What do professional scholars know about the Bible, what do religious professionals (ministers, e.g.) learn about it in seminary/divinity school, and why don’t they (usually/normally/ever) tell their congregations about it? That is the topic of my book Jesus Interrupted (Harper One, 2009). I consider it my most thorough overview of the range of problems found in critical scholarship on the Christian scriptures.
In this thread of posts I’ve been explaining the topics/contents/ideas of my various books in case anyone wants to read/reread them. In many ways I consider this one the most important: it deals with contradictions, divergences, forgery, problems of using the Gospels to know about the historical Jesus, how/why we got this canon of Scripture, the later theological creations of Christian thinkers that most readers wrngly assume are in the New Testament, and ultimately the question of whether it is possible to know all this material and yet still be a believer.
I’ve decided to excerpt the opening chapter of the book to give a good sense of what it’s about — this will take several posts. Here’s how it begins:
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The Bible is the most widely purchased, extensively read, and deeply revered book in the history of Western Civilization. Arguably it is also the most thoroughly misunderstood, especially by the lay reading public.
Scholars of the Bible have made significant progress in understanding the Bible over the past two hundred years, building on archaeological discoveries, advances in our knowledge of the ancient Hebrew and Greek languages in which the books of Scripture were originally written, and deep and penetrating historical, literary, and textual analyses. This is a massive scholarly endeavor. Thousands of scholars just in North America alone continue to do serious research in the field, and the results of their study are regularly and routinely taught, both to graduate students in universities and to prospective pastors attending seminaries in preparation for the ministry.
Yet such views of the Bible are virtually unknown among the population at large. In no small measure this is because those of us who spend our professional lives studying the Bible have not done a good job communicating this knowledge to the general public and because many pastors who learned this material in seminary have, for a variety of reasons, not shared it with their parishioners once they take up positions in the church. (Churches, of course, are the most obvious place where the Bible is—or, rather, ought to be—taught and discussed.) As a result, not only are most Americans (increasingly) ignorant of the contents of the Bible, but they are also almost completely in the dark about what scholars have been saying about the Bible for the past two centuries. This book is meant to help redress that problem. It could be seen as my attempt to let the cat out of the bag.
The perspectives that I present in the following chapters are not my own idiosyncratic views of the Bible. They are the views that have held sway for many, many years among the majority of serious critical scholars teaching in the universities and seminaries of North America and Europe, even if they have not been effectively communicated to the population at large, let alone among people of faith who revere the Bible and who would be, presumably, the ones most interested. For all those who aspire to being well educated, knowledgeable, and informed about our civilization’s most important book, that has to change.
A SEMINARIAN’S INTRODUCTION TO THE BIBLE
Most of the people who are trained in Bible scholarship have been educated in theological institutions. Of course, a wide range of students head off to seminaries every year. Many of them have been involved with Bible studies through their school years, even dating back to their childhood Sunday School classes. But they have typically approached the Bible from a devotional point of view, reading it for what it can tell them about what to believe and how to live their lives. As a rule, such students have not been interested in or exposed to what scholars have discovered about the difficulties of the Bible when it is studied from a more academic, historical perspective.
Other students are serious about doing well academically in seminary but do not seem to know the Bible very well or to hold particularly high views of Scripture as the inspired Word of God. These students are often believers born and raised, who feel called to ministry—most of them to ministry in the church, but a good number of them to other kinds of social ministry. For the country’s mainline denominations—Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopalian, and so on—a good number of these students are already what I would call liberal. They do not believe in the inerrancy of the Bible and are more committed to the church as an institution than to Scripture as a blueprint for what to believe and how to live one’s life. And many of them, frankly, don’t know very much about the Bible and have only a kind of vague sense of its religious value.
