Bart Ehrman is a bible scholar who started his career as a conservative evangelical, but eventually became an agnostic. Most of his students and colleagues are believers so he never ridicules Christianity. He just gives a clear, dispassionate account of its historical origins. For me, his polite tone made his critique even more devastating.

For example, here’s his summary of the historical evidence for the miracles of Jesus.

“Our first records of any of Jesus’ public miracles were written thirty-five to sixty-five years after the fact, by people who had not seen any of these things happen, who were basing their stories on oral traditions that had been passed down for decades among people who were trying to convince others to believe in Jesus. And these records are absolutely filled with discrepancies…” (pg. 173)

And how much does he think stories can change when they’ve been told and retold for decades?

“…Did you or your kids ever play the telephone game at a birthday party? … imagine playing telephone… for forty or more years, in different countries, in different contexts, in different languages…” (pg. 147)

“…This is how Christianity spread, year after year, decade after decade, until eventually someone wrote down the stories.” (pg. 146)

And the telephone game didn’t stop when people started writing down the stories. To give just one example, none of the earliest Christian writings referred to Jesus as being divine; this was a later invention. As Ehrman puts it:

“…if Jesus claimed he was divine, it seemed very strange indeed that Mathew, Mark, and Luke all failed to say anything about it. Did they just forget to mention that part?” (pg. 141)

Throughout the book Ehrman traces the evolution of the stories that eventually became the core of Christianity. Besides the divinity of Jesus these include the invention of the trinity, the virgin birth, and the existence of heaven and hell.

I especially enjoyed his description of the different types of Christianity that existed before they were steamrolled by the Roman church. For the sake of brevity I’ll give just two examples, but Ehrman describes many others.

The Marcionites were Christian polytheists. They believed that Jesus and Yahweh were two completely different gods. Yahweh was a vengeful and unforgiving god who had condemned all of humanity, and Jesus was a merciful god who came to earth to save us from Yahweh’s wrath. Unfortunately for the Marcionites the New Testament didn’t exist yet so they couldn’t learn about the insane mental gymnastics of the holy trinity, and how this “solved” the Jesus/Yahweh problem by uniting them into two three gods who were actually the same god. But on the plus side, the Marcionites had their own sacred books and their own apologists who made detailed arguments that proved that they were right.

The early Gnostic Christians were also polytheists. They believed that this world was a cosmic mistake that was created by ignorant and incompetent deities. But a damage-control deity took pity on us and decided to help us out. So he had his spirit take control of a man named Jesus, who he used as a sort of living sock-puppet to communicate secret knowledge that we could use to get out of this mess.

“This might not sound like the kind of Christianity you learned about in Sunday school, but it was very popular in many regions of the early church. Salvation came not by having faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection but by understanding the secret teaching that he revealed.” (pg. 196)

What surprised me was that these were not fringe beliefs – in many parts of the world they were more popular than the kinds of Christianity found in the New Testament. In fact, Ehrman states that whenever archaeologists discover early Christian texts they are always “heretical,” in the sense that they always reflect views that are very different than those in the New Testament. And this strongly implies that at one time the “heretical” forms of Christianity were the norm and not the rare exception.

What happened to all these different forms of Christianity? Well, one particular Christian sect which was particularly well organized and Machiavellian happened to win the struggle for converts in Rome, and…

“…when the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the early fourth century, he converted to this victorious form of faith. When Christianity later became the official religion of the empire, about fifty years after Constantine, it was this form that was accepted by nearly everyone…” (pg. 197)

“…This Roman group… eventually stamped out all its competition, declared itself orthodox, argued that its views really were those of Jesus and the apostles, claimed that it had always been the majority view, and then – as a final coup de grace – rewrote the history of the conflict…” (pg. 214)

So a vast range of different forms of Christianity, which all had their own holy books, which they all claimed were quoting Jesus and his apostles, were basically just made to disappear. And a small percentage of Christian writings, which were no more “authentic” than the others, were given a stamp of approval and became what we now call the “New Testament.” It didn’t matter that most of the texts in the New Testament were either forgeries or anonymous works that were attributed to the apostles purely to deceive people into viewing them as being more authoritative than they actually were.

Ehrman stresses repeatedly that the vast majority of bible scholars hold this view of the history of Christianity, and it is taught in most bible colleges and seminaries. So why is it that so few people in the predominantly Christian US know about it? Ehrman answers simply, “your guess is as good as mine.” (pg. 137)

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4. Jesus in the Football Huddle
5. Faith: Religion’s Achilles Heel

Tags | Bible, book review, christianity