The notion of different names for God must surely have Ehrman’s language students rolling their eyes in utter amazement and utter disbelief. As Hebrew students will immediately recognize the author of Genesis uses Elohim to identify God in both chapter one and chapter two. The only notable difference is that in chapter two the author adds Lord or Yahweh to Elohim. It is hardly a stretch to suppose that a single author would underscore the power of God in creation in chapter one and then emphasize that God in creation is likewise God in relationship with respect to humankind in chapter two.

Furthermore, I wonder why the consternation over topical recapitulation. Ehrman himself frequently brings up a topic in general terms and then restates the self same topic in different order with added detail and perspective and, frankly, I’m surprised one of his university Hebrew students hasn’t taken the time to unpack the problem for the professor.

One final point, I’m certainly surprised that in added detail and perspective, Ehrman wonders how light could have been created on the first day when the sun, moon, and stars were not created till the fourth day.^[2] It seems to me that even a full blown fundamentalist on the left would recognize that electromagnetic radiation inherit in the big bang produces more than a little light and, certainly, Ehrman believes in the big bang.

These are the kinds of objections that professor Ehrman, and other professors around the country, are using to dissuade their students that the Bible could be the infallible repository for redemptive revelation. There are good answers to the objections he raises over and over ad nauseum and ad infinitum. They’re not unusual objections, they’ve been raised before, and we provide those at the ministry of the Christian Research Institute and Bible Answer Man radio broadcast.

To help equip you in the area of doctrine I’ve developed a new resource called Memorable Keys to Essential Christian D-O-C-T-R-I-N-E. It’s available at our Website at www.equip.org or by calling us at 1-888-700-0274.

Truthfully, what I have a hard time understanding is how a simple problem like this can stump a world class scholar like Bart Ehrman. In any case, let me try to present the solution to the problem as simply as I can. This isn’t something that should cause any of his students that are Christians to lose their faith.

To begin with, as clearly communicated in the Gospel of John, the first miraculous sign that Jesus performed at Cana in Galilee was to change water into wine (John 2:1-11). Once again class, the first miraculous sign, number one in Cana in Galilee was changing water into wine.

Furthermore, in the Gospel of John, the second miraculous sign Jesus performed while at Cana in Galilee was healing the son of a centurion (John 4:26-54). What was the second sign Jesus performed at Cana while in Galilee? All together now class: healing the son of a centurion while at Cana in Galilee.

As should be patently obvious to Ehrman, the fact that Jesus did many signs in Jerusalem is not a problem with the Bible at all. It exposes a problem with Bart. In this case, it appears to be the problem of obfuscation. So if you’re a Bartonian student, if your professor is Bart Ehrman, watch out for the obfuscation!

Theirs nothing wrong whatsoever with what is chronicled here in the Bible. The first miracle was changing water into wine; the second was the son of the centurion. Those two miracles happened in a particular place. So the obfuscation of the many signs shouldn’t be problem particularly when the Bible tells us that those signs occurred in Jerusalem.

To address issues like this and the reliability of the Bible as a whole I’ve developed a new resource called The Bible Under Siege. I encourage you to get a copy. You can do so either by going to our website at www.equip.org or by calling 1-888-700-0274.

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[1] Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them) (New York, Harper One, 2009), 8-9.

As this professor has managed to shake the faith of multitudes in the classroom, he’s now bent on shaking the faith of multitudes in the culture. He has systematically forwarded the notion that Bible is not only hopelessly contradictory, but from his perspective a dangerous book in which to believe. In fact, he’s gone as far as to intimate that had we embraced the Gospel of Judas, a Gnostic gospel, instead of the Gospel of John, a canonical gospel, we might well avoided, nothing less than the holocaust itself. [2]

So in light of this onslaught by Bart Ehrman and many others like him in the media, I’ve developed a booklet in order to expose the skin of the truth stuffed with a great big lie. In this new booklet entitled, The Bible Under Siege, you will encounter the memorable acronym L-E-G-A-C-Y as an apt means of remembering factors that credible historians consider in determining the historical reliability and meaning of the Bible. It’s also includes the acronym S-H-A-F-T as means of unearthing and undermining contentions of the Bart Ehrman’s of the world. The “shaft” of the archeologist’s spade is a method by which you can remember that contra Ehrman, what has been discovered in the soil corresponds to what is detailed in the Bible. In addition to exposing the sophistry and scriptorture of professors and pundits the booklet systematically demonstrates that the Bible is divine rather than merely human in origin.

To help equip you to counter the attacks, I encourage you to get a copy. You can do so either by going to our website at www.equip.org or by calling 1-888-700-0274.

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[1] Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them) (New York, Harper One, 2009), 6.

[2] Gospel of Judas, National Geographic Channel, aired April 16, 2006, see http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lostgospel  (accessed April 9.2009).

In truth there is little warrant for delighting in this alleged discrepancy. Indeed an array of resolutions rules out Bart’s dogmatic declaration that these passages stand in contradiction.

