Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Misquoting Jesus and my fall from fundamentalism, written by Bart Ehrman, read by Ken Teutsch.
[00:00:10] Is the Bible the inerrant word of God or a very human book with all the problems that normally entails?
[00:00:19] For me, realizing that we don't have the Bible in its original form was important to my thinking as I moved away from believing the Bible had come straight to us from goddesse. I've been talking about all this as background to my book misquoting Jesus. In the following excerpt I begin to explain the wide ranging implications of my new way for understanding the New Testament. My previous post ended with my realization, as stated in my book, that there are more variations in the New Testament than there are words in the New Testament. Lots and lots of conservative christian scholars have maligned me putting it this way, even though they know it's true, they just think it's too radical. Little do they know until I inform them that the phrase came to me from the textual scholar they adore above all others, my mentor, Bruce Metzger, who used to say it all the time.
[00:01:15] Moreover, most of them don't pay attention to my next sentence in my book, which may as well not exist as far as they are concerned. I start there, here.
[00:01:27] But most of these differences are completely immaterial and insignificant. A good portion of them simply show us that scribes in antiquity could spell no better than most people can today. And they didn't even have dictionaries, let alone spell check.
[00:01:44] But even so, what is one to make of all these differences? If one wants to insist that God had inspired the very words of scripture? What would be the point if we don't have the very words of scripture in some places, as we will see, we simply cant be sure that we have reconstructed the original text accurately. Its a bit hard to know what the words of the Bible mean if we dont even know what the words are.
[00:02:11] This became a problem for my view of inspiration, for I came to realize that it would have been no more difficult for God to preserve the words of scripture than it would have been for him to inspire them in the first place. If he wanted his people to have his words, surely he would have given them to them, and possibly even given them to them in a language they could understand, rather than Greek and Hebrew. But the fact that we don't have the words surely must show, I reasoned, that he did not preserve them for us. And if he didn't perform that miracle, there seemed to be no reason to think that he performed the earlier miracle of inspiring those words. In short, my study of the Greek New Testament and my investigation into the manuscripts that contain it led to a radical rethinking of my understanding of what the Bible is. This was a seismic change for me before this, starting with my born again experience in high school, through my fundamentalist days at Moody, and on through my evangelical days at Wheaton. My faith had been based completely on a certain view of the Bible as the fully inspired, inerrant word of God. But now I no longer saw the Bible that way. The Bible began to appear to me as a very human book.
[00:03:28] Just as human scribes had copied and changed the texts of scripture, so too had human authors originally written the texts of scripture. This was a human book from beginning to end. It was written by different human authors at different times and in different places to address different needs. Many of these authors no doubt felt they were inspired by God to say what they did, but they had their own perspectives, their own beliefs, their own views, their own needs, their own desires, their own understandings, their own theologies. And these perspectives, beliefs, views, needs, desires, understandings, and theologies informed everything they said. And in all these ways, they differed from one another.
[00:04:14] Among other things, this meant that Mark did not say the same thing that Luke said, because he didn't mean the same thing as Luke. John is different from Matthew, not the same. Paul is different from acts, and James is different from Paul. Each author is a human author and needs to be read for what he, assuming they were all men, has to say, not assuming that what he says is the same or conformable to or consistent with what every other author has to say. The Bible, at the end of the day, is a very human book.
[00:04:51] This was a new perspective for me and was obviously not the view I had when I was an evangelical Christian, nor is it the view of most evangelicals still today.
[00:05:02] Let me give an example of the difference my changed perspective could have for understanding the Bible.
[00:05:09] When I was at Moody Bible Institute, one of the most popular books on campus was Hal Lindsay's apocalyptic blueprint for our future, the late, great Planet Earth. Lindsey's book was popular not only at Moody, it was, in fact, the best selling work of nonfiction apart from the Bible. And using the term nonfiction somewhat loosely in the english language. In the 1970s, Lindsay, like those of us at Moody, believed that the Bible was absolutely inerrant in its very words. To the extent that you could read the New Testament and know not only how God wanted you to live and what he wanted you to believe, but also what God himself was planning to do in the future and how he was going to do it.
[00:05:54] The world was heading for an apocalyptic crisis of catastrophic proportions, and the inerrant words of scripture could be read to show what, how, and when it would all happen.
[00:06:06] I was particularly struck by the when Lindsey pointed to Jesus parable of the fig tree as an indication of when we could expect the future Armageddon.
[00:06:17] Jesus disciples want to know when the end will come. And Jesus replies from the fig tree. Learn this parable. When its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. So also you when you see all these things, you know that he, the son of man, is near at the very gates. Truly, I tell you, this generation will not pass away before all these things take place. Matthew 24 32 34.
