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Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden…
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Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them) (original 2009; edition 2009)

by Bart D. Ehrman (Author)

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1,3404813,966 (3.99)39
To be honest this book confirmed what I have already thought about The Bible. My feelings about the Bible are that it's part history, part myth, part storytelling, part polemic and part propaganda. Ehrman establishes that he was once a "conservative Christian" who has left the Christian faith. He did not leave because of his research and findings from the Bible but because he cannot reconcile a loving God with all the suffering that he sees in the world. I can appreciate his feelings as they mirror mine partly.

Ehrman points out some of the discrepancies that can be found in the New Testament related to the life-and-death of Jesus Christ. Ehrman does believe that Christ existed but leaves the door wide open as to whether Christ was divine and the son of God. Much of the New Testament was written 60-70 or more years from Christ's death. It seems that the authors of the New Testament took great pains to reconcile Christ's life and deeds with previously held myths and speculations about the Messiah who was about to come.

Ehrman takes great pains to ensure his neutrality in presenting information in the book. He realizes that most Christians are unaware of the historical findings related to documents presented in the Bible. If you believe the Bible is the word of God and that literally everything is true within it, you may not like the conclusions or findings that Ehrman presents.

At some point in what remains of my life, I should read the Bible. Not as a believer but someone who appreciates the history of Christianity and would be interested to know more about its history and doctrines. ( )
1 vote writemoves | Jun 17, 2019 |
Showing 1-25 of 47 (next | show all)
Once again, a book club book that I read after the fact.

Wow, what a fascinating book. It really is NOT an anti-religion book but more of a historical look at Christianity and the Bible. After growing up Catholic and then studying the bible myself quite a bit, there was so much I still learned. The author is a former evangelical Christian that teaches biblical history. He is now agnostic but also states many times in the book that you can know and believe the things he teaches and still believe.

I found so many things interesting in this. The contradictions that were brought up were interesting and I was surprised how I had never noticed some of them but what was more interesting to me was the evolution of the religion. How it started, the various forms of Christians before it was an official religion and accepted worldwide as it is now. When the parts of the bible were written and by whom and how they figure these things out.

Absolutely intriguing and fascinating. I know many people that would probably enjoy this book. ( )
  KyleneJones | Jan 3, 2024 |
Probably the best book of Ehrman's (with the worst title) if you have to choose just one; it covers the bases of his familiar arguments that he delves into deeper in other books. You get an overview of early christianity, of the reliability of oral traditions, the battle to settle the first canon, the early heresies and competing christianities, as well as what it says on the tin about contradictions. Very well rounded book. ( )
  A.Godhelm | Oct 20, 2023 |
Bart Ehrman never explains his title. It reminds me of the title of the book and movie "Girl, Interrupted" about a teenage girl whose life is interrupted by her attempted suicide and consequent hospitalization. Can one find any connection between that and Ehrman's idea?

Certainly one theme of this book is that there seems to be a discontinuity between who Jesus starts out to be and who he becomes in the hands of Christian writers of the New Testament, especially if we read the scriptures "horizontally" instead of "vertically" as Ehrman puts it. Ordinarily we read as if we were reading a scroll vertically from the beginning of a book to the end, and this is a valid way of reading, but, in scriptures, there is often repetition from section to section or book to book and it is useful to read by comparing different accounts of the same or similar stories as well as different pronouncements on the same topics or issues. That is reading horizontally.

If you read the gospels in the order in which they are presented in the New Testament, you see Matthew first, and his version is probably pretty reminiscent of what your Sunday school teacher taught you. So far, so good. Then you read Mark, and it seems awfully pared down but essentially the same story you just read in Matthew. Next you read Luke. It might seem similar to Matthew, and also brings up memories of the gospel according to your Sunday school teacher or at least as told by Charles Schultz and Snoopy, but you might have forgotten by now that Matthew mentioned things that Luke is not saying and that some of the things that Luke is saying were not mentioned in Matthew. This is where it becomes helpful to go back and compare Matthew, Mark and Luke to see whether or not they really are telling the same story. Whether or not you do this, when you go on to read the Gospel of John, you find that for all the differences between Matthew, Mark, and Luke (called the "synoptics" because they see Jesus and the events of his life in more or less the same way) Jesus in John's account does not seem the same at all.

Ehrman picks out several discrepancies between Biblical texts that are difficult or impossible to reconcile. The conclusion of least resistance is that each gospel narrator saw Jesus differently from the others and so wrote something different about him even when describing similar events. Jesus' personality, experiences and teaching seems slightly-or sometimes greatly-different in each book. Most strikingly, it is only John that tells us that Jesus Christ is God. You can read the other gospels and think that they agree, but other interpretations are possible because they do not actually say that he is God. If Jesus is the Son of Man (Son of Adam) or even the Son of God, are we not all God's children? John alone among the evangelists makes a claim to divinity for Jesus in no uncertain terms. And yet, as Ehrman points out, there are passages in John that seem to hark back to a time when his community saw Jesus as more human, and these statements are mixed among the statements of his divinity.