It was not always like this in Protestant seminaries. In earlier decades it could be assumed that a student would arrive at seminary with a vast knowledge of the Bible, and the training for ministry could presuppose that students had at their command the basic contents of both Old and New Testaments. That, sadly, is no longer the case. When I was at Princeton Theological Seminary (a Presbyterian school) in the late 1970s, most of my classmates were required to take remedial work in order to pass an exam that we called the “baby Bible” exam, a test of a student’s knowledge about the most basic information about the Bible—What is the “Pentateuch”? In what book is the Sermon on the Mount found? Who is Theophilus?—information that most of us from stronger evangelical backgrounds already had under our belts.
My hunch is that the majority of students coming into their first year of seminary training do not know what to expect from courses on the Bible. These classes are only a small part of the curriculum, of course. There are required courses in church history, systematic theology, Christian education, speech, homiletics (preaching), and church administration. It’s a lot to squeeze into three years. But everyone is required to take introductory and advanced courses in biblical studies. Most students expect these courses to be taught from a more or less pious perspective, showing them how, as future pastors, to take the Bible and make it applicable to people’s lives in their weekly sermons.
Such students are in for a rude awakening. Mainline Protestant seminaries in this country are notorious for challenging students’ cherished beliefs about the Bible—even if these cherished beliefs are simply a warm and fuzzy sense that the Bible is a wonderful guide to faith and practice, to be treated with reverence and piety. These seminaries teach serious, hard-core Bible scholarship. They don’t pander to piety. They are taught by scholars who are familiar with what German-and English-speaking scholarship has been saying about the Bible over the past three hundred years. They are keen to make students knowledgeable about the Bible, rather than teach what is actually in the Bible. Bible classes in seminary are usually taught from a purely academic, historical perspective, unlike anything most first-year students expect and unlike anything they’ve heard before, at home, at church, or in Sunday School….
I’ll continue from this point in the next post.
This, for me, is your most important book because if there are significant differences in the Gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus and the empty tomb events, then this means that the Gospels are not inerrant. THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING. Thanks for helping me understand this.
I have not attended a seminary, but I have perused systematic theology books. The format of such books seems to be to organize the various Christian doctrines and footnote them with individual Bible verses from multiple Bible books and chapters, regardless of whether the book or chapter as a whole supports the doctrine. It would also seem that systematic theology is what seminarians take back to their congregations. Does critical Bible scholarship, as you describe it, collide with systematic theology as taught in seminaries? What is the dynamic like in seminaries between the critical Bible scholar professors and the systematic theology professors?
Yes, critical biblical scholars do not favor combining the views of various authors and then presenting a unified systematic theology. Some biblical scholars (most?) don’t much like the systematic approach; just as many systematic theologians don’t like the historical approach; some scholars simply point out that the two approaches are doing different things, and that there is no “right” way written in the sky somewhere.
Thank you for these posts. Desperately needed particularly in a zeitgeist that considers the bible literally and wants to impose their values throughout all society through laws. I have not read Jesus Interrupted, but will soon.
For readers interested in scholarship regarding the OT, the two best sources I have read are: Thomas L Thompson: The Mythic Past: Biblical Archaeology and The Myth of Israel; Jacob L Wright: Why The Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and It’s Origins.
Bart, you may have other references.
Imagine modern chemists considering as authoritative an alchemy reference from 1,000 CE, or psychiatrists/clinical psychologists treating schizophrenia using exorcism rituals rather than using the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of Mental Disorders. Similarly, all Jews and Christians should know whether their sources are authoritative, historical or mythical.
Professor Ehrman, could you list the best scholars of the last three centuries (both American and European) whose works are important to read in order to understand the Bible and its history
Thanks
I”m afraid it would be a huge list. I’d start with reading my book and my textook The New Testament: A Historical Introduction, and going from there. If you want to read about the history of the study of the Bible, there are very good books written about htat by such authors as Georg Werner Kummel (an old classic) and Stephen Neill and William Baird.
Do they have to take Strabo and Josephus and Archaeology classes?
It couldn’t be more surprising—coming from Sunday School with the guy hugging a Lamb–that the OT seems to have one fully “warm and fuzzy” story. And it’s a Moabite, Ruth, and Naomi.