Bart Ehrman on NPR

As many of you know, Dr. Bart Ehrman is on the talk show circuit again, he is promoting his new book, Jesus Interrupted, another attack upon the Christian faith, like misquoting Jesus was, but this one much more direct, much more promoting an atheistic perspective than the previous books.

And it is interesting, I want to look at some claims that Dr. Ehrman is making, some errant claims that he is making. It is true that over the years, as I have criticized Dr. Ehrman, I have said many times that Dr. Ehrman is normally factually correct, and he has even picked up on that from various sources and sort of repeats it as part of his apologetic.

But it is interesting to me that there is sort of a phenomenon, you may have noticed it, when people become involved with atheism, they tend to leave their narrow fields of expertise and they go into other fields, and the media gives them credibility in whatever field they choose to address.

Richard Dawkins is a biologist, he is not a historian, he is not a philosopher, he is certainly not a biblical scholar by any stretch of the imagination, neither is Christopher Hitchens, but these folks are allowed to get away with murder when they talk about the.

Bible.

Now, Dr. Ehrman obviously has an MDiv and PhD from Princeton, not exactly a center of conservative theology these days, but his expertise is specifically in textual critical studies. His dissertation was on the Alexandrian text type, and a specific focus even upon that.

And so, it is interesting that individuals are then given these wide swaths of authority even when they start going outside of their realm, and it seems to me that Dr. Ehrman is moving more and more into the standard atheist forms of argumentation.

And as he does so, he is leaving the specific realm of his own expertise. Yes, he may read the Gnostic Gospels or something like that, but your expertise is your expertise, and Dr. Ehrman is starting to, I think, make some interesting errors that might reflect this expansion beyond the specific area of his training and his expertise.

A Wrong Scripture Reference in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture

Now, it is not that this is the first type of error that I have detected in Dr. Ehrman's.

Work.

For example, his most popular work of scholarship, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, on page 65, reads as follows, an obvious example comes in Luke's depiction of Jesus as the Messiah. According to Luke's infancy narrative, Jesus was born the Christ, Luke 2 .11.

But in at least one of the speeches in Acts, he is understood to have become the Christ at his baptism, 10 .37 -8, possibly 4 .27, whereas in another, Luke explicitly states that he became the Christ at his resurrection, 2 .38.

That would be Acts 2 .38. Now, I immediately stop for a couple of reasons. First of all, there is this, the whole argument here is an argument that I find very fallacious. It involves applying a standard to Luke that Dr. Ehrman would never be allowed to apply to his own writings.

Language in The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture is very different than in misquoting Jesus, and he has different audience in these two books. It'd be very easy to make accusations of inconsistencies and contradictions, even between these two books, just based upon the different language and the different audiences that are being addressed.

But that would be unfair because, well, we have to allow Dr. Ehrman to address different audiences and to speak for himself, right? Except that's what modern liberal scholarship won't do for Luke or Mark or John or whoever.

Harmonization, even within one individual's writings, is simply not allowed. Anyway, the argument, I think, involves some egregiously poor exegesis of the relevant text, but that's not the problem. The problem is that there's nothing in Acts 2 .38 to substantiate this assertion.

Acts 2 .38 is very well known. Peter said to them, Repent, and each one of you baptize in the name of Jesus Christ, and be forgiven for your sins. You will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. That's a well-known text, but it has nothing to do with Jesus becoming the Christ at his resurrection.

You see, the reference is wrong. It's Acts 2 .36 that Dr. Ehrman is thinking about. Therefore, let all the house of Israel know, beyond a doubt, that God has made this Jesus whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.

Now, clearly, that's really stretching Acts 2 .36 to say, Oh, what Luke is saying is that this is when he became the Christ, was at the crucifixion. That's not what Luke or Acts 2 .36 is saying either.

So, the argument's bad, but the reference is wrong. You say, Ah, well, 2 .38, 2 .36. No, that's true. That's true. Except, if you pick up your copy of Miscoding Jesus, which is written 12 years after the unorthodox corruption of Scripture, you will find, as I'm putting on the screen right now, this page, and if you look closely, the exact same argument is repeated with the exact same wrong reference included 12 years later in Dr. Ehrman's work.

Well, that's a minor thing, minor thing indeed, but it is there, and it demonstrates that there has been really no interaction with this particular argumentation. He has taken the arguments that he made over a decade ago and just moved them in, replete with typographical errors, into Miscoding Jesus.

And so, that's interesting. Doesn't really prove much. Unless we see a development of an atheistic apologetic methodology in Dr. Ehrman's writings and presentations, which, as I said earlier, is I think what we see happening with him over the past couple of books that he's done.

Mark, Luke, and the Cross

As I mentioned earlier, he's now promoting Jesus Interrupted. He's hit the NPR talk show circuit. NPR loves to have anything on that bashes Christianity. They won't have any conservatives on, but they love to bash Christianity, and especially the Fresh Air program, and he was on the Fresh Air program again recently.

And what I found very, very interesting was an error that Dr. Ehrman has made. He's said many times that he believes that, from his perspective, that the Gospel of Mark is his favorite gospel. Well, when he was on with the infidel guy, he made this odd statement, and someone else pointed it out to me.

A friend up in Canada caught it. He made this odd statement. Let's listen to what he said.

Dr. Ehrman, I imagine they were, but there's not that much evidence one way or the other. His parents aren't named, for example, in the earliest gospel.

