Loading...Here are three quite disparate questions from readers (with attempts at answers), each interesting and together showing the kind of range of issues that are involved with trying to make sense of the Bible from a historical point of view.
QUESTION:
I am at one of the hardest points of my life, the dimming of my faith. I have always been a person of faith throughout my young age, and I really want to keep that faith mainly because I want a better future for my son. However, upon the discovery of the contradictions, errors, and upon actually studying the difficult-to-digest parts of the Bible, I do not know what to think anymore.
I still pray and read the Bible, but it’s like the house is slowly crumbling down; I can’t even read without being critical of the text. I know your position regarding faith, but also know that you have many friends and family members who still hold faith. How do they do it? How do they keep faith despite the facts mentioned earlier? Especially scholars who recognize the Bible as a contradictory and even human book.
RESPONSE:
Yup, I get it. I think one problem is
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Judy and Jeff Siker equivocate on this issue. Even when asked directly whether she believes in Jesus’ resurrection … a “yes” or “no” question … Judy cannot answer “yes”. She wrote “I believe in a God who brings life out of death.” Jeff wrote “for ‘reasons that are difficult to pin down’, I am most struck by what I experience as the graciousness of God. In the end my faith rests on the firm belief in a God who brings life from death, possibility from impossibility.” They seem to be saying they believe in God but have a hard time even defining “Christianity”.
They can define it easily enough, but they don’t think it is important to commit to the literal truth of a specific doctrine or historical event.
On the issue of the reliability of miracle stories, something folks all too often neglect to take into account is just how unique to Christianity they aren’t. The whole Mediterranean area was awash in magical tales of gods, kings, heroes, and wonders. We find miracle stories in – as far as I know – all human cultures. So an answer to why people believed miracle stories about Jesus is not necessarily independent of questions about why people believed miracle stories about Romulus, Alexander, the Caesars, the Buddha, or to take a modern example, Satya Sai Baba. There seems to be something deep in human psychology that creates a demand for belief in wondrous stories, and there’s always someone willing to supply them.
It is important to recognize that no single belief system has a monopoly on truth. Rather than being oblivious to other traditions, we should be willing to examine them thoughtfully. The more meaningful question is not simply what people believe, but which understanding of the divine best reflects reality.
A positive outlook has always been a powerful force in human life. Yet I suspect it goes beyond mere human psychology; perhaps it reflects the psychology—or nature—of the divine rather than our own.
P.S. I’ve been studying the teachings of the Buddha quite a bit lately. My own religious practice is Hellenic Polytheism, though I don’t believe that fact alone, determines the value of the ideas being discussed.
Bart,
I am interested in learning more about the critical analysis of Torah Leviticus (Vayikra) defined practices that are to’evah. My rabbi co-edited Torah Queeries (New York University Press, 2009) which has several excellent commentaries and analyses of text related to same-sex intercourse. I also know of the perspective of Rabbi Steven Greenberg who focuses on the meaning of lo tishkav mishkevei Ishah to suggest that the to’evah regarding same-sex intercourse is not a prohibition of anal sex per se but on taking a sexual partner forcibly, as an act of rape. For example, a conquering army raping defeated soldiers or rape among prison populations. I see some merit in this analysis based upon some study of historical perspectives, that the idea of “gayness” as an identity did it exist until late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, and how to’evah is broadly used in many places in Torah. I would appreciate your perspective on the injunctions in Vayikra 18:22 and 20:13. Also have you considered giving or hosting some lectures on what many define as “Troubling Texts” in the Torah?
Sorry — none of that is in my wheelhouse. It’s amazing how small my house is….
And that is why so many of us rely upon you as a subject matter expert!
Bart doesn’t need to host at his house. The world knows what the troubling text are. 🫡😐
The Sikers’ posts really resonated with me!
Once one accepts the idea that there is no heaven and there is no hell then personal faith will find its formulation.
