Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Critical problems with the Bible in a Nutshell, written by Bart Ehrman, read by Mike Johnson 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 Harper one 2009.
[00:00:23] For students who come into seminary with a view that the Bible is completely, absolutely, 100% without error, the realization that most critical scholars have a very different view can come as a real shock to their systems. And once these students open the floodgates by admitting there might be mistakes in the Bible, their understanding of scripture takes a radical turn. The more they read the text carefully and intensely, the more mistakes they find, and they begin to see that, in fact, the Bible makes better sense if you acknowledge its inconsistencies instead of staunchly insisting that there aren't any, even when theyre staring you in the face. To be sure, many beginning students are expert at reconciling differences among the gospels. For example, the Gospel of Mark indicates that it was in the last week of his life that Jesus cleansed the temple by overturning the tables of the money changers and saying, this is to be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves. Mark, chapter eleven whereas, according to John, this happened at the very beginning of Jesus ministry.
[00:01:32] Some readers have thought that Jesus must have cleansed the temple twice, once at the beginning of his ministry and once at the end. But that would mean that neither Mark nor John tells the true story, since in both accounts he cleanses the temple only once. Moreover, is this reconciliation of the two accounts historically plausible? If Jesus made a disruption in the temple at the beginning of his ministry, why wasn't he arrested by the authorities then? Once one comes to realize that the Bible might have discrepancies, it is possible to see that the gospels of Mark and John might want to teach something different about the cleansing of the temple, and so they have located the event to two different times of Jesus ministry. Historically speaking, then, the accounts are not reconcilable.
[00:02:21] The same can be said of Peter's denials of Jesus. In Mark's Gospel, Jesus tells Peter that he will deny him three times before the cock crows twice. In Matthew's gospel, he tells him that it will be before the cock crows. Well, which is it? Before the cock crows once or twice? When I was in college, I purchased a book that was intent on reconciling differences of this kind. It was called the Life of Christ in stereo. The author, Johnston Cheney, took the four gospel accounts and wove them together into one big megagospelto show what the real gospel was like. For the inconsistency in the account of the denials of Peter, the author had a very clever solution. Peter actually denied Jesus six times, three times before the cock crowed and three more times before it crowed twice. This can also explain why Peter denies Jesus to more than three different people or groups of people in the various accounts. But here again, in order to resolve the tension between the gospels, the interpreter has to write his own gospel, which is unlike any of the gospels found in the New Testament. And isn't it a bit absurd to say that, in effect, only my gospel, the one I create from parts of the four in the New Testament, is the right one, and that the others are only partially right? The same problem occurs in the accounts of Jesus resurrection. On the third day after Jesus death, the women go to the tomb to anoint his body for burial. And whom do they see there? Do they see a man, as Mark says, or two men? Luke or an angel? Matthew. This is normally reconciled by saying that the women actually saw two angels. That can explain everything else. Why Matthew says they saw an angel. He mentions only one of the two angels, but doesnt deny there was a second. Why Mark says it was a man. The angels appeared to be men, even though they were angels, and Mark mentions only one of them without denying there was a second, and why Luke says it was two men, since the angels appeared to be Mendez. The problem is that this kind of reconciling again requires one to assert that what really happened is unlike what any of the gospels say, since none of the three accounts states that the women saw two angels.
[00:04:46] As we will see, there are lots of other discrepancies in the New Testament, some of them far more difficult to reconcile, virtually impossible, I would say, than these simple examples. Not only are there discrepancies among different books of the Bible, but there are also inconsistencies within some of the books, a problem that historical critics have long ascribed to the fact that Gospel writers used different sources for their accounts. And sometimes these sources, when spliced together, stood at odds with one another. It's amazing how internal problems like these, if you're not alerted to them, are so easily passed by when you read the gospels. But how, when someone points them out, they seem so obvious. Students often ask me, why didnt I see this before? For example, in Johns Gospel, Jesus performs his first miracle in chapter two, when he turns the water into wine, a favorite miracle story on college campuses. And were told that this was the first sign that Jesus did John chapter two, verse eleven.
[00:05:51] Later in that chapter, we're told that Jesus did many signs in Jerusalem.
[00:05:59] And then in chapter four, he heals the son of a centurion, and the author says, this was the second sign that Jesus did. John 454. Huh. One sign, many signs. And then the second sign, one of my favorite apparent discrepancies. I read John for years without realizing how strange this one is, comes in Jesus farewell discourse. The last address that Jesus delivers to his disciples at his last meal with them, which takes up all of chapters 13 to 17 in the gospel according to John. In John chapter 13, verse 36, Peter says to Jesus, Lord, where are you going? A few verses later, Thomas says, Lord, we do not know where you are going.
[00:06:50] And then a few minutes later, at the same meal, Jesus upbraids his disciples, saying, now I am going to the one who sent me. Yet none of you asks me, where are you going?
[00:07:04] Either Jesus had a very short attention span or there is something strange going on with the sources for these chapters, creating an odd kind of disconnect. I'll continue from this point in my next post.