So, the mixing of visions can occur not only between texts but, often, within them, and these contradictions are not only about Jesus. Acts (The Acts of the Apostles), the fifth book in the New Testament, not only adds to the plethora of statements about who Jesus was, but it tells stories about the early church that formed after the death of Jesus. Much of this focuses on Paul, one of the pivotal figures in the history of Christianity. Now, Paul himself wrote letters that are included in the New Testament (and the historical Paul actually wrote some of them). If we compare what he says in his letters (such as Galatians and 1 Corinthians) to what is written about him in Acts, we find that there are irreconcilable contradictions. For example, while both agree that Paul met a disembodied Jesus on the road to Damascus, Acts says that Paul immediately went to Jerusalem and conferred with the apostles, Peter, James and all of the rest; but Paul says that he went away from Jerusalem and did not go there for three years, at which time he only met Peter and James and did not meet any other apostles. One gets the impression from Acts that early Christianity was one big happy family, whereas Paul's own letters give an impression of uneasy alliance, discord, and even petty jealousy.

Ehrman represents an approach called historical criticism that has been around for a few hundred years ever since scholars began to examine many of the oldest copies of the Bible they could find and compared them. They found thousands of discrepancies, and while many were not significant, enough were to make them reassess the notion of Biblical inerrancy. The analytic approach they developed is historical and critical in the sense that one is looking for evidence of what actually happened by comparing what is said in the texts, looking for the areas of agreement and consistency as well as discrepancy. Sometimes it is not possible to find an answer to the question of what really happened, but often there are clues in the texts that suggest one. For example, take the question of whether or not Jesus really existed. Though Ehrman uses the "criterion of dissimilarity" to discover the most basic historical facts of Jesus' life, the same criterion also argues in favor of his existence: While there are many heroic myths surrounding Jesus that put him in the same camp with Hercules and other legendary/mythical personages, consider the fact that all four gospels agree that Jesus grew up in Nazareth (though two of them claim that he was actually born in Bethlehem). Now, Nazareth was a little village of little account in the backward province of Galilee. If you were going to invent a hero, would you have him grow up in Nazareth or would you invent a sexier stomping ground? Why not have him grow up in Bethlehem, a town near Jerusalem, where he could have rubbed shoulders with the movers and shakers of Judea? But no, the gospels all admit that he was from Nazareth despite the unflattering baggage of being a country bumpkin that this conveyed to anyone in the ancient world who knew the difference between the first-century equivalent of a house in the suburbs and a shack in Tobacco Road. From this we can conclude that Jesus not only lived in Nazareth but that, considering this and numerous other unflattering biographical facts that slip out in the course of the gospels, he really lived.

In his subsequent book, "Forged," Ehrman discusses the question of authorship of the books of the New Testament, and he goes over much of the same ground in a couple of chapters here. Suffice it to say, most of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament were not written by the persons to whom they are ascribed. In perhaps most cases, this is not the fault of the authors who often wrote anonymously. None of the gospels claims within its text to be written by the person we have come to regard as its author. For example, a claim is made at the end of John that this book was written by the "Beloved Disciple" mentioned only by that designation in the text, but -besides the suspiciousness of this claim being made in the third person as if someone other than the author tacked it on as an editorial postscript-the fact that this book originally existed without a named author means that we do not really know who the "Beloved Disciple" was; we are really only following a pious second century tradition when we say that the author was John. On the other hand, several letters in the New Testament claim to have been authored by apostles like Peter and Paul when they often are actually forgeries intended to fool readers into thinking that the hidden authors' opinions should be taken seriously because they were "really" written by apostles. Only seven of the thirteen letters attributed to Paul were probably actually by him. Among the hints that the rest are forgeries are discrepancies both in style and message. Neither of the two letters credited to Peter are really by the apostle, who in real life was an "unlettered," Aramaic-speaking, Galilean fisherman who could not have written in the elevated Greek of 1 and 2 Peter.

Ehrman allows that the Book of Revelations may be fairly ascribed to someone named "John," which was and is a common name, and that it was not the author's fault that later churchmen assumed that he was the same as the apostle. Likewise it could be claimed that other books might have been innocently ascribed to James or Jude when the authors did not necessarily mean to imply that they were first century Christian celebrities. (On the other hand, it is possible that they did mean to give readers this false impression.)

The New Testament, as Ehrman is fond of pointing out, did not fall from the sky all at once, but developed out of a centuries long debate over the canon -the books that should be included as scripture. (There are still churches outside the purview of Western Christianity that use Bibles with a slightly different canon.) Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, a long-lived and major figure in the development of Christianity, published a list of twenty-seven books that should be read in the churches. While this list was neither the first nor the last word on the subject, it demonstrates that the canon was becoming fixed by the end of the fourth century.