Hello, Williamhenry. You wrote, “Once one accepts the idea that there is no heaven and there is no hell, then personal faith will find its formulation.” The ancient Gnostic Christians were 50% correct. This “world'” is the hell. This physical universe is the living hell and the only hell. You are 50% correct ” . and there is no hell.” 99% of the people today were LEFT BEHIND and forced to be BORN AGAIN. We missed Heaven. We had the opportunity but we misplayed it.
It is NOT a matter of faith. It is a matter of attitude. Evil people are LEFT BEHIND.
This mortal realm is the hell to avoid. Have a good day.
Your response to the first question was thoughtful and empathic. I appreciate it because my thoughts are similar to the questioner’s. I, however, do not choose to challenge my faith. I choose to let the questions or contradictions co-exist and simply call it a mystery of faith. I always look forward to reading your thoughtful analysis. Your blog is an ongoing source of my reading pleasure. In closing in no way am I suggesting it’s entertainment but a source of growth in that mystery of faith of mine. Respectfully
That’s how I feel sometimes and I believe in Olympus. Keep your head high. I believe you are being watched over. Open th Bible yes, good news for sure. Maybe look inside instead of paper pages. I get feeling of God a lot randomly. Follow the signs home. I will pray for you when you stop. Let this be a sign for you. Listen with your heart, not your eyes and what your reading🕊️🌎🤝❤️
Bart’s point that accepting the fact that much of what we read in the Bible is merely the opinions of unknown writers is part of Bible study. I am age 91 and learned long-ago that this is true, but I also learned that my life has been guided by an unseen power.
From my late teens until my early 40s I yielded to may temptations while also attending church almost every Sunday. Along the way my wife died, I remarried and 15 years later she also died. Since then I have recognized the emotional harms to others I had caused, regretted them, and to ask God for forgiveness and guidance to ways to make amends. As a result and because my 3rd wife also believes in helping others in various wats, including by making generous financial contributions each year to church and to several charities, we have been doing what we can to follow the primary teaching of Jesus, “Do what you can to help others!” It is obvious that Bart (who has difficulty accepting the fact that an unseen power has been guiding his life) also enjoys “feeling good as the result of doing good works.”
Bill Steigelmann
“I don’t think these were “made up” in the sense of “lies” but were originally rumors and gossip that was spread around…”
Hello Prof. Ehrman, if the gospel writers wrote into their stories of Jesus some rumors and gossip that they had heard, wouldn’t the originators of the rumors and gossip be lying?
Actually, as weird as this may seem, probalby not. There’s an entire field of study on rumors and gossip which shows that these begin almost always innocently, not with people intentionally trying to deceive others but unintentionally misrepresenting/misunderstanding/mishearing things that they pass on.
I hope this does not seem unfair or cruel.
I am curious to know if the Sikers present to their congregations textual criticism issues, linguistic issues, e.g. dual meaning of ‘being born from above’, how were the conversation(s) between Jesus and Pilate recorded, how gospel sections are not part of the earliest documents, e.g. end of Mark and woman caught in adultery in John, how miracles or signs are not meant to be understood literally.
Seems to me that if they, or any other pastor, priest or christian presenter who know these type of issues yet still believes, that they should be open to presenting these items to those they minister. These shouldn’t just be discussed in academic settings.
They do talk about these things to Christian groups, yes indeed.
Dear Dr Ehrman-If I may ask a very brief subsidiary question, in view of your work on the Johannine Epistles, do you perhaps have a view regarding what is being described in 1 John chapter 4?More specifically, what in your view does the author mean when he states, “do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world”? Does the author view the false prophets as genuine, evil spirits, or rather that they are empowered by spirits of deceit as opposed to the Spirit of Truth? Once again, thank you very much.
He thinks that some people who claim to be speaking the word of God are in fact being misled by demonic powers to speak error.
Through reading Bart’s books, I feel that I have gained a clearer understanding of what early Christianity was really like. In a sense, this has strengthened rather than weakened my faith.
