Bart Ehrman and Peter Williams Debate
1.
Bart says if you approach
the Bible believing it is God’s Word and therefore without mistakes, you will
never find mistakes/errors (yet he held to inerrancy and came to see errors,
correct?). The other view is to see if there are mistakes, and if so, find out
what to do about it. I think Bart is leaving out the possibility of believing
in inerrancy and inspiration of Scripture but also being open to the
possibility that your faith/belief itself is in error and needs revising.
a.
Certainly someone coming to
the Bible with belief/faith looks at it differently than someone who does not.
I would say that I believe the Bible is God’s Word, and if that is true, the
Bible will have no errors/mistakes/contradictions. If I was persuaded that the
Bible contained errors, I would then believe that, at the very least, not all
Scripture/Bible is God’s inerrant Word. I would not embrace an actual
contradiction.
b.
I believe the Bible to be
God’s word in part due to its harmony and consistency, not in spite of it. That
you have to harmonize certain passages with others is not surprising. But as I’ll
argue below, it is the theological content and what Scripture reveals that
convinces me most of all that the Bible really is divine revelation, come from
God Himself to man, because of the grandeur and glory of what it teaches.
2.
Bart’s definition of
contradiction is when you have two things that cannot both be true at the same
time. In his debate with Peter Williams, he uses the accounts in Scripture of Judas’s
death as a clear example of contradiction in the Bible.
a.
But Judas’s dying by hanging
in Matthew and then falling headlong and bursting open in the book of Acts is
not a contradiction at all. We know how corpses will swell over time, in the
heat, and often explode. If Judas were dead for a few days, swelled up, then
fell from the rope as it snapped, it isn’t hard to imagine his corpse exploding.
b.
That Bart chose that as the
one example of a contradiction in his debate with Peter Williams indicates he
thinks this is one of the chief contradictions of Scripture, of which Bart
claims there are hundreds in Scripture. But Judas’s death is literally not a
contradiction. It does not violate the law of non-contradiction.
c.
At the very least, Bart is
grossly overstating his case. He asks for an historical example of a body “exploding”
after falling from being hanged. Why would you need a historical example of
that? Surely there are other deaths recorded in history books that perhaps are
not found elsewhere, or only very rarely. But I would bet if you looked long
and hard enough you probably could find other records of corpses left hanging
eventually falling headlong and bursting open. Even if not, so what? If this is
one of Bart’s chief examples of “hundreds” of contradictions in the Gospels, he
didn’t demonstrate one, and why should we pretend he did?
d.
If he were being more forthright,
he’d say his argument is that the Bible is full of many improbable events (but
not demonstrable contradictions) that surely are not all true. I’d still
disagree, but would find that a more honest argument.
e.
I did a simple Google
search and found this article about corpses being able to burst open, or “explode”.
https://www.foxnews.com/world/graphic-corpses-rotting-exploding-in-venezuelan-morgues-autopsies-a-luxury-of-the-past
3.
Bart tips his hand that he
is equivocating some when he says in the lecture he gives that you can
reconcile nearly anything. That’s true. But it isn’t that much of a stretch to
think of a bloated corpse falling and bursting open, is it? It would be quite
hard to reconcile Judas falling and then being carried through the air by
pigeons, or falling such that he ended up on top of a high mountain higher than
he was before. That would be absurd. If the text said Judas died by hanging and
in another biblical text said he died by being crucified next to Jesus, yeah
that’d be a real contradiction.
a.
Ehrman says he will not concede
that a contradiction is not a contradiction. Good, I won’t concede that either.
That’s why I am noting his own contradiction concerning the Judas account. He
gives one definition of contradiction and apparently applies a different one to
the Judas accounts in Scripture. That’s sleight of hand. I will not concede
that a non-contradiction is a contradiction, and I hope everyone reading this
will not be intellectually dishonest either.
b.
He then goes on to say
around 14:00 in his lecture (and it’s shown on his powerpoint) that he will not
believe that “two contradictory accounts can both be historically accurate”.
Amen. I will not believe that either. If the Bible was full of genuine
contradictions, I think that would have been found by now and far less would
embrace Christianity, or at least far less would claim inerrancy. I have
studied Scripture carefully for many years, and would have found an actual
contradiction and rejected my faith in the Bible as God’s inerrant Word if
there really were demonstrable contradictions in Scripture.
c.
