Can We Trust the Bible on the Historical Jesus?

Bart D. Ehrman, Craig A. Evans, Robert B. Stewart

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781646980017
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Crítica e interpretación bíblicas

This book features a learned and fascinating debate between two great Bible scholars about the New Testament as a reliable source on the historical Jesus. Bart Ehrman, an agnostic New Testament scholar, debates Craig Evans, an evangelical New Testament scholar, about the historical Jesus and what constitutes "history." Their interaction includes such compelling questions as: What are sound methods of historical investigation? What are reliable criteria for determining the authenticity of an ancient text? What roles do reason and inference play? And, of course, interpretation? Readers of this debate—regardless of their interpretive inclinations and biases—are sure to find some confirmation of their existing beliefs, but they will surely also find an honest and well-informed challenge to the way they think about the historical Jesus.

The result? A more open, better informed, and questioning mind, which is better prepared for discovering both truth and contrivance. The debate between Ehrman and Evans along with Stewart's introductory framework make this book an excellent primer to the study of the historical Jesus, and readers will come away with a deeper appreciation for the ongoing quest for the historical Jesus.

Can We Trust the Bible on the Historical Jesus?

A Dialogue between Bart D. Ehrman and Craig A. Evans

[The title of the 2011 Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum and now the title of this book is Can We Trust the Bible on the Historical Jesus? The focus is especially on the Gospels of the New Testament, with a few comments on Acts. In the body of the dialogue, the word “debate” sometimes refers to the dialogue. The conversation had opening statements and responses, but in other ways it was not quite a formal debate. Hence, we have chosen to use the term “dialogue” in the chapter subtitle. But for practical purposes, the two words are interchangeable. The dialogue that follows was intended for oral presentation—to be spoken and heard. As a courtesy to readers of this text, some small editorial changes to grammar have been made to facilitate smoother reading. Notes in the main body of Evans’s discourse were written by Craig Evans and were part of his original paper from which he read during the oral presentation of his opening statement.]

BART EHRMAN: OPENING STATEMENT

Well, thank you very much. It’s a pleasure being with you today. The resolution that we are debating is “Can we trust the Bible on the historical Jesus?” Let me ask, how many of you think that we can trust the Bible on the historical Jesus? Right! How many are fairly sure that you are not going to agree with anything that I have to say? Well, it’s a pleasure being with you anyway. Thank you, Bob, for this invitation, and thanks to the seminary for bringing me in. It is an honor to be with people with whom I disagree, and I appreciate very much the chance to tell you what I think and what I believe. I was here three years ago, having a discussion with Dan Wallace, and I enjoyed it very much and greatly appreciated being well received by a large group of people who completely disagreed with my views. And I certainly am looking forward to sharing my view with an equally worthy opponent, Craig Evans.

Let me begin by saying something about what I understand this resolution to mean. The question is posed: “Can we trust the Bible on the historical Jesus?” I take the term “we” to mean the people today, us. Not people in antiquity. Not people in the Middle Ages. Can we modern people—with modern sensibilities and modern understandings of the world, of history, and of research—trust what the Bible has to say about the historical Jesus? The historical Jesus. We will not be debating whether the Bible tells us great stories about Jesus, nor whether the Bible provides the basis for an adequate theology of Jesus. We are not debating the literary merits or the theological adequacy of the Bible. We are debating its historical reliability, and we are not asking whether the Bible writers did a good job by the standards of their day. We are talking about our day. Can we today trust that the Bible is historically reliable in what it has to say about Jesus? At the outset of this discussion, I should admit that when I began my study of the Bible, I very much believed that the answer was yes. I was a Bible-believing Christian attending the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago. At that time I held to the view of the Moody Bible Institute, which affirmed the verbal-plenary inspiration of Scripture. We believed that the Bible was inspired even to its very words, thus that it was completely inspired. This is similar, I think, to the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, which I quote: “The Holy Bible . . . has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter. Therefore, all Scripture is totally true and trustworthy.”¹ But is that right? Is the Bible totally true? Without any mixture of error? That is the question that I will be addressing with you tonight.

As I said, I believed that when I was a student in the Moody Bible Institute. The more research I did on the matter, the more I began to doubt it. Today I think I can say without reservation that, in fact, the Bible does contain errors and the Bible does contain mistakes with respect to the historical Jesus. And I will try to demonstrate that to you in my short time with you.

