Loading...What’s it like for a devoted seminary student to be confronted with critical problems of the Bible for the first time? Here I continue the discussion with an excerpt from my book Jesus Interrupted (HarperOne, 2009).
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For students who come into seminary with a view that the Bible is completely, absolutely, one hundred percent without error,
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And…regarding the women going to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body. How did they expect to roll away the stone covering the entrance? Seems like a fool’s errand. I have picked up and moved rocks. A rock large enough to cover even a small entrance large enough to slide in a body would require several strong men.
Such discrepancies is why I am inclined toward explanations that the gospels, beginning with Mark, were written as allegorical with intended conclusions against Jesus’ literal resurrection, ongoing spiritual life, etc. I am not searching for alternative explanations to reconcile discrepancies. However, I do think alternative explanations need to be considered seriously when and because they do reconcile discrepancies.
These tomb stones were not boulders but “rolling stones” (shaped like wheels, but in ruts so they could be moved away from and onto the mouth of the cave-tomb).
I guess my views have changed,,,and these examples are merely outward symbols. I’m sure words, are even a limited vessels for expressing,,,,,and for sure, the infinite truth of God. What really matters to me,,,I think,, is not the exact agreement of human narratives, but the inner awakening these stories inspire within us. I see the Bible’s contradictions as a reflection of our human language—and in my view imperfect and unable to fully capture the divine. I have started to think that the real question is not about where Jesus went or what he said, but whether I am ready to follow the Christ within,,in the frame of christology perhaps best presented in the disputed letters of Paul, to enter that stillness where God speaks beyond words. I’m confident to refuse to be confined by the literal text and rather seek the Spirit/essence that lies beyond it.
You have in text a link to a google doc 😉
Your first paragraph (“For students…”) very much describes my experience when I started Uni as an earnest young evangelical, 40+ years ago. I’d already spent much time on how to reconcile the increasing number of discrepancies I’d found, but was confident that it must be possible, because the Bible was definitely inerrant.
The end occurred in the very first term in Hebrew class, when professor Muraoka pointed out Lambdin’s note on the meaning of רקיע, “firmament – apparently considered as a solid barrier by the cosmographers of Genesis”, adding that it came from רק, to beat, and meant something like a beaten bowl. At that instant, I realized inerrancy was false, and that night I went over and over the creation story noting the problems you point out in your next post. This set off an avalanche. By the end of that first term I’d dismissed Barth over his acceptance of the virgin birth and was reading Bultmann, and finding even him too conservative.
It’s only recently that I’ve found my experience is so widespread. Reading your experience has been hugely helpful to me.
In his article about Mark, Marko Marina quotes Jesus to support his argument (about the need to suffer and die). How do scholars judge whether these are actual quotes of words spoken by Jesus or quotes in circulating stories selected by Marina to support his argument?
I haven’t read his article. My view is that Jesus’ predictions of his coming death are not original but were placed on his lips by later story tellers, given what we can establish as Jesus’ overarching message on historical grounds (that the kingdom of God was to arrive; people needed to repent to enter it; it would come suddenly and soon; and that he and his disciples would be ruling in it. I dn’t think he expectd to be crucified)
Bart: Could you please indulge me and tell me what your opinion of the “Next Wave” scholars like Crossley in the Quest for the Historical Jesus. My understanding is they believe in historic analysis what is being evaluated is the stories that were told not the historic events.
I may be wrong, since I haven’t looked carefully into it, but my sense is the Crossley and Chris Keith think that there is no way really to reconstruct the life of the historical Jesus given the nature of our sources and so it is better to dive more deeply into how he is *portrayed* by various authors instead of worrying about what he really said and did. As they know, that’s not a new perspective — it wsa pretty much (with some differences) what many scholars thought for most of the first half of the 20th century. My view is that we definitely should dive as deeply as we can into how Jesus is portrayed — differently! — in all our sources, as in fact scholars do all the time; but that it makes no sense to say we need to do that *instead* of trying to establish what the historical man himself said did and experienced. To say that “the criteria” don’t work is to say that “history” of every sort is impossible, since these criteria are simply technical expressions of what every historian does with every event or person in the past to determine what probably happened.
Crossley says the gospels are just too unreliable to construct a historic account from them and we should focus on studying social and cultural factors of the time as well as what other teachers prophets did.
Yup, it’s not a new line.
