Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Finding value in writings you don't believe in in response to my Newsweek article on Christmas, written by Bart Ehrman, read by Mike Johnson last week, the final two reprints of my favorite posts of Christmas past reproduced an article I had written over a decade ago for Newsweek about the Christmas stories of the New Testament. I received a good bit of blowback from the article itself from various directions that led me to write a post explaining views of a broader issue. Is there anything to appreciate from a narrative that didn't happen that way, or that we simply don't believe? Here is what I wrote. When the editor at Newsweek asked me if I would be willing to write an article on the birth of Jesus, I was hesitant and wrote him back asking if he was sure he really wanted me to do it. I told him that I seemed to be incapable of writing anything that doesn't stir up controversy. It must be in my blood. Still, he said that they knew about my work and were not afraid of controversy, and they did indeed want an article from me. What's interesting to me is that I've been getting it from all sides. I don't know why that should surprise me. It seems to be the story of my life. For years, my agnostic and atheist readers were cheering me on from the sidelines as I talked about the problems posed by a critical study of the New Testament. There are discrepancies and contradictions. The Gospels are not written by eyewitnesses and the stories they contain were modified over time and many of them were invented in the oral traditions before anyone wrote them down, etc. My non believer readers were pleased that all this was coming out in a popular format for the general reader. And then I wrote Did Jesus Exist? Arguing that there is no serious doubt for virtually any real scholar of antiquity, whether biblical scholar, classicist historian, that Jesus of Nazareth really did live. And many of my agnostic and atheist allies suddenly felt completely betrayed and began to attack me even more virulently than the conservative Christians had earlier done. You can't please all the people all the time, and sometimes you just never can please everyone. But so it goes. History is like that. People line up on various sides and if what you're really interested in is uncovering the truth that history can convey, eg in an earnest attempt to do nothing other than reconstruct what actually happened in the past, you're going to offend people no matter what your views or reconstructions are. And so too with the Newsweek article, I've received several emails from readers who did indeed think it was good and important for me to note the discrepancies between Matthew and Luke and and to point out that we cannot use their accounts as accurate guides to what happened when Jesus was born. But they the people who have sent me these emails were really put off by how I ended the piece because they thought it gave too much away. To those who take these accounts seriously as scripture, even if the accounts are full of errors, implausibilities and discrepancies, this is how I ended the piece.
[00:03:20] The accounts of Jesus life in the New Testament have never been called histories. Instead they have always been known as Gospels, I.e. proclamations of the Good News. These are books that meant to declare religious truths, not historical facts. For believers who think that truth must necessarily be based on history, that probably will not be good news at all. But for those with a broader vision, a more generous appreciation of literature, and a fuller sense of theological meaning, the story of the Christ Child and his appearance in the world can be founded not on what really did happen, but on what really does happen in the lives of those who believe that stories such as these can convey a greater truth.
[00:04:08] It's that last sentence that was seen as problematic, so I thought that maybe I should say here what I meant by it for the sake of perfect clarity. My view is I do not personally hold to the New Testament as Scripture or the Word of God, in no small part because I am an agnostic atheist. Agnostic in the sense that I do not know if there is a greater power in the universe. Atheist in the sense that I do not believe that the traditional Judeo Christian God exists. But I do not. I really do not object to people who are believers who find meaning and comfort in Scripture. More precisely, I do not object to them so long as they do not insist the Bible is infallible, internally consistent, and a perfect guide for what people should or must believe and how they should or must act, behave and live in the current world. There are indeed lots of thoughtful believers, many of my best friends, who agree with me on just about everything I think about the Bible. Full of contradictions, historically inaccurate, filled with time bound views that no longer make sense or work in our modern world, etc. But who nonetheless find meaning in the Bible when interpreted in an enlightened and even post enlightened way. I have no problem with these people. I only have problems with the very conservative readers of the Bible who think that since it can be used to support sexism, racism, opposition to women, capitalist dominance, war, and whatever it should be used in those ways. I am dead set against such views and the people who hold them. But to repeat, I have no trouble with people who find rich meaning in the words of the Bible, just as I have no trouble with people who find rich meaning in the words of Euripides, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Lucretius, Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Dickens, Eliot, and John Irving, for God's sake. Literature, in my view, can be enlightening and ennobling. I myself revel in the words found in all these authors, including the ones who wrote books that eventually came to be considered the Bible, not because they are the inspired word of God, but because they make me think and reflect on life and realize that there is more to my existence than the mere fact of my existence. These writers make me thoughtful, self reflective, concerned about the universe I live in, eager to help those in need and to work to make this world a better place for both myself and and especially for others.
[00:06:53] Anyone who uses the Bible, or Shakespeare or Dostoevsky or Victor Hugo or George Eliot to those ends is on my side, and I am on theirs.