Ehrman next turns to the history of Christianity itself. While many Christians today think that Christianity is belief in the Bible, Ehrman shows that historically it is more importantly belief in and about Jesus. And contrary to the story of the homogeneous and unwavering progress of the Truth related to us by the fourth century church historian Eusebius of Caesarea, Ehrman argues that the real history of Christianity is something more like this:

Jesus was an apocalyptic teacher who probably believed he had a special connection to God. His followers may have believed that he was the "Son of Man" who would judge the world after the apocalypse, but not an (or the) actual God. As a result of the crucifixion and as Christianity spread to various communities all over the Roman Empire, many Christians assigned Jesus loftier titles. Many regarded him as the Messiah, another concept from Judaism, which title was translated into Greek as "Christ." They became convinced that the Hebrew Scriptures allowed for a Suffering Messiah even though this contradicted traditional Jewish expectations, which more often involved the Messiah's kingship. Eventually, the idea that Jesus was in some sense divine spread along with the new religion even though this idea did not originate with Jesus or his first followers. The belief took widely different forms as some Christians understood it in a more Jewish context while others, especially the growing population of gentile Christians, thought of it in terms of what "Son of God" meant in the Greco-Roman religion: a man who was half human and half god because one of his parents was a denizen of Mount Olympus and the other a mortal. These several different understandings of what Christ's divinity meant led to the rush hour of conflicting Christologies (theological explanations of the nature of Christ) in the second century and afterward. So while the church's official history of its development is that originally there was a correct understanding of Christ's nature but then all sorts of heterodoxies branched off and perverted the Truth, this was belied by an inconvenient fact: If the nature of Christ was already known from the beginning, why did the bishops of the church have to meet at least three times over subsequent centuries to figure it out?

As the idea that Christ was God developed variously without agreement about how it worked, the doctrine created more problems than it solved. What did the idea of Christ as God do to the doctrine of monotheism? If God the Father and God the Son are both gods, are there two gods? If they are two divine beings but represent only one God, how do they do that? Not until the Council of Nicea in 325 did the bishops decide on a formula. Unfortunately, it was a hastily agreed upon formula that still allowed for some ambiguities. It took at least two more councils over the next couple of centuries to straighten out the remaining ambiguities.

Ehrman's historical designation "proto-orthodox" for the Christian point of view that ultimately triumphed seems a bit unsatisfactory but I cannot think of anything better. One could call it Nicene or even Athanasian, but these terms would only apply to it during or after the fourth century. Before that, it was one of the competing forms of Christianity albeit one of the best organized. The proto-orthodox Christians had a hierarchical system of bishops in many of the cities around the Mediterranean Sea. Yet even among themselves they did not always agree on doctrine. Doctrines that would later be seen as heresies captured many bishoprics. Some embraced a doctrine called Patripassianism that held that God suffered through Jesus on the cross. (To show how tricky this all gets, it was equally problematic to suggest, as some did, that Jesus did not suffer at all.) The doctrine called Arianism held that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were not equal but formed a hierarchy and consisted of similar but not identical substances. This was very popular and even came to rule Rome at the end of the fifth century. But eventually the Nicene Creed held sway. Thus Christian history is not a story of smooth sailing with but a few occasional side contests with unruly dissidents; rather it is a story of debate and often violent clashes over what Christians should be required to believe.

Finally, Ehrman gets personal, although the end of the book is not the only time he does so. In the middle of the book, he gives some of his critics a tongue lashing for suggesting that the discrepancies in the Bible are not important. (One has to give him some latitude since this is not a text book, per se; still, had he no better avenue for answering his critics?) Toward the end of the book, he discusses his own response to what he has learned about the Bible during his career. He denies what many of his critics have suggested, that his study of Biblical discrepancies led him to his current agnosticism. Instead, he maintains that many of his colleagues in the historical criticism field agree with his assessment of the Bible without losing their faith. (I find it interesting that he suggests that people are free to choose any interpretation that resonates with them; I wonder if this might extend to those who cherish the books that Ehrman considers to have been forged, such as Paul's Letter to the Ephesians, which resonates with so many Christians.) In any case, he says, it was not his study of the Bible that eventually led him to agnosticism but the wider question of why any loving God would allow us to suffer. An interesting implication of this inquiry is that Ehrman seems to feel that study of the Bible raises this issue but does not answer it, but that is the topic of another book by Ehrman: "God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question -Why We Suffer."

I found many typos in this book, and I also wish that it had an index, but, otherwise, I found it the best overall statement of Ehrman's views yet. (I have read and reviewed several of his other books.) His sweeping history of the development of Christianity with its "orthodox" innovations is the concise description of church history that I have been trying to formulate in my own head with a much less satisfactory result. ( )
  MilesFowler | Jul 16, 2023 |
The first thing to know about Bart Ehrman is that you should ignore the titles of his books. I don't know if he comes up with him or if it is his publishers, but I do know that the titles are meant to grab eyeballs. The books are much less sensationalistic than the titles or the publisher's blurbs -- Ehrman mostly covers academically mainstream, vanilla views of the Biblical as a historical and literary text. These books, like pretty much anything that looks at the Bible as a historical and literary work, are going to be unpleasant for literalists.

The second thing to know about Ehrman is that he is one of those authors whose books cover the same topic repeatedly from different perspectives. Thus, you probably only need to read one Ehrman book to get the general gist of what he has to say. The other books give more depth for those interested in that.

