Today on Ward on Words I respond to one point made by exvangelical biblical scholar Bart Ehrman. He’s going to score a point with this point, but I’m not ultimately going to award it to him, because, as the historic sermon title said it, “Shall Unbelief Win”?
***
Ross Douthat is one of my favorite writers of all time. I read basically everything he writes, both articles and books. And I listen to all his podcast episodes. He is Catholic, and I’m Protestant, but the way he talks about the Bible reflects his Protestant upbringing, and the man has great wisdom, refined judgment, vast knowledge, and a pen I would gladly give all my money to possess. I frequently think: he’s a man for such a time as this.
Bart Ehrman is not one of my favorite writers of all time. I read almost nothing he writes. I’ll be frank: I don’t think it’s wise for me to read a lot of words by New Testament scholars who try openly to undermine Christian faith. I am not an evangelical inerrantist robot; I’m a person, and I’m subject to the temptations of unbelief. I’ve seen people lose their faith. That includes friends, including especially two men and one woman I served with in ministry. It doesn’t seem to me that they enjoyed their apostasy very much, or its aftermath. Christ is my only hope in life and death.
So what do I do when Ross Douthat has Bart Ehrman on his podcast? I listen. I walk a line: I pray for the humility to recognize when a given unbelieving biblical scholar has something to teach me that I need to know. And I am also willing to use what gifts and training I have to listen to unbelievers criticize the Bible so that I can respond in defense of others, to encourage and protect their faith. I’m willing then for some fellow Christians to call me a fundamentalist, as just happened when I critiqued D. B. Hart’s view of Scripture.
That’s what I want to do today with just one claim Bart Ehrman made in his interview with Douthat. I’m actually going to conclude that Ehrman had some justification for what he said, though I’m going ultimately to disagree. And I’m going to explain why.
I’m assuming that the New York Times won’t issue a copyright strike against a (very) long-time paying subscriber who is just driving more traffic their way in an obviously fair use of just a small portion of the shoulder of the information superhighway. Here’s the relevant excerpt. Douthat will start us off. Ehrman will answer.
Douthat: Give me a couple of examples, just so listeners have them, of places where the Gospels contradict themselves or contradict each other in ways that cast doubt on their historical validity.
Ehrman: Yeah. I’ve written a long book on this; “Jesus Interrupted” is the book where I deal with a lot of these. There are all levels. It’s interesting because they’re at all levels.
On a basic level, Mark’s Gospel is usually thought to be the first Gospel. Jesus is sending out his disciples and telling them to go heal the sick and cast out demons and preach the good news. He says, when you go, don’t take a backpack, don’t take extra sandals, don’t take any money, but do take a staff.
OK, you have to take a staff because you’re going to be walking.
Matthew’s is exactly the same episode, word for word in some places. But in Matthew, he says to the disciples, don’t take a backpack, don’t take extra sandals, don’t take any extra money — and don’t take a staff.
Wait a second. This is an obvious thing where he either said take a staff or don’t take a staff, but he probably didn’t say both.
What Ehrman sees you will see if you look. In Mark 6:8, Jesus says this:
He charged them to take nothing for their journey except a staff.
In Luke 9:3 Jesus says this:
Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money.
Now, never read a Bible verse. Always read the paragraph, at least. But doing so will not make the problem easier but harder. Let’s do so. Here’s Mark’s paragraph, which in my ESV has the heading, “Jesus Sends Out the Twelve Apostles”:
And he called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. He charged them to take nothing for their journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in their belts— but to wear sandals and not put on two tunics. And he said to them, “Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you depart from there. And if any place will not receive you and they will not listen to you, when you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.” So they went out and proclaimed that people should repent. And they cast out many demons and anointed with oil many who were sick and healed them.
Up next to it I have placed Luke’s paragraph, which in my ESV has the heading, “Jesus Sends Out the Twelve Apostles”:
And he called the twelve together and gave them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal. And he said to them, “Take nothing for your journey, no staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money; and do not have two tunics. And whatever house you enter, stay there, and from there depart. And wherever they do not receive you, when you leave that town shake off the dust from your feet as a testimony against them.” And they departed and went through the villages, preaching the gospel and healing everywhere.
I’ve highlighted the similarities in yellow and the key difference in orange.
What is going on here?