Bart’s work has helped me think more deeply about several issues: that the doctrine of the Trinity was formulated in later centuries and remains impossible for me to understand; that the existence of hell is difficult to reconcile with a loving God; that the resurrection cannot be established by historical inquiry but ultimately belongs to the realm of faith—and Bart has never tried to deny anyone else’s faith; that the Messianic Secret reveals how remarkable the Gospel of Mark is; and that hostility toward Jewish people developed gradually within Christianity.
These views may not fully align with orthodox modern Christian theology. Nevertheless, they seem consistent with the Bible and with what people closer to the time of Jesus appear to have believed. For me, as someone who converted from Buddhism to Christianity—though I am hardly an exemplary Christian—this understanding is deeply persuasive and meaningful.
That said, I have found myself reading mainly the Gospel of Mark and Paul’s undisputed letters.
Great that Bart’s books have benefited you and I respect your individual decisions based on what you state are based on ‘…reading mainly the Gospel of Mark and Paul’s undisputed letters’. Question: Would you say that your belief/faith lead to broad if not universal application to physics, morals, laws, findings in other fields, etc.? Said another way is the empirical universe consistent with your beliefs?
My views are shaped by reading/studying a broad range of sources then asking whether this evidence – which are empirical – can support a specific belief/faith. If physics, astrophysics, historical sources, biology and evolutionary biology, archeology, etc. can’t support a religious or faith system then I rely on the empirical evidence. Of course these sciences are always evolving and build upon confirmed foundations. That said, for me broad if not universal applications need to be empirical based. I will say that empiricism was not prevalent during ancient times which can make reconciling faith/beliefs with modern empirical evidence difficult.
All the best.
Thank you for your thoughtful question!
I do not see faith and empirical inquiry as competing methods that must produce the same kind of knowledge. For claims about the observable universe, we should take scientific and historical evidence seriously. If strong evidence conflicts with a particular interpretation of scripture or doctrine, that interpretation may need reconsideration.
At the same time, I do not assume that everything real is fully accessible to present human methods. I am deeply interested in science, especially physics and quantum mechanics. Modern physics has not yet unified relativity and quantum mechanics, and some theories propose more dimensions than we directly experience. In quantum mechanics, even whether a particle will be detected at a particular place can be predicted only probabilistically. This makes me conscious of the limits of observational experience itself.
Nor do I think, following Wittgenstein, that we must remain silent about what cannot be precisely expressed. Language has its own logical limits: Japanese and English, for example, divide and convey meaning differently.
Thus, I approach the Bible and Christian doctrine neither by rejecting empirical evidence nor by assuming that empirical methods exhaust reality. Faith, for me, must remain open to evidence, humility, and reinterpretation.
Hi Dr. Ehrman- regarding the last question: It seems interesting to me that ancient Jews came to the conclusion that if Jesus was raised from the dead, it would suggest he’s the son of God. Surely there are other options for what someone being raised from the dead could mean, especially to a people who were expecting their messiah to be something altogether different. As you mentioned in a later blog post, the concept of mortal humans being raised to become angels wasn’t entirely uncommon, so why would the apostles draw the specific conclusion that Jesus was the son of God? I was under the impression (although this could just be wrong) that scholars generally believe that Jesus hadn’t himself claimed to be the Son of God, so why would the conclusion be so obvious to the apostles?
Ah, right! I’m not saying that all ancient Jews would have one view or another. I’m saying that throughout antiquity if someone was believed to have been taken up into heaven, they were understood to have become a divine being. The disciples did not simply think Jesus had been resuscitated from the dead, but that he had been raised and transported to heaven (since unlike other people brought back to life, he was no longer here).
