Ehrman on the New Testament

We're in the middle of Jonathan's A&P report on the reliability of the New Testament. Don't know if he plans to rebut Bart Ehrman, whose latest book is Forged: Writing in The Name of God, Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are.

Ehrman contends that the New Testament is riddled with contradictions about the life of Jesus and his significance. He has provided compelling evidence that early Christianity was a collection of competing schools of thought and that the central doctrines we know today were the inventions of theologians living several centuries after Christ.  Commonwealth Club

"Misquoting Jesus"

The Department of Philosophy is happy to announce a lecture by
 Professor Bart D. Ehrman
“Misquoting Jesus: Scribes Who Changed the Bible and Readers Who May Never Know”
 Friday, February 18 at 3:30
State Farm Room of the Business and Aerospace Building

The lecture is free and open to the public. Professor Ehrman will be signing copies of his books immediately following his lecture.

Bart Ehrman is the James A. Gray Professor with the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Among Professor Ehrman’s fields of scholarly expertise are the historical Jesus, the early Christian apocrypha, the apostolic fathers, and the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.

He is the author of over twenty books.  Among his most recent are a Greek-English edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press), an assessment of the newly discovered Gospel of Judas (Oxford University Press), and three New York Times Bestsellers: Jesus Interrupted (an account of scholarly views of the New Testament), God’s Problem (an assessment of the biblical views of suffering), and Misquoting Jesus (an overview of the changes found in the surviving copies of the New Testament and of the scribes who produced them). His books have been translated into twenty-seven languages.

The lecture is part of the annual Applied Philosophy Lyceum sponsored by the Department of Philosophy with appreciation to the Distinguished Lecture Committee.

Bart Ehrman radio interview w/Gina Logue, WMOT

misquoting Jesus

We're excited in our department about the approaching visit in February, for our lyceum lecture series, of renowned UNC-Chapel Hill Bible scholar Bart Ehrman.


Not quite so exciting was yesterday's staff meeting, devoted to choosing between three possible lecture topics he's dangled before us. We narrowed it to "Who Wrote the Bible?" and "Misquoting Jesus."


A colleague inquired, of the latter: misquoted interestingly?


Yes, definitely.

Example: A crowd readies itself to stone an adulterous woman to death. Jesus leans down, doodles in the dust. Says, let the one without sin cast the first stone. The crowd melts away. It's one of the most famous stories in the Bible. 

And 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. 

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. 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? WashPo

Find out on Feb. 18. [Fresh Air interview]

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Bart Ehrman
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

But seriously,

free willy

Much talk in class yesterday of free will as an explanation of evil and suffering in the world. Jesus and Mo need to be heard, on this:

And Colin McGinn, too:



And Bart Ehrman. We'll hear from him on our campus in Murfreesboro, TN on Feb. 18, 2011... God willing.

"odd and pixeled"

I logged on to a live chat with New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik yesterday afternoon, discussing his piece in the new issue "What Did Jesus Do?" It's a smart review of the spate of new books on Jesus, including Bart Ehrman's Jesus, Interrupted. (Ehrman will be our department's first Lyceum Lecture guest early next year, stay tuned.)

Reminded me of the "biotech & ethics" Friday chats we did a couple years back: rapid-fire, a bit choppy, but fun and challenging and quickly over.

Here was my little exchange. (The excisions marked by [...] indicate moments when all those other unseen chatters rushed in to interrupt with their own agendas. You obviously couldn't do this in the flesh, it would be too much like a presidential press conference.)

3:35

[Comment From Osopher] 

Thanks for clarifying the end of the essay. But it still bothers me that you evoke a "mystery" surrounding this man, rightly credited by Jefferson with moments of moral sublimity but also documented by Bart Ehrman and others as having been almost uniformly misunderstood. So my question: what do you see as the unsolved mystery about Jesus of Nazareth?

3:36

Adam Gopnik: By "unsolved mystery" I meant only that there are aspects of the Jesus myth that are just never going to be susceptible to rational judgment, and that faith, as everyone says, remains a leap -- foolish or necessary -- but a leap past reason. [...]

