Who to Believe?

In this New York Times bestseller, leading Bible expert Bart Ehrman skillfully demonstrates that the New Testament is riddled with contradictory views about who Jesus was and the significance of his life. Ehrman reveals that many of the books were written in the names of the apostles by Christians living decades later, and that central Christian doctrines were the inventions of still later theologians. Although this has been the standard and widespread view of scholars for two centuries, most people have never learned of it.

Amazon.com product description of
Jesus Interrupted by Bart Ehrman

In "How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God?" Larry Hurtado investigates the keen devotion to Jesus that emerged with surprising speed after his death. Reverence for Jesus among early Christians, notes Hurtado, included both grand claims about Jesus' significance and a pattern of devotional practices that effectively treated him as divine. Directed at readers across religious lines, this book argues that whatever one makes of such devotion to Jesus, the subject at least deserves serious historical consideration.

Amazon.com product description of
How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God by Larry W. Hurtado

I've just started reading Hurtado's book, but I'm already impressed with both his scholarship and humility. I've already read and reviewed Ehrman's book and although I don't agree with all of his conclusions, he too makes a compelling case. And thereby lies my problem.

I've been turning this issue over in the back of my mind for awhile, but reading Hurtado yesterday forced the issue to the surface, something like an eruption at Old Faithful. It wasn't the only catalyst, but I'll explain the rest in a moment.

I've been reading books written by all of these scholars, theologians, and Bible experts and trying to put everything they're telling me into some kind of framework that makes sense and helps me sort out my faith. The problem is, most of them make a sort of sense and I can see all of their points of view. They're well educated and they know their stuff. The problem is, they don't all agree with each other. The real problem is, I don't operate at anywhere near their level of intelligence or education. How am I supposed to critique and evaluate one view vs. the other? How am I supposed to read all these books and say "this one's right and that one's wrong?"

This isn't just a matter of deciding between Ehrman, a New Testament scholar who is an agnostic and most assuredly doesn't believe in the deity of Jesus, and Hurtado, a Professor of New Testament Language and theology at the University of Edinburgh, who certainly does make a case for the deity of Christ, but all of the other learned teachers who have published their opinions and understandings.

For instance, Hurtado mentions Maurice Casey and his book From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God, which I also reviewed and found convincing, and refutes Casey's conclusions that the church arrived at the decision to "make" Jesus a God centuries after the resurrection and ascension. Hurtado makes a pretty good point about the early adoption of the worship of Jesus, but I either have to take his word for it that Casey is wrong or somehow replicate Hurtado's and Casey's research and see for myself, which is beyond my cognitive and educational abilities.

It's not just the big time experts either. I happened to mention (and I've been mentioning this a lot), that I find Paul Philip Levertoff's perspective on the Gospels to be particularly convincing, largely because Levertoff seems to solve many of my personal problems with the traditional Christian viewpoint on Christ. However, there are other opinions that oppose my personal judgment:

Let us stop to consider what you are arguing here: you are arguing that a first-century Jewish teacher is better understood in the context of eighteenth-century Jewish mysticism from Poland derived primarily from a thirteenth-century work of Jewish mysticism from Spain than in the context of his students' (John) students' (Polycarp) students (Iraneus) ninety years later.

While I think you can make a case that the unique perspectives of a Chasidic Jewish scholar who lived less than 100 years ago might say more about the ancient Jewish teachings of Jesus than Gentiles who lived much closer to the time of Christ, I'm hardly an expert and after all, I can be wrong. The young man who made this comment on one of my recent blog posts is intelligent and certainly better educated in both Christian and Jewish theologies than I am. In trying to understand, explain, and defend my evolving comprehension of who Jesus is and what he taught, I'm barely able to keep my head above water.

How do people do it? How do people seem so completely sure of what they believe, not just in general, but down to the most minute details?

I do have one answer. I noticed something when I was reading Hurtado's book. I bought a used copy from Amazon and the book has various highlights and underlines (apparently made by the original owner of the book) pointing out specific parts of the text. So far, I've noticed that the passages treated thus all support the deity of Jesus and the idea that worship of Jesus as God occurred almost immediately after the ascension and certainly within the first 30 years after the ascension of the Jewish Messiah to the right hand of God the Father.

I think people read books that support the positions they already hold. I previously made the point that I thought Bowman's and Komoszewski's book Putting Jesus in His Place seemed specifically written for an audience that already believed the book's central assumptions (and the book is written as a teaching aid for Bible studies to present the conclusions of the authors).

