Reading Bart Ehrman Will Not Turn You into An Atheist

I remember one time I was reading Bart Ehrman’s book, Did Jesus Exist? and I left it on my coffee table when a friend came over. The friend was instantly ruffled by the book’s title, and no doubt, the name of the author. “Of course Jesus existed, what a waste of time!”

I can understand why anyone who is only superficially familiar with Ehrman would assume this was some kind of anti-Christian polemic. I mean, isn’t he the guy that runs around the Internet telling people everything they know about Christianity is wrong?

Nope.

He does nothing of the sort. He provides extremely useful and enlightening historical-critical approach that all believers should at least be interested in. In fact, the book that offended my friend is actually a very left-brained approach that sets out to prove, yes, despite what a bunch of amateur mythicists want you to believe, Jesus did in fact exist.

Of course, that didn’t come as a big surprise to me. I’ve had personal mystical experiences of Jesus Christ so I would argue that not only did he once exist, but I also think he still exists. It doesn’t surprise me that Ehrman would lay out arguments for Jesus’s historicity because Ehrman’s main purpose is just to get to the historical roots of Christianity.

So why does the mere mention of Bart Ehrman cause so many Christians to bristle?

First, if you are unfamiliar with historical-critical study around the Bible – and especially if you come from a fundamentalist, inerrant position – these ideas will challenge some of your existing beliefs. The beliefs people like Ehrman are challenging deserve to be challenged and do not deserve to have systems of faith and theology built around them. In fact, Ehrman’s study didn’t lead him to agnosticism, it led him to be an Episcopalian for 15 years. According to Ehrman himself (Note: I couldn’t find a reference, so this is coming from memory of one of his interviews), it was the problem of suffering and evil that led to him becoming an agnostic. Also, important to note, he’s not even a hard-core atheist, he calls himself an atheist-agnostic who believes there is no way to prove the existence of God.

Here are some things I understand Ehrman to believe. This doesn’t sound like an atheist muckraker who is only out to spoil your faith:

• Jesus believed he was the Messiah
• Jesus called himself the Son of Man
• The disciples truly believed Jesus had been raised from the dead

Like any good historian, Ehrman does challenge inerrancy and literalism. Any honest and historical look at the Bible is going to come to some uncomfortable conclusions that the Bible has errors, has changed over time, has suffered from poor translations and has cultural problems that don’t translate easily to our times. If your faith depends on a perfect, literal and inerrant Bible, then historical and literary examination of scripture is going to challenge your faith. That is not Ehrman’s fault.

These ideas should challenge you, but they don’t contradict faith. Engaging with these facts and arguments should only lead you deeper into your tradition. Faith doesn’t have easy answers. Your foundation and identity as a Christian should be based on Christ, not a simplistic idea of scripture or philosophically unstable apologetics.

Ehrman is not shy about his atheist-agnosticism. It seems like a reasonable default position, at least more reasonable to me than either fundamentalism or atheism. Because he is upfront with being an atheist-agnostic, many people have some misconceptions about him based on stereotypes. They assume he is hostile toward religion. They assume his “falling away,” from faith was based on dangerous secularism, when in fact it was the problem of evil. Finally, some people assume that critical Biblical scholars are trying to pull people out of the pews. I’d argue that intolerant ideas are driving people from the pews, not scholarship.

I think Ehrman is challenging some dogma that needs to be challenged. If your faith requires the Bible to be the inerrant word of God, your faith may buckle under the weight of his arguments. If instead, your faith is rooted in many other areas of Christianity – like discipleship, tradition, mysticism, means of grace, prayer, family, community and love – you’ll be just fine taking a critical look at your scripture. In fact, I think you’ll come to a greater appreciation of this wonderful, diverse and very human collection of scripture we’ve inherited.

If Bart Ehrman’s scholarship is solid and he ended up an atheist-agnostic, then why wouldn’t it have the same effect on others? There are two main points of divergence I have with Ehrman. I’m only going to touch on them here.

First, I come to different conclusions about the problem of evil. Addressing this would require many more articles, but I’ve come to accept that evil, free will and true love are related and that we cannot know the mind or purposes of God. None of that, however, is very satisfying or reassuring, especially when you consider child suffering. I think the problem of evil is the best argument atheists have, but it is far from unsurmountable. I have many other reasons to believe in God, so the problem of evil isn’t a disqualifier for me as much as it is a puzzle of theodicy.

Second, like Ehrman, I believe that the disciples had a profound resurrection belief. That belief then caused them to reshape their theology. These layers were added quite a bit later and not prophesied earlier. Were there angels singing at Jesus’s birth? I don’t know, but it’s a nice story that people of that time would’ve understood to be beyond literal. They would’ve most importantly understood it to mean that Jesus was the real king, not Caesar. Many of the writers weren’t the writers you think they were. Paul didn’t write every letter. John may not have been written by the beloved disciple. But also, who knows, maybe they were. We – both Ehrman and faithful thinking Christians – are just doing the best we can right now with some ancient documents. The gospels were written decades after Jesus and intentionally embellished things to get a theological point across. I agree with Ehrman on all of that and it gives me a clear way to better understand the real meaning of some of the most difficult passages in the New Testament. Here’s the big however: I also very much believe in a literal resurrection of Jesus. The resurrection forced the early followers of Jesus to wrestle with their preconceived notions of messiahship and to include theological overlays in later writings. These weren’t meant to be historical accounts, they were doing theology in some symbolic and Midrashic ways. This opens many more doors to understanding my faith than it closes. So, in that sense, I can agree with Ehrman on his New Testament scholarship and still find that it is entirely consistent with an actual, historical resurrection experience.