Jesus, Interrupted has a wide scope. It covers the history of the Biblical text, questions of authorship, historicity, and the much richer views of the Biblical texts that arise if each text is allowed to speak with its own voice instead of being forced to synthesize with the other texts.

I would strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in gaining more background on the Bible. In addition to having better content than some of Ehrman's other books, Jesus Interrupted has a better style. One particularly nice improvement is that in this book, Ehrman started using a method that encourages more discovery by the reader. Instead of saying, for example, that certain passages are incompatible, Ehrman encourages the reader to place the two passages side-by-side and compare them. It's a fun technique. ( )
  eri_kars | Jul 10, 2022 |
Once again, a book club book that I read after the fact.

Wow, what a fascinating book. It really is NOT an anti-religion book but more of a historical look at Christianity and the Bible. After growing up Catholic and then studying the bible myself quite a bit, there was so much I still learned. The author is a former evangelical Christian that teaches biblical history. He is now agnostic but also states many times in the book that you can know and believe the things he teaches and still believe.

I found so many things interesting in this. The contradictions that were brought up were interesting and I was surprised how I had never noticed some of them but what was more interesting to me was the evolution of the religion. How it started, the various forms of Christians before it was an official religion and accepted worldwide as it is now. When the parts of the bible were written and by whom and how they figure these things out.

Absolutely intriguing and fascinating. I know many people that would probably enjoy this book. ( )
  KyleneJones | Apr 25, 2022 |
Fascinating topic. It's so rare to find information on Biblical history written by someone who's not trying to evangelize the reader, either for-or-against Christianity. Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in religion. ( )
  poirotketchup | Mar 18, 2021 |
I have listened to a couple of Bart Ehrman's Great Courses lectures and read two of his books (one somewhat embarrassingly forgotten from more than a decade ago), and I decided I'd read several more, and reread that one, to start out 2021. Ehrman is not without controversy - the devout really don't like his findings - but he's a good scholar and his scholarship shows in all of his writings and lectures. This book covers the subtitle and more. He outlines what we know, what we don't know, what we can't know (that's vexes the evangelicals), connects the dots and explains his rationale for the paths of connection he's chosen. He's clear as to the historical unreliability of almost everything in the canon (that makes him immensely popular among the faithful). And, he politely denies that any of it is an attack on Christianity. He says "I have been trying, instead, to make serious scholarship on the Bible and earliest Christianity accessible and available to people who may be interested in the New Testament but who, for one reason or another, have never heard what scholars have long known and thought about it." I don't see it as attacks, but then I don't play at the faith that takes the exception and emotions run high when our convictions are threatened. So...I'm primed to accept what he's presented. I do check his notes (which he properly cited in the text), follow the threads, which is why it takes longer to read good nonfiction, make my own notes...

His analyses are logical. He's a New Testament scholar who just happens to be a former "serious" Christian. He's read the oldest manuscripts we have (none of which are original, nor copies of originals, nor even copies of copies...) in their original languages. He's read the other documents, traced the history, identified all of the contradictions, changes, morphology that led him to the only conclusion that the bible is a human document, not a divinely inspired or authored one. And...none of this is new!! All of it has been know, discussed, analyzed in academia and seminaries for at least a couple of centuries. But these facts are largely unknown and
...not only are most Americans (increasingly) ignorant of the contents of the Bible, but they are also almost completely in the dark about what scholars have been saying about the Bible for the past two centuries.
So this should be required reading for anyone professing to be a Christian...and they won't read it. Even though he has "been trying, instead, to make serious scholarship on the Bible and earliest Christianity accessible and available to people who may be interested in the New Testament but who, for one reason or another, have never heard what scholars have long known and thought about it." He says
My view is that everyone already picks and chooses what they want to accept in the Bible. The most egregious instances of this can be found among people who claim not to be picking and choosing.
I've been watching, accessing, evaluating that for more than 40 years and that is my view also.

Selected soundbite takeaways, because as usual with a good book, I have more notes than anyone needs to see in a review:

On seminary students
For the country’s mainline denominations—Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopalian, and so on—a good number of these students are already what I would call liberal. They do not believe in the inerrancy of the Bible and are more committed to the church as an institution than to Scripture as a blueprint for what to believe and how to live one’s life. And many of them, frankly, don’t know very much about the Bible and have only a kind of vague sense of its religious value.
The Institutions are strong.

On mainline Protestant seminaries
They are keen to make students knowledgeable about the Bible, rather than teach what is actually in the Bible.


Historians
have problems using the Gospels as historical sources, in view of their discrepancies and the fact that they were written decades after the life of Jesus by unknown authors who had inherited their accounts about him from the highly malleable oral tradition.
And for scholarship of anything, especially the bible, "one should always know what the data are before deciding too quickly what the data mean."Knowing which books attributed to Paul or Peter could not have been written by the authors accepted to have written the other books is critical. Because when seeing obvious contradictions between two accepted books of the bible, "if you are creative enough, you can figure out a plausible explanation for both accounts being right." Apologists are extremely creative. I've known for decades that if the bible had a good editor, most of the problems would have been erased. Instead, it shows the collection to be what Ehrman says, a thoroughly human book, written by humans, with humans flaws, reflecting the human conflict that it (and the faith it represents) evolved from.