[00:06:49] What does this parable mean? Lindsay, thinking that it is an inerrant word from God himself, unpacks its message by pointing out that in the Bible, the fig tree is often used as an image of the nation of Israel. What would it mean for it to put forth its leaves? It would mean that the nation, after lying dormant for a season, the winter, would come back to life. And when did Israel come back to life? In 1948, when Israel once again became a sovereign nation. Jesus indicates that the end will come within the very generation that this was to occur. And how long is a generation in the Bible? 40 years. And so the divinely inspired teaching, straight from the lips of Jesus, the end of the world will come sometime before 19 88, 40 years after the re emergence of Israel.
[00:07:44] This message proved completely compelling to us. It may seem odd now, given the circumstance that 1988 has come and gone with no Armageddon. But on the other hand, there are millions of christians who still believe that the Bible can be read literally, as completely inspired in its predictions of what is soon to happen, to bring history as we know it to a close witness. The current craze for the Timothy Lahaye and Philip Jenkins series left behind another apocalyptic vision of our own future based on a literalistic reading of the Bible, a series that has sold over 60 million copies in our own day.
[00:08:22] It is a radical shift from reading the Bible as an inerrant blueprint for our faith, life and future, and seeing it as a very human book with very human points of view, many of which differ from one another, and none of which provides the inerrant guide to how we should live. This is the shift in my own thinking that I ended up making and to which I am now fully committed. Many christians, of course, have never held this literalistic view of the Bible in the first place. And for them, such a view might seem completely one sided and unnuanced, not to mention bizarre and unrelated to matters of faith. But there are plenty of people around who still see the Bible this way. Occasionally I see a bumper sticker that reads, God said it, I believe it, and that settles it. My response is always what if God didn't say it? What if the book you take as giving you God's words instead contains human words? What if the Bible doesn't give a foolproof answer to the questions of the modern age, abortion, women's rights, gay rights, religious supremacy, western style democracy, and the like? What if we have to figure out how to live and what to believe on our own without setting up the Bible as a false idol or an oracle that gives us a direct line of communication with the Almighty?
[00:09:44] There are clear reasons for thinking that, in fact, the Bible is not this kind of inerrant guide to our lives. Among other things. As I've been pointing out in many places, we as scholars or just regular readers, don't even know what the original words of the Bible actually were.
[00:10:01] My personal theology changed radically with this realization, taking me down roads quite different from the ones I traversed earlier in my life in my late teens and early twenties. I need to stress that I continue to appreciate the Bible and the many and varied messages that it contains, much as I came to appreciate the other writings of early christians written at about the same time, and soon thereafter, the writings of lesser known figures such as Ignatius of Antioch, Clement of Rome, and Barnabas of Alexandria. And much as I came to appreciate the writings of persons of other faiths at roughly the same time the writings of Josephus and Lucian, of Samosata and Plutarch. All of these authors are trying to understand the world and their place in it, and all of them have valuable and important things to teach us. It is important to know what the words of these authors were so that we can see what they had to say and judge then for ourselves what to think and how to live in light of those words.
[00:11:07] Which brings me back to my interest in the manuscripts of the New Testament and the study of those manuscripts in the field known as textual criticism.
[00:11:16] It is my conviction that textual criticism is a compelling and intriguing field of study of real importance not just to scholars, but to everyone with an interest in the Bible, whether a literalist, a recovering literalist, a never in your life would I ever be a literalist, or even just anyone with a remote interest in the Bible as a historical and cultural phenomenon. What is striking, however, is that most readers, even those interested in Christianity, in the Bible, in biblical studies, both those who believe the Bible is inerrant and those who do not know almost nothing about textual criticism.
[00:11:55] And it's not hard to see why.
[00:11:57] Despite the fact that this has been a topic of sustained scholarship now for over 300 years, there is scarcely a single book written about it for a lay audience, that is, for those who know nothing about it, who don't have the Greek and other languages necessary for the in depth study of it, who do not realize there is even a problem with the text, but who would be intrigued to learn both what the problems are and how scholars have set about to deal with them. Footnote the book that comes closest is by David C. Parker, the living text of the Gospels.
[00:12:35] That is the kind of book this is, to my knowledge, the first of its kind. It is written for people who know nothing about textual criticism, but who might like to learn something about how scribes were changing scripture and about how we can recognize where they did so. It is written based on my 30 years of thinking about the subject and from the perspective that I now have, having gone through such radical transformations of my own views of the Bible. It is written for anyone who might be interested in seeing how we got our New Testament, foreseeing how in some instances, we don't even know what the words of the original writers were foreseeing, in what interesting ways these words occasionally got changed, and foreseeing how we might, through the application of some rather rigorous methods of analysis, reconstruct what those original words actually were. In many ways, then, this is a very personal book for me, the end result of a very long journey. Maybe for others, it can be part of a journey of their own.
