Jesus, Interrupted

Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don't Know About Them)

Bart D. Ehrman's Jesus, Interrupted—a catchy title—is another book criticizing a literal or fundamental reading of the New and Old Testament scripture, but Ehrman approaches his subject with more passion and devotion than some of the other texts of the day, such as God is Not Great or God is a Delusion.

Ehrman early on describes himself as an agnostic, but he also describes that his scholarly friends agree with his ideas yet maintain deeply-rooted Christian values. So, this book, if you are a fundamental, orthodox, or literalist Christian reader, may attack the very beliefs you ascribe to. However, if a person is open to an historical reading of Jesus and the various developments in Christianity, then she will find illumination within the text. And, if one is an unbeliever, a believer of another faith, agnostic, or an atheist, his book—I firmly think—will give insight and appreciation into Ehrman's historical approach to Christianity.

His first three chapters focus on showing many contradictions in the New Testament and argues persuasively that the contradictions create a Bible informed by human conditions and contexts across many historical periods. As we approach this claim, we may compare his thesis to the idea of revisionist history. As we know now, Thomas Jefferson, one of the greatest thinkers and writers during the American Revolution, owned slaves and had a child with one of them. Likewise, Ehrman examines Christianity through the lens of an historian and unravels exactly what an historian should do: without pre-conceived notions and through the lens of historical evidence.

So, what exactly does he find?

First and foremost, he states the evidence clearly reveals that Jesus is an historical person. That idea itself should soothe the majority of Christians! However, the first three chapters inform the reader that the historical Jesus is buried in the various narratives of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, other New Testament scriptures, and the various “heretical” sacred texts of early Christianity. (Of course, the ”heretical” texts are so because they did not fit into the belief system of the dominant Christian scholarship in the Roman empire.)

One major point that interests me most is his willingness to concede that the disciples of Jesus were “lower class, illiterate, Aramaic-speaking peasants from Galilee,” while “the authors of the Gospels were highly educated, Greek-speaking Christians who probably lived outside Palestine.” This statement, by no means, implies that Jesus or his followers are less sophisticated; Ehrman simply means that early Christianity evolved in the same forms as many or most religions: through oral discourse and stories instead of a written system of organization. The orality of the early Christians, he claims, allowed it to spread in various directions opening up the possibility that Christianity merged the historicity of Jesus with a mythology of Jesus. (Fundamental Christians, close your ears here!) In fact, while Jesus' traditional death occurs around 30 CE, the earliest text, Mark, was probably written forty years later in 70 CE not by the Aramaic-speaking disciples of Jesus but by Greek-speaking Christian writers, who demonstrated some “ignorance of Palestinian geography and Jewish customs,” which possibly “suggests they composed their works somewhere else in the [Roman] empire.”

Ehrman establishes these and other claims in the early chapters, such as the following:

1.There were multiple oral sources influencing the gospels of the New Testament. (His book does not focus on the “pagan” influences of these sources, but I assume these elements are a book on their own.)

2.The Apostle Paul wrote during the period of 50 CE before even the gospels were probably written down. Therefore, even Paul was influenced by oral sources and may not have had written discourses of the various gospels.

3.The Gospel of Mark was written before the other three and makes some reference to the destruction of Jewish temple in 70 CE. Therefore, the earliest written account we have of Jesus is forty years after his death.

4.Matthew and Luke, probably written around 80-85 CE, were based partially on the Gospel of Mark and other possible written texts, which we no longer have. Luke also references the destruction of the Jewish temple.

5.Finally, the Gospel of John is written around 90-95 CE and is the only gospel that explicitly claims that Jesus is divine. According to Ehrman, “Jesus's divinity was part of John's theology, not a part of Jesus' own teaching.”

6.Ehrman also spends considerable time differentiating actual canonical texts written by Paul and those which may be forgeries but still accepted as part of the canon. He bases his evidence on the historical context and the writing style of the author. For example, he claims that 1st Timothy, 2nd Timothy, and Titus were written by Christian writers of the 2nd century long after the death of Paul. Ehrman states that “Paul's churches were not hierarchically structured” and the churches were “run according to the Spirit of God working through each member.” These “forgeries” claiming to be written by Paul give a more hierarchical structure to the church possibly because of chaos among the churches and “heretical” ideas emerging within the systems that even Paul rejected in his written discourses.

The first three chapters cover such ideas, which I have read in many other texts, and though they are interesting and needed to set up the rest of his book, I became mostly interested in the text by Chapter Five: Liar, Lunatic, or Lord? Finding the Historical Jesus.

His method of finding the historical Jesus is by using a cross-referencing method of the four gospels. What are their commonalities? Where do they differ? This method is perhaps what he means by creating an historical approach to understanding the gospels, but I think Ehram may be missing an important point that the scholar Karen Armstrong describes in many of her books. Armstrong argues that each gospel speaks distinctly to a different audience. Matthew's lineage of Jesus speaks directly to converting a Jewish audience, while other gospel languages have intent of persuasion rather than simply tracking down a specific history of Jesus' authenticity. Therefore, the gospels read separately attract a different audience to Christianity. The less authoritative Jesus in Luke, for example, might appeal more to women, children, the sick, poor, and oppressed.

Nevertheless, Ehrman believes that cross-referencing the basic elements of the gospels will lead the reader to the most historically accurate account of Jesus. How does this cross-referencing appear?

1.Jesus came from Nazareth. (The cross-referencing rejects the idea that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, a statement, he claims, Christians after Jesus died described in some of the gospel narratives to match the Messiah passages from the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament.