Other historical contradictions
The historical problems with Luke are even more pronounced. For one thing, we have relatively good records for the reign of Caesar Augustus, and there is no mention anywhere in any of them of an empire-wide census for which everyone had to register by returning to their ancestral home.
Or logical contradictions coming from the need to put Jesus in Bethlehem (not a an early church problem or even a thought, but one for the gospel writers who came much later): "If Jesus is not a blood-relation to Joseph, why is it that Matthew and Luke trace Jesus’ bloodline precisely through Joseph?"

Jesus's life story varies widely (with convenient convergences that can only be attributed to direct lifting from other texts, and divergences that are easily explained by understanding the radically different schools of thought on Jesus during the early evoltuion of the church). Example: what did the voice at the baptism of Jesus say?
In Mark, however, the voice says, “You are my son, in whom I am well pleased.” In this case the voice appears to be speaking directly to Jesus, telling him, or confirming to him, who he really is.
[And] In Luke we have something different (this is a bit complicated, because different manuscripts of Luke’s Gospel give the voice different words. I am taking here the original wording of the verse as found in some older manuscripts of the Bible, even though it is not found in most English translations).9 Here the voice says, “You are my son, today I have begotten you” (3:22), quoting the words of Psalm 2:7.
Selected notes, I said, and I've got many more for my use, for anyone who has read this far, why are there so many problems with all four of the gospels, even if three are Synoptic?
[...]we have an answer to our ultimate question of why these Gospels are so different from one another. They were not written by Jesus’ companions or by companions of his companions. They were written decades later by people who didn’t know Jesus, who lived in a different country or different countries from Jesus, and who spoke a different language from Jesus.
Not generally known among most of the practicing Christians i have known, and if known among the clerical ones (chaplains and minister friends), ignored.

Ehrman is careful with pronouncements. He's a historian and a good one. He uses phrases such as "it seems unlikely." Pop book authors like O'Reilly will state things as fact with no sources. I will trust a historian whose positions come with caveats and rightful uncertainty.

For anyone who claims that Jesus was written about or even popularly known in or near his lifetime, ...
What do Greek and Roman sources have to say about Jesus? Or to make the question more pointed: if Jesus lived and died in the first century (death around 30 CE), what do the Greek and Roman sources from his own day through the end of the century (say, the year 100) have to say about him? The answer is breathtaking. They have absolutely nothing to say about him. He is never discussed, challenged, attacked, maligned, or talked about in any way in any surviving pagan source of the period. There are no birth records, accounts of his trial and death, reflections on his significance, or disputes about his teachings. In fact, his name is never mentioned once in any pagan source. And we have a lot of Greek and Roman sources from the period: religious scholars, historians, philosophers, poets, natural scientists; we have thousands of private letters; we have inscriptions placed on buildings in public places. In no first-century Greek or Roman (pagan) source is Jesus mentioned.
[...]
The first time Jesus is mentioned in a pagan source is in the year 112 CE. The author, Pliny the Younger, was a governor of a Roman province. In a letter that he wrote to his emperor, Trajan, he indicates that there was a group of people called Christians who were meeting illegally; he wants to know how to handle the situation.
Ehrman does believe Jesus existed. He doesn't believe he was any of the things that the myth grew to encompass, but he is convinced that there was an itinerant apocalyptic Jewish preacher sometime in the early first century of the common era. "The idea that Jesus was divine was a later Christian invention, one found, among our Gospels, only in John. [...] In many ways, what became Christianity represents a series of rather important departures from the teachings of Jesus. Christianity, as has long been recognized by critical historians, is the religion about Jesus, not the religion of Jesus." These things fascinate me.

Jumping off points:
- other Ehrman books, obviously
- Pseudonymity, the New Testament, and Deception: An Inquiry into Intention and Reception by Terry. L. Wilder
- Synopsis of the Four Gospels by Kurt Auland ( )
1 vote Razinha | Jan 13, 2021 |
An expert on the Historical/Critical approach to reading/interpreting the Bible, he shows the many contradictions within the Bible, explains why many of the books weren't written by the people we think of as the authors, how some of these contradictions reveal the context of the people who were writing the books, and the long road to a canon. He also talks about why these results of historical/critical reading should not be a barrier to Christian faith, even though he, himself, has become agnostic.
  JohnLavik | Mar 29, 2020 |
A detailed critical-historical account of the New Testament explaining the contradictions and differences between the books. Ehrman shows how the different authors of the New Testament had very different theological views and how these views gradually evolved into christian ortodoxy after three centuries.
Ehrman's scholarship is excellent and his prose is clear. The only reason I would deduct one star, is it is to much essayistic for my taste, referring constantly to his own (abandoned) beliefes and how he teaches his students. ( )
  haraldgroven | Sep 8, 2019 |
To be honest this book confirmed what I have already thought about The Bible. My feelings about the Bible are that it's part history, part myth, part storytelling, part polemic and part propaganda. Ehrman establishes that he was once a "conservative Christian" who has left the Christian faith. He did not leave because of his research and findings from the Bible but because he cannot reconcile a loving God with all the suffering that he sees in the world. I can appreciate his feelings as they mirror mine partly.