3:38

[Comment From Osopher] 

So the mystery might be more about us: why do so many find reason so uncongenial?

3:39

Adam Gopnik: Because our lives are bounded by the certainty of death, I suppose, and what reason can give us seems, to some -- to so many -- unsatisfying. I'm with Darwin on this one -- enough in life to give anyone meaning, if we make it hard enough -- but I understand the opposite feeling. Much the best account of this, I think-- this double feeling --is in William James's "Varieties Of Religious Experience" [...]

3:42

[Comment From Osopher] 

Totally agree about Darwin and James. Thanks for the chat and for the review, I've got to go and pick up the kids now.

3:43

Adam Gopnik: Pleasure sharing views; even in this odd and pixeled forum.

And I do totally agree: many of us don't feel a need for Jesus to furnish our lives with meaning, though we admire his message-- which was not exclusively his, of course-- of hope and charity and love and forgiveness etc.  But like William James and Adam Gopnik I must also acknowledge the "double feeling" of so many others for whom sweet reason seems not to be enough.

It is indeed a pleasure sharing views. But I don't think I'll be joining your "mafia family" (an avatar-driven online game, I presume? ), Adam. Thanks for the invite, but I already feel a little guilty for the time I stole to join you online yesterday. But only a little.

holy books

Very interesting discussion in class today, stoked by a report pointing out Biblical inconsistencies, contradictions, unflattering depictions of Jesus, and in general the ongoing failure of the devout to answer "Epicurus's old questions" that converge on what Bart Ehrman calls "God's Problem," challenging the plausibility of an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good Supreme Being. Muslim students were quick to offer their measured and respectful agreement that the Christian Bible is a deeply flawed document, reflecting the contributions of many human hands over the centuries... unlike, they contended, the Holy Koran.

"Although many Christians revere the Bible, few if any treat it with the same degree of reverence as Muslims treat the Qur’an. Indeed, it is argued that a much closer parallel in Christianity is not the Bible, but Jesus Christ: 'If Christ is the Word of God made flesh, the Koran is the Word of God made text, and questioning its sanctity or authority is thus considered an outright attack on Islam — as Salman Rushdie knows all too well.'" (A. Cline)

Far from revering the Bible as untouchable, many prominent and pious Christians through the centuries have openly challenged its authenticity. Thomas Jefferson even took scissors to it, snipping all the supernatural bits.

Some scholars contend that What the Koran Really Says is not any more "clear, or mubin," than the Bible.

"Indeed, the Koran could well stand as the supreme example of a man-made text, worked over and doctored to an unfathomable extent, and subsequently endowed with a transcendental provenance by the associative and projective proclivities of the human imagination... 'if you look at it, you will notice that every fifth sentence simply doesn't make sense…. The fact is that a fifth of the Koranic text is just incomprehensible.' If this is the case, why is the impression abroad, among both Muslims and non-Muslims, that we not only know what the Koran is, but what it says? The explanation lies in the fact that once the Koran existed, in some form or another, not necessarily the form we know today, people began to make up stories about it..."

I don't know if that explanation will stand, but I'm very pleased that we were all able to leave class today amicably and in agreement that there's nothing wrong with disagreeing, so long as we do it respectfully and with ears open.

Made me proud, how much better we handled our little debate than did the ranting, raving, self-righteous monomaniac and his understandably-incensed detractors in front of our student center yesterday around noon. (Read about it in the student newspaper Sidelines... here's a philosophy student's first-hand account, including Preacher's outrageous statement that women "ask for" sexual assault. Apparently it's all women's responsibility to dress modestly, so as to protect Preacher and his pals from their own uncontrollable lust. How indistinguishable fundamentalists from different traditions are, at close range.)

The poor fool was evidently incapable of noticing the irony in his long list of human types and behaviors allegedly hated by their loving Creator.

If there's a hell, sounds like, it'd be a nice place to visit: all the fun people will be there.

But maybe Jean-Paul Sartre got this one right: hell is just (some) other people.