What Seminarians Learn About the Bible (Often to their surprise)

[00:00:01] What seminarians learn about the Bible, often to their surprise. Written by Bart Ehrman, read by Mike Johnson. [00:00:09] In this post I explain how prospective pastors and teachers, beginning work in seminaries and divinity schools, start learning things about the Bible that they never would have imagined. Or if they did imagine, it was only to reject it out of hand. As with the previous post, this is an excerpt from the first chapter of my book, Jesus interrupted, revealing the hidden contradictions in the Bible and why we dont know about them. Harper one, 2009 the approach taken to the Bible in almost all protestant and now catholic mainline seminaries is what is called the historical critical method. It is completely different from the devotional approach to the Bible one learns in church. The devotional approach to the Bible is concerned about what the Bible has to say, especially what it has to say to me personally or to my society. What does the Bible tell me about God, Christ, the church, my relation to the world? What does it tell me about what to believe? About how to act, about social responsibilities? How can the Bible help make me closer to God? How does it help me to live? [00:01:18] The historical critical approach has a different set of concerns and therefore poses a different set of questions. At the heart of this approach is the historical question, hence its name, of what the biblical writings meant in their original historical context. [00:01:35] Who were the actual authors of the Bible? Is it possible, yes, that some of the authors of some of the biblical books were not in fact who they claimed, or were claimed to be? Say, that one Timothy was not actually written by Paul or that Genesis was not written by Moses? When did these authors live? What were the circumstances under which they wrote? What issues were they trying to address in their own day? How were they affected by the cultural and historical assumptions of their time? What sources did these authors use? [00:02:10] When were these sources produced? Is it possible that the perspectives of these sources differed from one another? Is it possible that the authors who used these sources had different perspectives both from their sources and from one another? Is it possible that the books of the Bible, based on a variety of sources have internal contradictions, that there are irreconcilable differences among them? And is it possible that what the books originally meant in their original context is not what they are taken to mean today, that our interpretations of scripture involve taking its words out of context and thereby distorting its message? [00:02:51] And what if we don't even have the original words? What if, during the centuries in which the Bible, both the Old Testament and Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek, was copied by hand, the words were changed by well meaning but careless scribes or by fully alert scribes who wanted to alter the texts in order to make them say what they wanted them to say. These are among the many, many questions raised by the historical critical method. No wonder entering seminarians have to prepare for baby Bible exams even before they could begin a serious study of the Bible. This kind of study presupposes that you know what youre talking about before you start talking about it. A very large percentage of seminarians are completely blindsided by the historical critical method. They come in with the expectation of learning the pious truths of the Bible so that they can pass them along in their sermons as their own pastors have done for them. Nothing prepares them for historical criticism. To their surprise, they learn instead of material for sermons, all the results of what historical critics have established on the basis of centuries of research the Bible is filled with discrepancies, many of them irreconcilable contradictions. Moses did not write the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, and Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John did not write the Gospels. There are other books that did not make it into the Bible that at one time or another were considered canonical. Other gospels, for example, allegedly written by Jesus followers Peter, Thomas, and Mary. The exodus probably did not happen as described in the Old Testament. The conquest of the promised land is probably based on legend. The gospels are at odds on numerous points and contain non historical material. It is hard to know whether Moses ever existed and what exactly the historical Jesus taught. The historical narratives of the Old Testament are filled with legendary fabrications, and the book of acts in the New Testament contains historically unreliable information about the life and teachings of Paul. [00:05:03] Many of the books of the New Testament are pseudonymous, written not by the apostles but by later writers claiming to be the apostles. The list goes on. Some students accept these new views from day one. Others, especially among the more conservative students, resist it for a long time, secure in their knowledge that God would not allow any falsehoods into his sacred book. But before long, as students see more and more of the evidence, many of them find that their faith in the inerrancy and absolute historical truthfulness of the Bible begins to waver. There simply is too much evidence, and to reconcile all of the hundreds of differences among the biblical sources requires so much speculation and fancy interpretive footwork that eventually it gets to be too much for them. [00:05:52] I'll continue on this note in the next post. It.