Various solutions
Various solutions have been proposed. Maybe he was talking about two different kinds of staffs? But he uses the same word both times.
Maybe he was saying not to bring a spare staff? But who brings a spare staff on a walking journey?
Maybe there was a primitive, as they call it, scribal corruption, where Mark originally wrote “take no staff,” but the very first copyist mistranscribed it as “take nothing except a staff”? But I share the KJV-Onlyists’ aversion, believe it or not, to the possibility that certain words of the New Testament are simply available nowhere in the manuscript tradition. I can’t conclude that without any evidence. And there is none. I checked the usual source, the NA28 apparatus.
Maybe, say a lot of people, this isn’t a big deal and we should focus on bigger stuff like [fill in the blank with bigger stuff]. And, no, it’s not a big deal in itself. Staff or no staff—Jesus could have said either. I don’t think it’s a theological problem for the disciples to bring a staff or not to bring a staff.
I do think it’s a theological problem for Jesus to say, “The Scripture cannot be broken,” for Peter to call some things Paul wrote “Scripture,” for us to treat the Gospels as Scripture (as divine revelation), and for there to be errors of fact in these words. So what did Jesus in fact say? I don’t think it’s fundamentalism, which in this case would be an insult meaning, “Small-minded camel who swallows the eye of the needle but not the rich man,” something like that. I don’t think it’s obscurantism to ask what’s going on here; I think it’s bowing to the form of Scripture as it has been given to us. If there were only one Gospel—or even just John and one of the Synoptics, we’d have very few of these kinds of problems. God chose to give us multiple Gospels, and this simple fact of divine providence has caused some difficult questions to arise. It’s not stupid or faithless to try to answer them.
I’m going to tell you right now—this is the solution I favor. It comes from Grant Osborne, the author of the excellent hermeneutics textbook, The Hermeneutical Spiral:
My solution is that Jesus sent them on more than one mission. [In] Matthew and Luke … , … the disciples’ mission is sacred; Jesus therefore used a temple motif, according to which staff and sandals are left at the door because it is holy ground (see also the burning bush in Exod 3:5). Mark … narrat[ed] a different mission that Jesus views as a new exodus like Israel’s in Exodus 12:11, when the people were told to eat the Passover meal in haste, with staff in hand and sandals on one’s feet. Here in Luke we are to reflect on the sacredness of the mission on which Christ is sending his followers. Grant R. Osborne, Luke: Verse by Verse, ed. Jeffrey Reimer, Elliot Ritzema, and Danielle Thevenaz, Awa Sarah, Osborne New Testament Commentaries (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018), 242.
I recognize, however, that this is a little awkward. The two passages seem very closely parallel. The passages certainly don’t state, either, that there is some kind of theological significance to the presence of the staff in one passage and a different kind to the absence of one.
Am I and Osborne doing intellectual or spiritual gymnastics to avoid the obvious conclusion, the one Ehrman took, that the Bible contradicts itself and is, presto facto, ipso change-o, not divine?
Presto facto
Let me explain why I’m willing to endure some discomfort under the withering gaze of evangelicalism’s cultured despisers, such as Ehrman.
Seven reasons—one for each of the seven men of Proverbs 26:16 who are able to render reasons whenever they want to.
1. Ehrman must present a workable alternative worldview
First, I think critics of the biblical worldview have to produce a livable, workable alternative. And the hottest one going in this Western world of mine, the one taken by the coolest kids, the one taken (I believe) by Ehrman himself, requires faith that something can come from nothing, that life can arise from lava, that mind can arise from non-mind. And I think that worldview is the number one stupidest thing I ever heard. As one non-Christian thinker described the worldview of naturalistic materialism, “Give us one miracle and we’ll explain the rest.” Only I think it’s at least three miracles: first something, then life, then mind. I reached that third stage sometime during college, so I know that those miracles are impossible without a God of eternal power and divine nature. That’s reason one why I’m willing to accept what at first feels a tiny bit, I admit, like intellectual contortion. I prefer it to the main available alternatives.
