly have believed in malevolent gods and other supernatural beings as a way to explain away suffering that they otherwise can’t explain.
Yeah, I don’t think there is sufficient reason to believe in an evil and unjust God, either.
But there is sufficient reason to believe in a good and just God! Cosmology, design, the grounding of objective ethics, beauty, etc.
Hi Bart,
Thanks, again, for responding to Misquoting Ehrman Part 5. Here you provide the text in question & further historical recollection of your theological journey. Thanks!
From the book (quoted above), “if he didn’t perform that miracle, there seemed to be no reason to think that he performed the earlier miracle, of inspiring those words.” And in this post, “I started realizing that the *fact* the words of the authors had not been preserved was significantly problematic for my view of inerrancy.”
What is the reasoning from a to b or a to c? VPP could be false & it could be that either inspiration or inerrancy were true, so I am still wondering about that theological thought-process from the one position to the next (i.e. “there seemed to be no reason”). Granted: Textual interpretations could (and do) lead people to deny inerrancy or inspiration, but that is different from the other claims being made. I see two ways being communicated about the thought-process: A) the contingent one which looks at the evidence for a connection and B) the necessary one which jumps from one doctrine to the next. A has merit, B seems hasty.
Thanks for the engagement!
Quite frankly, I don’t understand why this misunderstanding of the reason for your “loss of faith” continues to be an issue. Unless I also misunderstand, it seems clear to me the theodicy issue is at the heart of the matter. You have expressed such on a number of occasions. I myself do not conclude that theodicy necessitates atheism…I have worked this out in my own mind. However, I am not about to engage in a rescue fantasy involving saving your soul from eternal perdition. After all, you might be right!
It’s happened before!
Dr. Ehrman,
In an interview, Dale Martin compared Paul’s describtion of the resurrected body to a body made of lightning…anything to that?
Yes, probably so. But it was a *BODY*& or him, not a disembodied spirit.
Dr. Ehrman,
A body composed of lightning would still be a body of substance…a plasma form of matter, correct?
A body is a body. It is made of some kind of “stuff”
I’m praying for you Professor Ehrman. I hope I can say that on here!!!
Thank you! I appreciate it.
Have scholars ever attempted to quantify the “copies of the copies of the copies of the originals”? Even an estimate would be helpful.
Manuscripts can be dated to ±50 years — a range that presumably narrows over time. Connection to geographical location of composition must, likewise, be possible — with similarly increasing precision. Further, there must be historical records of known monasteries and their scriptoria that produced most of the surviving manuscripts.
Experts in paleography, the grammatical/syntactical evolution of ancient languages, even progression of potentially informing church doctrine, should provide lines of inquiry. There is also archeological evidence, e.g., carbon 14 analysis.
Such a survey would undoubtedly be hampered by feast-or-famine intervals and would, of course, remain speculation. But even just the early portion of ≈6,000 exemplars should provide a large enough data set for making statistically credible inferences of how MANY “copies of the copies of the copies” we are removed from “the originals.”
The drift from accuracy would, after all, be less for a game of telephone played by ten than by a hundred. All other things being equal, isn’t confidence inversely proportional to the number of links in the whisper — or transcription — chain?
I”m not sure what kind of quantification you mean. Are you referring to the probably number of gnerations between one manuscript and its ultimate original? That’s a very tricky matter and apart from saying “there appear to have been several” it’s hard to say. You can’t really (compellingly) say that two related manuscripts are, say, five copies removed from one another. Geography is usually impossible to determine. Evolution of language doesn’t help much since they are copying not composing. We don’t have records from scriptoria. The +/- 50 years is as true for 240 CE as 1240 CE. Etc.
I loved the book misquoting Jesus. For me, because I grew up a fundamental Christian, the lose of inerrancy in the Bible was one of the factors for me losing my faith in Christianity and eventually a belief in God all together.
When you are taught for your entire childhood and teens that the Bible is perfect, no contradictions, and inspired by God, it is a blow when you find out it is not.
Correct me please if I am wrong, but it is my understanding that we have many copies of NT writings, and that by cross-checking among them we have been able to suss out the vast majority of copyists’ errors. There are some cases where we’re not sure if the original text had this word or that word, but we’re almost certain it was one or the other.
The fundamentalists’ fixation on inerrancy is counterproductive. When they insist that the NT is without error or contradiction, and that is obviously not the case, they undermine the credibility of the Christian faith. One thinks “The rest of this could be baloney as well”.
Yes, that’s pretty much right, in my opinion. There are dozens of places (hundreds?) where we aren’t really sure of the original wording, but most of the time we’re pretty sure. The problem is when people claim” We KNOW the original text! Nope, you don’t, I don’t, and none of us does. And I completley agree: it’s not at all the main problem.