Bart Ehrman is a New
Testament textual critic who used to be a professing Christian but is now an
agnostic and writes books that seek to cast doubt on the reliability of
Scripture, but his arguments are self-contradictory.
He was recently in debate
with New Testament scholar, Peter J. Williams on Premier Christian Radio’s Unbelievable?
show.
Williams has written an
excellent book called Can We Trust the Gospels, which I reviewed here.
Ehrman granted that Williams
did a very good job of showing that the Gospel writers were accurate in the
incidental details. Williams argued that this gives us good reason to think
that they got their information from people who were there, because these
incidental details are the things that get corrupted as the story passes from
one generation to the next. It is hard to imagine that the incidental details
were preserved accurately but the main thrust of the story got corrupted.
Ehrman unintentionally
agreed with Williams on this at a different section of the debate when he was
talking about what he viewed as an irreconcilable contradiction between
Matthew’s account of the death of Judas and Luke’s account. He said that he
believed Jesus had a disciple named Judas who betrayed Him, and then had an
untimely death and it was connected with a field. In other words, the main gist
of the story was preserved, but the incidental details got corrupted. (This is
not an admission of a contradiction – I find it pretty simple to put the two
accounts together with no contradiction, but I’m just taking Ehrman’s point as
true for argument’s sake.)
But when Williams said that
the accuracy of the incidental details gives good reason to trust the main
thrust of the story was accurate, Ehrman disagreed. He asked us to suppose that
2000 years from now a scholar finds a story about a debate that took place in a
radio studio in Westminster between an American named Ehrman and an Englishman
named Williams from Cambridge, and Ehrman took a train from Wimbledon to
Vauxhall and then walked across Vauxhall Bridge, but before Ehrman gets to the
debate there was an explosion because of a gas leak. The scholar goes on an
archaeological dig and finds evidence of a train line from Wimbledon to
Vauxhall, and a radio studio at Westminster. He investigates some more and
finds there was an American scholar named Ehrman and a Cambridge scholar named
Williams. Does that mean then that the explosion happened? And the answer is,
of course, no. So, Ehrman says, the accuracy of the Gospels in regard to names,
geography, customs, etc. (which Ehrman grants), does not mean that Jesus did
and said what the Gospel writers claimed He did and said.
There are a few fairly
obvious problems with this. I’ll just mention a couple here for brevity.
First, if our hypothetical
future scholar found no corroborating evidence of a gas explosion it should
make him wonder if it actually happened, and he might well doubt it or be agnostic
if all he has is one source. But when it comes to the claims of Christ, His
miracles and resurrection, we are not dependent on a single source. We have
multiple, independent sources testifying to this, even those who were once
sceptics and enemies.
Second, even if our
hypothetical future scholar believed the story about the explosion, no one
living at the time and place would have believed it. Such an invention could
only fool future generations. This isn’t analogous to the details about Christ.
The Christian message was proclaimed at the time and in the place where the
alleged explosion happened. They weren’t interested in fooling future
generations. They were writing and preaching to their own generation who could
check their claims.
The fact that Christianity
grew rapidly in, and spread widely from, Jerusalem is indisputable. There’s no
doubt there was an “explosion” following the death of Christ. Only the
resurrection could have sparked that.
