Talk about my recent life, I'm truly happy recently. Not that I'm not happy in the past, but quite a number of things which are of significance to me have happened recently (including the moment when I'm writing this post), which have really made me happier than I used to be. Nevertheless, I shall keep to my policy of not discussing about my personal stories here in this blog.
Recently, I have also read a few really good books. One of them is Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them) by Bart Ehrman. It is really a very fascinating book to read. Though I have come to the realisation that bible is just another human book, the bible still remains to be a source of fascination to me. And Bart Ehrman's honest relevation of the truth is really what makes the book so interesting and so informative. After I read the book, I'm just amazed by how ignorant I used to be when I hold the bible so high up and told people that it was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. In my past few posts about bible (here, here and here) I mainly talk about the old testament, very few about the new testament. This book deals with the problems in the new testament. As Bart Ehrman is an academic historian specializing in the study of new testament, he evaluated the claims in the bible with regard to the authorship (who wrote the new testament), historical Jesus, origin of christianity and the reasons for the (many) contradictions in the gospels.
I shall just quote some of the interesting excerpts for the benefit of those who don't have the chance to read the book.
- Of all the 27 books in the new testament, only 8 of them are almost certain to have been written by the people traditionally thought to be their authors.
- The Gospels for the most part do not provide disinterested factual information about Jesus, but contain stories that had been in oral circulation for decades before being written down. This makes it very difficult to know what Jesus actually said, did and experienced. Scholars have devised ways to get around these problems, but the reality is that the Jesus portrayed in the Gospels (for eg the divine being become human in the Gospel of John) represents a later understanding of who Jesus was, not a historical account of who he really was.
- There were lots of other Gospels available to the early Christians, as well as epistle, Acts and apocalypses. Many of these claimed to be written by apostles, and on the surface such claims are no more or less plausible than the claims of the books that eventually came to make up the New Testament. This raises the question of who made the decisions about which books to include, and of what grounds they had for making the decisions.
Though the author, through his profession, came to the realization that Christianity was just a human creation, his attitude is relatively different from mine, he adopts a more nuanced approach to his belief. Below are some of the excerpts that might summarise his attitude towards Christianity:
- In my case, when I came to realize that Christianity was a human creation, I felt the need to evaluate what I thought about its claims. And I came to think that they resonated extremely well-- with how I looked at the world and thought about my place in it.
- But the religion built up around God and Jesus was based, I came to believe, on various myths, not historical facts. Jesus' death was not a myth, but the idea that it was a death that brought about salvation was a myth.
- Salvation, for me, became less and less a question of whether I would go to heaven or hell when I die. I came to realise that these concepts were also, in a sense, myths. There is not literally a place of eternal torment where God, or the demons doing his will, will torture poor souls for 30 trillion years (as just the beginning) for sins they committed for 30 years. What kind of never-dying eternal divine Nazi would a God like that be? (Note: I couldn't agree more with this statement.)
- There came a time in my life when I found that the myths no longer made sense to me, no longer resonated with me, no longer informed the way I looked at the world. I came to a place where I could no longer see how-- even if viewed mythically-- the central Christian beliefs were in any sense "true" for me, given the oppressive and powerful reality of human suffering in the world.
For those who think that the bible has a unified theme throughout the 66 books in both New & Old Testament, and can be summarised into a simple statements (for eg: "the ten commandments", or "it's all about a loving, fair and just God"), this is his advice:
- It would be impossible, I should think, to argue that the Bible is a unified whole, inerrant in all its parts, inspired by God in every way. It can't be that. There are too many divergences, discrepancies, contradictions, too many alternative ways of looking at the same issue, alternatives that are often at odds with one another. The bible is not a unity, it is a massive plurality. God did not write the bible, people did.
- In my opinion, people need to use their intelligence to evaluate what they find to be true and untrue in the bible. This is how we need to live life generally. Everything we hear and see we need to evaluate-- whether the inspiring writings of the bible, or the inspiring writings of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or George Eliot, of Ghandi, Desmond Tutu, or the Dalai Lama.
