Dangers of sola scriptura

[Ahimsa]

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – Bart Ehrman is a sermon, a parable, but of what? He’s a best-selling author, a New Testament expert and perhaps a cautionary tale: the fundamentalist scholar who peered so hard into the origins of Christianity that he lost his faith altogether.

Once he was a seminarian, a pillar of conservative Christianity, whose doctrine states that the Bible “is a divine revelation, the original autographs of which were verbally inspired by the Holy Spirit.” But after three decades of research into that divine revelation, Ehrman became an agnostic. What he found in the ancient papyri of the scriptorium was not the greatest story ever told, but the crumbling dust of his own faith.

“Sometimes Christian apologists say there are only three options to who Jesus was: a liar, a lunatic or the Lord,” he tells a packed auditorium here at the University of North Carolina, where he chairs the department of religious studies. “But there could be a fourth option – legend.” Ehrman’s latest book, “Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why,” has become one of the year’s unlikeliest best sellers. Now No. 16 on the New York Times best-seller list, it casts doubt on any number of New Testament episodes that most Christians take as, well, gospel.

 

[PraRFLEsEkHm]

Hi

That is sad. Let it serve as a warning, as your thread title states, rather than a blanket statement about Christianity in general.

Peace

John

 

[Lazerlike42]

I am glad this was brought up. I was looking for a refutation of the book. Anybody want to take that on?

 

[Ahimsa]

Lazerlike42:

I am glad this was brought up. I was looking for a refutation of the book. Anybody want to take that on?

Check out this critique by Ben Witherington:

                               **           Misanalyzing Text Criticism--Bart Ehrman's 'Misquoting Jesus'      **

                             Bart Ehrman is both an interesting person and an engaging lecturer. He speaks well, he writes well, he obviously has a gift for what he does. I like Bart though I find his spiritual pilgimage troubling, and as an alumnus of UNC I am sad to see him as the successor to Bernard Boyd at Carolina. Boyd had such a positive spiritual impact on many persons including myself while at Carolina. In fact I have been told some 5,000 persons went into some kind of ministry as a result of Boyd's decades of teaching the Bible at Carolina.

I am however glad Bart is honest about his pilgrimage. If only he could be equally honest and admit that in his scholarship he is trying now to deconstruct orthodox Christianity which he once embraced, rather than do ‘value-neutral’ text criticism. In my own view, he has attempted this deconstruction on the basis of very flimsy evidence-- textual variants which do not prove what he wants them to prove.

 

[Lazerlike42]

I’d still prefer a more expert statement, but that being said, I did notice several things while reading the article:

1. This rings very much of Luther. The personal emotional problems that the man has seem to play a lot into what led him where it did.
2. Some of the points that he seems to make are all… well… not very good, for lack of a better word.

For instance, it says:

Another critical passage is in 1 John, which explicitly sets out the Holy Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, a cornerstone of Christian theology. This is the only place where it is spelled out in the entire Bible – but it appears to have been added to the text centuries later, by an unknown scribe.

If he thinks that this is a new discovery, I must seriously question the man’s scholarship. For one thing, the fact is so well known that no modern Bible has the passage anywhere other than as a footnote, if at all. For another, the identity of the “unknown scribe” tends to be more or less agreed upon these days. Aside from these more tangible problems with the point, obviously it is true that if he is basing his entire faith on only the Bible that the lack of this passage would be troubling to his faith. Surely Sola Scriptura plays a role here in his crisis.

In another instance, the article says:

Most of these are inconsequential errors in grammar or metaphor. But others are profound. The last 12 verses of the Gospel of Mark appear to have been added to the text years later – and these are the only verses in that book that show Christ reappearing after his death.

This too is very, very old news. Most Bibles indicate this questionable authenticity just as they relegate the Johanine comma to a footnote. So Mark doesn’t mention the resurrection - so what? Matthew, Luke, and John do, as do most if not all of the epistles. I would imagine if one held to the concept of Marcan priority, this may be a troubling discovery. However, Marcan priority is all but dead among scholars today. In fact, Matthean priority is beginning to become a very popular idea, for whatever that is worth.

 

[DaveBj]

This is just a wild guess on my part, but it sounds as if he had been brought up on the KJV and then had his faith shaken by the discovery that some of what was included in the KJV (the Johanine, the Marcan appendix, etc.) wasn’t necessarily Scripture.

It’s interesting where that discovery led him–to attempt to “reconstruct” Christianity, which has certainly been around long enough to withstand yet another attempt at reconstruction. In my case, I had known about the Marcan appendix and the Johanine comma for some time, but the realization of the need for an authority outside my own mind for the interpretation of Scripture is what started me on the relatively short (18 months) journey that led to my being received into the Catholic Church last Easter Vigil.

DaveBj

 

[Contarini]

I don’t think he was brought up on the KJV. He went to Moody, and they aren’t KJV folks (I’m not sure how old he is, but from the looks of him I’d guess that he’s in his fifties–so he would have been at Moody sometime in the 70s most likely).

One misrepresentation in the article originally cited–I don’t think he was ever a “pillar of conservative Christianity.” Not every Bible College student is a “pillar.” This is like the ex-Catholics who brag that they were “Jesuit-trained” when all they mean is that they went to a Catholic grade school! (In all fairness, the “pillar” language is the reporter’s, not Ehrman’s.)

Edwin

 

[Liberian]

Ahimsa,

He sounds like a more scholarly version of Dan Barker, who used to be a fundamentalist evangelist and now works for the Freedom From Religion Foundation. I read Barker’s book Losing Faith In Faith and can refute it pretty much paragraph by paragraph. I’ve not heard of Ehrman before.

• Liberian

 

[Angainor]

It is dangerous when you put your trust in anything but the Holy Trinity.

Don’t make the book your idol.