by BART EHRMAN
This is a very different audience from what I’m accustomed to as a scholar of the Bible. I teach in the Bible belt, and my students come largely from North Carolina, have grown up in the church, and, in my experience, have a much deeper commitment to the Bible than knowledge about it. So when I teach my class in the New Testament, which I do every spring semester, I begin by explaining that it’s not a Sunday school class and I’m not a preacher. I’m a historian and the class will engage in a historical study of the New Testament.
I then give students a pop quiz, which they think is very odd since I haven’t taught them anything yet. But I want to know what they know about the Bible. And actually I want them to know what they know about the Bible. It’s not a hard quiz; there are eleven questions and I tell them that if anyone gets eight of these eleven right, I’ll buy them dinner. Last year, out of 300 students, I bought one dinner.
Like I said, they’re not hard questions and these are mostly conservative, Bible-reading church kids. The first question is: How many books are in the New Testament? (It’s actually a very easy answer: twenty-seven. Because you think about the New Testament, you think God. You think the Trinity, and what is twenty-seven? It’s three to the third power. It’s a miracle!) The next question is: What language were these books written in? Now, it’s interesting––half of the students think the answer is Hebrew, which is wrong. Fortunately, only about four or five students typically think the answer is English. It turns out the answer is Greek. Greek was the lingua franca of the Roman Empire, just like English is the common language today.
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I myself was a fundamentalist, and it took me a long time to be over it. When I was seventeen I attended the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, a bastion of fundamentalism where my fellow students and I believed that the Bible was inerrant in everything it said. There were no mistakes in the Bible of any kind. This is what we were taught and this is what we believed.
As far as internal contradictions in the Bible, we could reconcile anything at the Moody Bible Institute, and we did. The fact that there are two accounts of creation in Genesis that are completely at odds with each other? No problem. The fact that the Gospel of Mark says Jesus cleansed the temple as the final act of his public ministry before being arrested, whereas in the Gospel of John, he did it at the very beginning of his ministry three years earlier? No problem. He did it twice, beginning and end. Sometimes the reconciliations got a bit ridiculous. Jesus tells Peter that he’s going to deny him three times before the cock crows according to the Gospel of Matthew. According to the Gospel of Mark, he says, “You’ll deny me three times before the cock crows twice.” Well, which is it, before the cock crows or before the cock crows twice? Easy solution: Peter denied Jesus six times—three times before the cock crowed, and three more times before the cock crowed twice.
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