Now, what Dr. Ehrman seemingly has forgotten is that in Mark 6, 3, Mary and, in fact, the brothers of Jesus are specifically named. Now, I suppose you could argue, well, Joseph isn't named, so the parents weren't named, but that wasn't the context that was being mentioned there.

So, it just seems that Dr. Ehrman sort of forgot what Mark had actually said at that particular point. Again, not a big deal, but then we come to the promotion of this book, and it's starting to become a big deal.

What I mean is that I've noted in a previous video that Dr. Ehrman, in his video promoting his book on Amazon, misrepresents Mark and Luke in their presentations of Jesus' death. This becomes even worse in the interview that takes place on the Fresh Air program, partly, obviously, because the NPR hostess wants to try to make it as bad as possible.

But Dr. Ehrman is simply in error in what he says concerning Jesus' behavior in the gospel of Mark. Let's listen to what was found on the NPR interview.

Let's look at one of the most significant moments in the story of Jesus, and that is Jesus' death on the cross. In Mark, Jesus dies in agony, unsure of the reason he must die, and he asks God, Why have you forsaken me?

Whereas in Luke, he prays, Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing. Can you talk about those two different points of view of what happens to Jesus as he's dying on the cross?

Right.

People don't realize that these are very different portrayals. But when you read Mark's account very carefully, Jesus seems to be in shock. He doesn't say anything the entire time. He's mocked by everybody, by the Roman soldiers, by people passing by.

In Mark's gospel, he's mocked by both robbers who are being crucified with him, and at the end, his only words are his cry of dereliction, as it's called. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And then he cries out and dies, and that's it.

And so it's a story that's filled with pathos and emotion, and Jesus is clearly in great agony going to his death.

Jesus in Control in Mark's Gospel

Now, at this point yesterday, I had completed recording video in response to this particular issue, even post the video briefly, though as you can tell, I've been having some major problems, specifically for some reason.

My system kept stopping recording, and I'd have to try to edit things together, and it resulted in some issues. But even when I posted the video, someone came and channeled and said, I don't think that's what Ehrman was saying.

And to a point, he was correct. And so I wanted to clarify what I was saying here. At this point, what we just heard from Dr. Ehrman, if you allow for an artificial limitation of what verses we're looking at, and say, well, if you start with, say, Mark 15, 16, and go from there, then all Jesus does is quote Psalm 22.

And I hope you'll go back to an earlier video where I discussed Ehrman's attempt to make Mark and Luke contradictory to one another, and where I discuss the use of Psalm 22, which he calls the cry of dereliction, which is actually the beginning of Psalm 22, which is a messianic psalm, which Jesus is indicating is being fulfilled in himself.

But how can we know what the context of Jesus's mindset is? Dr. Ehrman is telling us that he's in agony. Well, of course he's in agony. He's in agony in all of the Gospels. That's a given. He's out of control.

He's abandoned. He cries out in dereliction. How would we know that? We would only know that by what comes before this in the Gospel. And the problem with Dr. Ehrman's argumentation here, and it's the same that's found in Jesus Interrupted, is that he won't allow Mark to speak for Mark.

He never mentions what Jesus says in Mark chapter 14 when he identifies himself, beginning in verse 62, with the vision in Daniel. He doesn't mention the anointing for his burial. He does not mention any of the relevant evidence from Mark itself that demonstrates that Jesus is in control.

He knows what's coming. Now, he's going to say, Luke presents it that way. Well, so does Mark. So to ignore this data is to spin it, is to, obviously, in the context of NPR, they're not going to call him on it.

They're not looking these things up in the Bible. As long as it's opposed to Christianity, they're going to be very, very happy with that. And so he artificially limits the starting point of this Jesus says nothing, ignores this amazing reply of Jesus to the high priest.

Are you the son of the most blessed one?

I am.

And you will see the son of man coming with the clouds of heaven. And they tear their robes. If you don't include that, if you don't include what came in the rest of Mark, demonstrating that Jesus knows where he's going, he knows who he is, and he knows what he's doing, then you are grossly misrepresenting the gospel of Mark.

And why? Well, because that's what's consistent between the gospels, is that Jesus does know these things. And so if you're going to try to present some different Jesus and some different understanding, then you've got to downplay those places where there is clear harmonization between these gospels as to what their purposes are.

And so this kind of argumentation, when you see people like Barter and when you see people who become apostates and they go out into these other movements, especially in atheism, over time you see less and less concern on their part about actually impacting people who know the text.

All they want to do is impact people who are ignorant of the text and try to poison their minds against ever believing the text. It happens all the time, and I think it's happening here, because obviously Bart Ehrman is not trying to convince someone who actually knows these texts at all and knows the responses that have been offered to so many of the things that he takes as a given, just simply as a given.

Well, all scholars know this. Well, you know, you get to define who your scholars are that way. But that's what's going on here, and it does make me wonder, given how far this book goes beyond misquoting Jesus, what's next?

What's the next step going to be like? Is it going to keep going into more and more of this new atheism and its shrill, vitriolic attacks upon the Christian faith? Hard to say, but one thing is for certain.

When people look to Bart Ehrman as if he's some type of super scholar, the fact of the matter is there's a strong agenda here, and that agenda is being seen with more and more clarity as time passes. We'll have more to say about Jesus Interrupted and its arguments against the Christian faith in future videos.

Thanks for watching.