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Interview with Bart Ehrman
2008 March 27
| 1. How knowledgeable are typical Christians in the church pew (or your students initially) about Christian scriptures, and more generally, about the Christian tradition? | In the part of the world where I teach (the American South), people are far more committed to the Bible than knowledgeable about it. Most of my undergraduates are firmly convinced that in some sense, God wrote the Bible. And yet they’ve never read it. This has always seemed strange: if God wrote a book, wouldn’t you want to see what he had to say? |
| 2. Have pastors confided in you any frustrations they may have in bringing recent scholarship into their ministries? | Sometimes they have.
But more commonly, parishioners who have heard me talk have expressed frustration
at their pastors for not bringing up recent scholarship in their education
classes. Many people in the traditional Christian churches are hopelessly
ignorant about what scholars are saying about the Bible, the history of
early Christianity, theology, and so on.
When I give talks about early Christianity (for example, the “lost” Gospels, the historical Jesus, the historical problems of the New Testament, and so on), people almost always ask me. “Why have I never heard this before?” And it’s a mystery to me too, since often the pastors of their churches went through the same theological training I did, and certainly must know about such things. Why don’t they teach them? My guess is that they think that their parishioners aren’t “ready” to hear such things. In my opinion this is a completely condescending attitude to take toward intelligent, thinking adults who are people of faith. In my experience, people are eager — famished — for such information, and the pastors are the ones who are in a position to provide it. |
| 3. You have appeared on The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, NPR, and other media. Other writers, sometimes called the new atheists, are also more visible in the media. Can you speculate on the causes of what may be greater attention to skeptical viewpoints? —scholarly discoveries? —reaction against “funda-mentalism” injected into politics? —coincidental crop of articulate skeptics? —media love of controversy? —increasingly evident failure of traditional Christianity to have answers to why God permits the horrors in our world? —? | I’d say yes, all of the above. I think it was no accident that The Da Vinci Code was selling millions while the Left Behind series was selling millions. I certainly don’t support the historical scholarship of The Da Vinci Code — in fact there is virtually no historical scholarship in it, despite what it appears to claim for itself (I wrote a book about this). But it’s not a surprise that people who did not buy into the religious ideology of the far right welcomed a completely different perspective. The so-called “new atheists” (people like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens, whom I think of as the unanointed trinity) have reached an enormous audience. I disagree a lot with some of the things these people are saying — sometimes their attacks on religion are surprisingly ignorant about religion (I certainly wouldn’t be able to get away with attacking “science” given how little I know about science; I think critics of religion too should know what it is they’re attacking). But I think they’ve done a world of good as well (I especially like Hitchens’ book God is not Great and Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation; Dawkins’ book The God Delusion is probably the biggest seller of them all). |
| 4. Can you explain briefly how you understand the diversity within early Christianity for those who think there is a single authoritative “autograph” version of the scriptures and unanimity among early Christian writers? | Early Christianity was not one thing, but lots of different things, with different Christian groups teaching ideas that today would strike most Christians as absolutely ludicrous and even blasphemous. But each of these groups claimed to be representing the teachings of Jesus and his apostles (some of them taught that there were 30 gods, or that Jesus wasn’t really a human being, or that the Old Testament was inspired by an evil divinity, or that this world was the result of a cosmic disaster) . You might wonder, why didn’t they just read the New Testament to see that they were wrong? The answer, of course, is that there was no New Testament yet, in the early centuries of the church. The New Testament emerged out of these conflicts, and represents the books that the “winning side” decided should be considered scripture. The other sides also had books though, books that claimed to be written by the apostles of Jesus. Sometimes these alternative scriptures get re-discovered, and that’s where scholarship on early Christianity becomes especially fascinating. |
| 5. How did your abandonment of belief in biblical inerrancy
affect your own personal spiritual life? Is it possible for a non-believer
to have a "spiritual life," and if so, what does that mean? Is there any
personal benefit believers might expect from paying attention to skeptics?
Or, to put these questions differently: How necessary, if at all, is any
kind of faith for a meaningful, compassionate life?
|
I gave up on my views of Biblical inerrancy (which
I had when I went, for example, to Moody Bible Institute for college) when
I was in my 20s, but remained a Christian (church going, God-believing,
sin-confessing Christian) for many, many years. It wasn’t until I was in
my mid 40s that I finally came to acknowledge that I no longer believed
in Christ, no longer knew whether there was a God, no longer could go to
church.
When people learn this about me they sometimes tell me that they find if very sad. But I don’t find it sad at all, for the most part. I feel like I have a better handle on “the truth” than I ever did before, that I understand the world, where we came from, and what we should be doing better than ever. My view is that this life is all that there is. This is not a dry run, a dress rehearsal for something that is to come later. We are born, we live, and we die. So we should live life as fully as we can, in the here and now, because this is all there is. We should enjoy the simple pleasures of life to the utmost. It’s all that we have. My students have trouble believing me when I tell them that this is a biblical teaching. But it is! It’s the teaching of the Book of Ecclesiastes, a book that I think we should take seriously. But knowing that this life is all there is should not turn us into rank hedonists, grabbing only for intense pleasure (since, among other things, intense pleasures often lead to intense pain — both for ourselves and others). It should make us enjoy the simply things — good food and good drink, loving friendships and caring families, college basketball, hiking in the mountains, sleeping in on occasion, spending long evenings with friends talking about our hopes and dreams and successes and failures and loves and passions and pleasures. Moreover, we need to realize that other people are not able to enjoy life as we can, and we should do our utmost to help them do so. There is a lot of pain and misery in the world. And we should do what we can to help others, both to cope with it and to overcome it. We may not have all the answers to why there’s suffering in the world, but even if we don’t have an answer, we can have a response. Our response should be to alleviate suffering as much as we can: to volunteer, to support programs that deal with homelessness and poverty and illiteracy, to give more money to national and international relief effort, and so on. Doing so improves not only the lives of others but also our own lives, and makes our human existence a meaningful one. |
| 6. What would you most like readers to know about you or about your work? | I’m a Jayhawk by birth and always root for KU — unless they are playing Carolina! |
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