What if Bart Ehrman learned theology?

Or, why he's still a fundamentalist

Jul 08, 2024

Fellow Pilgrims,

To be fair, I’m not really talking here about Bart Ehrman, though he does fit what I want to talk about.

What happens when we understand the Bible only as a historical document, like other documents? A document which we can judge reliable or unreliable in the way we might judge other documents? What happens when we think it’s our job to find the meaning of the text, instead of learning something about theology and so about hermeneutics and so about what it means to live by faith?

Ehrman, with other similar critics, remains fundamentally (ahem, yes, I did choose that adjective for a reason) trapped in errors of the kind of Christianity he’s left behind. That is, he thinks the text is primarily a record (or a bad record) of facts, and he thinks it’s his job to prove the accuracy of his reading to the rest of us.

A girl reading the Bible (1823) Marie Ellenrieder, via Artvee

A New Testament scholar with an enormous public presence—writing trade books, speaking widely, and offering courses—Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He studied at Moody Bible Institute, Wheaton College, and Princeton. Before becoming an evangelical anti-evangelical, he was an evangelical Christian.

There is a (common) style of conservative American Christianity—we can call it “fundamentalist” or “evangelical,” depending on how we’re using those terms—which understands scripture to be a literal record of events. The job of the biblical scholar, on this understanding, might be to prove the historicity of biblical events, or it might be to find the original meaning of the biblical text through historical inquiry into cultural and contextual backgrounds.

When fundamentalist/evangelical Christianity decided it needed to save scripture from modernist reinterpretation, it took up the modernist’s tools for the fight. For the modernist, we must know by sight and not by faith, and so emerging evangelical biblical scholarship sought to offer proof of the truth of scripture. (For an incredibly helpful read on this, see George Marsden’s Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism.)

My point about Ehrman is just this: though he renounced evangelical Christianity, he still understands the job of the biblical scholar in precisely this modernist way. Instead of proving historicity, he may seek to disprove, and instead of establishing the Christian meaning of the text he may seek to establish another meaning, but he’s doing the same job he thought he would be doing when he started studying the Bible at evangelical institutions.

A quotation, from Ehrman’s Jesus, Interrupted, which I hear trotted out fairly often:

“One of the most amazing and perplexing features of mainstream Christianity is that seminarians who learn the historical-critical method in their Bible classes appear to forget all about it when it comes time for them to be pastors. They are taught critical approaches to Scripture, they learn about the discrepancies and contradictions, they discover all sorts of historical errors and mistakes, they come to realize that it is difficult to know whether Moses existed or what Jesus actually said and did, they find that there are other books that were at one time considered canonical but that ultimately did not become part of Scripture (for example, other Gospels and Apocalypses), they come to recognize that a good number of the books of the Bible are pseudonymous (for example, written in the name of an apostle by someone else), that in fact we don't have the original copies of any of the biblical books but only copies made centuries later, all of which have been altered. They learn all of this, and yet when they enter church ministry they appear to put it back on the shelf.”

This is a remarkable set of statements.

First, Ehrman expresses certainty about his interpretation of debated matters. For instance, one can’t simply say that it’s difficult to know “what Jesus actually said and did.” This claim depends a great deal on one’s methodology, among other things. A quick survey of statements from Ehrman shows this tone of certainty is completely characteristic of him. He knows the right way to read the text, and he admits no other possible readings. (An aside: in my opinion, to express certainty about debated matters is a particularly irresponsible way of teaching, whatever one’s faith commitments or lack thereof. I don’t mean that teachers shouldn’t share their convictions with students, but it’s harmful to pretend those convictions are unrivaled.)

In some cases, I wonder if Ehrman believes his own stump speech: he speaks of books, “at one time considered canonical” that “ultimately did not become part of Scripture.” This is rather a nonsense statement. To be considered canonical simply is to have become part of the canon of Scripture, there’s just no such thing as “once considered canonical” (except in the case of the deuterocanonical books, but Ehrman, here, claims to be talking early church). By “once considered canonical,” I suppose Ehrman means something like “written around the same time as the canonical books and used by some Christian communities.” The very idea of canon assumes the existence of books that aren’t part of the canon. Ehrman presents this simple common knowledge as a sinister and surprising discovery of modern biblical scholarship.

