“What’s the son of a duck? It’s a duck”
Bart Ehrman has gotten a lot of press in recent years over his supposed debunking of the Bible. A former Evangelical, Ehrman has left the Christian faith over the supposed contradictions he has found in the Bible.
Last week, he was on The Cobert Report and frankly, Cobert took him to school:
I have to admit, I’ve never read any of Ehrman’s books. After seeing him on Cobert, I’m not inclined to – his arguments are laughably weak. For example, in the clip above he claims that Jesus is not presented as divine in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark or Luke. This is an old argument that has been debunked on both the popular and scholarly level. The truth is that Ehrman doesn’t understand how 1st century writers like Matthew would express Christ’s divinity. (I’ll give you a hint: it’s not by writing “Jesus is God!”) Pope Benedict shows the fallacy in Ehrman’s claim in Jesus of Nazareth and a fuller treatment can be found in Larry Hurtado’s Lord Jesus Christ. Scholarship has shown decisively that the early Christians considered Jesus divine from the first days of the Church. Moderns may reject his divinity, but it is dishonest to claim that the early Christians and writers of the New Testament did.
Update: Dean gives some informative details in the comments regarding Ehrman’s previous life as a Christian as well as why he left the faith.
A few things worth knowing about Ehrman:
First, he’s coming from a fundamentalist background, not just an evangelical one, and thus from a view on biblical inerrancy so “high” that it’s very hard to maintain honestly and consistently. As he went on to study under/work with Bruce Metzger and became actually acquainted with NT textual criticism, I suspect he quickly found it impossible to adhere to a “direct verbal inspiration” theory and couldn’t/wouldn’t find any other theory of inspiration to replace it.
Second, and more importantly, he’s pretty open about the fact that the determinative point for him is the problem of evil, not all the scripture-criticism stuff. He rejected Christianity because of the problem of evil (see his God’s Problem), and persists on with the biblical criticism because that’s his training and he has to earn a living somehow. So his biblical criticism is done with a predetermined polemical purpose (to support his contention that Christianity is false) – rather than being an impartial inquiry that leads to his conclusion. I think that’s an important distinction.
Honestly, I think the poor fellow is one of those who earnestly desire God on the one hand but will not surrender to Him on the other. Easy for me to say of course, but then I’ve been there and done that and I recognize some of the symptoms.
For what it’s worth, your intuition that his books wouldn’t be worth reading is pretty accurate, in my opinion.
Thanks for that update, Dean. I figured he could not have left fundamentalism over something as simple as the supposed discrepancies in the biblical text.