I suppose only reading books that support your already held beliefs works in a sense, but what about people like me who are trying to get a wider perspective? Are we just supposed to take an expert's or a group of experts' word that they are right and everyone else is wrong? Which expert or experts are we supposed to believe? On what basis do we choose to believe one scholar and not the other? I want to be a good "Berean", but apparently they were a lot smarter than I am.

I can see agnostics and atheists believing Ehrman because his viewpoint supports their own. I can see evangelical Christians believing Bowman and Komoszewski because the points they make in their book support the evangelical view of Jesus. I can see more scholarly Christians who support the deity of Christ going for Hurtado's book because that's what he presents. I can see people like me, who need to believe that Christianity isn't totally and completely divorced from a Jewish conceptualization (Jewish Messiah teaching Jewish disciples, revealing mysteries in a Jewish mystic context in first century Judea...seems like there ought to be a Jewish interpretation being employed to me) gravitating toward people like Levertoff, who see the Gospels as closely mapping to Chasidic mystical teachings.

But are we supposed to make these sort of conclusions based on what seems or feels right to us? Is there nothing objective to our understanding of God? In the final analysis, are we just letting our personalities determine what is right and what is wrong as far as how we understand our faith in Jesus?

If anyone's got an answer to these questions, I'm all ears.

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.

Polar Ecclesiology

Some scholars have thought that the Ebionites may have held views very much like those of the first followers of Jesus, such as his brother James or his disciple Peter, both leaders of the church in Jerusalem in the years after Jesus' death. James in particular appears to have held to the ongoing validity of Jewish law for all followers of Jesus. His view, and evidently that of the Ebionites later, was that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah sent from the Jewish God to the Jewish people in fulfillment of the Jewish law. Therefore, anyone who wanted to follow Jesus had to be Jewish. If a gentile man converted to the faith, he had to be circumcised, since circumcision always had been the requirement of a male to become a follower of the God of Israel, as God himself demanded in the law (Genesis 17:10-14).

Jesus Interrupted
Chapter Six: How We Got the Bible
by Bart D Ehrman

Apparently Dr. Ehrman didn't take the Acts 15 letter into account when he wrote his opinion about James, the brother of the Master and head of the Jerusalem Council. Otherwise, he's almost describing a group who I would term as "proto-Messianic Jewish". These are Jews who believed that Jesus (Yeshua) was the prophesied Messiah and that the Messiah taught nothing that was inconsistent with Jewish cultural and religious practice and lifestyle. Dr. Ehrman further states that the:

...Ebionites were strict Jewish monotheists. As such, they did not think that Jesus was himself divine. There could be only one God. Instead, Jesus was the human appointed by God to be Messiah. He was not born of a virgin: his parents were Joseph and Mary, and he was a very righteous man whom God had adopted to be his son and to whom he had given a mission of dying on the Cross to atone for the sins of others.

OK, I don't know of any Messianic Jewish groups who publicly identify with the description of the Ebionites given by Dr. Ehrman, but it is interesting that this New Testament scholar and rather prolific writer does describe a group of early "Jewish Christians" who hold a set of beliefs and an "identity" substantially similar to modern Messianic Jews. Of course, their theology, according to Ehrman at least, is not consistent with Bilateral Ecclesiology in that they did not believe Gentiles could be disciples of the Jewish Messiah without becoming circumcised; that is, without converting to Judaism.

Interestingly enough, Ehrman says that Paul disagreed with the Ebionites and insisted...that the God of Jesus was the God of all people and that gentiles did not have to become Jewish to follow Jesus. Ehrman goes on to say that Paul believed that faith in the death and resurrection is what allowed a person to have right standing with God, not keeping the law, but that Paul believed this true for Jews and Gentiles alike. His writing paints a picture of two different viewpoints in the early Church (and there were many more, according to Christian scholars), one adhered to by the Jewish Ebionites who held to a very Torah-based, Jewish view of Jesus as Messiah, and the other by Paul and his followers, who believed (again, according to what is in Ehrman's book) that the law was no longer relevant to either Jewish or Gentile followers of Jesus.

Modern Messianic Judaism splits the difference by saying Paul believed (more or less) like the Ebionites as far as Jesus being the Messiah and that Jews should continue to live by the Torah, but that the Torah was not applicable or relevant to non-Jewish believers.

I don't want to get much more involved in the details since to do so would be to write a blog post as long as Ehrman's book. However, it is interesting to take a look at the New Testament through the eyes of a Gentile (and formerly Christian) New Testament scholar and see his take on those bits and pieces of information Messianic Judaism reorganizes as Bilateral Ecclesiology. Ehrman describes more of a "polar (opposite) ecclesiology" represented as two competing groups of Christians. In fact, based on the various writings and perspectives of the different "Christianities" existing in the first and into the second century C.E., there were a number of different theologies running around out there, some stating that Jesus was divine and others saying not.