What I find weird is that Christians disagree on biblical inerrancy. Since most don’t make inerrancy essential to salvation, they are forced to allow that a Christian could be authentically born again and yet still seriously deny the doctrine. The problem is that Romans 8 forces the conclusion that all truly saved Christians have the Holy Spirit. If that is true, we really have to wonder: Assuming bible inerrancy is true…what exactly is the Holy Spirit doing in the soul/spirit/heart of such Christian as they study the bible and draw the conclusion that the originals contained errors? Is the Holy Spirit “trying” to convince them otherwise, and He just can’t manage it? Then his boasts about being infinitely powerful are hollow. Does he sovereignly want some true Christians to deny biblical inerrancy for the sake of a higher mysterious good? Well, you can’t have a more powerful justification, than to truthfully declare “I believe this way because God wanted me to”.
Well as mentioned before… the insistence that the Bible is inerrant led me to my downfall as a Christian. After that is was a house of cards as I began to question and research every doctrine I’d ever been taught. The fact that clergy can stand up and lie about inerrancy week after week after knowing the truth is inexcusable to me. It didn’t have to be that way. But I am far more happy now than ever before and can love fully without fear of being “tolerant” of others’ sin. Thank you for leading me there. (You may not want that kind of thanks but I am forever grateful. Playing the lottery now to send you money in gratitude)
Dr. Ehrman: One reason I lost my trust and confidence in the reliability of the gospels is that I found in Matthew 28:1 a modern-day example of how they could be tampered with right under my nose. In the KJV and earlier translations this verse clearly recounted the two Marys came to the tomb when it was still the Sabbath; more specifically, it was at the evening (Greek: “opse”) of the Sabbath. I contend with great confidence that the evening is the last part (or tail end) of the Sabbath or any other Jewish day (see John 20:19). The Latin Vulgate reveals it was the “vespere” (“vespers”) of the Sabbath; and I found that all the way up to the KJV it was consistently translated to read as the “eventide” or “evening” of the Sabbath. But in 1946 the errant theologians who composed what would be known as the RSV of the NT altered the meaning of this verse by changing it to read “after the Sabbath”. I argue these New Testament revisers essentially scratched out the word “opse” from the MSS of Matthew and inserted the word “meta” (meaning “after”). A noun suddenly became an adverb. Continued.
Ignore double post. First Continuation. But these revisers accomplished the same result by changing “evening” to read “after”. Had I been their attorney I would have advised them to provide me evidence to support such a drastic change inasmuch as my research revealed the word “opse” had been translated for centuries to mean evening including the Latin Vulgate which said it meant “vespere” (vespers) and Wycliffe called it “eventide”. My position is these revisers should have left Matthew 28:1 alone and focused on trying to determine why Matthew was writing an irreconcilably-different story. I maintain he had to do so inasmuch as his gospel included the Jonah prophecy (Matthew 12:40) which meant Jesus’ corpse had to be entombed for three nights as opposed to two as recounted in the other three gospels. Furthermore, if Matthew was the most Jewish of the three gospel authors as some scholars suggest, I submit he wanted Jesus’ resurrection to be celebrated (memorialized) as a Jewish Sabbath evening sunset service as opposed to a Sunday morning sunrise event. Simply put, Matthew’s Gospel was not written to be in harmony and these revisers grossly erred trying to do so. One last continuation.
Second (Final) Continuation. I submit these revisers also erred in failing to realize a Jewish day actually began (dawned) at night which is to say when evening twilight had ended and it was dark enough for bright stars to be spotted or two people who were acquainted had difficulty recognizing each other close up. It is my position Matthew was simply relating that the next day (in this case the first day of the week) was about to spring to life inasmuch as the evening was passing away. We should not be thrown off by the use of the Greek word meaning dawning as it was not referring to the rising of the morning sun. We find in the Gospel of Peter a good example of the use of this similar Greek word Matthew used which referred to the dawning of a new Jewish day taking place when evening was ending. But here is another key piece of evidence. At this very time the Passover Moon had made its appearance and would be reflecting its light in the evening much like the sunlight in the morning. Simply put, Matthew was telling me it was Sabbath evening.
” tension between the Gospels the interpreter has to write his own Gospel, which is unlike any of the Gospels found in the NT ”
that’s what my aunt says that the Church I grew up in is better now than when the Apostle was alive.
I wonder also how I’ve changed over this past decade, as I frown against such that make up stuff in the Bible, like Eve was ordered directly not to eat the tree or other making up stuff
https://www.quora.com/How-does-the-book-of-Daniel-have-to-do-with-current-history/answer/Rick-Barszcz?comment_id=433127523&comment_type=2&__filter__=21&__nsrc__=notif_page&__sncid__=56848989898&__snid3__=76408258408
Samuel Liu
HIS Son failed on the most fervant believers praying against the Pandemic
Rick Barszcz
All that is in the Bible. Things before Tribulation starts is going to get worse. All Bible prophecy has come true. Everything that is happening around the world is suppose to happen. The earth will be restored after Armageddon (battle of good over evil). I realize in China the Bible is banned. Satan right now is in charge of the world. He and all world governments and all evil will be soon destroyed. Daniel 2:44.
