Project counters as professor spreads doubt

I've read a few of Bart Ehrman's books, and I went to hear him when he was at Barton College a few years ago. Ehrman is a tenured professor at my alma mater who has made a living on writing books that tweak Christian sensibilities, notably "Misquoting Jesus," "Jesus Interrupted," "God's Problem," "Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code" and many others, including his latest, "Forgery." Ehrman, who describes himself as a "happy agnostic," seems to enjoy slinging provocative barbs at orthodox Christian beliefs.

The News & Observer reported today that a campus Christian group has organized an anti-Ehrman study aimed at countering the doubts the professor's lectures have cast on unsuspecting Christian students. The Ehrman Project attempts to dispute Ehrman's interpretation of the rise of Christianity in its first few centuries. Much of what Ehrman teaches is not in dispute among modern biblical scholars. The Pentateuch was not written by Moses (whose death and burial is recorded in Deuteronomy). Genesis contains not one but two creation stories, which are contradictory in several aspects (scholars surmise that the two stories came from rival branches of early Judaism, and both were included when the Scripture was written several hundred years after the stories were first told orally). The Gospels have contradictions in the telling of their most important story, the execution and resurrection of Jesus. And the synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke) use common sources with Matthew and Luke borrowing heavily (in some cases nearly verbatim) from Mark. There were other Gospels that did not make it into the New Testament when it reached its final form in the fourth century. And most scholars agree that not all of the epistles attributed to Paul were actually written by him.

Ehrman won his job based on his scholarship, but it's hard not to get the impression that he takes delight in stomping on the beliefs of faithful Christians. Ehrman tells his story of a strict biblical literalism form of Christianity and how his simple faith was shattered by his first real analysis of Scriptural criticism. Ehrman lost his faith, and he seems to see no reason why his students shouldn't lose theirs.

It is possible, however, to accept the findings of modern biblical scholarship without giving up the Christian faith. Marcus Borg, who also spoke at Barton a few years ago, sees the Bible as a wonderful book filled with ancient myth and metaphors, great poetry, advice for living, and a description of God's overwhelming, unconditional love for individual people. Where Ehrman sees fallacies in Scripture, Borg sees metaphor, allegory, allusion or simple human error, non of which detracts from the fundamental truth of the Scriptures. While Borg is solidly in the camp of religious liberals (he was a member of the Jesus Project), he confesses that he remains a Christian. When our church did a study of one of Borg's book a year or so ago, we found it challenging, to say the least, and we sometimes disagreed with Borg's take on a particular Scripture.

Ehrman, and to a lesser extent, Borg, seems to dismiss the canonical Gospels as non-objective, belated accounts by enthusiastic supporters of the new religion. He seems to see no reason why one of the heresies of the early church should not have prevailed, creating a very different Christianity. But such conclusions discount the simple fact that orthodox Christianity evolved over several hundred years of disagreement and study. While political power might have played a role in these debates, early Christians aspired to find the true meaning of Christ's message. The canonical Gospels might not be entirely historically accurate, but they are the best accounts we have of Jesus' life. The letters of Paul, the oldest writing in the New Testament, are the clearest explanations of Christian doctrine and faith in the early church. Most biblical scholars accept the Bible as inherently flawed but the best available resource for understanding God and understanding life.

There is a middle ground between a fundamentalist's inerrancy and Ehrman's dismissive rationality. I hope the Ehrman Project scholars find it.