I found some of Ehrman's opinions and findings consistent with what I previously read in Richard Rubenstein's When Jesus Became God. Both Ehrman and Rubenstein have concluded that much of what we understand as the theological foundation of the Christian church today, including the issues of Christ's divinity, the Trinity, the meaning of the death and resurrection, and other core beliefs, weren't solidified in the Church until the Nicene Council in the early 4th century C.E. According to both these men, there is no evidence of a widespread worship of Jesus as God prior to this period in history, nor a final selection of canon for the Bible. This allowed Gospels and letters we do not have in our modern Bibles to be considered, at least by some groups, to be just as authoritative as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (and the Gospel of John is thought to have been "developed" by a Gentile "johannine community" after the destruction of the Temple, to support a much less Jewish perception of Jesus than seen in the other Gospels).

I'm not saying I buy everything these authors are selling, but I do believe that the Bible is a document that must be read and considered as much through the lens of faith and the Spirit as through the mind and intellect. The value of reading the works of men like Ehrman and Rubenstein is that they have the ability to bend and stretch us in ways we wouldn't be willing to do for ourselves. They also present ideas and opinions you won't typically hear from the pulpit of a Church or the bema of a Messianic Synagogue.

At this point, I've finished Erhman's book and am ready to pursue my next "reading assignment". I consider what Ehrman wrote and what he teaches to be valuable, not because I always agree with his perspective, but because he allows us to remove what you might consider our "rose-colored glasses" so that we can see our Bible with all of its warts, scars, and wrinkles. This is what the Bible looks like when we view it through the lens of historical-critical analysis, which is the method Ehrman and other Bible scholars use to examine the Biblical texts.

Dr. Bart Ehrman and Jesus Interrupted is only one step in my walk of faith, but Ehrman and his writing is an important step. As people of faith, we must confront the teachings and logic of those people who do not share our faith (Dr. Ehrman was previously a Christian but now describes himself as an agnostic) or our view of the Bible. We can learn much from how he sees the Word of God and how he, and scholars like him (and Ehrman readily admits that most of his peers are Christians) explain where the Bible came from and what they think it means.

I will write one more blog dedicated to my experience reading Jesus Interrupted, specifically about Erhman's opinion of whether or not, in light of his understanding of the Bible, a person can continue to have a viable faith. His answer may surprise you.

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.

The Danger Zone

For most Christians, who don't have a conservative evangelical view like the one I had, these textual facts can be interesting, but there is nothing in them to challenge their faith, which is built on something other than having the very words that God inspired in the Bible. And I certainly never intended to lead anyone away from the Christian faith; critics who have suggested that I myself stopped being a Christian once I realized there were differences among our manuscripts are simply wrong and being ridiculous.

Bart D. Ehrman
Jesus Interrupted (2009)

I've got less than 100 pages of Ehrman's book left, but as his writing unfolds before me, I'm gaining a greater understanding of what he's trying to communicate. There is, indeed a danger of a Christian's faith taking a serious hit by reading Ehrman's scholarly opinion (which is based on lots of research) that the Bible is a far less than perfectly consistent document. Yet, in the footnote accompanying the above-quote, Ehrman states that the "textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament" did not lead to his loss of faith, but rather it was "the problem of suffering (in the world) "that eventually led me to become an agnostic."

I actually suspect that the issue of suffering for Ehrman was much more personal than simply a feeling of anguish over the suffering of the world wide population of humans, both in the present and throughout history. In his recorded debate with Dr. Michael Brown on whether or not the Bible provides an adequate explanation for human suffering, Ehrman states that his father's diagnosis of cancer and subsequent death had a significant impact. Ehrman further states during the debate, that a Christian "ministered" to his father, anointed him with oil and told him point blank that God would heal him. No, not that God might heal him, could heal him, or had the power to heal him but, according to Ehrman's account, the Christian said that God would (apparently without a shadow of a doubt) heal him.

Ehrman says his father was tormented for the rest of his days by this pronouncement and was not healed but instead died.

I can't possibly know everything that happened relative to these events and exactly how Ehrman's faith was deconstructed since I only have one book and one recording to go on. However, based on not only the words but the tone of both Ehrman's voice in the recording, and the "tone" of Ehrman's words in his book, he seems to be very angry.

Keep in mind, I can't know this, I can only infer some sort of meaning from the two sources I just mentioned.

What's this got to do with you and me? Plenty.