I have been interested in your work because I thought an accurate understanding of what Jesus said and did was fundamental to my Christianity. But the NINT lecture on Paul’s theology convinced me that liberal Christianity today is not actually based on the New Testament, which is full of theological claims and debates that today’s church doesn’t agree with. Perhaps we should be studying the works of modern theologians rather than the New Testament. You’re not a Christian so you’re not obliged to comment on my thesis. But I’m wondering if you have any comment about it.
I’ve long thought that modern liberal Christianity, like every other kind of modern Christianity, is not directly drawn from the NT. But I’d say every form of Christianity is indeed “based” on the NT in one way or another. Theologians exist precisely because Xty is not about implementing the literal words of the NT. If that’s what it was, there’d be no reason to think, or to consider ramificatoins, or reflect on new situations that have arisen. But yes indeed, modern theologians write in order to be read! (And of course in my seminary training and after I read a ton of modern theologians!)
I apologize if my comment seemed to question the value of historical study of theologies, which I think is valuable, or to defend a literal reading of the Bible, which I don’t defend. But a NINT lecture did try to discern Paul’s theology and it was this apparent theology that disturbed me, because it was radically different from the theology I have heard in a mainline Protestant church. I think theology is conjecture triggered by human curiosity regarding explanations. But many of those theological conjectures have been proven to be erroneous. To me, that is a serious problem with claims “based” on the Bible. Rather than base religious claims on theologies, it think a better foundation is spirituality. By “sprituality” I mean each person’s unique experience of living a human life — an experience stimulated by the physical world. But music, color, strategy, intention, ethics — none of these exist in the physical world. They exist as non-physical translations in our spiritual experiences.
Dr. Ehrman: I have many of your books but have not yet found one in which you offered your opinion on the change made to Matthew 28:1 by the theologians who produced the Revised Standard Version of the New Testament in 1946. I could not even find any mention of this alteration in their Introduction or elsewhere which explained why they made such a change. If you have written about this matter would you kindly provide me the name of your book? If you have not so written, would you please share your thoughts and give me your opinion whether such a change “holds water” as being an accurate and justified one? I find that these revisers were trying to harmonize what was never written to be in harmony; in other words, I argue this putative author dubbed Matthew made it clear in many places his story was not meant to be in harmony with Mark, the very gospel (in some form) Matthew was using as a reference when composing his as I understand you agree was the case. Thanks.
It would be helpful for both me and the others reading your question for you to explain what the change is that you’re referring to, and then to repeat your questoin about it.disabledupes{3fa05385144c9af7637a51579c1d2b29}disabledupes
Dr. Ehrman: Please read my three posts above which explain it in detail. I am referring to the only change made to that verse, one which consists of changing the meaning of opse (evening, a noun) ) to the meaning of meta (after, an adverb). Hope this helps.
I’m afriad other readers won’t know what you’re referring to unless you restate the informatoin in summary form and then ask the question. That way others can see your point and my response!
Dr, Ehrman: I’m still learning what’s required to ensure all information is provided to qualify for receiving a response to a question. My three posts above dealt with theologians I claim produced the 1946 RSV of the NT by tampering with the evidence by changing the centuries-old meaning of “opse” (“evening”) to “meta” (“after”) in Matthew 28:1 and doing so without providing any supporting evidence or reason justifying such a significant alteration. My position is they did it to harmonize Matthew’s version with that of the other three gospels so Jesus’ resurrection would be celebrated as a Sunday morning sunrise event. I contend Matthew was not writing to be in harmony and that, being the most Jewish of the other anonymous authors as some scholars claim, he wanted the resurrection to be memorialized as a Sabbath (Saturday) evening sunset service. I also noted the Greek word for “dawning” had the same meaning it did in the Gospel of Peter where the next day was dawning when it was getting dark. Also in Matt. 28:1 there was the Full Passover moon in play. So, was this RSV alteration justified? I do not believe it was.
OH, sorry, this is the first I’ve seen you lay out what you were asking about. Apologies if you asked earlier with the full explanatoin. I’ve never seen this question before, but I do have an answer to it. The term OPSE can mean a variety of things, including in reference of time that occurs after a different point of time (= “after”). A similar usage in which it functions as a preposition (“after”) taking the genitive (in this case SABBATON) can be found, for example, in Philostratus, Life of Appolonius 4.18; 6.10; and other places, as indicated in Liddell-Scott; with more referneces in Bauer – Danker, which gives references to scholarly articles that discuss just this issue. I suppose in this case the “evening of” / “after” the Sabbath would mean the nightime before dawn of the next day.