And Bart Ehrman has many interesting comments on the various gospels-- Matthew, Mark, Luke & John. These are the materials taught in the major advanced bible study institutions in US and are well-known among the bible scholars but are never passed down to persons in the pew-- to quote his words --" It is the view taught in all the major textbooks on the New Testament used in these institutions. It is the view taught in seminaries and divinity schools. It is what pastors learn when they are preparing for ministry. And why isn't this more widely known? Why is it that the person in the pew-- not to mention the person in the street-- knows nothing about this? Your guess is as good as mine."
About Matthew (one example, you can read the book for more examples):
- We have seen that Matthew is particularly keen to show that everything in Jesus birth, life and death was a fulfillment of Scriptural prophecy. So why was he born of a virgin? It was because the Hebrew prophet Isaiah indicated that "a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call him Immanuel" (Matthew 1:23, quoting Isaiah 7:14). Actually, that's not exactly what Isaiah said. In the Hebrew bible, Isaiah indicates that a "young woman" will conceive and bear a son, a prediction of a future Messiah but of an event that was soon to take place in Isaiah's own day. When the Hebrew bible was translated into Greek, however, Isaiah's "young woman" (Hebrew alma; there is a different Hebrew word for "virgin") came to be rendered by the Greek word for "virgin", and that is the form of the bible that Matthew read..... So Matthew wrote that Jesus was born of a virgin because that's what he thought Scripture predicted.
About Mark:
- It appears that the final twelve verses of Mark's Gospel are not original to Mark's Gospel but were added by a scribe in a later generation. Mark ended his Gospel at what is now 16:8, with the women fleeing the tomb and not telling anyone what they had seen. In my discussion I accept the scholarly consensus that verses 16:8-21 were a later addition to the Gospel. (Note: I check my bible and do find that there is an indication that these 12 verses were added by scribes and not found in the earliest manuscript.)
- Since the nineteenth century, scholars have recognised that Mark was the first Gospel to be written, around 65-70 CE. Both Matthew and Luke, writing fifteen or twenty years later, used Mark as one of their own accounts. That is why almost all of Mark's stories can be found in Matthew or Luke, and it is also why sometimes all three of these Gospels agree word by word in the way they tell the stories.
About Luke:
- The historical problems with Luke are even more pronounced. For one thing, we have relatively good records for the reign of Caesar Augustus, and there is no mention anywhere in any of them of an empire-wide census for which everyone had to register by returning to their ancestral home. And how could such thing even be imagined? Joseph returns to Bethlehem because his ancestor David was born there. But David lived a thousand years before Joseph. Are we to imagine that everyone in the Roman Empire was required to return to the homes of their ancestors from a thousand years earlier? If we had a new worldwide census today and each of us had to return to the town of our ancestors a thousand years back-- where would you go?........Why then does Luke say there was such a census? The answer may seem obvious to you. He wanted Jesus to be born in Bethlehem, even though he knew he came from Nazareth. Matthew did too, but he got him born in a different way.
About John:
- One of my favourite apparent discrepancies-- I read John for years without realizing how strange this one is-- comes in Jesus' "Farewell Discourse," the last address that Jesus delivers to his disciples, at his last meal with them, which takes up all of chapters 13 to 17 in the Gospel according to John. In John 13:36, Peter says to Jesus, "Lord, where are you going?" A few verses later Thomas says, "Lord, we do not know where you are going" (John 14:5). And then, a few minutes later, at the same meal, Jesus upbraids his disciples, saying, "Now I am going to the one who sent me, yet none of you asks me, "Where are you going?" (John 16:5). Either Jesus had a very short attention span or there is something strange going on with the sources for these chapters, creating an odd kind of disconnect.
I think these excerpts should be interesting enough to entice you to read the book. It is a light-hearted reading with no jargons. Hope you enjoy the book!
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