I was a deeply religious Catholic. Now, I treat faith with skepticism.
That said, I recently read a book by Bart Ehrman.
Seriously, I do not understand why some people think this stuff can be damaging to someone’s faith. In my opinion, it is only damaging if someone believes in biblical inerrancy and infallibility of the Masterium. On the other hand, since I am on the verge of atheism and I think most of this stuff is bunk anyway, I have found Ehrman to be surprisingly refreshing. To wit:
- he completely demolishes claims of mythicism of Jesus, but pointing out that early sources diverge. If we were dealing with fabrication, then all texts would be derived from one original, and converge.
- he demonstrates that what we have (a collection of of differing manuscripts) is exactly what would happen, if people started writing down the stories of Jesus which were already in oral circulation among the illiterate. Which actually makes sense, because Jesus preached to the underclass, not to the elite, and it would take some years for his ideas to reach people who actually could read and write.
- we have a lot of manuscripts, and they generally agree. Yes, these manuscripts have a lot of errors, because the scribes were sloppy etc., but these errors do not preclude us from understanding the central mesage in the texts. So, Jesus’ sayings are actually surprinsingly well documented. Unless you are obsessed with position of commas in the text.
- he largely demistifies non-canon texts. They have um… alternative outlook on some issues, but they are hardly damaging.
- some books are forgeries, and some are written by people with an agenda. Well, I found thet notion quite liberating, because it means I can discount stuff which is over the top (1 Cor 14:34-5 being a typical example). Oh, and the fact that we are missing a lot of original cultural context also helps.
So, I am still extremely critical of the Catholic Church, but after reading Ehrman I am actually convinced that Jesus existed, and that we have some idea what he wanted to tell us…
One of the things I could commend Ehrman is that he is one of those rare breeds of scholars that could articulate their views well enough in a concise way to be understood by the common layman, write popular books on the subject and make public appearances. I mean, scholars aren’t exactly famous for being public figures, so those who are able to express their ideas in a convincing, easy-to-understand way has a chance of getting more attention than folks who author tomes which only other scholars and/or geeky niche audiences are able to appreciate. Same goes for Crossan.
That being said, I actually find Ehrman’s stuff to be mundane. (And I’m a Catholic!) I know that some people out there give much hype to Ehrman’s works (including, seemingly, Ehrman himself), but his ideas are hardly original or groundbreaking: if you’ve ever hung around New Testament / historical Jesus / Christian origins academia you’ll find that Ehrman is mainly just rehashing certain ideas that others have already been talking about in journals and scholarly works. And the thing about scholarship is, you can only very rarely get one person to completely agree with the other - you have a lot of differences of opinion all across the spectrum that it can (and does) get rather frustrating at times.
I agree with you partly: Bart Ehrman’s scholarship is really only ‘shocking’ or ‘revelatory’ if you’re new to and unfamiliar with this kind of thing. (I personally think that the reason why Ehrman is so big on it is because of his Fundamentalist origins.) However, try reading Ed Sanders, John Dominic Crossan, Maurice Casey, Geza Vermes, Tom Wright, Rudolf Bultmann, Raymond Brown, John Shelby Spong, Craig Blomberg, John Meier, James Dunn, Richard Bauckham, Joachim Jeremias, Ben Witherington, F.F. Bruce, Gary Habermas, Craig Keener, Robert Eisenman, Scott Hahn, Robert Price, Albert Schweitzer, Benedict Viviano, Joseph Fitzmyer, Martin Hegel, Craig Evans, Michael Barber, Hyam Maccoby, James Tabor, Bruce Chilton (whew!) or any other author alongside Ehrman. You’ll see that Ehrman’s views are already held by some and disputed by others.
Well, since I don’t share that particular “urge” and neither do most people on the planet, I’d have to say that while the urge to have what one wants is certainly common to man, it says nothing about our origins or our destiny–well maybe our destiny if we value earthly pleasures above love of God, but that’s another topic. 