Bart’s assumption seems to
be that Christians normally leave their Aristotelian logic at the door when
they start reading their Bibles. I don’t doubt that some do, but many do not,
like myself. The Bible is logical; Jesus, the Apostles, all the human authors
use Aristotelian logic all the time. We can’t really think or know apart from
it. The apostles clearly were not fools or prone to making huge gaffes in logic
and thinking, nor was Jesus Himself. Yet the apostles were one in their message
concerning Jesus Christ. Bart Ehrman’s argument concerning the “I am”
statements really doesn’t carry weight given each gospel is written for a
different theological purpose and isn’t written primarily to be a detailed
historical account (even Luke’s gospel is written with an apologetic/theological
purpose to persuade Theophilus).
d.
Bart also says he won’t
concede that we should stick to our guns no matter what. I agree, and I have not
stuck to my guns no matter what. My views on the atonement and salvation in
Christ, on predestination and election, changed dramatically when I was 18. In
more recent years, my political theology has changed dramatically. What I once
held on these things as biblically true and what Scripture teaches has changed,
and not merely by small degrees. If I came to find actual contradictions in
Scripture, I’d no longer embrace it as the inerrant word of God. You might say “Well
you’ll never do that if you believe in inerrancy” but Bart himself did this while
believing in inerrancy.
e.
I went from thinking that
Jesus died for everyone to believing God elected some and not others and Christ
only died for the elect. The emotional/spiritual jarring and upheaval of that
is, I think, at least as great if not greater than coming to believe the Bible
is not inerrant. It certainly felt like a Copernican Revolution in my thinking
about God and Scripture as I was embracing these new doctrines that many I went
to school with and even the teachers and pastors would regard as serious error if not heresy.
4.
I do appreciate that Bart
said in at least one of the videos that intelligent people come down on both
sides of the issue of the inerrancy of Scripture, faith in God/Jesus Christ,
etc.
a.
He says to read the Gospels
broadly, the parallel passages across the gospels, etc. Agreed, we do
horizontal reading like this in seminary. Robertson’s Harmony of the Gospels
is well known. Lay persons may not read like this a lot, but seminaries
worth their salt have students do this, and good pastors will help their
members harmonize Scripture as well and see that these supposed contradictions
are no such thing when they are preaching on those particular texts. If a
minister cannot give some sort of explanation (even if the explanation is that
there is no necessary contradiction yet admitting a given passage is hard to
harmonize/fully reconcile; such difficulties arise in other fields of academia
as well without having to give up on the overarching theory) then he shouldn’t
be a pastor.
b.
Concerning Jairus’ daughter,
Joseph’s genealogy, etc., I’ve looked at these before and as Bart says there
are explanations for all these as well. But he claims that all the explanations
are contradictions. That isn’t true. They might seem highly improbable, a stretch,
etc., to him, but that doesn’t magically make them contradictions (he later
admits that there have been times where he thought something was a
contradiction in Scripture but it turned out not to be, and I think he said
that kind of thing can happen “all the time” as well).
c.
Again, if he wants to say
that all these examples of SEEMING contradictions are too much for him, and that
since we cannot reconcile them all with certainty then the odds are that at
least one of them is a GENUINE contradiction, I can respect that line of
reasoning a lot more. But to simply say they are contradictions when in fact
they are not is dishonest, and he should know better. You cannot apply the
Aristotelian Law of Non-Contradiction to things that you simply think are
highly unlikely. They have to actually be a contradiction.
d.
Bart is clearly equivocating
again and again by saying “look at all these contradictions” to only later
admit “okay yeah, look, you can reconcile almost anything if you try hard
enough”.
5.
Bart recommends reading the
gospels broadly to find supposed contradictions. I have a recommendation for
reading Scripture to be persuaded of it being a revelation from God and
therefore inerrant and inspired:
a.
Put aside the question of
historical reliability (although it seems Bart grants that it is quite highly
reliable overall historically, just not inerrant) and just read the Bible for
what it is actually teaching concerning God, man, Christ, and salvation. Try to
get the big picture and the overall thrust, and the telos of man/God/Christ in glory.
The key question of Scripture first and foremost must be “is this a
revelation/word from God concerning man and salvation”, or not. The question of
utmost importance is not whether every last historical detail is so obviously
true that it cannot possibly be a contradiction. I believe the Bible is God’s inerrant Word in part because its theological teaching compels me to believe that these are the
Words of Life, words from God Himself, and are glorious/from glory and not man, and also because God’s
Word claims for itself to all be the very words of God.
b.