Ehrman points out some of the discrepancies that can be found in the New Testament related to the life-and-death of Jesus Christ. Ehrman does believe that Christ existed but leaves the door wide open as to whether Christ was divine and the son of God. Much of the New Testament was written 60-70 or more years from Christ's death. It seems that the authors of the New Testament took great pains to reconcile Christ's life and deeds with previously held myths and speculations about the Messiah who was about to come.

Ehrman takes great pains to ensure his neutrality in presenting information in the book. He realizes that most Christians are unaware of the historical findings related to documents presented in the Bible. If you believe the Bible is the word of God and that literally everything is true within it, you may not like the conclusions or findings that Ehrman presents.

At some point in what remains of my life, I should read the Bible. Not as a believer but someone who appreciates the history of Christianity and would be interested to know more about its history and doctrines. ( )
1 vote writemoves | Jun 17, 2019 |
Bart Ehrman is at it again. While in his previous book, Misquoting Jesus, he kept the focus primarily upon the actual art of textual criticism, Jesus, Interrupted, goes further into the historical context under which the Bible was developed.

The information within the book will not come as a surprise to anyone interested within the historical aspects of the Bible itself, nor those who have read his New Testament textbook, but to those who have only a devotional interest in the Bible it should be a shock. The Bible, not the inspired word of God? Say it ain't so!

The tone of the book, as most of Ehrman's work is, remains respectful and gentle. Never does he condemn those who hold the faith, in fact he goes out of his way to point out how much he respects them. This book would go a long way towards resolving the differences between those who hold the faith and those who don't. It's a brilliant piece of work, seeking only to foster an understanding of what's already been written and the situation under which the ideas came alive. ( )
  Lepophagus | Jun 14, 2018 |
Examination of the New Testament and early Christianity by a renowned Biblical scholar using the historical critical method. The author discusses discrepancies between the 27 books that comprise the accepted canon and presents the theory (almost universally taught in seminaries) explaining how early Church fathers altered the religion of Jesus (himself an observant apocalyptic Jew) into the foundation of the religion what is today the largest religion on the planet. ( )
1 vote dickmanikowski | Nov 20, 2016 |
Good book. An easy and interesting read. Ehrman is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, and is considered a leading secular authority of the Bible. Ehrman’s position is that the Bible is not without error, but has some major discrepancies. These errors are well known and taught at all the major divinity schools, but they are generally unknown or unrecognized by the general public. Some of the errors are minor and insignificant, but some are quite puzzling and thought provoking.

A couple of examples: Just before Jesus was born, what was the home town of Mary and Joseph? Matthew says it was Bethlehem. When the Wise Men visited Jesus in Bethlehem, Mary, Joseph and Jesus were living in a house, not a manger. Luke, on the other hand, says that Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth, and only went to Bethlehem because of the census. Ehrman asks, why the difference? How come the stories of the birth of Jesus are completely different in Matthew and Luke? How come they did not get their stories straight?

Another example: in relation to the Passover, on which day did Jesus die? Mark says that Jesus died on the day of the Passover. At 9 AM that morning. But John has a different story. He says that Jesus died at Noon on the day before the Passover. So, which is it. Did he die on Passover, or the day before?

And the list goes on. Ehrman says the authors of the New Testament have divergent views about who Jesus was and how salvation works. Matthew, John and Paul all represent different views on the religion of Jesus; views that are not consistent with one another. And many established Christian doctrines—such as the suffering Messiah, the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity—were all the inventions of later theologians.

Good book and I recommend it. I wonder if there is a book countering the ideas presented here. ( )
  ramon4 | Nov 20, 2016 |
Yet another outstanding book by Mr. Ehrman. His works are consistently well researched and his style is completely available to the common reader despite his background as a new testament scholar.

Jesus Interrupted makes a convincing case that bible was not the inspired words of God, but instead was written by various people from various places and sets forth sometimes different (if not contradictory) facts about the life of Jesus and the developing theology of being a Christian. Mr. Ehrman sets forth his arguments, which are standard in the scholarly community, in such a way that reader will finish the book with a far greater appreciation for the history of both the bible and the Christian religion.