What is faith?

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for. -Hebrews 11:1-2

That's the standard Christian response to my question but it doesn't even begin to touch on what faith really means. In the class I taught last night, as part of our discussion on what Jesus taught about humility and mercy, someone asked "How do you know that you've really been forgiven?"

Good question. There's no objective event that occurs when you are forgiven of your sins by God. Both Luke 5:20 and James 5:15 say that faith is the required ingredient for forgiveness. Mark 16:16 says that "he who believes and is baptized shall be saved." In other words, God doesn't give us a certificate of proof when he forgives us of our sins. We "know" we are forgiven, based on the relevant passages in the Bible and particularly by faith.

James, I am very concerned about the slippery slope you are on. You are reading the same books (Ehrman, etc.) that my formerly zealous intellectual Messianic friends read....and they ended up rabid atheists spewing the most horrid blasphemies against the God of the Bible all over the Internet. It breaks my heart to watch these train wrecks unfold before my eyes. The cognitive dissonance you are experiencing is dangerous. I have seen this confusion take its toll on others very close to me. Please be careful! Praying for you.....and all of us.

Tandi's comment on Judah Himango's blog post
Set Your Hope On Moses

I suppose just reading books by scholars like Bart Ehrman can be dangerous to one's faith, but on the other hand, if faith cannot survive close scrutiny, how much of a faith can it be? At the end of Jesus Interrupted (which I haven't read yet), Ehrman answers the question about whether or not he believes there can be a faith after understanding (and accepting) his perspective on the limited validity and internal inconsistencies of the Bible. At this point, I'm convinced there can be a faith. It wasn't the "evidence" or lack thereof contained in the Bible that resulted in Ehrman's decision to put aside his faith, but his experiences with suffering (and I'll be fair here), both of a personal nature and based on his compassion for humanity in general, that resulted in his walking away from God.

And yet, there are many, many believers across history who have suffered as much or more, have questioned the Bible severely, and who have undergone crises of faith, and still clung tightly to the living God. The answer to keeping your faith or losing it isn't based on external conditions alone. Faith is personal. No two people experience faith in exactly the same way, anymore than no two married couples experience their love and attachment to each other in an identical fashion.

Bart Ehrman and people like him (including my own brother) who once had a faith and then lost it, have decided to put it away (saying a person has "lost" their faith implies that it was accidentally misplaced, not that the person made a conscious and deliberate decision to not have that faith anymore) for individual and personal reasons. It's the difference (in general terms) between one married couple whose relationship survives a series of terrible problems and continues to exist and even perhaps becomes stronger, and another married couple who goes through the same problems and decides to divorce. The only difference for us is that God is always faithful in His relationships; it is we human beings who are the weak link in the relationship.

Ehrman made a decision to tell God that he wanted a "divorce". His decision doesn't have to affect anyone else and it certainly doesn't have to affect me. Does that mean my faith is blind and that I deny all objective evidence and cling to God in a superstitious manner? Not at all. It does mean that faith is more than examining the books of the Bible from a purely historical perspective, and viewing God's word from a strictly literalist, all-or-nothing, point of view.

I can't grow and strengthen my faith unless I challenge it. I can only challenge it by stepping outside my comfort area into the danger zone, and exposing myself to different perspectives on who Jesus is and what he means. Too many believers sit in church pews week after week as if they were in a warm, comfortable womb, and allow their Pastors to teach and preach only on how much Jesus loves us and how forgiveness is always available...and who completely ignore any responsibility we may have to God and to our fellow human beings as believers and disciples of the Jewish Messiah.

Hard questions and even questions that have no apparent answer don't mean that faith is lost. It means that faith is challenged. Some people's faith can survive the challenge, much as Jacob survived his struggle with the angel (Genesis 32:22-32). Faith can win the struggle against impossible odds and even if we are "injured" in the way Jacob was, we are also stronger.

While faith and a relationship with God is personal and unique and thus our challenges of faith are individual, we can't forget the world around us. God originally charged the Children of Israel to be a light to the world (Isaiah 42:6) and I recently mentioned that when we became disciples of the Jewish Messiah, we also inherited that responsibility (Matthew 5:14) and so, like Bart Ehrman, we must be concerned not just with our lives or the lives of those we love, but about everyone, everywhere. That's what "For God so loved the world" (John 3:16) means. But rather than let the "human condition" drive us from God, we need to respond to human suffering the way that God does; with compassion and a message of hope, even when we can't see how everything is going to turn out. That's the short definition of "faith".

500 years ago or so, someone said it this way:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

John Donne
Meditation 17
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.