I’m not getting into the weeds of this, but will only repeat what I always say. As a reporter, I would read the coverage of other reporters who attended the same meetings I did — and the stories were always completely different. Why would I believe that we’d get an accurate depiction of the life of Jesus from all those different people? It’s just not human nature to report anything without your own filter.
Who wrote the book of love
>> virtually half the New Testament was written by impostors taking on the names of apostles like Paul
That’s actually true of the whole Bible. It was never intended as a history, especially not a tick tock of events. It was meant to be a way to bolster faith. Read Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible for more information. It’s very long, but written in tidbits, and therefore is very readable. Reading it was the first time that anything in the Bible ever made sense to me.
Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com
Too many Americans — especially some Protestant Americans who make literalism a fetish — have never grasped the *difference* between a history and a sacred history. As to your reporter analogy, Susie, that’s on target — but imagine writing the story 30+ years later, as “Paul” is supposed to have done. This multiplicity of voices is precisely why the Council of Nicea (325 CE) established the canonical gospels — and banned and burned other books of gospel. (It’s what governments do, to establish their authority.) The ancients treated gospels as popular literature, and there were many different versions. Some survived by being secretly buried, such as the Nag Hammadi gospels that were rediscovered in the 1940s.
Scholarship like Bart Ehrman’s is always attacked by power brokers with an agenda. I expect a papal bull, and its equivalents from the Southern Baptist Convention and the American Family Association.
And Bart Ehrman’s publisher is… Harper Collins, the house owned by Rupert Murdoch. It should be interesting.