Dr. Ehrman:

I listened to a recent You Tube video where you said that just one person has ever bought your book, Jesus Before the Gospels, and that turned out to be the person who hosts your You Tube videos. I meant to write why I haven’t bought this book, though I have other books of yours, and don’t know whether I did, as I usually listen to these videos at work and it wouldn’t have been handy to write a comment. It turns out you must have sold two copies, because I seem to have bought the book recently on Kindle. I didn’t know what I was buying. Amazon had it among its $2.99 books and I vaguely noticed the title and grabbed it.

This morning in your email blog, you said that the gospels are full of simple mistakes. Mark said that whoever was high priest at a certain time and it was his son, and he simply got it wrong. John has Jesus crucified a day later than the other gospels, and it’s an accidental difference. In the video where you mentioned Jesus Before the Gospels, you said that the differences between the Gospels are explained by the telephone game. A message is passed from one person to another and gets changed in transit.

The reason I didn’t want the book, is that I am well familiar with the argument that the gospels differ from each other on account of the early stories that were told about Jesus changed as a simple telephone game, causing different stories to eventually get written down. I think just about everyone has heard that argument, and since it is a very simple argument, they wouldn’t need an entire book explaining this. In fact you just did quite well in just three or four paragraphs. Begging your pardon, as I know you put work into it, but I’m not going to buy an entire book explaining this. If few people bought it, that’s the most likely reason why not. They might agree with you, might not, but either way, they just don’t need a book long explanation of this.

I also don’t agree that the differences between the gospels are random products of a telephone game. The day the crucifixion happened is a perfect example of why not. People differed in how they saw Jesus, what they thought he represented, and what mattered to them. This shaped the stories they told. Many differences in the gospels come from theological differences. These gospels were carefully shaped to make theological points. In fact what day the crucifixion happened is an excellent example of this. The author of John wanted to say that Jesus was the lamb of God, so he was crucified as the priests were sacrificing lambs in the temple for Passover dinner. The different genealogies of Jesus made theological points. The differences in where he was born made theological points. And so on.

But as to the error in who was high priest at that certain time – did it occur to you that Jesus might have had it wrong? LOL! That would have been an easy error to make.