2. Bible difficulties are known issues
Second, I have never encountered a Bible difficulty, as we evangelicals call them, that wasn’t already a known issue—and usually a known issue for centuries. This one is probably one of those known since antiquity. Very early translations—from the earliest centuries of the church—pick up on it by using different words for “staff” (that’s their solution to the problem). And contemporary Christian biblical scholars, of course, discuss it in detail. I shared one with you, Grant Osborne. Seeing such Bible difficulties as known issues doesn’t in itself solve them, but it assures me that smarter people than me—like, I dunno, Augustine of Hippo—have maintained their faith in Scripture despite such difficulties.
3. Evangelical views of inerrancy account for these things
Third, careful evangelical biblical scholars have tried to articulate a doctrine of biblical inerrancy that accounts for these kinds of things. The 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy—signed by, among others, James Montgomery Boice, D. A. Carson, D. James Kennedy, Josh McDowell, John F. MacArthur, J. I. Packer, Francis Schaeffer, R. C. Sproul—gets a lot of shade thrown on it from people to my left on the evangelical spectrum. And it isn’t a divine document. But it’s yet more intelligent people saying (on the one hand) “we affirm that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit” and “we affirm that Scripture, having been given by divine inspiration, is infallible, so that, far from misleading us, it is true and reliable in all the matters it addresses” and (on the other hand) this:
We … deny that inerrancy is negated by Biblical phenomena such as a lack of modern technical precision [like the exhaustive detail that commander Data in Star Trek is always giving before Picard interrupts him, in a running gag on the show], irregularities of grammar or spelling [like the incomplete sentence that begins Ephesians 3], observational descriptions of nature [like the sun being said to “rise” in many passages], the reporting of falsehoods [like the charges of Satan againt Job], the use of hyperbole and round numbers [like Jesus talking about the mustard seed being the smallest of all seeds], the topical arrangement of material [like John arranging material differently than the other Gospels], variant selections of material in parallel accounts [like Judas hanging himself and falling headlong and having his bowels gush out], or the use of free citations [summarized quotations such as, surely, the Sermon on the Mount].
(To be clear, I supplied those examples, and I gave them all from memory because these features of our inerrant Bible are so readily visible.)
4. Bible difficulties carry spiritual value
Fourth, the Chicago Statement and many other Christians have pointed out some of the spiritual value of Bible difficulties. Here’s Chicago again: “Apparent inconsistencies should not be ignored. Solution of them, where this can be convincingly achieved, will encourage our faith.” The statement follows up with the advice I would give: “Where for the present no convincing solution is at hand we shall significantly honor God by trusting His assurance that His Word is true, despite these appearances, and by maintaining our confidence that one day they will be seen to have been illusions.” That’s a benefit. God is allowed to give us little tests like this—right? He’s allowed to have multiple legitimate purposes for various statements of Scripture.
5. We need to be reminded of our finiteness
Fifth, we need to be reminded of our finiteness. Walt Kaiser in his big book on the Hard Sayings of Scripture, says,
These passages are also another reminder to us that we do not have all of the answers. There are issues which may have a perfectly good explanation if we could gather Mark and Matthew and Luke together, but for which we will not have an answer short of such a gathering.” Walter C. Kaiser Jr. et al., Hard Sayings of the Bible (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1996), 424.
Call that credulity if you wish, but only if you believe something other than a big bang that gave rise—from nothing—to everything, including life and consciousness. I’d rather call this “faith,” as the Bible does. Lord, to whom shall we go? You alone have the words of eternal life.
6. Ramping up
Sixth, and I’ll bet you thought I was winding down, but I’m ramping back up—I was talking about this with my best friend Brian, one of the most brilliant students of Scripture and theology I have ever known, whose blog—called Exegesis and Theology—you should read. And he said something that got me all excited. I literally took notes during our recent monthly phone call. We’re busy guys, and scheduling is the only way we can be sure to connect. He just so happens to have been putting together something of a harmony of the Gospels, and in quite recent days, without noticing the particular difficulty we’ve been discussing, Brian had already been leaning toward seeing the two pericopes I read to you—from Mark 6 and Luke 9—as separate instances. He couldn’t give me more detail at the moment, he couldn’t recover all the reasons he thought this. But I found this quite interesting.
