![]() ![]() Ehrman reels them off, rapid-fire, shell bursts against the bulwark of tradition. "None of that is found in John!" The crucifixion stories are different - in Mark, Jesus is terrified on the cross in John, he's perfectly composed. (He holds informal office hours on Wednesday nights in a local bar/restaurant.)īut as he paces back and forth across the stage, Ehrman ruthlessly pounces on the anomalies - in this Gospel, Jesus isn't born in Bethlehem, he doesn't tell any parables, he never casts out a demon, there's no last supper. He is energetic and possessed of a gregarious personality that endears him to the student body. The problem is that it is distinctly different from the other three Gospels.Įhrman looks the professorial part - a not-too-tall man with a receding hairline, dressed in casual slacks and sport coat over a sweater. Thought to be the last written of the four Gospels that form the narrative of Christ's life, death and resurrection, it forms a cornerstone of the Christian faith. His text for today is the Gospel of John. Some 350 students are filing in for Religion 22, one of the most popular classes on campus. Void in His HeartOn a recent afternoon, Ehrman, 50, pulls off his fedora at the front of an auditorium. But sometimes I wonder if we are not all guilty of asking the Bible to do too much." "I can appreciate people feel differently. Where did it come from? How did these illiterate, impoverished fishermen create such a powerful religion? "There was no resurrection tradition in Jewish theology. "Even if I don't have a high-definition photograph of the empty tomb to prove Christ's resurrection, there's the reaction to something after Christ died that is very hard to explain away," Bock says. Like many Christian scholars who have studied the ancient scrolls, Bock says his faith was strengthened by the same process that destroyed Ehrman's. "I think Bart is writing about his personal journey, about legitimate things that bother him," says Darrell Bock, research professor of New Testament studies at the Dallas Theological Seminary. His take on them - first as devout believer in biblical inerrancy, then as a skeptic who rejects it all - suggests a demand for black and white in an arena where others see faith, mystery and the far traces of the unknowable. These ancient questions have been the guideposts to Ehrman's life. What actually happened to Jesus of Nazareth, there on the sands of Judea? Was he a small-time Jewish revolutionary or the Son of God? Both? Neither? There are dozens of other examples in "Misquoting Jesus," things that go to the heart of the faith, things that have puzzled scholars for centuries. It's one of the most famous stories in the Bible.Īnd it's most likely fiction, says Ehrman, seconding other scholars who say scribes added the episode to the biblical canon centuries after the life of Christ. Says, let the one without sin cast the first stone. 16 on the New York Times bestseller list, it casts doubt on any number of New Testament episodes that most Christians take as, well, gospel.Įxample: A crowd readies itself to stone an adulterous woman to death. A slender book of textual criticism, currently at No. "But there could be a fourth option - legend."Įhrman's latest book, "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why," has become one of the unlikeliest bestsellers of the year. "Sometimes Christian apologists say there are only three options to who Jesus was: a liar, a lunatic or the Lord," he tells a packed auditorium here at the University of North Carolina, where he chairs the department of religious studies. What he found in the ancient papyri of the scriptorium was not the greatest story ever told, but the crumbling dust of his own faith. Its doctrine states that the Bible "is a divine revelation, the original autographs of which were verbally inspired by the Holy Spirit."īut after three decades of research into that divine revelation, Ehrman became an agnostic. Once he was a seminarian and graduate of the Moody Bible Institute, a pillar of conservative Christianity. Then daylight comes and the listeners' questions fade.īart Ehrman is a sermon, a parable, but of what? He's a best-selling author, a New Testament expert and perhaps a cautionary tale: the fundamentalist scholar who peered so hard into the origins of Christianity that he lost his faith altogether. ![]() ![]() In the long hours of the night, the voices of the evangelical preachers on the AM dial seem to know. Where does faith reside? In the soul? The mind, the marrow of the bones?
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