Bart Ehrman on Premier Christian Radio

[pw201]

Bart Ehrman recently turned up on Premier Christian Radio's Unbelievable programme, talking to Peter Williams, Warden of Tyndale House. You can listen to the programme on Premier's site.

The subject of the programme was Ehrman's book Misquoting Jesus (which, confusingly, is also available in the UK as Whose Word Is It?), a book which we've

Comments

Re: Inerrancy

[pw201]

The problem with many Internet lists of Biblical contradictions is that they end up taking the Bible more literally than even most evangelicals think they should, so evangelicals can brush them aside easily. For example, stuff about how the Bible implies pi = 3 is clearly just an example of rounding. In general even evangelicals don't interpret single verses of the Bible as free-standing propositional statements (or they're not supposed to, anyway, although some of them try it if they think no-one's looking).

That's not to say there aren't good examples. An old posting of mine got into some of them.

The differing genealogies in Matthew and Luke represent an internal contradiction (the Bible contradicts itself) where the standard explanation (one of the genealogies is via Mary) doesn't really hold up.

The contradiction I mentioned in that posting is an external contradiction, if you like (the Bible contradicts reality). Pretty much everyone you ask who's not an inerrantist (including Bart Ehrman, in his God's Problem, but also more liberal Christians who aren't committed to inerrancy) will tell you that the early Christians thought there'd be an apocalypse, in which Jesus would return, within their lifetimes. You can tell this from their earliest writings (for example Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians, which probably predates the gospels, as well as other letters by Paul).

But if you're an inerrantist, Paul can't have written something that was wrong, so there are responses to this contradiction, too. When I was on Premier Christian Radio myself a while back, my opposite number came out with them: Paul's "we who are still alive" is intended to encompass his readers centuries later; Paul's "the time is short" means the time is shortened, in the sense that everyone since the time of Jesus has been living in the Last Days; Paul's talk of a crisis, which means there's not much point trying to change your job or marry (though you can if you really want to), refers to something local to his first readers, rather than the apocalypse.

The author is quite literally dead, and as Richard, channeling Quine, says, inerrantists can certainly construct responses which aren't internally contradictory, which allow them to keep inerrancy in the web of stuff they believe. The best argument against this stuff is that just admitting that Paul was wrong makes the interpreter's job simpler, I think.