After I went to Moody Bible Institute, I went off to Wheaton College to finish my degree, which is in English literature. I learned Greek at Wheaton College and became interested in studying the Greek New Testament. The expert in Greek manuscripts of the New Testament was a scholar named Bruce M. Metzger, who happened to teach at Princeton Theological Seminary. I decided that I wanted to study with the world expert, so I went to that seminary. While I was at Princeton, I learned many things. Princeton, of course, is a Presbyterian school, training Presbyterian ministers. As a ministerial school, it is very theological, although the professors at Princeton Theological Seminary did not hold to the inerrancy of the Bible. They did have a very high view of Scripture, but they allowed that, in fact, there could be some mistakes. At Princeton Theological Seminary I learned a different way of reading the Bible, a manner different from the way most people today read the Bible. Now, I don’t know about people in New Orleans, but I do know about people in Chapel Hill, and I can say how most people there seem to read the Bible. First of all, most people don’t read the Bible at all in my experience. I teach a very large class of undergraduate students at Chapel Hill, and as a rule they have a far greater commitment to the Bible than knowledge about the Bible. They are really sure the Bible is true, but they have never bothered to read it. Students who do read the Bible tend to do it in one of two ways. One way is what I call the “Ouija-board approach.” That’s when you have a question for God and open up the Bible [at random] to find the answer. There it is, in that verse. That is what I call the Ouija-board approach, which many people use. The other way people read the Bible—as people typically read if they are seriously reading the Bible—is what I call reading “vertically”: they start at the top of the page and read to the bottom of the page. And you ask, What’s wrong with that? Well, there is nothing wrong with that. Of course, that’s how you should read the Bible. You should read every book like that. You start at the top, you go to the bottom, then you go to the next page: top to bottom. You start at the beginning of the book and go to the end of the book.

Now when you read the Bible like that, especially the New Testament Gospels, it has a certain effect on you. You start at the beginning with the Gospel of Matthew, Matthew chapter 1, verse 1. And you read through Matthew from top to bottom, vertically. When you read Matthew vertically, you find out a lot about Jesus: Jesus’ birth, Jesus’ ministry, Jesus’ miracles, his teaching, his death, and his resurrection. And then you go to the Gospel of Mark, and you find, in fact, that it’s a very similar story: Jesus’ life, his miracles, his teachings, his death, his resurrection. It sounds a lot like Matthew. And then you read Luke, and it sounds a lot like Matthew and Mark: the birth of Jesus, the life of Jesus, the miracles, the teachings, the death and resurrection. You get to the Gospel of John, and it seems different, but it’s all basically the same thing. It’s the life of Jesus, his miracles, his teachings, his death and resurrection. It all sounds the same because of the way you are reading it, vertically, from beginning to end. The Gospels sound very similar to one another.

Another way to read the Bible, though, is to read it horizontally rather than vertically. A horizontal reading of the Bible is not to be done to the exclusion of the vertical reading; it’s simply a different way to read the Bible, especially the Gospels. The way it works is this: you read a story in one of the Gospels, and then you read the same story in another Gospel. Then you compare the stories. It’s as if you have the Gospels lined up in columns next to each other, and you read across the columns, perusing them horizontally instead of vertically. When you do so, you compare the Gospels carefully with one another.

When you read the Bible in that way, when you read it horizontally, you begin to find mistakes as you compare what one Gospel says about Jesus with what another Gospel says about Jesus in the same story. Let me give you a couple of examples. I should say at the beginning that I was not looking for mistakes when I started reading the Bible this way. I did not want to find mistakes when I started reading the Bible this way. I was reluctant to find mistakes when I read the Bible this way. But I started finding mistakes when I read the Bible this way. As a good conservative Christian, I was not someone who was particularly put off by the big differences in the Bible because I could reconcile those fairly easily. So when the Gospel of Matthew says that the followers of Jesus need to keep the law and Paul says the followers of Jesus do not have to keep the law, I did not have trouble reconciling those two things. When Mark’s Jesus is portrayed as very human, and John’s Jesus is portrayed as very divine, I did not have trouble reconciling those two things. When I started out, I had trouble reconciling the little things, the tiny things.

For example, in Mark 5:21–43 is the famous story of Jesus healing Jairus’s daughter. The way the story goes is that Jesus is beside the sea, and a ruler of the synagogue, Jairus by name, comes up to him; on seeing Jesus, he falls down before his feet and beseeches him many times, saying, “My daughter is ill; come and lay your hands on her so that you can save her, and she will live.” Jesus goes off to Jairus’s house, but before he gets very far, a woman comes up from behind—this woman who has had a hemorrhage for twelve years—and touches Jesus’ robe because she wants to be healed of her sickness. Jesus turns and asks, “Who has touched me?,” because he has realized that power has gone out from him. The woman ends up getting healed, but because of this incident, Jesus is delayed from going to Jairus’s house. While he is delayed, some servants come from Jairus’s house, and they come to Jairus and say, “It’s too late. Your daughter has died.” Jesus tells them not to worry, he goes to the house, and he raises her from the dead. Beautiful story in Mark, chapter 5.