I actually appreciated Bart’s
account around 32:00 or so concerning the temple veil being torn in two, and
access to God’s presence through the shed blood of Christ being opened. Bart
says it is a terrific passage because it is the death of Christ that reconciles
us to God. Bart is exactly right! It is beautiful indeed. Keep looking at the
beauty, wonder, and splendor of Scripture and its message, including and
especially the difficult bits of election, predestination, etc., and you get to
a place where (I have, at least, by God’s grace) this knowledge and truth is
too wonderful, too glorious, to be something that mere men conjured up (they
couldn’t have imagined something so glorious), but truly was revealed from the
source of all Truth, God Himself.
c.
To be clear, seeing the
splendor and glory of the theological message of Scripture DOES NOT mean I
suddenly decide to embrace contradictions as just minor inconveniences to be swallowed
on the way to a more glorious truth. It does, however, encourage me to be much more
open to looking for harmonies of the apparent discrepancies/contradictions, and
this would apply to other fields of knowledge and learning as well and isn’t
necessarily a bad way to proceed.
d.
I think this is where both
sides, when they are honest, will admit that what you think about the grand
message of the Bible will nudge you in one direction or another concerning
these passages that have to be harmonized to one degree or another. If I have
found my wife to be faithful to me as her husband, and then suddenly there is a
report that she is cheating on me and there is evidence that isn’t demonstrable
but has some degree of being compelling, I’m going to be more inclined to give
her the benefit of the doubt. Bart would likely counter that I would be a fool to keep believing her if she put herself into these situations again and again. And I would agree. But that goes back to the original
issue at hand. I don’t find the Judas account of his death to be damning or
difficult to reconcile at all. Some other Scripture passages might be more
difficult in my mind, but the nature of a book (really the Bible is many books
with many authors) written over hundreds/thousands of years is going to have
some difficult bits to reconcile, especially when you are straining historical
accounts, landmarks/geography, battles, etc., from thousands of years ago.
e.
Bart says there are
hundreds of seeming contradictions in the Gospels, and eventually he says you
just have to throw your hands up and say they cannot all be reconciled. He then
makes an error by saying that if you cannot reconcile them all, then they
cannot all be true. But that itself is illogical. If there is a genuine
contradiction, yeah, that cannot be reconciled and cannot be Truth. But simply not having enough information
of precise historical detail or even differing narrative accounts to determine
definitively whether or not something happened precisely the way it is reported does not necessarily mean there is a contradiction somewhere. Again, Bart is overstating his case. Jesus says the mustard
seed is the smallest seed, when it is not. Was Jesus in error, or just speaking
loosely, or just speaking according to his best knowledge, etc.? You could
reconcile this by saying He was in error, or you could reconcile it in a myriad
of ways that show he was not. The first question really has to be, again, “Who
is Jesus?”
f.
Bart says he believes there
are other books that can and probably are “inerrant” but that alone doesn’t mean
they are inspired by God. I agree. That is why I am saying, essentially, to examine
the question of inspiration first, by looking at the overall message of
Scripture and its theology, and trying to carefully understand it first. It isn't special pleading to ask that we look at a book that itself claims to be God's Word, to consider the claims and see where that leads you. It would be nonsensical to look at the Bible and examine it in precisely the same way you would any other book that DOES NOT claim to be the words of God. We would expect a book that really was written by God/inspired by God to bear teaching/truth that is from glory/the divine. So again, listen to the theological message of Scripture, what it says about God, man, and salvation. Relatively speaking, who cares what it says about geography, animals, plants, battles, etc.?
g.
Obviously many still won’t
be compelled and will hate what they hear (the Bible of course says why this
happens, and it isn’t an intellectual issue but a heart/spiritual/emotional revulsion
which Bart himself says was true of him as he abandoned Christianity not due to
inerrancy but later due to the problem of evil), but some will be compelled of
the beauty and splendor and deep truths revealed in Scripture about God, man,
salvation, the eschaton, etc., and be persuaded of its inspiration and
therefore its inerrancy, unless you want to say that the God of Truth inspires
error, which certainly seems like a genuine contradiction to me. If God cannot lie,
then He cannot inspire lies/errors, etc. I think we all would agree on that.
6.
Toward the end, around
55:00, Ehrman talks about what I presume is the debate with Peter Williams that
I also linked to above, and Bart again expresses his frustration that in Williams’ book Williams
did not deal with the most difficult texts that are claimed to be contradictions
(Bart says no one claims the ones Williams’ touched on are even contradictions
to begin with, but I imagine Bart is overstating a bit/speaking loosely to make
the point).
a.