7. Jesus was a traveling preacher
Seventh and finally, as my friend Brian pointed out to me, Jesus was a traveling preacher, and traveling preachers often reuse material. We need to handle Synoptics problems with that in mind. N.T. Wright has some real wisdom on this:
The fact that Jesus was an itinerant prophet meant, clearly, that he went from village to village, saying substantially the same things wherever he went. Local variations would no doubt abound. Novelty would spring up in response to a new situation, or a sharp question or challenge. But the historical likelihood—and it is very likely indeed—is that if he told a parable once he told it dozens of times, probably with minor variations; that if he gave a list of (what we call) ‘beatitudes’ once, he gave such a list, probably with minor variations, dozens of times; that he had regular phrases with which he urged repentance, commended faith, encouraged the desperate, rebuked those he considered hard-hearted, spoke words of healing. The chances of his finding totally new things to say all the time, so that everything he said he said once and once only, must be reckoned at nil.
I’d add that to think that Jesus repeated whole sermons verbatim in different towns is an implicit denial or weakening of the incarnation. The understanding and answers that impressed the Jewish leaders when he was twelve were amassed, I must presume, through personal study and not pressing the divinity button. I’ve just got to keep quoting Wright, though, because this is so good:
Within the peasant oral culture of his day, Jesus must have left behind him, not one or two isolated traditions, but a veritable mare’s nest of anecdotes, and also of sentences, aphorisms, rhythmic sayings, memorable stories with local variations, and words that were remembered because of their pithy and apposite phrasing, and because of their instantly being repeated by those who had heard them. Again and again he will have said cryptic words about having ears to hear, about the first being last and the last first, about salt and light, and particularly about Israel’s god and his coming kingdom. My guess would be that we have two versions of the great supper parable, two versions of the talents/pounds parable, and two versions of the beatitudes, not because one is adapted from the other, or both from a single common written source, but because these are two out of a dozen or more possible variations that, had one been in Galilee with a tape-recorder, one might have ‘collected’. Anyone who suggests that this is not so must, I think, … have no historical imagination for what an itinerant ministry, within a peasant culture, would look like. N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1996), 170–171.
Maybe I’m stretching this point to fit what was not a sermon. But what if Jesus sent his disciples out every Sunday for a while, and what if he gave his little send-off speech more than once? Wright’s words might apply.
Conclusion
There may have been a time when Christians who believe in Scripture were simply not confronted with certain Bible difficulties. The internet, though, can serve them up to you literally during your devotions. You are reading your Bible in Luke, you get a notification and you pick up your phone, and within moments—you know how the phone grabs you—you are watching a video by a skeptical biblcal scholar who is trying to undermine your faith. That can happen, can’t it? Even if you have no phone and you simply read your Bibles the way we all say we’re supposed to, you’re going to notice difficulties on your own. I don’t think it helps anyone to pretend that all questions raised by the Bible are neatly answerable. I think it is best to acknowledge, sometimes, that it’s difficult to explain how two passages fit together. Let the difficulty rest on your shoulders and swill around in your mouth a bit. It will mean more when you find a possible solution.
So Ehrman gets a point, but I took it mostly back. Not all back: I can see why he would think I and Grant Osborne and my friend Brian are all guilty of special pleading. But maybe he can remember a day when, as an evangelical, he saw the world through biblical eyes. Maybe he can acknowledge that his worldview serves up difficult questions for him, too. Like what are we doing here anyway? I’d rather have my problems than his. And I’d rather have my solutions, my Jesus Christ dying for my sins and taking me to my God and later making me inherit my earth.
This is what my church professes together to believe, and I want to finish with it:
We believe that the Bible is the Word of God, fully inspired and without error in the original manuscripts. We believe that it was written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and that it has supreme authority in all matters of faith and conduct.
Extra for Subscribers
Pushback on posts like this is spiritually draining for me. I feel that people’s souls are in the balance in a way that they simply are not with the other major issue I’ve tackled on this channel, namely King James Onlyism. If you’d like to see more apologetics content, as some viewers have requested, I would like to request that you pray for me.
And let me say just a few extra things:
- I think there are Christians out there who can read Bart Ehrman without temptation to the sin of unbelief. Don’t hear me denying that. Maybe I will be that guy. Maybe soon.
- I recognize (I write this after a few comments from cogent unbelievers) that the Big Bang doesn’t necessarily imply something from nothing. I use it synedochically to refer to naturalistic materialism.
- I feel a life of sincere godliness and prayer has to underlie a life of apologetics. I feel that burden on my shoulders right now, and I am going to literally kneel and pray after I hit “post” here.