First, at the risk of pressing the text into a wooden literal labyrinth it should be noted that the words “all the livestock” are qualified by the phrase, “in the field.” (Ex. 9:3) As such a consistent literalist ought to suppose that all other livestock would be spared.

Furthermore, it might credibly be argued that the word “all” can be used in less than an exhaustive sense. For example, when Scripture tells us that all the people of Jerusalem went out to John the Baptist (Mark 1:5) no ones supposes that every single person without exception went to see the prophet. Likewise, when broadcasters gush that “everyone was following Tiger Woods during this past Masters,” I seriously doubt that anyone supposed that no one was following the leaders.

Finally, while the solutions offered above are more than sufficient, a range of other solutions can be deduced. For example, it’s quite plausible that the Egyptian slave owners having lost their horses and their donkeys would have absconded with some of the livestock of the slaves.

The bottom line is this: it is more than a little baffling that Bart would want to hang his hat on such a tired old canard. The Bible and Christian doctrine is under assault. To help equip you I’ve developed a new resource called Memorable Keys to Essential Christian D-O-C-T-R-I-N-E. It’s available at our Website at www.equip.org or by calling us at 1-888-700-0274.

One of the alleged inconsistencies that he cites in his book is that the gospel of Mark indicates that it was in the last week of Jesus’ life when he cleansed the temple by overturning the tables of the money changers, saying; “This is to be a house of prayer…but you have made it a den of thieves.” Whereas, according to Ehrman, the gospel of John says that this happened at the very beginning of John. Then Ehrman says, “some readers have thought that Jesus must have cleansed the temple twice, once at the beginning of his ministry and once at the end. But that would mean that neither Mark nor John tells the “true” story, since in both accounts he cleanses the temple only once.” He further asks, “Moreover, is this reconciliation of the two accounts historically plausible? If Jesus made a disruption of the temple in the beginning of his ministry, why wasn’t he arrested by the authorities then?” He concludes with the following dogmatic assertion: “Historically speaking, then, the accounts are not reconcilable.”

Well is Professor Ehrman right? Is this just one more in a litany of errors made by a pseudonymous gospel writer, or is this just indicative of a professor gone wild? I would first say, in answer to that question, it is not only uncharitable but unquestionably wrong headed to suggest that neither Mark nor John—who by the way Ehrman demeans as illiterate—would be telling the true story had the temple been cleansed twice. As is no doubt obvious to even the most unlettered of Ehrman’s students, neither Gospel writer provides an exhaustive account of everything Jesus said or did. As the apostle John indicates in hyperbolic parlance, no doubt lost on a wooden literalist like Bart Ehrman, “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” (John 21:25).

Furthermore, the gospel of John itself provides a more than historically plausible insight as to why Jesus might not have been arrested during His initial temple cleansing. The proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back leading to the arrest and trial of Jesus quite logically would have resulted from a late, not an early temple cleansing. Not only so, but as the gospel of John makes clear, the Jewish leaders did not arrest Jesus in the early stages of his ministries for fear of the multitudes who were in awe of Christ’s teaching and miracles.

One final point, as even a cursory reading reveals, John kairologically orders his gospel by theme. I think that is an important point. John as such says, the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us, which fulfills the Old Testament promise that God’s glory would again return to His temple. Moreover, John reinterprets the meaning of Passover by revealing Jesus as the quintessential Passover. As such it would be logically, and I would say charitable, to surmise that John might introduce his account of Christ’s temple cleansing early in his Gospel narrative and within a context in which Jesus is reveled as the substance that fulfills the types and shadows of temple priests and sacrifice.

While such a notion does not sit well with a fundamentalist reading of scripture, it accords well with the nuanced and highly sophisticated reckoning of time particular to the ancients. A kairological interpretation, which reckons time not in terms of our familiar chronological ordering, but in terms of a quality of purpose in which an event is said to occur at just the right time. In other words, even if there was just one temple cleansing, one might logically assume that John communicates it kairologically, as opposed to chronologically.

Of the course the very fact a number of plausible resolutions have been forwarded precludes the charge that the gospel accounts are in fact contradictory.

So, Bart Ehrman set this up as a way of dissuading his students, particularly the ones he calls his conservative students, from believing that the Bible is the infallible repository of redemptive revelation. He writes, “some students accept these new views from day one. Others––especially those among the more conservative students––resist for a long time secure in their knowledge that God would not allow any falsehoods into a sacred book, but before long as students see more and more of the evidence many of them find that their faith in the inerrant and absolute historical truthfulness of the Bible begins to waver.”[3] This is of course his goal, he’s shaking the faith of his students, because he wants them to know what he thinks is true, and that is that the Bible is riddled with errors.

In the face of this onslaught on the Bible, we always need to be ready to give an answer. For further information on supposed Bible contradictions please see my Complete Bible Answer Book.    

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[1] Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them) (New York, Harper One, 2009) 5-6.

[2] Ibid., 7

[3] Ibid. 6