Bart Ehrman and the Trustworthiness of the Ancients

I would direct you, gentle reader, although to my shame, to today's article in my hometown paper about a certain popular writer, of whom I would rather not confess that "we were nursed upon the selfsame hill." Although I can claim no personal experience with his writing, his general attitude towards orthodox Christianity, or more specifically, the earliest histories of it, which I have gleaned from various secondary encounters, is one of those persistent maladies of the contemporary mind whose popularity far outstrips the credence it is due. The insistent and oftentimes outrageous skepticism which has become the common attitude towards earliest Christianity not only among many scholarly circles (among whom I must say Mr. Ehrman is a legitimate figure), but more influentially among certain well-known instances of popular literature, is not only such a poison upon the modern popular conception but a misrepresentation of scholarly consensus as well. I am neither ready nor credentialed to give any great defense of my views or to critique another's, but I will say that, from what I have read on the subject, broadly defined, the question of with what sincerity the teaching of the New Testament as we have it now should be considered to reflect the teaching of Jesus is answered today either with the shouts of an overly critical skepticism or the plea of a reasoned credulity. I am no great scholar, but these seem to me to be the way the lines are drawn up, and I would hope always to support mediocritas before frenzy.

This opposition, in fact, is not a phenomenon confined only to early Christianity's small though vociferous corner of ancient scholarship. I read not too long ago a portion of a book (I have forgotten both the title and the author) which took up the debate of the veracity of Livy's narratives against certain scholars who suggested and more than suggested that most of his stories were his own inventions or at the very least those of his earlier sources like Fabius Pictor, whose history we have now lost. Now, although we most certainly cannot say confidently with Dante "Livio... che non erra," this author pointed out that the idea of any ancient historian simply making up whole stories does not work in traditionally oriented societies, which hold very strongly to certain memories of the past. Whether these memories actually reflect the past or not, the efforts of an historian whose narrative told an entirely different story would certainly encounter difficulty and opposition on these points. From the embellishment of stories, a common feature of nearly all the ancient literature we group together as 'history,' to their invention is a step far more easily presumed by the modern than executed by an ancient.

Even in poetry (with the exception of comedy) the invention of entire stories is rare, if not impossible, although it was a sort of slogan among philosophers that poets necessarily lie. The modern reader, who is accustomed to imagine every author like one of our novelists, has a great deal of trouble with the idea Sophocles did not come up with Oedipus, or that the story of the Odyssey, whoever wrote it, is in no way a sequel to the Iliad, although the poem may be usefully thought of that way, so long as one removes from their mind all thought of a public clamor to 'know what happened to all their favorite characters from the Iliad.' When so much of our modern literature, performed and otherwise, is dependent on 'interesting characters' and 'original stories' it should not at all surprise us that the ancient world, which assigned a far more circumscribed place to the virtue of originality, should perplex a modern sensibility in this way.

Although these broader concerns about the place of originality and factuality in the ancient world are certainly part of the same general debate, Bart Ehrman's popular books seem to be, from what I have picked up about him, less concerned with the broad view of things as the microscopic. His popular book Misquoting Jesus is a book about text criticism, one of the great homes of idle speculation in biblical studies since the nineteenth century, although it has also produced much of great value, and as such deals not so much with whether the New Testament reflects the teaching of Jesus but whether, in fact, we even have the real New Testament at our disposal. The success of books like these has far more to do with the ignorance of layfolk than any real scholarly debate. For example, as mentioned in this account of a debate between Ehrman and evangelical scholar Dan Wallace, one of Ehrman's real shock points for popular audiences seems to be that story of the woman caught in adultery in John's Gospel (7:53-8:11) is not found in the oldest manuscripts. The status of this story is nothing new to scholars, and by nothing new I mean that John Calvin mentions in his commentary on John; nor does its apocryphal status suddenly make the story irrelevant, anymore than something wise said in Sunday's sermon is irrelevant. Yet the idea that, so to speak, 'things aren't like they told you when you were a kid,' has a great pull on our modern society for whatever reason. David Wray, my professor this quarter in two classes on Vergil's poetry, commented the other day that one finds American literary scholars far more than those of other nations concerned with unreliable narrators in literature, and speculated that the idea of lies from a position of power plays a special anxiety in the American soul; he tied this anecdotally to things like Watergate. In any case I would say the same cultural anxiety, whatever its sources, lies at the heart of the popularity of books by people like Ehrman and Elaine Pagels. I will not meditate too long on this feature of our life today, although I find it more and more curious and distressing the more I think about it, but I do think it answers well why this sort of overzealous skepticism finds such a welcome ear in an American public whose tastes are normally quite traditional.