This debate was among those rare exceptions. When one of those comes along, you don’t talk about who won or lost the debate, as much as what you learned from it. Unfortunately, Bart Ehrman is unskilled at oral debate and sounded uncomfortable and strident. In addition, he did not always argue as effectively as he could have. So, if we have to speak of a winner, it is the conservative, Craig Evans. But both were interesting, and both made a number of valid points. I’ll recap a couple. But right now, it’s time to watch the video. It’s just shy of an hour and a half, so watch it when you have some time.

First, some points about Evans. I really admired his closing statement which contrasted the humility of evangelical Christianity with the false confidence of fundamentalism. I believe that even fundamentalists hearing him defend conservative Christianity would appreciate his viewpoint (and might, without giving up the doctrines of hard inerrancy and other unfortunate aspects of fundamentalism, think of themselves as being closer kin with his view than with the view they have historically espoused).

Second, while his presentation on such issues as whether the gospels “contain” eye-witness testimony, whether we have sufficiently well-attested witnesses to the originals, where we can have a good deal of confidence about concerning the historical core of the gospels, and how the gospels can be and are used by historians and archaeologists, was relatively partisan, it was also essentially correct. In the case of how historians and archaeologists use the gospels, it was more correct than Ehrman’s contribution.

Third, for whatever reason, he left a number of points very conspicuously unanswered.

Fourth, he was in very questionable territory on a couple of items.

For his part, Ehrman was somewhat far afield in answering the question about how archaeologists might employ the gospels. He was not his usual professorial self (I’ve seen instructional videos in which his style is much more somber and reflective) – instead he did come across as strident and uncomfortable. In addition, apart from his answer on archaeology, his answers were essentially correct – but very partisan in presentation.

His strongest point – and one which did go unanswered – concerned the question of who Jesus said that he was. He is correct that John differs from the other gospels in that it portrays Jesus as being self-consciously Divine in terms of equality or near-equality with the Father. Before I go into more detail on this let me diverge for a moment.

Evans cites a short list of items that can be historically known about Jesus from the Gospels – including that he was known as a healer, that he was baptized by John, and that he preached the Rule or Kingdom of God, among other things. He also points out that he was received as a messiah-figure by (some, at least, among) his disciples and may have acknowledged such a designation himself. These are all important facts about Jesus that it would be foolish to discard lightly, and they attest to a certain amount of reliability of the gospels in terms of how they characterize Jesus life, and teachings. Ehrman probably agrees with most of those points, but treated them dismissively. As I said, his approach was partisan.

Significantly, this list of Evans correctly omits any notion that Jesus thought of himself as uniquely Divine. In fact, Evans would have been irresponsible to defend that notion as being anything like a historical certainty. Ehrman made the point that many evangelicals ask the question – is Jesus who he said he was? Ehrman, rightly in my view, made the point that these same evangelicals hold an unjustified assumption – that Jesus said he was God. In my view, he never believed that or thought it.

That isn’t to say that John invented the notion (or even held it in the same way modern Evangelicals do). Notions of the divinity of Jesus certainly predated John and showed up in the writings of Paul and even, obliquely, some of the synoptic gospels. John is simply the gospel that presents that notion least ambiguously and attributes it to Jesus himself. One of the most interesting fields of study I’ve recently run across is trying to understand in the context of first century Judaism what was meant by the notion of divinity, especially as it was applied to Jesus. If Evans had answered Ehrman’s challenge on the historical reliability of the notion that Jesus and his immediate followers conceived of him as co-equal with the Father, then the discussion would have inevitably become more technical and begun to explore some of those issues. I believe that Evans avoided that in part because he did not relish that discussion – knowing as he must that there is little support in the Bible or in the context of first century Judaism for the idea that Jesus was, thought he was, or was thought of as being “fully God”.

This is the biggest point of contention, I believe, between the liberal or secular student and the conservative one: the identity of Jesus. On this point, I think Ehrman’s position is stronger. The next biggest point of contention between the liberal or secular student and the conservative one is the nature of the Bible. On this point Evans does engage, and in some ways corrects Ehrman’s views which – presented from the partisan viewpoint of counter-apology – are a tad extreme. However, Ehrman is largely correct – there are good reasons to discount the doctrines of inerrancy and infallibility. Evans, to the extent that he only corrects Ehrman’s occasional over-reach but does not answer his basic charges, seems to agree with Ehrman in spirit, even if he holds to a strong notion of Biblical reliability and considers it the authoritative word of God. He consistently defers the repeated question: does he finds in the Bible the same irreconcilable contradictions that others find. In short he does not base his “high” view of the scripture on the idea that there are no “errors” in the Bible, but rather on the idea that the Bible is generally reliable and tells a consistent and believable story.