Highly recommended for believers and non-believers alike. ( )
1 vote la2bkk | Apr 26, 2016 |
An excellent, plain language survey of critical scholarship on the nature and development of the New Testament documents of the Christian bible. As the author points out, scholars have known the information presented in this book for many, many decades - it’s just that the person in the street is not told about it. The information will be a bombshell for those who are not aware of this information - and a brilliant summary and discussion for those who already do. The author is an agnostic and is often asked why he continues to study the Bible. His answer, provided near the end of this book, is that ‘The Bible is the most important book in the history of Western civilization. It is the most widely purchased, the most thoroughly studied, the most highly revered, and the most completely misunderstood book—ever! Why wouldn’t I want to study it?’ Bart Ehrman is clearly an expert in his field. But he has the ability to make his area simple to understand without dumbing down the material. For anyone interested in the Bible - atheist, agnostic, or believer - this is a must read. ( )
3 vote spbooks | Jan 11, 2015 |
Most of Ehrman's criticisms don't make any sense to me. Besides the minor ones, they seem like a simple twisting of the literal level of scripture. That is not the way early Christians wrote or interpreted (2 Co 3:6). Ehrman used to believe "literally." That's where He started to go wrong, by rejecting the spiritual. Most of the discrepancies he speaks of were resolved in the second and third centuries. Following is how Ehrman disagrees with scripture.

Ehrman seems to think that John teaches a different kingdom of God than Mark. Learn a parable of the mustard seed where faith is the kingdom of God. As Luke says, the kingdom is within you (Luke 17:21, Rom 14:17). Paul says the kingdom is present and spiritual (Rom 14:17 1, Co 15:50). For Paul the kingdom is already present. Jesus does miracles to prove who He is (John 12:37). Signs and miracles are used for confirmation in all the Gospels (Mark 16:20). Jesus was the fulfillment of the commandments (Mat 5:17). He wasn't asking people to poke out their eye or cutoff their hand. The way to heaven was to follow Him (Luke 9:23-24). In Romans 1 Paul mentions several sins. He doesn't single out idol worship for the wrath of God. It is because of their materialism and rejection of God that they do those things. It is a symptom, not a cause. Matthew shows Jesus is divine by calling Him "God with us," (Mat 1:23) and closing chiastically, Jesus says I am with you always (Mat 28:20). The idea that one day equals a thousand years was present before the first century in such literature as the book of Jubilees (4:30) and Psalms (90:4). It wasn't the invention of first century Christians who were disappointed that Jesus hadn't returned. The orthodox church has always looked forward to the resurrection. The Trinity is shown in such verses as Mat 28:19-20.

He admits that argument from vocabulary is a tricky way to establish authorship, and their are many disagreements among scholars, yet he depends on it. That's why the opinions of modern scholars about authorship aren't better known among the general public. Historians have no real way to authenticate the process of scripture canonization. Their opinions vary widely and they can't be proven. Ehrman claims that people believe in things that were "made up." Yet he believes in the old "whispering game" idea where the message gets jumbled up. Which is it? How can he base conclusions on history if history isn't true? He says the ancient world was "different." If so, how can he draw conclusions about their thinking using 19th century methods of interpretation. He simply picks and chooses what he wants to believe in the bible, and even admits that.

Ehrman believes that most people live miserable lives. Perhaps he is describing his own situation. If he had faith then maybe that would change. ( )
  arfuller | Oct 2, 2014 |
Too much repetition from his other books. This would have been okay if I had been reading it in book form and could skip over familiar material, but I borrowed an audiobook from the library and sat through it all. ( )
  TanteLeonie | Sep 25, 2014 |
Ehrman explains the issues and current scholarship regarding the Bible and the historical Jesus where anyone can understand them. Highly recommended. ( )
  jamesfallen | Feb 7, 2014 |
Maybe one of the only popular books on biblical scholarship I have ever seen. ( )
  nmele | Apr 6, 2013 |
I never did figure out what the title of this book is supposed to mean, but it doesn't matter. The secondary title is most relevant. Ehrman is a biblical scholar in the "historical-critical" school and he really knows his stuff. Scholarly but quite readable, fascinating, and provocative. ( )
  Sullywriter | Apr 3, 2013 |
Bart Ehrman is on a roll. A scholar of the New Testament (NT) at the University of North Carolina, Ehrman has published a new book on the history of early Christianity, NT, or the historical Jesus every other year or so since 2005. Ehrman's recent output has tended toward the popular rather than the scholarly. I haven't yet read any of Ehrman's more scholarly works (I mean to, I will), but I assume that books such as Jesus, Interrupted: Revaling the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don't Know About Them) (2009) are more accessible distillations of his academic monographs.

Ehrman's thesis in Jesus, Interrupted is that the NT, early Christianity and, consequently, modern Christianity, is riddled with “hidden” contradictions. As Ehrman himself repeatedly points out, there is nothing “controversial” about the notion that the NT contradicts itself. It is obvious to any observant reader that the Jesus portrayed in Mark is different from that in Luke, and both versions of the Nazarene radically differ from the one in John. Ehrman notes that even readers familiar with the NT might miss such differences since they tend to read the books sequentially rather than “horizontally”; that is, they read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the order they appear in the Bible rather than comparing aspects of the stories to one another (for instance, Jesus' birth).

