Great lecture series: History of the Bible: The Making of the New Testament Canon by Bart D. Ehrman

My review of History of the Bible: The Making of the New Testament Canon by  Bart D. Ehrman, an outstanding lecture series from  The Great Courses:

I listened to this lecture series on the drive to and from Barcelona, Spain, from Geneva, Switzerland, and from lecture one, I was hooked. Normally, I can only digest a couple lectures at a time while driving before my attention begins to wander, but Professor Ehrman gave such a humorous but excellent overview I kept listening.

I strongly disagree with reviewers who believed he was condescending either to Christianity (or to his students); I felt his comments simply reflect how widespread misconceptions are about the Bible and the astonishingly arbitrary way in which the New Testament was created. He repeatedly approached the subject with humility, emphasizing that he was a historian, not a theologian, and his job was not to pass judgment on the truth of the texts, only to describe how they were written, translated, propagated and accepted. Those who gave the course low ratings seemed to be rating it based on how it conformed to their theological ideas rather than whether it did what it was supposed to do: report the history of the writing and canonization of the New Testament.
I felt the reviewer who commented on the professor's personal religious beliefs both misrepresents the content of the lecture and injects a prejudice that I hope the Teaching Company does not share; since Jews do not believe that Jesus was divine, should Jewish professors be barred from studying this area of history? I certainly hope not.
If only Marxists could teach about Marx, psychoanalysts about Freud, or communists about Stalin, we would not have scholarly lectures but propaganda (itself a Christian term invented to propagate the faith (versus critically analyze it)).
I learned much from an Islam lecture series given by a non-Muslim ( Professor John L. Esposito, Ph.D., Temple University,
Georgetown University) and much about Judaism from Karen Armstrong, who is not Jewish, but who is recognized in Israel for her scholarship on Mediterranean Monotheism including Judaism. We can learn far more from Alexis de Tocqueville about American society because as a French citizen he saw it as an outsider, taking note of things those who had never left America might have been oblivious to.

Frankly, I do not trust people with strong a priori belief systems to be honest presenters of the data wherever those data may lead. At any rate, if something is true, our belief in it is immaterial as long as we are intellectually honest in how we present the consensus of scholarship and evidence. A 2010  survey showed that agnostics, Jews, and Mormons scored higher on a test of religious knowledge than those who considered themselves very religious, especially evangelical Christians.

This has certainly been my experience - anyone who says that every word of the Bible is perfect, timeless, and represents the direct word of god either has not read it or is oblivious to the extraordinary arbitrary way the collection of works we now call the Bible were created, translated, copied, and edited. The fact that a message was imperfectly copied or transmitted does not mean automatically that the message should be rejected as false, but anyone ignoring the enormous human fingerprints all over the Bible are simply not telling the truth. 

If Professor Ehrman was critical of anyone it was fundamentalists, particularly those of the End Times variety who misunderstand the historical context and contemporary targets of Revelation (which many of them incorrectly pluralize). But how else can a scholar of this period respond to those who seem to believe that the New Testament was never altered, magically and directly flowing from the mouth of Jesus - as captured by his followers - into a hotel room near you? And why should a scholar not point out absurd misconceptions, even strongly held ones? 

One is free to believe in one god, no god, or twenty, or choose whatever sacred texts to reinforce this belief system, but the rest of us are free not to and to examine those texts and ask how they were created. The passion with which a belief is held - and the offense some will take to us paying attention to the "man behind the curtain" - says nothing about its ultimate truth in an absolute sense. 

My wish is that those who search for theology seek it in the appropriate forum but please let those of us who love history enjoy and learn from these courses. Giving a history course a low rating because it does not match your metaphysical preconceptions is not fair either to the lecturer or to other potential listeners who might be scared away by a low rating that does not reflect the true quality of the course. 

If anything, I felt that Professor Ehrman was too kind to the centuries of anguish and bloodshed that the Christian obsession with orthodoxy (versus orthopraxy) unleashed. He did a good job of pointing out how strange monotheism and exclusivism were in the ancient world, but since all competing more tolerant polytheistic faiths were brutally crushed in the Mediterranean and Europe, we forget the radical nature of these beliefs - that god appeared once and only once to a specific people and time, was not recognized as such by his contemporaries who mostly rejected him, but that if we don't believe in him in just the right way 2,000 years later god will punish us forever and ever. Beliefs are ultimately involuntary (I can no more will or force myself to believe in Jesus anymore than I can force myself to believe in Allah or Zeus or Krishna) but clearly those exposed to the same texts either did not find them convincing or have now split into tens of thousands of Christian denominations, most of which do not recognize each other, and many of which have done their best to exterminate each other.
If someone launched a public education campaign with such contradictory documents written in such a manner that most people exposed to them are either not understanding them or erupting into savage battles over whose interpretation is correct - usually over the pettiest of metaphysical differences - then that public education campaign would be deemed a failure at best, a destabilizing and toxic influence at worst.
My only gripe about the course was that I would have liked to have more meat and less bread, meaning a bit more detailed analysis of exactly how the canon were selected and the others rejected. This came at the end of the series and seemed to go by so quickly I almost thought I missed it. The Council of Nicea, the influence of the Roman authorities who wanted to settle disputes such as the Arian "heresy" quickly for political expedience rather than any divine inspiration or scholarly reflection, and the fact that Jesus did not - despite what the lecturer implied - ever explicitly state he himself was a deity, were either glossed over or not mentioned, but perhaps this is the reason the lectures flowed as they did - they were relatively uncluttered. Also, the idea of a virgin birth was far from universally accepted, and the lecturer did not mention that early Christians took some liberty with language when translating the Hebrew word Åalma ("young woman") in chapter 7, verse 14, of Isaiah ("Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel") into the Greek word for virgin (parthenos).  

Professor Ehrman mentioned that the two genealogies of Christ differ from their starting point (one from David, the other from Adam) but perhaps out of kindness does not reflect that not a single name on the two lists is the same (except for David and Joseph of course).   They cannot both be right.  

He does point out something I had only learned recently, that the story of Christ forgiving the adulterer about to be stoned (as Biblical law demanded) had been inserted in the year 150 into a text that generations of early Christians read without that account.  This of course does not mean that it did not happen only that those who originally wrote the texts did not feel it was important enough to put in or did not know about it if it did happen.
The idea of blood atonement, essentially having another innocent creature (or in the case of Jesus, a man) killed to offset some wickedness you might have engaged in is strange and frankly immoral to a modern audience (I am reminded of people who paid substitutes to take their place rather than fight themselves in the Civil War; legal at the time, but frowned upon today); Richard Dawkins makes an excellent case against this central theme of Christianity (and of sacrifice-based religions as most Mediterranean ones were), one that I had not even thought much about until it was presented in its starkest terms.  (Like so many of the stranger aspects of Christianity, it is just there in the background culture so much that even those of us who were not indoctrinated as children can't help but ignore some of its more jarring tenets and claims.) 

In other words, Professor Ehrman held his fire and if anything bent over backwards not to offend modern Christians who believe Jesus was divine (half of first century Christians didn't) or that the New Testament was the unaltered direct word of God meant to be read as an objective history (something those who wrote it and the audience for whom it was created would have found absurd). Given all the pain and anguish that rigid interpretation of these texts has caused, I think it is imperative that we all recognize that they were never meant to be taken literally and even metaphorically they are frequently contradictory if not troublesome. I cannot imagine that even those who believe these texts contain a great deal of truth would not be strengthened by critically examining them, and that is exactly what this lecture series could help them do.  As another great teacher once said, let him who has ears listen.