The same goes for the business about the reliability of biblical manuscripts as transmitted over time. The fact that there are textual discrepancies is not news to Christian scholars of scripture, but it is also not nearly the dramatic situation Ehrman suggests. What is, in fact, remarkable, about the transmission of the biblical texts is how reliable that transmission has been, so much so that scholars, like Ehrman, can identify those unusual instances in which we have questions about transmission.

Most startling, though, is the way Ehrman drops the idea that some biblical books are pseudonymous (that is, they may not have been written by the human authors tradition has assumed for them). He says this as though such knowledge is automatically and obviously disqualifying for any theology which would understand scripture to be the inspired Word of God. But this knowledge is only disqualifying to an understanding of biblical authority which shares the modernist assumptions Ehrman takes from his Christian life into his post-Christian scholarly life. There is no part of me that needs Moses to have authored the Pentateuch to secure its authority as scripture. The authority of the text rests in God.

Since the ancient period, Christians have been well aware of all the questions Ehrman raises here. Augustine, for instance, sees contradictions in the timelines of the gospels, but what he doesn’t do is believe this is a problem. This is because Augustine does not ask scripture to be a piece of post-Enlightenment historiography; he asks it to be itself, the surprising, complicated, sometimes ineffable, revelation of a transcendent God who chooses to work together with the human authors of scripture so that we might know the truth about who God is. More simply, Augustine is happy to let a gospel be a gospel and not a history book.

I’m not denying that the gospels are historical, neither is Augustine, but I am saying the genre of “gospel” is more interesting and complicated than the genre of “timeline.” This is because timelines exist to give us timelines, while gospels exist so that we might know the person Jesus Christ, “and that by believing [we] may have life in his name” (John 20:31).

Old Woman Reading the Bible (1663), Quirijn Van Brekelenkam, via Artvee

And I’m not denying that historical and cultural backgrounds can help us to understand the scriptures, but I am denying that the meaning of the text can be circumscribed by those backgrounds.

What if Ehrman had never been taught that scripture is for “proof” and timelines and refuting of science?

Or what if, when he learned that scripture is not as good at “proof” as it is at introducing us to Jesus, he had also been introduced to ways of thinking about this theologically? What if he had been taught that the messiness of canon, in which God chooses to work together with the church and human beings in order to bring us the revelatory Word, is a beautiful messiness, a messiness which reveals something to us about the love of a God who loves humans in our messes?

Every great Christian theologian, from the first century to the present, has understood that scripture requires interpretation, and that this is a feature of the text, not a bug. Admitting this—even embracing this—does not require denying the authority of scripture. Ehrman’s story suggests the opposite: the authority of scripture cannot operate without a theology, a theology that itself arises from scripture, a theology which helps us to read the Word well, as those who are intimates of the person, Jesus, to whom that Word testifies. And the authority of scripture operates in community, wherein the saints testify to the truth of the Word, spurring each other on to righteousness.

What if early evangelical Christians were right, that many modernist reinterpretations of Christian faith would make that faith something other than Christian? But what if they were wrong, that scripture needs defending or proving? What if we laid down our modernist tools and embraced the messy, complicated, literary canon of scripture on its own terms? What if we didn’t try to clean up that which we might perceive as messes? What if the messes are central to the revelatory?

David Steinmetz argued that modernist tools are inadequate to the nature of the biblical text, in his famous essay, “The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis,”1

Ehrman still wants to extract the correct meaning (for Ehrman, not a Christian meaning) from the text, but there’s another way in which he’s still an evangelical. He really, really wants to share the “good news” he’s found in rejecting scripture as revelatory.

One could be cynical, and assume he’s mostly sharing to make money (and he does, make money), but I feel an evangelical fervor there. At my most hopeful, I might view it as a longing for the real good news, not the defense of biblical inerrancy, but the news of the personal revelation of the Word made flesh.

Grace & peace,

BFJ

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Steinmetz, D. C. (1980). The Superiority of Pre-Critical Exegesis. Theology Today, 37(1), 27-38.