The Gospel of Matthew has the same story. And when you read the Gospels horizontally, you find something very interesting. What happens in Matthew’s Gospel [9:18–26] is that this leader in the synagogue comes up, worships Jesus, and says to him, “My daughter has just now died. Come and lay your hands on her so that she will live.”

But wait a second: in Mark’s Gospel she was sick but hadn’t died yet, and because Jesus was delayed, she died in the interim. But in Matthew’s Gospel she is dead before Jairus even comes to Jesus. Well, which is it? You might say, “Who really cares? The girl died, and Jesus raised her from the dead.” Yes, that’s enough if you are just interested in a good story; they are both really good stories. But this is the kind of detail that started making me think, “Why is it that the stories are different?” They can’t both be right: the girl was either dead before Jairus came to Jesus, or she died while Jairus was talking to Jesus. It can’t be both in the same happening. Somebody has changed the story. If they changed the story in little ways, how do you know they didn’t change it in big ways? You don’t have to take my word for it that somebody changed the story; read the story horizontally yourself.

Now, I have students who find this kind of little detail really insignificant, even immaterial: “Who really cares?” So, I tell my students that it is like what happens when a detective shows up on the crime scene. Somebody has been murdered and is lying in a pool of blood. The detective comes into the room, and what does he start doing? He starts looking for fingerprints or a strand of hair. And you say, “Why are you looking for fingerprints and a strand of hair? There is a dead body here!” Yes, but to solve the crime you have to find the evidence, and sometimes the evidence is the smallest little thing. When I was an evangelical Christian, convinced that the Bible had no errors of any kind, I had to deal with the problem that there were differences among the Gospels that could not be reconciled with one another. Some of these differences were small, little, but they were differences. And how do you reconcile those?

The Last Supper. Before Jesus’ death he is having his Last Supper with his disciples, and he tells Peter, according to the Gospel of Matthew [26:34], “Before the cock crows you will deny me three times.” When you read the same story in the Gospel of Mark [14:30], Jesus tells Peter, “Before the cock crows twice you will deny me three times.” Well, which is it? Is it before the cock crows or before the cock crows twice?

In stereo. When I was at Moody Bible Institute, I bought a book that explained little differences like this. This is a book by a guy who wanted to show that even though we do have differences among the Gospels, they can all be reconciled. The book was called The Life of Christ in Stereo.² The idea is that you get four speakers, you see, and you get surround sound. The author took the four Gospels and spliced them all together, creating a surround sound of the Gospels where there are no differences. And he dealt with this problem that in Matthew the cock has to crow and in Mark it has to crow twice. His solution was that Peter denies Jesus six times: three times before the cock crows, and three times before the cock crows twice. Well, that’s an interesting solution. But to create the solution, the author of the book actually wrote his own gospel, different from the four Gospels of the New Testament. I should point out, by the way, that when Peter denies Jesus in the fulfillment of the prophecy, he denies him to different people in the different Gospels. What’s that all about? It’s about somebody changing the story.

There are changes in all sorts of stories throughout the New Testament. You can start at the very beginning of the New Testament: the genealogies of Jesus. My students wonder why we have genealogies of Jesus at all. The interesting thing about these genealogies—there is one in Matthew, chapter 1, and there is one in Luke, chapter 3—is that both are genealogies of Joseph. So Joseph’s father is so-and-so, and his grandfather is so-and-so, and his great-grandfather is so-and-so: they are genealogies of Joseph. And my students ask, “Why do you have a genealogy of Joseph?” They wonder about this because in both Matthew and Luke, Jesus is born of a virgin. In other words, Joseph is not the biological father. So why do these Gospels trace the bloodline of the father if Jesus is not related to the bloodline? That’s a good question. I guess we need to assume that Joseph adopted Jesus or something like that. But what’s interesting is that when you compare the genealogies, they in fact are different genealogies. Who was Joseph’s father? Was it James as in Matthew or Eli as in Luke? Who was his grandfather? Was it Matthan as in Matthew or was it Matthat as in Luke? Who was his great-grandfather? Eleazar or Levi? His great-great-grandfather, Eliud or Melchi? These are different genealogies, yet they are both said to be genealogies of Joseph. How can they both ...