2.There is a close association between John the Baptist and Jesus, placing them in an apocalyptic view of reality—the idea that the end of the world is approaching. The Gospel of Mark, the first source of the Jesus narrative focuses entirely on this idea of the end times and, at times, seems rushed as Jesus moves from place to place quickly. Perhaps also the least complex gospel of Mark persuades Ehrman in the idea that cross-referencing should focus first in Mark, which may be a weakness in Ehrman's interpretation. Could there have been, for example, biographical information in Matthew and Luke unbeknown to Mark?

3.Jesus was probably baptized by John the Baptist. This idea is interesting, for how could the God-Man be baptized by a person? Obviously, the historical Jesus was initiated into the same ideas and values as John the Baptist. This close alignment with John the Baptist supports the notion of the apocalyptic view of the present. We are going to die and be judged soon. The Messiah is coming!

4.Jesus described that the Son of Man is coming to rule God's kingdom. Ehrman's analysis is that Jesus may not be the Son of Man (or the Messiah). In fact, Ehrman states that “Jesus believed his own disciples would be the rulers of the future, earthly kingdom of God” after Jesus dies and the Son of Man arrives on the scene. The gospels always question whether or not Jesus is the Messiah. He mostly denies it. His acceptance as the Messiah could have been part of the revisionist view of Jesus after the death of the historical Christ.

5.Not only was Jesus apocalyptic in his vision of the world's end, but his disciples and the apostle Paul also take this approach.

6.If this large focus of the apocalypse is correct, then the moral teaching of Jesus are less about the ethical monotheism of Judaism, but about repenting quickly before the world ends. This idea de-emphasizes how much Jesus focuses on teaching through the parable and spending time discussing love and the Beatitudes, one of the most beautiful aspects of the Bible, which, from an historical perspective, cannot necessarily be attributed to Jesus, since they do not participate in the cross-referencing analysis. Bummer!

7.Christ, traditionally thought to side mostly with the Pharisees, represents an entirely new path of Judaism (again the apocalyptic path of John the Baptist). Therefore, he takes a different approach from the Pharisees, interested in “keeping the law,” the Essenes, interested in living monastically to preserve their own purity, the Sadducees, interested in continuing their aristocracy and positive relationship with the Roman Empire, and the Zealots, interested in military action against the Roman Empire to restore Israel to its former glory.

8.The miracles of Jesus should be interpreted from a symbolic and apocalyptic perspective that the kingdom is already near. In fact, Ehrman views the various miracles of Jesus as part of the early folklore tradition of Christianity.

9.Jesus clearly made a ruckus in the Jewish Temple, but the amount of damage he caused may be overstated by the gospels. Otherwise, he probably would have been arrested at an earlier period. (Here, Ehrman misses a good opportunity to see how the mythology of the gospels speaks directly to the history of the first century. Jesus overthrowing the temple could be an anti-Semitic description of Christianity replacing or displacing Judaism, since the Jewish temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. This story reminds me briefly of when Muhammad decided to pray toward Mecca instead of Jerusalem.) So, I wonder if Ehrman can positively state the temple issue as clearly part of the real history of Jesus through the cross-referencing technique.

10.A disciple, Judas, betrayed Jesus, but the reason is not clear. Ehrman imagines that Judas knew the secret of Jesus—that he claimed to be the messiah. If this were the case, then Ehrman contradicts himself earlier in his attempt to show Jesus not believing he is the Messiah-King.

11.Jesus died on a cross and was buried.

That is as far as Ehrman will go with the Jesus History. He then claims that an historian cannot trace miracles: only facts. Therefore, he takes an agnostic approach to Christianity possibly an easy route out of the mess of what is or isn't Jesus. Jesus could be a miracle worker and resurrected, or the miracles could be attributed to mythology. This agnostic approach is actually enlightening as a reader, because in this day and age, revisionist history of Jesus and Christianity are sometimes more rhetorical, powerful, or condescending.

His other chapters describe the various Christian movements already described in many other texts, so there is nothing new in this area. However, in the context of his cross-referencing idea, these movements are needed to show how the Bible takes its form and is ultimately canonized in the Catholic tradition.

Overall, I enjoyed Jesus, Interrupted. He establishes the historical approach to reading Christianity, provides us with a different perspective on the historical Jesus, places large emphasis on the difference between the Jesus-man and what the Christians created: the Jesus-God. He concludes personally about talking about his agnostic view and how he arrived at it not by the discrepancies in the New Testament but because of other ideas related to suffering, which he explores in his other book, God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer. He restates that a Christian can view these ideas he mentions and still be a devoted Christian.

As a non-fundamental, non-sectarian Mystic Christian and Buddhist (yes, very paradoxical), I did not find my belief system threatened whatsoever. And, even though I grew up in a fundamental household, I already came to the conclusion that Christianity is a social construct and contextual to its time period. However, I am not a fundamentalist, and I can see this book problematic for many Christians reading it. However, I think they should. It challenges the reader to think in terms of historical accounts, for Christ lived in history and died in history.

Though the book challenges Christ's miracles, the resurrection, and the divinity of Christ as God, I left his book with a sense of calmness. Jesus existed. He attempted to reform Judaism and still be Jewish. He died possibly because the Romans saw Jesus as a threat to the Empire. After Christ's death and now, can we still say with some agreement that the kingdom of God is where it has always been? In the soul of the believer and not necessarily in the history of Jesus!

--Jinglett