My holiday respite from work is turning out nicely - I've been off since the 24th, and won't be returning until January 4th of the new year. Falling into a similar pattern as my last stay-cation, I have devoured a few books - the fictional Inamorata (which I highly recommend) but also Bart D. Ehrman's Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them). I've had a handful of Ehrman's books on my wishlist at Amazon, but finally picked this up this week, along with his Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make it Into the New Testament. I like to think of myself of a "new believer," which isn't entirely accurate, as I always "believed" but until now it was very passive - "Yes, I believe in God. What's for dinner?" It wasn't something I actively participated in, and isn't something that I steadfastly participate in daily - I've mentioned my hope for the continued discipline and motivation to maintain my Christianity. My collection of literature over the past few months continues to grow, and Ehrman's assertions, especially after Strobel's A Case for Faith, were particularly interesting.
If you've never read anything by Ehrman, I would highly recommend it - he is a New Testament scholar at UNC-Chapel Hill and essentially posits, in short, that the Bible is not the inerrant word of God. Shocking enough, I would imagine, if you're a "conservative" Christian, but shocking to someone like me who considers myself to be fairly "liberal" (I put both of these in quotations to mock how truly silly these distinctions are). I was prepared for the inerrancy argument, which I already agreed with, but I was not prepared to learn that some of the books I had recently read may not actually have been written by their supposed authors. Ehrman, along with other historical scholars, assert that there are only a handful of New Testament books that were truly penned by their supposed authors - AND did you know there are discrepancies in the New Testament? WHAT?!
Perhaps my pride in having finished almost all of the 27 New Testament books was premature, as I failed to notice the discrepancies between some of them - take for example the genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke. Ehrman suggests that in addition to reading the Bible in a devotional way, that we should also read it with a historical-critical approach - it is by reading the Bible in this latter way, by comparing accounts in each of the gospels to one another versus taking them singularly, that we see the discrepancies. After completing his book, I went on my own self-directed scavenger hunt, listing out both genealogies to compare the two lists - lo and behold they are different. Considering how many human hands and minds have transcribed and passed along the New Testament, it doesn't necessarily bother me to know that there are human errors - of course there are. Instead, I went through and tried to research the common names among both lists, which sent me chasing after a white rabbit down a hole -
After pulling myself out of the mess, it occurred to me that I'm not sure that I care about the errors - of course there are errors - God's "word" was left in the hand of man and we are messy. In all honesty, to deny this fact seems a bit unintelligent to me - it's the same as looking logic in the face and simply choosing not to agree. Ah - choices - that word keeps creeping in to my mind - we can choose to believe what we want about the Bible's accuracy: we can research, read, pray, talk to others, go to church, etc. We can choose to deny how Christianity was formed and how the canon as we know it was formed and pretend as if we didn't have a role in muddying it. Or we can choose to acknowledge that perhaps just as our current Bible is a human creation, and just as Christianity is a human creation, perhaps God is as well.
Yes - I said it. And here is where our hearts and souls must rest of faith - I'm starting to hate that word. Ehrman acknowledges in the book multiple times, surely due to an exorbitant amount of scrutiny, that he didn't leave the faith due to his historical research, but due to his inability to marry all the suffering in the world with a loving and just God. Christian apologists have arguments for this - read A Case for Faith if you don't believe me - but what a real argument: how on earth are we to maintain faith when we take a look outside? I know of people who have very happy lives, very successful, have everything they want and then some, and have tremendous faith - perhaps it's easy when things are going your way and life is handing you chocolates. But when you're faced with disappointments, death, illness - are we just to have "more faith"?
What really irritates me about Christianity is how we all love to go to church, sing hymns, pray with our heads bowed faithfully and then we leave, taking no responsibility to take this into the world. I'm not talking about "converting" or "saving" people (if I hear one more person insist on "saving" someone I will scream), I'm talking about helping those in need - feeding the hungry, clothing the poor, educating the uneducated. Jesus, our humanitarian savior, would be deeply disappointed by our barely-there attempts of helping others - our everyday explosions of how great God is to us. The truth is that millions of people are suffering and us Christians aren't doing a thing about it.
Faith - I hate that word.