Even when stated this way, I disagree with him. Yes, the New Testament is harmonious on certain matters central to Christian theology. Furthermore, there are no written testimonies to Christian views from the same early period that profoundly contradict the New Testament position on those matters (though there is ample evidence that such contradictory Christian views did exist in that early period – and there is reason to surmise and some limited evidence that in fact non-Christian views of Jesus from those in as good a position as Paul and the Evangelists to evaluate the stories was also at odds with the Christian narrative).

But even if we take the view on face value that the Bible is generally reliable concerning the life and teachings of Jesus, it is still quite a task to derive from that support for wide swaths of evangelical doctrine. As Ehrman pointed out, important doctrines (including the Trinity) are without Biblical foundation apart from layers of interpretation in light of doctrines unheard of at the time the New Testament was written. (Furthermore, taking into account the cultural context of New Testament writings, it might be said that the Bible is directly or indirectly at variance with, for instance, Trinitarianism as later conceived). This is one area where Evans may have overstated his case – in suggesting that issues which come up in textual variants are resolved by other, better-founded, texts – and including the Trinitarian formula of First John. He would be hard pressed to produce those texts and show how they are properly interpreted in light of the cultural context of their writing in support of the spurious formula of the Johannine comma. As Ehrman pointed out, a number of teachings historically (and currently, in many circles) held to be important and worth repeating and sermonizing over, are based on insecure variants. Not all are as clearly spurious as the Johannine comma, but quite a few are at least disputable. Taken together with ample evidence to doubt the absolute reliability of every statement in the New Testament, with good reason to read the Gospels as each expressing its own position, with an honest appreciation of the tension between their accounts, and mindfully of which are most representative of what the earliest followers of Jesus thought and believed about him, it follows that the weight of modern conservative theology, including doctrines about the Bible itself, is very insecure.

That said, I like Evans’ approach. While he still holds (unjustifiably in my view) to much of conservative theology and a traditionally high view of scripture, he divorces himself from fundamentalist absolutes both by leaving Ehrman’s strongest charges unanswered, and by – in his closing statement – positively pointing out the futility of an absolutist interpretation of the Bible. He acknowledges, rightly, that his views are contingent and debatable, and that while he holds to the authority of a traditional interpretation, that rejection of that tradition is also a valid and honest position. It is precisely this humility that separates the modern evangelical from the modern fundamentalist, and lends respectability to the conservative position.

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I had heard the interpretation several times before that, despite the praise for Abraham in the text, the fact was that Abraham FAILED the test, that God wanted Abraham to make the ethical choice and refuse the order to do evil. After all, in Nuremberg the world decided that obedience is not an ethical act and the individual has the ethical responsibility to disobey unethical orders – at least when they rise to a certain level.

But a reading of the story that I hadn’t heard several times before came from a sermon preached by a Reform rabbi, a great preacher and a real mensh, with whom my Unitarian Universalist congregation had a wonderful relationship. As he presented it, it is really a question of whom the reader of story should identify with.

- Do we identify with Abraham, who is either a dupe of a mischievous God or self-righteous, seeing himself as incapable of misunderstanding instructions handed down by a wholly Other deity?

- Do we identify with Isaac, the intended victim, and mourn our lot in life, mistreated, even by the one we should most be able to trust but who treated our life itself as a proving ground for himself rather than as our life?

- Or do we identify with the angel, the only other thinking character physically present in the story, who physically stops Abraham’s act of violence once he has begun to act, who orders Abraham not to harm the boy.

For my rabbi friend, this story is not a celebration of blind obedience to God but a call for us to act for social justice, preventing harm of the weaker members of society where possible and being a voice speaking out against harm that might be lessened or stopped in response to our voice drawing awareness to situations needing to be fixed or avoided.

The rabbi’s sermon was titled “Be the Angel.”

Scripture, like literature, may have a place in our lives… but sometimes you have to turn it on its ear to make it really work. The real “scripture” here, I believe, is the thinking of the Rabbi. I endorse his view wholeheartedly.

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So… I guess we all know who Paul was. We ought to – more of his words appear in the New Testament than do those of any other figure, and he doubtless had influence on the writers who came after him. Nevertheless, even with the abundance of his letters, and supplementary information about him from Acts, there are still places where we might like to know more – or at least have greater certainty about what we know.

