I mentioned here that I’ve been thinking a lot about understanding and addressing millennial apostasy. I’ve been doing this by identifying and looking through several lenses, one of which is a loss of confidence in the authority of Scripture. In my research, I’ve found that Bart Ehrman’s New York Times bestseller Misquoting Jesus has been a major contributor to this trend in Gen Y.
For example, one millennial couple who heard Ehrman speak noted his scholarship and “well-crafted criticism,” saying he left all with an impression that “objective truth is unknowable; ultimately, it comes down to your interpretation; ultimately it comes down to what you think.”[1]
Given its influence, I decided to read Misquoting Jesus for myself.I found it scholarly, thorough, a bit boring, and—as a seminary grad—about many things I already knew. Given that it supposedly rocked the world of so many now formerly evangelicals or Christians, I kept expecting it to be a lot more faith-damning.
Admittedly, it was a little tricky to figure out what Ehrman’s main point was. Maybe “scribes changed scripture so we can too?” Or “Inerrancy is not accurate…” Ok… well is the Bible still trustworthy? On this, Ehrman talks out of both sides of his mouth. For example, early in the book he refers to “error-ridden copies of the autographs” and then admits in several other places: “To be sure, of all the hundreds of thousands of textual changes found among our manuscripts, most of them are completely insignificant, immaterial, [and] of no real importance…”[2]
So, again, what is his big point?! I couldn’t find it in his conclusion but here is an oft-quoted statement from his introduction:
“How does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant world of God if in fact we don’t have the words that God inerrantly inspired, but only the words copied by the scribes—sometimes correctly but sometimes (many times!) incorrectly.? What good is it to say that the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don’t have the originals! Only error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them… in thousands of ways.”[3]
Friends, Ehrman’s questions are important but I certainly don’t think they’re apostasy-worthy. In fact, many who’ve seriously considered and answered them have come to greater faith in the reliability of Scripture. (I’ll touch on this more next week.) Even Ehrman affirms that “for the most part their [copyists and scribes] intention was to conserve the tradition, not to change it.”
Agreed. The problem is that, in our day of revisionist history, hedonism, and pragmatism, the intention is often to change not conserve—to jettison whatever is “oppressive” or “archaic” in the biblical canon. Folks like Nadia Bolz-Weber, for instance—as I’ve written about here, have no interest in accurately passing on the tradition, only updating and corrupting it.
Perhaps Ehrman is most dangerous to those who grew up in rigid homes with a King-James-only mentality, little imagination, and/or a predisposition for always taking the Bible literally. As evidence for this, one friend, in describing how Ehrman contributed to his friend’s abandoning faith, wrote: “Scripture was always presented [to my friend] as a ‘jot and title’ perfect creation that was accurate to the number of casualties on a battlefield. Seeing the reality [that Ehrman describes in Misquoting Jesus] of the various ‘copies, of copies, of copies,’ made that crumble and, now the whole thing becomes suspect…”
Ehrman, himself, says he came from a very conservative, evangelical background and some of his hang-ups with the Bible evidence a guy with little tolerance for life’s messiness. Perhaps he’s gone from wooden literalism to wooden liberalism? And then, later, into agnosticism and atheism? (See how he describes his personal beliefs here.)
N.T Wright’s observations on Ehrman and his teaching are a fitting conclusion to part 1:
[1] Michael and Lauren Mcaffee, Not What You Think: Why the Bible Might Be Nothing We Expected and Yet Everything We Need (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2019), 58.
[2] Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (New York: Harper, 2005), 207.
[3] Ibid. 7.