Have you ever wondered what a book reviewer would say if they were naive about the claims made for the Bible and were asked to review it? Today on NPR's Fresh Air Terry Gross interviewed
Bart Ehrman: The Gospel Truth: Sometimes A Little Hazy. Dr. Ehrman is author of a number of books about the Bible. Ehrman is anything but naive having been a "born again" Christian and one who thought the Bible had to be taken literally. Professor Ehrman who is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of more than a dozen books his latest being: Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing The Hidden Contradictions In The Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them). That title gives away the fact that his views have changed after years and years of delving into original texts, etc. Look below the break to see what he had to say along with some thoughts of another who once shared his earlier views and also changed as he learned more.
The Bible is a unique book even if compared with others like the Koran, for example. Its uniqueness is in its malleability in the hands of those who use it. It is clearly a book meant to be used. It probably has created more of the events that shaped Western Civilization than any collection of other influences I could list on one page. Here we are in the early days of the 21st century and we still are dominated by the book whether we like it or not. Thus the question in my opening:
How would the Bible be reviewed in a situation where the reviewer could be made naive to all the history and other context that shapes peoples attitudes to it?
An impossible question at best, yet one that conjures up an exercise of imagination. Today's interview on Fresh Air left that idea burning in my mind. At one time in my life I had almost memorized the entire book. I knew links between verses and passages and could recite one whatever the subject I was discussing. That is a minor level of understanding of the King James edition when compared to Dr. Ehrman who has devoted a major part of his life to studying in depth the book's origins and related documents that were excluded from the final cut.
Dr. Ehrman talked about the four Gospels and the differences between them. He made an interesting assertion, namely that people tend to lump the four together and thereby actually create a version that does not even exist in the Bible! His analysis made clear the confusion the different authors had about who Jesus actually was and what his crucifiction was all about. It seems clear that one would have to have a very different belief structure if the practice of personal rewriting were abandoned and an actual literal interpretation were attempted.
Here are some excerpts from the Fourth Chapter of his latest book Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them):
Students taking a college-level Bible course for the first time often find it surprising that we don't know who wrote most of the books of the New Testament. How could that be? Don't these books all have the authors' names attached to them? Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, the letters of Paul, 1 and 2 Peter, and 1, 2 and 3 John? How could the wrong names be attached to books of Scripture? Isn't this the Word of God? If someone wrote a book claiming to be Paul while knowing full well that he wasn't Paul—isn't that lying? Can Scripture contain lies?
When I arrived at seminary I was fully armed and ready for the onslaught on my faith by liberal biblical scholars who were going to insist on such crazy ideas. Having been trained in conservative circles, I knew that these views were standard fare at places like Princeton Theological Seminary. But what did they know? Bunch of liberals.
What came as a shock to me over time was just how little actual evidence there is for the traditional ascriptions of authorship that I had always taken for granted, and how much real evidence there was that many of these ascriptions are wrong. It turned out the liberals actually had something to say and had evidence to back it up; they weren't simply involved in destructive wishful thinking. There were some books, such as the Gospels, that had been written anonymously, only later to be ascribed to certain authors who probably did not write them (apostles and friends of the apostles). Other books were written by authors who flat out claimed to be someone they weren't.
In this chapter I'd like to explain what that evidence is.
That should be enough to make the point. So it indeed is a book to be used and like the "free market" buyer beware! So much power is wielded because this simple bit of scholarship is systematically ignored and those who produce it or cite it are placed in a category of such careful framing that it could never be imagined in a work of fiction! You know what I am talking about. We see it out there every day, Global Warming, Climate Change, The Food Scam, etc. These are all possible because the public has been immunized against scholarship and what it produces for us. The anti-intellectual frame is the most powerful piece of unconscious programming ever accomplished. Information is dangerous and therefore it must be guarded against and only when stamped "approved" by an authority figure can it be trusted. Thinking for yourself is evil and asking for trouble. I maintain that it is the Bible that has achieved this miracle. The miracle of negating the usefulness of the human mind.
We all saw the obvious connections between the religious right and the repressive anti-intellectual bravado of the Bush administration. What still lingers as a question for me, and others, is why so many of the American people could be swindled by these people. Twice yet! That question goes deeper into what framing of this kind can do to the human mind. I bring this up again because it is clear to me that it has not gone away. We relish when the republicans put on the latest versions of a cat fight, but we are not there yet. They did win the framing battle for some time and are rich and powerful enough to hire another batch of scholars to come up with a new round. The funny part is that their success was due to spending lots of money, time and effort on scholarship of a limited kind.
So I welcome programs like today's Fresh Air on NPR. They keep us thinking about the framing thing and how potent it actually is. Otherwise we might be prone to letting our guard down. The last eight years should have taught us the price of doing that.