One such area is the question of Paul’s Christology. Would he have assented to the later Trinitarian twin doctrines that Jesus was “fully God” and “fully human”? (Here the “Jesus-mythers” are apt to say that Paul may have thought the former, but not the latter. I disagree vehemently with the mythicist position, and don’t know anyone who really takes that position seriously except for those who hold it). The question of whether Paul saw Jesus as fully God, however, is worth a closer look. In the past few days, one aspect of that question has been debated by a couple of guys from Biblioblogs. I refer you to their posts here and here, arguing that Paul saw Christ as subservient to God, and here arguing the contrary side. On this controversy, without the benefit of specialized knowledge, I’m inclined to favor Michael’s view that Paul saw Christ as “subject to” God. I would have argued further that we should have seen evidence of a controversy between Paul and the Jerusalem church on this point (more so than on the questions surrounding gentile converts and the status of the Law). In fact, I think the schism might have been irreparable if Paul departed so much from Jewish montheist thinking as to openly preach Christ the equal of God. I think that, had that been the case, we would see a very different picture from the New Testament (if we had a New Testament at all).

Another area where I imagine there are questions that might keep us awake at night is Paul’s cosmology. Well, not really, since I doubt anyone cares much one way or another about Paul’s cosmology. Nevertheless, I’m building to something here, so I’ll point it out. Paul says very little about his cosmology, but I would like to point out 2 Corinthians 12:2-4 and Ephesians 3:9-10. What we find here are a) multiple hierarchical? heavens – the highest? of which is paradise b) ruled by archons or angelic ‘principalities’, wherein c) secret knowledge may be learned. There are a lot of speculative viewpoints on the meaning of all this. I don’t claim to know precisely what Paul was talking about, but I will say that nothing here deviates radically from viewpoints that were current at the time. If anything, Paul is a touch stingy with his heavens.

What is clearest from Paul, I suppose, is his soteriology. Adamantly faith alone, apart from works. Hopefully someone will correct me on that point if I’m wrong. But, the next clearest thing we know from Paul was the suspicion in which he held “the flesh” (σάρξ, as the Bibliobloggers would say).

By now, I expect that someone is hoping I don’t go there… hoping I won’t accuse Paul of being a “gnostic”. Well, I won’t. First, I’m not even sure I know what gnostic is. Second, I don’t think gnosticism was seriously distinguished from proto-orthodoxy until after Paul’s time. Third, Paul’s soteriology is foreign to what we call gnosticism, and his Christology is certainly not gnostic. Even if it isn’t “lower” than the Nicean Christology, it certainly isn’t a matter of superceding the Hebrew God.

So, I don’t think Paul is a gnostic, but I do have to point out these hints of ideas on his part that from a 21st century perspective might fit more comfortably within our view of gnosticism than our view of orthodoxy. And, I point out that there is evidence that gnostic communities used Paul’s letters, and even wrote apocryphal Apocalypse in his name. Just to recap what I haven’t already made explicit… The notions I am talking about that seem from this distance and time to be at least “gnostic”-flavored are these:

1) Multiple heavens
2) Heavens ruled by Archons/Prinicipalities
3) Secret knowledge
4) Severe denigration of the flesh, elevation of the spirit

The significance of this to my mind is that these thoughts were likely current and uncontroversial not only with Paul, but with early Christians generally. So at least some of the seeds of what would eventually become gnostic communities were already present in the earliest churches… perhaps more of them than we learn from Paul. This means that later, by the late second century when the church was radically diverse, it is likely that more than one of the various schools of thought could make significant claims of priority based on their relationship to their forbears in the earliest church. This isn’t to detract from the proto-orthodox line so much as to find the foundations of some of the other lines. Certainly, the orthodox could make some unique priority claims that carry force and privilege that point of view even if its contemporaries were also grounded in the first century church.

Any way…. I warned you at the outset. This is thinking out loud… and that means rambling. And I’m afraid I’m at an end of it now, without much to say “in conclusion”. I’ll just say that it’s interesting how much room for debate there is over the best known figure in the New Testament, and arguably the best known figure in first century history!

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While it is not the case that all the things Thomas mentions are things that all ministers would tell you if they could, I suspect that enough of them are, and if not these things then there are other things that they could tell you were they not afraid that ordinary Christians, rather than welcoming a deeper understanding of the faith, of the Bible, and of Christian history, would complain, argue, and eventually drive the minister out who dared expose them to uncomfortable truths.Although a very short book, it packs a serious punch and reveals more in its 108 pages than many other works of much greater length on more specific subjects.
[...]
His recognition not only of [these facts is] refreshingly honest but even more than that refreshingly Biblical compared to the selective quote mining of the fundamentalists.

Despite my dimmer view of the book, I agree wholeheartedly with McGrath’s final word:

To paraphrase a famous quote that the book mentions at one point, all that has to happen for fundamentalism to thrive is for those who have actually studied the Bible and understand it in depth and detail to keep silent.

*not in the Mark Sanford sense

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