Having established the varied perspectives of the Gospels, Ehrman goes on to discuss issues of interest to both scholars and the reading public. In light of the differences in the Gospels, what can scholars say about the historical Jesus? Who wrote the NT? How was it compiled? Who were the early Christians and what did they believe? Readers unfamiliar with history or religion (as academic disciplines), or who consider themselves versed in the NT (without really having read much of it) might be surprised or disturbed by Ehrman's points. I read one user review that said something along the lines of, “As usual, Ehrman's facts are flawless but his conclusions are biased and totally off-base.” The conclusions to which the user was referring were unclear (Ehrman touches on a variety of topics, after all), but Ehrman builds arguments that, although sometimes based on a paucity of evidence and a heap of speculation, seem sound. Remember that this is not an academic work; Ehrman is permitted leeway in terms of expressing his “guesses” and “intuitions.”

Some readers will be concerned about the implications Jesus, Interrupted will have for faith (their own, Christians in general). My impression is that such readers needn't worry. Ehrman takes pains to point out that he is not attacking Christianity, nor is he interested in subverting anyone's faith. Ehrman began his academic career as an evangelical Christian and is now an agnostic. Lest anyone suspect that Ehrman's fall from grace is proof of the perversions rife in academe, he notes that his abandonment of Christianity had nothing to do with his studies and everything to do with his inability to reconcile the notion of a loving deity with the suffering evident in the world. Ehrman points out, rightly, that the discipline of history can neither prove nor disprove the assertions of faith, although it can inform particular schools of belief. Evangelical Christians who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible may find Jesus, Interrupted a difficult pill to swallow.

I will end on a personal note, a liberty I take in light of Ehrman's frequent personal asides. I am a Jew. I am not in any way invested in the truth of Christianity. (Although, I think, it would be sad to see my Christian friends and neighbors abandon their faith en masse as a result of the scholarship Ehrman shares.) That said, I completely embrace Ehrman's assertion that scholarship can enhance one's faith and one's understanding of one's religion. Liberal Jews have known this since biblical studies began in earnest in the nineteenth century. The majority of my fellow (liberal) Jews do not recognize Moses as the author of Torah, as tradition states. We are aware that Torah was compiled by at least four sources (“authors”) and put into its final form by a Redactor (or, if you prefer, redactors). The literary-historical approach to the text opens a vista of interpretations, understandings, and meanings. We find the multiplicity of meanings not threatening, but liberating. I don't presume to tell our Christian friends how to approach the NT, but to see them study it the way liberal Jews do Torah would provide us all a common ground from which to speak to one another. ( )
2 vote LancasterWays | Nov 18, 2012 |
I think the subtitle of this book is a little misleading. There's really only one chapter that focuses primarily on "revealing the hidden contradictions in the Bible, "and that one only offers up a smattering of examples, all of them from the New Testament. (In fact, the book as a whole focuses almost exclusively on the New Testament, that being the author's area of expertise.) What it really is, rather than a list of contradictions, is an introductory overview of the historical-critical approach to the Bible, in which the texts are examined in an analytical fashion, in their proper historical context. So, we do get a chapter that talks about how the various accounts of the life and death of Jesus contradict each other and how those contradictions reflect the individual authors' own theological concerns. But there are also discussions about who wrote the various books of the Bible (which often turns out not to be who they're attributed to), how some writings were accepted as part of the biblical canon while others were left out, what we can conclude (or reasonably speculate) about the historical Jesus based on the writings we have, how Christian theology changed in the centuries after Jesus and affected the biblical texts, and so on.

I imagine a lot of this is likely to be quite eye-opening for those raised in a tradition of Biblical literalism (assuming they're willing to hear it out). For heathen unbeliever me, though, some of the basic points have a certain "well, duh!" quality to them. Of course reports of events written by different people decades after the fact are going to differ significantly, and all the more so if differing religious agendas are involved. Many of the historical details are quite interesting, though, especially when you consider the incredible, massive influence the Christian Bible has had on all of western civilization. And Ehrman's writing is very clear and readable, covering the subject matter well without getting too bogged down in fiddly academic disputes, and providing just enough examples to make his points without letting things get too tedious. He also doesn't make any unwarranted assumptions about his readers' personal beliefs, or expect more than a basic, general familiarity with the Bible going in. ( )
1 vote bragan | Sep 28, 2012 |
The author is an academic professor whose job is to examine critically the New Testament as a collection of works written in the 1st-2nd century, rather than as a collection of Holy Books, and understand the aim and the worldviews of their authors.

And this book is just, that, an examination of the contradictions among the books of the New Testament and of the differences between the theologies of the early Christian communities that held them precious. ( )
1 vote Panairjdde | Aug 18, 2011 |
I bought this one as a Kindle edition and found it very interesting and well written. It is measured and well reasoned without the shrillness and emotion of many of the new, militant-atheist books but it certainly blows the fundamentalist idea of the inerrancy of scripture out of the water.

The points it makes are well argued but it treats the reader as an adult and doesn't try to lecture - or at least not to excess. Throughly recommended to anyone interested in whether the christian religion is valid, either as a way of getting in touch with God or as a cultural artefact. ( )
  Philogos | Feb 24, 2011 |
A very well-written and thought provoking book that shares the view of the Bible that biblical scholars have long had and addresses all those nagging questions left over from Sunday School. ( )
1 vote dragonimp | Feb 15, 2011 |
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