Words are slippery! Like its cousin in politics, “originalism” — it’s important to remember that “the letter killeth but the spirit giveth life”. So, my approach is to read between the lines, asking my Thesis Advisor (The Holy Spirit) to mentor me. Two examples:
In grad school I heard a German theologian tell us that “dominion” (Gen1:26) meant “to trample”. It did not set well with this country boy. But then it came to me that “trample” and “walk over” were virtually the same concept, and no farmer carelessly tramples his crops, but surely surveys the planting by walking the ground. ANOTHER: “the only begotten Son of God (see John1; John3; 1John4): the word is monogenes: “one beginning” >>> my rendering: “the only kind of kids Our Father bears”. ~eric. MeridaGOround dot com
Bart, thanks for your response. But, I feel compelled to ask how one can claim a religion if one does not think it is important to commit to the literal truth of a specific doctrine or historical event. I always thought the barest essentials of being a Christian meant believing I would not go to heaven if Jesus had not come into the world and been killed. What am I missing? Thanks, Raemon Polk
Its a little hard for many of us to get our minds around the idea that something can be true if it’s not literally true. But we often think that fiction, for example, conveys “truth,” in the sense that a story can reveal something true about human relations or ethics or the nature of the universe. As a biblical example, the creation story of Genesis 1, among other things, shows that God is Sovereign over all things. That could be true whether the world was created in six days or not. So too with stories about Jesus. For many believers they convey truths even if they didn’t literally happen.
Regarding the origin of Jesus’ miracle stories, I wrote a series of Platinum Posts on the subject, from my perspective as a physician. The first was “Jesus the Healer: Those Darn Demons”, Platinum guest post by Douglas Wadeson MD, July 20, 2021. I recall that at least one of the posts was put on the general blog, if you’re not a Platinum member (search around that date or search my name to find them.)
RE: 2 Peter 3:10. In the TANAKH from the Jewish Publication Society 1985, they use this abbreviation in the text: “Meaning of Heb. uncertain” explained like this: ‘Where the translation represents the best that the committee could achieve with an elusive or difficult text. In some cases, the text may be unintelligible because of corruption.’ Why don’t translators of the Greek text do something like that? Or do you think many Christian readers couldn’t tolerate the uncertainty?
They sometimes do do that (e.g., in the NRSV). But Greek is much easier to translate than Hebrew in some ways — both because we have so many more manuscripts (so that textual “corruptoin” is more widely documented than in Hebrew, for which we often rely on one manuscript) and because Greek words are far better known since we have so massively many usages of them outside the NT (The Hebrew Bible provides our only Hebrew writings from the periods of the books’ compositions, so that we don’t have tons of other non-biblical places to look at to see how words were typically used/what they meant)
I’ve been watching you Bart on Misquoting Jesus. I just saw your show on what Jesus thought about human souls and heaven. A couple of thoughts popped to mind which you did not address in the program. I do understand that the afterlife was something to have been experienced in a human body on earth. I’m a elapsed Episcopalian. And I used to say that I believed in the resurrection of the body every Sunday! As you pointed out – I never thought about what that really meant.
But what I am curious about is what Jesus meant in the Lord’s prayer when he said our father who art in heaven. Where was the father? In another dimension, on earth somewhere or up in the sky? And when he said to his disciples that he was going to prepare a place for us and that in his father’s home, there are many rooms what was he likely to have been thinking or what were the writers of that gospel thinking?
Yup, the Father is up in heaven, in the sky above. That’s not where people will dwell after death, though. God created the earth for them. And that’s where they’ll live. (I’m referring to Jesus’s own views here). The Gospel of John begins the move to the other conception, that followers of Jesus will dwell in heaven above after death. That’s a change from Jesus’ own teaching. I deal with all this at some length in my book Heaven and Hell if you wan thte fuller scoop.
“problem is that people today equate Christian faith with believing the Bible in inerrant/”
in Shanghai, Concordia HS teacher & Expat Church senior preacher when I asked him some inconsistency in one of the NT letters, he replied that’s what he thought, as opposed to HS editting.
As to the miracles, despite what they taught in the church growing up [not using his divine nature] – DEFINITELY!
& also when Simon Peter proclaims that he is the MESSIAH. I thought that Jesus had always been telling the disciples that [in confidence].