Misquoting Jesus
August 5, 2007
Review of Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman
ONCE YOU make the (very justified) decision to reject the idea that the Bible is the literal word of God, then it takes a very strange intellectual contortion to then say that the Bible - shaped as it was by barely literate scribes and ambitious community leaders with their own personal agendas and writing several centuries after Jesus died - still embodies the spirit of something that is genuine.
But this is why Biblical literalism has made such inroads during the scientific age: after all, blind, stubborn and stupid faith is the only thing that prevents the whole edifice from collapsing, and U.S. fundamentalists, stuck in one of the most secular and scientifically advanced communities ever known, are digging their heels in and refusing to budge.
They realize, quite rightly, that as soon as any concession is made about the dubious human origins of their holy scripts, the whole thing just shrivels away into groundless superstition. What they don't want to realize is that it is, indeed, mere groundless superstition.
Which brings us to Misquoting Jesus, a recently published book by biblical scholar Bart D. Ehrman. Biblical literalism, Ehrman now believes - after abandoning his adolescent fundamentalism - is completely unjustified. It is unjustified largely because one never can be sure whether the texts we are reading are actually consonant with the original intent of the author.
Scribes copied and erred and interpolated, translated and mistranslated and then back-translated the mistranslations until finally, the so-called Word of God had been drowned out by white noise. There are, he says, more variations in surviving manuscripts than there are words in the entire New Testament
And yet, Ehrman can never bring himself to doubt that it is still worth pursuing original texts, assuming that they could somehow capture something of the spirit or aura of God's message. He cannot question the idea that what we read in the Bible is the combined wisdom of the followers of Jesus Christ and that it was somehow "inspired" by God. He does not doubt that Jesus Christ was the son of God born through the pristine womb of his mother, a presumption that seems to underpin Christian faith a priori, irrespective of any inaccuracies in the New Testament.
"It is important to know what the words of these authors were," he writes, "so that we can see what they had to say and judge, then, for ourselves what to think and how to live in light of those words."
But why on earth should we have to think and live in the light of those words if they were, in fact, actually written in the light of ancient local prejudices and superstitions and then passed on, in a long game of Chinese whispers, to future generations? Why should we listen and decide how to live in the light of these words any more than we do with the words of others like, say, Lucretius, Homer or Pythagoras?
What is it, exactly, that Ehrman is clinging onto? The entire basis of his belief seems to have been shattered by the implications of his research and the force of his reasoning, but he is unable to draw the logical conclusion. What is it that he has left? A vague sense that the Bible is approximately true? But how approximate, and by what criteria? Is he left with anything other than a baseless faith that some (but not all) of the events described in the Bible are more or less accurate? What else can Christianity be based on other than a literal interpretation of the Holy Book with its virgin birth, its miracles and its resurrections? Without its claims to absolute truth, it is just one more foolish superstition, like the desert djinns and the cargo cults and the animisms of Africa.
And if you think you have the right to start picking and choosing the bits that suit you and the modern world in which you live, then on what criteria do you make the selections? On what grounds do you include, say, the Good Samaritan and exclude, for instance, the stoning to death of those people who choose to work on the Sabbath?
By what authority do you resolve any one of the many contradictions that exist in the various Gospels? Did, for example, the fig tree cursed by Jesus wither instantly (Matthew) or overnight (Mark)? Furthermore, if you like Jesus's "let he who is without sin" schtick when the Pharisees drag the prostitute to the temple, how do you respond to the very convincing evidence that the tale was added to the original text at a much later stage by enthusiastic scribes?
If your answer is that you will exclude, emphasize and reinterpret on a pragmatic basis, then what's the point of calling yourself a Christian at all?
Of course, we see all the usual sophistry. Some scholars even claim that the lack of consistency in the Bible is actually proof that it is closer to the true word of God, because humans have obviously not made much of an effort to edit it.
Ehrman cites a scholar called Daniel Whitby, who claimed that "even though God certainly would not prevent errors from creeping into scribal copies of the New Testament, at the same time he would never allow the text to be corrupted to the point that it could not adequately achieve its divine aim and purpose." So the Bible is the divine word of God and it teaches us how to live. How do we know that it is true? Because God would not allow it to be false. And God is all-powerful and would not allow himself not to exist. Therefore God exists. And any instruction attributed to him must therefore be true, because God would not have allowed untruths to prosper in his name. As for certain errors and inconsistencies, God may have allowed them, Whitby concedes, but he would not allow them to be anything more than trivial.
There are no original, sacred texts. There is no mechanism by which sacredness can be carried on the page and no mechanism by which the spirit of God can be conveyed by language. Add to that the vast number of transcription errors and self-serving interpolations and spelling mistakes and misrenderings of texts that purported to cover events that were already centuries old, add to that the many volumes of early Christian memoirs with an equal claim to belong to the canon but were very quickly lost, and it is obvious - obvious to any child - that this is a man-made document that should even then have had absolutely no claim over us.