I can understand that
frustration, just as I imagine Williams
is frustrated when Bart waffles on what in Scripture is actually a
contradiction or only apparently contradictory, or in Bart’s mind “almost
certainly” a contradiction.
b.
Williams noted that his
book is only 160 pages or something like that and only has 1 chapter/6 pages on
contradictions. That wasn’t the overall focus of his book. I can understand
that as well, and I would hope Bart can too.
c.
I have an Encyclopedia of
Bible difficulties that is nearly 500 pages long, and I am sure there are other
similar resources as well. If an Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties didn’t
address the most difficult passages in one way or another, then yes, that would
be a major problem. But what is a “difficulty” and what gets “resolved” is
always changing.
d. Bart also talks about how the oral traditions always get passed down in such a way that the message changes. So discrepancies emerge, contradictions, and if we find contradictions in the Gospels which are (presumably) from oral traditions, then this oral tradition should be treated like all the rest, as just an oral tradition with errors that are NOT inspired by God, and of course are not inerrant. But again, Ehrman goes to the death of Judas Iscariot around 43:00 in the debate video with Williams, and that simply isn't a compelling example of a contradiction at all to me, and I would think most people. When Williams gives a plausible scenario where Judas's corpse falls and the ground below him is such that it is angled so that Judas falls headlong, Bart reverts to saying that "you can reconcile anything" and then demands a case in history where a man is hanged, falls headlong, and his guts burst out. But why? If there were such an example, would Bart suddenly embrace this as a plausible explanation? If so, why? Even if he did, he would just jump to another one of his "contradictions" and when they are shown not to be, he'd revert to saying "you can explain anything away," rinse and repeat. So who is the close minded fundamentalist here?
7.
In conclusion, I actually
appreciate Bart Ehrman even though I think he is wrong. I agree that we should
follow the Truth no matter where it leads us. He is convinced of his views
and is at least making an argument, albeit an overstated and inconsistent one,
and isn’t jumping to even further absurd conclusions that many atheist trolls
online do.
a.
I appreciate that Bart
Ehrman said it was ultimately the problem of evil that caused him to reject the
faith rather than concluding that Scripture is NOT inerrant. If I heard him
right, he said that some of the explanations to the problem of evil (I suppose
even based on Scripture?) were satisfactory but not compelling to him. I
suppose he means by that, that they are logical but not emotionally satisfying.
I have found a satisfactory explanation to the problem of evil in Scripture, in
the person and work of the God-Man Jesus Christ. It sounds like Bart has not
resolved the problem of evil by turning to agnosticism/atheism. I am a joyful
Christian, he had no joy in his understanding of Scripture and still has no ultimate
joy concerning the problem of evil, which is sad.
b.
Emotions do not determine
truth, but I gladly admit I would not be emotionally or intellectually satisfied
concerning the problem of evil if I were not a Calvinist. When I was 18 I had a
significant growth/change in my theology and it all centered around Calvinism
and the problem of evil. Many run from Calvinism because they think it makes
God wicked and only exacerbates the problem of evil. It is the red pill they
cannot swallow. But for those who by God’s grace can and do, you discover Jesus
Christ, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life (Jn. 14:6). God’s sovereign
control and foreordaining all things for His glory (the greatest good) and His
people’s good (which is delighting in glorifying Him for who He is and what He
has done, pre-eminently in Jesus Christ) as the Author of all history, the good
and the evil, makes perfect sense to me. It is the only way evil can make sense
to me, or anything for that matter.
c.
To embrace Atheism/Agnosticism
is nigh unto embracing Nihilism and gives no hope for the problem of evil,
except perhaps in mere mortal mankind, which is a fool’s errand. Evil is just
evil, not permitted/allowed/foreordained by a benevolent God toward a greater
good with the promise and guarantee of sin, death, and the devil/all evil being destroyed forever. There is no greater good that God is orchestrating all things toward, no
salvation that has been accomplished, no certain redemption and renewal of all
things.
d.
So I don’t think for a
second that removing the Sovereign God from the problem of evil increases our
joy, happiness, and prospects of overcoming evil. It seems that Bart believes
in real, actual evil, which is good given where we are at in the world/our
nation today, where everything is relative and there is no eternal, objective,
good and bad, right and wrong. It is just “cancel culture” based on people’s
subjective feelings, which are constantly changing like the wind.
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