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OF COURSE, Ehrman was brought up in a god-fearing family and found himself drifting into extremist Christian circles at an early age, so it is presumably very difficult for him to abandon his faith completely. Having been brought up with no religion to rebel against, no lingering yearning for an afterlife and no sense that I need to derive moral strength or rectitude from the supernatural, I find all this very curious.
My school was still permeated by the faint background noise of Christianity, a dull and slightly irritating hum emanating from a distant pre-scientific universe and cranked up to as high a volume as possible in Religious Education classes and achingly tedious morning assemblies. I remember having to read the Lord's Prayer at school, but it was just rote chanting on the orders of the headmaster, and meant absolutely nothing to me. I didn't think about any of the words, and didn't, for example, link the phrase "give us our daily bread" to any idea that God was somehow responsible for providing me with food. If I thought it meant anything at all, I might have become indignant - if such a thing was possible at such a tender age - at the idea that I was being indoctrinated.
In any case, by the age of 12 I was already resentful at the idea that as an already well-formed atheist I still had to attend those school assemblies and listen to these litanies of nonsense and all those vacuous parables while a motley crew of Jehovah's Witnesses could stand outside the hall and chat about last night's TV.
I was lucky (or, if you are that way inclined, damned) from an early age. I had received antidotes from my father, including a salutary lesson in the principles of evolution based on a chance mutation in the shape of my little fingers. My bent fingers could improve my chances of survival, he said, perhaps enabling me to climb higher in the event of a flood, and if they did assist my survival, they could increase the possibility of my having children and passing the mutation along. It was as simple as that. An elegant lesson in Darwinism when I was, at the most, seven years old. I don't believe that my little fingers will actually aid my and my descendants' survival, but the idea was sound in principle.
And so, while famous atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins were schooled in religious thinking and in the King James' Bible, I was not. I couldn't even make much sense of Philip Larkin's wistful respect for religion in his otherwise beautiful poem, Church Going. My childhood texts were by Douglas Adams, and - by extension - the legendary Oolon Coluphid.
In The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins recalls a conversation with a "well-known" atheist philosopher, in which Dawkins admits that he could not imagine being an atheist before 1859, when the Origin of the Species was finally published. I personally can conceive of no rational way of being any sort of deist or theist at all, but concede that in much of the sorry duration of human history, I would almost certainly have been coerced - like almost everyone else in my vicinity - into believing something or other.
If there were enough "pain of death" scenarios, enough threats against the nonbeliever, enough charges of heresy and paganism and blasphemy, enough bonfires and hangings and witch trials, it would no doubt be very easy to enforce faith. It happens all the time, and if a vast proportion of the planet's population is likely to be executed for expressing an opinion, it is almost impossible to ascertain what people really believe.
But it is more complex than that. Like any individual yearning to be free in the face of such totalitarian oppression, my instinct in such circumstances might have been to believe, and to convince myself that I truly, freely believed. To satisfy the demands of my ego, I might have internalized the oppression and pretended that this, somehow, was my individual choice. In a state of affairs reminiscent of the Stockholm Syndrome, I'd have persuaded myself to believe that my oppressors were right, that I was a miserable sinner, that they were saving my and everyone else's soul.
Dawkins, in The God Delusion, suggests that the "extreme horribleness of Hell.. is inflated to compensate for its implausibility." Thus, you have the otherwise rational Blaise Pascal making his celebrated wager: even if there is only a remote chance that God exists, it makes sense to believe in him because the penalties for not doing so are too severe to take the risk. There is no reward for not believing, but there is a considerable reward for believing. All other things being equal, why not just believe?
At the same time, God's worldly protectors compensate for the implausibility of their faith by inflating the punishments imposed on sceptics, heretics and heathens. Pascal does not need to invoke Heaven or Hell to make his wager. The bonfires here on earth are terrifying enough.
One can understand why the ancients thought in the way that they did. After all, they had no conception of weather patterns, no scientific understanding of the origins of life or the causes of natural disaster, and few means of ascertaining the truth-value of religious claims. Naturally, you beg for mercy and pray to a force that seems utterly capricious and irrational. You try to look for the causes of such caprice and irrationality, and see it in your own behaviour or in the behaviour of your family, friends and society. You make bargains with this force, and perhaps even human sacrifices. Something, perhaps the political circumstances of the time or perhaps the siege mentality of the Jewish community, led to the Covenant - the idea that in exchange for unconditional worship of a single God, you would be chosen by that God to be protected over and above all other communities.
And somehow, this is still with us. You can imagine a bunch of illiterate peasants in the eastern Mediterranean falling for the charismatic Paul as he spreads the teachings of Jesus. They weren't exactly in the position to read the texts on their merits. They have Paul's word for it that Jesus fulfilled certain Jewish prophecies that, erm, Paul himself has selected and interpreted, and in any case, his parables cannot be any more outlandlish than the ones they have already been using.
But now? As Christopher Hitchens writes in God is Not Great, it is only in recent years that the Church has been forced to defend itself on a logical basis now there is no longer much of a penalty (in most of the Christian world) for speaking out against it. Without the powers of enforcement, punishment and propaganda, it has failed miserably to press its case. Still, somehow, it survives.
